Kathleen Munn

Kathleen Jean Munn (1887– October 19, 1974) is recognized today as a pioneer of modern art in Canada, though she remained on the periphery of the Canadian art scene during her lifetime. She imagined conventional subjects in a radically new visual vocabulary as she combined the traditions of European art with modern art studies in New York. She stopped painting about 1939 and when she died in 1974 at age 87, she was unaware that her long-held hope for "a possible future for my work" was about to become reality.

Early years

Kathleen Jean Munn Munn began her formal art education in 1904 when she began attending the Westbourne School in Toronto, studying under Farquhar McGillivray Knowles. Beginning in 1909, she began to show her work in exhibitions with the Ontario Society of Artists, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and the Canadian National Exhibition. studying with A. S. Baylinson, Andrew Dasburg and Max Weber, students of Cubism derived from Cézanne. Weber had a powerful influence on her as an artist and a notebook she kept from her time at the League, records quotations from Claude Bragdon, who was an influence on Weber.

Munn's family was extremely supportive of her career and paid for her art education in both New York and Philadelphia.

Later success

Munn sought to convey spiritual truths within a formal order "like her colleague and admirer Lawren Harris". which did not suit the popular styles of painting in Toronto at the time she was practicing and exhibiting. He also said "More attention might be paid to her if she exhibited in New York or Paris, instead of Canada, where public appreciation of this kind of painting is as yet undeveloped ..."

In 2011, Cassandra Getty for the Art Gallery of Windsor organized an exhibition of Munn's work which travelled to the Art Gallery of Ontario where it was titled The Passion of Kathleen Munn. In Toronto, the show of around 40 paintings and works on paper was supplemented with related drawings and collages from her archives which revealed her working process.

Collections Munn's work is included in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada.