14.
Presented under the sponsorship of one of the city's most respected senior artists, Jack Shadbolt, Claude Breeze's 1964 Lovers in a Landscape exhibition (Breeze was twenty-six) launched one of the most meteoric careers of the sixties.24 Figurative, sexual and violent, the Lovers paintings are a polyglot of acid colour, hard-edge elements and animated brushwork. Subsequent series explored the imagery of war on television, and futuristic images of man mutated by technology. Breeze's paintings mocked authority and assaulted the eye.

Responsive to the growing image universe, especially the one on television that was bringing the Vietnam War into North American homes, Breeze's paintings appropriated a mixture of techniques and styles. His Sunday Afternoon (from an Old American Photograph), 1966, a painting based on a photograph of the lynching of two black men in the American south, was reproduced as the colour centrefold for the first issue of the experimental artscanada (1967), which also contained a record of an interview with Breeze by Barry Lord, the new editor. Lord, who had been an assistant curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, was working toward the thesis he would expound in his book The History of Painting in Canada: Toward a People's Art (1974).25 Lord saw Breeze's work as polemical, political and anti-American, and he positioned it with the work of other Canadian figurative artists of the sixties, including John Boyle and Greg Curnoe. Arguing that the problem of the figure in the landscape was key to a national people's art--a "sense of who we are, where we are"--and that the landscape of British Columbia was a particularly brutal anti-pastoral confrontation of wilderness and capital, Lord claimed that Breeze's ability to integrate figure and landscape signaled a particular and recent progression in nationalist consciousness.26It is fascinating that the budding Greenberg acolyte Terry Fenton, who curated a two-person exhibition of Brian Fisher and Claude Breeze for the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery in 1967 (the friends were Regina artists from this point of view), saw them both as "conceptual" painters, "as are the majority of artists on the West Coast--they have a tendency to concentrate their creative development on their subject matter, their imagery." He put it softly, though he considered this a flaw that would cause them to burn out.

Despite his involvement in performance . . .