15.
Despite his involvement in performance (and despite Fenton's opinion), Breeze was, of all the sixties Vancouver painters, most committed to the idea of a practice of painting. He was rash enough to condemn the incipient conceptualism of the early seventies: "Mostly so-called conceptualists who move ahead by moving behind. Most of them are filled with garbage from American art magazines." Indeed.

By 1971, the year this remark was printed in The Province, "conceptualism"--whose "move behind" was partly to the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century--was so au courant that the "logo" for Richard Simmins' art column on Breeze's ten-year retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, "Down with Social Depravity!" was a Supremacist black circle crossed diagonally by a white bar.27

What Breeze did share with some of the hard-edge painters was a hot palette . . .