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Marian Scott

Stairway

Artist

Marian Scott
Montreal 1906 – Westmount, Quebec, 1993

Title

Stairway

Date

About 1940

Materials

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

74.3 x 50.7 cm

Credits

Purchase, A. Sidney Dawes Fund, inv. 1942.749

Collection

Quebec and Canadian Art

In 1940, Scott wrote in her journal, “What I want to get at is something nearer Franz Marc. His abstraction was [used] to express an attitude toward life. Simplification and rhythm, the unity of animal and nature. I would like to express the creative rhythmic unity of man and his world.” The characteristically curved staircase that adorned the outside of so many of Montreal’s early twentieth-century dwellings, creating a kind of decorative rhythm, here provides the setting for a series of stylized human figures whose own curves blend into a rigorously Cubist construction.

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