{"id":2698,"date":"2022-11-10T22:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-10T22:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dartmagazine.com\/?p=2698"},"modified":"2022-11-12T15:17:39","modified_gmt":"2022-11-12T15:17:39","slug":"harold-town-the-muscle-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/?p=2698","title":{"rendered":"Harold Town: The Muscle Show"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Steve Rockwell<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Harold
Harold Town, Musclemen<\/em>, 1984, oil and lucite on canvas, 55.5 x 68.5 inches<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTown: The Muscle Show\u201d at Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto is a display of Harold Town flexing his own creative muscle in the closing decade of his life. I admit that I couldn\u2019t  suppress a smile at his zesty full throttle tackle of a subject that was not \u201cin\u201d or popular in any refined, cultural sense. His building up to this painterly leap is revealed in a statement that he made in the late \u201870s, \u201cIt\u2019s time for me to become unpopular again.\u201d Predictably, the works were disparaged as trivial by the art establishment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Harold
Harold Town, Muscle Men #3, 1981, oil and lucite on canvas, 60 x 120 inches<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Town stuck to his guns, insisting they should be included in his 1986 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As painting subject, his musclemen paintings here have proven resilient, being also prescient. Bodybuilding itself at that time underwent a rehabilitation from the freakish to a somewhat respectable arm of the physical fitness movement that took off in the 1980s. The acknowledged catalyst seems to have been the 1977 bodybuilding documentary, “Pumping Iron,” that introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger to popular culture. Shelley Town cites \u201cPumping Iron\u201d as an inspiration of her father for the Muscle paintings. The artist would subsequently go on to collect 1970s muscle magazines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Harold
Harold Town, Muscle Man #1, 1981, oil on linen canvas, 90 x 60 inches<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A liberation from the constraint of “taste” fuelled a sense of the heroic in Town\u2019s \u201cMuscle Man\u201d series of paintings, that included an occasional “Muscle Woman.\u201d The artist\u2019s \u201cMuscle Man #1\u201d stands out as a gesture of defiance, featuring a subject with flexed bicep and clenched fist raised high. Town dated the work April 1, 1981 as perhaps a sucker punch to his critics, as if to say, “Plenty of time for history to sort out where the joke lands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Harold
Harold Town, The Muscle Show installation view<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Apart from the anomaly of bodybuilders as subject, Town\u2019s \u201cMuscle Men\u201d paintings possess an exuberance independent of their images. Their allusion to the landscape is clear in their unshackled freedom with brush, color and form. Similarly to the artist\u2019s 1970s \u201cSnap\u201d series of paintings, \u201cThe Muscle Show\u201d is a prime example of a Harold Town career shift on steroids, energized here by a supporting tactic, \u201cpumping irony.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harold Town: The Muscle Show<\/strong> (October 15 \u2013 November 19, 2022) at Christopher Cutts Gallery, 21 Morrow Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6R 2H9 Phone: 1-416-532-5566 Email: info@cuttsgallery.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Steve Rockwell \u201cTown: The Muscle Show\u201d at Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto is a display of Harold Town flexing his own creative muscle in the closing decade of his life. I admit that I couldn\u2019t  suppress a smile at his zesty full throttle tackle of a subject that was not \u201cin\u201d or popular in … <\/p>\n

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