The Globe and Mail

When Simpson's Queen Street store mounted Abstracts at Home in October, 1953, the idea was to show the public that modern, abstract paintings fit just as well in domestic spaces as in an art gallery. Each of the seven popular room-settings contained a work (or works) by Tom Hodgson, Oscar Cahén, Alexandra Luke, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, Jack Bush and William Ronald; soon after, these artists would add four more to their number and become Toronto's legendary Painters 11.

But should it have been “Painters 12”?

Bauhaus-trained artist Andor Weininger thought so. Sitting in his apartment in Toronto's Mimico neighbourhood, innovative wood reliefs and striking abstract oils lining the walls, he dashed off a letter to his friend, Mr. Ronald, outlining his disappointment at being excluded.

In fact, this was but one of many disappointments for the new Canadian, who was born near Pécs, Hungary, in 1899 but travelled to Germany to study under Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy (among others) at the famed Bauhaus between 1921 and 1928. After a lengthy and artistically unproductive stay in Holland, he immigrated to Toronto in 1951 with his wife, Eva, and soon established a friendship with future P11 member Jock Macdonald, who would in turn introduce him to future art-world star William Ronald.

With connections like these, it looked, for a time, like Mr. Weininger would make waves in Toronto's burgeoning modern art scene or, perhaps, as a designer of interiors or furniture (both of which he had done in Europe), but rejection after rejection by many artist associations eventually drove this “Bauhausler” to New York in 1958.

So what? Well, despite leaving little trace “on the Canadian artistic imagination of the 1950s,” Mr. Weininger's story can aid in understanding both “the deep provincialism of Canadian culture up to the 1940s” and how it “has been internationalized since” writes University of Manitoba art history professor Oliver A. I. Botar in his recently released 280-page monograph A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the '50s (University of Manitoba and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2009). In vivid detail, it does this and more as it recounts early successes such as his published design for a Spherical Theatre (1927) and as “guiding spirit” of the Bauhaus jazz band before strapping readers in for Mr. Weininger's seven-year Canadian rollercoaster ride.

I was so taken with the book (it helps that I'm already a fan of 1950s Canadian abstract art) that I drove to Norris Crescent near Lake Shore Boulevard and Royal York Road to see the squat, two-storey, hipped-roof building where the Weiningers rented an apartment between 1951 and 1955 before they bought a house on Cortleigh Boulevard (since demolished) in North Toronto. For an English-language class in the fall of 1952, Mr. Weininger wrote that, from his living room, he could “look on an expanse of sky, on trees, small cottages, and on the bay of Lake Ontario;” while the cottages are long gone and the shoreline has been pushed much further by landfill than it was in Mr. Weininger's day, even today “the lake is roaring, it chases white waves against the shore.” It's an inspiring view, but looking at Toronto's distant skyline, I can't help but wonder if simple geography contributed to Mr. Weininger's sense of isolation and frustration.

“I think it was maybe part of the problem,” offers Mr. Botar over the phone from Winnipeg. “But on the other hand there's a streetcar on Lake Shore, it runs right downtown, it ran at that time … the second thing is that this was their choice: They could have chosen to live, like most immigrants, close to the centre [of the city], but they wanted a nice view [and] I'm sure that was good for his art.”

Regardless of good or bad, the fact remains that, despite the rejections, Mr. Weininger produced more art during his Toronto period than anywhere else. And it was very good: In 1956, he finally secured a gallery show at Karl May's Eglinton Gallery and, by the next year, he made strong connections within the city's architectural community.

So why wasn't he more successful?

Mr. Botar's fine book puts forth a number of theories, from Mr. Weininger's conflicting modesty and sense of entitlement – “I think that there was a certain amount of him expecting that he would be embraced because of his stellar background and education,” says the 52-year-old author – to the desire by P11 to align themselves with the 1950s New York school of abstract painters rather than the 1920s Bauhaus.

Ultimately, the book paints a complex picture of what life was like for an older, artistically sensitive foreigner in a young city just beginning to shed its provincial skin for a cloak of international ideas; not only was the modernist Don Mills showing what a “new town” looked like, modernist furniture – designed by other newly arrived immigrants such as Jan Kuypers or Sigrun Bülow-Hübe – was beginning to slowly displace grandmother's antiques in living rooms. One gets the sense that, had Toronto's one-and-only Bauhausler decided to stay, the city would have caught up with him sooner rather than later.

“I think it's important for us to reclaim these moments no matter how peripheral or tangential,” Mr. Botar writes. “This was a most important moment, let's face it.”