William Perehudoff, internationally renowned Saskatoon-based abstract painter and member of the Order of Canada, passed away yesterday at the age of 94.
According to A Concise History of Canadian Painting, Perehudoff was born near Langham, Saskatchewan, in 1919. His schooling occurred stateside, in the 1940s, at Nevada’s Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and then at the Ozenfant School in New York. On relocating to Saskatoon in the 1950s, Perehudoff worked as an art director for a local printing plant while painting in his spare time. In 1952, he married Dorothy Knowles, who went on to become a prominent landscape painter.
Perehudoff was an important product of the Emma Lake workshops, the University of Saskatchewan’s summer program in a remote area of the province, which became a Modernist hub in the 1950s and 60s. Perehudoff attended a number of Emma Lake workshops, including the 1962 workshop with American critic and abstractionism proponent Clement Greenberg, and the 1963 workshop with colour-field painter Kenneth Noland. These and subsequent workshops—Perehudoff and Knowles had a cottage at Emma Lake, and attended frequently—had evident influence on his work.
In the 1960s, Perehudoff hit his stride as a colour-field painter, producing canvases (A Concise History of Canadian Painting indicates) stained with a variety of arrangements of circles and rectangles. He showed his work internationally, to significant acclaim, and in the late 1970s retired from his day job to focus solely on his art. In the 1980s and 1990s, Perehudoff and Knowles spent more time in Langham, where they farmed and painted.
“Perehudoff represents a moment at which colour-field painting attains real currency in Canada,” says Adam Welch, assistant curator, European and American Art at the National Gallery of Canada. “[The style] was taken up and advanced by a lot of Canadian painters, in part due to those visits by Greenberg and Noland—but it also connects with the landscape in very interesting ways.”
Perehudoff was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1994 and was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2001. In 2011 and 2012, a retrospective of his work titled “The Optimism of Colour” toured venues in Saskatchewan, BC, Alberta and Ontario.
He is survived by his wife Knowles; his daughters Catherine Fowler, Rebecca Minton and Carol Perehudoff; his grandchildren Charles Fowler, Stephanie Fowler and Molly Minton; his sister Elizabeth Cheveldayoff; and several other family members.
A formal announcement and funeral arrangements are to follow.
