Glossary of Canadian Art History

A painter and printmaker best known for his photorealistic depictions of the lingerie-clad midriffs of female subjects. Born in Iowa, Kacere taught at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art from 1950 to 1953. Kacere was originally associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement but moved away from this painterly style in the 1960s to become a leading practitioner of Photorealism.

Associated with the Woodland School, Kakegamic received early training from Norval Morrisseau and Carl Ray. He is known for championing Indigenous print production by co-founding the Triple K Cooperative. Kakegamic’s work is held at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

An artist, gallerist, curator, and community builder in Hamilton, Ontario, since the 1970s, the artist and gallerist received a Governor General’s Award in 2021 in recognition of his lifetime contributions to Canadian visual arts. Kanbara is known for working with a range of media, including printmaking, painting, and sculptural assemblages. In 1975 he helped establish the artist-run centre Hamilton Artists Inc., where he mounted the 1986 exhibition Shikata Ga Nai: Contemporary Art by Japanese Canadians, a group show that featured contemporary work by a range of Japanese Canadian artists. Kanbara is also the founder and proprietor of Hamilton’s you me gallery.

An artist, teacher, and philosopher who settled in Germany and later in France, Kandinsky was central to the development of abstract art. Much of his work conveys his interest in the relationships between colour, sound, and emotion. Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), his famous treatise on abstraction, draws on mysticism and theories of divinity.

Influenced by the American artist George Catlin, this nineteenth-century painter and explorer spent extensive time documenting Indigenous Peoples in North America and depicting, in a traditional European style, scenes of their culture and landscapes. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto houses one hundred paintings and several hundred sketches by Kane. (See Paul Kane: Life & Work by Arlene Gehmacher.)

An artist and Holocaust survivor, Alfred Kantor produced drawings and watercolours depicting daily life in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau and Schwarzheide concentration camps. Kantor created works throughout his imprisonment, but while some were safeguarded through the war, many were destroyed, only to be recreated following his liberation. In 1971 his illustrations were published with captions as The Book of Alfred Kantor. 

A prominent dealer of Inuit art, Judy Scott Kardosh was the daughter of Marion Scott and the owner and director of Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver from her mother’s death in 1989 to the end of her life. She spearheaded a sophisticated curatorial program that challenged definitions of Inuit art and its place in a larger art world and was an early advocate of the art of Oviloo Tunnillie and other female artists from the Arctic.

Robert Kardosh is an art dealer from Vancouver. He is the son of prominent gallerist Judy Scott Kardosh and the grandson of gallery owner Marion Scott. He is currently the director and curator of Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver. He is the author of many articles on the work of Inuit artists.

Associated with the abstract art movement Constructivism, Kazimir Karpuszko was an art dealer, curator, and author. He contributed to the international art journal Structure, which was a reference for artists interested in Constructivist art.

One the preeminent portrait photographers of the twentieth century, Karsh was born in Turkey to Armenian parents and sent to Canada in 1924 as a refugee. He studied photography under his uncle, who was a professional portrait photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Karsh’s dramatically lit and carefully composed black and white portraits of luminaries such as Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, and Grace Kelly earned him international renown.

An Iowa-born photographer who, as co-founder of the Photo-Secession group of Pictorialist photographers, worked to earn photography recognition as a high art form by imitating aspects of painterly technique using the camera. Käsebier became well known for her intimate portraits of mothers and children, writers and artists such as Auguste Rodin, and an 1898 series of portraits of Sioux men.

Born in Iraq of Assyrian origin, Kaspaules has based his artistic practice in Ottawa since the mid-1970s. The themes of migration, cultural exchange, and exile pervade his interdisciplinary work in painting, engraving, photography, and video. A graduate of the University of Ottawa, Kaspaules has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.

A multi-disciplinary artist and fine arts professor, Kavanagh has explored environmental degradation, the material evidence of war and weapons, and the nuclear industrial complex in her art. A participant in the Canadian Forces Artists Program in 2012–13, Kavanagh has also completed research residencies at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada (2014), and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico (2015). Kavanagh is currently a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) at the University of Lethbridge.

A self-taught painter and participant in the Canadian Forces Artists Program, Kearns has worked on themes of conflict since the early 1990s. Seeking to portray the complexity of military power in conflict, Kearns’s paintings are regularly viewed as controversial. She received the Order of Canada in 2019 for her artistic contributions to Canadian military history.

A freelance graphic designer during the First World War, Keelor designed notable propaganda posters to support the Canadian war effort, including For Industrial Expansion, Buy Victory Bonds, c.1917. Unlike more traditional campaign posters, Keelor’s work was inspired by early twentieth-century heroic realist imagery.

A German-born photographer who operated successful studios in England, South Africa, Montreal, Toronto, and Oakville, Ontario. Keene worked in a pictorialist style, creating artistic portraits, landscapes, and commercial works. She was the first woman fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in England. Keene often worked with her daughter, Violet, who managed the Eaton’s Portrait Studio in Toronto and went on to become a respected portrait photographer.

A painter, illustrator, and arts educator, Keith-Beattie shared a studio with artist Doris McCarthy. Also known as “Nory,” she and McCarthy travelled and painted together often.

An abstract artist from New York who matured in Paris, where he studied from 1948 to 1954, enabled by the G.I. Bill. Back in the United States he practised hard-edge colour-field painting, but, even as his rigorous style often approached Minimalism, his visual wit drew from his observations of natural forms.

An influential American conceptual artist, educator, and writer whose large-scale narrative installations examine issues relating to sexuality, identity, and memory. Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, 1973–79, which intimately explored the mother-child relationship as she cared for her son from birth until age five, is considered a landmark work of feminist art. In the 1990s she produced series addressing the theme of war and more recently has considered historical protests and collective memory in several collaborative projects.

A Cleveland, Ohio-based artist best known for his abstract, gestural paintings that often incorporated bright colours and geometric shapes and symbols. Initially a sculptor, he studied at the Philadelphia College of Art before earning his BFA and MFA from Ohio University. He later transitioned into painting and taught at Northland College in Wisconsin and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University).

A member of an unusually artistic Cape Dorset family that includes her father, the carver Kaka Ashoona, and her grandmother, the widely admired Pitseolak Ashoona, Siassie Kenneally began drawing at Kinngait Studios (formerly the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative) in 2004. She often drew on a large scale, depicting traditional Inuit lifestyles in a contemporary manner.

An artist and arts educator, Kennedy was primarily a watercolourist. He and his wife, the artist Kathleen Kennedy, taught at Toronto’s Central Technical School alongside other artist-teachers, including Doris McCarthy and Virginia Luz.

Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, and based in Halifax, Kennedy was a pioneering Conceptual artist and distinguished art educator and arts administrator. He was president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (1967–90), which he transformed from a conservative institution into a leading centre for Conceptual art. As an artist, he is widely known for his paintings investigating institutional power within and beyond the art world.

An illustrator as well as a landscape painter specializing in remote and stark environments including the New England coast, Alaska, and Greenland, Kent was also a labour-rights activist. His woodcut illustrations for periodicals and books, including two editions of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, recall the style of English Romantics like William Hogarth and William Blake.

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Kerbel is an artist who lives and works in London, England, where she is also a reader in fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work uses performance, audio recording, printed materials, light, and music to create new forms out of conventional narratives, such as a bank heist, a baseball game, or a ghost town. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2015 for DOUG (2013), a performance work for six voices that imagines the spiralling bad luck of a man named Doug.

Both a skilled lithographer and a painter of landscapes and urban scenes, Kerr-Lawson immigrated to Canada as a child. He studied first at the Ontario School of Art, and later in France and Italy. He returned to Canada in 1885, but after a brief stay he moved to Europe, establishing himself in Glasgow and London. In 1908 Kerr-Lawson became a founding member of the Senefelder Club to promote interest in lithography. He also exhibited with the Canadian Art Club from 1912 to 1915.

Born in Lumsden, Saskatchewan, Kerr was a painter celebrated for his colourful, emotive landscape paintings of the Saskatchewan and Alberta prairies. He taught at the Vancouver School of Art before becoming director of the art department at Calgary’s Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in 1947 (now known as the Alberta University of the Arts). In 1983 Kerr was named to the Order of Canada in recognition of his long and prolific artistic career.

Born in Hungary, Kertész moved to the United States in 1936 and became known for combining documentary photography and photojournalism with artistic and formalist tendencies. He worked for major publications including Collier’s, Harper’s Bazaar, and Condé Nast before breaking out on his own.

A portrait and landscape painter and etcher who spent much of his life in California. Keszthelyi studied in Vienna, taught at the Carnegie Institute from 1907 to 1910, and lived briefly in Canada. He was elected an honorary member of the short-lived Regina Society for the Advancement of Art, Literature, and Science.

“Bill” Kettlewell was an equestrian painter who also worked as an art director in Toronto.

Kiakshuk was a gifted storyteller who took up drawing and printmaking in the last decade of his life. Like his stories, his artworks recount tales of the natural and spirit worlds, hunting, and domestic life. In addition to his drawings, engravings, and stencil and stonecut prints, he occasionally produced carvings.

A wood engraver who has lived in the rural Niagara Escarpment since the late 1950s, Kilbourn infuses her work with the spirituality and energy she finds in the land around her. She also worked in stained glass for a period beginning in the 1980s, completing numerous church commissions.

Located on Dorset Island off the southwest coast of Baffin Island, Kinngait is a community of approximately 1,400 in the territory of Nunavut. Incorporated in 1982, the Hamlet of Cape Dorset, which had been named for the 4th Earl of Dorset in 1613, voted in 2019 to change its name to the Hamlet of Kinngait (“where the hills are”), the Inuktitut name for the hamlet’s location. Kinngait is the home of Kinngait Studios, the oldest Inuit art co-operative in Canada.

Since the mid-2000s, the arts and crafts sector of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative of Cape Dorset (Kinngait), Nunavut, has also been referred to as Kinngait Studios. The studio includes artist co-op members who carve, draw, and make prints.

A painter and printmaker, Kirchner co-founded the German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge). Influenced by Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, Kirchner is known for work imbued with erotic and psychological tension.

Born and raised in the Prairies, Japanese Canadian artist Roy Kiyooka studied under Jock Macdonald at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (now Alberta College of Art and Design) in Calgary from 1946 to 1949. A regular presence at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, the avant-garde painter developed a hard-edge abstract style. In the 1960s, Kiyooka experimented with a wide range of media and was a central figure in the Vancouver art scene.

Primarily known as a painter of prodigious energy and imagination—his output comprises an estimated nine thousand artworks—Klee was also a printmaker, art writer, and beloved teacher, first at the Bauhaus and later at the Düsseldorf Academy.

An important figure in the history of Minimal, Pop, and performance art, known for his interest in “pure colour” and his invention of International Klein Blue, the pigment he used in many of his famed monochrome paintings. He was also a sculptor, writer, and—significantly for a Westerner of his time—judo master.

Elsie Klengenberg is a graphic artist who began drawing in the 1960s. She is known for her sophisticated use of stencil technique to layer colour and tone in her prints and is one of the artists represented in Adrienne Clarkson Presents along with Oviloo Tunnillie. Her father, Victor Ekootak, and son, Stanley (Elongnak) Klengenberg were also graphic artists. 

A Viennese painter best known for the decorative patterns that surround his figures and for his use of gold leaf in Byzantine-influenced paintings like Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, and The Kiss, 1907–8. Klimt was the first president of the Vienna Secession, a splinter group of artists who broke from Vienna’s conservative Künstlerhaus Genossenschaft (Artists House Union), rejecting the academic historical style in favour of an avant-garde approach.

An Abstract Expressionist painter and draftsman whose gestural works drew inspiration from contemporaries such as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. From the late 1940s Kline’s paintings were largely black and white, but in the last years of his career he returned to a full-colour palette.

A Montreal-based painter born in Deventer, the Netherlands, widely acclaimed for his large-scale abstract and surreal self-portrait works on canvas. Klunder’s works, which often employ abundant layering of paint and take years to complete, are included in public collections such as the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

A painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer, Klutsis became a prominent Russian Constructivist, known for his agitprop art, particularly posters (which were printed in the tens of thousands) in support of the early Soviet state. Klutsis is recognized as a leading developer of the photomontage technique. In the late 1930s, during a Stalinist purge, the artist was arrested and subsequently killed in prison.

A landscape painter who frequently painted the Saskatchewan prairies, Knowles drew inspiration from British watercolour techniques and modernist abstraction. Her practice of painting directly from nature was strongly influenced by her participation in the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, a summer-school program in northern Saskatchewan that began in 1955 and ran nearly every year until 2012.

Born in Ottawa, Elizabeth Annie McGillivray Knowles established her artistic career in Toronto before moving to New York City in 1920, where she and her husband, fellow artist Farquhar McGillivray Knowles, continued to paint, showing her work in both Canada and the United States. Knowles painted in the Romantic tradition, producing landscapes and rural scenes. She was an active member of numerous Canadian and American artistic societies, including the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the American Water Color Society.

Born in Syracuse, New York, Knowles became a noted Toronto painter, active in the city from the 1880s to 1920. He became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in 1898. His work is in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and other major collections in Canada.

The Eastman Kodak Company was founded in New York by American inventor George Eastman, with successive firms throughout the 1880s becoming the Eastman Kodak Company—its name to this day—in 1892. Eastman democratized photography by inventing the Kodak camera; released in 1888, it was the first portable device equipped with a preloaded roll of film. Over the course of its history the company has introduced revolutionary photographic technology in the form of other cameras, including the Brownie and the first digital camera, and colour film, including Kodachrome and Ektachrome.

A painter, printmaker, and writer celebrated for his deeply expressive portraits and landscapes. An important figure in European modernism, Kokoschka sought to give visual form to the immaterial aspects of our world. Spiritual, psychological, and emotional forces are rendered through turbulent forms and luminous effects.

The art critic Eugene Kolb began his career as a writer and publisher in Budapest, Hungary, but left the country as one of more than sixteen hundred Jewish refugees to escape on the Kastner train in 1944. After a brief stay in Switzerland, he immigrated to British Mandate Palestine (which became the modern state of Israel in 1948), where he continued to write and engaged with the nascent Israeli art world. In 1952, he became the director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where he worked to establish the museum’s collection and promote Israeli artists until his death in 1959.

Best known for her printmaking, Käthe Kollwitz began her career working in a realistic style. During and after the First World War, she created dark, emotionally wrenching portraits of death, war, and poverty and, in 1920, turned to woodcuts in an expressionist style. She was an advocate for women artists and served as a prominent member of the Prussian Academy of Arts from the 1920s until she was forced to resign by the Nazi government in 1933. Her granite monument to the death of her youngest son during the First World War stands in a cemetery near Ypres, Belgium.

A German curator and museum director who taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) from 1973 to 1975, where he helped establish the university’s publishing program, the NSCAD Press. He has also held teaching positions at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. From 2002 to 2012, he served as the director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.

One of the first generation of Inuit artists who sold their work to southern markets, Kopapik was a carver, printmaker, and graphic artist especially known for his representations of birds. He was married to fellow artist Mary Qayuaryuk (Kudjuakjuk) (1908–1982).

An artist, sculptor, and arts educator, Ron Kostyniuk is affiliated with the Constructivist movement. His geometric abstraction is informed by his background in biology and interest in organic forms. In 1975, he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art.

A leading figure of Conceptual art, known for his exploration of the relationship between language, objects, and meaning. Kosuth believes that individual artistic persona and skill should be removed from art in favour of the purity of the idea. His seminal work, One and Three Chairs, 1965, presents a physical chair along with its photograph and a textual definition. The work emphasizes the idea of an object over hierarchies of representation.

A painter whose expansive landscapes often function as statements condemning environmental devastation. Krausz frequently references the Mediterranean in his large-scale works, drawing on his memories of Romania, where he lived and studied before coming to Canada in 1970. He has taught art at Concordia University and the Université de Montreal since 1991.

A painter who emigrated to the United States from Europe in 1837 and then moved to Canada. Krieghoff was drawn to First Nations peoples and environments as subjects; he also painted landscapes and scenes of everyday Canadian life.

An American Conceptual artist and collagist. Kruger is best known for appropriating black and white magazine images and overlaying them with concise phrases in white Futura Bold text on red background. First begun in 1979, these political works provide social commentary on mass consumerism, gender roles, religion, sexuality, politics, and other facets of contemporary culture.

A forerunner to the Pop art movement in America, Krushenick was a painter known for his fusion of Pop art and abstraction. Hard-edged black lines surrounding bright, solid colours in abstract formation characterize his work, particularly of the 1960s. His work is held by major public institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

One of the most celebrated filmmakers of the twentieth century, whose influence extends internationally and across creative mediums, from cinema to painting. Among his numerous landmark productions are 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and The Shining (1980).

Twin brothers and experimental filmmakers, active from their teenage years on the New York film scene alongside Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wieland. The Kuchars’ renowned 8mm films include I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960) and The Devil’s Cleavage (1973)—ultra-low-budget versions of Hollywood genre movies.

Primarily a carver, although he also produced drawings, Thomassie Kudluk was one of the first Inuit artists to produce work depicting contemporary life. His often humorous sculptures depict men and women in everyday, often erotic, situations. Known for his blunt, rough-hewn forms, he is one of the few Inuit artists to represent sexuality in his work.

A prolific artist of the Edo period, Utagawa Kunisada was a painter and printmaker who produced thousands of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) woodblock prints. This style of art, which flourished from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, depicted scenes from the pleasure districts of major cities including Osaka, Kyoto, and the capital, Edo (now Tokyo). In keeping to the themes and subjects that characterize ukiyo-e art, most of Kunisada’s work consists of portraits of kabuki actors and of women, the latter often erotically charged.

A filmmaker and producer whose film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) was the first Inuit-made feature film entirely in Inuktitut with an all-Indigenous cast. In 1988 Kunuk co-founded the independent production company Igloolik Isuma Productions, based in Nunavut. He has championed Inuit self-representation through broadcast media and video in order to prevent further collective memory loss due to the influence of foreign missionaries, priests, schools, and mass media. Kunuk received the Golden Camera Award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

A filmmaker, author, and actor born in Poland whose memoir Child of the Holocaust (1967) details his experience surviving the Holocaust by disguising himself as a Polish peasant. Brought to Halifax in 1947 as part of the Canadian Jewish Congress’s War Orphans Project, in his adulthood Kuper worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before establishing a film production company and authoring books and screenplays.

An abstract painter and satirical illustrator known for his exploration of theosophy, religion, music, and theories of motion through colour and geometry, Kupka studied at the art academies in Prague and Vienna before settling in Paris in 1896. He was influenced by the Manifesto of Futurism (1909), written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and by Cubism, Fauvism, and Pointillism, though he did not identify with any one movement. In 1912, he became the first artist to publicly exhibit abstract paintings. In 1931, he was a founding member of the Abstraction-Création group, which included Jean Arp and Theo van Doesburg.

Born on a farm in Alberta to Ukrainian immigrants, Kurelek was a painter of trompe l’oeil objects, scenes of his childhood farm life, religious subjects, and apocalyptic visions influenced by the Cold War and current events. His suffering from an unspecified mental illness and periodic admissions into psychiatric hospitals led him to devout Catholicism in the mid-1950s. In 1959 Toronto gallerist Avrom Isaacs gave Kurelek his first solo exhibition. In the 1960s Kurelek became one of the most commercially successful artists in Canada. (See William Kurelek: Life & Work by Andrew Kear.)