“Driving Mr. de Grandmaison: The Scene of Portraiture in Twentieth Century Western Canada”

Nicholas de Grandmaison
(Canadian [Russian], 1892-1978)

Lawrence, a Blackfoot from Gleichen Alberta, circa 1940

pastel on paper 55.5 x 45.5 cm
MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection

Gift of Imre Szabados and Dr. Bela Szabados

Photo: Don Hall

Date: Wednesday 17 September 2008
Time: 3:30 pm
Place: Language Institute Theatre, LI 215

All are welcome

Refreshments will be provided

For further information please call Milagros Charriez (HRI) at 585-4226

Béla Szabados’s personal recollections of travels with Nicholas de Grandmaison –– a successful yet marginalized Canadian artist –are twinned with an idiosyncratic description and assessment of his achievement.

Béla Szabados grew up in Hungary and at the age of 14, with his mother and sisters, fled the Soviets in late 1956 when the Revolution was defeated. He attended schools in Austria and Montreal, earning a BA from Sir George Williams University. He came West first in 1966 as a graduate student at the University of Calgary, from which he holds MA (1968) and PhD (1972) degrees.

After short-term teaching positions at Lethbridge and Simon Fraser, he joined the University of Regina in 1975 and through his many influential articles on self-deception and Wittgenstein “he put Saskatchewan on the philosophical map.” A past president of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics, his books include In Light of Chaos (Thistledown), Once Upon a Time in the West: The Making of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association (Academic Publishing), Wittgenstein Reads Weininger (with David Stern, Cambridge University Press), Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations (with Eldon Soifer, Broadview Press), and Writing Addiction (with Ken Probert, CPRC).

Szabados is presently at work on projects dealing with issues of culture in Western Canada as well as in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The forthcoming presentation is the first essay in a planned book on Western Canadian cultural figures.