With the death of art historian Dennis Reid, Canada has lost a major figure whose career spanned almost 60 years. In 1962, while studying at the University of Toronto, Reid met Stan Bevington, and with poet Wayne Clifford, they founded Coach House Press. The Press’ first title, Wayne Clifford’s Man in a Window, with Reid’s illustrations, was published in March 1965. Two years later, Chambers: John Chambers Interviewed by Ross G. Woodman, was to mark “the first of a series of books on Canadian art under the general editorship of Dennis Reid, published by The Coach House Press.” However, by May of that year, Reid had moved to Ottawa to work at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and a second volume, on Greg Curnoe, was never published. In Ottawa he rose from assistant curator to curator of post-confederation Canadian art by 1979, when he became curator of Canadian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), assuming several other positions over the years until 2010.
At the NGC, Reid was privileged to work under Jean Sutherland Boggs, who, from her arrival in Ottawa in 1966, promoted an ambitious publication program. In addition to major exhibition catalogues, she initiated a series on masterpieces in the NGC in 1971 (Reid wrote on Tom Thomson’s The Jack Pine in 1975) and a Canadian Artists Series produced under Reid’s general editorship from 1973 to 1989. His own volumes on Bertram Brooker (1973) and Edwin Holgate (1976) complemented his exhibitions of the two artists’ works and, as a member of the editorial board of Provincial Essays, published by Coach House Press from 1985 to 1989, Reid edited an additional volume on Brooker in 1989.
Reid’s exhibitions and publications, including A Concise History of Canadian Painting (1973, 1988, 2012), were exemplars of scholarship, and he returned over time to some favourite subjects. His 1969 MacCallum-Jackman exhibition preceded his major 1970 exhibition of the Group of Seven, an essay on Tom Thomson’s photographs in the National Gallery Bulletin (1970), his 1975 study of The Jack Pine, and the major Thomson retrospective curated by the AGO and the NGC in 2002. At the AGO, Reid organized three exhibitions of the later work of A.Y. Jackson (1982), Arthur Lismer (1985), and Lawren Harris (1985).
Reid’s last exhibition for the National Gallery, with the apt Victorian title “Our Own Country Canada,” Being an Account of the National Aspirations of the Principal Landscape Artists in Montreal and Toronto, 1860-1890 (1979), led to the exhibition and publication Lucius R. O’Brien: Visions of Victorian Canada (AGO, 1990), for which he received The Janet M. Braide Memorial Award for Excellence in Canadian Art History in 1991.
A number of Reid’s projects grew out of his associations with contemporary artists starting in the 1960s. The incomplete volume on Greg Curnoe led to Reid’s entry on Curnoe in the 1968 Paris exhibition catalogue, Canada, art d’aujourd-hui; the Curnoe catalogue for the Biennale in Sāo Paulo in 1969; and finally his retrospective, Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff, curated with Sarah Milroy for the AGO in 2001. Reid’s work with Ann Pollock on the 1969 Jock Macdonald retrospective led to the 1972 exhibition, Toronto Painting: 1953-1965, co-organized with Barrie Hale, that was in turn preceded by Reid’s essay “Notes on the Toronto Painting Scene, 1959- 1969” in Canadian Art Today (1970). His long friendship with Michael Snow resulted in the AGO’s 1994 Michael Snow Project, and Ross Woodman reappeared with an essay in Jack Chambers: Light, Spirit, Time, Place and Life, curated by Reid and Milroy in 2011.
From the Four Quarters: Native and European Art in Ontario, 5000 B.C. to 1867 A.D. (1984), curated with Joan Vastokas of Trent University, exploring the Indigenous and colonial aesthetics in response to their common geography, history, and cultural circumstances, was a groundbreaking initiative of Reid’s. A book of 376 pages with over 400 illustrations was advertised but regrettably only a small catalogue of 48 pages appeared with brief introductory essays and lists of the works in the exhibition.
From 1973 to 2018, Reid taught Canadian art history at Carleton University and University of Toronto and supervised numerous masters and doctoral theses.
Reid was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1998, honorary fellow of the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2000, Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, University of Lethbridge in 2001, and he received the Distinguished Service Award from the Canadian Museums Association in 2011.
