Prairie Woman is a powerful example of Bates’s empathetic exploration of the human condition. The enigmatic woman confronts the viewer with her unwavering gaze, raising her gnarled hand as she feeds the chickens at her feet. Toughened by the harshness of living on the prairie, she embodies the strength and resilience required to survive in this landscape.

 

Biographer Kathleen Snow remarked that Prairie Woman reflects the “intensity of the shock Max experienced on his return to the expanse of the prairies” after enduring five years as a prisoner of war in Germany. Bates found the bright and arid prairie an unforgiving environment, and in Prairie Woman, he observes the toll prairie life takes on the form and spirit of its inhabitants.

 

Bates painted two versions of Prairie Woman in 1947. This version was included in the Art Gallery of Victoria’s 1982 exhibition Maxwell Bates: A Retrospective and is reproduced in the accompanying catalogue as well as in the catalogue of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 1973 retrospective, and in Kathleen Snow’s book Maxwell Bates: Biography of an Artist. The other version of Prairie Woman is held in the collection of the Glenbow Museum and was used as the catalogue cover image for the Art Gallery of Alberta’s exhibition Maxwell Bates: A Canadian Expressionist (2004).

Maxwell Bates was a Canadian architect and Expressionist painter. Born in Calgary, Bates started painting at an early age, and as a young man, he worked for his father's architecture firm. He also studied in the Art Department at the Provincial Institute of Technology, but as an early proponent of modernism in Alberta, Bates quickly rejected the traditional academic education provided. His modernist leanings eventually led to his expulsion from the Calgary Art Club.

 

In 1931 he made the decision to leave Calgary for England, where he found commercial success as an artist before enlisting with the British Territorial Army. One year into his service he was captured in France by the Germans. The five years Bates endured as a prisoner of war left a lasting mark and likely deepened the psychological intensity of his later work. This experience as a POW was captured in his 1978 book A Wilderness of Days.

 

Upon liberation Bates returned to Calgary and resumed work as an architect at his father’s firm. He immersed himself in the artistic community he met fellow modernists Janet Mitchell, Jock Macdonald, Jim and Marion Nicoll, and Luke Lindoe. Together they formed the Calgary Group, with the aim to broaden the city’s conservative art scene.

 

Bates’s exposure to contemporary art while in Europe, and a pivotal 1949 trip to study with German Expressionist Max Beckmann at the Brooklyn Museum deeply influenced his work. These experiences led Bates to embrace the distorted perspectives, flattened forms, and gaudy colours of Expressionism to document his observations of Canadian society from the working-class to the elite.

 

Bates balanced parallel careers as an architect and artist. Among his most important architectural projects is the design of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Calgary, a striking modernist landmark completed in 1956.

 

Despite suffering a stroke in 1961 that partially paralyzed him, Bates continued to paint prolifically. He moved from Calgary to Victoria in 1962 and produced some of his most distinctive work over the next several years. His paintings have been exhibited across Canada, including at the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery, and continue to resonate for their raw, uncompromising vision of human experience.

 

Though long under appreciated in Canada, Bates received an honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary in 1971 and was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1980, just months before his death. Bates had suffered a second stroke in 1978 and died in Victoria on September 14, 1980.