Harold Town

Harold Barling Town (Toronto, 1924 – Peterborough, Ontario, 1990) was a Canadian painter, as well as an occasional writer and media personality. He was a prominent member of Painters Eleven, an abstract group active in Toronto from 1953 to 1960, whose name he chose himself. Before devoting himself fully to painting, he worked as an illustrator for magazines such as Maclean's and Mayfair.

He trained at the Central Technical School and the Ontario College of Art. In the 1950s and early 1960s he drew on de Kooning, Picasso and the Asian art he saw at the Royal Ontario Museum, though these influences were not decisive, as the originality of his collages shows. Between 1953 and 1959 he produced his Single Autographic Prints, a novel printmaking technique that won him awards in Ljubljana and Santiago, Chile. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1956 and 1964 and at the São Paulo Biennial in 1957 and 1961, and he also appeared at Documenta in 1964.

From the mid-1960s he absorbed Pop Art, Op Art and assemblage, in series such as Muscelmen and Toy Horses. This period brought negative reviews accusing him of a lack of seriousness. Retrospectives at the Art Gallery of Windsor (1975) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (1986) affirmed his place in Canadian art.