William Perehudoff


William Perehudoff was a Canadian artist most closely associated with colour field painting. He was married to the landscape painter Dorothy Knowles.

Life and career

Perehudoff was born in St. Paul's Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on April 21, 1918, and was raised on a farm in the Doukhobor community of Bogdanovka, between the towns of Langham and Borden, Saskatchewan. His formal education ended at grade eleven, but he pursued art studies with French artist Jean Chariot at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado, with Amedee Ozenfant at the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts, New York, New York and through the Emma Lake Artist's Workshops, where he became acquainted with teachers Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. It was at one of these workshops in 1962 that he met New York art critic Clement Greenberg, who introduced him to Post-painterly Abstraction, which had an enormous impact upon his art and career.
Perehudoff's work has been represented in numerous public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Remai Modern in Saskatoon, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art.
In 1994, he was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and in 1999, he was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada. Due to failing eyesight, Perehudoff gave up painting around 2003-2004.
He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
In November 2009, several of Perehudoff's murals were successfully removed from the executive suite in the former Intercontinental Packers plant. Perehudoff painted them in 1950, and the abstract silhouettes are considered the last remaining examples of purist cubist art from that period. Appraised at $250,000, the murals had been at risk as the plant was slated for demolition. Ian Hodkinson, a retired art conservator, was brought in and used a special method to remove the acrylic paint from the plaster intact. The murals remained in storage until the Remai Modern was completed in 2017. They are now displayed in a special antechamber, built to the same dimensions as the boardroom in which they first existed.
Perehudoff died on February 26, 2013 at age 94.