15 “A Lot of Heifer Dust”

Alberta Maverick Marion Nicoll and Abstract Art

Jennifer E. Salahub

Madam, you insult me. That thing you described—the pink, blanc mange with the brutal black slash is “abstract expressionism” which is anathema to a “classical abstractionist” such as myself. I start with something—the model—the street we live in and struggle with the thing, drawing it, trying to find the skeleton that is there. I do this 24 hrs. a day. I dream it, eat it and agonize over it. Usually it is damned hard work with mistakes barring the way. You have to fight your way through the underbrush with every painting.¹

Upon being called an abstract expressionist by her good friend Jean Johnson, Marion Nicoll’s response was immediate and passionate. Nicoll’s letter, written from New York City in 1959, reads—in part jest, part sober rant—as an indication of just how seriously she approached her art and the hurdles that marked her creative process. What this letter also reveals is that Nicoll saw herself as a bushwhacker: she was not following a path—she was forging one of her own. Nicoll’s identity as an abstract artist in the 1960s was informed by the better part of a lifetime of experience. This chapter considers the strategies that allowed her to navigate through a time and place where women and abstract art had yet to be liberated.²

According to the counterculture ethos that informed the mythology of the 1960s, Nicoll, who had turned fifty-one on 11 April 1960, was of the wrong age to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” By all rights, she should have been considered persona non grata by the generation that coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” And yet Nicoll had more in common with this youthful generation than she had with her own, for she was in the habit of challenging the status quo—studying abroad, marrying late, not having children, pursuing an unconventional career. In fact, it would be Nicoll’s batiks, jewellery, and especially her abstract paintings and prints that would exemplify modernity to Alberta’s avant-garde throughout the 1960s. As she vigorously pointed out to Johnson, she was not an abstract expressionist but rather worked in the “classical” tradition of abstract art, in which images are inspired by nature or by concrete objects rather than being entirely non-representational (see figure 1).

Today, Nicoll is recognized as one of the earliest abstract painters in Alberta, as well as the first female artist from the Prairies to be elected to the Canadian Royal Academy (1976). She is fondly remembered by her former students as having a remarkable presence—as a big-boned woman who smoked cigarillos and, when asked how it felt to be the only female instructor at “the Tech” (that is, the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art), is said to have replied “almost outnumbered.”³ Stan Perrott, a former student and, from 1967 to 1974, head of the Alberta College of Art (ACA), would describe Nicoll as “loveable, crusty and affirmative.”⁴ She was, he said, “the rock upon which everybody stood when they were starting out to make art.”⁵ Of course, to some of those starting out she was formidable. “She scared the hell out of everybody,” two students recalled.⁶ Like most women pushing the boundaries, Nicoll set out to exceed expectations—and she did so. When she retired in 1966, it took four men to replace her.⁷

Nevertheless, throughout her life as an artist, Nicoll was viewed with suspicion by those outside of the art community, and she was summarily dismissed by many of her male colleagues. She worked in a variety of modern styles and media, for which she was repeatedly castigated. In mid-century Alberta, it was presumed that any middle-aged, middle-class woman would have assuredly donned the dressings of respectability—complete with white gloves and a cloak of invisibility. But propriety was not Nicoll’s goal; her life was her art, and her style her own. Contemporary photographs show her resplendent in batik-patterned muumuus and chunky silver jewellery, all of which she designed and made (see figure 2). And in the words of one former ACA student, “Marion was a woman who wore scarves and muumuus well.”⁸

In spite of her triumphs—as an educator, a craftsperson, a crafts advocate, a professional artist—the mainstream press continually attempted to reframe her. Nicoll was described not as a professional artist but rather as an “art and craft teacher” and “a wife, housekeeper, full-time and night school teacher” or, simply, an eccentric.⁹ That she had an extensive formal art education and would hold a permanent faculty position at the Tech for more than three decades, or that she was an active member of the art community, teaching at the Banff summer school and participating in the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops—or that she had been funded several times by the Canada Council, or even that her jewellery was exhibited as examples of modern Canadian metalwork at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair—was seldom accorded any significance. During the swinging sixties, when one might have believed that society had finally caught up with Nicoll’s lifestyle, she was still being judged by the outdated mores of her conservative contemporaries.

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of Canada’s cultural dynamism in the 1960s than Expo ’67, the world exhibition in Montréal that is often regarded as this country’s coming out party. At Expo, and across Canada, art was everywhere on display—including work by Nicoll’s students. However, it should be remembered that even in the 1960s the definition of Canadian art had yet to be articulated, with many still arguing that historically it was merely a derivation of European or American art. Across the country, contemporary artists would take up the challenge: to define and shape Canadian art and identity.

Alberta was also in search of a cultural identity; however, the province was looking inward to its history for affirmation of its uniqueness and was suspicious of changes wrought by outsiders. There was a strong sense of belonging to a community of settlers and pioneers. (Calgary’s Heritage Park Historical Village was established in 1963.) Many Albertans of a certain age were survivors of the Great Depression and had witnessed first-hand the effects of the dirty thirties. Theirs was an insular view—one that celebrated wheat, cattle, oil, the prairie landscape, the Calgary Stampede, and western music. There was a genuine respect for hard work and rural traditions that, in the visual arts, would translate as a strong preference for craftsmanship over concept.

The conviction that modern art in Alberta was a homegrown phenomenon was promoted by Alberta artists and described as the creative coming together of local makers, local materials, and local inspiration. Nicoll would credit her former teacher, Alfred Crocker (A. C.) Leighton, a British academic landscape artist who directed the art department at the Tech from 1929 to 1936, for envisioning the seminal role that Alberta-born artists would someday play: “He said that this country would be painted by people who were born here; [. . .] that he came here as a stranger and would never be as close to it as the people who were born in this place, and it would never be painted until somebody here did it.”¹⁰ One of Nicoll’s students, Luke Lindoe, who later became head of ACA’s ceramics department, would affirm that “we were able to be isolated and independent. Consequently, ceramics in Alberta grew as a thing separate, not tied to any apron strings.”¹¹

Reinforcing this insular reading was a general distrust of the federal government and urbanized central Canada. In provincial politics, this identity was given form by the Alberta Social Credit Party (in power from 1935 to 1971), which had been founded on conservative Christian values by William (“Bible Bill”) Aberhart. Under his successor, Ernest Manning, the Socreds became known as the most conservative provincial government in Canada. Alberta’s government took pains to set boundaries. At one point, airlines were forbidden to serve alcohol over the province’s air space. Alberta artists saw themselves benefiting from this isolation. George Wood, a student at the Tech in the 1950s and an instructor there in the 1960s, would remark that people in Alberta were “in some ways fortunate that we lie well off the much-traveled cultural routes. We are left alone to weave our own aesthetic thread.”¹²

The cultural climate in Calgary was, by tradition, conservative. In the visual arts, the art community was primarily made up of naturalistic painters, who would continue to remain popular with the public, while the much smaller cohort of modern painters was looked upon with disbelief and disdain. Nicoll would state that “any time modern art stuck its head up though, it got smacked down.”¹³ In 1926, two art students at the Tech, Maxwell Bates and W. L. (Roy) Stevenson, were banned from exhibiting with the Calgary Sketch Club because their work was seen as too modern.¹⁴ A decade later, Leighton was forced to surreptitiously take his art students into a locked storeroom to show them an Emily Carr exhibition, which had been banned by the head of the Tech as being “too modern.”¹⁵ And, in the late 1940s, upon discovering Nicoll’s growing obsession with abstraction, Leighton, her former teacher, is said to have walked the floor for three days, unable to sleep.¹⁶

Considering how energetically Nicoll bucked Alberta’s cultural conservatism, it is surprising to discover that she had been born and raised in this milieu. Marion Florence Mackay was the daughter of Florence Gingras, an American-born schoolteacher, and Robert Mackay, a Scottish immigrant. She was born in Calgary in 1909 into middle-class respectability. From Marion’s earliest years, art was an integral part of her life, with her father supporting her aspirations. She would later confide that he could have been an artist, “but I don’t think that men in Canada at that time ever did that sort of thing, not in western Canada.”¹⁷

From an early age she challenged conventions, recalling that in Grade 1 her version of what might have been a simple geometric rendering—a drawing of the Union Jack—was distinguished by having a ripple in it. Upon completing Grade 11, she announced that there was no purpose in her returning to high school because she intended to go to art school. And her parents yielded. In 1927, Marion travelled to Toronto to attend the Ontario College of Art (OCA), where she studied landscape painting under the tutelage of J. E. H. MacDonald, a member of the Group of Seven, as well as taking classes in craft and design. While a love for painting and the prairie landscape was a driving force throughout her life, her academic career was underpinned by craft. Ironically, her later fame as a painter would mean that her advocacy of craft and her cutting-edge work in textiles and jewellery have gone unremarked.¹⁸

Poor health and her mother’s insistence kept Marion in Calgary after completing only two years of the four-year OCA diploma. Marion enrolled, somewhat reluctantly, at the Tech, where she came under the eye of Leighton, the school’s new director. After graduation, “Miss M. F. S. Mackay” worked alongside Leighton as a teaching assistant and, from 1935, as a full-time “instructress” in Crafts and Design. In 1937, she travelled to England to study at the London County Council School of Art and Crafts (now Central St. Martins), where she continued to hone her skills, not only in painting but in weaving, textile printing, pottery, bookbinding, architectural decorations, and mosaics, even adding a course in glaze chemistry.

Marion returned to Calgary in 1938, to the Tech and to James “Jim” McLaren Nicoll, whom she had met at the Calgary Sketch Club in the early 1930s. They married in 1940 and she took on his name and a new identity—that of a wife. For the duration of World War II, she accompanied her husband, who was supervising construction jobs for the Commonwealth Air Training Program, across the country. During this period, she continued to paint academic landscapes in the style she had been taught and that her much older husband admired. In 1945, the Nicolls returned to Calgary, and the following year, Marion resumed teaching at the Tech.

By the 1950s, the fascination with modernism was being felt in Alberta and a small community of like-minded individuals was finding a forum. The nuclei existed where one might expect the ideologies of the counterculture and modern art to be nurtured: in the universities and post-secondary institutions where art was being taught and discussed. In Calgary, the flame shone brightest within the art department of the Tech (established in 1916) where the entrenched British-influenced academic conservatism was slowly eroding. In 1960, the art department took its first step toward autonomy and was renamed the Alberta College of Art.

Being housed within a technical institution was no small burden. Throughout the ’60s, the arts students had to run a gauntlet of teasing and ogling by Tech-side students—with young women taking the brunt of the chauvinism. One of them remembered Nicoll as “a wonderful role model” at a time “when there weren’t many women teaching in art schools.”¹⁹ Others were even more impressed when Nicoll, finally fed up with the harassment, turned a water hose on the Tech men.²⁰

Whereas it had been virtually impossible even to consider being a self-sustaining artist in Alberta during the early 1950s, by the end of the decade it was possible—and students were graduating with that very intention. By the early 1960s, the persona of the modern artist in Alberta was beginning to come together. It was young, defiant, and primarily male. As Bill Duma, who attended ACA from 1958 to 1962, described it, “This was the time of the beatniks, Jack Kerouac, bongo drums, poetry, coffee houses . . . and dark smoky basement Jazz clubs such as the Foggy Manor.” He went on to remember his instructor Perrott telling him, “‘Once you attend art school for a couple of years you will never look at things in the same way and probably not fit into main stream society again.’ How right he was and how lucky we were.”²¹ If some change was stirring at ACA, much conservatism remained, even among the instructors themselves, for the world of fine art would remain very much a male bastion. Commenting on the demographic shift that would by 1960 see women art students in the majority, H. G. Glyde, chief instructor of the art department, condescendingly observed that “in spite of this preponderance of femininity the quality and vigor of the work produced is exceptional and promises interesting developments in the art world.”²² While women might have been filling the classrooms, the faculty would remain predominantly male—Nicoll being the exception. Illingworth “Buck” Kerr, who headed the art department from 1947 to 1967, saw her as primarily valuable for her “feminine mind and temperament” and her “good work in support of crafts,” rather than for her “creative work as a painter.”²³ In short, her value as a teacher was put forward as proof of a woman’s innate ability to nurture rather than inspire. Little wonder that Nicoll, facing a return to Calgary after spending the 1958–59 academic year in New York City, wrote to a friend saying that the prejudice against her in her home city—“I’m considered a craftsman and a woman [rather than] a real painter”—would cause Kerr to put “me right back to what he considers normal and fitting of my lowly position in ten minutes.²⁴

Despite the rampant chauvinism, Nicoll would use her skills and reputation as an abstract artist and designer to bring art into Calgary through public commissions, including children’s playgrounds: “I’ve always wanted to do a playground, [. . .] probably because they are always so dull and uninteresting places.”²⁵ And, on a grander scale, in 1967 she was commissioned by the provincial government to design a cast concrete wall for a tourist camp on the Trans-Canada Highway.

Yet the press remained cautious. In a 1967 article headlined “Abstract art with a cigarillo,” Albertan columnist Eva Reid subjects both the abstract art and the cigarillo-wielding artist to scrutiny, while at the same time attempting to make both palatable to Calgarians:

Using abstract, for which she is so very well known, the artist tells the story of a temporary home. The triangle symbol in the Indian language indicates the passage of time, the beadlike symbols speak of day and night, while the morning star indicates people on the move, Mrs. Nicoll explained.

A native daughter [Nicoll] who has distinguished herself in the arts has judged paintings at the Calgary exhibition and Stampede art show for many years. Her father, Robert Mackay, an associate director [of the Stampede], was the first superintendent of the city’s electric light and power. Her husband was also an associate director, so this family’s collection of Stampede badges competes with a museum.²⁶

In 1945, while teaching at the Banff summer school, Nicoll met J. W. G. (Jock) Macdonald and his wife, Barbara. Macdonald’s tenure as head of the art department at the Tech would last only one year before he moved on to the OCA and central Canada, but they remained fast friends. Macdonald had graduated with a diploma in design and an art specialist teacher’s certificate from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1922 and worked in textile design before being hired in 1926 to direct the design department at the Vancouver School of Art, where he taught design and craft classes. Like Nicoll, he is remembered as a painter—the first to exhibit abstract art in Vancouver, an active member of the Painters Eleven, and one of the first to proselytize abstract art in Canada. In Macdonald, Nicoll found not only a kindred spirit but, when he introduced her to the intricacies of automatic drawing, a mentor.

At the time, Nicoll was already a well-educated professional, familiar with the current trends in modern art, who knew that the European surrealists had developed automatics as a way of bypassing the rational. She had read about Paul-Émile Borduas and Québec’s Les Automatistes in Canadian Art and would recall, “To me the best painting done in Canada is done in the province of Quebec.”²⁷ Under Macdonald’s guidance, she began to experiment with automatic drawing: “you take a pencil and in a quiet place you put the pencil on the paper and you sit there and wait until your hand moves of its own accord. You do that every day, [. . .] It will happen without any effort on your part.”²⁸ Here was a totally different approach to art making, and Nicoll was smitten—and sustained by Macdonald’s continued enthusiasm.

Given the critical success of the abstract paintings she made during the 1960s, curators and historians have continued to look for ties between her automatic drawings and her abstract paintings. While recognizing that there are few formal similarities, most are in agreement. As Brooks Joyner suggested, “The quasi-abstract space in these watercolours replaces her disciplined composition; and the careful colour structures she learned from Leighton give way to painterly, fluid, colour washes.”²⁹ A decade later, Christopher Jackson would conclude, “There is no doubt that automatics broke down her academic prejudices and allowed her to make use of abstract forms.”³⁰ Nicoll herself would state, “I don’t think I would have become an abstract painter if I had not done the automatic for eleven years.”³¹ This influence of the automatic shows up in Nicoll’s dream-like imagery of dripping amoeba and cellular shapes within her batiks and jewellery. In fact, upon seeing the batiks, one might assume they were automatic drawings done using a pen-like tjanting tool and hot wax on fabric instead of pen and ink on paper.

Nicoll’s craft remains an important, if overlooked, signifier of modernity in Alberta in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only was her work in craft media being shown and purchased locally, it was being exhibited nationally and internationally—she marketed her jewellery as “sculpture to wear.”³² “Plateau,” a sterling silver brooch by Nicoll, was featured in the National Gallery of Canada’s First National Fine Crafts Exhibition (1957) and was selected to represent Canadian contemporary metalwork at the Universal and International Exhibition in Brussels in 1958.

In 1957, when her modern jewellery was being shown in Ottawa and she was organizing and adjudicating the provincial exhibition Alberta Craft, Nicoll took part in what is generally regarded as the tipping point of her painting career—the Emma Lake Workshop in northern Saskatchewan. The annual summer workshop brought together professional artists and critics from across North America, and that summer it was conducted by Will Barnet, a much-admired American abstract painter and printmaker. It was Barnet who introduced Nicoll to a new formal vocabulary—one that would move her from naturalism to abstraction and generate her most prolific period of painting. Nicoll would later recall that “this sudden abstraction was the most astounding experience I have ever had. I knew then. No question whatsoever in my mind. This was for me. Believe you me, it was for me. I felt as if someone had cut off one hundred pounds and given me wings.”³³

Inspired by Barnet and abstraction, the Nicolls spent the 1958–59 academic year in New York City. There she set up a tight and productive regime, attending classes and critiques at the Art Students League in the morning and painting the rest of the day (interspersed with visits to public and private galleries and studios, where she had access to both historic and contemporary art.) She felt challenged, productive, and confident about her work and herself. In New York, there was no doubt she was an artist and a respected one—she would even receive an offer of a teaching position at the prestigious Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. In November, Nicoll reported that her paintings were “showing a big change—better color and much simpler imagery.”³⁴ In later interviews, she would recount her experiences as the workaday life of an artist: “I worked eight hours a day, seven days a week, and did 60 canvases. [. . .] It was absolute heaven.”³⁵ Jim was taking a course in existentialism at Hunter College and, as always, was willing to engage in heated philosophical discussions. But by the spring Jim was yearning to return to Alberta. Fortunately, Nicoll was awarded a Canada Council fellowship, which eased the financial strain of living in the Big Apple and allowed the couple to travel to Europe for several months before returning home. It was just as well, because, as she confided to a friend, without this break, she doubted she would survive the transition from New York to Calgary: “If I had to return to Calgary straight from here . . . I would slit my throat and bleed messily from here to Times Square.”³⁶

Nicoll knew it would be an uphill battle against the conservative tendencies of her home province and the prejudices she faced at the Tech. It must have been an added aggravation to know she would once again be back under the jaundiced eye of Kerr, whom, she noted, “didn’t approve too much of women in positions of any responsibility.”³⁷ So antagonistic was he that the mild-mannered Perrott would write to another colleague, “There seems to be a streak in this man, growing yearly, that makes him sadistically ‘torture’ those to whom he is committed to render the decencies of civilized behaviour.”³⁸

Nicoll’s return to Calgary would indeed be marked by culture shock. She had left the very definition of modernity—the Big Apple and the energy of the virile New York school of art—to return to a parochial Prairie community. Adding insult to injury, she would, according to popular opinion, be working in a cultural void. As Archibald Key, curator of Alberta Artists 1961, indignantly reminded his audience, it had recently been stated in Canadian Art, the nation’s premier art journal, that “there exists, between Ontario and British Columbia, something close to an artistic wasteland.”³⁹

While the greater Canadian art community would have understood the direction that Nicoll’s work was taking—and would even have recognized her voice as unique to the Prairies—to her detractors, she was “selling out,” dismissed as simply a follower of an American school of art. For the uninitiated conservative Albertan, Nicoll remained an enigma—a middle-aged woman making unseemly, if not unsightly, paintings. Was it even art? This question would remain under discussion in Alberta for much of the decade. In 1963, an article in the University of Alberta’s student paper begins as follows:

More and more these days we are being confronted by something called “Modern Art.” [. . .] Many people, when they come face to face with an abstract painting or read a so-called “beat” poem, call it rubbish. [. . .] Is modern art true art? Or are these supposed artists trying to pull the canvas over the public’s eyes? Is there any set of rules to which we can refer to judge whether or not a piece of work is art? Can we trust the critics in their judgments? Can we trust the artists?⁴⁰

The mainstream press responded to this puzzle not by engaging in a critical art conversation but by reframing the artist to meet ongoing social expectations. Nicoll was identified not as a professional—a cutting-edge abstract artist with a long-standing reputation—but instead as a middle-aged wife (Mrs. James Nicoll), a teacher of crafts, a good neighbour and community supporter (designing playgrounds). At best she was an eccentric, at worst a rank amateur. In the words of a chatty article published in 1958, “Batik, […] takes on meaning when seen through the eyes of Calgary’s—and possibly western Canada’s—only teacher and hobbyist of the art.”⁴¹

Nicoll was troubled by the reception (or lack thereof) that she and her abstract paintings met upon her return to Alberta, but she continued to be championed by Barnet and her friends, who empathized with the resistance and lack of engagement that she encountered in Calgary. Barnet urged her to be courageous and to continue painting “as she must.”⁴² Still, the titles of the work created immediately after her return are revealing. Her bold painting Prophet (1960) is perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to her feeling of rejection and alienation—“for a prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (Mark 6:4). The titles of two other paintings, Ugly City (1964) and Hostile Place (1965), likewise speak volumes about her state of mind at the time.

Nicoll had returned to a full teaching schedule at the Tech and, notwithstanding her misgivings about being again in Calgary, her students remember her enthusiasm for abstraction feeding her craft and design classes. The hectic pace she had set in New York continued with an exhibition of twenty oils shown at the Tech in December. A reviewer for The Albertan was not antagonistic, but he was certainly vague—attempting to define, rather than critique, the art, calling it “a resolute adherence to a classical concept of form and structure.”⁴³

Within the year, we begin to see a shift toward a greater acceptance of Nicoll’s art, at least within the art community. The Edmonton Journal would describe her as a “well known western Canadian artist,” while in Calgary the art critic Robin Neesham proffered that “Mrs. Nicoll, [. . .] at one time overly influenced by New Yorker Will Barnet, [is] now refining her own imagery to a point where she is making an original contribution.”⁴⁴ In Winnipeg, Ken Winters, reviewing an exhibition of “Miss” Nicoll’s work at the Yellow Door Gallery, proposed that hers was not simply a Prairie but a Canadian voice, and one whose “hard-won, hard-painted, distilled observations of life and the world are enormously worth our attention and respect.”⁴⁵

By the mid-sixties, even the local “reviews” were no longer hostile; instead, they were curious, focusing on the artist and her domestic, rather than professional, life. Adeline Flaherty provided Calgary Herald readers with a masterly portrayal of the artist-teacher as a suburban Sunday painter: “The Nicolls’ home in Bowness is comfortable, unpretentious [. . .] also home for three cats, two dogs” and distinguished by being “the only studio in Canada that you enter through the bedroom.”⁴⁶

Nicoll was by now exhibiting regularly in Canada and the United States, and Barnet would write that he was pleased: “All your exhibiting is going to add up one day and you will awake one morning as queen of the Canadian painting world. Of course, this is only the first step and there are many other thrones awaiting you.”⁴⁷ In 1963, it appeared the throne had been unveiled, for the controversial but extremely influential American art critic Clement Greenberg wrote that of the Prairie artists he had seen, “among the best both in oil and in water colour was Marion Nicoll.”⁴⁸ Greenberg’s article touched on the work of a number of Calgary artists, and while gratified to be singled out by the quintessential modernist critic, Nicoll was irked by some of his sweeping statements. For instance, Greenberg identified timidity on the part of artists as characteristic of Prairie art. The following issue of Canadian Art featured a selection of letters to the editor, and they were anything but timid, including a twenty-nine-verse rebuttal by the historian and art curator Moncrieff Williamson, as well as Nicoll’s own pithy response to what she felt were Greenberg’s generalizations. Her comment—“It is a lot of heifer dust”—placed her firmly back on Alberta soil.⁴⁹

Despite these successes, by the end of the 1960s Nicoll’s career as an artist was ending. Hers had been a difficult path—besides the continual psychological battle to be accepted in what was predominantly a man’s world, she had been suffering physically from debilitating arthritis, a condition that would compel her to retire from teaching in 1966 and force her to stop painting in 1971. This was followed by a flurry of interviews and retrospective exhibitions. In a 1975 exhibition catalogue, Barnet would describe her as “one of Canada’s most powerful, imaginative and poetic painters. She has developed a painting language that expresses the imagery, the structure and the atmosphere of her everyday surroundings.”⁵⁰

The following year, the national art community elected Nicoll to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts—the first woman in Alberta to be so honoured. By the early 1980s, she was described as a “living legend,” “a pioneer,” and “Canada’s most overlooked modern.”⁵¹ At the time of her death, in 1985, Nicoll was well on her way to being rewritten into the history of modern painting in Canada and today is remembered not only as a remarkable artist but as a pioneer of abstract art in Alberta. Death even brought a measure of gratitude for her perseverance in the face of Alberta’s indifference and disdain. As a former student observed, “Many of us thought Calgary wasn’t quite the right place for her, but we are indebted to her for staying here.”⁵² Nicoll not only bucked tradition and redefined boundaries but moved beyond the enclosure and brought back what she had learned.