signed and dated

 

Painted in 1965, during what is widely regarded as the peak of Maxwell Bates’s career, The Man Who Voted for Gambetta may be interpreted as a self-portrait. The figure’s concealed arms recall Bates’s own partial paralysis following a stroke in 1961, which left him without the use of his left arm.

 

Set in a café— a motif Bates returned to throughout his career—the work evokes both his European travels and his surroundings where he lived in Victoria. For Bates, the café was a stage for observing human tension and introspection.

 

One of the most intriguing aspects of this work is the use of collage. Bates has embedded real playing cards onto the painting, materials rarely, if ever, seen elsewhere in his oeuvre.

 

The title adds another layer of intrigue. “Gambetta” most likely refers to Léon Gambetta, the 19th-century French statesman and national hero of the Franco-Prussian War. His name entered popular culture as a symbol in games of chance and lotteries. Bates’s choice of this title suggests a deliberate interplay between politics, gambling, and fate.

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.