Arnaud Maggs, Once a Designer

Arnaud Maggs had a decades-long career during which he produced important work in both commercial and fine art. In his early years he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator. In the late 1960s he pursued commercial photography. Maggs then transitioned to fine art in the early 1970s, producing work frequently positioned within the context of conceptual art. Maggs and others often portrayed his shift to fine art as a dramatic and transformative reinvention, resulting in limited acknowledgment of his early commercial work and only cursory investigation of its impact on his subsequent artistic production. This dissertation maintains that Maggs’s visual and conceptual languages reveal a synthesis of strategies from each stage of his career, and argues for a more comprehensive understanding of Canada's visual culture by bridging the gap between fine and applied art histories.

Biography helps to reveal a range of influences and experiences that may otherwise remain concealed but contribute to shaping an artist’s work. In so doing, biographical detail — especially detail that traces professional experiences and work history — helps to unsettle perceptions of artistic genius by offering a more nuanced understanding of how an artist’s work develops through interconnected influences, life experiences, and work history. Through a close examination of Maggs's biography and emphasis on his commercial experience, this dissertation highlights the interconnections in Maggs’s creative practices and challenges traditional biases in art history. In order to expand biographical and contextual details, I conducted a series of interviews with people who knew and worked with Maggs. This oral history unsettles the mythology around his career narrative. What emerges instead is a picture of an artist whose formal and conceptual languages evolved over decades of work.

Structured in two parts, “Once a Designer, Always an Artist: Redefining the Mythology of Maggs” and “Once a Designer, Always a Designer: Commercial Practice and Conceptual Praxis,” this dissertation contextualizes Maggs’s work within larger trends and foregrounds the profound influence his early careers had on his artistic production in order to illuminate his motivations and offer a counternarrative to published accounts of his career trajectory.