Joan Murray’s Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century is a first, though one would have expected there to have been a compendium of this kind before now. There is Dennis Reid’s Concise History of Canadian Painting (the standard university textbook across the country), but it’s a paperback, digest-size, and hardly a book you’d use outside of a classroom. Which makes Murray’s 100-year survey of Canadian art important in its one and onliness, and the expectation for it to be impressive is high.

It comes as a disappointment that the designer made most of the art reproductions smaller than postcards, but left huge margins and double-spaced the text. Only a half-dozen of the some 300 images actually get full-page treatment, although the book includes such gems as Lawren S. Harris’s mountainous landscapes of the 1930s, or Attila Richard Lukacs’ 1990 painting of skinheads digging up a public square (“This Town”).

If I were Regan Morris, I would be a bit upset to find “Oscar Wilde’s Last Words,” my 1993 painting of detailed texture spanning over 16 metres, reproduced here in monochrome and only slightly bigger than a postage stamp.

Murray’s writing glides easily and informatively over important works and players of each period. An art historian and curator for many years, she writes with clarity and makes a conscious effort to avoid excessive artspeak. The average reader should find this a valuable introduction to Canadian art and a useful resource of names, dates, and bibliographic information.