Walter Abell
Walter Halsey Abell (1897–1956) was an American Art teacher and theoretician. Early years Walter Halsey Abell was born in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York. The Barnes Foundation sponsored him to study in France. He became a teacher of art and an art theoretician, interpreting art from Marxist and psychological viewpoints. He taught at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (1925–27). Career Abell taught at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada from 1928 to 1943. He was one of the first professors of fine art at a Canadian university. Abell helped to found the Maritime Art Association, and was founding editor of Maritime Art. The first issue of Maritime Art, the first magazine in Canada devoted to the visual arts, appeared in October 1940. The Carnegie Corporation provided a small grant to help with starting up, and the Maritime Art Association gave organizational support. Abell was editor, but Violet Gillett was responsible for production of the first issues. In the late 1930s Abell saw Canadian modernists, particularly women such as Pegi Nicol and perhaps Paraskeva Clark, as a "very important group of young Canadian painters ... more important than the Group of Seven." André Charles Biéler organized the first conference