Cecil Buller was born into comfortable circumstances on September 15th 1886 in Montreal. She was the second daughter of Frank Buller, a Montreal opthalmologist and professor at McGill University and his wife Elizabeth Langlois of Quebec City. Frank Buller was a supporter of the arts and a member of the Art Association of Montreal (AAM), and Cecil grew up in an environment that encouraged her artistic creativity. In 1902 she was exposed to international art when she travelled to Europe with her father and sister, Marguerite. During their trip to Europe Buller visited art museums and is reputed to have studied briefly at the famous Académie Julian in Paris.
After the family returned to Canada, Buller pursued her art training, initially studying under William Brymner at the AAM. The AAM followed traditional academy methods which emphasized the mastery of anatomy and drawing from plaster casts and the nude model as the basis for further art study. In 1910 she moved to New York City to study at the progressive Art Students League, and in 1912 she travelled to Paris where she studied with the French Symbolist artist Maurice Denis. Denis encouraged Buller’s interest in the figure, and the female form would become one of her favourite subjects. Her earliest block print, Summer Afternoon, a rhythmic and stylized linocut from 1915, demonstrates her interest in the formal qualities of the female nude.
Buller was initially more interested in painting than in printmaking; however, during the late 1910s she turned increasingly to printmaking. Her interest in block prints coincided with an interest by many American artists in the medium during the period. Her earliest prints were linocuts (linoleum was a cheaper and more pliable alternative to wood blocks); however, in 1922 she turned to wood–engraving.
In 1916 Buller travelled to London, England, where she studied with British printmaker Noel Rooke at the Central School of Art and Design. It was here that she met the American artist and printmaker John J.A. Murphy. During World War I Murphy was stationed in France where he worked with the camouflage unit of the American Army. Buller and Murphy were married in 1917 in Dijon, France, and after the war they settled in New York City. In 1924 the couple’s only child, Sean, was born. Perhaps because of her European training, Buller did not produce many works that featured identifiably Canadian or American subject matter. Two notable exceptions are French Canadian Oven (1919), an uncharacteristically naturalistic linocut that was stylistically influenced by Rooke, and Man–Machines (1924), a formalist wood engraving that was later reproduced on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in July 1927.
In 1929 Buller produced Song of Solomon, eleven wood engravings that were published in an edition of 25 by Féquet, Paris. Each print from the series reproduced a passage from the Old Testament love song. The Song of Solomon is an allegory of human passion, and Buller places the couple at the front of the picture plane in the majority of the prints. In Kneeling (I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine) the triangular composition of the lovers embracing in an Edenic landscape is the main element of the composition. One print from the series is different though: in the final illustration Skyscrapers (In the streets and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth), a work that the art critic John Gould Fletcher called “daringly modern,” the figures are dwarfed by the skyscrapers of New York City. In 1931 Éditions du Raisin in Paris used the blocks from the Song of Solomon to illustrate Cantique des Cantiques (Song of Songs).
Between 1930 and 1945 Buller made few block prints. A shift in her work to lithography and increased family obligations were jointly responsible for her move away from block prints. During the 1930s Buller had a young son, and her husband was in ill health. The couple eventually separated around 1937. By the mid–1940s, when she returned to wood–engraving, the style and content of her work was different. Her prints became more psychologically charged and expressive and she began to employ a more animated and detailed technique. Self Portrait of the Artist (1949), one of her only self portraits, shows the artist in a reflective and sober pose before several mythical and allegorical figures that she had used in earlier prints.
During the 1940s Buller’s work was included in two important exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 1957 she was featured in a retrospective exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She ceased making prints in about 1956 and, in 1959, she returned to Montreal, where she lived until her death in 1973. Although Buller did not achieve fame during her lifetime, in recent years she has become the subject of increased interest. There have been four major posthumous exhibitions of Buller’s work: Cecil Buller: Modernist Printmaker was held at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary in 1989, Husband and Wife: The Wood Engravings of John J.A. Murphy and Cecil Buller was featured at the Musée du Québec in 1997, Cecil Buller: A Canadian Modernist was held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2005 and Woman Imprinted: The Work of Cecil Buller opened at the Carleton University Art Gallery in 2005. In 2005 her son Dr. Sean Murphy donated the studio archives of Cecil Buller and John J. A. Murphy to the Carleton University Art Gallery.
Katie Cholette
Associate Editor