Plaza Café

Each individual is alone, cut off. Each wonders how others cope with life. – Philip Surrey, c. 1949 A friend and student of F.H. Varley, Surrey was a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Society. Here, he depicts a Montreal café, carefully staging the anonymous figures to convey a sense of loneliness. In the 1930s Surrey’s work increasingly expressed the human experience in the throes of the Great Depression.