By Roald Nasgaard. Douglas & McIntyre/Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 432 pp, $85, hardcover

Abstract Painting in Canada meets most of the demands of a discerning coffee table: lavish illustrations, sumptuous production, and a scholarly yet accessible text.

Academic and curator Roald Nasgaard has put together an eloquent and exhaustive history of his subject. He documents the early development and middle florescence of the art form in this country, then marks its late-20th-century resurgence. In his introduction, Nasgaard notes the significance of Peinture Peinture, a 1998 multivenue exhibition of abstract painting in Montreal. "From being a retrograde and theoretically discounted practice, abstract painting in its many guises, at the turn of the millennium, was suddenly rediscovered reasserting itself quite unembarrassedly and unapologetically."

Canada should be embarrassed by abstraction's tardy beginnings here. Despite the powerful European examples of Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian, Canadian artists were reluctant to commit themselves to the nonrepresentational and nonillusionistic. This tentativeness is seen in the odd experiments of Kathleen Munn and Bertram Brooker in Toronto in the 1920s and the mystical weirdness of Lawren Harris a decade later.

Despite their various shortcomings, Nasgaard pays these artists thorough and respectful attention, then presses on, celebrating abstraction's astonishing burst of vitality and originality with Les Automatistes in Montreal in the 1940s and '50s. He also examines many other postwar developments, including Toronto's Painters Eleven, Vancouver's landscape-based abstractionists, Les Plasticiens, the Regina Five, the famed Emma Lake artists' workshops, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where abstraction took on a conceptual agenda. The book travels from city to city, focusing on distinct regional influences and developments, then observes that, after 1980, regionalism became a nonissue in Canadian abstraction.

As comprehensive as the book is, however, there are notable omissions of contemporary painters for whom abstraction is or has been a significant aspect of their practice. (The list is long, but Arabella Campbell, Wanda Koop, Elizabeth McIntosh, Sylvia Tait, and Shirley Wiitasalo are among those not recognized here.)

But even with these exclusions, this is a gorgeous and important addition to any art library.