Why renowned Canadian artist Joyce Wieland was so fascinated by Quebec
Self-described cultural activist Joyce Wieland created art ranging from semi-abstract paintings to film as a way to express her feminist politics. Nearly 30 years after her death, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario are presenting Joyce Wieland: Heart On, an exhibition bringing together some 100 works until May 4, 2025.
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Globe and Mail
3 days ago
- Globe and Mail
Unusual Lawren Harris painting showing in Nova Scotia to mark William Davis centenary
An unusual Canadian painting has made a sentimental journey to Cape Breton this spring, 100 years after the dramatic events that inspired it. Miners' Houses, Glace Bay, painted by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris during the bitter 1925 miners' strike, is showing at the Eltuek Arts Centre, an artist-run cultural centre and gallery in Sydney, N.S., down the road from the mines. The painting is important to both Nova Scotia labour history and Canadian art history. It represents the last time Harris, renowned for his northern landscapes, painted an urban industrial scene. The Sydney exhibition is timed to the centenary of Davis Day, Nova Scotia's commemoration of miners who have died on the job. The day, marked annually on June 11 since 1925, is named for William Davis, a Cape Breton miner shot by company police during the strike. Miners' Houses has never before been shown in Cape Breton, but was exhibited in Halifax in 2004. It is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has lent it to the Eltuek for the occasion. Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explores Indigenous masks that inspired Paris Surrealists When Harris visited Nova Scotia that spring, as part of relief efforts for the strikers organized as far away as Toronto, the miners had dug in, 'standing the gaff,' after the management of the British Imperial Steel Corporation threatened them with starvation. The artist had visited Nova Scotia in 1921 and been appalled by the poverty he saw in Halifax, where he had painted two views of wood-frame tenements. In 1925, he was equally shocked by the miners' working and living conditions in Glace Bay, and published an uncharacteristically illustrative drawing of an emaciated miner's wife and her children in Canadian Forum that summer. Strikes were rampant in the 1920s in the Cape Breton coalfields. Poorly paid for dangerous work, the unionized miners were captives of an employer who owned their houses and the local store. Davis's death occurred during a riot at Waterford Lake, where the striking workers had at one point seized the power plant that controlled the pumps that kept the mines from flooding. When the company retook the plant on June 11, it cut off the miners' electricity and water in retaliation. The miners marched to the power plant demanding the restoration of the utilities, and were met by company police on horseback who shot into the crowd, killing Davis. Unsung art dealer Berthe Weill, the first to sell a Picasso, finally gets her due His death became a rallying cry for better working conditions in Nova Scotia, and miners traditionally never worked on June 11 ever after. The last underground mine closed in 2001, and the province recognized the commemoration day officially in 2008. Harris had left Nova Scotia by the time of the riot, and though it would be tempting to say his painting is returning home, it is unclear whether he started the work in Glace Bay or, more likely, just sketched there and completed the painting in his Toronto studio. Warsaw's new museum of contemporary art offers a stark white contrast to the city's troubled history More abstracted than the Halifax tenements of 1921, the work comes from a period when Harris had all but ceased painting urban scenes. It presents a dour, rugged and geometricized view of the miners' housing. No people are in sight, but the houses stand in a row like a line of oppressed workers. They have also been compared to coffins. Only a ray of sunshine appearing in a small gap in moody clouds gives any sense of hope. Earlier in his career, Harris had often painted pleasant Ontario street scenes and also the slums of The Ward in Toronto, but by this point he had already travelled to Lake Superior and was increasingly only interested in the drama of landscapes. Miners' Houses, his final industrial scene, was also one of the last times he painted houses of any kind as he moved west and concentrated on views of the Rockies and the Arctic. The painting is being shown at the Eltuek Arts Centre until June 28 – alongside a billy club found in the woods after the 1925 strike.
Montreal Gazette
15-05-2025
- Montreal Gazette
Montreal artist and ‘extraordinary mentor' Rita Briansky has died at 99
Montreal artist Rita Briansky, whose work is featured in the permanent collections of institutions including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Vancouver Art Gallery, has died. She would have been 100 in July. Briansky, who died April on 24, had long been recognized for her career as a painter, printmaker and etcher. She is remembered also as an adored teacher who inspired many other artists over decades in classes at the Visual Arts Centre, Saidye Bronfman School of Fine Arts and at Cummings Centre. 'She was an extraordinary mentor, a coach,' Gina Roitman, a Cummings Centre student, said of Briansky. 'She never instructed: She always kind of led you.' In one of dozens of tributes accompanying Briansky's obituary on the Paperman website, another student observed: 'Rita knew how to talk to her students with total respect for them and for their artistic efforts, whether they were rank beginners or skilled painters. She drew the best out of each of us.' Class with Briansky was 'more like a workshop: Everyone worked at their own level,' Cummings student Phyllis Deitcher said. 'Rita was full of stories and full of wisdom and humour. The class became like a family. We all loved her. She was a warm, wonderful, passionate person — and she cared about each of her students,' Deitcher said. 'She felt anyone could become an artist. Her favourite expression was: 'Be yourself: everyone else is taken.'' It was always clear to Briansky that she wanted to be an artist. 'Before I could write, I could draw,' she said in a 2020 interview. 'I was the one as a little kid who took chalk from the blackboard and drew on the sidewalks,' she recalled in the 2018 documentary by Janet Best and Dov Okouneff, The Wonder and Amazement — Rita Briansky on Her Life in Art. Briansky was born in Grajewo, Poland, in 1925 and arrived in Canada in 1929 with her mother and two older sisters to join her father in Ansonville, a northern Ontario pulp and paper town. She remembered small, sweet, strawberries to snack on, wild roses along the roadside and the northern lights in the sky, she told the filmmakers. 'I was very much involved with nature.' The family moved to the northern Quebec mining town of Val d'Or in 1939 and in 1941 to Montreal, where they lived on Parc Ave. and Briansky's mother took in boarders and roomers. The family struggled financially and her parents wanted her to leave Baron Byng High School before graduating to find work. But she wanted to study art. The Yiddish poet Ida Maze championed her, got her babysitting jobs and introduced her to her first art teacher, Alexander Bercovitch. 'I felt so awed by meeting this great artist,' Briansky recalled. 'In many ways he was my best teacher — because he acknowledged me.' In her early 20s, she moved to New York City to study with the Art Students League, taking various jobs in the evenings to support herself. On her return to Montreal in 1949, she met fellow artist Joseph Prezament, a Winnipeg native; they married five months later. The couple had two daughters, Anna and Wendy. 'I loved being a mother,' Briansky told Best and Okouneff. She worked from home, making etchings that sold well. 'I was the only mother they knew who had a printing press in the living room.' Her work, which used portraiture, still life and landscapes, addressed diverse subjects and themes but was rooted in her own experiences. 'Practically everything I have drawn or painted has been something familiar to me,' she told the filmmakers. In 1983, Prezament died of a brain tumour. He was 60. A few years later, Briansky began to travel alone to destinations including India, Israel and Mexico. 'I was brave,' she recalled. Briansky, who had lost relatives in the Holocaust, felt 'an unyielding urge' in 1995 to return to the country of her birth. She visited memorial sites and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Viewing a field of red poppies, she realized that 'this beautiful landscape was fertilized by human ashes.' On her return, she produced the Kaddish series — her reflection on the trauma of the Holocaust: Its 18 works are on permanent display at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Westmount. In 2006, Briansky contacted the Art for Healing Foundation — the not-for-profit foundation collects and installs art from prominent artists and benefactors in hospitals and other health-care institutions — about donating paintings by her late husband. A number of works by Prezament hang at the Maimonides Geriatric Centre. She began to donate some of her own work: Paintings from her Carousel series, for instance, hang in the Montreal Children's Hospital. 'Rita loved donating her art,' said Earl Pinchuk, co-founder with Gary Blair of the Art for Healing Foundation and its executive director. 'She was a lovely person — and strong-minded. I was in awe of everything she did.' Briansky's work was featured in 2008 in the group exhibition Jewish Painters of Montreal: Witnesses of Their Time, 1930-1948, at the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec and later at the McCord Museum. Group members included Jack Beder, Sam Borenstein, Eric Goldberg, Harry Mayerovitch, Louis Muhlstock and Moe Reinblatt — and she was its last surviving member, as Michael Millman observed. The West End Gallery, started by Millman's mother in 1964, was a fixture on Greene Ave. for 50 years; Briansky was represented in its opening and final exhibitions and several solo shows in between. She would start her weekly classes at Cummings with a brief lecture on art history relevant to what her students were working on. 'By teaching, I am learning. I am proving that getting older doesn't mean you have to stop growing: I am challenging them and they take up the challenge and I feel that, from week to week, they are growing.' Patricia Kehler, supervisor of the Cummings fine arts and crafts department, said Briansky was its most popular teacher. The last class she taught was in March, weeks before her death. When Kehler visited her in hospital, 'she asked about registration for her spring classes. I just felt she was going to live forever.' Briansky, who in addition to her husband was predeceased by her devoted partner, Eddie Klein, and by two of her sisters. She is survived by her daughters, her younger sister and by nieces and nephews. A celebration of her life is planned for a later date. This story was originally published
Montreal Gazette
01-05-2025
- Montreal Gazette
Brownstein: Late, great filmmaker Peter Pearson will get the memorial service he deserves — in a movie theatre
By Bill Brownstein The decision by his son Louis would have left Peter Pearson smiling — or more likely chortling, in his own inimitable fashion. An acclaimed Montreal director, film executive and fierce advocate for the arts, Pearson died last month at 87 at the long-term Ste. Anne's Hospital in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue following a three-year struggle with the devastating effects of dementia and Parkinson's disease. Louis Pearson decided the best way — the only way — to honour his dad would be to hold his memorial Friday morning at, appropriately, a movie theatre: the Cinéma du Musée, inside the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 'This was the only fitting place for his send-off,' says Louis Pearson, a TVA exec. 'Our place of worship was the movie theatre. The way some would convene at their place of worship, we would go the movies every other week. He had such a passion for film. He had such a passion for life.' In December 2023, with support from friends like Margaret Atwood and Ken Dryden as well as Louis, Peter Pearson was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada for his 'groundbreaking contributions as a filmmaker and for his tireless advocacy of Canadian film and television.' 'It brings tears to my eyes. … I'm very moved,' Pearson told me at the time. 'It's such a surprise and honour to be in such rarefied company. I don't know if I deserve this.' He did. Pearson served as president of the Directors Guild of Canada, executive director of Telefilm Canada and chair of the Council of Canadian Filmmakers. And when he decided to retire from the film business, he set up the Cinémagique club for local cinephiles, providing close to 1,000 members with premières of everything from arty Euro to highly touted American indie to homegrown Québécois fare, followed by analyses from the films' writers and directors. Pearson's contributions as a filmmaker were groundbreaking: among them, The Best Damn Fiddler From Calabogie to Kaladar (1968) — which won eight Canadian Film Awards, including best picture, and launched the career of his close pal Margot Kidder — and Paperback Hero (1973), winner of a slew of honours and featuring Keir Dullea, star of Stanley Kubrick's monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In addition to the nearly two dozen films he made for the National Film Board of Canada and others, Pearson made his mark on the small screen as a producer of CBC's This Hour Has Seven Days in the 1960s and as producer-director of CBC's much-lauded six-part series Ken Dryden's Home Game (1990), based on the latter's bestseller The Game. Pearson and Dryden became great buddies as a result of their collaboration on the series, which took them everywhere from Montreal to Moscow. 'Peter was immersed with life,' the legendary Habs netminder notes in a phone interview. 'He tried to make sense of life and he also tried to make nonsense of it. He was interested in so many things and always had a fascinating take on things. He was funny, smart, a great storyteller — just great company. 'He was very much a character, but a real character, a compelling character, not a self-focused character. He was a performer, but he wasn't self-indulgent.' Dryden, who lives in Toronto, recalls taking in a Canadiens game at the Bell Centre with Pearson, in what was one of the filmmaker's last public outings. 'Peter was struggling physically at the time, but, as usual, he was never not interesting, still adept at capturing the essence of it all,' Dryden says. 'His joy was always enjoying the moment.' No doubt about that, as those of us who had the privilege of spending time with him can attest. Prior to his illnesses, Pearson, gregarious and forever with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, was always the life of the party and never held back from voicing his opinions on everything from hockey to politics to culture and, of course, film. He had no use for cheap sentiment. 'He was one of a kind,' says Louis, married and the father of two. 'Apart from his love of film, he also had a passion for opera, standing on chairs and belting out arias at parties, sometimes even in the proper key. He had a passion for baseball, and was a fervent Expos season-ticket holder. He could even recall the opening-day lineup for the Cleveland Indians — in 1948! And he had a passion for storytelling and embellishing it from time to time for dramatic effect.' Close friend Peter Raymont was always blown away by Pearson's love of life. 'I loved his passion for life, for people, for film, for everything. He had such enormous energy and gusto,' says Raymont, director of Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (2004), co-director and producer of Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word Is Power (2019) and executive producer of Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band (2019). Raymont will be singing the Phil Ochs tune When I'm Gone in tribute to Pearson at Friday's memorial. 'The point of the song is do it while you're alive, and Peter certainly did that,' Raymont says. 'What Peter did for me and so many others was to inspire us to be our best. He was very supportive of me and so many others in our careers. I'm so forever grateful to him.' Ever cognizant of Pearson's accomplishments and passions, Louis points out what to him was his dad's greatest attribute. 'He was also the greatest dad. We went on all kinds of amazing adventures together, catching sports events and operas. He came to my baseball games. He coached my hockey team,' points out Louis, before taking on a more wistful tone. 'As an adult two decades back, when I had cancer, he picked me up for every treatment. He was so attentive, shepherding me through the whole ordeal. 'Really, he shone his light wherever he was in his life.'
