James King, “Bertram Brooker: Life and Work” [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2018, page 41
A forerunner in abstract art, the self-trained Bertram Brooker was a skilled draftsman, talented advertising artist and businessman. His extensive experience with graphic illustrations provided the artist with a particularly keen eye for compositional balance, proportion and the dramatic contrast between light and dark in his works. Steeped heavily in notions of musicality, theosophy and the fourth dimension, Brooker infused his works with a mystical quality, hovering in a space between the two and three dimensional worlds.
The still-life genre was a traditional touch point the artist often returned to while exploring the material and immaterial. Discussing a similar work to “Still Life with Apples and Glass” entitled, “Still Life with Lemons (1936)”, James King notes: “The two lemons, the squash and the dining table cloth have an almost palpable texture; yet the bowl, its shadow, and the background are rendered with precise abstract lines that seem to remove these elements from the reality of the others in the composition. Thus the viewer is forced to question what is being viewed.” By the 1930s, Brooker had largely abandoned pure abstraction in favour of a hybrid of figural and natural forms. In both works there is a tension between the cubist abstraction of the background linen forming very precise hard edge folds and draping, compared to the softened smooth texture of the apples and glass goblet.
Not dissimilar to the early abstraction works by Kathleen Munn, there is an experimental quality in Brooker slicing the image plane with bold geometric outlines heightened with dramatic contrast. There is an even balance within the composition, perhaps thanks to an exploration into dynamic symmetry and the process of building a proportionally balanced work with the compositional elements. A master of rendering fabric in a decidedly modern geometric style, Brooker has given equal weight to both the physical objects of the apples and goblet as to the patterned folds of the linen. A modern artwork, “Still Life with Apples and Glass” is testament to Brooker’s avant-garde practice influencing future artists, which firmly cemented his unique position within Canadian art history.
