Exhibited
"Sounds Assembling: Bertram Brooker in Winnipeg Collections", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 3 October 1999-30 January 2000
Possibly "The View From Here: Selections from the Canadian Historical Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 28 May-31 December 2000
"Focus on Paintings", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 24 January-9 March 2003
Bertram Brooker established his artistic credentials with a landmark exhibition of abstract paintings at the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto in 1927. Although the initial response of his peers was negative, the ensuing notoriety launched his artistic career and eventually catapulted him to fame as the first artist in Canada to hold a solo show devoted exclusively to abstraction. After meeting Winnipeg artist Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald during the summer of 1929, Brooker shifted to more representational images in the thirties. From that point on, Brooker toggled between abstraction and figuration, sometimes combining both approaches in a single picture.
In October 1930, FitzGerald sent Brooker the painting "Still Life", 1925 (Private Collection), which he would later purchase. This picture, a constant source of joy for Brooker, included a classical Roman statue (likely a plaster reproduction after the "Farnese Hercules") and was perhaps painted at the Winnipeg School of Art where plaster casts were readily available for FitzGerald’s students to copy. The picture may have been a demonstration piece for the students since FitzGerald taught courses on both the Antique and Still Life as part of the general plan of instruction.
With FitzGerald’s "Still Life" hanging in his living room, Brooker painted "Still Life with Top Hat, Stone Fragment, Glass Ball, and Tumbler", 1931. Against a curtained backdrop and upward tilted foreground à la Paul Cézanne, Brooker organized a group of objects representing
a basic vocabulary of geometric forms that recall Cézanne’s famous dictum to see nature reduced to the essentials of “cylinder, sphere and cone.” Like FitzGerald, Brooker introduces a historical element with a plaster fragment most likely depicting a detail of the right eye from Michelangelo’s marble sculpture "David" (Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence). In addition to recreating this surface in paint, Brooker demonstrated his technical versatility by painting a silk hat, glass globe, and metal cup. As the thirties progressed, Brooker would turn continuously to Cézanne as a source of inspiration for the underlying structure and surface treatment of still life compositions.
Michael Parke-Taylor, Canadian art historian, curator and author of "Bertram Brooker: When We Awake!" (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024) and editor of "Some Magnetic Force: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Writings" (Concordia University Press, 2023).
This artwork is being sold to benefit the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG)-Qaumajuq in establishing an endowment fund to support more diverse representation in the permanent collection, beginning with contemporary Canadian art. Cowley Abbott is pleased to donate our selling commission to the fund as part of the sale.
