Gershon Iskowitz: Life & Work

GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Life & Work by Ihor Holubizky
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Contents
03
Biography
24
Key Works
55
Significance & Critical Issues
70
Style & Technique
84
Where to See
95
Notes
107
Glossary
124
Sources & Resources
134
About the Author
135
Copyright & Credits
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz (1920 or 1921–1988) was born and grew up in Poland.

The circumstances of his early life—the trauma of the Holocaust and
the uncertainty of the immediate postwar period, followed by
immigration and adaptation to Canada—provide the context within
which we must try to understand and appreciate his work, for art and
life were inseparable for Iskowitz. His early figurative images represent
his tragic observed and remembered experiences. In his later luminous
abstract works, he created his own vision of the world as he remade
himself a new man in a different place.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
KIELCE TO BUCHENWALD
Gershon Iskowitz was born in Kielce—an ancient city in south-central
Poland with a significant Jewish population of approximately 18,000 on
the eve of the Second World War. 1 His father was Shmiel Yankl, generally
referred to as Jankel; his mother was Zisla Lewis. Gershon was the third of
four children; he had two brothers, Itchen and Yosl, and a younger sister,
Devorah. The exact date of his birth cannot be firmly established, but he
was born in either 1920 or 1921. 2
The most comprehensive accounts of Iskowitz’s early life are found in two
books written at the time of the Iskowitz retrospective at the Art Gallery
of Ontario in 1982: Adele Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light,
and David Burnett, Iskowitz. 3 Both authors interviewed the artist
extensively and recorded his stories. Unfortunately, there is a lack of
basic documentation about him: Iskowitz kept only two key official
records and a few photographs from a crucial period in his life, 1945–47,
and he never saved any letters. New research has corrected many long- Left to right: (back row) Parents Zisla
Lewis and Jankel and (front row) children
standing biographical errors, but his life story remains compelling—one of Yosl, Gershon, and Itchen, c.1924,
survival, renewal, and artistic achievement. photographer unknown, Gershon Iskowitz
Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives,
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Jankel Iskowitz “made a modest living writing satirical pieces—poems,
jokes, vignettes—for the weekly Yiddish language papers in Warsaw, Radom,
and Kielce [but] did not take an active part in politics.”4 The family lived in the
Jewish quarter, where most men were tradespeople or peddlers and the
people were poor but self-sufficient, with their own schools, theatre, and social
services. They lived in constant fear of opposition from the other townspeople
—conflicts that erupted at times into pogroms. Hoping his son would become a
rabbi, Jankel sent Gershon when he was only four to a nursery in Lublin
sponsored by the Lublin Yeshiva, an important centre for the study of the
Torah. But the boy rebelled against institutional life, so two years later he
returned home and, over the next few years, attended a Polish school or was
privately tutored. The family spoke Yiddish, but Gershon learned Hebrew,
Polish, and some German before he turned ten. Early on he demonstrated an
aptitude for drawing, and his father encouraged his talent by portioning off
space in a front room of the house where he could sketch.
Gershon loved films, and the enterprising child made a deal with the owner of
a local movie theatre to produce advertising posters in exchange for free
tickets—and, later, a fee. He also drew good likenesses and caricatures of
people within his social circle. Even as a young teenager, he knew he wanted to
be an artist. He told how, when he was accepted by the Academy of Fine Arts
in Warsaw, he arranged to live with an uncle in the city and arrived there in
August 1939. 5 A few days later, the German Army invaded the city, and
Iskowitz returned to Kielce.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Side Street, c.1952–54, watercolour, coloured ink, and gouache on illustration board, 50.9 x 63.5 cm, National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, It Burns, c.1950–52, coloured ink and gouache on illustration board, 50.9 x 63.4 cm,
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
The Nazi persecution of the country’s Jewish population began almost

immediately. On March 31, 1941, the occupying forces established the Kielce
Ghetto, a few square blocks surrounded by barbed-wire-topped walls and
locked gates. The Iskowitz family and all the other Jews in the city were forced
to live there. They were soon joined by Jews transported from elsewhere in
Poland for “containment,” and by August 1942, more than 25,000 people were
jammed into this squalid area. Hunger and typhoid ran rampant, and many
people died.
In his earliest surviving drawing,

Action, 1941, Iskowitz records an
incident he witnessed in the
ghetto—a German soldier forcibly
pulling a young girl from a
woman’s arms. 6 On August 20,
1942, the Nazi occupiers ordered
the liquidation of the ghetto, and
four days later, only 2,000 people
remained. 7 Many sick, elderly, and
disabled inhabitants were rounded
up and shot in the streets, but the
others were sent on trains to the
extermination camp at Treblinka,
northeast of Warsaw. Iskowitz’s
parents, brother Itchen, and sister
all died at the camp.
Gershon Iskowitz, Action, 1941, pen and black ink, watercolour, and gouache on wove
paper, 39.2 x 52.3 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Iskowitz and his brother Yosl were
sent to the Henryków labour camp and, in early fall 1943, to Monowitz-Buna, a
forced labour camp that was one of the three main sites of the Auschwitz
concentration camp. 8 There, Iskowitz’s left arm was tattooed with the prisoner
number B-3124. In 1951, after he had settled in Toronto, Iskowitz made a
drawing of his arm, recording the number. 9 While imprisoned in Auschwitz, ill-
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
clothed and half-starved, he worked fourteen-hour days in a cement factory

and endured the naked “selection parades” carried out every two weeks by the
notorious Dr. Josef Mengele. Whenever he could, he scavenged paper, ink,
and other art materials and, alone at night, sketched the horrors around him
and hid the drawings under loose boards in the barracks. Occasionally, guards
asked him to make drawings for them and paid him with sausage or some
bread. 10
Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled (“B-3124”), 1951, felt marker on paper, 35.5 x 43 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
In late 1944, as the Russian army was advancing westward into Germany,
Iskowitz and many other Auschwitz prisoners were transferred in a 250-
kilometre death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the rush to
depart, Iskowitz had no chance to retrieve his drawings. His brother Yosl was
not among the marchers, and Iskowitz presumed he had died in the camp.
When he arrived at Buchenwald, he played sick: he understood the camp
mentality—a bullet would not be wasted on someone who was going to die of
“natural causes.”11
Later in life, Iskowitz spoke of the horrors and his state of mind during his time
in Buchenwald, of why he continued to make drawings there: “I did it for myself
. . . I needed it for my sanity, to forget about my hunger.”12 He used materials
he could scavenge in the camps, and as he described, he came across paper
and cakes of watercolour on a work detail. 13 Only two sketches survived his
time in Buchenwald, Condemned, c.1944–46, and Buchenwald, 1944–45.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Iskowitz was not alone in documenting the camps. Among Holocaust survivors,
Constance Naubert-Riser writes, “were artists who had the strength to bear
witness to this sinister enterprise. The more intimate nature of [such works]
takes us to a real and interiorized proximity to death.”14 Their work stands in
contrast to paintings by official war artists who could depict the camps only
“from the outside.”15 Canadian artists such as Alex Colville (1920–2013), Aba
Bayefsky (1923–2001), and Jack Shadbolt (1909–1998) documented
prisoners in the weeks after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and the destruction
of war.
LEFT: Alex Colville, Bodies in a Grave, Belsen, 1946, oil on canvas, 76.3 x 101.6 cm, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War
Museum, Ottawa. RIGHT: Jack Shadbolt, Dog Among the Ruins, 1947, watercolour and carbon pencil on paper, 78.2 x 56.9 cm, Art
Gallery of Greater Victoria.
Buchenwald had been constructed in 1937 as a forced labour camp with sub-
camps and as a centre for “medical experiments” and extermination by Nazi
doctors. The Nazi Schutzstaffel had imprisoned some 250,000 people there
between 1937 and 1945, and more than 55,000 internees had died. 16 Fearing
that the Germans were about to dynamite the camp, Iskowitz made one
desperate escape attempt. As he scrambled over the surrounding fence, he
was shot in the leg and fell to the ground, breaking his hip. He was left for
dead by his pursuers, but his friends brought him back to the barracks, where
he remained until the Americans arrived two weeks later. 17 The injury left
Iskowitz with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Escape, 1948, oil on paper, mounted on corrugated cardboard, 28.3 x 40 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
In the end, there were approximately 21,000 survivors when Buchenwald was
liberated by a division of the U.S. Third Army on April 11, 1945. Gershon
Iskowitz was among them.
FELDAFING AND MUNICH

After his liberation, Iskowitz was
taken first to a hospital and then to
a sanatorium, with suspected
tuberculosis. 18 On October 31,
1945, he was registered at the
Feldafing Displaced Persons Camp
south of Munich, which had been
established by the United States
Army exclusively for liberated
Jewish concentration camp
Feldafing Displaced Persons Camp banknotes. Many displaced persons camps issued
prisoners. 19 Although the camp their own internal currency, which was paid to workers and used at the canteen for food
was initially an emergency and supplies.
measure, by 1946 there were 4,000

inhabitants; it was a self-sustaining community with educational and religious
life, a rabbinical council, and vocational training, including making coats from
dyed U.S. Army blankets. 20 Iskowitz most likely remained at Feldafing until
he immigrated to Canada in September 1948. The camp finally closed in
March 1953.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
In Feldafing, Iskowitz began to paint again. A photograph shows him posed

with his portrait of the Polish Jewish author and playwright Isaac Leib Peretz
(1852–1915) which he had painted from a photograph. He also continued to
draw—photographs of self-portraits exist as well as memory drawings of life in
the Kielce Jewish quarter and scenes from the concentration camps, including
Barracks, 1949, and Escape, 1948. Many of these pieces were painted in bold,
bright colours, and they can all be confidently dated to his time at Feldafing.
Iskowitz said he was accepted as a

student at the Academy of Fine
Arts, Munich, and over the next
eighteen months travelled there by
train every day. 21 His name does
not appear in the official records,
but at this time the academy was
housed in an old castle while its
original building was being
restored. New students were not
registered but advised to do a year
of independent work or be a
“guest” of the academy. 22 In all
probability, Iskowitz audited
classes.
Iskowitz described how, during

these months in Munich, he
received advice about form and
composition from the Austrian
Expressionist artist Oskar
Gershon Iskowitz and portrait of Isaac Leib Peretz, Feldafing, 1946, photographer
Kokoschka (1886–1980)— unknown, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of
encouragement that was very Ontario, Toronto.
important to him. 23 In June 1946

Kokoschka was a candidate for a professor’s position at the Munich Academy,
and it’s possible that he came to the city at that time. There are, however, no
records of a visit in either the Munich Academy files or the Kokoschka Archives.
Kokoschka travelled to the United States in 1947 and lived for much of that
year in Switzerland. His first recorded postwar trip to Munich was not until
September 1950, for the opening of his exhibition in the Haus der Kunst. 24 If
there was a meeting between Iskowitz and Kokoschka in Munich, it was almost
certainly by chance and informal. Nonetheless, it is clear that Kokoschka’s work
was important to Iskowitz and offered him an inspirational model—a “meeting
of minds.”
Other stories Iskowitz told of his time at Feldafing relate to surreptitious trips
to Paris and to Modena, Italy, for group exhibitions that included some of his
war and memory sketches. He indicated that he visited galleries in Munich,
where he may have seen works by Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Pablo Picasso
(1881–1973), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), and Kokoschka, who were included in
1947 exhibitions. 25 He also said that he painted sets for the Bavarian State
Opera in Munich “part-time”—Aida, La Bohème, Lucia di Lammermoor—and used
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
the money to buy art supplies. 26 As with so much from this time, none of these
accounts can be verified.
Gershon Iskowitz, Portrait of Mother, 1947, oil on board, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
COMING TO CANADA
In the turmoil following the war, the victorious powers had to alleviate
devastating shortages of food, fuel, and housing for millions of displaced
Europeans even as they tried to disarm Germany, reopen schools, and restore
some semblance of a functioning democracy. 27 Iskowitz was one of an
estimated 250,000 Jewish refugees who passed through the displaced persons
camps. 28 A number of relief organizations worked with diplomatic missions
and the Allied military in assisting Holocaust survivors. Many had no home to
return to, and emigration was the only option. Iskowitz had lost all his family
members and, moreover, he would have heard about the continuing anti-
Semitism in Poland and yet another ugly pogrom in Kielce: “The Feldafing
court helped investigate the perpetrators of the Kielce pogrom of 1946 and
publicized information about the Nazi murderers of Lithuanian Jews who were
thought to have been in the vicinity.”29 He decided to leave Europe and build
a new life in North America.
LEFT: Mourners and local residents watch as men shovel dirt into the mass grave of the victims of the Kielce pogrom, 1946, photographer
unknown, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington. RIGHT: Temporary travel document, Military Government for
Germany, Munich, May 3, 1948, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Within a month, Iskowitz’s emigration process was underway. His maternal

uncle, Benjamin Levy, lived in Toronto, and he sponsored Iskowitz’s
application. 30 He deposited $162 with the United Service for New Americans
to cover the cost of Iskowitz’s transportation to the United States, where the
Kielce Landsmannschaft (a Jewish philanthropic organization) would take
responsibility for him. He offered to provide funds for his nephew until he
became self-supporting. 31 Obstacles arose: on March 28, 1947, the American
consul informed Iskowitz he would have to “wait two to three years under the
Polish Quota”; and the Jewish Immigrant Aid Services in Canada (JIAS) told
Levy they could not file an application because nephews older than eighteen
years of age were inadmissible to Canada. 32 On April 12, 1948, a letter from
the JIAS to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Chicago noted that Iskowitz
did not qualify for entry to Canada and that entry to the United States might
take years. Levy requested and received a full refund of his deposit. 33
Despite these setbacks, on May 3, 1948, Iskowitz received a temporary travel

document, issued by the Military Government for Germany to stateless people
in lieu of passports, which authorized voyage to “Canada and Countries in
Direct Transit.” On it are two “Canadian Immigrant Visa” stamps and one from
the “Dept. of National Health Welfare Canada, London,” dated May 16,
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
1948. 34 Iskowitz boarded the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman at

Bremerhaven in northwestern Germany on September 17, 1948, and on
September 28, 1948, he arrived, via Brooklyn, New York, at Pier 21 in Halifax.
A NEW BEGINNING
Iskowitz travelled by train from
Halifax to Toronto, where Benjamin
Levy and other members of his
extended family met him at Union
Station. 35 They were all strangers
to him, but one of his aunts invited
him to stay with her at 218
Rusholme Road until he got
settled. He knew no English and,
initially, he hated Toronto. 36 Over
the next few years, Iskowitz moved
many times, mostly from one
boarding house to another. He
picked up casual jobs whenever he
could and visited the few local
galleries—Roberts, Laing, Hart
House, and Douglas Duncan’s
Picture Loan Society. He thought
the work he saw there “provincial.”
On the voyage to Canada, Iskowitz

had met Yehuda Podeswa (1924 or
1926–2012) (also known as Julius
and Yidel), who had been liberated
from Kaufering, one of the Dachau
concentration camp sites. Podeswa
had also been born in Poland and
aspired to be an artist, as his father
Gershon Iskowitz, Portrait of Yehuda Podeswa, 1954, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm,
had been. During his internment, Podeswa Family Collection, Toronto.
he had created memory paintings,
including Early Times in the War (Burning Synagogue), 1945, and later he
studied briefly at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. Iskowitz and Podeswa
became friends and visited each other’s “studios,” and in 1954 Iskowitz painted
his portrait. 37 Through Podeswa and others, Iskowitz began to meet students
at the art college and make some artist friends. In the 1950s he attended
informal life-drawing classes at the Artists’ Workshop and produced untitled
life drawings and street sketches, which were probably never exhibited. 38
In due course he received a few portrait commissions—a 1954 painting of

Muriel Hirst is one possible example—and in 1953 was hired to teach an
evening art class at Holy Blossom Temple, a reform synagogue on Bathurst
Street. 39 The Toronto Jewish community followed Iskowitz’s career closely,
covering his exhibitions in the Canadian Jewish News and other
publications. 40 He was not openly religious, although he always maintained
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
social connections with Jewish friends. It is most likely that the arched tops of
his Uplands three-panelled painting, 1969–70, later repeated in the Northern
Lights Septets, 1984–86, are a visual allusion to his early religious
instruction, synagogue experiences, and to the popularized representation of
Hebrew tablets. Nonetheless, Iskowitz never spoke of his reasons for shaping
these paintings.
Gershon Iskowitz, Yzkor, 1952, watercolour, coloured ink, and pen and black ink on illustration board, 30.9 x 40.9 cm, National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa.
From 1948 until 1954, Iskowitz continued to create works from memory as he
had in Munich—recollections of life in Poland, such as Yzkor, 1952 and Korban,
c.1952; the Kielce Ghetto, such as Torah, 1951; and the Auschwitz and
Buchenwald camps, such as Escape, 1948. 41 These were done in gouache or
bodycolour on board and paper. He also branched out into portraits and
flower still-life works, as in Untitled Flowers in Vase, n.d. His friends drove him
on sketching excursions to Markham (then on the rural outskirts northeast of
Toronto), and he sometimes went there by bus as well. In 1952 he made his
first “pure” landscapes with felt marker—untitled works intended to express his
experience and observations of the natural world in a gestural style.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
In 1954 Iskowitz appeared in his first recorded exhibition in Canada—the

annual show organized by the Canadian Society of Graphic Art at the Art
Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). He submitted two ink
and watercolour works, Barracks, 1949, and Buchenwald, 1944–45, and
listed them both at $300 each, by far the highest price of any work in the
exhibition. Two well-known members of Painters Eleven were also
included in the show, Oscar Cahén (1916–1956) with a wash and crayon
work priced at $75, and Harold Town (1924–1990) with two “print
drawings” for $35 each. Iskowitz continued to show regularly with the
Society of Graphic Art until 1963.
Around this time Iskowitz became friends with Eric Freifeld (1919–1984)
and William Coryell (n.d.), both graduates of the Ontario College of Art,
and he painted Freifeld’s portrait in oil (1955). In 1954 Coryell took
Iskowitz to the “summer school for painting” at McKellar, northwest of Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled (Seated
Figure), c.1955, watercolour on paper,
Parry Sound, run by Bert Weir (1925–2018). 42 There artists mentored the 29 x 22 cm, E.P. Taylor Library and
students in exchange for food and lodging, and in these welcoming, Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
congenial surroundings, Iskowitz blossomed. He returned every year until
1965 to his “Canadian family.” His art also progressed, from literal depictions
of landscapes to increasingly abstract compositions of colour and light as he
looked through the trees to the sky or studied the lake below from a cliff
(Sunset, 1962). His trees deconstructed into brightly coloured shapes, his skies
into strokes of sun and cloud, sometimes with the suggestion of flames or a
figure lurking within. The first of his works to enter public galleries were both
Parry Sound abstracts from 1965. Parry Sound Variation XIV was purchased by
the National Gallery of Canada, and Summer Sound by the Art Gallery of
Ontario, both in 1966.
In 1962, Iskowitz felt secure enough in Canada to move into the first
independent living space he ever had—a two-room studio he rented on the
third floor at 435a Spadina Avenue. He was forty-one years old, and he finally
had the space in which he could paint large canvases and set his own schedule.
He stayed there for the next twenty years.
A TORONTO ARTIST
The Toronto gallery scene in the early 1950s was relatively small yet lively, with
few opportunities for emerging artists to exhibit and a minuscule market for
the work of contemporary Toronto artists. But that was about to change, with
the opening of new avant-garde spaces such as Isaacs Gallery and the
formation of Painters Eleven—an ambitious group of artists determined to
succeed. Within a few years, art and artists became fashionable as people
flocked to gallery openings and began to buy art.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
The short-lived Hayter Gallery gave

Iskowitz his first solo exhibition,
from September 14 to 28, 1957,
but there is no record of what was
shown. Two years later, Dorothy
Cameron (1924–1999) included
him in the opening exhibition of
her Here and Now Gallery on
Cumberland Street, which also
featured work by Jock Macdonald
(1897–1960) and Alexandra Luke
(1901–1967). Iskowitz felt that
Canada was now his home, and he Left to right: Gershon Iskowitz, Kazuo Nakamura, Tony Urquhart, and Madeline Mary
Jennings at Isaacs Gallery, c.1961–62, photograph by Tess Taconis, E.P. Taylor Library
became a Canadian citizen on
and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
February 13, 1959.
Although there is no definitive date for Iskowitz’s turn to non-representational

art—no works dated between 1956 and 1959 have been identified—by the start
of the 1960s, his work had become abstract. In March 1960 he had his first solo
exhibition with Cameron, and the second in September 1961. There are no
checklists for these shows, and newspaper reviews mention only recent works;
one undated image is titled Sunset. However, Cameron was deeply moved by
his memory paintings, and a press release from the 1960 exhibition mentions
one Holocaust work. 43 “People were glad to see [Iskowitz] really could paint,”
she recalled. “Because he wanted to be an artist so much, they were always
afraid it was just a dream of his.”44
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Sunshine, 1955, oil on board, 50.8 x 61 cm, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz
painting outdoors, date unknown, photographer unknown, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of
Ontario, Toronto.
Iskowitz’s final solo exhibition with Cameron was in October 1963. 45 “There
was a joy and serenity in everything he was doing,” she said. “He’d taken the
Canadian landscape and turned it into something we never saw in [it].”46 The
reviews in all the newspapers were equally laudatory. Shortly thereafter, she
introduced Iskowitz to Walter Moos (1926–2013), a well-connected German-
born Jewish émigré who had opened a Toronto gallery in 1959. Cameron
closed her gallery in October 1965 but continued to be a friend and supporter
of Iskowitz throughout his lifetime.
15
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Iskowitz’s first exhibition at Gallery

Moos was in October 1964. He and
Walter Moos developed an active
professional relationship that
lasted for the next twenty-four
years as Moos managed all the
details of Iskowitz’s career and
finances. Although six years
younger, Moos became an “uncle”
to the artist and remained
committed to his work and legacy
all through Iskowitz’s life.
In short order, an active market

had developed for Iskowitz’s
luminous abstract landscapes. He
had regular, often annual, solo
Gershon Iskowitz Gallery Moos invitation, 1966, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor
exhibitions at Gallery Moos from Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
1964 through to the 1980s, which
garnered positive critical attention and solid sales. Public galleries also began
to take notice: in 1966 the University of Waterloo gave him a solo show,
followed by the Cedarbrae branch of the Toronto Public Library. Subsequent
solo exhibitions were mounted at Hart House Gallery, University of Toronto, in
1973 (remounted at Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catharines, in 1973); the
Glenbow-Alberta Institute in 1975; and the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New
Brunswick, in 1976 (remounted at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 1977).
Published biographical accounts indicate that, in the late 1960s, Iskowitz

taught at the New School of Art in Toronto. The school had been founded as
an alternative to the more conservative Ontario College of Art—it required no
prerequisites and operated through loosely structured workshops. 47 It
attracted students and instructors associated with Toronto’s Spadina art scene:
Robert Markle (1936–1990) and Gordon Rayner (1935–2010) were teachers,
and Alex Cameron (b.1947) and Arthur Shilling (1941–1986) were students.
Most likely, Iskowitz’s involvement at the New School consisted of informal
class critiques or the occasional guest talk. Daniel Solomon (b.1945), a friend
who taught a few classes from 1969 to 1973, wrote: “Iskowitz would not have
been a big part of that school. I doubt Gershon would have enjoyed teaching.
He would not have had the patience for it.”48
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
ARTISTIC TRANSFORMATION
A key moment in the Iskowitz story
—and mythology—is the
breakthrough that occurred in his
painting following a conversation
with photographer John Reeves
(1938–2016), who told Iskowitz he
saw an “aerial perspective” in his
work and his palette. 49 Iskowitz
applied for and received a Canada
Council travel grant in 1967, which
he used to visit Churchill,
Manitoba. 50 The trip probably
took place in the summer of that
year, summer being when
“recreational” flying is easy and the
full-colour landscape spectrum is Aerial photograph of Churchill, Manitoba, 1966.
visible below. 51 Once there,

Iskowitz chartered an aircraft to fly over the sub-Arctic landscape and the coast
of Hudson Bay. 52
Churchill is situated at the juncture of three ecological regions: a boreal forest

of fir and spruce trees to the south, the Arctic tundra to the northwest, and
Hudson Bay to the north. The vast spaces and the brilliant crystal-clear colours
he saw below through the scattered cloud cover amazed Iskowitz—he felt he
had found the terrain that fitted his particular sensibility. In September 1971 he
flew north again, this time to James Bay, and in 1973 and 1975 he visited the
area around Yellowknife. 53 Iskowitz frequently returned to these northern
experiences for the rest of his life with works in oil and watercolour.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Seasons No. 1, 1968–69, oil on canvas, 254 x 355.4 cm overall; panels 254 x 177.7 cm each, National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa.
On his return to Toronto, Iskowitz’s art snapped into a more complex

abstraction, and he painted much larger works than before. The groundwork
for this new creative inspiration had, however, already been laid in his Parry
Sound works, with paintings such as Summer Sound, 1965, which had delicate
cloud-like trails. In the immediate post-Churchill period, he produced Seasons
No. 1—a diptych measuring an epic 254 by 355.4 centimetres—and Seasons No.
2, both 1968–69. The titles were inspired by Baroque composer Antonio
Vivaldi’s violin concertos The Four Seasons (1721–25), music Iskowitz loved and
often listened to as he painted.
Both Seasons works were included in his solo exhibition at Gallery Moos,
February 17 to March 2, 1970; Seasons No. 1 was purchased by the National
Gallery of Canada. This show also included thirteen smaller-scale Lowlands
paintings, representing Iskowitz’s impressions of the landscape as the aircraft
swooped down. They were a “prelude” to his large-scale Uplands series—
reflecting his impressions as the aircraft surged upward. 54 The first of the
Uplands paintings, three-panelled, is dated 1969–70. It was selected in 1970,
along with Seasons No. 2, for the exhibition Eight Artists from Canada
organized by the National Gallery for the Tel-Aviv Art Museum in Israel.
Iskowitz was the only artist not born in Canada. Painters Charles Gagnon
(1934–2003), John Meredith (1933–2000), and Guido Molinari (1933–2004)
were among the other artists included.
18
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands, 1969–70, oil on canvas, 315.1 x 434.5 cm overall (irregular); left panel 273.5 x 140 cm arched at top; centre
panel 315.1 x 153 cm arched at top; right panel 273.5 x 140 cm arched at top, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Over the following years, Iskowitz garnered widespread recognition and many
awards. In 1974 he was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of
Arts. Several group and solo exhibitions in New York followed, with the New
York Times calling him “extremely gifted in selecting and arranging lyrically
beautiful colours that coalesce into a radiant composition.”55 Iskowitz was also
selected for travelling exhibitions across Canada, including to the Art Gallery
of Nova Scotia and the Glenbow Museum. In 1977 he received the Queen’s
Silver Jubilee Medal and was represented in the Seven Canadian Painters show
that toured Australia and New Zealand.
In 1972 Iskowitz was chosen by the National Gallery, along with sculptor Walter
Redinger (1940–2014), to represent Canada at the Canadian Pavilion for the
Venice Biennale. Four Uplands diptychs were shown in this prestigious
exhibition, and Iskowitz’s selection affirmed that he was considered an artist of
merit in Canada. Iskowitz protested that “the biennale didn’t help my art—but it
makes me feel good.” Walter Moos agreed: “For Gershon the biennale was a
high point. It gave him that added assurance he could do even better art.”56
19
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
LEFT: Guests at the Venice Biennale, 1972, photographer unknown, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery
of Ontario, Toronto. RIGHT: Cover of the 1972 Venice Biennale catalogue for the Canadian Pavilion, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P.
Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
AN ARTIST OF ROUTINE
Iskowitz’s personal life was simple: once he settled into his own space on
Spadina Avenue, he followed the same routine for the rest of his life. He
painted at night, under artificial light, and never worked on more than
two paintings at once. He had few possessions, and he kept the studio
very neat. As described by filmmaker and art historian Peter Mellen:
“Canvases carefully stacked against the wall. Paint tubes neatly laid out in
long rows. Everything in its place.”57 Daniel Solomon (b. 1945) noted:
He seemed to paint every day but there was never much smell of oil
paint in his studio. He was a very tidy and organized painter. I never
saw him in the act of painting. He kept that private [and] would
never show me a work in progress, just finished paintings. On
Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, and
Tecumseth [after 1982] he had large white curtains installed on the Robert Markle parody the Artists’ Jazz
Band in Rayner’s Toronto studio, 1965,
walls to cover works in progress. 58
photograph by John Reeves.
Iskowitz’s routine ensured he was part of an artist’s village where he felt

comfortable. It was roughly bordered by Tecumseth Street to the west, Yonge
Street to the east, King Street to the south, and Scollard Street to the north. He
could walk to Gwartzman’s Art Supplies, at 448 Spadina, where he purchased
the painting materials he needed. He frequented artists’ hangouts: Grossman’s
Tavern, south of his Spadina studio; the Pilot Tavern (first on Yonge north of
Bloor, then on Cumberland Street); and later the Wheatsheaf Tavern at the
intersection of King and Bathurst streets. 59 At the dinner hour he had a regular
table at La Cantinetta, and later La Fenice, owned by his friend Luigi Orgera.
He always dressed respectably but never for fashion; his signature “fisherman’s
cap,” recalling those worn by men in his youth, was British-made by Kangol. 60
20
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Iskowitz’s Canadian experience could be described as a simple life driven by

one thing alone—painting without encumbrance. If Iskowitz was quiet by
nature, by all accounts he was confident. He did not seek approval but
graciously accepted it as it came. Daniel Solomon summarized: “[Iskowitz] had
a healthy sense of ego and he knew that he was a good painter—and that
seemed to be what mattered. He was definitely a loner and very guarded and
also very regimented in his routines.”61
Iskowitz maintained his privacy, but over the years he became quite social.
Among his friends were younger artists who lived nearby: Solomon, David
Bolduc (1945–2010), and John MacGregor (b.1944). Gordon Rayner (1935–
2010) had a studio in the same Spadina building. Apart from trips within
Canada and New York related to exhibitions, the only two documented trips
outside of North America were to Venice for the Biennale in 1972, and for the
opening of his retrospective at Canada House Gallery in London, England, in
1983. 62 Solomon recalled: “He did wonder why young people wanted to
travel to Europe for pleasure; he saw Europe only as a nightmare to escape.”63
Iskowitz made a new beginning in Toronto, and his life folded into a
quintessentially Canadian émigré/diasporic experience: to be self-made
without assimilating pressures, to have an individual dream and not conform to
a collective one.
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands G, 1971, oil on canvas, 254 x 355.6 cm, Museum London.
21
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
A LASTING LEGACY
In 1982 the Art Gallery of Ontario held a retrospective of Iskowitz’s work. Such
exhibitions were not common for living Canadian artists in major institutions at
the time. It confirmed Iskowitz’s stature as an artist in Canada—only sixteen
years after his first, modest public gallery exhibition. Iskowitz appreciated the
honour—and he decided to give up his rented studio on Spadina and purchase
a one-storey building at 58 Tecumseth Street, southwest of downtown. 64
The retrospective offered the first

opportunity to view the whole arc
of Iskowitz’s work to that point and
to study it in-depth. The show
travelled to four other major public
galleries across Canada and to
Canada House Gallery in London,
England. In hindsight art historian
Roald Nasgaard writes: “It was
impossible to not be moved by
these richly luminous, often
intensely hued pictures, so
exquisitely poised at that moment
when landscape references
dissolve into the tangibility of
colour and paint.”65
As the retrospective was Iskowitz in his studio, date unknown, photograph by Michel Lambeth, Gershon Iskowitz
Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
concluding, Iskowitz, who had no
close family, set up a foundation as
his lasting legacy. He wanted his estate (both savings accumulated from the
sale of his work, now commanding high prices, and his new property) to
provide financial support to artists through an annual prize. He stated:
It’s very important to give something so the next generation can really believe
in something. I think the artist works for himself for the most part. Every artist
goes through stages of fear and love or whatever it is and has to fight day after
day to survive like everyone else. Art is a form of satisfying yourself and
satisfying others. We want to be good and belong. That goes through history;
we’re striving for it. 66
The Gershon Iskowitz Foundation was granted charitable status in 1985. Its
charter was forged by Walter Moos and lawyer Jeanette Hlinka, who became
the first trustees together with Iskowitz himself. Independent museum
consultant Nancy Hushion was appointed executive director in 1989. The prize
was initially administered through the Canada Council and awarded by an
independent jury—Iskowitz maintained a hands-off approach to the award. The
first two prizes, the only ones to be granted while Iskowitz was alive, were given
to Louis Comtois (1945–1990) in 1986 and to Denis Juneau (1925–2014) in
1987. As recorded on the foundation’s website:
The impetus for the Prize was Gershon’s grateful disbelief when he was
awarded his 1967 Canada Council travel grant and the boost it gave to his
22
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
painting at a time when he felt his career was in a lull. With no surviving family,
a practical question he faced was the future of his estate. His solution was
simple enough. Just as he had received support from the Canada Council, he
wanted to give his money to artists to help them along. 67
Gershon Iskowitz died in Mount Sinai Hospital on January 26, 1988, after
having been hospitalized there in October 1987. 68 His simple life in Toronto
had been ordinary in all respects but one—his work. By 1960 Iskowitz’s studio
was a refuge where, painting alone at night, he could imagine and create a
world of positive experience through colour and form. This daily routine
affirmed a new life and freedom, one Iskowitz shared with fellow artists and
friends through his work, and in the public realm through exhibitions. The
message was simple and direct: this is who I am, this is life.
Gershon Iskowitz with painting design for a limited edition Art Gallery of Ontario umbrella, 1986, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor
Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
23
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Over a forty-five-year period, Gershon Iskowitz’s work reflected the

trauma and dramatic changes in his life—from his wartime
experiences and Holocaust ordeal to his postwar survival in Europe
and immigration to Canada in 1948. By the mid-1950s a newfound
freedom enabled him to pursue a self-determined path that led first to
his landscape painting and, by 1960, to an individual approach to
abstraction that continued through the rest of his career.
24
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
BUCHENWALD 1944–45
Gershon Iskowitz, Buchenwald, 1944–45

Watercolour on paper, 39.5 x 52.3 cm
McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton
Buchenwald is one of two surviving works made by Iskowitz while he was

imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. It depicts a group of prisoners, with a
view of the barracks in the background. It is unlikely that Iskowitz’s drawing was
meant to portray specific people or a specific moment, but the scene is
observed from life and was done at a moment when the outcome of the war
and his own fate was uncertain. Iskowitz later said that he did such works for
his own sanity, using whatever materials he could find or scavenge, and kept
them hidden to avoid detection by the guards. 1 To consider Buchenwald only
within “art terms” would be to diminish the reality of one person reflecting on
the suffering of all prisoners in the camp. In this way, we can see the work as an
act of hope in the face of unthinkable horror, even though it depicts “the
condemned in the final stages of exhaustion.”2
25
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
In this real-life context, Iskowitz’s drawing is a primary document—he was

both witness and victim—but inevitably art comparisons have been made.
The American Civil War, 1861–65, was the first conflict to be recorded by
the newly invented camera. Yet photograph-documents may not have
the same impact today because of the saturation of images in the
contemporary, internet-focused world. Users can simply choose to look
away from the horror depicted.
The graphic work of German artists who saw military action in the First
World War provides another comparison: Der Krieg (The War), 1924, a
suite of fifty etchings, drypoints, and aquatints by Otto Dix (1891–1969),
for example, and single printworks done after the war by Erich Heckel
(1883–1970) and George Grosz (1893–1959). Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945),
a committed socialist and pacifist who lost her youngest son in the First
World War, produced a suite of seven woodcuts titled War, 1923. All
Gershon Iskowitz, Condemned, c.1944–
these recorders of war atrocities were influenced by The Disasters of War 46, pen and black ink and watercolour on
engravings by Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Created between 1810 and cream wove paper, 71.3 x 54.4 cm,
1820, the series depicted his impressions and horrific-satirical responses
to the Peninsular War between France and Spain from 1808 to 1814.
Iskowitz’s Buchenwald was first exhibited in the 1954 Annual Exhibition of the
Canadian Society of Graphic Art at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now Art Gallery
of Ontario) and was included in his 1982 retrospective at the Art Gallery of
Ontario.
26
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
KORBAN C.1952
Gershon Iskowitz, Korban, c.1952

Gouache on board, 43.5 x 53 cm
McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton
Korban refers to the Korban Pesach, the Hebrew sacrifice of a lamb at Passover,
practised since the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt in biblical times. Although this
ritual was “officially” ended in the first century of the Christian Era, it continued
throughout the European diaspora as an important symbolic act, often
expressed in the sacrifice of a chicken, as depicted in this painting.
27
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
After his liberation from the

Buchenwald concentration camp in
April 1945, Gershon Iskowitz
embarked on memory works. He
continued to make these drawings,
watercolours, and gouache or
bodycolour paintings until
approximately 1954, six years after
he immigrated to Canada. These
works depict aspects of his life in
Poland before the war, the
pogroms and the Kielce Ghetto,
the concentration camps, and,
perhaps, life during his two and a
half years in the Feldafing Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled (Memory Marc Chagall, The War, 1943, oil on
Displaced Persons Camp outside Picture), 1952, watercolour on paper, 51 x canvas, 105.8 x 75.8 cm, Musée
40.5 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. National d’Art Moderne Centre
Munich. Pompidou, Paris.
While the subject matter of Korban is distinct from the traumatic events in
other Iskowitz memory paintings, as David Burnett writes, it offers an important
and revealing aspect of Iskowitz’s need to recover the past through “the theme
of the family, of its loss and yet its essential reality in memory” rather than
sentiment or nostalgia: “The act of painting itself [is] approached with a literal
and . . . naïve directness . . . recapturing the reality of his past [and] in a sense
atoning by keeping the memories vividly before him.”1
Iskowitz was not following the model of any other artists for these works, but
they can be linked to work by other twentieth-century artists who reflected on
the ruptured past of everyday life through memory paintings, most notably
Marc Chagall (1887–1985), David Burliuk (1882–1967), and William Kurelek
(1927–1977).
28
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
SELF-PORTRAIT C.1955
Gershon Iskowitz, Self-Portrait, c.1955

Oil on commercial canvas board, 50.8 x 40.6 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
29
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz’s self-portrait, though depicting a pensive pose, exudes a

confident self-assurance. It also offers strong evidence of the artist’s painterly
ambitions—a bold and graphic rendering with the flesh expressed in strong and
“unnatural” blues and greens. The abstract background continues into the
shoulders. In contrast, Iskowitz’s earlier portrait paintings have clearly defined
backgrounds.
The portrait is inscribed, signed, and dated 1947 on the back of the canvas
board in Iskowitz’s writing, but several factors suggest that the painting and the
inscription were done not at the Feldafing Displaced Persons Camp but in
Canada. Iskowitz did not use block script or formalize the spelling of his last
name until the mid-1950s. The inscription is in black felt-tip marker, which was
not commercially available until the early 1950s, and the canvas board support
conforms to a North American product.
Moreover, the composition and palette are similar to portraits he made of

Toronto artist friends Eric Freifeld (1919–1984) and Yehuda Podeswa
(1924 or 1926–2012), dated 1954 and 1955, respectively, and bear little
resemblance to the three photographic documents of Iskowitz portraits
dated 1946—two self-portrait drawings and the painting of Polish
Yiddish-language playwright Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915), produced
while Iskowitz was interned in the Feldafing camp. The Gallery Moos
label on the back suggests an inscription no earlier than 1964, when
Iskowitz began to be represented by the gallery, and it is possible that it
was signed, dated, and framed for the 1982 AGO retrospective, when it
first “appeared.”
Another self-portrait, in oil on a pressed cardboard support, has recently

come to light in a private collection. It is neither signed nor dated, but
Gershon Iskowitz, Self-Portrait, 1980, Art
the composition and palette are close to a mirror image of this work. Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Iskowitz’s errant dating suggests he was indifferent to such details: to
him, the painting was evidence enough, and he left the history to historians.
Iskowitz produced portraits all through his life, both drawings and paintings.
His earliest prewar works were of movie stars drawn from photographs and
caricatures of the local townsfolk. 1 After arriving in Canada, he was
occasionally commissioned to create portraits,2 and he also painted his
mother, Zisla, based on a family photograph, and a Kielce neighbour, Miriam,
c.1951–52, produced from memory. His last self-portrait is a drawing dated
1980, which was reproduced on the back jacket of Adele Freedman’s Gershon
Iskowitz: Painter of Light (1982).
30
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
PARRY SOUND I 1955
Gershon Iskowitz, Parry Sound I, 1955

Watercolour on paper, 22.9 x 30.5 cm
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Parry Sound I is a prime example of Iskowitz working away from observed

subject matter toward “pure” painting. The upper band—if indeed it is “sky”—
could be a setting-sun nocturne, but the foreground is composed of fluid
forms in bright, possibly sun-lit, colours. The use of primary greens, reds,
yellows, and blues would stay with him throughout his career, and the foliage
strands reappear as abstract forms in the early 1980s, such as in Orange Yellow
C, 1982.
31
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz made many trips

to the Parry Sound area of
Georgian Bay, Ontario, from 1954
to the mid-1960s, and the
paintings—both watercolours
(possibly done in situ) and oils—
that resulted from them mark a
critical stage in his artistic
development. These breaks from
the city offered him inspiration for
explorations of space, colour, and
light through nature and the
landscape. Iskowitz’s Parry Sound
oil paintings are literal—trees are
trees—but watercolour offered him
a route to his own inventions.
Iskowitz’s 1960 solo exhibition at Gershon Iskowitz, Parry Sound II, 1955, watercolour on wove paper, 22.8 x 30.4 cm, Art
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
the Here and Now Gallery included
a number of Parry Sound works. 1
In her Hamilton Spectator review of the exhibition, Elizabeth Kilbourn wrote:
[Iskowitz] has painted the Canadian landscape in a way it has seldom been
seen before. Out of waves of colour, which . . . convey physical depth and
mental agony, the forms of trees and rocks and hills erupt with dramatic
inevitability. The earth and sky are painted with an intense, personal and
disturbing vision. 2
Parry Sound I was removed from a spiral sketchbook, as were many other
variations, and was included in Iskowitz’s 1982 retrospective at the Art Gallery
of Ontario. Watercolours remaining in sketchbooks (held at the Gershon
Iskowitz Foundation) are similarly signed and dated.
32
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
UNTITLED 1962
Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled, 1962

Ink on paper, 33.4 x 26.2 cm
33
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
In drawings such as Untitled, 1962, Iskowitz explores his ideas about style and
technique in art. After moving into his new Spadina studio, he began to
develop a distinct direction in his work that appears to be pointillist in
appearance. There is nothing, however, to suggest that Iskowitz was
copying the techniques developed by the nineteenth-century French artist
Georges Seurat (1859–1891). Iskowitz did apply an exaggerated form of
this technique to his painting, yet his drawings maintain a sense of order and
structure. 1
The earliest of these are landscapes from 1952 and they are distinct from
his street sketches. Some of them are gestural with bold cross-hatching,
which can be related to paintings of the period, such as Untitled - Rushing
Water, Autumn, 1955. Iskowitz applied this new technique to a few
portrait drawings, but the most successful works were the landscapes, a
way to continue depicting or “registering” the land as his paintings
became fully abstract.
Like his paintings beginning around 1960, this drawing is a studio Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled - Rushing
Water, 1955, oil on board, 45 x 61 cm,
invention, an idealized view. Gone is the lyrical brushwork typical of his
private collection.
paintings, replaced by short pen strokes that control both the depth and
the perception of the picture. Using as little visual information as
possible, Iskowitz produces an ordered and recognizable image. The subject
matter is distinctly Canadian—a scene from the Ontario countryside. By 1962,
Iskowitz had mastered the illustration of forms by grouping together small
strokes of pure colour. He suggests the image by varying the intensity and the
spacing of the marks, and, as viewers, we complete the picture and enter into
the landscape.
For most of his career Iskowitz exhibited his colour paintings and watercolours;
however, drawing continued to be an important and parallel studio activity for
him. 2 In 1981, he asked Gallery Moos to feature a group of 1980 works in
an exhibition. The technique he developed in the 1960s was now reified and
minimal, given density by varying the spacing of the marks. All were titled
Landscape and numbered. These later works demonstrated his unique
understanding of the visual world and his skill as a draughtsman.
34
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
LATE SUMMER EVENING 1962
Gershon Iskowitz, Late Summer Evening, 1962

Oil on canvas, 114.3 x 127 cm
Late Summer Evening preludes a significant development that

characterizes all of Gershon Iskowitz’s mature work after 1965—his focus
on light. It was shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, although the
exact date of the exhibition is unknown. The image is murky compared
with most of his foliage paintings of the time, such as Spring Reflections,
1963, yet the light plays through foliage reaching out from the tree trunk
suggested in the lower right corner. The leaves dissolve into patches of
vivid blue, yellow, and bright green, perhaps akin in exaggerated form to
the pointillism of works by Georges Seurat (1859–1891) from the 1880s. 1 Gershon Iskowitz, Summer Impression,
Iskowitz unifies the subject through a disciplined layering of coloured 1963, pen and black ink on wove paper,
27.5 x 35 cm, National Gallery of Canada,
shapes that mix in the eye. The “evening” in the title may be better read Ottawa.
35
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Ottawa.
through the German term dämmerung, a light effect that occurs when it is
neither day nor night.
By 1960 Iskowitz had established a regular studio practice of painting at night

under artificial light. His works had become studio inventions, and in contrast
to those from the 1950s, which were created on small, commercially prepared
canvas board, they expanded in size. “I don’t paint what I see but what I have
seen,” he said in 1977. 2
36
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
AUTUMN LANDSCAPE #2 1967
Gershon Iskowitz, Autumn Landscape #2, 1967

Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 99.1 cm
Art Gallery of York University, Toronto
37
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz’s 1967 paintings were his first compositions with strong
colour “ovoid” forms “floating” on a toned-down neutral ground. Here, bright
red shapes touched with green and yellow on their amorphous edges float
against a light background. Although Iskowitz’s studio practice over the last
twenty years of his career did not present sudden or dramatic shifts, in 1967,
before his trip to Churchill, Manitoba, a bold and critical element appeared
with a suite of simplified paintings that included Autumn Landscape #2.
The year before, Iskowitz had painted the prototype canvas titled
Summer Song, 1966, which was most likely purchased immediately from
Gallery Moos by Imperial Oil for its collection. The 1967 series of twenty
paintings of varying size appeared in Iskowitz’s solo exhibition at Gallery
Moos in November and December of that year. Each one was titled
Landscape, preceded by spring, summer, or autumn. The largest group
was “autumn,” with eight numbered variations. Iskowitz’s use of
“landscape” in the title reinforced the interpretation that his work derived
from nature, and he did refer to leaves when speaking of the 1967
works. 1 However, he rarely offered details about his inspirations and
process beyond a few repeated poetic and idyllic responses to
interviewers’ questions. He expected the compositions to speak for
themselves.
Gershon Iskowitz, Summer Song, 1966, oil

The few extant colour images from this 1967 suite show that two of the
on canvas, 165.1 x 127 cm, collection of
autumn landscapes have red ovoids and one has purple. Two of the the Estate of Dr. Luigi Rossi, Kelowna Art
spring and summer paintings have similar different-hued green shapes, Gallery.
whereas Spring Landscape #1 uses yellow with three red and green blips
on the contour edge bleeding outward. Autumn Landscape #2 could simply be
a reference to green leaves becoming yellow, then red in autumn. In all
likelihood, Iskowitz applied the titles rather than “painting to them.”
Another puzzle remains: Iskowitz said of his 1967 works that “everything was
falling down. The leaves were falling down.”2 If so, he represented them in
flight, not on the ground. Alternatively, the ovoids may represent cloud
formations that are not “cloud-coloured.” As Theodore Heinrich writes,
“[Iskowitz] not only completely abandoned representation [but] altered his
position with relation to it. The first new orientation in place of looking at was
to look straight up from the ground level, the other was to be up at some
height and look straight down.” And, he continues: “This might be termed
intimate cartography, poeticized by its sensibility to season change and the
times of day or night, clear or overcast as expressed by light.”3
38
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
LOWLANDS NO. 9 1970
Gershon Iskowitz, Lowlands No. 9, 1970

Vancouver Art Gallery
39
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
The Lowlands series represents the first body of work to draw directly on
Gershon Iskowitz’s 1967 trip to Churchill, Manitoba, and the flights over the
surrounding landscape. 1 These thirteen works are unique in his oeuvre
because they all share a boldly coloured central band with a “stem” that
extends to the bottom of the canvas. The one exception is a Lowlands painting
dated 1969–70, which has two stems. Iskowitz explained that, while flying in
the aircraft over the landscape, the Lowlands paintings reflect the “swoop
down,” and the Uplands paintings that followed reflect the “swoop up.”2
If the stem element represents an

estuary—the tidal mouth of the
Churchill River emptying into
Hudson Bay—then the band across
the top is sky and the flanking
forms at the bottom edge are the
land that creates the mouth of the
estuary. Yet the two accompanying
elements and top band are done
with the same light colours and
horizontal paint technique. Of the
series, only Lowlands No. 9, with its
blue central band, seems to
represent water; other band-stems
in the series were painted in green
and purple, and one in orange. Are
the colour differences another
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Lowlands No. 2, 1969, oil on canvas, 50.5 x 33.5 cm, Canada
landscape observation of this sub- Council Art Bank, Ottawa. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, Lowlands 1, 1969, oil on canvas,
Arctic experience in summer? Most 49.5 x 33.7 cm, private collection.
likely the Lowlands series is a
painted invention that reflects Iskowitz’s experience of flying in the North.
The small clusters of two or three “blips” with different and assertive colour-
optical combinations seen in Lowlands No. 9 represent a new element in
Iskowitz’s work, one that occurs in all the Lowlands paintings. Are these clusters
rising or falling? Iskowitz adds yet one more shape paradox with the lighter
painted areas along the top and bottom to the left and right. Are they negative
space, and we are looking through the mass of the blue central band? This
uncertain pictorial space bears no resemblance to the kind of
nonrepresentational painting dominated at the time by Canadian artists such
as Jack Bush (1909–1977), Yves Gaucher (1934–2000), and Guido Molinari
(1933–2004). Nor do these Lowlands pieces fit comfortably into any of the
then-current abstract categories of colour-field, hard-edge, or systemic optical
painting. They are unique.
A previously unexamined approach to the Lowlands paintings is to compare

them with Iskowitz’s 1969–70 three-panelled Uplands painting. 3 His largest
painting to date, it comprises three rounded-top panels reminiscent of Hebrew
tablets and windows in churches, synagogues, and helicopters. As in the
Lowlands series, a dominant central band crosses the panels—blue for the
flanking left and right sections and cupric green in the centre. The ground, or
upper and lower bands, is white. Again, blip-clusters are distributed across the
40
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
work—five each on the left and right, and seven in the centre—but in a balanced,
not irregular, distribution. There are also six colour “trails,” which do not
appear in the Lowlands series but reappear in later works.
The Uplands three-panelled painting was begun in 1969 and completed in

early 1970. The earliest Lowlands paintings, No. 6 and No. 10, are dated 1969
(Iskowitz does not appear to have numbered the works in the order of
production). In this period he was inventing a painting language that would be
his alone, one that he would continue to develop throughout his mature
period.
41
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
UPLANDS E 1971
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands E, 1971

Oil on canvas, diptych, 228.6 x 356 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gershon Iskowitz’s Uplands, a suite

of nine diptych paintings
produced between 1970 and
1972, overlaps with the Lowlands
series and the Uplands, 1969–70,
three-panelled painting. They were
designated A through K (letters I
and J were not used). 1 Uplands E
marks the midpoint of the series,
with a more open structure than
some of the others. The floating Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Agapanthus), 1915–26, oil on canvas, 200 x 425.4 cm,
central form is registered by blip- Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
clusters and diffused ovoids that
continue into what may appear to be the ground—a subtle overall transparency.
The horizon line is likewise diffused, pushed back to a just-visible trace in the
upper corners of the panel.
As in the Lowlands paintings and the ovoids of Autumn Landscape #2, 1967,
the blip-clusters create a central and eccentric biomorphic form. Each of the
Uplands paintings has a horizon line in a different latitudinal position and at
42
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
different degrees of registration. In three of them, Uplands B, G, and H, the

central component has a strong primary colour that defines the contour: two
are blue and one is red. The other six have a more open structure.
In writing about these elusive works, scholars have tried to explain them
though analogies and art history. David Burnett compares them to the late
Water Lilies paintings by Claude Monet (1840–1926) because both the subject
and the painting itself transcend literal illustration. 2 Roald Nasgaard writes of
the Uplands paintings:
These diptychs are strange combinations of panoramic landscapes and

abstract forms. . . . Both cloud-curtain and landscape are executed with large
Impressionistic brush strokes, more like tachist patches, brushed into one
another and coalescing into a variegated all-over blanket of colour. 3
Iskowitz’s friend, artist David Bolduc (1945–2010), commented in 1971: “They

are like weird galaxies, like Star Trek gone mad.”4
These were Iskowitz’s most

ambitious works to date in terms of
scale and complexity, and they
firmly established him as an artist
of note. Uplands E, F, and G were
first shown at Gallery Moos in
November 1971, and Brydon
Smith, the curator of contemporary
art for the National Gallery of
Canada, wrote that he found them
“very beautiful.” Four months later,
the National Gallery requested a
loan of Uplands C, E, G, and H to
include in the Canadian exhibition
at the prestigious Venice Biennale—
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands F, 1971, oil on canvas, 228.5 x 356 cm, Canada Council Art
and it went on to purchase Bank, Ottawa.
Uplands E for its own collection. 5
Four of the series were selected for the Iskowitz retrospective at the Art Gallery
of Ontario in 1982.
Iskowitz had first used the diptych format in two Seasons works in 1968–69,
Seasons No. 1 and Seasons No. 2. He was fascinated to realize that, as he
explored his way through a series of works, the paintings were never in conflict
with each other but could even be paired. He returned to this dual format
periodically throughout his career, including his last paintings.
43
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
LITTLE ORANGE PAINTING II 1974
Gershon Iskowitz, Little Orange Painting II, 1974

Little Orange Painting II is a signature work from Gershon Iskowitz’s mature

painting of the mid-1970s, when, following the Uplands diptychs, he
frequently returned to single-panel images. Here, Iskowitz further develops the
massed ovoids from the 1967 Landscape suite and the dynamic shapes from
the Uplands series but expresses them with a new focus, as if zooming in on a
small area of an Uplands painting.
44
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
At the same time, Iskowitz

explored ways to “uncover” the
space between the clustered,
polychromatic patches. From a
distance, the strong blues, greens,
and purples come forward and
“float” on a grey background. Yet,
on closer examination, the greys Gershon Iskowitz, Seasons, 1974, oil on canvas, 178 x 610 cm, Art Museum at the
University of Toronto.
are painted on top of the coloured
areas. Iskowitz has reversed the
convention of atmospheric perspective, where we perceive dark colours in the
foreground and light colours retreating in the distance. Little Orange Painting II
is one of the few paintings in which Iskowitz used black, but sparingly. As with
the Lowlands and Uplands paintings, he suggests a sense of movement, across,
up, and down the image plane, without a horizon line.
The 1970s was a decade of high creative productivity for Iskowitz, who now
followed a disciplined routine and studio practice. Peter Mellen described his
painting process as intuitive, applying one colour, then another, to achieve
structural balance and harmony on his own terms. In Iskowitz’s words: “There’s
no explanation. I don’t even know myself how the painting will come out.”1
Colour was a keystone of his art: he contemplated each carefully, always mixed
his own, and frequently cited colour in his titles. As Toronto artist Daniel
Solomon (b.1945) commented: “Iskowitz and Jack Bush are the only two
people [in Toronto] who thought specifically about carefully constructed
colour relationships and how paint sits on the surface of a canvas.”2
45
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
UNTITLED 1977

Watercolour on paper, 42.8 x 56 cm
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
In 1977 and 1978 Gershon Iskowitz produced a large body of watercolour

works, most of them untitled. He made this series by dropping paint onto
dampened paper, creating ovoid blips and clusters of selected colours that
float in ethereal groups on a neutral background. This process was careful and
measured, to avoid overbleed (losing the shape) or muddying the strong
chromatic patches. Whether lighter blue, green, and yellow as in this painting,
or vivid reds, blues, and greens in the majority of them, they are jewel-like in
their clarity and transparency and appear to move and flutter on the paper.
The yellows may recede while the blues and greens protrude. No two of them
are alike in composition, and as often in Iskowitz’s work, they reflect his
“experience of the experience” in his painting practice. 1
46
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
The watercolours have strong

affinities with the oil paintings,
though they were created in a
wholly different and equally
disciplined way. With oils Iskowitz
painted in layers, and he could
add colour or adjust shapes over
time. The watercolours, in contrast,
could not be corrected later. But
Iskowitz had much experience with
watercolour, from his youth in
Poland, through his war and
memory paintings, to his Parry
Sound works after 1955. Always,
though, they were a separate and
parallel part of his studio practice.
His first series, Western Sphere,
dates from 1969, and the images Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled, 1977, watercolour on paper, 42.8 x 56 cm, Art Gallery of
are larger than the untitled works. Ontario, Toronto.
The exact number of watercolours Iskowitz produced is unknown, but it could

be well in the hundreds. Thirty of them are still held in the Iskowitz Foundation
inventory, and dozens have been sold in the secondary auction market over
the past fifteen years. In addition, Iskowitz produced one hundred smaller ones
that were included in a deluxe, signed edition of Adele Freedman’s Gershon
Iskowitz: Painter of Light (1982).
47
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
SUMMER G 1978
Gershon Iskowitz, Summer G, 1978

Oil on canvas, diptych, 167.7 x 305 cm
Winnipeg Art Gallery
Summer G is a prime late-1970s example of Gershon Iskowitz’s continuing use

of the diptych format and a dominant red—an “Iskowitz red.”1 Here, he uses a
complex blend of small red ovoids that create biomorphic forms comparable
with those in the bold central shapes in the Uplands diptychs. Small blue,
purple, and green ovoids float across the two panels, both on the red figures
and grey-white neutral ground. As with the Lowlands series and Little Orange
Painting II, the reds could occupy negative or positive space. This fluctuating
play presents an inversion of atmospheric perspective—a device used by
landscape painters since the sixteenth century where lighter, cooler colours
appear to be in the background and stronger colours in the foreground. In
Iskowitz’s abstract works, he embraces both options.
48
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
The ovoids create balance and

overall harmony across the two
canvases, but the red forms have a
hard and abrupt division in the
centre. In this approach to the
diptych, Iskowitz was unique: most
other artists have created a single
composition across two conjoined
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Deep Green No. 8, 1977, oil on canvas, 178 x 198.5 cm, Canada
canvases. In Summer G the centre
Council Art Bank, Ottawa. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, Red Grey Painting, 1976, oil on
line is activated by an apparent canvas, 107 x 183 cm, Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa.
misregistration of the reds, which
do not match in the middle, thereby creating a directional paradox. They could
be moving toward the centre or away from it. Conversely, the right could be
descending and the left ascending, or the other way around. But as Iskowitz
has already established in earlier works such as Autumn Landscape #2, 1967,
and Lowlands No. 9, 1970, it can be all these possibilities, a multidirectional
potential for perspectives and perceptions.
49
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
ORANGE YELLOW C 1982
Gershon Iskowitz, Orange Yellow C, 1982

Oil on canvas, diptych, 127 x 228 cm
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston
In Orange Yellow C, vertical strands of purple, green, and blue float on a

bright orange-yellow background speckled with blips of the same
colours. In 1981 Iskowitz began to create paintings with vivid overall
colours, rather than the pairings of expressive and lighter pigments he
had done in previous works. He emphasized lively strands, such as those
that first appeared in the Parry Sound works of the mid-1960s—for
example, Parry Sound Variation XIV, 1965—and then continued in the
Uplands triptych, 1969–70. Offering a strong example of Iskowitz’s return
to these earlier compositions, Orange Yellow C also shares the same Gershon Iskowitz, Parry Sound Variation
centre-line diptych disruption as Summer G, 1978. The 1982 painting, XIV, 1965, watercolour on wove paper,
48.1 x 63.2 cm, National Gallery of
however, is less disjunctive because of the painterly harmony between
Canada, Ottawa.
the blips and the strands, and their balanced distribution across the two
canvases.
As in earlier works, the lengths could be floating on top of the orange-yellow

ground or appearing through the ground (as with the “leaves” in Autumn
Landscape #2, 1967). They have no determined direction (as with the red
forms of Summer G), up or down or across, and none of them terminates at the
bottom edge of the painting; two terminate at the top edge, one at the far-
right edge, and two “collide” in the centre line. Viewers can imagine they are
looking up or down through clouds, though the whole composition is an
abstraction rather than a reference to observed nature.
50
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
NORTHERN LIGHTS SEPTET NO. 3 1985
Gershon Iskowitz, Northern Lights Septet No. 3, 1985

Oil on canvas on shaped plywood in seven sections, overall: 233.5 x 410.2 cm
University of Lethbridge Art Gallery
In 1984–85 Gershon Iskowitz produced twenty-two paintings, both single

canvases and diptychs, titled Northern Lights. All have similar compositions,
with ovoid blips clearly expressed on the grounds. Also in 1984, he embarked
on six known multipanelled works that return to the rounded arch-top shape of
the Uplands three-panelled painting, 1969–70. 1 Iskowitz used the term
“polytych” to describe these works because he painted them on seven separate
but joined sections. They are the first he created on canvas mounted on an
ingenious plywood support that had circles cut out of the plywood to reduce
the weight. The Septet variations have identical shapes and dimensions.
51
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Northern Lights Septet No. 3 is the

only Iskowitz work that was
accompanied by a Gallery Moos
press release. In this text Iskowitz
returns to recollections and
inspiration from the 1967
Churchill, Manitoba, trip, but he
also emphasizes his current work
ethos: “It is the most recently
completed painting which is the
most important one.”
The importance lies in the

series of paintings. Gershon Iskowitz, Septet No. 5, 1985, oil on canvas on shaped plywood in seven sections,
overall: 233.5 x 410.2 cm, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of
Guelph.
I had in mind for a long time
to paint a polytych where I
could really create lots of space and depth in terms of the sky and flying shape.
I drew a lot of plans to develop the shapes of this polytych, and by trial and
error evolved this shape. I must caution the viewer: the entire painting lies flat
on the wall! It is not three-dimensional. Now, take another moment and have
another look, because each shape forming the polytych is different, and yet the
entire composition is harmonious. It seems to me that the seven-part shape of
the canvas is something new, as nobody ever did this before, and I feel that
such a painting as this, if seen in reality, translates really well what I wanted to
say. 2
The paradox of direction and movement is now actualized in a

pronounced optical distortion in the left and right segments, which each
comprise what appear to be three overlapping arched pieces but are in
fact seven individual paintings mounted as one. The centre panel in each
of the Septets is the only one that is not distorted.
No apparent colour system is applied, though No. 3 and two other

Septets have a dark-blue central panel. The other two have, respectively,
Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled (Sketch for
a red central panel and an orange one. The most frequently used ground Septet), c.1984, pencil on paper, Gershon
colour—in four of the Septets—is blue, while another one is purple. Nor is Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and
Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
there any discernible progression in the distribution of the ovoid blips,
though they follow the column-like arrangement of the Four Seasons–
titled paintings from 1967. Curator Roald Nasgaard writes:
[The Septets are like] giant tablets or stained glass windows, or segments of an
altarpiece. Stylistically, these works resemble the abstracted colour-field
landscapes, but Gershon has upped the expressive ante. They are less lyrical,
somehow shriller, the colours searing rather than glowing. They are
magnificent but not benign, more hieratic than secular. What had precipitated
such a reorientation toward something Mystical? We can only speculate. 3
52
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
NOT TITLED C.1987
Gershon Iskowitz, Not Titled, c.1987

53
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Ovoid blips of pink, blue, and green appear with a warm orange-yellow
ground in this unsigned, undated work. There are, in fact, no signed or
1987-dated Iskowitz paintings, and his last solo exhibition at Gallery
Moos was in 1986. Gershon Iskowitz continued to produce work after
that show, and there are signed and dated paintings from 1986. Nine
unsigned canvases are ascribed to 1987, including two diptychs.
However, there is strong evidence that, from the late 1960s on, Iskowitz
signed and dated works only when he had completed a series. Given that
Iskowitz never seems to have worked on more than two paintings at a
time, it’s likely, then, that he had not finished this series. He was
hospitalized in late fall 1987, where he remained until he died on January
26, 1988.
Gershon Midnight #2, 1987, lithograph on

In art-world convention, unsigned works are not usually ranked as wove paper, 105.7 x 89.9 cm, Art Gallery
completed. Nevertheless, we can include this painting in Iskowitz’s of Ontario, Toronto.
oeuvre. It has all the hallmarks of Iskowitz’s work over the previous twenty
years: the minimalist ovoid compositions of the 1967 season-titled paintings
(as in Autumn Landscape #2), and the green and blue palette for the ovoid
blips from the 1984–85 Northern Lights Septets. But unlike the Septets, Orange
Yellow C, 1982, or any previous paintings, the orange-yellow ground is a
complementary hue to the blips.
An examination of Iskowitz’s late works and a comparison with signed and

dated 1986 paintings strongly suggest that all but one large diptych were
finished. It would be dismissive to relegate them to mere curiosity or
conversation piece. In art history, “late works,” for a senior artist, can be a
pejorative or derogatory term, implying that the “best works” came earlier or
that the artist is settling into a comfortable and familiar style. The evidence is
clear that in this painting, Iskowitz was still working toward new solutions in his
practice.
54
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
As a survivor of concentration camps in Poland, Gershon Iskowitz

became a witness to the Holocaust in his drawings and memory works
from the years 1941–54. After some time in Canada, he began to paint
landscapes around Parry Sound, though his expression vastly differed
from the Group of Seven’s nationalist ideals. A breakthrough came in
1967 after a flight to Churchill, Manitoba, when he discovered his
unique Canadian landscape in abstract panoramic images of land
and sky painted in brilliant, luminous colours. Although he was familiar
with current art movements, his style remained entirely his own. His
legacy lives on through the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation and many
works in public and private collections.
55
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
A WITNESS TO THE HOLOCAUST

Iskowitz recounted that in the
horrors of the Nazi concentration
camps, he drew with scavenged
materials to preserve his sanity and
to forget about his hunger. 1 Only
three of his works from 1941 to
1945 still exist: Action, 1941,
Buchenwald, 1944–45, and
Condemned, c.1944–46. Following
his liberation from Buchenwald in
May 1945—beginning in 1947 and
continuing after immigrating to
Canada in 1948—Iskowitz made
memory drawings, watercolours,
and paintings. Earlier examples of
these sketches depict impressions
of the camps, such as Barracks,
1949, or of events, such as Escape,
1948. Other works, such as It Gershon Iskowitz, Torah, 1951, gouache and brush and black ink on illustration board, 43
x 53.3 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Burns, c.1950–52, and Torah, 1951,
depict the pogrom—the
persecution of Polish Jews in his hometown of Kielce as the war began. But
Iskowitz also created images that recalled everyday prewar life, such as Korban,
c.1952, and Market, c.1952–54. These memory works are all rendered in a
stark, naive style, and they document the destruction around him, the
humanity of the survivors, and how he related to the experience as a survivor.
After the Allied victory, exposing and documenting the realities of the German
camp system and the sheer number of its victims became part of the liberation
effort: artists were commissioned to accompany the troops, and governments
sent journalists, photographers, and newsreel crews to capture images that
revealed the atrocities inflicted within these compounds. 2 Canadian war artists
such as Alex Colville (1920–2013) and Aba Bayefsky (1923–2001) documented
the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp following its liberation in 1945, but
they could give only an outside perspective, distanced by the fact that they
witnessed the effects of the camps but not the reality of life inside them. 3
Iskowitz, in contrast, created his works from the perspective of a victim and a
survivor, and his sketches are better compared with those by Otto Dix (1891–
1969), who saw military action in the First World War, and Käthe Kollwitz
(1867–1945), who lost a son in that conflict. The earliest and most significant
“visual essays” in European art that depicted the horrors of war was Francisco
Goya’s (1746–1828) suite of eighty-two engravings titled The Disasters of War,
1810–20, in which Goya recorded his response to the Peninsular War between
France and Spain from 1808 to 1814.
56
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Barracks, 1949, watercolour, pen and black ink, and gouache on wove paper, 38.3 x 50 cm, National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa. RIGHT: Francisco Goya, Plate 57 from Los Desastres de la Guerra / Disasters of War, plates produced between 1810
and 1820, from the first edition, 1863, etching on thick vellum, 15.4 x 20 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Iskowitz was far from the only visual artist to document Holocaust experiences.
The exhibition Art from the Holocaust, held at the Deutsches Historisches
Museum, Berlin, in 2016, displayed one hundred works from the art collection
of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel. The
images of Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and Schwarzheide by Czech artist Alfred
Kantor (1923–2003) were published in The Book of Alfred Kantor in 1971. Bill
(Wilhelm) Spira (1913–2000), an Austrian cartoonist, and Jan Komski (1915–
2002), one of the first prisoners of Auschwitz, both created small works of art
capturing life and death in the concentration camps. It is difficult to make a
general statement about the artists—those who did not survive and those who
pursued art after the war—but their works bear testimony to the atrocities they
endured. Yehuda Bacon (b.1929), as one example, survived Auschwitz as a
young teenager (Iskowitz was a very young adult) and pursued art after the
liberation. Initially, he too made memory and memorial works. In a 2005
interview, he stated:
I am somehow obliged because I survived to tell the story of the people who
didn’t survive [and] I had to draw [and] say what I experienced in the hope that
someone would learn from it. In Israel they have one day of commemoration of
the Holocaust every year . . . but that is mainly for the other people who didn’t
experience it. For us, the ones who survived, we live with it every day. We don’t
have to have a special day. 4
Toronto film producer Harry Rasky (1928–2007) met and interviewed Iskowitz
for his 1987 documentary Mend the World, his attempt, Rasky said, “to find
meaning or perspective in the Holocaust, largely through the painted works of
artists who lived through those days of human agony.” In Rasky’s interview
transcript, Iskowitz is quoted as saying: “Even in the camps, I saw the sunset. It
kept me alive . . . I got very inspired, not just for painting, I got very inspired
with life.”5
57
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Iskowitz continued to depict his

experiences after the war and
through the early 1950s. Like
Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel, and
Primo Levi, whose published
memories opened scholarly
discussions about the relationships
between trauma and memory and
brought insight into victims’
personal experiences, Iskowitz
exhibited his Holocaust work in
group exhibitions in the 1950s;6
the traumatic period of his life in
the Kielce Ghetto and in Auschwitz
and Buchenwald were mentioned
in relation to exhibitions in the
early 1960s,7 but it was not until
1966 that they were reproduced in
an article in the national weekly Gershon Iskowitz, Market, c.1952–54, coloured ink, gouache, and pen and black ink on
arts and culture magazine Saturday illustration board, 51.9 x 60.7 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Night. 8
Iskowitz’s art dealing with his wartime experiences brings to mind what the
French writer Charlotte Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz, described as “deep
memory,” a recollection of experiences of death of such magnitude that they
seem to exist outside the life of the person who remembers them. 9 Iskowitz’s
portraits of his neighbour Miriam, c.1951–52, and his mother, as well as images
of Kielce and the camps, draw on memory not to articulate a connection
between life before the war and the losses that followed but to convey, in vivid
colour, the artist’s emotional relationship to his past. Though from the mid-
1950s on, Iskowitz, like Levi, sought to be known for subjects separate from the
trauma he had experienced, art reviewers and members of the interested
public never forgot his work as an artist of the Holocaust. 10
58
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Miriam, c.1951–52, coloured ink, watercolour, and gouache on illustration board, 37.7 x 26.8 cm, National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa.
59
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
A DIFFERENT ÉMIGRÉ ARTIST

Gershon Iskowitz was very different from other émigré artists who came to
Canada. Two who arrived before him in 1911–12, for example, the English
artists Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) and F.H. Varley (1881–1969), emigrated
voluntarily, attracted by the opportunity for skilled employment with the
Toronto design company Grip Limited. For them and other British artists who
settled in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada represented cultural continuity with
the homes they had left, and they were immediately welcomed by local artists
they met through work or social groups. 11 They went on to play a key role in
generating a national art movement through the Group of Seven. In the 1920s
these painters explored ways to depict the natural landscape in raw colours
and bold brush strokes, quite unlike the genteel, domesticated scenes earlier
artists had preferred. Their inspiration, however, was rooted in the Western
European modernist tradition, particularly in Scandinavia and the “Mystic
North.”12
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Selection, Auschwitz, 1947, pen and black ink, watercolour, and gouache on illustration board, 40.8 x 50.3 cm,
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. RIGHT: Oscar Cahén, illustration for short story “Mail” by John Norman Harris, Maclean’s, tear sheet,
1950, collection of The Cahén Archives, Vancouver.
In contrast, the immigrants to Canada in the years immediately following the

Second World War were often driven by desperation: the countries they left in
eastern and southern Europe were not only culturally different but had been
severely damaged. Iskowitz’s experiences as an artist and as a new arrival to
Canada have remarkable parallels with those of the painter and illustrator
Oscar Cahén (1916–1956), though there are also important differences. 13 Both
men were young, Jewish, and embarking on an artistic career when the Nazis’
rise to power curtailed their ambitions. Iskowitz’s family was Polish, of limited
means, and largely lacking connections to a network beyond their small town;
Cahén’s background was prosperous, cosmopolitan, and connected, through
his father’s work, to important intellectual communities across Europe. Iskowitz
was imprisoned in concentration camps and a displaced persons camp before
he immigrated to Canada; Cahén managed to escape to England on the eve of
war, but one year later he was arrested, deported to Canada with other “enemy
aliens,” and placed in an internment camp for two years.
60
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
As Cahén and Iskowitz sought to establish themselves in the conservative

Toronto art scene during the early 1950s, Cahén drew on his connections to
European modernism to help guide the Painters Eleven with their experiments
in abstraction. For example, Cahén’s Growing Form, 1953, takes cues from the
postwar graphic compositions of British artist Graham Sutherland (1903–1980)
and the vibrant colours that characterized works by CoBrA, a group of postwar
artists that included prominent members such as Karel Appel (Dutch, 1921–
2006) and Asger Jorn (Danish, 1914–1973) who were active in Europe. Iskowitz
followed a different path, and there is no indication that new trends in art were
of interest to him. He remained fiercely independent, moving from
remembered images like Yzkor, 1952, through his vision of the Canadian
landscape (as in Sunset, 1962), to large colour compositions such as Uplands
H, 1972. None of his works fit neatly into any defined category—Canadian or
otherwise.
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands H, 1972, oil on canvas, diptych, 182.9 x 241.3 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
In his private life, too, Iskowitz was different: he didn’t aspire to marry or have a
family, and he disdained politics. “I don’t give a damn about society,” he said.
“I just want to do my own work—to express my own feelings, my own way of
thinking.”14 In the years immediately following his arrival, the conditions of art
and culture in Canada began to change significantly. The Massey Commission
on the development of the arts and sciences in Canada, begun in 1949, led to
significant national cultural initiatives, including the formation of a Canada
Council for the Arts to provide funding to artists and cultural organizations.
Between 1967 and 1976, Iskowitz would receive six Canada Council grants for
his work, establishing him as a Canadian painter in his own right.
61
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
A NEW TAKE ON LANDSCAPE

Iskowitz found his place in
Canadian art in the mid-1950s
when he switched his subject
matter from memories to
landscapes, initially in the Parry
Sound area north of Toronto.
Paintings such as Parry Sound I,
Street Scene Parry Sound, and
Summer, all 1955, responded to
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Street Scene Parry Sound, 1955, oil on board, 46 x 65 cm, Art
the terrain in that area and bore Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. RIGHT: Franklin Carmichael, Spring, Cranberry Lake, 1932,
some resemblance to works by oil on canvas, 25.1 x 30.4 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Group of Seven artists—for

example, Jack Pines, La Cloche, c.1935, by Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945).
While a stylistic comparison can be made between Carmichael’s Spring,
Cranberry Lake, 1932, and Iskowitz’s Parry Sound landscapes of the 1950s,
Iskowitz’s painting was not a “project of the land.” Rather, it was a way out of
his memories, allowing him to break with the past and begin a new life as an
artist in Canada.
Around 1960 Iskowitz stopped painting literal landscape works and made a
significant shift toward abstraction—as in Late Summer Evening, 1962, and
Spring Reflections, 1963. While he maintained some pictorial elements in these
beautifully coloured paintings, he dissolved the skies into glowing ribbons of
light and deconstructed tree forms into brightly hued shapes that seem to
explode outward from their trunks (Spring, 1962). He followed this artistic
trajectory for the rest of his life. Iskowitz never explained the reason for this
change, but perhaps, amid the freedom and independence he now enjoyed,
he decided to pursue his own visual language and discover where it led.
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Spring Reflections, 1963, oil on canvas, 76.3 x 71.1 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz,
Autumn Image, 1963, oil on canvas, 94 x 116.8 cm, private collection, Toronto.
62
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
By the late 1960s Iskowitz’s abstract pieces had become larger, with reduced
elements—as in Autumn Landscape #2, 1967—and they fit with the progressive
art being made at that time. Works by Painters Eleven members Jack Bush
(1909–1977) and Harold Town (1924–1990), for instance, echoed the dominant
trends in painting in the United States and Europe as well as in Canada. 15
Since the 1950s abstraction had gained a wider reception in Toronto following
exposure to works by Montreal’s Automatiste painters, led by Paul-Émile
Borduas (1905–1960), and the influence of important exhibitions such as
Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America in 1951 at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. The influence of British modernists, including Henry Moore
(1898–1986), and American Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning
(1904–1997), Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), and Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was
evident throughout this period. 16
In 1966 Harry Malcolmson was the first art critic to position Iskowitz in the
Toronto art scene. In the text he wrote for Iskowitz’s solo exhibition at Gallery
Moos,17 he grappled with questions of how Iskowitz’s abstract style fitted into
the contemporary scene:
[Iskowitz’s] Canadianism
comes out directly in [his]
subjects [of] this country’s
landscape, in particular the
Ontario landscape [and] by
now is a local painter in the
best sense of the term. His
personal vision and warmth at
first foreign has passed into
the community and after a
period of time has become an
integral part of it.
Canada remains a country in

a close and vital relationship
economically and
psychologically with its
landscape . . . In Iskowitz’s
case his style has less in
common with his Ontario
contemporaries (such as
Gordon Rayner and Harold
Town) than with the modern
generation of Quebec
landscape painters . . . and in
particular the flowing
discontinuous surfaces of the
1960–63 [Jean] McEwen
paintings. 18 Gershon Iskowitz, Summer Sky, 1966, oil on canvas, 101.8 x 81.5 cm, Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria.
63
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Critic Kay Kritzwiser’s review of the

1966 exhibition described
Iskowitz’s recent work as a “lyric
abstraction” that he was now
applying “to a countryside usually
painted with Group of Seven eyes.
Iskowitz,” she wrote, “makes us
look at it anew.”19 In fact, as
Malcolmson had astutely noted,
Iskowitz had turned his view away
from the horizon line, which
defines a view of the land, and
looked instead to the sky. He used
colours from the land and applied
them to the sky, and, because the
sky has no shape or form, the Gershon Iskowitz, Seasons No. 2, 1968–69, oil on canvas, 254 x 355.4 cm overall; panels
254 x 177.7 cm each, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
works became abstract. Theodore
Heinrich reiterated this point more
than a decade later in an article related to Little Orange Painting II, 1974, and
Seasons, 1974. 20
On the few occasions when Iskowitz talked to art critics about his art practice,
he defended his independence and refused to be described by any of the
common labels. In a 1975 interview with Merike Weiler, he said:
People say, oh, Gershon Iskowitz is an abstract artist. . . . But it’s a whole
realistic world. It lives, moves . . . I see those things . . . the experience, out in
the field, of looking up in the trees or in the sky, of looking down from the
height of a helicopter. So what you do is try to make a composition of all those
things, make some kind of reality: like the trees should belong to the sky, and
the ground should belong to the trees, and the ground should belong to the
sky. Everything has to be united.
Now, most of my work comes visually from memories, and the colour is also
self-invented. I reflect things I’ve seen before up north, but you’ve got to look
for a while to see the fact. If it becomes too obvious, it’s no use, it’s just a
decoration. I think Season I and [Season] II reflected the Northern Lights, even
without my knowing it. And the Uplands series . . . is a new evolution for me of
flying shapes . . . the whole landscape. But it’s nothing to do with
documentary. It’s above all that, it’s something you invent on your own. 21
Iskowitz was expressing something beyond the literal, just as instrumental

music is formed with sound, tempo, and interval (the space between the
sounds), not words. For him the sky was a universal view, one we can all
experience regardless of where we live.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
THE TORONTO LOOK

Group exhibitions, formed around themes—common style, subject matter, or
what is new—are a useful way of tracking how an artist is written into a history of
art. Although Iskowitz was selected for multiple group exhibitions with fellow
Toronto artists, his positioning within the story of art in Toronto—and Canada—
has remained apart.
Iskowitz began showing in Toronto

just as commercial galleries began
to multiply. Isaacs Gallery—the
home for cutting-edge Canadian
artists such as Gordon Rayner
(1935–2010), Graham Coughtry
(1931–1999), Joyce Wieland
(1930–1998), and Michael Snow
(b.1928)—included him in a group
show in 1957, and, three years
later, Dorothy Cameron gave him
his first solo exhibitions at her Here
and Now Gallery. When he moved
over to Gallery Moos in 1964, he
was in international company: the
Twentieth-Century Master group
exhibitions that Walter Moos
initiated in 1961 with artists such
as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973),
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz in Toronto, winter c.1948–49, photographer unknown, Gershon
Georges Braque (1882–1963), and Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Marc Chagall (1887–1985), and RIGHT: Pamphlet for Iskowitz: New Paintings, September 15–October 2, 1961, Here and
Now Art Gallery, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of
Canadian artists establishing
Ontario, Toronto.
international careers, such as Jean-
Paul Riopelle (1923–2002) and
Sorel Etrog (1933–2014). 22 From then on, Moos managed Iskowitz’s life and
career very well.
After his frequent visits to Gallery Moos, Iskowitz often dropped into the other
galleries in the Yorkville area: Mira Godard, Gallery One, Waddington & Shiell,
and Jared Sable Gallery (later Sable-Castelli). He continued on to Isaacs and
Carman Lamanna on Yonge Street and visited the David Mirvish Gallery on
Markham Street, where his friend Daniel Solomon (b.1945) worked. 23 There he
would have seen large brilliantly coloured works by contemporary American
Abstract Expressionist and colour-field painters including Hans Hofmann
(1880–1966), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), Frank Stella (b.1936), and Helen
Frankenthaler (1928–2011), along with the Canadian Jack Bush (1909–1977).
Around his studio on Spadina, he became a father figure to a younger group of
artists who were exploring a wide diversity of styles and were often
represented by Isaacs. 24 All these developments signalled a profound shift in
the Toronto art scene—and Iskowitz kept abreast of it all.
65
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
The first significant group exhibition for which Iskowitz was selected presented
a story of art in Toronto. In 1972 curator Dennis Reid organized Toronto
Painting: 1953–1965 for the National Gallery of Canada. He placed Iskowitz in a
section titled “The Toronto Look: 1960–1965,” though there was no common
approach among these artists, which included both figurative and abstract
work by Snow, Wieland, Coughtry, and Rayner. When the Art Gallery of
Ontario mounted Toronto Painting of the Sixties in 1983, the one Iskowitz
painting included, Summer Sound, 1965, had also been in the National Gallery
exhibition.
In 1975–76 Iskowitz was selected

for The Canadian Canvas, a multi-
gallery partnership sponsored and
circulated by Time Canada Ltd.
Alvin Balkind, the curator of
contemporary art at the Art Gallery
of Ontario, chose the ten Ontario
artists in the show. In his words, he
“wanted to find very able, but little
known (even unknown) artists and
to mix them together with artists of
known quality.”25 Senior abstract
painter Jack Bush was included,
along with younger abstract
painters Ron Martin (b.1943) and
David Bolduc (1945–2010) and the
figurative painters William Kurelek
(1927–1977) and Clark McDougall
(1921–1980). Iskowitz was next
selected for the Exhibition of
Contemporary Paintings by Seven
Canadian Painters from the Canada
Council Art Bank, which was shown
at the Art Gallery of Harbourfront,
Toronto, and circulated to galleries
in Paris, New Zealand, and
Australia in 1976 and 1977. Other
artists chosen were Claude Breeze Gershon Iskowitz, Autumn Landscape #7, 1967, oil on canvas, 97.5 x 80 cm, private
(b.1938, the only figurative painter collection.
of the group), Paterson Ewen

(1925–2002), Charles Gagnon (1934–2003), Ron Martin, John Meredith (1933–
2000), and Guido Molinari (1933–2004).
None of these exhibitions laid claim to any stylistic commonality, but they
offered an interim report of art in Canada in the moment. 26 Iskowitz could be
paired with no other artist: his “look” was unique.
66
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
LEGACY
Mark Cheetham writes of Gershon Iskowitz: “Knowing an artist’s biography can
be a trap for the ways we see and think about their work, because too often
life’s events and art’s purposes do not align as perfectly as we might wish.”27
Iskowitz was a Holocaust survivor who worked through that trauma in his
powerful and disturbing memory works from 1947 to 1954—for example,
Through Life, c.1947; Yzkor, 1952; and Burning Synagogue, c.1952–53. But it
was his later innovative abstract work—paintings such as Little Orange Painting
II, 1974; the Lowlands series, 1969–70; and the Uplands series, 1969–72—
that garnered him significant critical recognition.
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Through Life, c.1947, pen and black ink, watercolour, and gouache on illustration board, 52.7 x 42 cm. National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, The Wall, 1952, pen and black ink and oil paint on grey laid paper, 60.5 x 45.5 cm,
Iskowitz added something different and individual to art in Canada, but he did
so on his own terms. Through his rigorous discipline and lifelong
determination to be an artist, he set an example of integrity rather than
ambition—for which he was admired and respected by younger artists such as
David Bolduc, Daniel Solomon, and John MacGregor (b.1944). He felt no need
to subscribe to a “Canadian lens” or other forms of discreet assimilation.
Iskowitz identified himself simply as an artist, and he may be best seen as a
deterritorialized Polish Jew and Canadian, but never as a “hyphenated”
Canadian.
Iskowitz’s legacy is twofold: his paintings and his foundation. An extensive

body of work by him continues to be admired and exhibited in major public
institutions—including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario,
Winnipeg Art Gallery, and Vancouver Art Gallery—as well as in corporate and
private collections across the country. But individual works by Iskowitz are not
specifically iconic, a term that is best applied to pictorial art such as The West
67
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Wind, 1916–17, by Tom Thomson (1877–1917). Over time, Thomson’s lone

tree and shoreline has become a stand-in for the Canadian wilderness. In
contrast, the iconic for Iskowitz rests in the body of his work over time, a
consistency of vision that stands for him.
Iskowitz appreciated the acclaim he received during his lifetime and the
opportunities that came from living and working in Canada. That led to his
second important legacy, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize. In 1982, the year of his
retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he began working on plans for an
independent charitable foundation that would provide financial support to
Canadian artists of merit. “It’s very important to give something so the next
generation can really believe in something,” he said. 28 The Gershon Iskowitz
Prize was first presented in 1986 and continues to be awarded annually.
Winners have included General Idea (active 1969–1994) in 1988; Françoise
Sullivan (b.1923) in 2008; Michael Snow in 2011; and Rebecca Belmore
(b.1960) in 2015.
The Gershon Iskowitz Prize past winners. [1] Françoise Sullivan [2] Rebecca Belmore [3] Michael Snow [4] General Idea [5] Shary Boyle [6]
Valérie Blass [7] Brian Jungen [8] Stan Douglas [9] Janet Cardiff and George Miller.
The Gershon Iskowitz Foundation was not mandated to promote Iskowitz’s

oeuvre, but it is responsible for the artist’s inventory. On its tenth anniversary,
in 1995, it gifted 148 works by Iskowitz—paintings, watercolours, drawings,
printwork, and sketchbooks—to thirty-two public gallery collections across
Canada. 29 In 2006 it formed a partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario,
renaming the prize the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO and adding a solo
exhibition of the recipient’s work at the gallery to the cash award. 30
68
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands B, 1970, oil on canvas, 213 x 335 cm, private collection.
69
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
A largely self-taught artist, Gershon Iskowitz’s work can be separated

into three distinct phases: figurative memory paintings depicting his life
before and during the war; landscape paintings from his visits to Parry
Sound, Ontario, 1954 to the late 1960s; and from 1960 on, a rapid move
into abstract painting. His materials were consistently basic and
essential: oil on board or canvas for paintings; watercolour on paper;
and ink on paper for drawings. Yet defining Iskowitz’s style is elusive: he
never spoke of influences, and his work cannot be mistaken for that of
any other artist. He painted his own personal vision—and that makes
his art unique.
70
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
A SINGULAR STYLE
There is an unmistakable “look” to Iskowitz’s work, especially in his abstract
paintings. In those final decades of his life, the elements of colour and form in
his oeuvre did not vary dramatically, as can be seen by comparing Autumn
Landscape #2, 1967, and a late untitled painting from 1987. Nevertheless, his
work does not fit easily into any of the contemporary schools and movements—
whether hard-edge, minimalism, abstract expressionism, or action painting.
Iskowitz was largely self-taught, and he did not borrow from other artists in any
obvious ways. Though he expressed an interest in paintings by some other
Canadian artists—David Milne (1881–1953), Jack Shadbolt (1909–1998), and
Kazuo Nakamura (1926–2002)—there is no direct link between their work and
his. 1
In spite of this self-determination,

some art scholars and critics have
tried to fit Iskowitz into known
categories, ranging from Holocaust
artist to colour-field painter.
Beginning in 1960 and continuing
through to his 1982 retrospective
exhibition at the Art Gallery of
Ontario, reviews of his exhibited
works often referred to the tragic
circumstances of his pre-émigré
life—for example, “Gershon
Iskowitz: Transmuting Personal
Tragedy into Art.”2 Only three
surviving sketches can be
positively dated to the war years:
Action, 1941, drawn as Iskowitz
Gershon Iskowitz, Ghetto, c.1947, watercolour, gouache, and pen and black ink on card,
witnessed the brutality of Nazi 35.5 x 48.4 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
soldiers in the Kielce Ghetto, and
two from his time in concentration camps: Buchenwald, 1944–45, and
Condemned, c.1944–46. Simple and raw in style, these visual documents bear
witness to the horrors of the time and express Iskowitz’s empathy with the
suffering he observed. They have a strength and integrity that can come only
through personal experience. As he waited in the Feldafing Displaced Persons
Camp outside Munich in 1946–48 and for some years after his arrival in
Toronto in September 1948, Iskowitz worked through his emotions in ink and
watercolour memory sketches: images of prewar Poland, such as Through Life,
c.1947, Korban, c.1952, and Market, c.1952–54; of events that took place in the
Kielce Ghetto, such as It Burns, c.1950–52, and Torah, 1951; and of camp
experiences, including Escape, 1948, and Barracks, 1949.
Eventually, Iskowitz began to paint interior scenes and floral still lifes—for
example, an undated, untitled 1950s floral painting in the collection of the Art
Gallery of Ontario. These images, along with Parry Sound landscapes such as
Summer and Street Scene Parry Sound, both 1955, can be compared in some
respects with works by other artists such as Kazuo Nakamura, who took a
71
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
contemporary approach to landscape. Rather than creating a pictorial view,

they painted beyond landscape as nature, and into the nature of painting itself.
As Iskowitz noted years later, his Parry Sound landscapes were more important
for starting a new life and his personal sense of renewal—not to “paint like the
Group of Seven”—than for adapting to the styles and subject matter of art in
Canada. 3 In this way, they too are autobiographical.
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled Landscape, 1960, watercolour on paper, 40 x 76.2 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery. RIGHT: Kazuo Nakamura,
Plowed Field, 1953, watercolour on wove paper, 36.9 x 54 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
As Iskowitz’s work began to garner attention and approval by the late 1950s
(tellingly, there are no bad reviews), he remained a complicated fit within the
context of Canadian art and Toronto artists at the time. He never belonged to
any artist group, such as Painters Eleven. Between 1954 and 1960 he exhibited
five times with the Canadian Society of Graphic Art, but he regarded this
association as an opportunity rather than a shared artistic objective. Even when
he was selected for large group exhibitions in the 1970s—including Toronto
Painting: 1953–1965 for the National Gallery of Canada in 1972, and the
Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings by Seven Canadian Painters from the
Canada Council Art Bank, which toured to galleries in Paris, New Zealand, and
Australia in 1976 and 1977—he shared no common style with the other artists.
Indeed, Iskowitz’s resolute individuality may stem from the way he worked in
his studio every night: his method was not to observe but “to experience the
experience.”4
The critics who reviewed Iskowitz’s paintings in early exhibitions expressed

admiration for his work through his subject matter and his relationship, as they
perceived it, with the Canadian landscape. Colin Sabiston praised the images
in the March 1960 Here and Now solo show as “a sonnet in paint—a poet-
painter’s love poem to the spacious freedom of Canada’s land, waterways and
skies.”5 A year later, reviewing another show at the same gallery, Robert
Fulford expanded on this idea:
Gershon Iskowitz is the sort of painter who inspires words like “lyric,” “mystic,”
“poet-painter,” etc. . . . Again, he offers abstract landscapes, painted in rich
evocative waves of color. Again, the colors are soft, the construction is
horizontal. But in a few other pictures he veers towards the romantic . . . he is
evolving what seems likely to be one of the lasting personal styles of this time
and place. 6
72
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Summer in Yellow, No. 1, 1972, oil on canvas, 111 x 80.5 cm, Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa.
73
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Whenever Iskowitz was asked about his later work, he replied in generalities—
that his paintings, even his abstracts, were real: “I see those things,” he said,
going on to explain that his challenge as an artist was to put all the parts
together. “Everything has to be united.”7 Certainly he found inspiration for his
work in the Canadian landscape, whether on the ground around Parry Sound
or from above as he flew over the northern boreal forest and Hudson Bay. Yet,
as his paintings became totally abstract in the last two decades of his life, he
created his own distinctive landscape, as much looking up to the sky as looking
down on the ground, such as in Summer in Yellow, No. 1, 1972. It’s also
possible that these abstracts are not only a new kind of painting. They may be
formal compositions of light and space, or they may even be another kind of
memory art. Iskowitz spoke of continuity in life and how, as he worked alone at
night, he reflected on his early life with his family and friends in Poland.
Whatever the source, the brilliantly coloured shapes that fluctuate in and out
on his canvases are his own unique inventions.
If Iskowitz’s abstract works are indeed multilayered in their meaning, they fit
well into the current reappraisal of the term “Canadian Art.” In 2017, Canada’s
sesquicentennial year, the National Gallery of Canada published Art in Canada,
a new volume on its collection. In it, director Marc Meyer asked: “How
Canadian is Canadian art? Is there such a thing, beyond the Canadian passport
of the artists? Would it make more sense to talk about art made in Canada
rather than presume such a thing as ‘Canadian art?’”8
Installation view of Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings by Seven Canadian Painters from the Canada Council Art Bank at
Harbourfront Art Gallery, 1976, photograph by David Lloyd.
Iskowitz always seemed unconcerned with what was said or written about his
work, and he accepted it without known comment. When interviewed, he
spoke simply of being human and of his work as an expression of his being. As
curator Roald Nasgaard wrote as he reflected on Iskowitz’s work, “The
interconnectedness of [his] art and life . . . is fluid and immeasurable.”9
74
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
PURE EXPRESSION
With works such as Parry Sound I, 1955, Iskowitz turned away from the pictorial
depiction of what he observed to “pure” painting—the act of creating as an
expression unto itself. Theodore Heinrich writes that Iskowitz’s “action of pure
painting” was a process and “intuitive, each stroke dictating of inner necessity
its answer and successor.”10 At the time of the retrospective at the Art Gallery
of Ontario in 1982, curator David Burnett described Iskowitz’s work as “rooted
in the directness of experience.”11 He traced this thread from the early
figurative memory works such as Escape, 1948, Torah, 1951, and It Burns,
c.1950–52, through to the later abstractions. Explosion, c.1949–52, an early
example of the bridge between his figurative and abstract works, reveals this
transition. “The strength and value of Iskowitz’s work lies in the absolute and
naïve unity between his subject matter and its painterly manifestation,” he
wrote. “It lies in the essential singleness of his artistic expression.”12
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Explosion, c.1949–52, gouache on illustration board, 50.9 x 63.5 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, Parry Sound I, 1955, watercolour on paper, 22.9 x 30.5 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
This “essential singleness” for Iskowitz was the same, regardless of the different
styles of work he produced. Burnett also qualified “naïve” not as “an ignorant
roughness” but as Iskowitz’s unwavering focus and the self-directed discipline
of his studio routine—“the drive that necessitates his working day in and day
out.”13 When Iskowitz turned to the act of painting, working exclusively within
the confines of his studio and no longer needing to create memory images (as
in the drawings Ghetto, c.1947, and Memory (Mother and Child), c.1951) or
observe the forms in nature (as in an untitled flower painting from 1956),
painting became his nature—it spoke for itself, without his having to explain
hidden meanings.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Orange Violet, 1979, oil on canvas, 155 x 141 cm, Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, Florida.
Burnett concluded that Iskowitz “came to recognize that expression in painting

lay in the activity of painting and that the reality of communication came
through the painting itself and not the particular subject matter.”14 Iskowitz
referred to this unity between an artwork and the act of painting in an interview
he did with his artist friend David Bolduc (1945–2010): “Every form of art is the
image of life,” he said. “There has to be a certain kind of reality in it.”15 Years
earlier the noted Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) made a similar self-
revelatory comment while painting in Tunisia in 1914: “Colour possesses me. I
don’t have to pursue it . . . colour and I are one. I am a painter!”16
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
COLOUR AND SHAPES

With works such as Late Summer
Evening, 1962, Iskowitz started to
move toward abstraction, although
the compositions retained
elements of the pictorial. As his
work became fully abstract by
1967—initially with images such
as Summer Landscape #2—writers
began in the 1970s to analyze
Iskowitz’s painting process,
focusing on his particular use of
colour and his inventive shapes. In
an early 1971 feature article for
artscanada magazine, Peter Mellen
wrote:
After looking at [Iskowitz’s

paintings] a long time, colors
begin to fluctuate. Some
come rushing out to you,
others pull you into the depth
of the painting. They appear
to come alive before you,
glowing with vibrant
luminosity. Real space
becomes infinite space—space
through which you can float
Gershon Iskowitz, Summer Landscape #2, 1967, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 127 cm, private
weightlessly. 17
collection.
Three years later, critic Art Perry also analyzed Iskowitz’s use of colour:
An Iskowitz red is dissimilar to any other red. It is a hyper-red, a

supersaturating red, an individually and sensually encompassing red. And not
to discredit Iskowitz green, mauve, blue or purple, they too have no visual
counterpart. To view a color-field painting by Gershon Iskowitz is to re-
experience color. Through a subtle juxtaposition of catalyst color dots and his
mottled color-fields, Iskowitz not only controls but activates the whole painted
surface [to] make it vibrate at a higher intensity: Iskowitz is probably Canada’s
finest color engineer. 18
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
The colour-field painters emerging

in the United States in the 1940s
had been of great interest to the
Toronto abstractionist collective
Painters Eleven in the 1950s. The
influence of expressionist-based
versions of the style was evident in
the work of Jack Bush (1909–1977)
and Oscar Cahén (1916–1956) in
particular. Exhibitions by
Americans Jules Olitski (1922–
2007) and Frank Stella (b.1936) at
David Mirvish Gallery brought the
evolving style to Toronto critics
and audiences. Iskowitz did not
identify as a colour-field painter—or
with any category or school. Still,
some critics used this term in LEFT: Oscar Cahén, Candy Tree, 1952–53, oil on Masonite, 123 x 75 cm, private
collection. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, Tree Reflections, 1960, watercolour on paper, 63.2 x
discussing his abstract works: it 53.3 cm, private collection.
enabled them to focus on the
innovative use of colour that became his hallmark. Art historian Dennis Reid,
for instance, describes the watercolour Summer Sound, 1965, and other similar
pieces, such as Tree Reflections, 1960, as landscape and colour-field
paintings. 19
Merike Weiler focused on the duality she experienced in 1975 as she viewed
Iskowitz’s works in his first public gallery exhibition at the Glenbow-Alberta
Institute in Calgary:
In his work I see a recurring process, an alternating though uneven rhythm

between structured and unstructured shape . . . . For me, Iskowitz is a duality, a
curious blend of alienation and ebullience, at once an ascetic and a sensualist.
In the same way, his paintings are a revelation and a camouflage. 20
In the 1970s art historians presented two different perspectives on Iskowitz’s

work. Roald Nasgaard made an analogy between Iskowitz and the Romantic,
lyrical sublime, especially with the German painter Caspar David Friedrich
(1774–1840). 21 Theodore Heinrich focused on Iskowitz’s painting process
(how he applied paint) and working method (the solitude and discipline in his
studio) but also added a wry analogy: “As in the October canvases, [the forms]
avoid becoming islands by touching an edge in peninsular fashion, much the
way Spain clings to Europe while turning its back on it.”22
DRAWINGS
While Iskowitz never made preliminary drawings for paintings, drawing was a
lifelong and parallel activity for him. His earliest work, done in Poland and
Germany during and immediately after the war, could only be drawing, given
his limited art materials and the urgency he felt to record impressions and
memories. He continued his memory drawings after he arrived in Toronto and
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
into the early 1950s. In this same period he also made quick life drawings
(nudes) and sketches of Toronto street scenes, but thereafter he focused on
two distinct subjects: portraits and landscape. By 1951 his portrait drawings
took on a consistent style that continued until the last dated work in January
1987. They are immediate contour sketches that capture the essential features
of his subject, without any shading or toning. Most of them are of women.
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz, Luigi Orgera, 1980, felt pen, 42.5 x 35 cm, Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled
Drawing, 1958, felt pen, 56 x 42.5 cm, Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
In contrast, his landscape drawings did change in style. The earliest, dated
1952, are vigorous gestural drawings done in felt pen. By 1962 Iskowitz
developed a “pointillism” style, using short strokes done in ink. 23 He never
exhibited the portrait drawings: he did them for himself and sometimes gave
them to the sitter. In 1981, however, he asked Gallery Moos to feature a group
of the later landscape drawings in an exhibition. 24
These drawings, a series of landscapes that make use of the pointillist style and
combine it with tiny ovoid line work, reveal the breadth of Iskowitz’s late-career
technical abilities. While Iskowitz was often considered a methodical colourist,
his command of drawing technique shows a keen eye for space and detail
communicated through minimal arrangement and repetition. As seen in
Landscape #2, 1980, the composition is achieved through a bold central
feature that is distinguished by vertical spires contrasted with waning diagonal
lines to invoke the pitch and horizon of a landscape. The works from this 1981
exhibition offer a rare glimpse into the artist’s relationship with the land—
intimate and controlled. Like his paintings, the landscape drawings are an
Iskowitz studio invention, an idealized view of an imagined world.
79
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Landscape #2, 1980, ink on paper, 43.2 x 58.4 cm, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.
A MEASURED TECHNIQUE
For all the apparent simplicity of
the abstract paintings Iskowitz was
creating by the late 1960s, he
achieved these results in complex
and varied ways. Deep
contemplation and detailed
execution were required for both
the ovoid and blip forms in
LEFT: Detail of Uplands K, 1972, installed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, photograph by
Autumn Landscape #2, 1967;
Daniel Hutchinson.
Orange Yellow C, 1982; and RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands K, 1972, oil on canvas, 228.4 x 355.4 cm, Art Gallery of
Hamilton.
Northern Lights Septet No. 3, 1985,
and the organic contours of large
cloud or galaxy forms in Uplands E, 1971; Uplands H, and Uplands K, both
1972; and Little Orange Painting II, 1974.
Iskowitz spoke of painting layers upon layers, but the ovoid and blip forms
were not always the last layer he applied. Sometimes he brushed a background
colour onto the surface to create these forms, as in the detail of Lowlands No.
9, 1970, and Newscape, 1976. Other times he painted the forms directly onto
a coloured ground, as in the alternative detail of Lowlands No. 9 (in this case,
Iskowitz is using both the brush techniques in one painting) and in an untitled
80
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
1987 painting. The 1987 painting also has subtler forms, yellow on yellow.
These techniques are Iskowitz’s own invention, and they cannot be mistaken
for those of any other artist.
Dennis Reid writes that Iskowitz had only to “alter colours and their
configuration in order to achieve a limitless variety of moods and feelings.”25
That is true for his 1977 watercolours, which were made with instant and direct
“drops” of colour on dampened paper. An untitled watercolour in the
collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts uses green, yellow, and blue; in
another, entitled AK, 1977, the red is dominant, whereas the yellow recedes in
the untitled work and the blue and green are dominant.
Gershon Iskowitz, AK, 1977, watercolour on paper, 42.9 x 56 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Iskowitz applied no formula, but he registered the nuance of technique in the

final work, as all high-functioning painters do. Like virtuoso musicians, they
know what they want to achieve. The difference between the best artists or
performers and their myriad competent followers is in the mind. To be “in the
music,” as Iskowitz was “in the painting,” is “to experience the experience.”26
Harry Malcolmson remembers Iskowitz as an unaffected person, deliberate in

manner yet also spontaneous. He recalled a gathering at artist Les Levine’s
(b.1935) New York studio in the early 1980s that included Iskowitz, following
the opening of the Canadian’s New York solo exhibition. 27 As the conversation
progressed, Levine declared that artists had to have in mind what they were
81
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
going to do. Iskowitz replied that before artists could begin to work, they had
first to clear their minds and approach the canvas blank. In Malcolmson’s
interpretation, although Iskowitz did not begin a painting with a complete
image in mind, his approach was methodical, and the final composition
emerged only as he progressed. 28
Style and technique were

inseparable for Iskowitz. He built
up his paintings with layers, and as
he made adjustments to shapes
and contours, he never
overpainted in order to generate
impasto texturing. Works such as
Ultra Blue Green, 1973, are an
accomplished example of this
technique. All his paintings were
rectilinear, never square, with only
two exceptions, the arch-topped
three-panelled work Uplands,
1969–70, and the 1985 Septet
series. As Daniel Solomon (b.1945)
wrote: “Gershon’s studio practice,
like everything in his life, was
simple and stripped down. He
used Stevenson’s oil paint and
bristle brushes, as basic as you can
get. He had people who stretched
and primed his canvas.”29 He did
not mix media, nor did he engage
in any hybridization or pastiche of
forms. He found what worked and
kept to it, and he never
experimented for the sake of
novelty. Gershon Iskowitz, Ultra Blue Green, 1973, oil on canvas, 157.6 x 127 cm, Art Gallery of
Ontario, Toronto.
82
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Two Iskowitz interviews—one with

David Bolduc (1945–2010) and the
other with Merike Weiler—offer a
direct sense of his thoughts and
voice. In 1974 with Bolduc,
Iskowitz spoke about the process
of painting as a living experience
and emphasized that he did not
follow any critical theories or
doctrines:
Whenever I put on a coat of

paint I look at it and say: well,
let’s leave it until tomorrow,
when it dries; and tomorrow
I’ll put on another coat and . .
. let’s leave it. Then I put on
one coat—ten coats—fifteen—
twenty—it depends. Then I say
it’s finished. That’s it; I can’t
work anymore.
All paintings, if they’re good

paintings, have skill, form,
space, colour. It’s like a
landscape, a form of life.
Every form of art is the image Gershon Iskowitz, October 2, 1976, oil on canvas, 139.7 x 119.4 cm, private collection.
of life. There has to be a
certain kind of reality in it. It can be . . . just a few blobs of paint, but it has to
be a form of communication. My work is more like . . . space, and poems; and it
relates to my daily living. What we do is paint; we build an image, a form. It’s
not an obvious form, it’s private.
I never look at drawings when I paint, they’re just to get some ideas. Painting is
entirely different . . . a direct approach. If I had to look at a little drawing and
then blow it up—it would be awful. The painting would be dead, a blown-up
thing. 30
In 1975 with Weiler, Iskowitz offered a similar commentary, emphasizing the

daily life and working only at night, and what was revealed to him as he
worked:
The only fear I have is before starting to paint. When I paint, I’m great, I feel
great. You reflect on your own vision. That’s what it’s about. You put in your
own intelligence, your own expression, your own ability. You put yourself in
any form of art. I just paint; I see and I feel and I want to be honest. It’s very
important; you make what you believe. It’s like a plastic interpretation of life.
83
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
The works of Gershon Iskowitz are held in public and private

collections internationally. Although the following institutions hold the
works listed below, they may not always be on view. This list contains
only the works held in public collections discussed and illustrated in
this book; many other works by Iskowitz may be found in public
collections across Canada.
84
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
AGNES ETHERINGTON ART CENTRE

36 University Avenue
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
613-533-2190
agnes.queensu.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Orange Yellow

C, 1982
Oil on canvas, diptych
127 x 228 cm
ART GALLERY OF GREATER VICTORIA

1040 Moss Street
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
250-384-4171
aggv.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Summer

Sky, 1966
Oil on canvas
101.8 x 81.5 cm
85
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
ART GALLERY OF HAMILTON

123 King Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
905-527-6610
artgalleryofhamilton.com
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands K,

1972
228.4 x 355.4 cm
ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO

317 Dundas Street West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1-877-225-4246 or 416-979-6648
ago.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Parry Gershon Iskowitz, Parry
Portrait of Mother, Untitled Sound I, 1955 Sound II, 1955
1947 (Memory Picture), 1952 Watercolour on paper Watercolour on wove
Oil on board Watercolour on paper 22.9 x 30.5 cm paper
50.8 x 40.6 cm 51 x 40.5 cm 22.8 x 30.4 cm
86
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Late Gershon Iskowitz, Not Gershon Iskowitz,
Street Scene Parry Summer Evening #2, Titled, c.1987 Untitled, 1962
Sound, 1955 1962 Oil on canvas Ink on paper
Oil on board Oil on canvas 96.5 x 83.8 cm 33.4 x 26.2 cm
46 x 65 cm 114.3 x 127 cm
Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz,

Untitled, 1962 Spring Reflections, Seasons No. 2, 1968– Uplands H, 1972
Felt marker on paper 1963 69 Oil on canvas, diptych
35.5 x 43 cm Oil on canvas Oil on canvas 182.9 x 241.3 cm
76.3 x 71.1 cm 254 x 355.4 cm overall,
panels 254 x 177.7 cm
each
Gershon Iskowitz, Ultra Gershon Iskowitz, Little Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz,
Blue Green, 1973 Orange Painting II, Midnight #2, 1974 Untitled (Sketch for
Oil on canvas 1974 Lithograph on wove Septet), c.1984
157.6 x 127 cm Oil on canvas paper Pencil on paper
177.8 x 165.1 cm 105.7 x 89.9 cm
87
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
ART GALLERY OF YORK UNIVERSITY

8 Accolade East Building
York University, 4700 Keele Street
416-736-5169
agyu.art
Gershon Iskowitz, Autumn

Landscape #2, 1967
Oil on canvas
129.5 x 99.1 cm
ART MUSEUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

15 King's College Circle
416-978-8398
artmuseum.utoronto.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Seasons, 1974

Oil on canvas (in four parts)
178 x 610 cm
88
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
CANADA COUNCIL ART BANK

921 St. Laurent Boulevard
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
artbank.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Red

Lowlands No. 2, 1969 Uplands F, 1971 Summer in Yellow, No. Grey Painting, 1976
Oil on canvas Oil on canvas 1, 1972 Oil on canvas
50.5 x 33.5 cm 228.5 x 356 cm Oil on canvas 107 x 183 cm
111 x 80.5 cm
Gershon Iskowitz, Deep

Green No. 8, 1977
Oil on canvas
178 x 198.5 cm
89
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
KELOWNA ART GALLERY

1315 Water Street
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
250-762-2226
kelownaartgallery.com
Gershon Iskowitz, Summer Song,

1966
Oil on canvas
165.1 x 127 cm
MCMASTER MUSEUM OF ART

1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
905-525-9140
museum.mcmaster.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Buchenwald, Gershon Iskowitz, Korban, c.1952

1944–45 Gouache on board
Watercolour and ink on paper 43.5 x 53 cm
mounted on cardboard
39.5 x 52.3 cm
90
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

1380 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
514-285-2000
mbam.qc.ca

Watercolour on paper
42.8 x 56 cm
MUSEUM LONDON
421 Ridout Street North
London, Ontario, Canada
519-661-0333
museumlondon.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands G,

1971
254 x 355.6 cm
91
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA

380 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
613-990-1985
gallery.ca

Action, 1941 Condemned, c.1944– Ghetto, c.1947 Selection, Auschwitz,
Pen and black 46 Watercolour, gouache, 1947
ink, watercolour, and Pen and black ink and and pen and black ink Pen and black
gouache on wove paper watercolour on cream on card ink, watercolour, and
39.2 x 52.3cm wove paper 35.5 x 48.4 cm gouache on illustration
71.3 x 54.4 cm board
40.8 x 50.3 cm

Through Life, c.1947 Escape, 1948 Barracks, 1949 Explosion, c.1949–52
Pen and black Oil on paper, mounted Watercolour and pen Gouache on illustration
ink, watercolour, and on corrugated and black ink, and board
gouache on illustration cardboard gouache on wove paper 50.9 x 63.5 cm
board 28.3 x 40 cm 38.3 x 50 cm
52.7 x 42 cm
92
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz, It Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz,

Burns, c.1950–52 Torah, 1951 Miriam, Yzkor, 1952
Coloured ink and Gouache and brush and c.1951–52 Watercolour, coloured ink,
gouache on illustration black ink on illustration Coloured ink, watercolour, and pen and black ink
board board and gouache on on illustration board
50.9 x 63.4 cm 43 x 53.3 cm illustration board 30.9 x 40.9 cm
37.7 x 26.8 cm
Gershon Iskowitz, The Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Side Gershon Iskowitz, Self-
Wall, 1952 Market, c.1952–54 Street, c.1952–54 Portrait, c.1955
Pen and black ink and Coloured ink, gouache, Watercolour, coloured ink, Oil on commercial
oil paint on grey laid and pen and black ink and gouache on canvas board
paper on illustration board illustration board 50.8 x 40.6 cm
60.5 x 45.5 cm 51.9 x 60.7 cm 50.9 x 63.5 cm
Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz, Parry Gershon Iskowitz, Gershon Iskowitz,

Summer Impression, Sound Variation XIV, Seasons No. 1, 1968– Uplands, 1969–70
1963 1965 69 Oil on canvas
Pen and black ink on Watercolour on wove Oil on canvas 315.1 x 434.5 cm
wove paper paper 254 x 355.4 cm overall, overall (irregular)
27.5 x 35 cm 48.1 x 63.2 cm panels 254 x 177.7 cm Left panel: 273.5 x 140
each cm arched at top
Centre panel: 315.1 x
153 cm arched at top
Right panel: 273.5 x
140 cm arched at top
93
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz,
Uplands E, 1971
228.6 x 356 cm
UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH
50 Stone Road East
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
519-824-4120
uoguelph.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Septet No. 5,

1985
Oil on canvas on shaped plywood
in seven sections
Overall 233.5 x 410 cm.
UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART GALLERY

4401 University Drive West
Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
403-329-2666
uleth.ca/artgallery
Gershon Iskowitz, Sunshine, 1955 Gershon Iskowitz, Northern

Oil on board Lights Septet No. 3, 1985
50.8 x 61 cm Oil on canvas on shaped plywood
in seven sections
Overall 233.5 x 410 cm
94
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

750 Hornby Street
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
604-662-4700
vanartgallery.bc.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Lowlands

No. 9, 1970
Oil on canvas
121.9 x 93.9 cm
WINNIPEG ART GALLERY

300 Memorial Boulevard
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
204-786-6641
wag.ca
Gershon Iskowitz, Summer G,

1978
167.7 x 305 cm
95
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
NOTES
BIOGRAPHY
1. “Iskowitz” is the anglicized spelling of his name that was accepted by 1955,
although Iskowitz used both the “itz” and “icz” endings until that year. We
accept that form throughout this text for consistency and to conform to the
most current documents.
2. All the biographies give 1921, a date Iskowitz never publicly refuted.
However, the Kielce Synagogue records were destroyed by the Nazi occupiers
of the city after October 1939. The earliest legible extant document recording
Iskowitz’s personal details is the temporary travel document issued by the
Military Government for Germany in Munich, May 3, 1948. There, Iskowitz’s
date of birth is written as November 24, 1920. Subsequent Canadian
documents—his 1959 citizenship and his last Canadian passport, issued in 1982
—conform to this date. All documents cited, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, Art
Gallery of Ontario.
3. Adele Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light (Toronto/Vancouver:

Merritt Publishing, 1982); David Burnett, Iskowitz (Toronto: Art Gallery of
Ontario, 1982).
4. Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 23–24.
5. Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 30; Burnett, Iskowitz, 53. There is, however, no
record of Iskowitz in the academy archives. Correspondence with Krzysztof
Oktabiński, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, August 28, 2017.
6. Iskowitz told Freedman that he sketched the scene from a rooftop and hid it
in the attic; friends who returned to Kielce in 1946 retrieved it for him.
Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 50.
7. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, accessed July 30,

2017, https://sztetl.org.pl/en/towns/k/399-kielce/99-history/137460-history-
of-community.
8. In a 1966 Saturday Night magazine article, Kildare Dobbs noted that,

sometime in 1942, Iskowitz escaped from Kielce and managed to remain at
large in Poland for three months before being sent to Henryków. This story is
not repeated elsewhere. Kildare Dobbs, “From the Ranks of Death: Buchenwald
and Auschwitz: The Witness of Gershon Iskowitz,” Saturday Night, March 1966.
9. The drawing is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The “B series”
was instituted at Auschwitz after the first “A series” tattoos, accounting for the
first 20,000 prisoners.
10. Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 42.
11. Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 44, 47.
96
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
14. Constance Naubert-Riser, “ . . . Everything We Love Will Die . . . ,” in The

1930s: The Making of “The New Man,” ed. Jean Clair (Ottawa: National Gallery
of Canada, 2008), 106.
15. Naubert-Riser, “ . . . Everything We Love Will Die . . ., ” 106. Also see Gerald
Green, Artists of Terezin (New York: Schocken Books, 1988).
16. Records of the total number who died at Buchenwald vary. This figure
comes from the Jewish Virtual Library, accessed February 10, 2018,
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-statistics-of-buchenwald.
17. Dobbs, “From the Ranks of Death”; Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 47;
interview with David Moos, July 20, 2018.
18. Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 50; Burnett, Iskowitz, 53.
19. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario. Iskowitz’s address was
Feldafing bei München, Willa Park #9, U.S. Zone, Germany. Ontario Jewish
Archives (OJA), accessed February 14, 2015. The file consists of an initial
application form to the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society of Canada, case no.
1763, August 13, 1946, and nine letters, the last dated June 1, 1948.
20. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, accessed August 19, 2017,
http://search.archives.jdc.org. Coats made in the clothing workshop of
the Feldafing DP Camp. Reference Code: NY_12390.
22. Correspondence with Dr. Caroline Sternberg, Archive of the Akadamie der
Bilden Künste München, July 29, 2015.
24. Correspondence with Régine Bonnefoit, Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, July

22, 2015.
25. Iskowitz described what he saw to Adele Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 55,
but it is difficult to confirm details. Munich galleries active in the immediate
postwar period included Haus der Kunst, the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum,
and Städtische Galerie, but the gallery scene was more active in Ausburg, 80
kilometres from Munich, and in Berlin.
26. Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 55. The opera productions mounted by the
Bavarian State Opera in 1947–48 do not coincide with these details.
97
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
27. Chris Knowles, “Germany 1945–1949: A Case Study in Post-Conflict

Reconstruction,” January 29, 2014, History and Policy,
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/germany-1945-1949-a-
case-study-in-post-conflict-reconstruction.
28. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, accessed August 27,

2017, http://archives.jdc.org/topic-guides/jdc-in-the-displaced-persons-dp-
camps-1945-1957.
29. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed September 1,

2017, https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/displaced-persons/camp2.htm.
30. OJA.
31. OJA.
32. OJA.
33. OJA.
34. Iskowitz’s Canadian Immigration stamps are both signed by “R.L. Barker”
and are dated May 23, 1948, and June 28, 1948.
37. Interview with Ruth Ann Podeswa, Toronto, July 2014. The Podeswa
portrait by Iskowitz is in the Podeswa Family Collection.
38. See Jo Manning, Etched in Time (Victoria: FriesenPress, 2016), chapter 18.
Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 74; Burnett, Iskowitz, 58.
39. Records of the instructors’ names were not recorded in the Temple
Bulletins, but there is confirmation that art classes were held in 1953.
Correspondence with Holy Blossom Temple, August 23, 2017.
40. See for example the profile by Ben Rose at the time of Iskowitz’s
retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario: “Largest Iskowitz Show Opens Jan.
23 at AGO,” Canadian Jewish News, January 7, 1982. The article focused on
questions of identity (with questions about ongoing anti-Semitism in Europe
and discussion of Iskowitz’s exhibition in Israel), and Iskowitz seems to play into
the interviewer’s desire to portray him a certain way, noting trips to Europe and
Israel that are not documented. He did travel to London, England, in 1983 for
the opening of his retrospective there.
41. Iskowitz’s Yzkor refers to “Yizkor,” a Jewish memorial prayer and public
observance for the deceased. It is recited four times a year in the synagogue.
42. Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 76, 78, 81; Burnett, Iskowitz, 59–60.
98
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
44. Cameron to Freedman, in Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 90.
45. An existing invitation indicates that he showed works dating from 1941 to
1963. (Cameron changed the gallery name to the Dorothy Cameron Gallery
and re-opened on Yonge Street in October 1962.)
46. Cameron to Freedman, in Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 90.
47. J. A. Wainwright, Blazing Figures: A Life of Robert Markle (Waterloo: Wilfrid

Laurier Press, 2010), 97–98.
48. Correspondence with Daniel Solomon, January 18, 2018.
51. There are no surviving detail documents, but the Canada Council grant was
approved on March 30, 1967. Canada Council grant summary document
accessed September 30, 2017.
52. There are varying published descriptions of this trip, which cannot all be
reconciled. The most realistic scenario is that Iskowitz first flew to Winnipeg
and then by a small aircraft to Churchill. There are no existing documents to
verify the “landscape-coast” flight from Churchill. All published accounts
indicate a helicopter, and if this is the case, it could only have been through a
private charter company. A letter from the Canada Council to Iskowitz dated
April 9, 1968, refers to a trip to James Bay, although this may have been a
clerical error.
54. Lowlands No. 2, 1969, was purchased by the Canada Council Art Bank from
the 1970 Gallery Moos exhibition.
55. David L. Shirley review, New York Times, May 1980, quoted in Freedman,
Gershon Iskowitz, 153.
56. Both quotations from Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 129.
57. Peter Mellen, “Gershon Iskowitz,” artscanada, October/November 1971, 50.
58. Correspondence with Daniel Solomon, April 7, 2015.
59. Interview with artist Richard Sturm, August 24, 2017.
60. Iskowitz had summer, winter, and fall–spring versions of the same blue cap.
Kangol designed a similar cap for the Beatles in 1964.
99
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
62. Harry Malcolmson remembers seeing Iskowitz at a party in New York, most
likely in late 1983, when he had a solo exhibition at Marisa del Re Gallery.
Conversation with Harry Malcolmson, Toronto, May 14, 2018.
64. It is likely that Walter Moos, who managed Iskowitz’s financial matters,
encouraged Iskowitz to purchase the building. It was registered under a
company name, Newscape Inc. Iskowitz Estate Assets statement, 1988, Walter
Moos Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario.
65. Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, accessed July 22, 2018,

http://iskowitzfoundation.ca/gershon.
66. Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, accessed May 5, 2018,

http://iskowitzfoundation.ca.
67. Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, accessed August 20, 2017,

http://iskowitzfoundation.ca/prize. Iskowitz received seven other Canada
Council Grants through until 1976, including three “A” grants (indicating the
highest amount that could be awarded to an artist), and the Victor Martyn
Lynch-Staunton Award in 1974, which was administered by the Canada
Council. Montreal painter Claude Tousignant was the Lynch-Staunton Award
co-recipient. A 1969 grant was awarded for the creation of four “mural sized
works,” which were most likely the first Uplands diptychs.
68. The October date is given by documentary filmmaker Harry Rasky, who
visited Iskowitz at Mount Sinai Hospital. Harry Rasky, “There Are Many
'Survivors',” Globe and Mail, April 2, 1988. There was no single cause for
Iskowitz’s hospitalization, and his death resulted from a deteriorating physical
and medical condition over the years. The memorial service was held at
Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel, Toronto, on January 28, 1988, where the
attending rabbi and Walter Moos spoke at the service. Iskowitz is buried at
Mount Sinai Memorial Park, Toronto.
KEY WORKS: BUCHENWALD

Merritt Publishing, 1982), 42.
2. Constance Naubert-Riser, “ . . . Everything We Love Will Die . . . ,” in The

1930s: The Making of “The New Man,” ed. Jean Clair (Ottawa: National Gallery
of Canada, 2008),106.
KEY WORKS: KORBAN

1. David Burnett, Iskowitz (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982), 57.
100
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
KEY WORKS: SELF-PORTRAIT

KEY WORKS: PARRY SOUND I

1. No checklist of works for this exhibition has been uncovered.
2. Cited in Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, 90.
KEY WORKS: UNTITLED

1. London Ontario artist Jack Chambers, who exhibited with Isaacs Gallery, also
produced comparable technique drawings, but his earliest works are dated
1963.
2. Iskowitz sketch books in the AGO collection contain numerous landscape

drawings, dating from the early 1960s on. The last dated work is 1981.
KEY WORKS: LATE SUMMER EVENING

1. Georges Seurat developed a painting approach based on colour theory,
which he termed “chromoluminarism” and later “pointillism,” derived in part
from active investigations by scientists such as Michel Chevreul. These theories
had a strong influence on the Impressionist painters at the time.
2. Theodore Allen Heinrich, “The Intimate Cartography of Gershon Iskowitz’s

Painting,” artscanada, May/June 1977, 13.
KEY WORKS: AUTUMN LANDSCAPE #2


Painting,” artscanada May/June 1977, 12.
KEY WORKS: LOWLANDS NO. 9

1. David Burnett rightly asserts that Iskowitz’s diptychs Seasons No. 1 and
Seasons No. 2, both 1968–69, are the first studio realization after the flights;
Burnett, Iskowitz, 67. The Lowlands, however, are an extended project.
2. Burnett, Iskowitz, 67.
3. Uplands, 1969–70, has for many years been wrongly titled “Triptych,”
although the original title has now been corrected by the National Gallery of
Canada.
KEY WORKS: UPLANDS E

1. The Uplands triptych is not letter-designated and is not included in the
series proper.
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3. Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas &

McIntyre/Halifax: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2007), 245.
5. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario.
KEY WORKS: LITTLE ORANGE PAINTING II

1. Mellen, “Gershon Iskowitz,” 52.
KEY WORKS: UNTITLED

1. This phrase was coined by American novelist Kenneth Patchen in his “The
Artist’s Duty,” Journal of Albion Moonlight, (New York: Self-published, 1941;
2nd ed. 1944), 253.
KEY WORKS: SUMMER G

1. This phrase was coined by Art Perry in his review of Iskowitz’s solo exhibition
at Galerie Allen, Vancouver, artscanada, December 1974, 107.
KEY WORKS: NORTHERN LIGHTS SEPTET NO. 3

1. Only two of four examined Septets are signed, titled, and dated. The earliest
dating is 1984; one of them is now in a private U.S. collection. A sixth Septet,
also dated 1984, was reproduced for the Gallery Moos exhibition invitation of
May 11–25, 1985. The painting’s whereabouts is unknown.
2. The Gallery Moos press release—Walter Moos Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario—
dates Septet No. 3 as 1986, but the work is artist-dated “85” on the back.
3. Roald Nasgaard, “Gershon Iskowitz” in The Gershon Iskowitz Prize, 1986 to

2006 (Toronto: The Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 2009), 12.
SIGNIFICANCE & CRITICAL ISSUES

Merritt Publishing, 1982), 42.
2. Mark Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the
Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2015).
3. Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap, 127. Canadian war artist Molly
Lamb Bobak also visited Bergen-Belsen but decided against making any
drawings of the camp.
4. BBC interview with Yehuda Bacon, accessed October 1, 2018,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/
witness/january/27/newsid_4184000/4184147.stm. Bacon studied art in Israel
after emigrating and then taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem
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until his retirement. In another interview, Bacon said, “It was a period [after the
War] in which I wanted to develop in several directions; I wanted to be a
painter, not a Holocaust-painter.” Yad Vashem interview with Yehuda Bacon,
accessed October 1, 2018, http://www.yadvashem.org/articles/
interviews/yehuda-bacon.html.
5. Both quotes, Harry Rasky, “There Are Many ‘Survivors,’” Globe and Mail,
April 2, 1988.
6. Primo Levi published the first edition of Se questo é un uomo (If This Is a
Man) in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz in 1947, but it was not until
1958, when the book was republished in Italy and Wiesel’s La nuit (Night)
appeared in French, that these accounts began to enter a wider public
consciousness. By 1959 both Levi’s memoir and Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for
Meaning (first published in German in 1946, and originally translated as From
Death Camp to Existentialism) had been translated into English.
7. Press releases for early solo shows by Iskowitz mention both his personal
survivor story and his work on this theme, and those for his 1960 exhibition at
the Here and Now Gallery and his 1963 exhibition at Dorothy Cameron Gallery
include promises that, respectively, one and five works from this series will be
shown. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario Library and Special
Collections.
8. Kildare Dobbs, “From the Ranks of Death: Buchenwald and Auschwitz: The
Witness of Gershon Iskowitz,” Saturday Night, March 1966.
9. Lawrence L. Langer, “Afterdeath of the Holocaust,” in Witnessing Unbound:

Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory, eds. Henri Lustiger Thaler
and Habbo Knoch (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2017), 16–19.
10. Interview with David Moos, July 20, 2018. Moos is the son of Iskowitz’s
dealer and manager, Walter Moos.
11. Immigrants to Canada in the years before the Second World War were
primarily British, and social, political, and economic ties to England remained
strong. See http://ccrweb.ca/en/hundred-years-immigration-canada-1900-
1999.
12. The term “Mystic North” was used by curator Roald Nasgaard for his 1984
exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, examining the relationship between
the Group of Seven and Scandinavian artists, The Mystic North: Symbolist
Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890–1940.
13. A 2010 exhibition by Jeffrey Spalding, Oscar Cahén and Gershon Iskowitz:
Artists Caught in Hitler’s Web, at Horton Gallery, New York City, addressed this
comparison in depth. See also Oscar Cahén (Fredericton/Vancouver:
Beaverbrook Gallery/Cahén Archives, 2017).
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15. The Canadian centennial year promoted this progressive view. The
enormously successful Expo 67, held in Montreal, attracted millions of
international visitors and exhibited Canadian art alongside that from many
other countries. Iskowitz was not included in Expo 67, but he was selected for
the Ontario Centennial Art Exhibition, which travelled to eleven galleries in
Ontario and Quebec. In 1970 Iskowitz was included in the exhibition Eight
Artists from Canada, held at the Tel-Aviv Art Museum in Israel, and in 1972 the
National Gallery of Canada chose him and sculptor Walter Redinger to
represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in Italy.
16. Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas &

McIntyre/Halifax: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2007), 93–98.
17. Included in the show were Parry Sound Variation XIV (purchased by the
National Gallery of Canada) and Summer Sound (purchased by the Art Gallery
of Ontario), both from 1965.
18. Harry Malcolmson, Gershon Iskowitz, (Toronto: Gallery Moos, 1966).
19. Kay Kritzwiser, Globe and Mail, February 19, 1966. Exhibition review,
Gallery Moos.

21. Merike Weiler, “Of Landscape, Dreams and Light,” for Iskowitz, Glenbow-
Alberta Art Institute, April 30–May 25, 1975, n.p.
22. See http://www.gallerymoos.com/archindex.html.
23. Details about Daniel Solomon courtesy of Harry Malcolmson, personal

interview, August 18, 2018; Iskowitz’s gallery going noted by David Moos,
personal interview, July 20, 2018.
24. Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, 231–232.
25. Alvin Balkind, The Canadian Canvas: Traveling Exhibition of 85 Recent

Paintings (Toronto: Time Canada, 1974), 54.
26. Survey books on Canadian art from the 1960s and 1970s provide another
indication of Iskowitz’s uncertain place in the Canadian art scene. He was not
included in J. Russell Harper’s Painting in Canada, A History (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1966) or in William Withrow’s Contemporary
Canadian Painting (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972). Withrow was
director of the Art Gallery of Ontario at the time. Iskowitz was listed in the
1970 issue of Studio International, “Canadian Art Today,” but his work was not
reproduced.
27. Mark Cheetham, “Gershon Iskowitz” catalogue entry, Heffel Post-War &
Contemporary Art Auction, May 30, 2018, 73.
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28. Mark Cheetham, “Gershon Iskowitz Foundation,” accessed May 5, 2018,

http://iskowitzfoundation.ca.
29. Gershon Iskowitz Foundation files.
30. The Gershon Iskowitz Prize has been solely funded through the artist's cash
assets, the subsequent sale of the Tecumseth studio building, continuing sale
of foundation inventory works through appointed dealers, and the investment
management of foundation funds.
STYLE & TECHNIQUE

1. Interview with Adele Freedman, summer 2015.
2. Iskowitz’s early shows in 1960–61 coincided with the capture and trial of the
notorious Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann. The headline comes from Lawrence
Sabbath, Montreal Gazette, June 5, 1982.
3. Merike Weiler, “Of Landscape, Dreams and Light,” for Iskowitz, Glenbow-
Alberta Art Institute, April 30–May 25, 1975, n.p.
4. This phrase was coined by American novelist Kenneth Patchen in his “The
Artist’s Duty,” Journal of Albion Moonlight (New York: Self-published, 1941;
2nd edition 1944), 253.
5. Colin Sabiston, Globe and Mail, March 12, 1960. All review citations from Art
Gallery of Ontario Library, Gershon Iskowitz artist file, except where noted.
There is no existing list of works for this exhibition, but Sabiston may have
been referring to works such as Sunset, 1960.
6. Robert Fulford, Toronto Star, September 23, 1961. Courtesy of Margaret

Fulford, University of Toronto, December 22, 2017.
7. Peter Mellen, “Iskowitz,” artscanada, October/November 1971, 52; Weiler,

“Of Landscape, Dreams and Light,” n.p.
8. Art in Canada (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2017), n.p.
9. Roald Nasgaard, “Gershon Iskowitz,” in The Gershon Iskowitz Prize, 1986–

2006 (Toronto: The Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 2009), 12.

Painting,” artscanada, May/June 1977, 15. In the 1950s Montreal artist Guido
Molinari (1933–2004) produced “automatic writing” works on paper—guided by
the mind and not to achieve an imagined “picture.” See David Burnett, Guido
Molinari: Works on Paper (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1981).
11. David Burnett, Iskowitz (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982), 51.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
15. David Bolduc, “Round Midnight, Gershon Iskowitz in conversation with

David Bolduc,” Proof Only, January 15, 1974, n.p.
16. Paolo Valenti, “Paul Klee’s Journeys to Italy and Tunisia,” Mediterranean
Studies 16 (2006): 200.
17. Mellen, “Iskowitz,” 52.
18. Art Perry, “Gershon Iskowitz [Galerie Allen, Vancouver], ”artscanada,

December 1974, 107. Perry’s use of the term “color-field” is most likely a
reference to the general term applied to New York abstract painters in the
1950s and early 1960s. See http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/colour-
field-painting (accessed May 5, 2018), but Iskowitz did not see himself in this
movement.
19. Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 2nd ed. (Toronto:
Oxford University Press 1988), 310.
20. Weiler, “Of Landscape, Dreams and Light,” n.p.
21. Roald Nasgaard, “Gershon Iskowitz,” artscanada, August 1973, 56–59.

23. Ironically, Georges Seurat (1859–1891), the “inventor” of pointillism, never

did “pointillist” drawings—his were tonal. A 1962 Iskowitz “pointillism” drawing
is reproduced in Theodore Heinrich’s 1977 artscanada article. These works
were not included in the 1982 Art Gallery of Ontario retrospective, nor are they
reproduced in Adele Freedman’s 1982 book, Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light,
although both included a selection of the 1952 felt-pen landscape drawings.
Comparable short-stroke drawings can be seen in the early 1960s work of Jack
Chambers (1931–1978)—although it is not known if Iskowitz was aware of
Chambers’s work—and in Ann Kipling’s (b.1934) Falkland, B.C., landscape
drawings beginning in the late 1970s.
24. Gerard Jennings, who worked at Gallery Moos from 1980 to 1992, said that
Iskowitz did not want to be identified with his most intimate moments, which
the portrait drawings represented, although three were illustrated in Adele
Freedman’s Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light—including a self-portrait.
Conversation with Adele Freedman, May 12, 2018.
25. Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 384.
26. Patchen, “The Artist’s Duty,” 253.
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27. Conversation with Harry Malcolmson, Toronto, May 14, 2018. The date of
the studio gathering was most likely late 1983, in conjunction with Iskowitz’s
solo exhibition at Marisa del Re Gallery.
28. Conversation with Harry Malcolmson, May 23, 2018.
30. “Round Midnight, Gershon Iskowitz in conversation with David Bolduc,”

n.p. “Round Midnight” is also the title of a classic 1944 jazz composition by
Thelonious Monk—and an intentional secondary reference.
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GLOSSARY
abstract art
Visual art that uses form, colour, line, and gestural marks in compositions that
do not attempt to represent images of real things. Abstract art may interpret
reality in an altered form, or depart from it entirely. Also called nonfigurative or
nonrepresentational art.
Abstract Expressionism
A style that flourished in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, defined by its
combination of formal abstraction and self-conscious expression. The term
describes a wide variety of work; among the most famous Abstract
Expressionists are Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Willem
de Kooning.
Academy of Fine Arts, Munich

Founded as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts by Maximilian I Joseph, king of
Bavaria, in 1808, the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich has its roots in a drawing
school established in the city in the late eighteenth century. In the latter half of
the nineteenth century, the academy became a major centre for painters
trained in the Academic style, closely associated with the Munich School of
influential German artists. It changed its name to its current version in 1956.
Appel, Karel (Dutch, 1921–2006)

An abstract painter and sculptor, Karel Appel was involved with the
Nederlandse Experimentele Groep (Dutch Experimental Group, 1948) and was
a founder of CoBrA (1948–51), an influential group of young European artists
active in the years following the Second World War and closely associated with
its Amsterdam members. After moving to France in 1950, he showed widely in
Europe and North America through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His
work incorporates the intensity and affinity for l’art brut that emerged in
CoBrA’s reaction against artistic convention.
Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

One of the largest museums in Atlantic Canada, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
was founded in 1908. Its collection includes more than 17,000 works, with a
focus on work by artists with strong connections to Nova Scotia and Atlantic
Canada as well as work by historical and contemporary Canadian artists more
generally. Its collection of folk art, anchored by the work of Maud Lewis, is
especially notable.
Artists’ Workshop (Toronto)

The Artists’ Workshop was located in a coach house near Sherbourne and
Bloor streets. First presided over by Barbara Wells, she was succeeded by John
Sime, who folded it into the Three Schools of Art.
atmospheric perspective
The effect by which more distant elements and objects appear to take on the
colour of the atmosphere, decrease in saturation, and increase in brightness,
appearing hazy and less distinct. In landscape painting, atmospheric or aerial
perspective is often employed for dramatic effect: the background and more
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distant elements are rendered with less definition, creating depth and a sense
of space in the image.
Automatistes
A Montreal-based artists’ group interested in Surrealism and the Surrealist
technique of automatism. Centred on the artist, teacher, and theorist Paul-
Émile Borduas, the Automatistes exhibited regularly between 1946 and 1954,
making Montreal a locus of mid-century avant-garde art. Members included
Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Jean-Paul Riopelle,
Fernand Leduc, and Françoise Sullivan.
Bacon, Yehuda (Czech/Israeli, b.1929)

A Jewish artist and Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Bacon depicted his experiences
in the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Gunskirchen concentration
camps in ink drawings, which attempt to reconcile the artist with his traumatic
history. Drawings of the gas chamber and crematoria at Auschwitz that he
created following his liberation were used as evidence in the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in 1961 and 1962 in Jerusalem.
Bayefsky, Aba (Canadian, 1923–2001)

Commissioned as an Official War Artist for the Royal Canadian Air Force in
1944, Bayefsky was a painter and teacher at the Ontario College of Art in
Toronto. In 1945 he documented the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after
its liberation. He remained committed to confronting anti-Semitism in his art
for the remainder of his career and created a number of works exploring his
own Jewish heritage. Bayefsky was awarded the Order of Canada in 1979.
Belmore, Rebecca (Anishinaabe, Lac Seul First Nation, b.1960)

Widely recognized for her contributions to Canadian art, Belmore is a
prominent performance and installation artist known for her politically charged
work addressing the unresolved issues of history, trauma, and identity in the
colonial spaces of Canada and the Americas. Among her most recognized
works is the performance video Vigil, 2002, which calls attention to the
hundreds of Indigenous women gone missing from Vancouver’s Downtown
Eastside. In 2005 Belmore became the first Indigenous woman to represent
Canada at the Venice Biennale.
bodycolour
Watercolour pigment mixed with gum or binder and white pigment added to
make it opaque. Bodycolour is often used interchangeably with gouache,
although the terms and techniques have slight differences in history and
composition, with bodycolour being traditionally made with an animal-derived
binder and gouache with gum arabic (acacia gum).
Bolduc, David (Canadian, 1945–2010)

One of Canada’s foremost abstract painters of his generation, Bolduc
continued the modernist tradition of Jack Bush, Jules Olitski, and Robert
Motherwell and is known for lyrical and contemplative works that consider how
layers of colour influence the reflection of light. He draws on Chinese
calligraphy, North African designs, and Persian miniatures. His works are in the
collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Art Gallery of Ontario
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in Toronto, and Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.
Borduas, Paul-Émile (Canadian, 1905–1960)

The leader of the avant-garde Automatistes and one of Canada’s most
important modern artists. Borduas was also an influential advocate for reform
in Quebec, calling for liberation from religious and narrow nationalist values in
the 1948 manifesto Refus global. (See Paul-Émile Borduas: Life & Work by
François-Marc Gagnon.)
Braque, Georges (French, 1882–1963)

A seminal figure in the history of modern art. Working alongside Picasso from
1908 to 1914, Braque developed the principles of major phases of Analytic
and Synthetic Cubism and, along with the latter, the use of collage. After the
First World War he pursued a personal style of Cubism admired for its
compositional and colouristic subtleties.
Breeze, Claude (Canadian, b.1938)

Also known as C. Herbert, Claude Breeze began creating the brightly coloured
Pop Art–influenced paintings for which he is best known in Vancouver in the
1960s. Breeze was the first Canadian artist to depict mediatized violence in his
work, and his paintings often address social and political issues. An educator
as well as a painter, he has held teaching positions at universities across
Canada and is currently professor emeritus at York University in Toronto.
Burliuk, David (Ukrainian/American, 1882–1967)

The central figure in the Russian Futurist movement of the early twentieth
century, David Burliuk was a painter, poet, and critic who promoted avant-
garde art in the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire, participating in and
appearing at exhibitions that included performances. Following the Russian
Revolution, Burliuk spent from 1920 to 1922 in Japan before moving to the
United States.
Bush, Jack (Canadian, 1909–1977)

A member of Painters Eleven, formed in 1953, Bush found his real voice only
after critic Clement Greenberg visited his studio in 1957 and focused on his
watercolours. Out of these Bush developed the shapes and broad colour
planes that would come to characterize a personal colour-field style, parallel to
the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. With them, Bush participated in
Greenberg’s 1964 exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction.
Cahén, Oscar (Danish/Canadian, 1916–1956)

Born in Copenhagen, Cahén attended the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and
taught design, illustration, and painting at Prague’s Rotter School of Graphic
Arts before his family’s anti-Nazi activities forced him to flee to England. He
was deported to Canada as an enemy alien and settled in Montreal before
moving to Toronto in 1943; he was one of the founders of Painters Eleven in
1953. (See Oscar Cahèn: Life & Work by Jaleen Grove.)
Cameron, Alex (Canadian, b.1947)

A student of the New School of Art in Toronto in the 1960s, Alex Cameron
developed a style of painting that featured boldly textured pigment and
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dynamic use of colour. Influenced by Painters Eleven member Jack Bush, for
whom he worked as an assistant, Cameron’s work moved from abstract,
conceptual canvases in the 1970s to abstracted landscapes that draw on the
Canadian landscape tradition of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven.
Cameron, Dorothy (Canadian, 1924–1999)

A prominent Toronto art dealer, Dorothy Cameron opened her Here and Now
Gallery in 1959, changing its name to the eponymous Dorothy Cameron
Gallery by 1962. In 1965 Toronto police raided her gallery’s exhibition Eros ’65
and charged Cameron with obscenity for displaying a work by Robert Markle
showing two nude women touching each other. Despite arguments for the
merits of the work and the exhibition, Cameron was found guilty. She closed
her gallery, but re-emerged as an artist in the late 1970s, creating sculptural
work.
Canadian Society of Graphic Art

Founded in Toronto in 1904 as the Society of Graphic Art and chartered in
1933 as the Canadian Society of Graphic Art, the society was an organization
of artists interested in printmaking, illustration, and drawing. From 1924 to
1963 it hosted annual exhibitions, producing The Canadian Graphic Art Year
Book in 1931. Notable members included Bruno Bobak and Charles Comfort.
Once among the largest artists’ organizations in Canada, the society
disbanded in 1974.
Carmichael, Franklin (Canadian, 1890–1945)

An original member of the Group of Seven, Carmichael created landscapes in
watercolour as well as in oil. He was a founding member of the Canadian
Group of Painters and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. Like
so many of his colleagues, he earned his living primarily as a commercial artist
and, in 1932, he became head of the Graphic Design and Commercial Art
Department at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Toronto.
Chagall, Marc (Russian/French, 1887–1985)

A painter and graphic artist, Chagall’s work is characterized by colourful,
dreamlike images and a defiance of the rules of pictorial logic. Although he
employed elements of Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism, Chagall did not
formally align with any avant-garde movement.
colour-field painting
A term first used to describe Abstract Expressionist works that use simplified or
minimalist forms of flat or nuanced colour, as in paintings by Morris Louis. It
was later applied to works by such artists as Kenneth Noland and Barnett
Newman in the United States and Jack Bush in Canada, whose geometric or
abstract motifs highlight variations in colour. Post-Painterly Abstraction, a
description coined by the critic Clement Greenberg, includes colour-field
painting.
Colville, Alex (Canadian, 1920–2013)

A painter, muralist, draftsman, and engraver whose highly representational
images verge on the surreal. Colville’s paintings typically depict everyday
scenes of rural Canadian life imbued with an uneasy quality. Since his process
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was meticulous—the paint applied dot by dot—he produced only three or four
paintings or serigraphs per year. (See Alex Colville: Life & Work by Ray Cronin.)
Comtois, Louis (Canadian/American, 1945–1990)

Louis Comtois was a Montreal-born abstract painter whose work, often
juxtaposing rectangular panels of different sizes and colours, shows the
influence of the Montreal Plasticiens as well as hard-edge painting. He moved
from Montreal to New York City in 1972, switching from acrylics to oils and
encaustic in the 1980s and adding experimentations in texture and surface
treatment to his primary concern with colour.
Coryell, William (n.d.)

A Toronto artist in the 1950s and graduate of the Ontario College of Art (now
the Ontario College of Art and Design University). William Coryell attended a
“summer school for painting” run by fellow artist Bert Weir in Parry Sound,
Ontario, in the mid-1950s.
Coughtry, Graham (Canadian, 1931–1999)

An influential painter and teacher known for his conceptual use of colour,
expressive brushwork, and abstract representations of the human figure.
Coughtry’s first exhibition was with Michael Snow in 1955; he went on to
represent Canada at the Bienal de São Paulo of 1959 and the Venice Biennale
of 1960.
cupric
An adjective meaning of or containing copper, “cupric” is often associated in
chemistry with “oxide” and refers specifically to substances containing copper
with a valence of two.
de Kooning, Willem (Dutch/American, 1904–1997)

Although a prominent Abstract Expressionist, de Kooning was not concerned
with strict abstraction—figures appear in the dense and riotous brushwork that
characterizes much of his work. Among his most famous works are those of the
Women series, first exhibited in 1953 to much critical scorn.
Dix, Otto (German, 1891–1969)

An Expressionist painter and printmaker who created harshly satirical,
sometimes grotesque depictions of figures from Weimar Germany, Dix was a
pioneer of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. War,
prostitution, and human depravity were central themes of his work.
Etrog, Sorel (Romanian/Canadian, 1933–2014)

A painter, illustrator, draftsman, and filmmaker, Etrog was known principally as
a sculptor, creating variously sized abstract works reflecting the human form.
One of his many commissions was the bronze statuette known from 1968 to
1980 as the Etrog, the award for excellence presented to Canadian filmmakers,
subsequently called the Genie. His work is in important public and private
collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Ewen, Paterson (Canadian, 1925–2002)

Born in Montreal and later settling in London, Ontario, Ewen was involved with
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the Automatistes, the Plasticiens, and the London Regionalists, although he

was never fully identified with a single movement. His mature works embraced
experimentation with colour combinations and textures, and the use of
gouged plywood as a painting surface. These invoked landscape and natural
elements through abstract and geometric gestures. (See Paterson Ewen: Life &
Work by John Hatch.)
Expressionism
An intense, emotional style of art that values the representation of the artist’s
subjective inner feelings and ideas. German Expressionism started in the early
twentieth century in Germany and Austria. In painting, Expressionism is
associated with an intense, jarring use of colour and brush strokes that are not
naturalistic.
figurative
A descriptive term for an artwork that depicts or references recognizable
objects or beings, including humans. Figurative art is often representational
and takes source material from the real world, although its subjects may be
overlaid with metaphors and allegory. The term arose in popular usage around
the 1950s to describe artwork in contrast with the Abstract Expressionist
movement as well as nonfigurative and non-objective art.
Freifeld, Eric (Russian/Canadian, 1919–1984)

Eric Freifeld was a Russian-born figurative painter and influential instructor at
the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design
University), where he taught drawing and served as chair of the fine arts
department. He initially gained recognition in Edmonton, where he had moved
with his mother and sister at the age of five. Freifeld’s interests and output
were broad, but he is perhaps best known for a series of structural, minutely
detailed watercolours that placed him among the leading Canadian artists of
his generation. A 1986 retrospective exhibition at the Rodman Hall Art Centre
in St. Catharines, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto was
organized following his death in 1984.
Friedrich, Caspar David (German, 1774–1840)

One of the major Romantic painters, and the most exemplary of the
movement’s German practitioners. Friedrich’s dramatic landscapes—seascapes
and mountains, forests and farmland—are both realistic and symbolic, painted
in meticulous detail but expressive of the artist’s deeply held mystical and
spiritual beliefs.
Gagnon, Charles (Canadian, 1934–2003)

A Montreal artist who worked indiscriminately across a variety of media,
including film, photography, collage, and box constructions, as well as
painting. During 1956–60 Gagnon studied in New York, immersing himself in
the city’s avant-garde world of experimental art. Back in Montreal his painting,
especially his use of hard edges, was often associated with that of his Plasticien
contemporaries.
Gallery Moos
An important part of the emergent Toronto art scene in the city’s Yorkville
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neighbourhood in the 1960s, Gallery Moos was founded in 1959 by Walter

Moos, who remained its owner and director until his death in 2013. The
gallery’s early exhibitions brought a mix of Canadian, American, and European
artists to local audiences, with a focus on modernist work. It launched and
sustained the careers of a generation of Toronto artists, including Sorel Etrog
and Gershon Iskowitz. From 1982 to 1992 Gallery Moos operated an outpost
in New York City, New York, expanding its reach into the American art scene.
The gallery moved to what would be its final space, in Toronto’s Queen West
Arts District, in 1992.
Gaucher, Yves (Canadian, 1934–2000)

An internationally recognized abstract painter and printmaker, associated with
the Plasticiens. Gaucher’s inquisitive nature made him an individualistic figure
and artist who drew from many sources, including jazz and atonal music,
Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, and the New York Abstractionists. He fought to
modernize printmaking and open the medium up to experimental and
innovative techniques. Gaucher founded the Associations des peintures-
gravures de Montréal in 1960 and was named a Member of the Order of
Canada in 1981. (See Yves Gaucher: Life & Work by Roald Nasgaard.)
General Idea (Canadian, active 1969–1994)

A prolific, provocative, and socially critical artist collective comprising AA
Bronson (Michael Tims, b.1946), Felix Partz (Ronald Gabe, 1945–1994), and
Jorge Zontal (Slobodan Saia-Levy, 1944–1994). General Idea formed in
Toronto out of the countercultural scenes of the experimental free school
Rochdale College and Theatre Passe Muraille. Their conceptual projects
included those associated with Miss General Idea and series dealing with the
AIDS crisis. The collective founded FILE in 1972 and the artist-run centre Art
Metropole in 1973. (See General Idea: Life & Work by Sarah E.K. Smith.)
Glenbow-Alberta Institute
An art and art history museum in Calgary, Alberta, the Glenbow-Alberta
Institute was formed following Eric Lafferty Harvie’s donation of his collection
of historical artifacts from western Canada to the province of Alberta in 1966.
Now the Glenbow Museum, it is dedicated to the art and culture of western
Canada, with important historical, artistic, archival, and library collections.
Exhibitions at the museum focus on both art history and contemporary art.
gouache
An artists’ material, gouache is watercolour that is mixed with white pigment
and the binding agent gum arabic, rendering it opaque. Gouache has been
used in numerous painting traditions from antiquity, including manuscript
illumination and Indian and European miniatures.
Goya, Francisco (Spanish, 1746–1828)

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was an influential painter of the Spanish
Enlightenment whose expressive style would guide the Romantic, realist, and
Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century, particularly French artists
including Edouard Manet. Though he rose to prominence as a court painter for
the Spanish monarchy, Goya’s drawings and etchings of the horrors of the
Napoleonic Wars and Spanish struggles for independence in the early
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nineteenth century, none of them published during his lifetime, would prove
some of his most enduring work.
Grip Limited
A Toronto-based design and advertising firm established in 1873 to publish
the weekly satirical magazine Grip. In the early twentieth century Grip Limited
employed several artists who championed a distinctly Canadian style of
landscape painting: Tom Thomson and some members of the future Group of
Seven—Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald,
and F.H. Varley.
Grosz, George (German/American, 1893–1959)

A caricaturist and scathing social critic, painter, and draftsman associated with
Dada in his early career, Grosz became a pioneer of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity). His avidly anti-war work grew out of his participation in the First
World War. His late career focused on landscape and still-life painting, though
it retained a bleak tone.
Group of Seven
A progressive and nationalistic school of landscape painting in Canada, active
between 1920 (the year of the group’s first exhibition, at the Art Gallery of
Toronto, now the Art Gallery of Ontario) and 1933. Founding members were
the artists Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston,
Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and F.H. Varley.
hard-edge painting
A technical term coined in 1958 by the art critic Jules Langsner, referring to
paintings marked by well-defined areas of colour. It is widely associated with
geometric abstraction and the work of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and
Kenneth Noland.
Hart House Gallery

Now the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, part of the Art Museum at the University
of Toronto, Hart House Gallery is an exhibition venue and collecting institution
associated with University College at the University of Toronto. Current
acquisitions for the collection focus on work by living Canadian artists,
especially emerging and mid-career artists of First Nations and culturally
diverse backgrounds.
Hayter Gallery
Part of a scattering of short-lived commercial art galleries to appear in Toronto
in the late 1950s, the Hayter Street Gallery lasted a single season. It was
located at 77 Hayter Street in a small neighbourhood around Gerard Street
West that was a hub of the Toronto art and culture scene in the 1950s and
1960s.
Heckel, Erich (German, 1883–1970)

A founder of the influential Expressionist group Die Brüke (The Bridge, active
1905–13), in Dresden, Germany, Erich Heckel was a painter, printmaker, and
sculptor. Before the First World War, Heckel was best known for woodcuts of
nudes and landscapes featuring bold outlines and vivid colours. After the war,
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his colour palette became more subdued, his paintings more conventional.
Heckel was declared a degenerate artist by the ruling Nazi party in 1937.
Isaacs Gallery
A Toronto art gallery opened in 1955 by Avrom Isaacs. Originally called the
Greenwich Gallery, it supported emerging Canadian artists—including Michael
Snow, Graham Coughtry, Joyce Wieland, and Robert Markle—and hosted
poetry readings, experimental music performances, and film screenings.
Jorn, Asger (Danish, 1914–1973)

Born Asger Oluf Jørgensen Vejrum, Asger Jorn was a painter, sculptor, graphic
artist, ceramicist, lithographer, and theorist. He was one of the founders of the
post–Second World War avant-garde group CoBrA, which sought to further
free artistic expression through adopting an abstract, primitivist style. Later, he
was a founding member of the groups Mouvement International pour un
Bauhaus Imaginiste (International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus) and
International Situationniste (Situationist International). Jorn’s art and
philosophy were governed by a belief in the necessity of collective
participation as a way of bringing society to art.
Juneau, Denis (Canadian, 1925–2014)

A member of the second generation of Montreal Plasticiens, Denis Juneau was
a painter and sculptor. As a geometric abstractionist, he is best known for his
bold colours and for paintings that experiment with the geometry of the circle
and the line. Influenced by the techniques of the hard-edge painters, his work
minimizes evidence of the artist and often includes optical illusions.
Kantor, Alfred (Czech/American, 1923–2003)

An artist and Holocaust survivor, Alfred Kantor produced drawings and
watercolours depicting daily life in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto and
Auschwitz-Birkenau and Schwarzheide concentration camps. Kantor created
works throughout his imprisonment, but while some were safeguarded through
the war, many were destroyed, only to be recreated following his liberation. In
1971 his illustrations were published with captions as The Book of Alfred
Kantor.
Klee, Paul (Swiss-German, 1879–1940)

Primarily known as a painter of prodigious energy and imagination—his output
comprises an estimated nine thousand artworks—Klee was also a printmaker, art
writer, and beloved teacher, first at the Bauhaus and later at the Düsseldorf
Academy.
Kokoschka, Oskar (Austrian, 1886–1980)

A painter, printmaker, and writer celebrated for his deeply expressive portraits
and landscapes. An important figure in European modernism, Kokoschka
sought to give visual form to the immaterial aspects of our world. Spiritual,
psychological, and emotional forces are rendered through turbulent forms and
luminous effects.
Kollwitz, Käthe (German, 1867–1945)

Best known for her printmaking, Käthe Kollwitz began her career working in a
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realistic style. During and after the First World War, she created dark,
emotionally wrenching portraits of death, war, and poverty and, in 1920,
turned to woodcuts in an expressionist style. She was an advocate for women
artists and served as a prominent member of the Prussian Academy of Arts
from the 1920s until she was forced to resign by the Nazi government in 1933.
Her granite monument to the death of her youngest son during the First World
War stands in a cemetery near Ypres, Belgium.
Kurelek, William (Canadian, 1927–1977)

Born on a farm in Alberta to Ukrainian immigrants, Kurelek was a painter of
trompe l’oeil objects, scenes of his childhood farm life, religious subjects, and
apocalyptic visions influenced by the Cold War and current events. His
suffering from an unspecified mental illness and periodic admissions into
psychiatric hospitals led him to devout Catholicism in the mid-1950s. In 1959
Toronto gallerist Avrom Isaacs gave Kurelek his first solo exhibition. In the
1960s Kurelek became one of the most commercially successful artists in
Canada. (See William Kurelek: Life & Work by Andrew Kear.)
Levine, Les (Irish/American, b.1935)

An important figure in twentieth-century Conceptual art, whose work
addresses questions of consumerism and disposability. Levine is noted
particularly for his pioneering use of mass media, including television, radio,
billboards, posters, and telephone conversations; he was among the first artists
to work with videotape. Born in Dublin, he lived in Canada in the 1960s and
early 1970s.
Lismer, Arthur (British/Canadian, 1885–1969)

A landscape painter and founding member of the Group of Seven, Lismer
immigrated to Canada from England in 1911. He was also an influential
educator of adults and children, and he created children’s art schools at both
the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (1933) and the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts (1946).
Luke, Alexandra (Canadian, 1901–1967)

An Abstract Expressionist painter and a member of Painters Eleven, Luke
trained at the Banff School of Fine Arts and the Hans Hofmann School of Fine
Arts in Massachusetts. A significant figure in early Canadian abstract art, she
was included in the exhibition Canadian Women Artists in New York in 1947.
Macdonald, Jock (British/Canadian, 1897–1960)

A painter, printmaker, illustrator, teacher, and a pioneer in the development of
abstract art in Canada. Macdonald began as a landscape painter but became
interested in abstraction in the 1940s, influenced by Hans Hofmann and Jean
Dubuffet. Macdonald was one of the founders of Painters Eleven in 1953. (See
Jock Macdonald: Life & Work by Joyce Zemans.)
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MacGregor, John (British/Canadian, b.1944)

One of the artists to show at Toronto’s influential Isaacs Gallery in the 1960s,
John MacGregor’s abstract-influenced work addresses concepts of time. A
prominent figure in Toronto’s 1960s art scene, MacGregor is one of a
generation of artists who marked the emergence of the city’s contemporary art
market.
Markle, Robert (Mohawk/Canadian, 1936–1990)

A painter and graphic artist who worked primarily in tempera and ink, Robert
Markle was known for his bold, sexual female nudes. His piece Lovers I,
showing two women embracing, led to an obscenity charge against the
gallerist Dorothy Cameron when she displayed it as part of the exhibition Eros
’65 in 1965. Later in life, Markle began to incorporate elements of his
Indigenous identity into his work.
Martin, Ron (Canadian, b.1943)

An abstract painter, Martin is concerned with the process and performance of
artmaking. Since 1965 his paintings have been shown globally in solo and
group exhibitions, including at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and
the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Matisse, Henri (French, 1869–1954)

A painter, sculptor, printmaker, draftsman, and designer, aligned at different
times with the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Fauvists. By the 1920s
he was, with Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous painters of his generation,
known for his remarkable use of colour and line.
McDougall, Clark (Canadian, 1921–1980)

A painter from St. Thomas, Ontario, a small town south of London, Ontario,
Clark McDougall depicted scenes from his local community, including the
landscape and architecture of southern Ontario. His later work is defined by
the stark, black enamel outlines and acidic colours for which he became best
known.
Meredith, John (Canadian, 1933–2000)

Born John Meredith Smith, John Meredith, like his brother, Painters Eleven
member William Ronald, used his first two names professionally. A painter
known for his calligraphic style, he created abstract works in vivid colours,
progressing from dense to looser, more open compositions through his career.
Milne, David (Canadian, 1881–1953)

A painter, printmaker, and illustrator whose work—principally landscapes—
displays the tonal brilliance and concern with process of his Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist influences. Milne lived in New York early in his career, where
he trained at the Art Students League and participated in the Armory Show in
1913.
Minimalism
A branch of abstract art characterized by extreme restraint in form, most
popular among American artists from the 1950s to 1970s. Although
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Minimalism can be expressed in any medium, it is most commonly associated

with sculpture; principal Minimalists include Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and
Tony Smith. Among the Minimalist painters were Agnes Martin, Barnett
Newman, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella.
modernism
A movement extending from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century
in all the arts, modernism rejected academic traditions in favour of innovative
styles developed in response to contemporary industrialized society.
Modernist movements in the visual arts have included Gustave Courbet’s
Realism, and later Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism
and on to abstraction. By the 1960s, anti-authoritarian postmodernist styles
such as Pop art, Conceptual art, and Neo-Expressionism blurred the distinction
between high art and mass culture.
Molinari, Guido (Canadian, 1933–2004)

A painter and theorist who was a member of the Plasticien movement in
Montreal. His work, beginning in the mid-1950s, set new models for geometric
painting internationally. His “razor-edged” Stripe Paintings create the illusion
of a dynamic space, evoked by the viewer’s active engagement with how
colours appear to change as they rhythmically repeat themselves across the
canvas.
Monet, Claude (French, 1840–1926)

A founder of the Impressionist movement in France. Monet’s landscapes and
seascapes are among the canonical works of Western art. Introduced to plein
air painting as a teenager, Monet returned to it throughout his life as a means
of exploring the atmospheric effects and perceptual phenomena that so
interested him as an artist.
Moore, Henry (British, 1898–1986)

One of the twentieth century’s most important sculptors. From its beginning,
Moore’s work was influenced by non-European sculpture; later he also drew
from natural sources, such as bones and pebbles. His technique most often
involved carving directly into his material, whether wood, stone, or plaster.
Moos, Walter (German/Canadian, 1926–2013)

The founder of Gallery Moos in Toronto, Walter Moos was born into a German
Jewish family of art dealers who operated a gallery in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Moos fled to France and Switzerland during the Second World War before
arriving in New York City, where he spent twelve years. In 1959 he moved to
Toronto to open his gallery, becoming an important fixture in the cultural
scene that emerged in the city’s Yorkville neighbourhood. A champion of
modernist art, Moos played a key role in fostering the careers of Canadian
artists, including Sorel Etrog and Gershon Iskowitz.
Munch, Edvard (Norwegian, 1863–1944)

Prefiguring the Expressionist movement, Munch’s work prominently
represented the artist’s own emotions—fear, loneliness, sexual longing, and
dread. A revered and prolific painter, printmaker, and draftsman, Munch is best
known for his painting The Scream.
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Nakamura, Kazuo (Canadian, 1926–2002)

A member of Painters Eleven, Nakamura embraced science and nature in his
early abstract landscapes. Later, he created a body of work known as the
Number Structures, which explores the connections between mathematics and
aesthetics. The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto held a posthumous
retrospective of his work in 2004.
National Gallery of Canada

Established in 1880, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa holds the most
extensive collection of Canadian art in the country as well as works by
prominent international artists. Spearheaded by the Governor General the
Marquis of Lorne, the gallery was created to strengthen a specifically Canadian
brand of artistic culture and identity and to build a national collection of art
that would match the level of other British Empire institutions. Since 1988 the
gallery has been located on Sussex Drive in a building designed by Moshe
Safdie.
New School of Art in Toronto

The New School of Art was founded as an alternative to the more conservative
Ontario College of Art (now Ontario College of Art and Design University) in
1965. It required no prerequisites and operated through loosely structured
workshops, attracting students and instructors associated with Toronto’s
Spadina art scene.
Olitski, Jules (Russian/American, 1922–2007)

Born Jemel Devikovsky, Jules Olitski moved to the United States with his family
as a young child. He became famous in the 1960s for his intensely coloured
spray-gun paintings, which were shown at the Venice Biennale in 1966. In these
works, Olitski’s non-primary colours overlap and bleed into each other,
creating atmospheric fields of colour. His later work returned to a gestural
technique, using greys and earth tones to create iridescent surfaces.
Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University)

The name given in 1912 to what had previously been the Ontario School of Art
(founded 1876), and what would become the Ontario College of Art and
Design in 1996. In 2010 the institution was renamed OCAD University, to
reflect its new status. OCAD University is located in Toronto and is the oldest
and largest art school in Canada.
Painters Eleven
An artists’ group active from 1953 to 1960, formed by eleven Abstract
Expressionist Toronto-area painters, including Harold Town, Jack Bush, and
William Ronald. They joined together in an effort to increase their exposure,
given the limited interest in abstract art in Ontario at the time.
Peretz, Isaac Leib (Polish, 1852–1915)

A prolific Yiddish writer of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, Peretz
is credited for creating a modern Yiddish literature and was a proponent of the
language as a place of Jewish cultural identity. His poems, plays, humorous
sketches, and especially his short stories experimented with form and brought
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psychological realism to his characters. His role as mentor to a generation of

Jewish writers in Warsaw ushered in a new literary era for the Yiddish language.
Picasso, Pablo (Spanish, 1881–1973)

One of the most famous and influential artists of his time, Picasso was a
prominent member of the Parisian avant-garde circle that included Henri
Matisse and Georges Braque. His painting Les demoiselles d’Avignon, 1906–7,
is considered by many to be the most important of the twentieth century.
Podeswa, Yehuda (Polish/Canadian, 1924 or 1926–2012)

Born into a family of artists, Yehuda Podeswa was a painter and Holocaust
survivor. He created memory paintings while he was interned at Kaufering, a
satellite camp of the larger Dachau concentration camp in Germany. After the
war, Podeswa moved to Toronto, where he studied at the Ontario College of
Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University).
Pointillism
A painting technique developed in 1886 by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac as
an offshoot of Impressionism. In this style, rather than broken brushstrokes,
artists used thousands of small dots of intense and complementary colours
that coalesced to make their images. In this way they developed an
understanding of how the human eye works and the reality of light as a
spectrum of colour.
Pollock, Jackson (American, 1912–1956)

Leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement, best known for his drip
paintings of the 1940s and 1950s. Pollock is also closely associated with action
painting, in which the act of painting is gestural and the artist approaches the
canvas with little notion of what he or she will create.
Rayner, Gordon (Canadian, 1935–2010)

A prominent artist in Toronto from the early 1960s, Rayner explored in both
painting and sculpture the complex relationship between representation and
abstraction. He was a member of the Artists’ Jazz Band.
Redinger, Walter (Canadian, 1940–2014)

A sculptor from southwestern Ontario who also produced paintings, drawings,
and prints, Walter Redinger was one of the artists represented by Toronto’s
influential Isaacs Gallery in the 1960s. His large-scale fibreglass sculptures
feature organic forms and draw on surrealist influences. In 1972 he
represented Canada at the Venice Biennale alongside Gershon Iskowitz.
Reeves, John (Canadian, 1938–2016)

A noted portrait photographer, John Reeves began capturing notable
Canadians for the magazines of the 1960s. Later projects included
photographing the artists of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (now
Kinngait Studios) from the late 1970s to 1998, and, in the 1980s, jazz
musicians. Reeves was also a broadcaster who hosted a radio program, Toronto
in Review, on the CBC for a short time in the 1970s.
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Riopelle, Jean-Paul (Canadian, 1923–2002)

A towering figure in Québécois modern art who, like the other members of the
Automatistes, was interested in Surrealism and abstract art. Riopelle moved to
Paris in 1947, where he participated in the last major exhibition of the Parisian
Surrealists, organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton.
Rodman Hall Art Centre

Rodman Hall Art Centre is a contemporary art gallery associated with Brock
University in St. Catharines, Ontario. It hosts regular exhibitions of work by
Canadian and international artists, as well as pieces from its own collections.
Rothko, Mark (American, 1903–1970)

A leading figure of Abstract Expressionism, Rothko began his career as an
illustrator and watercolourist. In the late 1940s he developed the style that
would come to define his career, creating intense colour-field oil paintings that
express the same anxiety and mystery that informed his earlier figurative work.
Seurat, Georges (French, 1859–1891)

An influential painter, Seurat was a pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist
movement, departing from Impressionism’s relative spontaneity and practising
more formal structure and symbolic content. Along with Paul Signac, he
developed Pointillism, a technique adopted by other painters such as Camille
Pissarro, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky.
Shadbolt, Jack (Canadian, 1909–1998)

Primarily known as a painter and draftsman, Shadbolt studied art in London,
Paris, and New York before returning to British Columbia. He taught at the
Vancouver School of Art from 1945 to 1966, becoming the head of the
school’s painting and drawing section. Major influences include Emily Carr and
Aboriginal art of the Pacific Northwest.
Shilling, Arthur (Ojibwa, 1941–1986)

Painter of expressionistic portraits of Ojibwa people, friends, and family
members. Shilling was known for his bold use of colour and broad brush
strokes, which convey the spiritual integrity of his subjects. To encourage
talent where he grew up, Shilling built and opened an art gallery on the
Chippewas of Rama First Nation lands. The 1978 National Film Board of
Canada film The Beauty of My People documents Shilling’s life.
Snow, Michael (Canadian, b.1928)

An artist whose paintings, films, photographs, sculptures, installations, and
musical performances have kept him in the spotlight for over sixty years.
Snow’s Walking Woman series of the 1960s holds a prominent place in
Canadian art history. His contributions to visual art, experimental film, and
music have been recognized internationally. (See Michael Snow: Life & Work by
Martha Langford.)
Solomon, Daniel (American/Canadian, b.1945)

An artist and professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University,
Daniel Solomon’s work features vivid colours and complex pictorial space. He
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moved to Toronto in 1967 and worked at David Mirvish Gallery in the city’s
Mirvish Village neighbourhood from 1968 to 1970, developing a friendship
with the gallery’s eponymous owner.
Stella, Frank (American, b.1936)

An Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor and a major figure in American
art. Stella often works in series, developing a formal theme over an extended
period. Primarily a painter and printmaker, he began taking on decorative
commissions in the 1990s; the Princess of Wales theatre in Toronto features
decorations and vast murals by Stella.
Sullivan, Françoise (Canadian, b.1923)

Born in Montreal, Sullivan—an artist, sculptor, dancer, and choreographer—
studied at the city’s École des beaux-arts (now part of the Université du
Québec à Montréal) in the early 1940s, where she met Paul-Émile Borduas. His
vision of automatism would become a great influence on her modern dance
performances and choreography. (See Françoise Sullivan: Life & Work by Annie
Gérin.)
Sutherland, Graham (British, 1903–1980)

Graham Sutherland was a surrealist painter of landscapes and a noted
portraitist whose depiction of British prime minister Winston Churchill was
famously destroyed after its subject objected to the artist’s representation. He
participated in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, England,
but turned to representational, documentary painting during his time as an
official war artist from 1940 to 1945.
Tachism
Along with Lyrical Abstraction and Art Informel, Tachism refers to an art
movement of the 1950s considered the European counterpart of Abstract
Expressionism. Strongest in France, it is also associated with Automatism (as
practised by the Surrealists), for its emphasis on unplanned mark making,
allowing imaginative expression to arise freely from the unconscious mind.
Thomson, Tom (Canadian, 1877–1917)

A seminal figure in the creation of a national school of painting, whose bold
vision of Algonquin Park—aligned stylistically with Post-Impressionism and Art
Nouveau—has come to symbolize both the Canadian landscape and Canadian
landscape painting. Thomson and the members of what would in 1920
become the Group of Seven profoundly influenced one another’s work. (See
Tom Thomson: Life & Work by David P. Silcox.)
Town, Harold (Canadian, 1924–1990)

Town was a founding member of Painters Eleven and a leader in Toronto’s art
scene in the 1950s and 1960s. An internationally recognized abstract artist, he
created paintings, collages, sculptures, and prints with brilliant effect and
developed a unique form of monotype, “single autographic prints.” (See
Harold Town: Life & Work by Gerta Moray.)
Varley, F.H. (Frederick Horsman) (British/Canadian, 1881–1969)

A founding member of the Group of Seven, known for his contributions to
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Canadian portraiture as well as landscape painting. Originally from Sheffield,

England, Varley moved to Toronto in 1912 at the encouragement of his friend
Arthur Lismer. From 1926 to 1936 he taught at the Vancouver School of
Decorative and Applied Arts, now known as Emily Carr University of Art +
Design.
Venice Biennale
Founded in 1895 as a biannual exhibition of avant-garde and contemporary art
from participating countries, many of which have permanent pavilions in the
Venice Giardini, a section of parkland that serves as the heart of the event.
There have historically been several additions to the Biennale’s programing,
including film, theatre, and musical festivals. At present, the main events are
the International Art Exhibition, which is held in odd-numbered years, and the
International Architecture Exhibition (or Venice Biennale of Architecture), which
is held in even-numbered years.
Weir, Bert (Canadian, 1925–2018)

A painter who moved from southern Ontario to Parry Sound in the 1950s, Bert
Weir created gestural, richly coloured paintings of the northern Ontario bush.
He hosted a summer retreat for Toronto artists in the 1950s and 1960s and
taught art in Sudbury and throughout northeastern Ontario.
Wieland, Joyce (Canadian, 1930–1998)

A central figure in contemporary Canadian art, Wieland engaged with painting,
filmmaking, and cloth and plastic assemblage to explore with wit and passion
ideas related to gender, national identity, and the natural world. In 1971 she
became the first living Canadian woman artist to have a solo exhibition at the
National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. (See Joyce Wieland: Life & Work by
Johanne Sloan.)
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After a dozen years of working in relative obscurity, as a Holocaust

survivor and émigré to Canada, Gershon Iskowitz forged a new vision
of painting for himself. Beginning in the mid-1960s, his work received
critical attention and was shown in solo and group exhibitions
nationally and internationally. Numerous reviews and articles
culminated in two major publications at the time of his 1982 Art Gallery
of Ontario retrospective. Two rare interviews in 1974 and 1975, plus the
only two extant documentary films of Iskowitz, produced by art
historian Peter Mellen in the early 1970s, offer an intimate insight into
Iskowitz’s thoughts. The earliest of these documentaries includes
footage of Iskowitz in his Spadina Avenue neighbourhood and studio.
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SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
LEFT: Gershon Iskowitz in Feldafing, date unknown, photographer unknown, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, Library and Archives, Art Gallery of
Ontario, Toronto. RIGHT: Gershon Iskowitz in Feldafing verso, date unknown, photographer unknown, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, Library
and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
1957 September 14–28, Paintings by Gershon Iskowitz, The Hayter Gallery, Toronto.
1960 March 4–28, Gershon Iskowitz, Here and Now Gallery, Toronto. Subsequent
exhibition, September 15–October 2, 1961, Iskowitz: New Paintings.
November 15–December 13, Pictures on View in Alumni Hall, Victoria College:

Gershon Iskowitz, University of Toronto.
1961 April 9–23, Gershon Iskowitz, Young Men’s Hebrew Association, Toronto; Bloor
Street & Spadina Avenue location.
1963 Gershon Iskowitz, Towne Cinema, Toronto.
October 11–31, Survey 1941–1963 of Oils, Drawings and Watercolours by

Iskowitz, Dorothy Cameron Gallery, Toronto.
1964 October 1–14, New Paintings by Iskowitz, Gallery Moos, Toronto. Subsequent
gallery exhibitions: 1966, 1967 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977,
1978, 1979 (Toronto and Calgary), 1981, 1983, 1986, 1988 (posthumous).
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1966 Gershon Iskowitz: Retrospective Exhibition, The Gallery of the Theatre of the
Arts, University of Waterloo.
November 30, 1966–January 3, 1967, Iskowitz: Oil and Watercolours,

Cedarbrae Regional Library, Scarborough, Toronto.
1973 March 24–April 15, Gershon Iskowitz, Hart House Art Gallery, University of
Toronto.
November 29–December 31, Gershon Iskowitz—Paintings, Rodman Hall

Art Centre, St. Catharines.
1974 October 16–November 2, Paintings and Watercolours by Gershon

Iskowitz, Galerie Allen, Vancouver.
1975 April 30–May 25, Gershon Iskowitz, Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary.
1976 December 3, 1976–January 4, 1977, Gershon Iskowitz, Owens Art Gallery,

Mount Allison University, Sackville. Travelled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia,
January 10–February 15, 1977.
1982–83 January 23–March 7, Iskowitz, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Retrospective exhibition that travelled to Art Gallery of Windsor, Musée d’art

contemporain de Montréal, London Regional Art Gallery, Glenbow Museum.
Travelled to Canada House Gallery, London, UK (1983).
1983 December 1–31, Gershon Iskowitz: New Paintings: 1981–1983, Marisa del Re
Gallery, New York.
1984 December, (exhibition title unknown), Diane Farris Gallery, Vancouver.

Inaugural opening exhibition of the Gallery.
1993 June 5–July 7, (exhibition title unknown), The Drabinsky Gallery, Toronto.
1998 June 18–August 22, The Path of Colour: Gershon Iskowitz, University of
Lethbridge Art Gallery.
2000 January 6–February 3, Gershon Iskowitz, Galerie René Blouin, Montreal.
2007 November 8–December 29, (an exhibition of watercolours), Galerie Samuel

Lallouz, Montreal.
2008 May 10–June 7, Gershon Iskowitz — Rare Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s,
Miriam Shiell Fine Art, Toronto. Other solo exhibitions, 2006 and 2015.
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Gershon Iskowitz at the Art Gallery of Ontario retrospective, 1982, photograph by Doug Griffin
Toronto Star Archives.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
1954 31st Annual Exhibition, Canadian Society of Graphic Art. Art Gallery of Toronto.
Also 1958, 1959 in London, Ontario; 1960 in Halifax, Nova Scotia; and 1963 at
Toronto Central Library.
1957 April 5–28, Anniversary Exhibition, Art Gallery of Hamilton. Also, Art Gallery of
Hamilton Annual exhibitions in 1961, 1963, 1969, 1970, 1972.
1958 November 28, 1958–January 4, 1959, Annual Exhibition, Canadian Society of

Painters in Watercolour, Art Gallery of Toronto. Also 1965.
1964 October 4–November 6, Winnipeg Show, Winnipeg Art Gallery. Also 1966 and
1970.
1965 June 4–August 22, Sixth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting, National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
1967–69 September 22–October 15, 1967, The Ontario Centennial Art Exhibition, Art
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Administered by the Art Institute of Ontario for
the Province of Ontario Council for the Arts. Travelled through until May 1969
to London Regional Art Gallery (now Museum London) and 20/20 Gallery,
London; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston;
Lakehead University, Thunder Bay; Laurentian University, Sudbury; Kitchener-
Waterloo Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Windsor; Art Gallery of Hamilton; Belleville
Library & Art Gallery; Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catharines; Musée d’art
contemporain de Montréal; and Musée du Québec, Québec City.
1970 November 12–December 12, Eight Artists from Canada, Tel-Aviv Art Museum,
Israel.
1972 June 11–October 1, La Biennale di Venizia 36, Venice, Italy. Two-person

exhibition with Walter Redinger.
September 15–October 15, Toronto Painting 1953–1965, National Gallery of

Canada. Travelled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, November 10–
December 10.
1975–76 The Canadian Canvas: travelling exhibition of 85 recent paintings. An exhibition

jointly organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Edmonton Art Gallery, Art
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Musée d‘art contemporain de Montréal, and the
Anna Leonowens Gallery. Travelled to Montreal, Edmonton, Vancouver,
Saskatoon, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary, Winnipeg.
1976–77 February 13, 1976–April 17, 1977. Changing Visions, organized by the
Edmonton Art Gallery (now Art Gallery of Alberta) and the Art Gallery of
Ontario, Toronto. Travelled to Toronto, Windsor, Montreal, Lincoln
(Massachusetts), Edmonton, Winnipeg, Calgary, Burnaby, London.
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1977 Canadian Tapestries: an exhibition of 23 tapestries designed by Canadian

painters and sculptors. Initiated by Fay Loeb; exhibition organized by Marie
Fleming for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, with four other simultaneous
venues: Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, Charlottetown;
Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary; Vancouver Art Gallery; Winnipeg Art
Gallery (Artist design sketches shown only at the Art Gallery of Ontario).
Artists: Maxwell Bates, Ronald Bloore, Claude Breeze, Dennis Burton, Jack
Bush, Sorel Etrog, Gershon Iskowitz, Dorothy Knowles, William Kurelek, John
MacGregor, Toni Onley, William Perehudoff, Christopher Pratt, Don Proch,
Gordon Rayner, Otto Rogers, Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, Michael Snow,
Jacques de Tonnancour, Harold Town, Joyce Wieland.
1976–78 October 9–November 7, 1976, Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings by Seven

Canadian Painters from the Canada Council Art Bank. Harbourfront Art Gallery,
Toronto (later, Art Gallery at Harbourfront). Artists: Claude Breeze, Paterson
Ewen, Charles Gagnon, Gershon Iskowitz, Ron Martin, John Meredith, Guido
Molinari. New Zealand cities tour, 1977: Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin,
Hamilton, Auckland. Australia cities tour, 1978: Newcastle, Brisbane, Adelaide,
Sydney, Hobart, Canberra.
1978 February 7–March 19, A Toronto Sensibility, Harbourfront Art Gallery (later, Art
Gallery at Harbourfront). Travelled to Cleveland State University, The Canton
Art Institute, and Kilcawley Art Center, Ohio.
1979 November 2–14, Gershon Iskowitz and Ron Martin, Harbourfront Art Gallery
(later, the Art Gallery at Harbourfront), Toronto. One of four two-person
exhibitions for the Compass/8 Painters series held between October 19 and
December 10.
2008 June 6–September 7, The 1930s: The Making of “The New Man,” National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
2010 July 9–September 8, Oscar Cahén and Gershon Iskowitz: Artists Caught in
Hitler’s Web, Horton Gallery (formerly Sunday L.E.S.), New York.
2015–18 Living Building Thinking: art & expressionism, organized and circulated by the
McMaster Museum of Art. Venues: October 24–February 15, 2016, Art Gallery
of Alberta; August 31–December 23, 2016, McMaster Museum of Art; March 3–
May 21, 2018, Vancouver Art Gallery.
2016–18 April 23, 2016–February 19, 2018, Staging Abstraction: Paintings from the
Collection, Art Gallery of Hamilton.
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SELECTED MONOGRAPHIC PUBLICATIONS AND CATALOGUES

Burnett, David. Iskowitz. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982.
Freedman, Adele. Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light.

Toronto/Vancouver: Merritt Publishing, 1982.
Goodman, Susan Tumarkin. Gershon Iskowitz. New paintings: 1981–1983.

New York: Marisa del Re Gallery, 1983.
Malcolmson, Harry. Gershon Iskowitz. Toronto: Gallery Moos, 1966.
Weiler, Marike. Iskowitz. Calgary: Glenbow Art Institute, 1975.
ARTICLES
Dobbs, Kildare. “From the Ranks of Death, Buchenwald and Auschwitz: Iskowitz catalogue by David Burnett.
The Witness of Gershon Iskowitz.” Saturday Night, March 1966.
Freedman, Adele. “Art, Gershon Iskowitz: Colours of Joy from the Heart of
Darkness.” Toronto Life, October 1977.
Heinrich, Theodore Allen. “The Intimate Cartography of Gershon Iskowitz’s

Painting.” artscanada, May–June 1977.
Mays, John Bentley. “Iskowitz Works Torn, Discarded.” Globe and Mail, April
16, 1988.
Mellen, Peter. “Gershon Iskowitz.” artscanada, October–November 1971.
SELECTED REVIEWS
Bowen, Lisa Balfour. “An Awe-Inspiring Pedestal for a Great Painter.” Globe and
Mail, June 1, 1982.
Dault, Gary Michael. “Diminished Under the Spotlight.” Maclean’s, February 8,

1982.
Eleen, Luba. “Gershon Iskowitz.” Canadian Art, November–December 1963.
Freedman, Adele. “Painting the Layers of Life.” Globe and Mail, September 15,
1979.
---. “A Life of Many Colours.” Globe and Mail, March 5, 1983.
Fulford, Robert. “In Cool Maturity.” Toronto Star, September 23, 1961.
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Gordon, Tom. “Les Paysages de mémoire: Iskowitz/Iskowitz: Landscapes

and Memory-escapes.” La Vie des Arts, Autumn 1982.
Kritzwiser, Kay. “Canada at the Venice Biennale: Two Artists do Taxpayers

Proud.” Globe and Mail, June 10, 1972.
Littman, Sol. “Artist Lives, Works in Mean Surroundings.” Toronto Star,

March 1, 1974.
The Gershon Iskowitz Prize: 1986 to 2006
catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Lord, Barry. “Colour as Proof of Survival.” Toronto Daily Star, February 20,
1970.
Mays, John Bentley. “Iskowitz’s Anguish Bursts Into Clement Colour.” Globe
and Mail, January 23, 1982.
Nasgaard, Roald. “Gershon Iskowitz.” artscanada, August 1973.
Purdie, James. “Exploring the Land with the Mind’s Eye.” Globe and Mail,
February 21, 1976.
Perry, Art. “Gershon Iskowitz.” artscanada, December 1974.
Rasky, Harry. “There Are Many ‘Survivors.’” Globe and Mail, April 2, 1988.
Ryval, Michael. “Adele Freedman: Illuminating the Painter of Light.” Quill &
Quire, April 1982.
Sabiston, Colin. “Gershon Iskowitz.” Globe and Mail, March 12, 1960.
Wood, Kay. “Gershon Iskowitz.” artscanada, October–November 1979.
Wylie, Liz. “Gershon Iskowitz, Art Gallery of Ontario.” Vanguard, April 1982.
FURTHER READING
Balkind, Alvin. Ontario selection in The Canadian Canvas: travelling exhibition
of 85 recent paintings, 54–55. Toronto: Time Canada Ltd., 1974.
Burnett, David and Marilyn Schiff. Contemporary Canadian Art. Edmonton:

Hurtig Publishers Ltd. / Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1983.
Fenton, Terry, and Karen Wilkin. Modern Painting in Canada: Major Movements
in Twentieth Century Canadian Art. Edmonton: Hurtig Publishing, 1978.
Hale, Barrie and Dennis Reid.

Toronto Painting 1953–1965.
Ottawa: National Gallery of
Canada, 1972.
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Heath, Terrence. “A Sense of

Place” in Visions, Contemporary Art
in Canada. Vancouver/Toronto:
Douglas & McIntyre, 1983.
Holubizky, Ihor. Living Building

Thinking: art and expressionism.
Hamilton: McMaster Museum of
Art, 2017.
Lord, Barry. The History of Painting

in Canada: Towards a People’s Art.
Toronto: NC Press, 1979.
Gershon Iskowitz in front of his Tecumseth Street studio, 1981, photographer unknown.
Nasgaard, Roald. Abstract Painting

in Canada. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008.
---. “Gershon Iskowitz” in The Gershon Iskowitz Prize 1986–2006, 8–13. Toronto:
Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 2009.
Reid, Dennis. A Concise History of Canadian Painting. Toronto: Oxford

University Press, first edition 1973; second edition 1988; third edition 2012.
INTERVIEWS
Bolduc, David. “Round Midnight, Gershon Iskowitz in conversation with David
Bolduc.” Proof Only, January 15, 1974.
Weiler, Merike. Iskowitz. Calgary: Glenbow Art Institute, 1975.
FILMS
Peter Mellen & France Mellen, Standing Apart, 1973: Examining the
participation of Gershon Iskowitz and Walter Redinger at the 1972 Venice
Biennale. Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre:
http://www.cfmdc.org/film/1233.
Peter Mellen, I Paint What I Know, 1972: Mellen produced an Iskowitz film
essay for the Ontario Educational Communications Authority, (now TV Ontario)
in 1972. It shows Iskowitz in his Spadina Avenue neighbourhood and studio. A
VHS copy can be found in the Iskowitz Fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Harry Rasky, To Mend the World, 1987: A documentary produced by the

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “An attempt to find meaning or
perspective in the Holocaust through the painted works of artists who lived
through those days of human agony.”
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ARCHIVES
Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Walter Moos Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IHOR HOLUBIZKY
Ihor Holubizky is an art historian and senior curator based in
Canada and has been a Trustee of the Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation since 2009. He has held several public gallery
curatorial positions, including curator at The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, from 1979 to 1988 and the
Art Gallery of Hamilton from 1989 to 1997. He has been a guest
curator for retrospective exhibitions of Don Jean-Louis, Walter
Tandy Murch, and Kazuo Nakamura at The Robert McLaughlin
Gallery, Oshawa. In Australia he was a curator at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Art Museum at the “Over his mature career,
Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He was from 1965 to 1987, Gershon
awarded a senior Canada Council grant for independent curators
Iskowitz produced a unique,
in 1998, and an Australia Council grant in 2004 for a research
residency at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, in coherent, and compelling
Japan. body of abstract works;
paintings and watercolours
Holubizky holds a PhD in art history from the University of
that drew vision and
Queensland, Australia, and has contributed writing to numerous
publications on historical, modern, and contemporary topics in inspiration through his
art and culture in North America, Europe, Australia, and New experiences of ever-
Zealand. Some recent writing includes “The Ordinary
changing light, atmospherics,
Photograph: Its Agency and Aesthetics” for Artmatter; “The
Best…of a hopeless situation” for Volumes; “Michael Belmore:
and colour in nature.”
Shorelines, Flux and Dark Water—the slowness of things” for HIDE:
Skin as Material and Metaphor; and “The Enactments of Citizen
Kuball” for Mischa Kuball . . . in progress, Projekte 1980–2007. He
lectures on a wide range of topics across Canada, and in the
United States, Brazil, and Australia, and was a sessional instructor
in the New Media Department at the Ontario College of Art
from 1986–1991.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
COPYRIGHT & CREDITS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From the Author
A research project that circulates through complex personal, social, and art
histories cannot be undertaken without the cooperation of individuals,
institutions, and organizations. I am indebted to the ongoing support and
commitment of the Art Canada Institute; my thanks go to Executive Director
Sara Angel and Commissioning Editor Anna Hudson, and to the staff members
for their important and invaluable editorial support and diligence: Steven
Boyle, Stephanie Burdzy, Laura Carusi, Lara Hinchberger, Natalie Hume,
Beverley Mitchell, Michael Rattray, Rosemary Shipton, Meg Taylor, Kendra
Ward, and Simone Wharton.
My gratitude goes to the staff of the Art Gallery of Ontario, in particular Amy
Furness, Marilyn Nazar, and Donald Rance from Library and Archives for their
continuing assistance during my research, and access to Fonds and files. Many
other individuals generously provided important insights and recollections of
Iskowitz. Among them, from Toronto, were Adele Freedman, Gerard Jennings,
Harry Malcolmson, David Moos, Ruth Ann Podeswa, and Daniel Solomon. I
must also express my gratitude to the many individuals from galleries,
museums, and organizations across Canada, Europe, and Australia who
responded to my seemingly bottomless well of questions. Even the most
casual exchange, the simplest of queries, can open the door to valuable
insights.
Finally, I must thank the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation for their support of the
project as well as access to Iskowitz works held by the Foundation. Some
included in this publication are being reproduced for the first time.
From the Art Canada Institute
The Art Canada Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Maxine

Granovsky Gluskin and Ira Gluskin, the Title Sponsors of this book. The ACI
also extends its appreciation to the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, Sponsor of
this publication, and the Donors Alistair Mitchell and Naomi Margo.
The Art Canada Institute gratefully acknowledges the other sponsors of the
2018–2019 Canadian Online Art Book Project: Anonymous, Alexandra Bennett
in memory of Jalynn Bennett, Consignor Canadian Fine Art, Kiki and Ian
Delaney, The Sabourin Family Foundation, Karen Schreiber and Marnie
Schreiber, and Sandra L. Simpson.
We also sincerely thank the Founding Sponsor for the Art Canada Institute:
BMO Financial Group; and the Art Canada Institute Patrons: Butterfield Family
Foundation,* David and Vivian Campbell,* Connor, Clark & Lunn Foundation,
Albert E. Cummings,* the Fleck family,* Roger and Kevin Garland,* Glorious
and Free Foundation,* Charlotte Gray and George Anderson, The Scott Griffin
136
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Foundation,* Jane Huh,* Lawson Hunter, Gershon Iskowitz Foundation,* Alan

and Patricia Koval Foundation, Phil Lind,* Nancy McCain and Bill Morneau,*
John O’Brian, Gerald Sheff and Shanitha Kachan,* Stephen Smart,* Nalini and
Tim Stewart,* and Robin and David Young.*
We thank our Lead Benefactors: Alexandra Baillie, Alexandra Bennett and the
Jalynn Bennett Family Foundation,* Grant and Alice Burton, Kiki and Ian
Delaney,* Jon S. and Lyne Dellandrea,* Michelle Koerner and Kevin Doyle,* K.
James Harrsion, Sarah and Tom Milroy,* Partners in Art,* Sandra L. Simpson,*
Pam and Michael Stein,* and Sara and Michael Angel.*
*Indicates a Founding Patron of the Art Canada Institute
The ACI gratefully acknowledges the support and assistance of the Agnes
Etherington Art Centre (Leah Cox, Jennifer Nicoll); Art Gallery of Greater
Victoria (Stephen Topfer); Art Gallery of Hamilton (Christine Braun); Art Gallery
of Ontario (Eva Athanasiu, Amy Furness, Debbie Johnsen, Tracy Mallon-Jensen,
Marilyn Nazar); Art Gallery of York University (Allyson Adley); Art Museum at
the University of Toronto (Heather Pigat); Canada Council Art Bank (Martha
Young); Canadian War Museum (Fiona Anthes); Consignor Canadian Fine Art
(Rob Cowley); David Zwirner Gallery (Chris Rawson); Estate of Alex Colville
(Ann Kitz); Estate of Dr. Luigi Rossi; Estate of John Reeves (Beverley McGhee);
Gershon Iskowitz Foundation (Nancy Hushion); Kelowna Art Gallery (Nataley
Nagy); Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph
(Robbyne MacKenzie); McMaster Museum of Art (Julie Bronson); Miriam Shiell
Fine Art (Simon Bentley); Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Marie-Claude Saia);
Musée National d‘art Moderne Centre Pompidou; Museum London (Janette
Cousins Ewan); National Gallery of Canada (Raven Amiro, Véronique Malouin);
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Podeswa Family Collection (Howard Podeswa);
Simon Fraser University Galleries (Christina Hedlund); The Cahén Archives
(Maggie Cahén, Michael Cahén); The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
(Blair Swann, Melanie Lowe); University of Lethbridge Art Gallery (Andrea
Kremenik); Vancouver Art Gallery (Danielle Currie); Winnipeg Art Gallery
(Nicole Fletcher); and Rebecca Belmore, Valérie Blass, Shary Boyle, AA
Bronson, David Burnett, Brandon Clarida, Stan Douglas, Adele Freedman, Toni
Hafkenscheid, Brian Jungen, Evaan Kheraj, Maryse Larivière, Isadora C.
Marinier, Christinne Muschi, Birthe Piontek, Michael Snow, Françoise Sullivan,
and Christopher Wahl. The ACI recognizes the numerous private collectors
who have given permission for their work to be published in this edition.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
IMAGE SOURCES
Every effort has been made to secure permissions for all copyrighted material.
The Art Canada Institute will gladly correct any errors or omissions.
Credit for Cover Images
Gershon Iskowitz, October 2, 1976. (See below for details.)
Credit for Banner Images
Biography: Gershon Iskowitz, Self-Portrait, c.1955. (See below for details.)
Key Works: Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands H, 1972. (See below for details.)
Significance & Critical Issues: Gershon Iskowitz, The Wall, 1952. (See below for details.)
Style & Technique: Gershon Iskowitz, Orange Yellow C, 1982. (See below for details.)
Where to See: Installation view of Staging Abstraction at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2017. Left: Jack Bush,
Black Velvet, 1963, oil on canvas. Centre: Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands K, 1972, oil on canvas. Right: David Diao,
Pick Up, 1972, aquatec on canvas. Photograph by Daniel Hutchinson.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Sources & Resources: Gershon Iskowitz, Self-Portrait, 1980. (See below for details.)
Credits for Works by Gershon Iskowitz
Action, 1941. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto, 1998
(39900). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
AK, 1977. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (GIF C-278). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Autumn Image, 1963. Private Collection. Courtesy of A.H. Wilkens Auctions & Appraisals.
Autumn Landscape #2, 1967. Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (71.4). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Photo credit: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Autumn Landscape #7, 1967. Private Collection. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Barracks, 1949. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto, 1998
139
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Buchenwald, 1944–45. McMaster Museum of Art, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Levy Bequest
Purchase, 1993 (1993.003.0001LB). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. Photo credit: John Tamblyn.
Condemned, c.1944–46. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum,
Toronto, 1998 (39901). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Deep Green No. 8, 1977. Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa (78/9-0033). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Photo credit: Brandon Clarida.
Escape, 1948. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto, 1998
Explosion, c.1949–52. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (39919). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Ghetto, c.1947. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (39904). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
It Burns, c.1950–52. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto,
1998 (39917). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Korban, c.1952. McMaster Museum of Art, McMaster University, Hamilton, Gift of Gerard Jennings in memory
of Walter Moos, 2013 (2013.002.0001). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. Photo credit: Robert McNair.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Landscape #2, 1980. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.
Late Summer Evening, 1962. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (AGO.128901). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Little Orange Painting II, 1974. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Beverly and Boris Zerafa, 1975
(75/60). © Art Gallery of Ontario.
Lowlands 1, 1969. Private Collection. Courtesy of Waddingtons. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Lowlands No. 2, 1969. Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa (72/3-1554). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Lowlands No. 9, 1970. Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 1995 (VAG 95.26.7).
© The Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. Photo credit: Ian Lefebvre.
Luigi Orgera, 1980. Courtesy of Adele Freedman. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Market, c.1952–54. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (39922). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Midnight #2, 1987. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (94/140). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Miriam, c.1951–52. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (39912). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Northern Lights Septet No. 3, 1985. University of Lethbridge Art Collection, Gift of the Iskowitz Foundation
(1995.91). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Not Titled, c.1987. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (AGO.128908). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
October 2, 1976. Private collection. Courtesy of Consignor Canadian Fine Art. © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
Orange Yellow C, 1982. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Gift of the Gershon
Iskowitz Foundation, 1995 (38-018.02). Photo credit: Agnes Etherington Art Centre. © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
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Orange Violet, 1979. The Collection of the Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, Florida (#G20365). © Gershon
Iskowitz Foundation.
Parry Sound I, 1955. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Mr. Grant W. Jones, Toronto, 1986 (86/138).
© Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Parry Sound II, 1955. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Sandra and Grant Jones, 1996 (96/183).
Parry Sound Variation XIV, 1965. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (14923). © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
Portrait of Mother, 1947. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 2009
(2009/261). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Portrait of Yehuda Podeswa, 1954. Podeswa Family Collection, Toronto. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Red Grey Painting, 1976. Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa (76-7-0238). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Photo credit: Brandon Clarida.
Seasons, 1974. Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation 1995.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Seasons No. 1, 1968–69. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum,
Toronto, 1998 (15917.1-2). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Seasons No. 2, 1968–69. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 1995
(95/185). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Selection, Auschwitz, 1947. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum,
Self-Portrait, c.1955. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto,
Self-Portrait, 1980. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of Adele Freedman. © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
Septet No. 5, 1985. Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph, Gift of the
Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 1995 (MS1995.015). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Side Street, c.1952–54. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum,
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Spring Reflections, 1963. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2007/780). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Street Scene Parry Sound, 1955. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (95/217). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Summer G, 1978. Winnipeg Art Gallery, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation (G-95-123 ab). © Gershon
Iskowitz Foundation. Photograph: Ernest Mayer.
Summer Impression, 1963. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (38008). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Summer in Yellow, No. 1, 1972. Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa (72/3-1819). © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
Summer Landscape #2, 1967. Private Collection. Courtesy of Heffel. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Summer Sky, 1966. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2001.078.001). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Summer Song, 1966. Collection of the Estate of Dr. Luigi Rossi. Courtesy of the Kelowna Art Gallery.
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Sunshine, 1955. University of Lethbridge Art Collection, Gift of M. Wiltshire (1993.46). © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
The Wall, 1952. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto, 1998
Through Life, c.1947. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto,
Torah, 1951. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (39909). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Tree Reflections, 1960. Private Collection. Courtesy of Heffel. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Ultra Blue Green, 1973. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Francis and Marvin Yontef, 2007 (2007/106).
Untitled, 1962. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
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Untitled, 1977. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (GIF C-239). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Untitled, 1977. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Dr.1995.23). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Untitled (“B-3124”), 1951. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (AGO.129173). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Untitled Drawing, 1958. Courtesy of Adele Freedman. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Untitled Landscape, 1960. Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, 1995
(VAG 95.26.5). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. Photo credit: Maegan Hill-Carroll.
Untitled (Memory Picture), 1952. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation,
1995 (95/222). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Untitled (Seated Figure), c.1955. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Untitled (Sketch for Septet), c.1984. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of
Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
147
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Untitled - Rushing Water, Autumn, 1955. Private Collection. Courtesy of Waddingtons. © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
Uplands, 1969–70. National Gallery of Canada, Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, Toronto, 1995
(38000.1-3). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Uplands B, 1970. Private Collection. Courtesy of Miriam Shiell Fine Art. © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Uplands E, 1971. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Purchased 1972 (16993.1-2). © Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation.
Uplands F, 1971. Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa (72/3-1500). © Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
Uplands G, 1971. Museum London, Gift of Claridge Investments Ltd., Montreal, Quebec, 1998 (98.A.18.1-.2).
Uplands H, 1972. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Purchase with assistance from Wintario, 1977 (77/26).
Uplands K, 1972. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Gift of Mr. John Morris Thurston and Wintario, 1977 (77.2).
148
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Yzkor, 1952. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift of Joey, Toby, and Alan Tanenbaum, Toronto, 1998
Credits for Photographs and Works by Other Artists
1. Françoise Sullivan, Courtesy of the artist. 2. Rebecca Belmore, photo credit: Christinne Muschi © Christinne
Muschi. 3. Michael Snow, Courtesy of the artist. 4. General Idea, Courtesy of AA Bronson. 5. Shary Boyle,
photo credit: Christopher Wahl © Christopher Wahl. 6. Valérie Blass, photo credit: Maryse Larivière © Maryse
Larivière. 7. Brian Jungen, photo credit: Dean Tomlinson. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. 8.
Stan Douglas, photo credit: Evaan Kheraj. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery. 9. Janet Cardiff & George Miller,
photo credit: Birthe Piontek. © Birthe Piontek.
Aerial photograph of Churchill, Manitoba, 1966. Photographer unknown.
Mourners and local residents watch as men shovel dirt into the mass grave of the victims of the Kielce pogrom,
1946. Photographer unknown. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington (14393). Courtesy of
Leah Lahav. © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Bodies in a Grave, Belsen, 1946, by Alex Colville. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum,
Ottawa (19710261-2033). © Canadian War Museum
Candy Tree, 1952–53, by Oscar Cahén. Private Collection. © The Cahén Archives.
Cover of the 1972 Venice Biennale catalogue for the Canadian Pavilion, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor
Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
149
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Dog Among the Ruins, 1947, by Jack Shadbolt. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1980.069.001).
© Jack Shadbolt Estate.
Detail of Uplands K, 1972, installed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton for Staging Abstraction, 2017, photograph
by Daniel Hutchinson.
Feldafing Displaced Persons Camp banknotes.
Gershon Iskowitz in Feldafing, date unknown, photographer unknown. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor
Gershon Iskowitz in Feldafing verso, date unknown, photographer unknown. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds,
E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Gershon Iskowitz Gallery Moos invitation, 1966, Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives,
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (LA.156125). Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Gershon Iskowitz in his studio, date unknown, photograph by Michel Lambeth. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P.
Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario. © Michel
Lambeth Estate.
150
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz in front of his Tecumseth Street studio, 1981, photographer unknown. Gershon Iskowitz
Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Gershon Iskowitz at the Art Gallery of Ontario retrospective, 1982, photograph by Doug Griffin. Courtesy of
the Toronto Public Library Archives. © Toronto Star Archives.
Gershon Iskowitz in Toronto, winter c.1948–49, photographer unknown. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor
Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light catalogue by Adele Freedman.
Gershon Iskowitz with painting design for a limited edition AGO umbrella, 1986. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds,
E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Gershon Iskowitz with portrait of Isaac Leib Peretz, Feldafing, 1946, photographer unknown. Gershon Iskowitz
Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Gershon Iskowitz, Kazuo Nakamura, Tony Urquhart, and Madeline Mary Jennings at Isaacs Gallery, c.1961–62,
photograph by Tess Taconis. E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the
Art Gallery of Ontario.
151
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Gershon Iskowitz painting outdoors, date unknown, photographer unknown. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P.
Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, and Robert Markle parody the Artists’ Jazz Band in Rayner’s Toronto
studio, 1965, photograph by John Reeves. Courtesy of Canadian Art Magazine. © The Estate of John Reeves.
Guests at the Venice Biennale, 1972, photographer unknown. Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and
Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Installation view of Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings by Seven Canadian Painters from the Canada
Council Art Bank at Harbourfront Art Gallery, 1976, photograph by David Lloyd. Courtesy of The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery Archives.
Iskowitz catalogue by David Burnett.
Oscar Cahén, illustration for short story, “Mail,” by John Norman Harris, Maclean’s, 1950. Collection of The
Cahén Archives. © The Cahén Archives.
Pamphlet for Iskowitz: New Paintings, September 15–October 2, 1961, Here and Now Art Gallery. Gershon
Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of
Ontario.
152
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Parents Zisla Lewis and Jankel and children Yosl, Gershon, and Itchen, c.1924, photographer unknown.
Gershon Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of the Gershon
Iskowitz Foundation, 2009 (LA.SC114.S1.f2.2). Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Plate 57 from Los Desastres de la Guerra / Disasters of War, plates produced between 1810 and 1820, from
the first edition, 1863, by Francisco Goya. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (4180).
Plowed Field, 1953, by Kazuo Nakamura. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2000/1151). © Art Gallery of
Ontario.
Spring, Cranberry Lake, 1932, by Franklin Carmichael. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Roy G. Cole,
Rousseau, Ontario, 1990 (90/194). © Art Gallery of Ontario.
Temporary travel document, military Government for Germany, issued in Munich, May 3, 1948. Gershon
Iskowitz Fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of the Gershon Iskowitz
Foundation, 2009 (LA.SC114.S3.2). Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The Gershon Iskowitz Prize: 1986 to 2006 catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
The War, 1943, by Marc Chagall. Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou, Paris, Gift of the artist,
1953, on deposit at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource NY.
153
GERSHON ISKOWITZ
Water Lilies (Agapanthus), 1915–26, by Claude Monet. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Courtesy
of Wikicommons.
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© 2019 Art Canada Institute. All rights reserved.
Art Canada Institute

Massey College, University of Toronto
4 Devonshire Place
Toronto, ON M5S 2E1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Gershon Iskowitz : life & work / Ihor Holubizky.

Names: Holubizky, Ihor, author. | Iskowitz, Gershon, 1921-1988. Paintings.
Selections. | Art Canada
Institute, issuing body.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20189069082 | Canadiana (ebook) 20189069090
| ISBN 9781487101923
(hardcover) | ISBN 9781487101930 (HTML) | ISBN 9781487101947 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Iskowitz, Gershon, 1921-1988. | LCSH: Iskowitz, Gershon,
1921-1988—Criticism and
interpretation. | LCGFT: Biographies.
Classification: LCC ND249.I84 H65 2019 | DDC 759.11—dc23
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GERSHON ISKOWITZ

Life & Work by Ihor Holubizky

Gershon Iskowitz (1920 or 1921–1988) was born and grew up in Poland.

The Nazi persecution of the country’s Jewish population began almost

In his earliest surviving drawing,

clothed and half-starved, he worked fourteen-hour days in a cement factory

FELDAFING AND MUNICH

measure, by 1946 there were 4,000

In Feldafing, Iskowitz began to paint again. A photograph shows him posed

Iskowitz said he was accepted as a

Iskowitz described how, during

important to him. 23 In June 1946

Within a month, Iskowitz’s emigration process was underway. His maternal

Despite these setbacks, on May 3, 1948, Iskowitz received a temporary travel

1948. 34 Iskowitz boarded the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman at

On the voyage to Canada, Iskowitz

In due course he received a few portrait commissions—a 1954 painting of

In 1954 Iskowitz appeared in his first recorded exhibition in Canada—the

The short-lived Hayter Gallery gave

Although there is no definitive date for Iskowitz’s turn to non-representational

Iskowitz’s first exhibition at Gallery

In short order, an active market

Published biographical accounts indicate that, in the late 1960s, Iskowitz

visible below. 51 Once there,

Churchill is situated at the juncture of three ecological regions: a boreal forest

On his return to Toronto, Iskowitz’s art snapped into a more complex

Iskowitz’s routine ensured he was part of an artist’s village where he felt

Iskowitz’s Canadian experience could be described as a simple life driven by

The retrospective offered the first

Over a forty-five-year period, Gershon Iskowitz’s work reflected the

Gershon Iskowitz, Buchenwald, 1944–45

Buchenwald is one of two surviving works made by Iskowitz while he was

In this real-life context, Iskowitz’s drawing is a primary document—he was

Gershon Iskowitz, Korban, c.1952

After his liberation from the

Gershon Iskowitz, Self-Portrait, c.1955

Gershon Iskowitz’s self-portrait, though depicting a pensive pose, exudes a

Moreover, the composition and palette are similar to portraits he made of

Another self-portrait, in oil on a pressed cardboard support, has recently

PARRY SOUND I 1955

Gershon Iskowitz, Parry Sound I, 1955

Parry Sound I is a prime example of Iskowitz working away from observed

Gershon Iskowitz made many trips

Gershon Iskowitz, Untitled, 1962

LATE SUMMER EVENING 1962

Gershon Iskowitz, Late Summer Evening, 1962

Late Summer Evening preludes a significant development that

By 1960 Iskowitz had established a regular studio practice of painting at night

AUTUMN LANDSCAPE #2 1967

Gershon Iskowitz, Autumn Landscape #2, 1967

Gershon Iskowitz, Summer Song, 1966, oil

LOWLANDS NO. 9 1970

Gershon Iskowitz, Lowlands No. 9, 1970

If the stem element represents an

A previously unexamined approach to the Lowlands paintings is to compare

The Uplands three-panelled painting was begun in 1969 and completed in

Gershon Iskowitz, Uplands E, 1971

Gershon Iskowitz’s Uplands, a suite

different degrees of registration. In three of them, Uplands B, G, and H, the

These diptychs are strange combinations of panoramic landscapes and