Showing 61 results

Authority record
Brownstone, S. (Shieky)
SB · Person · fl. 1977

Dr. Yehoshua (Shieky) Brownstone is a photographer in London, Ontario. He was formerly a Professor in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Western Ontario.

Zacks, Sam, 1904-1970
CA-AA01 · Person · 1904 - 1970

Samuel J. Zacks (1904-1970) was a financier, Zionist and art collector, born in Kingston Ontario and educated at Queen’s University and Harvard. He married Ayala Ben Tovim Fleg in 1947, whereupon they immediately began to collect art of the School of Paris as well as Canadian and Israeli art and antiquities, amassing an extensive collection by the late 1950’s that was in continual demand by museums around the world. Mr. and Mrs. Zacks were both involved in international art circles, sitting on the Boards of the International Committee of Museums (ICOM), a branch of UNESCO, the International Committee of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario and others. In 1969 Mr. Zacks received an Honourary Fellowship from St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He died in 1970 in Toronto.

Abramov, Ayala Zacks
CA-AA · Person · 1912-

Sam and Ayala Zacks were prominent Canadian art collectors of international repute active in the mid-20th century whose gifts form the basis of the modern European art collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Ayala Ben Tovim Fleg Zacks Abramov (1912-) was born in Jerusalem and educated in Israel, Paris and London. In 1938 she married Maurice Fleg in Paris, and joined the French Resistance after her husband died in action in1940. Active in Zionist circles after the war, she met Sam Zacks in Switzerland. Samuel J. Zacks (1904-1970) was a financier, Zionist and art collector, born in Kingston Ontario and educated at Queen’s University and Harvard. Following their marriage in 1947 they immediately began to collect art of the School of Paris as well as Canadian and Israeli art and antiquities, amassing an extensive collection by the late 1950’s that was in continual demand by museums around the world. In 1956 a collection of Canadian art was donated to Queen’s University, Mr. Zack’s alma mater, the first of many significant gifts to institutions in Israel and Canada including the Hazor Archaeological Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Mr. and Mrs. Zacks were both involved in international art circles, sitting on the Boards of the International Committee of Museums (ICOM), a branch of UNESCO, the International Committee of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario and others. In 1969 Mr. Zacks received an Honourary Fellowship from St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He died in 1970 in Toronto. After his death, Ayala Zacks was awarded the Order of Canada and an honourary degree from the University of Toronto. She married Zalman Abramov, an Israeli lawyer and politician in 1976 and moved permanently to Israel in 1982.

AGOACO00854 · Person · 1881-1969

Frederick Horsman Varley, painter, was born in Sheffield, England in 1881. He studied at the Sheffield School of Art 1892–1900, and at the Koninklijk Akademie voor Shone Kunsten (Académie royale des beaux-arts) in Antwerp for the following two years. After working as an illustrator and art teacher in England, he immigrated to Canada and obtained work as a commercial illustrator in Toronto in 1912, the same year he first exhibited his art work at the Canadian National Exhibition. In 1914, Varley joined Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer on sketching trip to Algonquin Park in Ontario. Some of his most famous works resulted from his association with these artists. He participated in the War Art program after the war in 1918 and was a founding member of the Group of Seven in 1920. Although he painted numerous landscapes, his interest lay more in portraiture, which he pursued during the 1920s. Varley moved to Vancouver in 1926 to teach at the School of Decorative and Applied Arts. His landscapes from this period are marked by fine draftsmanship, exotic colour and unusual vantage points. In 1933 he and J.W.G. Macdonald opened their own school, the British Columbia College of Arts, which closed in 1935. Varley lived subsequently in Ottawa and Montreal, returning in 1944 to Toronto. The Art Gallery of Ontario held a retrospective of his work in 1954. He died in Toronto in 1969. Varley was a member of the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto. His work is in numerous Canadian public collections.

AGOAC04376 · Person · 1876 - 1922

Anna Belle Wing Kindlund (later Mrs. Alois Trnka), 1876-1922, was an artist born in Buffalo, New York. She studied with W. Hitchcock in Buffalo, and G. Bridgman in New York. She was a member of the Buffalo Society of Artists and the New York Society of Craftsmen, and is listed in Who Was Who in American Art as a painter and miniaturist.

Howard, A. H., fl. 1889-1904
AGOAC02356 · Person · 1889 - 1904

A.H. Howard (fl. 1889-1904) was an artist and member of the Toronto Art League.

Mercer Union (gallery)
AGOAC00788 · Corporate body · 1979 -

Mercer Union was created by former members of A.C.T. in 1979 to operate as an artist-run, non-profit cooperative gallery. Twelve founders contributed financially to the rental of a ground floor space at 29 Mercer Street and planned to mix local, regional, national and international exhibits, collaborating with other artist-run programs. Its mandate was to exhibit new work in the most advanced forms of painting and sculpture that was not receiving exposure in the commercial and public galleries. Performance art, installations and music were incorporated into the programming, which has continued to represent innovative and sometimes controversial material. Twelve board members are elected by dues-paying members and serve on the various committees (programming, curatorial, etc), with the help of a small paid staff. The gallery moved to 333 Adelaide Street West, 5th floor in 1981 and 439 King Street West in 1994. Their present location is 37 Lisgar Street; current information about the gallery can be obtained at www.mercerunion.org.

Sandham, Henry, 1842-1910
AGOAC00784 · Person · 1842-1910

Henry Sandham (1842-1910) was an illustrator and painter who lived successively in Montreal, Boston, and London, England. He was associated with the Montreal studio of William Notman, where he received his early training, later headed the art department, and was briefly a partner. Sandham produced illustrations for several leading magazines of his day, including the Century Magazine.

Stacey, Robert, 1949-2007
AGOAC00782 · Person · 1949 - 2007

Robert Stacey was born on July 2, 1949, to Harold Stacey and Margaret Ellen West ("Peggy") Jefferys. He graduated from Northview Heights Secondary School in 1968, and went on to earn an Honours BA in English Literature at the University of Toronto in 1972. During the summers, he worked as a library assistant in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the University of Toronto Library. After his graduation, he worked for several rare book dealers, and spent six months in England in 1973 working for A. Zwemmer Ltd., a book publisher and dealer. After returning to Canada, in September 1973 Stacey became the manager of Pan Gallery, where he organized exhibitions on posters, private-press ephemera, and more. With the assistance of a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, Stacey began researching Canadian art and writing reviews for Artmagazine and other publications. In 1975, he began first as an apprentice, and eventually as an editor for Dundurn Press. Over the next thirty years he would continue his work as a freelance writer, editor, researcher, consultant, and exhibition curator, and published many essays, reviews, criticisms, and studies on Canadian /art. He is often recognized for his photography research, which allowed the inclusion of images in many important publications. Among his many other notable achievements, Stacy was appointed the first Canadian Research Fellow in the National Gallery of Canada's Research Fellowship Program in 1991. Stacey died of liver failure on November 4, 2007, in Toronto.

Bush, Jack
AGOAC00760 · Person · 1909-1977

John Hamilton Bush (1909–1977), primarily known as Jack Bush, was a Canadian painter best known for his Abstract Expressionist style. Born in Toronto, he lived in London, Ont. and Montreal during his early years. Jack Bush began his career in advertising, working in his father’s firm, Rapid Electro Type Company in Montreal. During this time, he studied at the Art Association of Montreal with Edmund Dyonnet and Adam Sherriff Scott. In 1928, he transferred to the company’s office in Toronto, where he took evening classes under Frederick Challener, John Alfsen and Charles Comfort at the Ontario College of Art. Bush’s early work as a painter was influenced by Comfort and the Group of Seven, and throughout the 1930s and ‘40s he produced largely landscape and figurative paintings. His first exhibition was with the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto in 1936.
In 1934, Jack Bush married Mabel Mills Teakle, a family friend from Montreal, and together they had three sons, Jack Jr (b. 1936), Robert (b. 1938) and Terry (b. 1942). In 1953, dissatisfied with Canada’s place in the international contemporary art scene, Bush and several other Toronto abstract artists founded the group Painters Eleven. William Ronald, another member of Painters Eleven, and an artist who had worked in New York, introduced U.S. art critic Clement Greenberg to the group, which led to a lasting friendship between Bush and Greenberg. The contact with Greenberg in 1957 led to Bush’s international breakthrough in the early 1960s, beginning with his 1962 exhibition at the Robert Elkon Gallery in New York. Between the late 1950s and mid ‘60s, Bush painted in loose brushstrokes with diluted oils, staining paint onto unprimed canvas. In 1966, concerned by the health hazards associated with oil-based paints, he switched to water-based acrylics, less textured than oils but more brightly coloured.
In 1964, Jack Bush’s work was included in Greenberg’s Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum, an exhibition that travelled to Minneapolis and Toronto. Along with Jacques Hurtubise, Bush represented Canada at the Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil) in 1967. In the year preceding his death in 1977 (from a heart attack), he received the Order of Canada. That same year, the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a retrospective exhibition of his abstract works that travelled to several Canadian galleries. Jack Bush’s work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, London’s Tate Gallery and others.