Modernism Ghitta Caiserman-Roth

Ghitta Caiserman-Roth (March 2, 1923 – November 25, 2005) was a Canadian artist. She was a founder of the Montreal Artist School and has work in the National Gallery of Canada. Caiserman Roth was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy (RCA) and the first artist to receive the Governor General Award.
Ghitta Caiserman-Roth was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923. Her parents were Sarah Wittal, an owner of a children's wear company and Hannaniah Meir Caiserman, a civic leader in the Montreal Jewish community and union activist.[4] Both parents were heavily involved in socialist causes which had a significant impact on Ghitta's art; she was also influenced by her experiences working in war factories in Montréal and Halifax. By young adulthood much of her art was influenced by her experiences working in war factories in Montréal and Halifax, her work embraced the working class life and explored socialist themes.

 Caiserman-Roth attended the Parsons School of Design in New York from 1939 to 1943. She studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Montreal in 1961 to 1962. She returned to Montréal in 1947, with Alfred Pinsky she opened the Montréal Artists School.They opened the school with artists Barbara Eckhart and Harold Goodwin. Many of the students were war veterans and Caiserman-Roth served as principal. The school however only lasted until 1952 and was sold. A trip to Mexico in 1948 exposed her to the socialist mural movement, and she began incorporating mural forms into her work, once again exploring socialist themes.She studied with Moses Soyer at the American Artists School of the Art Student League of New York.Caiserman-Roth studied political murals as they explored Mexico bringing fresh idea’s back to the McGill Ghetto where they lived until 1956.

 Caiserman - Roth’s father ran a salon out of their family home in Montreal and this was where her earliest influences began. There artists and writers would gather to discuss social and political change. Her father, Hanane Caiserman reviewed art exhibitions and exposed her to many Montreal artist and writers. One of the most memorable to Caiserman-Roth was “Yud-Yud” Segal who introduced her to Marcel Proust and Romain Rolland. Not only was she heavily influenced by literature but by the painter Louis Muhlstock. After his return from artistic study in France. They would take many walks together and she learned the difference between “seeing” and merely “looking at”. Muhlstock was incredibly sensitive to his environment and this had a large influence on Caiserman. Later on she attribute her free-range imagination and varying degrees of abstractionism to Muhlstock.Her early childhood experiences play heavily into the relationships depicted in her paintings, especially between mother and child. Her mother Sarah Caiserman, expressed her love of art by designing clothing for her children. Caiserman-Roth recalls sitting in piles of her mother's fabric enchanted by the colours, textures and patterns. This experience was heavily drawn upon when she painted First Steps (1956), depicting her own daughter. Her first and formal influence was her art teacher Alexandre Bercovitch, who taught her through private lesson at her family home in Montreal in 1932. He was the epitome of bohemian and she recalls his “bulging blue eyes” with fondness. He heavily inspired her work with pastels and she was deeply moved by his dedication to the craft. Bercovitch also had an incredibly fondness for New York City, the city that Caiserman-Roth aspired to move to.Wikipedia

Postmodernism José Bernal

José Antonio Severino Bernal Muñoz (January 8, 1925 – April 19, 2010, known by his first name and by his paternal family name José Bernal) was a Cuban-American artist, born in Santa Clara, Cuba, in the former province of Las Villas (now Villa Clara) and became a naturalized U.S.A. citizen in 1980.
Bernal's aesthetics stemmed from his Cuban birth and the experience of exile and renewal. His art has been described as modernist, abstract, and expressionist. The term postmodernist also may be applied to Bernal's diverse and complex body of work, specifically as he rejected the notion of the new in art, a characteristic imbued in postmodern theory.

When Bernal was a child, he was privately tutored in art and music. He was graduated from Normal Teachers College in 1945 and began teaching at a series of public and private schools in the province of Las Villas. Simultaneously, he enrolled in the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Leopoldo Romañach where he earned his MFA. His musical and visual creations were performed and exhibited in Santa Clara and Havana.
In 1961, "... during the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Bernal was among the throngs of Cubans arrested for unpatriotic behavior and confined for eleven days in the gymnasium of the Marta Abreu University in Santa Clara. Bernal's offense was refusal to work in the fields cutting sugar cane. After his release, the threat of execution haunted and his wife, and they cautiously initiated plans to leave the country with their three young children. It took more than a year to obtain visas ..." and with the help of the Methodist Church, the Bernals were able to board a Pan Am flight for the United States of America in June 1962.

The Bernal family entered the United States in Miami, Florida. Their stay in the state was brief — a few months on account of the scarcity of employment. Subsequently, in autumn of 1962 they relocated to Chicago, Illinois. Bernal confronted the need to support his family and, because of language barriers, became employed in a factory designing artistic materials for commercial purposes. Meanwhile, he continued to produce personal art. Critics during this period observed his work revealed a transformation affected by the change in geographical environment. While in Cuba his palette did not reflect the brilliant, intense colors of his native land; but in Chicago he began to incorporate in his art the tropical hues of his Caribbean homeland.

In 1964, Bernal's art portfolio was reviewed by an executive at Marshall Field's and he was offered a position as Senior Designer. There, the director of Field's fine arts gallery persuaded Bernal to exhibit his impressionist portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Shortly thereafter, "... Betty Parsons, art dealer, artist, and collector, discovered Bernal's work and began a series of orders to show and sell his paintings at Dayton's art galleries in Minneapolis. The lucrative connection made it possible for Bernal to give up his job at Field's and return to school where he could pursue his dual dream of teaching and painting."

 After being granted an MFA evaluation by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970, Bernal returned to teaching art while continuing to create and exhibit his works. Lydia Murman, art critic of the New Art Examiner, wrote about Bernal's 1981 solo exhibition of collage and assemblage: "Bernal's works involve the viewer because they resurrect the concern for art as a communicative force. The viewer reacts to the classical arrangement, in which found objects are manipulated with a respect for their physical properties and for their potential symbolic value. While warm wood, old newspaper print, tarnished metal, and antique objects produce an aura that absorbs the viewer and stirs archetypal images within his subconscious, some works, such as "Balancing the Unbalanced," in which a faucet is perceived as a faucet, invite the viewer to open the dialogue concerning substance and illusion, art and reality.Wikipedia

Kathleen Munn

Kathleen Jean Munn, painter (born 28 August 1887 in Toronto, ON; died 19 October 1974 in Toronto, ON). Kathleen Munn is recognized today as a pioneer of modern art in Canada, notably for experimenting with abstraction earlier than most Canadian artists. Considered too “advanced” by critics and the public in the 1910s and 1920s, she remained on the periphery of the Canadian art scene during her lifetime.( the canadian encyclopedia )

 Munn kept extensive notebooks and she read constantly about colour theory whilst embracing an intellectual and spiritual approach to art. Her extensive reading on Cubism and the relationship between colour and music attracted her to the tenets of theosophy and a variety of Eastern religions.Wikipedia