Jewish Painters of Montreal
[5] This collective included two generations of painters — established artists: Jack Beder (1910–1987), Alexander Bercovitch (1891–1951), Eric Goldberg (1890–1959), Louis Muhlstock (1904–2001); those in mid-career: Sam Borenstein (1908–1969), Herman Heimlich (1904–1986), Harry Mayerovitch (1910–2004), Bernard Mayman (1885–1966), Ernst Neumann (1907–1956), Fanny Wiselberg (1906–1986); and those just beginning: Sylvia Ary (1923–2011), Rita Briansky (1925), Ghitta Caiserman-Roth (1923–2005), Alfred Pinsky (1921–1999), and Moses "Moe" Reinblatt (1917–1979).
[2] As individual artists, their style varied from socialist realism to stylized expressionism with some the subject of recent museum exhibitions in Montreal, Ottawa or New York.
[6] Most lived east of Mount Royal in Montreal's Jewish neighbourhood where, by 1926, Bercovitch, Mulstock and Reinblatt met informally at Bernard Mayman’s sign store on St Lawrence Boulevard.
Although there were discussions on creating a formal organization of Jewish Artists, as Bercovitch, Goldberg, Muhlstock, Mayervitch and Reinblatt were members of the 1938 Eastern Group of Painters and/or the 1939 Contemporary Arts Society, they were prohibited from other affiliations.
[1]: 219 Muhlstock identified with the working class and referred to his imagery as "proletarian art",[8] He later described his choice of subject matter as "something I had known and experienced and seen, and so it was the thing I wanted to express".
In New York they were exposed to the work of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco and the social purpose of art was debated in both America and Canada.
[1]: 275 In the mid 30s Mulstock exhibited with the Canadian Group of Painters in Toronto and along with Beder, Bercovitch, Borenstein, Goldberg, Mayman, and Wiselberg with the Contemporary Arts Society of Montreal.
[1]: 276 By 1948 the more senior artists of the group: Beder, Bercovitch, Borenstein, Heimlich, Mayervitch, Muhlstock, Neumann, and Reinblatt had all exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
IBy the mid-30s 1935 they were reviewed collectively in the Canadian Forum (Toronto): "The subject matter of [Louis Muhlstock, Alexander Bercovitch, and Sam Borenstein] is similar: they paint the Montreal ghetto, tramp steamers in the harbour, street scenes, typical workers and members of the lumpen proletariat.... Muhlstock and Borenstein link their preoccupations closely with political awareness, though neither has as yet participated in the revolutionary movement.
[18] In 2009, Esther Trépanier, as executive director of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec mounted the touring exhibition Jewish Painters of Montreal.
"[1]: 184 For art historian Esther Trépanier, these artists of the 30s and 40s "unequivocally produced works that, both in their formal exploration and in their more contemporary, urban subjects, contributed towards the definition of the particular form of modernity that emerged between the major nationalist movements and abstraction"[1]: 205 of Les Automatistes painters Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle.
In terms of contribution, Trépanier has concluded that: "The artists of the Jewish community not only helped to define cultural modernity in Quebec and the rest of Canada during the interwar period, but have continued to enrich and enhance the originality of its development ever since.
