Jewish Painters of Montreal

Jewish Painters of Montreal refers to a group of artists who depicted the social realism of Montreal during the 1930s and 1940s. First used by the media to describe participants of the annual YMHA-YWHA art exhibition, the term was popularized in the 1980s by art historian and curator Esther Trepannier. Since then these artists have been exhibited collectively in public galleries across Canada. In 2009 the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec mounted a touring exhibition Jewish Painters of Montreal: a Witness to their time 1930-1948 which renewed interest in the group in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

This collective included two generations of painters — established artists: Jack Beder (1910-1987), Alexandre Bercovitch (1891-1951), Eric Goldberg (1890-1959), (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). As a group during the 30s and 40s, they were united in their choice of subjects — the human figure, Montreal and its people, and the war. 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.

These artists were either new arrivals from Eastern Europe or children of immigrants from that region. All were trained artists with a deep appreciation of impressionism and post-impressionism. 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. Following the opening of the new YMHA (Young Men's Hebrew Association) on Mount Royal Avenue in 1929, the group became associated with its annual art exhibition. As the Depression of the 1930s deepened, many of these artists found themselves in reduced circumstances. Louis Mulstock used discarded sugar sacks as canvas, while in 1936 Bercovitch took a teaching position at the YWHA (Young Women's Hebrew Association). There he instructed a new generation of artists including daughter Sylvia Ary, Ghitta Caisserman and Rita Briansky, all of whom included in the annual YMHA-YWHA art exhibition. 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.

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