Dali House

Another great painting by the late Frank Black, “The Angry Atlantic”. Click the image to see a larger version.

The owner of this work and “Back Street Bermuda” tells me she and her husband bought them directly from Black on a visit to his Georgetown home around 1973 or ‘74. Her grandmother had previously bought some of his work.

Frank Black’s “Back Street Bermuda”, circa 1932
Click the image to see it much larger.

It was a really pleasant surprise to get a couple of comments on my March 2007 post on Canadian artists who aren’t well known beyond the national borders. And the comments weren’t about the brighter of these dimmer lights but about the least known of them all, Frank Black.

Frank Charles Black was a British-born, Toronto-based artist who was an associate of some members of the Group of Seven and shared their initial profession — commercial art — and their disdain for it. He retired from the business as soon as he could and moved to Georgetown, Ontario, just west of Toronto, where he taught art basics to pay the bills but finally got down to painting what he wanted to paint. He died in 1988.

The readers’ requests for more information prodded me to try and get in touch with John Sommer, proprietor of Gallery House Sol in Georgetown, which is also the town where I grew up. John knew Black fairly well, whereas I had only met the artist once, around 1976. Unfortunately House Sol doesn’t have an online address, and the local library, who I know could put us in touch, didn’t respond to my email. Georgetown does seem to be in a timewarp that way.

However, both the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts responded quickly and helpfully. The latter has no Frank Black works in its collection, but at least offered a list of titles from its archives:

“Georgian Bay, Minnieog”, 1922
“Broken Ice”, 1922
“Old and New”, 1930
“Midsummer Street”, 1930
“The Mill Road”, 1930
“Landscape Bermuda”, 1931
“Old Trading Ship, Bermuda”, 1933
“Near Caledon”, 1934

“Minnieog” in the first entry could be a typo, since I’ve found no references to such a place in Ontario’s Georgian Bay area. There is, however, a Minnie Rock there. Other than that, the list indicates when Black was painting in Bermuda, which was central to the queries I had from both readers.

One of them, a resident of Lansdowne, Ontario, owns the painting reproduced at the top of this post, “Back Street Bermuda”. Her grandmother, she reported, had lived in Georgetown and while there bought a handful of Frank Black paintings. A label on the back of “Bermuda” includes accreditation by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

The National Gallery sent me by regular mail a package of photocopied newspaper clippings about Black, among which I was astonished to find two articles that I’d written while I was with Georgetown’s now-defunct Halton Hills Herald. I had no idea I was in the national archives (apart from police records).

Alas, neither of the galleries was able to supply digital images of any of Black’s work or confirm that any of his paintings had been at some point part of their collections (and the Art Gallery of Ontario is in the midst of a revamp for the next few months). But from the clippings, I’ve at least been able to prepare a short biography and extract some photos. The photocopied newspaper pictures are in rough shape, which I’m afraid still shows through in my Photoshopped versions in this post. See the rest.

Somewhere between the Group of Seven and their acclaimed juniors who are painting today there was a vast swath of Canadians poking away at canvases, all of whom are relevant in the big picture and most of whom are actually worth a look. I have posts coming up separately on the abstract artists of Painters 11 and the Automatistes, and will eventually get around to two other outstanding people who deserve individual consideration, Emily Carr and Graham Coughtry.

But for now, here, in no particular order, are a few of the more crusty codgers who toiled away in the Seven’s shadow and earned their vertical patches of turf on the National Gallery walls. There are many more than this; I’m just taking a sampling.

“The Cloud”, from 1942, at the top of this post, is by Bertram Brooker (1888-1955), who I think was one of the best Canadian artists who ever lived. He was a British-born writer and musician as well as a painter who was blown into Toronto in 1921 by the wind from Portage la Prairie. Freelance journalism somehow led to advertising, and thence the Arts and Letters Club, where he met Lawren Harris and others of the Seven. He and Harris must have been soul brothers, because they both ultimately soared with the spirit. See the rest.