KAKEGAMIC o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-05 published
Prolific and brilliant Ojibwa painter was called 'the Picasso
of the North'
Like the great Spanish artist, he could draw spontaneously, never
lifting his pencil until the image was complete. He is the only
native artist to have held a solo exhibition at the National
Gallery of Canada
By Donn DOWNEY,
Page S8
This obituary was prepared by Donn
DOWNEY (who died in April,
2001,) with files from James
ADAM/ADAMS.
Toronto -- The descriptions are spectacular and too generous,
perhaps. Norval
MORRISSEAU was "the Picasso of the North," according
to some, and "the most important painter Canada has ever produced,"
to quote his Toronto art dealer.
Such descriptions, of course, ignore the likes of Tom Thomson,
Emily Carr and the Group of Seven and place Mr.
MORRISSEAU in
a league with the most innovative artist of the 20th century.
The hyperbole is forgivable. They are part of the legend - the
story of a true primitive who emerged from the Northern Ontario
wilderness to awe the sophisticates in the major art centres
of the world. Indeed, Mr.
MORRISSEAU remains the only native
artist ever to have had a solo exhibition (for three months,
starting in February, 2006) in the 127-year history of the National
Gallery of Canada.
Art dealer Jack
POLLOCK, one of the many who claimed to have
discovered Mr.
MORRISSEAU, was also part of the legend but had
a better grasp on his contribution. "He invented a visual vocabulary
that never existed before him," Mr.
POLLOCK said before his death
in 1992. "He gave the demi-gods of his people an image."
Mr. MORRISSEAU could properly lay claim to being the creator
and spiritual leader of the Woodland Indian art movement, not
only in Canada but in the northeast United States. He developed
his style independent of the influence of any other artist and
was the first to depict Ojibwa legends and history for the non-native
world.
He broke the taboos of his people by revealing sacred stories,
but believed it was his mission to put his heritage before the
modern world so it could be kept alive. He was "a living bridge
to the past," said Donald
ROBINSON of Toronto's Kinsman Robinson
Galleries, his major dealer for more than 15 years.
Three generations of native artists have followed in his footsteps,
producing variations of the
MORRISSEAU style using heavy black
outlines to enclose colourful, flat shapes. Many of these artists
have become wealthy in the process but such success was denied
Mr. MORRISSEAU, who never quite escaped the poverty into which
he was born.
"To this day, I don't know how we made a living," he wrote in
an article published in The Globe and Mail in 1979. "You see,
that sense of real necessity is not a thing that most people
in white society know anything about." He was raised by his grandfather
who was "the most influential person in the whole of my life
and also a good provider. We always had moose meat in the house.
Also oranges, but no bananas."
Born near Thunder Bay to a family living on the Ojibwa Sand Point
Reserve on Lake Nipigon, he was baptized Jean-Baptiste Norman
Henry MORRISSEAU.
The oldest of five sons, he went to school
for six years, but only finished Grade 2. "You see, the first
year you get there, they put you in kindergarten," he once wrote.
"The next year you come back and they put you in kindergarten
again. Next thing you know, you are in Grade 1. Then, the following
year, you start Grade 1 all over again. Maybe you stay in Grade 1
three or four years."
He was brought up by both his maternal grandparents. His grandfather
was a shaman who schooled him in the traditional ways of his
culture while his grandmother, a Catholic, made it her business
that he was familiar with Christian beliefs. By all accounts,
it was the conflict between the two cultures that influenced
his outlook and what would later become his art.
Over the years, legends have developed around Mr.
MORRISSEAU.
According to one story, he became perilously ill at 19. A visit
to the doctor did nothing and a medicine woman was summoned.
A renaming ceremony was performed (Anishnaabe tradition holds
that a giving powerful name to someone near death can rally strength
and save a life). He was renamed Copper Thunderbird, and recovered.
Later, he would use it to sign his paintings.
Somewhere along the way, he developed a fondness for alcohol.
When Mr. POLLOCK first met him in the summer of 1962, he was
drunk. The artist demanded that Mr.
POLLOCK look at his work.
Mr. POLLOCK was impressed and was interested in mounting an exhibit,
but Mr. MORRISSEAU wanted to sell his works on the spot for $5 each.
Mr. POLLOCK talked him out of it and a subsequent showing at
the Pollock Gallery sold out within 24 hours, netting the artist
$3,000. Time magazine declared that "few exhibits in Canadian
history have touched off a greater immediate stir than
MORRISSEAU's"
and predicted that he would launch "a vogue as chic as that of
the Cape Dorset Eskimo's prints."
He continued to live in the area north of Lake Superior and apparently
squandered much of his money. In 1978 - a year in which he was
appointed to the Order of Canada - when someone jokingly suggested
that he throw a garden party, just like the Queen, he bought
an antique silver tea service and a set of Royal Crown Derby
china to entertain 21 of his Friends, colleagues and admirers
in his chair-filled wilderness garden. Each was given a rare
American buffalo nickel as a gift and a
MORRISSEAU original drawing.
Over the years, he remained a master of the primitive school
of art. In 1981, Globe and Mail art critic John Bentley
MAYS
described Mr.
MORRISSEAU's as wholly appropriate to the context
of his background. "His styles, situations and subjects are exactly
what we would expect in the work of a self-taught artist who
has lived most of his life in northern Ontario. There is little
attention to figurative modelling in these pictures, no delving
into the problems of perspective or pictorial depth. Using his
small repertoire of techniques, he presents stylized versions
of what he knows: the bears, loons, fish and turtles that live
in the forests and ponds, and the people in the town around him.
"But these are not ordinary forests, ponds and people.
MORRISSEAU's
art transports us into a shadowy archetypal realm where ordinary
things are wonderful. In his visionary lakes swim mighty fish,
armed with bolts of spiritual lightening. A bear spirit -- a
dragon-like chimera spangled with bright eyes and brilliant colours
suddenly stands in your path."
For all his success, Mr.
MORRISSEAU allowed his career and his
life to descend relentlessly. In 1987, he was discovered wandering
the downtown streets of Vancouver, sleeping in alleys and selling
his sketches for the price of a bottle of booze. "To get drunk
in Vancouver is the most beautiful thing there is," he was quoted
as saying.
Years later, after he had dried out, Mr.
MORRISSEAU told The
Globe that his drinking binges in part reflected his resentment
over "never getting my fair share." Still, he said he enjoyed
life on the Vancouver streets: "I met a lot of nice people. I
might even do it again - without the booze - so I can remember
them all clearly."
Around that time, he met Gabor
VADAS, a young man with problems,
and the two formed a bond. Mr.
MORRISSEAU believed that Mr.
VADAS
was his son and the younger man presents himself as such. However,
the relationship was never ratified "through the legal courts,"
according to Mr.
VADAS's wife, Michele, "but certainly as far
as from a traditional native and spiritual point of view [Mr.
VADAS
was his son] because they take their adoptions very seriously&hellip
They never lost faith in each other and have always been very
loyal to each other."
In 1989, Mr.
MORRISSEAU was the only Canadian painter invited
to exhibit at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris during the
bicentennial of the French Revolution. After seeing the works
of Van Gogh and Picasso, he decided they were "all greys" and
returned home to paint "some real colour."
He first exhibited with the Kinsman Robinson Galleries the following
year. Wearing a new silk suit, he arrived for the opening in
a white limousine. The exhibition sold out.
At 65, Mr.
MORRISSEAU developed Parkinson's disease but continued
to paint. "My hands don't shake when I hold a brush," he told
Chris Dafoe of The Globe in 1999.
He had a healthy respect for his own talent. Doctor Henry
WEINSTEIN,
a doctor in Northern Ontario's Red Lake district who in the 1950s
was among the first to recognize Mr.
MORRISSEAU as a true original,
was a friend of Pablo Picasso and once gave a
MORRISSEAU drawing
to the Spanish master. On the back, Mr.
MORRISSEAU had written,
"From one great artist to another." Picasso, after looking at
the drawing is said to have remarked: "Well, you never know,
do you?" - meaning that great art surfaces in unlikely places.
The comparison of the two artists was not entirely inappropriate.
Mr. MORRISSEAU, like Picasso, could draw spontaneously, never
lifting his pencil from the paper until the image was complete.
"Very few artists in the world have this ability," Doctor
WEINSTEIN
said.
Mr. MORRISSEAU's early work was created on birch bark or animal
hides. Mr.
ROBINSON said he at first punched holes in the bark
or hide but was later given paints by Doctor
WEINSTEIN.
Mr. MORRISSEAU believed he was a "born painter" and said that
when he started to paint, the images "just come." He created
his designs to beautify the world with colour. "The world needs
it," he said. Colour was a key resource in Mr.
MORRISSEAU's repertory
of symbols. He used connecting lines to depict interdependence.
"These paintings only remind you that you're an Indian," the
artist said. "Inside somewhere, we're all Indians. So now when
I befriend you, I'm trying to get the best Indian, bring out
the Indianness in you to make you think everything is scared."
Less inviolate were his family relationships. Mr.
MORRISSEAU
has six (some say seven) adult children from his marriage in
1957 to Harriet
KAKEGAMIC, and has claimed at times to have fathered
as many as 14 sons and daughters. Over the years, this has resulted
in conflict with some of the children. Three months ago, for
instance, one of Mr.
MORRISSEAU's sons, Christian, also an artist,
announced the creation of the Morrisseau Family Foundation to,
in part, "ensure my family's heritage and the integrity of my
father's legacy." A month after this, Mr.
MORRISSEAU issued through
Mr. VADAS a press release declaring that he had "not been consulted
or in any way involved" with the Morrisseau Family Foundation,
"nor do I support it in any way."
Mr. MORRISSEAU was a prolific artist before illness slackened
his output - it's been estimated he produced more than 10,000 works
in his lifetime. Aided by Mr.
VADAS, he battled in recent years
against what they alleged were a spate of fakes.
In the meantime, Mr.
VADAS and his wife cared for Mr.
MORRISSEAU
after the onset of Parkinson's and Mr.
MORRISSEAU doted like
a grandfather on their two children, Kyle and Robin. Earlier
in this decade, he spent some time in an extended care facility
on Vancouver Island, but for most of this year, he lived with
the VADAS family in their house in Nanaimo, B.C.
All things considered, Mr.
MORRISSEAU was proud of his place
in Canadian art history. "I may not have a Ferrari, but I'm the
first Indian to break into the Canadian art scene and I have
forever enriched the Canadian way of life," he said. "I want
to make paintings full of colour, laughter, compassion and love...
If I can do that, I can paint for 100 years."
He spent much of his last years in a wheelchair, deprived of
intelligible speech. He suffered at least two strokes.
In October, Mr.
MORRISSEAU travelled to Northern Ontario to receive
an honorary degree from the University of Sudbury, and had planned
to go to New York to attend the opening of his one-man show at
New York's George Gustav Heye Center, which is part of the National
Museum of the American Indian. Instead, he became ill in Toronto
and was admitted to hospital.
Norval MORRISSEAU was born Norman Henry
MORRISSEAU at Beardmore,
Ontario, on March 13, 1931. He died yesterday in Toronto General
Hospital of complications from Parkinson's disease. He is survived
by numerous children.
The public may visit Mr.
MORRISSEAU's open casket Thursday and
Friday this week from 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. each day at
Jerrett Funeral Homes, 1141 St. Clair Ave. W., Toronto. It is
anticipated that he will be buried near Beardmore, Ontario, or
Thunder Bay.
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KAKFWI o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-08-27 published
WILSON, T.N. "Neil"
At Bluewater Health, Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Site, Petrolia,
on Saturday, August 25, 2007, T.N. "Neil"
WILSON of Alvinston
in his 81st year. Beloved husband of Ellen
(McLELLAN)
WILSON.
Dear father of Thomas (Barbara) of Holstein, Bob (Judy) of Windsor,
Marie (Stephen)
KAKFWI of Yellowknife, Tod (Diane) of Bowmanville.
Loving grandfather of Clare (Jeff), Angus, Matthew, Jessica,
Kyla (Amos), Daylyn (Lance), Thomas Keenan, Rachel and Cory and
great-grandfather of Maslyn and Tydzeh. Also survived by 3 sisters
and 2 brothers and their families. Predeceased by brothers; Norman,
Roy, Alec and Donald. Relatives and Friends will be received
at the Van Heck Visitation Centre, 3232 River Street, Alvinston
on Monday from 7-9 and
on Tuesday from 2-4 and 7-9. The Funeral
Service will held at Hope United Church, Alvinston on Wednesday,
August 29 at 11 a.m. Interment Alvinston Cemetery. Memorial donations
may be made to Hope United Church or Shriners Hospital for Children.
Arrangements by Van Heck Funeral Home (519-287-2831).
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