Philip Surrey, at his best, presents a paradoxical, mystifying mixture of banality turning into violence HENRY LEHMANN THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL Sep 25, 2004 - p. H2 Montreal painter Philip Surrey (1910-1990) is best known for his nocturnal scenes - at least by those relatively few members of the general public...

In the context of contemporary art, the work of Maurice Cullen (1866-1934) might seem incredibly conservative. Yet, in his time, the late 19th and a chunk of the 20th century, his work was quite radical. Cullen’s vision of reality was especially far out in a Canada still under the...

When a major touring retrospective for Maurice Cullen was not shown in Montreal because the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was closed for renovation, the late Walter Klinkhoff in September 1974 undertook the task of presenting his own show of Cullen's art. His son Eric said, 'My father did this...

As a young, aspiring reporter in Montreal in 1964, one of my first stories was about Sam Borenstein , the iconoclastic painter. After the piece appeared in the Westward News, the now-defunct weekly owned and edited by a rambunctious Irishman named John O'Meara, Borenstein gratefully gave me a print of...

The story goes something like this: During a 1966 exhibition of his works, AY Jackson , the great Canadian painter and founding member of the Group of Seven , who loved to talk about his work, stood next to one of his paintings surrounded by an adoring crowd, which was...

William Raphael (1833-1914) was the first Jewish professional artist in Canada. He was respected enough by his peers to have been appointed as a charter member of the Royal Canadian Academy, employed by William Notman's photography studios and sought after as a teacher. Raphael was also considered a significant enough...

No more than a few dozen visual artists in Canada have the privilege of supporting themselves these days solely from selling their art. Most artist have to cobble together a living teaching of doing odd jobs. And even then, Statistics Canada has shown that the average income of a visual...

Retrospective designed to attract people unlikely to visit an art gallery ANN DUNCAN THE GAZETTE Saturday, September 12, 1992 Each fall for the past 20 years, the Galerie Walter Klinkhoff has done something that is truly exceptional for a commercial gallery. It organizes a museum-quality exhibition at its own expense...

Montrealer Robertson deserved a better fate ANN DUNCAN - Gazette Art Critic THE GAZETTE Saturday, September 12, 1991 Montreal painter Sarah Robertson has all but fallen through the cracks of history. After all, it has been 40 years since she was accorder her only solo exhibition. Organized by the National...

Walter Klinkhoff, doyen of Montreal’s commercial art galleries, tells the story of a phone call from business tycoon E.P. Taylor: 'Can you remove the office portraits of my predecessors and replace them with good Canadian paintings? Nothing too expensive. I know horses and nothing about art, and you know everything...

Like many of his contemporaries, Canadian painter Frederick Simpson Coburn (1871-1960) listened to the beat of the drum inside him, so his oeuvre reflects little, if anything, of the art movements that revolutionized 20th-century and late 19th-century art. Coburn, the subject of a retrospective at Galerie Walter Klinkhoff (1200 Sherbrooke...

The 82-year-old woman, handicapped since childhood, has left to posterity one of the finest testaments to the joy of Canadian life. Her love affair is declared with every bold brush stroke. The happiness and joie de vivre is brought is told with each robust splash of colour. From looking at...