Tag: artist

My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War

  REVIEW: My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War, by Anne Sinclair (Farrar Strauss & Giroux) Born in New York in 1948, the prominent French-Jewish journalist Anne Sinclair says that while the heroic stories of her paternal grandparents, who had stayed in France during wartime, had always resonated deeply within her, she…

The sculptor Glicenstein and other Glicenstein ‘cousins’

Born as Tsvi Hirsh Glicenstein in Konin Poland about 1872, my great-grandfather came to London as a youth, married, then brought his family to New York in 1909, and to Toronto in 1913. His tombstone (1955) memorializes Harris Glickstein, the anglicized name he used most of his life. My late grandfather Ralph Gladstone further altered…

The new Arts & Letters Club opens, 1910

The Arts and Letters Club will have unique quarters in the York County Building on Adelaide Street From The Star Weekly, August 1910 By Augustus Bridle Less than a year ago a well-known artist in Toronto, whose name is W. E. H. Macdonald, drew a simple picture of a Viking ship with full sails set…

Only in Los Angeles: the Wilshire Boulevard Temple

When your address is Hollywood and you’d like some murals in your synagogue, who are you going to call? L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple is a magnificent structure, both inside and out. Modeled roughly after the Great Synagogue of Florence, its features seem by turns pure Byzantium and pure Hollywood. Large as a cathedral, it boasts…

Obit: artist Ernest Raab (died 2003)

Ernest Raab, an internationally renowned sculptor, artist, poet, writer, and Talmudic scholar, died Aug. 22. He was 77. Among his many other works, Raab created the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and the monument to Raoul Wallenberg in Earl Bales Park, a bas relief at Beth Tzedec Congregation and the stained glass windows at Beth David…

Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology

Situated on a dramatic windswept cliff overlooking Vancouver’s Georgia Strait and the snow-capped peaks of the Coast Mountains, the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology pays homage to the art of the Northwest Coast First Nations in several important and pioneering ways. The museum, which opened in 1976, was designed by internationally renowned Canadian…

Obit: gallery curator Ken Saltmarche (1920-2003)

Canada’s art world is lamenting the end of an era with the demise of Ken Saltmarche, founding director of the Art Gallery of Windsor, who died in Toronto on July 3, 2003, at the age of 82. An accomplished artist, Saltmarche ultimately made his greatest mark as an arts administrator and is being remembered as…

Horses on Yonge Street bridge below Davisville

No, it isn’t an advertisement for Marlboro Cigarettes. Those dozen horses, seen in silhouette on an old railroad bridge that spans Yonge Street below Davisville, are the work of 34-year-old site-specific sculptor Robert Sprachman of Toronto. Entitled The Iron Horse, the sculpture consists of 12 life-sized silhouettes of horses arranged on the defunct Beltline Railroad…

Toronto sculptor Sorel Etrog helps commemorate D-Day landing

Sorel Etrog, one of Canada’s most notable sculptors, recently attended a ceremony in Reviers, a town along the Normandy coast of France, at which one of his works was unveiled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Canadian landing on D-Day. The sculpture, called “Sunbird II,” is made of bronze, weighs about 900 pounds, and…

A sketch of artist Gerald Gladstone

Humanity’s future: will it be “earthbound” or “spacebound”? My uncle, the artist Gerald Gladstone, posed this question to me recently outside Yorkdale shopping centre in North York. We were standing in the parking lot near The Bay, beside one of his major works, a bronze colossus called Universal Man, which was installed there in late…