Christiane Pflug was born in Germany and immigrated to Canada in 1959. Her work focuses primarily on domestic spaces, taking a close, inquisitive and intimate look at the details and detritus of everyday life: views through her window, interiors, quotidian observations, landscapes and still lifes found at hand in her kitchen or her immediate neighbourhood. This subject matter belies the internationalism of her lived experience—her mother, Regine Schütt, a Red Cross nurse, renowned fashion designer and anti-fascist activist from a wealthy middle-class family, gave her up to a devoutly religious Roman Catholic Austrian family as a child to ensure her daughter’s survival during the height of the Second World War.
Christiane’s marriage to Michael Pflug, a medical student she met while studying fashion at École Baziot in Paris in 1953, meant further travels to Tunisia, back to Germany and then to Canada. Her early separation from Regine, whom she reunited with as a teenager, imparts an enigmatic solitariness to much of her work, while her experimentation with colour, form and composition derives from a fusion of Tunisian influence and her study of European painting. Despite what may have been seen as non-monumental subject matter and despite a relatively brief career, she became one of Canada’s pre-eminent realist painters.
Bird in Cage is a poignant monochromatic work completed in 1961, one year prior to her joining Avrom Isaacs’ gallery, which represented her work from 1962 to 1967. Pflug was a self-taught painter, and this small oil painting evidences the intersection of her influences, fusing a straightforward composition with dramatic intensity. Recognizable here are her studies of modern painters, including Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso. Bird in Cage is reminiscent of Picasso’s own monochromatic Blue Period and Rose Period works, where the narrowed chromatic field lends a wistfulness and emotional weight to playful figurative scenes.
Despite her studies of modern art, some of Pflug’s smaller works can disarmingly resemble folk art in their simplicity and distillation of form. Yet for Pflug, the playfulness and charm of these works is offset by the symbolic: here, the solitary figure of the bird, set against what resembles less a cage and more the bars of a prison, seems to stand in for larger questions of freedom and agency.
The “cage” is deftly established by the artist as an abstract grid of black and grey, with foreground / background delineated efficiently by a deep black band. The painting is without a discernible natural lighting source. Instead, a shadow seems to hover around the bird subject like an atmosphere: it reads as a kind of cumulus cloud of deeper grey outlining the bird. The bird itself, a white dove—suggesting both peace and communication—references its relative, the homing pigeon, a carrier of messages during the two world wars and mostly abandoned for such uses today. Caged, the dove is denied both roles and is instead reduced to a symbol. This is perhaps one of Pflug’s rarest gifts: to imbue a simple arrangement with psychological and sociological intensity.
She was commercially very successful at a time when women artists did not enjoy the same kind of attention as their male counterparts. Pflug taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design and held three separate solo exhibitions, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1966, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House) in 1969, and the Alix Art Gallery, in Sarnia, in 1971. She was also strongly encouraged by her husband, Michael, in her pursuit of an art career. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Pflug died in 1972, at age 36.
We thank Lisa Baldissera for contributing the above essay. Baldissera has worked in curatorial roles in public art galleries in Western Canada since 1999 and is currently the director of Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, BC. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2021.