PRICE: $15,000

PROVENANCE
West End Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, Ontario
Canadian Post-War and Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 28, 2013, lot 51
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
William Kuhns and Léo Rosshandler, Sam Borenstein, 1978, pages 49, 54 and 92
Loren Lerner, Sam Borenstein, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2005, pages 38 and 42

Sam Borenstein began painting in the Laurentians north of Montreal in the early 1940s. Unlike his Montreal street scenes, he now painted with a greater expressiveness and bolder colour. As William Kuhns observed, the landscapes, “evoke a mood altogether different from the dour, vagrantly sad, city studies – bright greens thrash with yellows in a grassy field; clouds move in a gorging rush of white impasto, reminiscent of Vlaminck; trees and bushes become a splashwork of apposite strokes and colour, flaking off one another like sparks.” His landscapes are rarely devoid of the human presence and include village churches and older houses, destabilized by a tornado of paint. As Leo Rosshandler wrote, “It was during the last ten or twelve years of his life that he found his own way of seeing and painting the world. These were the years of his greatest achievement.” Here a bridge traverses the river and anchors the composition. Foliage, painted with a palette knife in brilliant yellows and reds, defines the foreground in a composition very similar to his painting Mont-Rolland, Autumn of c. 1962, reproduced in Lorne Lerner’s catalogue. Borenstein dated this canvas to a specific day, 5 October 1961. The product of his entire life to that day, the painting was most likely painted in a single sitting, so characteristic of the artist’s amazing energy.

We thank Charles C. Hill, former curator of Canadian art from 1980 to 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada and author of The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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