Printmaker, Painter and Person: Ghitta Caiserman from World War to Cold War

Résumé

We investigate the first two decades of Ghitta Caiserman’s long career, a career which has yet to receive the attention it warrants in Canadian art history in spite of her substantial prominence during much of it. These early decades reveal an artist already deeply engaged in national and international public spaces and institutions, as well as in those specific to her city of Montreal. Her precocious work of the 1940s, in particular the prints, was overtly sociopolitical, and holds an important place in Canadian graphic satire. The postwar shifts we witness, while more evidently focused on the personal in her paintings, find her no less engaged. Her turn toward the more deeply subjective was marked in particular by a fusion of subject and formal concerns; it is this fusion, in the context of an art world that had given such precedence to the formal, that gives her the space to engage with the world around her as a teacher, a mother, a public figure, and a feminist before the fact.