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Gabor Szilasi, Guido Molinari and Judith Terry, opening at Galerie Sherbrooke, Montreal, January 1969, Collection of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, View along St. Paul Street with Bonsecours Market, Montreal, November 1961. Collection of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, André and Marie-Rose Houde’s kitchen, Lotbinière, January 1979. Mira Godard Study Centre, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto, Donation of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, Classy, Phillips Square, Montreal, April 1977, Mira Godard Study Centre, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto, Donation of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, Staircase, Lörinc tér 2, 8th District, Budapest, September-October 1995, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, Classy [now destroyed], St. Hubert Street, Montreal, Summer 1985. Collection of the artist, © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, Engraver’s shop, Gozsdu udvar, 7th District, Budapest, September-October 1995, Collection of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, Television with crucifix in Léon Lajoie’s house, Île aux Coudres, Charlevoix, September-October 1970, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, Linda Dornan in her apartment, Montreal, December 1979. Collection of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Gabor Szilasi, Luc Simard, Édouard Guay, and Joseph Lajoie, standing beside stock car, Saint-Urbain, Charlevoix, September-October 1970, Collection of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009.

Canadian Museum
of Contemporary Photography
380 Sussex Drive
613-990-1985
Ottawa
The Eloquence of the Everyday – Gabor Szilasi
October 9, 2009-January 17, 2010

Over the last 50 years, Gabor Szilasi has created one of Canada’s most significant and influential bodies of photographic work, comprising environmental portraits, domestic and urban views of Montreal and Budapest, and images of rural Quebec. His photographs have been sustained by an unwavering belief in the humanistic and documentary value of the medium. This exhibition of 124 photographs celebrates Szilasi’s achievement and reveals the essence of his artistic vision through his observations of urban and rural life and his recordings of the connections between culture and community. In order to represent the evolution and reach of Szilasi’s work, more obscure and never-before-exhibited photographs are shown alongside better known, more iconic images.

The exhibition was organized by Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Musée d’art de Joliette.

“Everything is constantly changing around us: what my camera captures at this moment is already of the past. That is why it is important to me to record the world as I see it today through photography. I am not interested in the past or the future: I am interested in the present. Through the photographic image, I can directly record the signs of the past and the future as they appear in this moment.”

— Gabor Szilasi, 1977

Gabor Szilasi was twenty-nine years old in 1957 when he and his father arrived in Halifax as immigrants fleeing Hungary. Two years later, he settled in Montreal, where he has lived ever since.

Szilasi had developed an interest in European pictorialist photography while still living in Budapest, but from the time of his arrival in Quebec, his work has been sustained by an unwavering belief in the documentary value of the medium. In keeping with documentary practices, his concern centres on the subject of the photograph and its clear presentation and elucidation. Szilasi’s viewpoint remains that of an outsider, one whose European perspective and sensibility have allowed him to temper formality with sympathy and to produce compelling photographs that embody a sense of profound compassion.

He has created remarkable images of Quebec and Europe — townscapes and cityscapes, architectural views, and environmental portraits, a genre in which the setting plays a prominent role. The cultural and historical value of the work rests not only in the eloquence of the individual images, but also in the cumulative record they provide.

This exhibition presents the photography of Gabor Szilasi, describing its evolution over five decades through an examination of the work carried out in three locations: Hungary, rural Quebec, and Montreal. Within each section, architectural, and town and city views mingle with portraits in order to reveal Szilasi’s belief in the centrality of community. The exhibition includes early images of Hungary in the 1950s, as well as those made since 1980. The photographs of rural Quebec date principally from the 1970s, while those of Montreal span the years from the late 1950s to the present.

— David Harris, Curator

Early Hungarian Work, 1952-1956 / Return to Hungary, after 1980

“When people ask me how I began to take photographs … I do not have a nice story to tell. No archangel appeared to me in my dreams and said, ‘Gabor Szilasi! Go, buy a Leica and you will become a great photographer.’ It was nothing like that – I simply felt the need to take photographs, to put what I saw on film. And so I began to work.”

— Gabor Szilasi, 1979

In 1952, at the age of twenty-four, Gabor Szilasi acquired a Zorkij camera, a Russian copy of the Leica IIIF, and started photographing. He developed film in the bathroom of his family’s apartment in Budapest, and a few years later bought an enlarger, which allowed him to make rudimentary prints of his work. His earliest photographs are varied and exploratory: informal portraits of friends mingled with picturesque views of the city with its characteristic street vendors and tradesmen. These early images reveal the influence of European pictorialism, fashion and documentary photography, genres Szilasi would have been exposed to through books and magazines, as well as exhibitions by both professional and amateur photographers in Budapest. His moving record of the Hungarian uprising in late November 1956, his last photographs made before fleeing the country, is represented by three images in this section that reinforce the documentary impulses found in his early work.

Szilasi first returned to Budapest in 1980. Since then, he has revisited the city eight times, photographing its streets, buildings, and parks and making environmental portraits of people whom he had known earlier in his life. This more recent work has been motivated by the desire to connect a personal past with the present, and to create cultural records and architectural documentation similar to what he had produced in rural Quebec and Montreal.

Montreal:
Architectural and Urban Views,
1959 to the present

“If you keep walking in Montreal in any direction, within 500 metres you’re in a different community: street views, people, architecture change.”

— Gabor Szilasi, 2008

In 1959 Szilasi settled in Montreal. He learned about the city largely from walking, exploring an unfamiliar place and deciphering an unknown culture through the lens of his newly acquired 35 mm Leica camera. Throughout the 1960s he created a series of picturesque urban views, but beginning in the 1970s, he sought more formal and systematic ways of representing both the city’s urban form, and by extension, its urban life. In this section, three projects are highlighted. In his 1977 and 1979 study of St. Catherine Street, a major, commercial thoroughfare running east-west across much of the city, he used a 4 × 5 inch view camera to respond to the disparate commercial, religious, and institutional buildings along its length. In 1980–81 he borrowed a panoramic camera, whose horizontal sweep allowed him to describe the character and qualities of a variety of urban spaces found throughout the city. During three successive summers, from 1982 to 1984, in marked contrast to the more austere black-and-white work, Szilasi photographed buildings with electric and neon commercial signage in colour.

Through its sheer physical size and cultural and linguistic diversity, Montreal is perhaps unknowable in its entirety, but inhabitants construct their own image of the city, informed by individual circumstances and concerns. Szilasi’s Montreal projects can be viewed as constituting a cumulative portrait of the city, seen through the filter of his sensibilities as he grew to understand and progressively record it.

Rural Quebec in the 1970s

“In looking at the changes that have taken place in rural Quebec, one cannot help but be fascinated by the strange mixture of old and new, sacred and profane. Before us is a society in transition where the giant figure of Mr. Muffler stands beside a statue of the guardian angel, and the television, flashing its images of contemporary life, sits next to the crucifix in the family home.”

— Gabor Szilasi, 1977

Szilasi spent the decade of the 1970s extensively photographing small rural communities and towns throughout the southern half of Quebec in a number of self-initiated projects. Beginning with a study of Île aux Coudres and Charlevoix county in the autumn of 1970, he went on to photograph in the Beauce, the town of Lotbinière, at the western festival in Saint-Tite, and extensively throughout the Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean regions. At the outset, Szilasi did not envision this work, which has come to represent one of his most important contributions to Canadian photography, as a single project. What had been conceived in 1970 as a relatively modest study of a single community gradually evolved into a massive social and cultural document comprising hundreds of photographs, which includes environmental portraits, domestic interiors, architecture, and landscape and town views. With each phase, with each new region, Szilasi discovered continuities and commonalities. At the same time, he recognized local variations and regional particularities, and developed strategies for responding to these differences. Viewed now from a vantage point of more than thirty years, the entire body of work constitutes an invaluable record of these communities in a decade of economic and cultural transition.

Montreal:
Portraits of Artists
and Family,
1959 to the present

“I have made frequent excursions into street work, urban landscapes and interiors. Yet I have always returned to portrait photography. I enjoy the contact that occurs between the photographer and the sitter: conversation, silence, tension, relaxation, mutual exploration”

— Gabor Szilasi, 1989

Portraiture remains at the heart of Szilasi’s work, arising from his profound engagement with people and their experiences. While portraits are found throughout his Hungarian and rural Quebec work, those made in Montreal form the most extensive and distinctive group.

Almost all of the Montreal portraits are of people whom Szilasi has known well for a long time — his family, close friends, neighbours, fellow photographers, and artists — and,  for the most part, were not made as part of a specific project, but arose naturally during the course of his daily life. As such they can be read in biographical terms, revealing his interests, friendships, and professional relationships. None was commissioned, and Szilasi has photographed a number of the subjects, such as his wife, Doreen Lindsay, and their daughter, Andrea, many times over the last fifty years.

Szilasi has been drawn primarily to environmental portraiture, a genre in which the setting — a person’s home, work place, or even a public place — plays an essential role in elucidating the subject. How a person inhabits his or her space, and what the surroundings reveal about that person’s interests, tastes, and sensibilities become inseparable elements in the final portrait. The setting never functions merely as a generalized or arbitrary backdrop, but assumes a leading role, offering evidence for our understanding of the person and contributing to the larger meaning of the image.

Gabor Szilasi, born February 3, 1928, Budapest, Hungary, is a documentary photographer renowned for his humanitarian vision. His fascination with daily life has led him to search for images that show the traces of man’s presence — be it photos of people, interiors, vernacular architecture and urban landscapes.

“My subjects in photography really deal with every day life, mostly with people and their environment whether it’s indoors or outdoors and that is what always interested me.  I like … how everything changes, how everything is in eternal flux … you know signs change, buildings are demolished, new buildings constructed, same thing with people. If you walk into an interior to take a photograph, if you come back the next day it’s not the same anymore.  It might be just one object moved in the room but this constant change interests me and that’s one reason that I’m interested in social documentary.”

— November 2008

Largely self-taught, Gabor Szilasi started to photograph in Hungary in 1952 when he purchased his first camera — a Zorkij. In 1956 he documented the Hungarian Revolution in Budapest and shortly afterwards fled the country, eventually immigrating to Canada in 1957.  From 1959 until 1971, Szilasi worked as a photographer at the present Office du Film du Québec, photographing a wide range of subjects including Expo ’67.  During these years, Szilasi’s technical and practical experience, and extensive travel in Quebec grew through a wide range of assignments.  The photographer Sam Tata introduced him to the work of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and encouraged him to abandon pictorialism for social-documentary photography. In 1966, he was introduced to the work of the American documentary tradition as practised by Paul Strand and Walker Evans while taking a course at the Thomas More Institute. Parallel to his artistic practice, Szilasi was also a dedicated teacher: from 1971-1980, he taught at the Collège du Vieux Montréal and from 1980-1995, at Concordia University.

Szilasi’s personal work during the 1960’s includes a rich mixture of street scenes in Montreal, portraits of friends and family and images taken at exhibition openings. In the 70’s, Szilasi embarked on an extended series of projects documenting life and cultural change in rural Quebec. He first focused on the Île aux Coudres and the Charlevoix region, then the Lotbinière region from 1976 to 1977 and the Abitibi-Temiscaming and Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region between 1976 and 1979. In these works which he shot mostly with a view camera, Gabor focused exclusively on street views, and the interiors of residential and commercial buildings. From 1977-1979, he also worked on a series that documented storefronts, chaotic signage, and commercial buildings of Ste-Catherine Street. This project led in 1980-81 to a series of Montreal street panoramas achieved through his use of a panoramic banquet camera. Szilasi’s fascination with the city’s signage and advertising also inspired the Lux series (1982-84) in which he used colour photography and restricted them to illuminated signs that had been individually conceived and manufactured. From the 19080’s onward, Szilasi did much of his work abroad, undertaking projects in Hungary, Italy, Poland and France. In 1980, Szilasi returned for the first time to Hungary, and visited again in 1994 and 1995 to specifically photograph the city, places and people he had known.

Portraiture, which began in the 1950s with portraits of family and friends, has permeated Szilasi’s entire photographic production. In Montreal, from the 1960s until today, Szilasi continues to make portraits of artists, family and friends. From 1977-79, Szilasi took a new approach with the Portraits/Interiors series in which he created diptychs consisting of a black and white photo of the sitter paired with a colour photo of the room in which the photo was taken. In 1992, he embarked on a new approach to portraiture, using a view camera and photographing his subjects at extremely close proximity, tightly framing the sitters’ facial features. In 2003, he undertook the first of two projects at Les Impatients, an art therapy centre for people with psychiatric disabilities, where the artist and participants took turns in exploring the roles of subject and photographer, creating portraits and self-portraits.

Miller Brittain, The Rummage Sale,  1940, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Miller Brittain, Night Target, Germany, 1946, Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, (19710261-1436).

Miller Brittain, Longshoremen Off Work, 1938, New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, NB, (A48.7).

National Gallery of Canada
380 Sussex Drive
613-990-1985
Ottawa
Miller Brittain:
When the Stars
Threw Down Their Spears
October 23, 2009-January 3, 2010

New Brunswick’s Miller Brittain (1912-1968) burst upon the Canadian art scene with masterful emotion-filled drawings and paintings of the human form at a time when landscapes by the Group of Seven held sway. Miller Brittain: When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears celebrates Brittain’s artistic legacy and provides a fresh insight into his diverse body of work, from the dynamic social realism depictions of his native Saint John, to his surrealist-inspired compositions.

Organized and circulated by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the exhibition includes 70 works.

“Miller Brittain’s art explores the complexity of being human in desperate times,” said NGC director Marc Mayer. “While his early narratives continue to stir our emotions, his later post-war abstractions still intrigue our psyches. The National Gallery is pleased to present this important exhibition of one of Canada’s most talented artists and congratulates the Beaverbrook Art Gallery for organizing such an intelligent and beautiful representation of Brittain’s entire career.”

Miller Brittain: When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears charts the life of an artist, soldier, husband, father, and champion of William Blake’s poetry, from which the exhibition’s subtitle draws inspiration. “Ordinary urban narratives, New Testament parables, figurative abstractions and variations on organic metaphors all contribute to the iconographic lexicon of an artist who constantly pushed himself into new, perhaps dangerous, creative territory,” writes guest curator Tom Smart in the accompanying catalogue. The exhibition provides a magnificent overview of his life and work and is organized chronologically.

The exhibition begins with a look at Miller’s training at the Art Students League in New York City, a vibrant centre of instruction and debate, established and run by students for students. Here, Brittain developed his artistic voice and practiced his skills on a daily basis, true to the league’s motto — nulla dies sine linea (no day without a line). His etching Art Students (c. 1931) is a testimony of his attention to line, composition and form — the elements of art he would come to master.

Like many of his contemporaries, the Great Depression of the 1930s would see Brittain return to the familiarity and comforts of home. A studio on Saint John’s waterfront became an oasis for a close-knit creative community who argued, debated, sang, fell in love. It was here where Brittain met his future wife, the gifted pianist Caroline Starr. Many of Brittain’s earliest surviving works, such as Head of a Man (1932) from the NGC’s collection, are figurative drawings from these studio sessions. The portrait was drawn on kraft paper, a strong brown wrapping paper produced by the local paper mill that became a popular material for artists in hard times. His satirical drawings such as Lecturer (1937) and his genre paintings such as The Rummage Sale (1940) and Longshoremen Off Work (1938) would draw the attention of the critics of the day who recognized Brittain’s extraordinary talents and called him the “Canadian Brueghel.”

Brittain’s promising career was interrupted by the Second World War, when he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, serving as a bomb aimer before becoming an official war artist. During this time he produced the painting Night Target, Germany (1946), a pivotal work in Brittain’s career. The work is his only direct reference to the terrible aspects of war. Gone are the representations of the human figure, unprecedented in Brittain’s whole artistic practice to this point.

Lastly, the exhibition demonstrates Brittain’s crucial connection to the poet and engraver William Blake, whose mystical poetry inspired his post-war art. The recurring motif of the star and spear entered Brittain’s expressive vocabulary. First used to describe aircraft falling from the sky in the painting described above, it came to represent flowers and stems, heads and necks, sunbursts and smoke, sanity and insanity.

Tom Smart is the Executive Director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Previously, he was Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Carnegie Mellon University. His curatorial and gallery-management career also includes serving as Acting Director and Chief Curator of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Curator of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, and Curator/Manager of the Samuel E. Weir Collection and Library of Art near Niagara-on-the-Lake. He is the author of numerous books on Canadian art, including Alex Colville: Return and The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light.

A catalogue written by exhibition curator, Tom Smart, and comprising an essay by writer, philosopher, and art critic Allen Bentley, professor of English at St. Thomas University (Fredericton, New Brunswick), accompanies the exhibition. The 180-page fully-illustrated hardcover catalogue is available for $65 plus taxes at the NGC’s Bookstore or online at http://www.shopngc.ca/.