Dentist Harry Rosen also crafted outdoor sculptures
Harry Rosen was a pioneering Montreal dentist who made a name for himself as the creator of imposing outdoor sculptures that are on display around the city. He died Thursday at age 89 of pancreatic cancer. An emeritus professor in McGill University’s Faculty of Dentistry who specialized in reconstructive dentistry, Rosen developed a lifelong passion for sculpture while moving rocks and boulders near his country house on Lac Patrick in the Laurentians. “The kind of dentistry I do is more like engineering than dentistry. All week long, I move things around and build structures but on a tiny scale,” he told the Montreal Gazette in 1999. “On weekends, I also build things, but on a massive scale: I built a country house out of stone, then I worked on our waterfront, then I built a natural amphitheatre out of stone.” He was also building large sculptures, including a three-metre Inukshuk out of piled stones, each carved with a mallet and chisel. The head weighed 1,000 pounds. “A lot of what people create isn’t permanent — it decays, it falls apart,” he said at the time. “I don’t like that. It’s probably the mortality thing. You want to live as long as you can. You want permanence.” Rosen donated many of his works to Montreal health institutions, including the Jewish General Hospital, the Mount Sinai Hospital Centre, the Montreal Heart Institute and the Montreal Children’s Hospital at the MUHC superhospital. “He knew the connection well between art and healing,” said Sherry Goldstein, who facilitated the creation and donations of Rosen’s work for 18 years. In dentistry, he “was always creating environments that were conducive to healing. And it just was a natural evolution to wanting to put his work in healing institutions because we know art has such an ability to heal.” Fourteen of his works are installed around Montreal, with another three on display in Toronto. Many others dot his property in the Laurentians. Rosen’s works, the most recent of which were in bronze, usually depicted figures reaching for the sky. One titled The Ascent, located outside the Jewish General Hospital, was inspired by a Robert Browning poem that included the phrase “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” In 2011, he said of his passions for dentistry and sculpting: “It’s heaven, heaven on Earth. To do something like this, what could be more satisfying? I don’t know, someone in the business world who scores a big profit? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean that much to me. I suppose it’s important. But beyond a certain point, how much money do we all need?” Rosen was an internationally recognized dentist who in 1970 initiated the first Canadian graduate program in prosthodontics, a branch of dentistry that focuses on the restoration of natural teeth and the replacement of missing teeth. His work influenced his art. “I have had so much experience with hand-eye coordination and fitting things and grinding things and I understand materials so well,” Rosen once told an interviewer. “I can see things in three dimensions easily and I can tie form, function and esthetic together.” He taught at the Montreal General Hospital for 62 years, only retiring last year. The Dr. Harry Rosen Endowed Clinical Teaching Fund at McGill has raised about $500,000. Filmmaker and photographer Ezra Soiferman, a friend who has been documenting Rosen’s life over the past decade, said what fascinated him most “was how he seemed to be built of the very same stones he found, moved, chipped, ground, moulded, cast, set, donated, showed and shared. “Like his sculptures, this gentle giant of a man was unshakable and unmistakable. A rock-solid mensch.” Rosen last unveiled a sculpture in August, outside the Côte-St-Luc public library. His 18th and final work, titled Self Portrait, is expected to be unveiled in Hampstead’s Ellerdale Park in March to mark what would have been his 90th birthday. Rosen is survived by his wife of 62 years, Delores, as well as three children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Rosen’s funeral was scheduled to take place on Sunday at 1 p.m. at Paperman and Sons, 3888 Jean-Talon St. W.