In praise of ordinary women
Regina Seiden Goldberg, a member of the Beaver Hall Group, was known for her portraits of women
When Canadian artist Regina Seiden left Paris in 1935 to return to Montreal, war in Europe was imminent. She left behind a stash of her paintings. She never saw them again.
Back in Canada, Seiden more or less abandoned her art career and let her husband, Eric Goldberg, get on with his.
“I only blame myself,” she said in an interview in 1979. “I just wanted to live for him.”
Seiden was born in Rigaud, Que., in 1897. A daughter of immigrants, she grew up in Montreal and studied art there.
The 1920s were her most productive decade. She went to Paris to continue her studies. She exhibited in Montreal, Paris and London.
The National Gallery of Canada then snapped up three of her paintings.
Then in 1928 she got married — not a good career move.
Seiden’s repertoire focused on women and landscapes. In painting women, she tapped into a traditional subject for a woman artist.
But she was a modernist who embraced a loosely representational, simplified style — one that was still relatively new to Canada.
She was also an original member of the Beaver Hall Group, a collective of modern artists, both female and male, who painted and exhibited together in Montreal in the 1920s.
Painting portraits of the rich and famous helped many Canadian artists pay the bills. Seiden was well known for her portraits of women, some more ordinary than others. The sitter in “Old Immigrant Woman” (1922), for instance, is neither rich nor famous.
The painting belongs to the Art Gallery of Hamilton. It was one of the works showcasing the best of Canadian art at the British Empire Exhibition in England in 1924.
Seiden ennobles the woman by letting her dominate the composition. Instead of a fashionable outfit, she wears a modest dark shawl that covers her head, shoulders and chest, a white blouse, a striped jacket and skirt. The darker tones of the clothing draw attention to her face and hands.
Her body faces left, but her head turns to gaze directly, almost critically, at us. The corners of her mouth turn slightly downward.
Her hands rest clasped in her lap. The hands look tense, as though she is not quite comfortable being in the limelight. She may also be uncomfortable because her hands are idle. Not working is unfamiliar to her.
The background consists of a subtle pattern of brush strokes.
Obvious brush strokes, the marks of a modernist, enliven “Girl Washing Dishes on a Farm, St. Eustache, Quebec,” executed in the same year. Images of women at work in the home were popular subjects in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A woman stands with her back to us at a table in a sparsely furnished sunny kitchen. She has her left hand in a basin, or bowl. She faces a big window. A wide-brimmed straw hat, a staple of farm life, lies on the window sill.
Seiden’s style is sketchy and simplified. The cloth hanging from the table is painted in uneven vertical and horizontal strokes, not in imitation of fabric folds. Likewise, the woman’s blouse comprises white and yellow strokes running in many directions.
Seiden blurs the boundaries between an object and its geometric shape. The window, for instance, looks emphatically rectangular, its panes, squares. The legs and top of the table offer another square. And the woman’s apron adds another rectangle.
In “Nudes” (circa 1925), Seiden paints two women seated against a landscape. Female nudes in a landscape are traditional enough. Or, the setting might be an artist’s studio, the women are models, and the landscape, a big painting.
But the female nude belonged to the male artist. Seiden, like other modern female artists, was challenging that tradition.
Seiden died in Montreal in 1991 at the age of 93.