RESTORING A REPUTATION
Leibovitch family wants his artwork exhibited
The first thing that hits you is the smell — a dusty rush of old linseed oil and mildew — as the door opens to reveal hundreds of paintings leaning against the metal walls and piled haphazardly on the concrete floor.
From large-scale Rubenesque nudes and sombre caricature-like portraits to smaller, breezy summer landscapes, the diverse array of images seems weirdly out of place in a dimly lit storage unit. Some are hard to make out through years of dust.
These mouldy canvases and warping boards are the sole legacy of Norman Leibovitch, the mercurial modern artist whose star shone brightly in Montreal throughout the 1940s and early ‘50s but dimmed in subsequent decades.
Despite early critical acclaim, Leibovitch turned his back on the art scene. He worked in solitude, producing a body of work estimated at more than 1,000 paintings at the time of his death in 2002.
Fifteen years later, all that work is in danger of perishing — slowly deteriorating in two commercial storage units.
He devoted his life entirely to painting. “I do it because I must” was his stock answer when asked about his curious vocation.
Leibovitch is remembered as a rugged, highly intelligent man whose articulate demeanour and movie-star looks masked the inner demons he conveyed on canvas. He could also be stubborn, and became notorious for feuding with art dealers and fellow artists. Consequently, he cut himself off from the Montreal art scene for decades at a time while his friends were busy establishing markets for their work.
He refused to exhibit throughout most of his life, despite venerated Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer singing his praises at the vernissage of Leibovitch’s 1951 one-man show Paintings of Israel, at the West End Gallery. But he never stopped painting. “Life has meaning to me only through my work,” he said. “My interest in life is based on my art and it is the connection I have with reality.”
Born into Montreal’s artistically fertile Jewish ghetto in 1913, Leibovitch attended Baron Byng High School alongside future poet Irving Layton, a lifelong friend. “We lived for a long time on Drolet St.,” he recalled in a 1988 television interview, describing how the old buildings along St-Dominique and Coloniale below Marie-Anne St. inspired his early paintings.
At 23 he left for two years in New York to study at the American Peoples School and the American Artists School, and came home with his head ablaze with new ideas. He enjoyed the company of fellow artists, many of whom shared his Eastern European roots: Alexander Bercovitch and daughter Sylvia Ary, Moe Reinblatt and Louis Muhlstock.
“He was a very charismatic man in his youth,” says son Charles Leibovitch. He describes his father as “the quintessential bohemian, who wore a beret and came from a family of immigrants.”
Leibovitch’s unfettered drive to create was matched only by his versatility, and he mastered a diverse range of styles. Riffing on the earlier generations of Post-Impressionists and Fauves as well as his Montreal friends, he produced a wide body of work that encompassed everything from uniquely Canadian themes to subjects inspired by his travels to Israel and Mexico in the 1940s.
His large female nudes, some dancing in groups, are reminiscent of Cézanne and Matisse; his floating horses and sheep suggest Chagall; and at first glance some figurative work could be mistaken for that of Montreal friends Harry Mayerovitch and Ghitta Caiserman-Roth.
“I don’t remember him ever going to a museum,” says his daughter, poet Babo Kamel. “I can see Picasso and Chagall in his work, but he never mentioned any artist by name. He was an independent soul who produced from within.”
Leibovitch attributed much of his artistic success to Pearl, his devoted wife of 52 years.
“She was a most charming and gracious lady — and a good social worker and mother,” he recalled. In an unusual arrangement for the time, Pearl was the family breadwinner, leaving her husband totally free to paint. She also arranged sales and forged all-important connections.
It was through Pearl’s social work that the couple became close friends of Judith and Sam Borenstein, the expressionistic artist who created bold, colourful Laurentian landscapes and Montreal street scenes with dramatic slashes of his brushes and knives — a far cry from Leibovitch’s more subdued palette.
“Pearl became my mother’s first Canadian friend when she arrived in Canada from Germany as an immigrant in 1936,” recalls filmmaker Joyce Borenstein, who chronicled Sam’s life and art in her Oscarnominated NFB documentary The Colours of My Father. “Pearl was very helpful in making my mother feel at home. Pearl was a very capable social worker and my mother admired her as a professional.”
The Leibovitches never owned a car, but that didn’t stop them from visiting fellow artists’ families in the Laurentians: the Muhlstocks in Val-David and Borensteins at Lac Brulé near Ste-Agathe. They boarded at local farms, which allowed Leibovitch to spend his days painting en plein air in the pastoral countryside.
“He walked everywhere, and yet he always wore second-hand shoes,” recalls Kamel.
After two successful comeback exhibitions in the early 1960s, a promising real-estate business opportunity went sour and Leibovitch lost everything.
“It injured him to the core,” says Kamel. “He should have declared bankruptcy, but he refused. That’s when he became completely reclusive and stopped exhibiting — but he never stopped painting.”
Kamel says her father always kept odd hours; he would leave their Outremont home in the middle of the night and go to his downtown studio, situated above a strip club. When he returned the next day, he often smelled of alcohol.
Meanwhile, Pearl’s career flourished; she eventually became manager of professional development at Jewish Family Services. But when she died of ALS in 1987, the aging Leibovitch withdrew even further. “When my mother died, that’s when he started drinking heavily,” Kamel recalls.
From that point until his own death 15 years later at 88, Leibovitch rarely ventured out of the family’s Davaar Ave. home, drinking beer and scotch while continuously experimenting with different styles and new ideas. Finished canvases piled up, but most of them have never been seen by the public.
About 70 paintings were exhibited posthumously at an Outremont gallery in 2004, and since then most of his life’s work has been in storage.
As former West End Gallery owner Michael Millman points out, the many years of self-imposed isolation led to his being largely forgotten by dealers and collectors, and that lack of demand diminished the value of his work. As a result, Leibovitch was literally a mere footnote in local art historian Esther Trépanier’s definitive work on his friends and contemporaries, the 2008 book Jewish Painters of Montreal.
“Leibovitch had a promising career, but in the early 1950s was overcome by manic depression,” says Millman, whose grandmother, Rose Millman, organized Leibovitch’s 1951 show. “He withdrew from all exhibitions and associations . ... Though he continued to paint in private, his art career was interrupted. He exhibited once or twice years later at a small gallery in Toronto.
“It’s a tragic story, and I found it difficult to value his work alongside the likes of (Jack) Beder, Borenstein and Bercovitch.”
Prominent Montreal and Toronto art dealer Alan Klinkhoff agrees. “It is sad but true,” he says. “(Leibovitch) didn’t help himself by not creating a market base somewhere. Had he done so, there would not be 1,000 works in storage.
“The status of his estate is not unlike countless other artists of their generation,” Klinkhoff continues. “He and his family would have been better served to sell his work more aggressively during his lifetime.”
Regardless, Leibovitch’s children still hope to restore those surviving canvases and their father’s reputation. They know they face an uphill battle, but they remain optimistic.
“I’ve had a few shows here,” Charles says of Vancouver, where he now lives. So far, he says, a few of his father’s canvases have also found their way into the collections of public institutions, including the Vancouver General Hospital.
“Recently, a lady who bought a painting a few years ago came back and bought three more. There are a few people who come back each year to buy more of his work.”
“I would just love to see these works on people’s walls and on the walls of institutions,” Kamel says, adding that a few have already been donated to the Montreal Children’s Hospital and the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Côte-St-Luc.
But that road may not be easy, and in the meantime she hates to think of her father’s life’s work laying forgotten in a dark, dusty storage facility.
“We would love to get them out of storage and enjoyed — brought out from the dark and into the light.”