Gallery owner a champion of modern Canadian art
He was one of those bigger-than-life characters who came along at the right time with the right attitude — and a keen nose for art that stood out.
When Canadian art was shrugging off the generations-old dominance of the Group of Seven and Toronto was emerging as Canada’s most vibrant cultural centre, Av Isaacs’s Toronto gallery was exhibiting cuttingedge works that would define the era.
“Av had a long life — and oh what a big life!” Donnalu Wigmore said this week of her husband and longtime “partner in everything,” who died Jan. 15 at age 89.
A Manitoba native — born Avrom Isaacovitch in north Winnipeg in 1926 — Isaacs moved to Toronto in 1941. Within a few years he would have a front-row seat for the city’s creative development, and eventually have a hand in shaping the course of modern Canadian art.
His 51-year career started with a simple framing shop on Hayter St. in 1950. This morphed into an art gallery that would migrate over the years from Bay to Yonge and finally to John St. Along the way, he became mentor, supporter and friend to a roster of then unknown names that today cause serious collectors’ hearts to beat a bit faster.
Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers, William Ronald, Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, Tony Urquhart and Richard Gorman — to name just a few — were closely associated with Isaacs’s galleries during his long run as Toronto’s premier promoter of contemporary art.
“In the ’60s, I almost had a monopoly, or at least a vital part, of a scene,” Isaacs once said. “In the ’70s, there were a lot more galleries, Toronto was expanding, and the action spread out. I still had a terrific gallery, but there were a lot of other galleries doing terrific work, too.”
Dennis Reid, former chief curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario and one of Canada’s most prominent art historians, has fond memories of Isaacs’s gallery, where he often hung out in the early 1960s while a University of Toronto student.
“If you were interested in contemporary art at all, everybody was always abuzz over what was showing at Isaacs’s gallery,” Reid said. “The ‘Isaacs Gang,’ as they were known, were widely respected for being intensely avant-garde. Coughtry — wow! Snow — amazing!”
From Chambers’ realism and William Kurelek’s regionalist scenes to the all-out abstractions of Ronald and Rayner — with Inuit art, photog- raphy and installations tossed in — Isaacs showed a wide range of art. He also hosted musical events, poetry readings and lectures.
“There was a common pulse running through it all,” Reid. “If you went to see a Kurelek show, there might be an amazing Mike Snow out back.”
Although most of the artists Isaacs promoted were men, several prominent women also found a home at his gallery. Aside from Wieland, Isaacs showed the work of such key artists as Michaele Berman, Gathie Falk and Christiane Pflug.
Isaacs was no stranger to controversy; he knew that in art there is no such thing as bad publicity, and always supported his artists whenever they tested the boundaries of conventional taste. This landed him in hot water in the early 1970s, when complaints over sculptor Mark Prent’s realistic renderings of butchered body parts twice sent police to his gallery to charge Isaacs with publicly displaying “a disgusting object.” The resulting cause célèbre led to a change in obscenity laws — and did nothing to hurt Isaacs’s reputation as an art entrepreneur.
“Av was very good at what we would today call marketing, but I’m sure it never crossed his mind that that was what he was up to,” said Reid.
Groundbreaking art movements all have their unsung heroes — the dealers, patrons and critics who shared the vision and supported the artists when they needed it most. The impressionists had Paul Durand-Ruel; the abstract expressionists had Clement Greenberg; and the Group of Seven had Dr. James MacCallum.
Likewise, the story of Canadian modern art cannot be told without Av Isaacs, whose name is right up there with the creative men and women whose careers benefited from his guidance, promotion and friendship.