Our city. Our art.
Female artists featured in Market Gallery show
For Paraskeva Clark, the painting Rosedale Viewreflected how she felt. Stuck.
The Russian-born artist came to Toronto when she married a local accountant in 1931 and found the city and its art scene very dull: “Landscape, landscape, landscapes,” she liked to say with a wave of her hand — don’t get her started on that “bloody” Group of Seven. What did they know about menstruation?
The Rosedale View shows a snowy winter scene out of the second-floor window of her Roxborough Dr. home, but the vantage point also showed her reality. In 1943,
her oldest son, Ben, was been diagnosed with schizophrenia. For the rest of her life she lived with her son, painting in her Rosedale home and railing against capitalism.
“She had to always be home for Ben,” her younger son, Clive, now 85, says. “Because she was stuck at home she had to find all sorts of subject matter she could paint from home, so you get all these still lifes, pictures of fruits, personal friend’s portraits. She painted from memory.”
“And Rosedale land views,” his wife, Mary, chimes in.
Paraskeva Clark died in 1986, but two of her works are being shown at Toronto Through the Eyes of Women Artists, an exhibit at the Market Gallery. The city has been collecting art since the 1850s, and a quarter of its collection comes from women who painted, etched and drew a city that in some cases we only know from black and white photos.
Over the years, the city’s art collection — found in meeting rooms, offices and city-owned properties — has depended on its finances. There were good times in the early 20th century, and also in the 1980s, but the recession in the early 1990s saw a sharp cut to acquisitions. Now, the city mostly collects art through donation, says Neil Brochu, the supervisor of collections and outreach for the city.
For this show, Market Gallery manager Jacquie Gardner had the idea to focus on how women saw the city. She noticed there was a relationship between interior and exterior spaces — views from windows in home, studios and public buildings. From Doris McCarthy’s 1931 painting of downtown from the window of her mother’s Toronto General Hospital room to Christiane Pflug’s 1967 drawing that shows the view from her kitchen sink — complete with faucet, hydro lines and apartment towers.
Paraskeva Clark’s two works in the show are views from different homes where she lived with her young family in Toronto. Paraskeva was fiercely loyal to her family, but she felt that a woman’s role in the world was unjust.
“Painting is not a woman’s job,” she said in 1957. “If I were a man I could be hard-hearted, selfish and paint modern art. But I’m not and I can’t.”
Paraskeva Plistik was born in Russia, and grew up working class. She studied painting in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd) during the Russian Revolution — and when she painted theatre sets after graduation, she met Oreste Allegri Jr., a scene painter from a famous set designing family. The couple married and lived in the back of a theatre, and had their son Benedict in March 1923. They planned to move to Paris, but in July 1923, Oreste drowned while swimming. Widowed with an infant, Paraskeva moved in with her in-laws in the Parisian suburbs that autumn, doing housework to earn extra money. After her son was old enough to go to school, she learned English and worked at an interior design shop in Paris, where, in the summer of 1929, she met Philip Clark — a tall, bookish Canadian accountant visiting the city with his friend, wellknown violinist Murray Adaskin.
Philip and Paraskeva began corresponding. He didn’t know she was an artist until she sent a self-portrait. They eventually married in England, and Paraskeva moved to Toronto in 1931.
Clive Clark looks at the Rosedale View on a cellphone and recognizes the snow-covered chimneys of his old neighbours. The house was on a hill, with good views on every side. He remembers his mother sketching from different rooms and then going to her basement studio to paint, the smell of turpentine drifting upstairs. She always talked about how an artist needed to close the door and lock out the world, but her studio door was never locked, he says. She always sent her work to juried shows. “I can remember paintings going out the door, and the oils were still wet,” he says.
His parents threw great parties, with lots of French cooking. Over the years, their big living room hosted artists like Charles Comfort, Elizabeth Wyn Wood and A.Y. Jackson. Paraskeva was the life of the party, but occasionally embarrassed her husband with her communist rants, Clive says.
“Oh, I loved her,” Clive’s wife, Mary, says. “She was very controversial. She went on about the Group of Seven and how they didn’t understand menstruation, and how hard it was for a woman like her.”
Clive says his mother eventually softened on the Group of Seven and did a few landscapes herself. But she always believed that art should have a social element.
Paraskeva was a self-identified “red,” but she didn’t join workers organizations or the Communist Party of Canada “because she worried that political activity could put her and her family in jeopardy,” Jane Lind writes in her biography of the artist, Perfect Red: The Life of Paraskeva Clark.
Clive thinks his mother’s Communist sympathies were spurred on by her friendship with famed Canadian doctor and blood transfusion pioneer Norman Bethune. Paraskeva and Bethune met when Bethune was raising money to send a medical team to help the rebels in the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
Clive remembers a gregarious man at the door yelling, “Where’s the beer?” at one of his parents’ parties.
The two became close. “He was my lover,” Paraskeva said in a 1982 NFB documentary.
In Lind’s book, she notes that infidelities and open marriages occurred in 1930s Toronto but speaking about it was taboo. That always “seemed hypocritical” to Paraskeva. Speaking “improper truths” was how she sustained her identity and “survived in Toronto’s sedate culture,” she writes.
Paraskeva raffled off her art to raise money for Spain, lectured on Russian art and created one of her most famous pieces in 1937. Held by the National Gallery, Petroushka was inspired by the killing of striking steelworkers by the Chicago police.
The painting shows two puppets — a police officer beating a worker, and a capitalist in a top hat, performing on a small stage in the street, surrounded by workers. Clive says his mother did not change her political views later in life, during the Cold War. She’d talk about “Stalin building the canal,” but she never got enough information, he says. Even if she did, he doubts that she would have changed her mind.
Although the Clarks were heavily mortgaged during the Depression, Philip had done well in his accounting career. She despised capitalism, but she never had to worry, living on its spoils in Toronto’s toniest neighbourhood.
That tension was captured by the 1982 NFB documentary Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady. The owner of Canada Packers, J.S. McLean, bought several of Clark’s paintings, and the film shows Paraskeva at the meat processing plant.
“I just hate capitalism,” she says, walking around the lunchroom. “Well it helps to buy art,” an employee says. Lind notes that Paraskeva didn’t use the word feminist to describe herself, but she was instinctively one. She objected to an all-male committee at a 1941 artists’ conference, and when she was asked to paint the “drama of women’s work” during the war, she pointed out that many of the jobs — cooks, clerks — were not positions of power. But she was filled with contradiction — she believed women were “physically less capable than man,” Lind writes. But yes, she was a feminist. In the NFB documentary, an art dealer tells Paraskeva to “smile pretty” for a picture. “Oh, go to hell,” she replies.
Toronto Through the Eyes of Women Artists runs until late April at the Market Gallery.