Lilias Torrance Newton, Portrait of André Biéler, around 1950, oil on canvas. Purchase, Chancellor Richardson Memorial Fund, 2003 (46-032). Credit: www.bernardclarkphoto.com
Exhibitions
Portrait of the Artist
Première Series
Samuel J. Zacks Gallery
27 June - 22 August 2004
In late 2003, the Art Centre acquired two art works to honour Frances K. Smith, curator emeritus, and to celebrate her 90th birthday. They were on public view for the first time as the nucleus of this exhibition. Frances Smith was the assistant and colleague of André Biéler (1896-1989) during the Art Centre's early years, and is the author of his biography, André Biéler: An Artist's Life and Times, published in 1980.
Biéler played an important role in the history of art in Canada and had a significant impact on the arts in Kingston and at Queen's University over a period of fifty years. Born in Switzerland, he was raised in Montreal and studied at the Art Students' League in Woodstock, N.Y., in Switzerland, and in Paris with Symbolist artists Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis. In 1936, Biéler became artist-in-residence at Queen's University. He remained in Kingston for the rest of his life, serving at Queen's until his retirement in 1964 as founding head of the Department of Art and founding director of the Art Centre. He was a gifted artist, a charismatic teacher and is remembered with affection in the Kingston community.
The first of these works acquired in Frances Smith's honour was Portrait of André Biéler by Lilias Torrance Newton (1896-1980). This magnificent portrait of our founding director was purchased with the assistance of the Chancellor Richardson Memorial Fund.
The second, The Yacht Club, by Biéler himself, was a handsome example of the artist's work from the 1950s and came to the Art Centre from the Biéler family.
These two works were joined by several related paintings and drawings from the collection, including another new acquisition: a chalk portrait-sketch of Biéler by Grant Macdonald (1913-1987) was drawn as a classroom demonstration in 1948, and donated to the Art Centre by a student in that class, Ronald E. Blair.
Dorothy Farr