Sorel Etrog, towering figure in Canadian Modern art, dies at 80

Major public sculptures leave an indelible mark on Toronto’s urban landscape, AGO’s Matthew Teitelbaum says

Sorel Etrog with one of his most recognized Toronto pieces, The Hand.

By: Murray Whyte

Sorel Etrog, the renowned Toronto-based sculptor whose rough, visceral works put him at the fore of the nascent Modern art movement in Canada, died here Wednesday morning. He was 80 years old.

“I am truly saddened to learn that Sorel Etrog, a great Canadian artist, has passed away,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which held a retrospective of Etrog’s work last year. “His deep and ongoing search for ways for us all to connect will be visible for generations to come in Toronto, the city he loved, where several public installations of his sculptures have left an indelible mark on the urban landscape and our public imagination. I considered Sorel a friend, and will miss him.”

Etrog, whose gestural figurative style allied him with such giants of Modern art as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, leaves a legacy of public sculptures across Canada and particularly here, in his adopted hometown. But perhaps his most public work is the one that bears his name: The Etrog, the Canadian version of the Oscar for excellence in film, which he designed in 1968 and which later became known as the Genie.

That legacy will grow posthumously in the near future, as Mount Sinai Hospital prepares to open a sculpture centre with more than 100 of Etrog’s works designed, as the hospital’s chief of psychiatry described it, as “a place of intervention.” The 2,500-square-foot facility will open next year.

Etrog made several public works throughout his career, many of which dot the urban landscape here. His overriding concern was the human body’s transformation in an increasingly mechanized, industrial world.

Dreamchamber, a fixture of Bloor St. W. at Huntley St. since 1976, is a dense cluster of bronze forms resembling a skull split open. Sun Life, a 1984 signature work installed at King St. and University Ave., is a tall abstract cluster of angular bronze forms, like a machine let loose of its housing. Just down King St., another bronze from 1972 called The Hand is a grotesque, comic monument, fingers morphing into links of a chain. Nearby, at 40 University, Flight II, from 1964, reads as an abstract, mechanical bird, shrouded in shrubbery.

An accomplished poet and writer, Etrog was deeply influenced by Surrealism, publishing plays, poetry and non-fiction, collaborating at one point with Marshall McLuhan. Though he was born in Moldavia, now part of Romania, he was deeply rooted in the cultural life of Toronto.

Etrog, who was Jewish, survived the Second World War, immigrating to Israel with his family in 1950, where he studied art. His first show in Tel Aviv in 1958 won him a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum. Once there, the Guggenheim purchased one of his sculptures in 1959 and his career began to blossom. It was there that he met prominent Toronto collector and patron Samuel Zacks, who, with his wife Ayala, became Etrog’s most vocal champion and supporter.

Toronto’s Gallery Moos showed his work for the first time in Canada that same year. By 1963, he had moved to Toronto and become a Canadian citizen. His career had bloomed when, in 1966, at just 32 years of page, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale alongside Alex Colville and Yves Gaucher. At the same time, Etrog’s work was commissioned to appear in an even larger public forum, as the signature piece for the Pavilion of Canada at Expo 67. Called Flight, a twisted, angular birdlike form, it’s now part of the Bank of Canada collection. It’s installed at Wellington and Bank Sts. in Ottawa.

In the years that followed, the accolades piled on, with Etrog showing at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to name a few, among the most accomplished artists of his generation.

“We at the AGO had the privilege of working with Sorel recently on an exhibition that spanned the breadth of his impressive career,” Teitelbaum said. “From that opportunity came a meaningful understanding of his legacy.”

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2014/02/26/sorel_etrog_towering_figure_in_canadian_modern_art_dies_at_80.html