A Newsletter for Collectors
Morris Tenzer 1966
St. James & Peel
While researching my biography of Surrey (click the Life & Times page for fuller information), I acquired a surprising amount of historical and/or technical data about a large number of his works.
Because much of it is the kind of information that’s too detailed for publication in either the biography I’m writing or the database I’m cataloguing, I’m making it available through newsletters. Through the generosity Nicholas Simpson of the artist’s estate and SODRAC who administers the licensing of all reproductions, I have their permission to post Philip Surrey, Artist: A Newsletter for Collectors on this site, illustrated with all relevant images. These illustrations are .pdf compressions from low resolution photographs and are intended only as rough but useful educational guides. Readers are invited to send queries and responses to philipsurreynewsletter@gmail.com
Until I’ve assessed demand, the newsletter is available only in English.
Newsletters will be posted at irregular intervals. They are free-standing and can be read in any order but frequently overlap, looking at one aspect of his work from various angles. I’m aware of repetitions but some things do bear repeating.
In 1965 when I was twenty-one, I moved to Ottawa where I lived for two years. Back then, the old National Art Gallery on Elgin became one of two refuges (the other was the legendary Le Hibou coffeehouse) when I needed to take time outs from my personal obsessions – poetry, theology, Biblical Studies and simply contemplate the pictures Canadian artists painted and the songs Canadian musicians wrote and sang. It was a good place to be to do both. At the NAG, I sat and looked and listened to what people said about what they saw when they looked at what I beheld. Half a century later, I still think it’s the best first step in art education and now, through the NAG’s underappreciated internet site, anybody can do what I did without living in Ottawa.
As far as Philip Surrey goes, the NAG doesn’t have much to offer – 8 pieces are said to be in the collection but only 7 are catalogued: oddly assorted, the reflect several distinguishing features of his work but minimize it and give no hint of how controversial he was at the beginning of his career and how successful he was artistically and commercially in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to the pictures, there is also a taped interview conducted by Charles Hill, the curator of Canadian Painting in the 30s which does little to enhance his reputation: Surrey was in poor health, addled by medications, and uncommunicative.
The driving forces behind the first series of newsletters are to illustrate how limited a view of Surrey the NAG presents by examining his work in the 1930s in detail and to provide collectors with a better sense of the artist’s studio practices and range of interests.
Briefly stated, the first newsletter deals with Surrey’s Vancouver period with special attention to his portraits of women; the second issue focuses on Surrey’s Martinique 64 and his longtime (1932—1990) support of the Civil Rights movement and his advocacy for the freedom of consenting adults everywhere to embrace in public and love as they choose in the private without legal constraints; the third issue examines Surrey’s wartime criticism of the A.Y. Jackson—National Gallery’s Poster Project and his espousal of the subject matter and sensibilities of the Beaver Hall artists that the Poster Project rejected. Read on.