Artist Samuel Borenstein
Title Untitled - Port de Treboul, Bretagne
Media gouache on paper
Size 17.5 x 19.25 in. / 44.4 x 48.9 cm.
Frame Size 26.5 x 28.5 x 1.5 in.
Estimate $1,500 - $2,500
Notes
signed lower right; framed with special glass
Provenance
private collection, Calgary
Biographical Information
Samuel Borenstein ~ [1908-1969] Canadian CAS
Born in Kalvarija, Lithuania, Borenstein was a painter, a draughtsman, a watercolourist and a sculptor. He immigrated in 1921 with his father and a sister to Montreal, where four of his brothers were already living. After apprenticing with a furrier and working as a cutter in a garment factory, Borenstein focused full-time on painting. With only minimal formal training, he approached painting with a distinctively modernist sensibility, rejecting traditional narrative, romantic subject matter and academic technique in favor of direct observation of the world and a free and expressive use of paint and color, taking inspiration from the works of avant-garde European artists, which he saw and admired in museums and galleries. He studied with Ezéar Soucy, John Y. Johnstone, and Alfred Laliberté at the Council of Arts and Manufactures in Montreal around 1926-29
for more biographical detail see www.galerievalentin.com; see Sam Borenstein, by W.Kuhns/L.Rosshandler, McClelland and Stewart, 1978; Sam Borenstein, by J. Des Rochers, Montreal Museum of Fine Art, 2005; biography and other examples in N.G.C. Vol.1, A-F, ed.C.Hill, pg.115; Jewish Painters and Modernity, Montreal 1930-1945, by E.Trepanier, pg.125, Centre Saidye-Bronfman, 1987; exhibition list in M.M.F.A., pg.38 and R.C.A.A., pg.41 by E.McMann