Bruno Bobak the Full Palette

BRUNO BOBAK THE FULL PALETTE

Edited by Bernard Riordon

Goose Lane Editions and The Beaverbrook Art Gallery

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

On the cover: The Tired Wrestler, 1964, oil canvas, 120.0 x 100.0 cm. Gift of Mel and Stephen Ross in memory of Reuben Ross. NAC: 965.29. Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal QC

Book jacket and page design by Julie Scriver. Typeset by Troy Cole – Envision Graphic Design. Printed in Canada. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bruno Bobak: the full palette / Bernard Riordon, editor.

Co-published by Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-86492-481-X

1. Bobak, Bruno. 2. Artists — Canada — Biography. I. Riordon, Bernard II. Beaverbrook Art Gallery. III. Title: Full palette.

N6549.B6252F84 2006 709'.2 C2006-904661-1

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.

Goose Lane Editions The Beaverbrook Art Gallery Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court Box 605, 703 Queent Street Fredericton, New Brunswick Fredericton, New Brunswick CANADA E3B 5X4 CANADA E3B 5A6 www.gooselane.com www.beaverbrookartgallery.org

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CHAPTER 1 The Early Years

Bruno Bobak knows very little about his early childhood. During World War I, Joseph Bobak, the man who would become his father, had moved from Wawelowka, Poland, to Buffalo, New York, with his sister, Mary, and their parents. There, Joseph married Bronislawa Wiewiorka, also a Polish immigrant, in 1917, and later that same year, their first child, Henry, was born. Joseph and Bronislawa moved back to Poland in 1921, and soon their second son, Ernie, was born. Bruno was born on December 28, 1923, on a night so stormy that Joseph was unable to get Bronislawa to a doctor. He was christened Bronislaw Josephus Bobak, named after his mother and father. In 1925, conditions in Poland were such that Joseph, Bronislawa, and Henry, Ernie, and Bronislaw returned to North America; a Canadian customs official gave him the name Bruno because he thought it was easier to pronounce and more acceptable to the Canadian ear. Joseph and Bronislawa left Henry with his Aunt Mary, who adopted him; in 1986, Bruno tracked his brother down in Louisiana, where they celebrated their reunion, and Henry died a few months later. Bobak doesn’t know why his parents gave up their eldest son, but in hard times, families commonly share the upbringing of children, and perhaps this was behind their decision. The Bobak family ended up in Saskatchewan, where Joseph, a teacher and newspaper editor, was expected to farm. Naturally, he and Bronislawa didn’t care for farming, and, Bobak says, they “started moving eastward, to places in Ontario.” By 1926, they had left the Windsor area and settled in Hamilton.1 “The earliest memory I have is of Hamilton, Ontario,” Bobak says. “My brother Ernie and I were sitting in a school playground when we were approached by a strange woman. I was four or five years old, in kindergarten, I guess. The woman had a bag of cookies, the two-layered kind with icing in the middle. She gave us a cookie and persuaded us to leave with her. I didn’t know it at the time, but my real mother had left my father for another man, and this woman with the cookies, who was essentially abducting us, was my father’s new common-law wife. Her name was Mary. Growing up, we called her Babi. Babi became our kind, loving mother, the only mother I ever knew. The only time I think I saw my real mother

Bobak-V2.indd 17 9/7/06 11:03:50 AM Bronislawa Bobak, Bruno, Ernie, Joseph Bobak, and Henry, as pictured on an immigration document, Danzig, Poland, 1925.

again was many years later on a street in Toronto. We passed on the street, and I got the feeling she was my real mother. I turned and looked back at her and saw that she had turned to look back at me. We made eye contact and that was it, we kept on going.” Other than that her last name, Wiewiorka, is Polish for “squirrel,” Bobak knows as little about his mother as he knows about his life in Poland.2 Bobak’s second memory is of Ernie persuading him to run away from home. “We were living somewhere near Gage Park in Hamilton, and Ernie, two years older than me and the guy who made all the decisions for me, said, ‘Let’s get out of here and go and live with Mother.’ So we headed out to a place called, I think, Stony Creek, where my mother was living with her common-law husband. We were walking, of course, and about halfway there darkness overtook us. It was summer and warm enough, so we decided to spend the night in the ditch by the road. We were comfortable and dozing when all of a sudden there were flashlights shining in our faces. It was a couple of police officers, who picked us up and took us back home. Ernie ran away again when he was in his early teens, made it to Mother’s place and stayed there. I didn’t see him again for fifteen years. So, except for my father and me, our family was all separated — Ernie and Mother somewhere in the Niagara area, Henry with Aunt Mary in Buffalo, and Father and I in Hamilton.” Bobak has nothing but praise for his stepmother. “Babi was kind and sweet and warm and looked after me,” he says. “I was her baby.” His relationship with his father was stressful to say the least. He describes his father as a jealous, demanding disciplinarian; dictatorial and temperamental, he tried to dominate every situation and got very angry if his sons didn’t fol-

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Bobak-V2.indd 18 9/7/06 11:03:51 AM low his instructions. In the years between World War I and World War II, jobs were few and far between. Joseph resorted to manual labour when he could find it, taught drama in schools in the Polish neighbourhood, and frequently contributed to a Polish journal. He also organ- ized picnics and festivals, events that young Bruno intensely disliked, perhaps because he was frequently commanded to volunteer his services. His father had no sympathy for Bruno’s opinion; he simply expected Bruno to obey orders. The occasional employment Joseph found was not sufficient to sustain the family. They could barely pay the rent, let alone buy basic necessities like food and clothing. Their living conditions bordered on squalor; they occupied two-room apartments, often sharing bathroom facilities or even an outhouse in the backyard. “There was a government policy that the only way to stabilize the price of food was to create a shortage,” Bobak recalls. “I remember going down to the wharf in Hamilton where there were truckloads of potatoes being dumped into the water. I was there along with a lot of other poor people, fishing the potatoes out of the water to take them home to help feed the family. Would you believe it, police ran us off! We were starving, and the police wouldn’t let us get those potatoes out of the water! “Food was scarce for the poor. I remember going down to the railway yards and trying to pick up lumps of coal to help heat our apartment. Once we went into an empty boxcar where there were broken bits of watermelon scattered around, scraps from a broken crate or something. We were trying to scrounge a bit of it for food, and the railroad policemen ran us off for trespassing. So, in a sense, it was really starvation. I remember one of the best treats I ever had was at school. Babi had packed me a shredded cabbage sandwich for lunch, and I swapped lunches with another boy. His sandwich was brown sugar and honey.” It is not surprising that, burdened with the stress of living with a demanding father and the pain and disorientation that accompanies hunger, Bruno was failing miserably at school. He was laughed at and bullied, and, lacking insight and unaware of his precarious conditions, his elementary school teachers could not quite understand why he was such a difficult student. They frequently caught him doodling, daydreaming, unable to apply himself to his work, and, worst of all, defiant. Dealing with such a child in the usual manner — giving him the strap — was futile. Strap him as hard as they might (which they often did), he’d look them in the eye and smile while they were doing it. In 1935, the Bobaks moved to Toronto, where, for the first year, conditions were not much better. There was a bit more work to be found, however, and Joseph took up stripping, repairing, and varnishing hardwood floors. Babi also began to bring in meagre wages as a seamstress in a laundry. While his Hamilton teachers more or less concluded that Bobak’s intelligence was less than average, his Toronto teachers recognized his condition for what it really was. He wasn’t doing well in school because he was hungry, malnourished. The situation was assessed, and it was decided that under the circumstances he should be transferred to another school, a special school on College Street that concentrated on developing children’s bodies as well as their minds. “In those days,” says Bruno, “the best the province of Ontario had to offer was on the top floor of the Department of Education building. It was just classes, a program of a sort. I don’t think it even had a name.”

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Bobak-V2.indd 19 9/7/06 11:03:51 AM Saturday Morning Art Classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto, 1930s.

In this institution, all of Bobak’s classmates were in the same straits, but here they weren’t beaten, they weren’t bullied, and they weren’t forced to work. They were given food every day, allowed to take naps, were permitted to do just about anything they wanted to do. “At times we were allowed to go up on the roof and sleep on cots, or just hang out,” Bruno recalls, “When the weather was good, we’d sometimes go to High Park, for the outing, for our health and, I guess, peace of mind. They had facilities there to help you express yourself. So I did a lot of art work. “I met up with a rather delicate young fellow named Gerald Budner. I was a sensitive child and so was he, and we became great friends. It was Gerald who told me about the art classes they were giving on Saturday mornings at the Art Gallery of Toronto, now the Art Gallery of Ontario.” In 1930, the Saturday Morning Classes, part of the Children’s Art Centre established originally for children of gallery members, had expanded to include children recommended by their schools. The classes offered practical instruction in arts and crafts, as well as art appreciation. Arthur Lismer, one of the founding members of the renowned Group of Seven and the supervisor of education for the Art Gallery of Toronto, emphasized freedom of practice and expression: “The children are led towards experiments for them- selves. There is no question of what they will become, no thought of making artists or art workers, their professional and vocational life is not our problem — it is the business of the staff to encourage every latent idea in design, form and colour, to lead out from the child and to avoid the practice of merely pounding in theories, facts and information.”3 Bruno Bobak and Gerald Budner (who later became a National Film Board of Canada director) went to the gallery, and there they discovered that there was a fee for attending these classes. “It was very little money,” says Bruno, “but more than I could afford. The man I talked to, the guy in charge of the classes at the gallery, was Arthur Lismer, a socialist-mind-

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Bobak-V2.indd 20 9/7/06 11:03:53 AM ed fellow who, when he learned I had no money, suggested I become a monitor. A monitor sets up benches and easels and cleans up after the classes have ended, and it meant not having to pay. Well, I thought that was great. In fact, being a monitor made it all the more exciting for me because it meant I could mix not just with the student body, but with the teachers and staff as well. So I got more and more excited about this whole art thing and started to meet a great many capable artists, many of whom became well-known later in life.” Entering those classes was an experience Bobak has never forgotten. And it wasn’t just the classes that enthralled him. The art itself — the works displayed on the gallery walls, the ex- posure to the hundreds of paintings by great artists from around the world — fascinated him. “There was no such thing as television, and the people I knew and rubbed shoulders with didn’t go to movies. To see even a book with colour reproductions was a rare thing. So coming face to face with real art on the wall was an incredible inspiration for me, for all of us.” Bobak could scarcely have had a better guide into the world of art than this tall, charis- matic, pipe-smoking member of the Group of Seven; he felt himself transported into a world of magic and creativity. “He had a way about him that attracted you, that made you want to get involved,” Bobak says. “He was a great man. He inspired a whole generation of Canadian artists. I don’t know if his manner of teaching was unique or not, but he never wanted us students to paint in any kind of detail. He encouraged us to express ourselves boldly and vigorously. He was so certain about this approach to the basics that he limited the material we used, giving us very few colours and big brushes to work with.” It was the era of the Great Depression; the economy was grim, in a state of ruin. Most people, including artists, were suffering financial distress. Although Bobak himself was poorer than most, the general poverty turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him. Many artists, even some of the greatest of the day, could not find commissions or sell their works. To

Mary (Babi), Bruno, and Joseph Bobak in the garden of their home on Ossignton Street, Toronto.

THE EARLY YEARS 21

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