Ghitta Caiserman-Roth

Ghitta Caiserman-Roth (March 2, 1923 – November 25, 2005) was a Canadian painter and printmaker.

She was a founder of the Montreal Artist School and her work is in the National Gallery of Canada.

Caiserman-Roth was also an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy and the first painter to receive the Governor General's Award for Visual Media and Art.

Ghitta Caiserman-Roth was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923 to a Romanian-Jewish family.

Her parents were Sarah Wittal, the founder of a children's wear company called Goosey Gander, and Hananiah Meir Caiserman, a civic leader in the Montreal Jewish community and a union organizer and activist.

Both parents were heavily involved in socialist causes which had a significant impact on Ghitta's art.

Her first formal influence was her art teacher, Alexandre Bercovitch, who taught her through private lessons at her family home in Montreal in 1932.

While painting under his tutelage, at the age of eleven, Caiserman-Roth received an Honourable Mention at the Art Association of the Montreal Spring Exhibition.

Bercovitch was the epitome of bohemian and she recalls his "bulging blue eyes" with fondness.

Caiserman-Roth attended the High School of Montreal, the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, and finally from 1940 to 1943 the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

During that time in New York, she also studied at the American Artists School, at the Art Students League, and with realist painter Moses Soyer.

Caiserman-Roth returned to Montreal in 1947 and opened the Montreal Artists School with her first husband, Alfred Pinsky.

They opened the school with artists Barbara Eckhart and Harold Goodwin.

Many of the students were war veterans and Caiserman-Roth served as the principal.

During a 1948 trip to Mexico, she encountered the socialist mural movement, after which she started to incorporate mural forms along with socialist themes into her work.

Caiserman-Roth recalls that her first major sale was to A.Y. Jackson; her first major public gallery sale was of her painting entitled Backyard, which she sold to the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1949.

She continued successfully as a practicing artist, receiving numerous awards and memberships, and having her work featured in solo and group exhibitions.

She has been represented in over 100 collections, both public and private.

Although the Montreal Artists School was closed, Caiserman-Roth remained devoted to education.

She held teaching and lecturing positions at Sir George Williams College and Concordia University, as it was called later.

She also taught at the Saidye Bronfman Centre, Queen's University and Mount Allison University, the Nova Scotia College of Art, Mount St. Vincent University, Arts Sutton, Ontario College of Art, Vermont Studio, John Abbott College, Ottawa School of Art, and others.

She also served as a critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, offered critiques to individual artists and education groups, and gave numerous lectures in Canada and the United States.

She has been recognized as an significant mentor for artists in Quebec and across Canada.

Caiserman-Roth’s father, Hananiah, ran a salon out of their family home in Montreal and this was where her earliest influences began.

Artists and writers would gather there to discuss social and political change.

Her father reviewed art exhibitions and exposed her to many Montreal artist and writers.

One of the most memorable to Caiserman-Roth was "Yud-Yud" Segal who introduced her to Marcel Proust and Romain Rolland.

Not only was she heavily influenced by literature but by the painter Louis Muhlstock.

After his return from artistic study in France.

They would take many walks together and she learned the difference between "seeing" and merely "looking at".

Muhlstock was incredibly sensitive to his environment and this had a large influence on Caiserman.

Later on she attributed her free-range imagination and varying degrees of abstractionism to Muhlstock.

Her early childhood experiences play heavily into the relationships depicted in her paintings, especially between mother and child.

Her mother, Sarah Caiserman, expressed her love of art by designing clothing for her children.

Caiserman-Roth recalls sitting in piles of her mother's fabric enchanted by the colours, textures and patterns.

However, the school only ran until 1952 and was then sold.

Caiserman-Roth studied political murals as they explored Mexico bringing fresh ideas back to the McGill Ghetto where they lived until 1956.

This experience was heavily drawn upon when she painted First Steps (1956), depicting her own daughter.

She studied with Albert Dumouchel in graphics under a Canada Council Senior Fellowship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal in 1961 to 1962.

She had a special fondness for Dumouchel and praised his welcoming demeanor and his acknowledgment of individual expression.