Mashel Teitelbaum

Mashel Teitelbaum (1921–1985) (variant name Mashel Alexander Teitelbaum) was a Canadian painter, born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1921.

He was the father of museum director Matthew Teitelbaum.

At first, self-taught but studied from 1950 to 1951 at the California School of Fine Arts with Clyfford Still and at Mills College with Max Beckmann (1951).

He then lived in Montreal, then Toronto, where he worked as a set designer for CBC Television and served as art critic for the Toronto Telegram for over a decade (1954–1959).

He then studied art in Europe (1959), and taught at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba (1960) before returning to Toronto, founding the New School of Art in 1962.

At first, Teitelbaum painted his own form of portraits featuring expressionism, then landscapes of various regions in Canada.

His style became increasingly abstract throughout his years of painting, going through many changes, among them single Zen-like improvised gestures on unprimed canvas.

He taught at the University of Manitoba School of Fine Art (1960), and New School, Toronto (1961).

By 1967, he critiqued modern art, then in 1973, he made paint skin constructions, of acrylic paint peeled away when dry from polyethylene sheets to make collages.

He then turned to painting exuberant landscapes.

That he turned from abstraction to representation in some ways resembled that of other artists of his generation such as Duncan de Kergommeaux who also turned away from abstraction to make landscape.

Mashel Teitelbaum died in Toronto, Ontario in 1985.

Mashel Teitelbaum was described as a "brilliant but mercurial" artist, afflicted by bipolar disorder by the Toronto Star in 2009.