Bertram Brooker

Bertram Richard Brooker (March 31, 1888 – March 21, 1955) was a Canadian abstract painter. A self-taught polymath (the first in Canadian art), in addition to being a visual artist, Brooker was a Governor General's Award-winning novelist, as well as a poet, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, copywriter, graphic designer, and advertising executive. A key part of the art community in Toronto, he is considered one of its "most gifted first responders".

Early life Brooker was born in Croydon, England, to Richard Brooker and Mary Ann (Skinner) Brooker. In 1905, when he was seventeen, he moved to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba along with his family. There was a booming economy and a huge influx of emigrants from England and elsewhere in Europe wanting to better their lives. In Portage la Prairie, Brooker worked with his father at the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in a menial capacity. He attended night school and was, as a result, given clerical work at the railway.

In his social life he sought out like-minded persons with a passion for art and music. The Brookers' modest Glenview Avenue house in the middle-class neighbourhood of Lawrence Park became a meeting place for creative individuals, including the conductor Ernest MacMillan and the artists Charles Comfort, Paraskeva Clark, and Kathleen Munn.

Artwork Around 1922 to 1924, Brooker began working on a series of non-objective paintings inspired by a profoundly mystical experience during a visit to the Presbyterian church in Dwight at the Lake of Bays in Ontario around 1921. This mystical experience reinforced his spiritualism and motivated him to attempt to render the mystical in art. at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto. He was one of the first Canadians to paint in this style, although Kathleen Munn, Henrietta Shore and Lowrie Warrener also made abstract paintings in advance of 1927, but these were not presented in solo exhibitions before Brooker.

Brooker's first set of abstracts, from 1922 to 1924, and later works such as Ascending Forms, c.1929, appear to be inspired by the Vorticist paintings of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), David Bomberg (1890–1957), William Roberts (1895–1980), and Helen Saunders (1885–1963). The art of this group, particularly that of Lewis, used abstraction in sharp-edged lines to denote movement in a violent, slashing way. Brooker's first abstracts are influenced by the English group's use of precisely defined geometrical forms in aggressive contortions and highly saturated hues. Brooker later wrote the essay "Nudes and Prudes" in 1931 as a rebuke. It was published in "Open House", edited by William Arthur Deacon and Wilfred Reeves (Ottawa: Graphic, 1931).

Memberships He was elected a member of the Ontario Society of Artists. He was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters and belonged as well to the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour.

Legacy

In 1972, the National Gallery of Canada held Bertram Brooker: A Retrospective Exhibition, which travelled nationally.

In 2024, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection organized a retrospective curated by Michael Parke-Taylor, titled "Bertram Brooker: When We Awake!"

Brooker bibliography Subconscious Selling (1923) Layout Technique in Advertising (1929), writing as Richard W. Surrey Copy Technique in Advertising (1930), writing as Richard W. Surrey Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, (1929–30, 1936) edited by Brooker Elijah (1929), drawings published November 1929 Think of the Earth (1936) The Tangled Miracle (1936), writing as Huxley Herne The Robber: A Tale of the Time of the Herods (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949; Published in Canada by Collins, 1949) Sounds Assembling: The Poetry of Bertram Brooker (1980) Source: