Robert Markle

Robert Markle (August 25, 1936 – July 5, 1990) was a Canadian painter of the female nude.

Early life and career Markle was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1936. In 1954, he began attending the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where he met his wife, Marlene Shuster.

Since his wife worked at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, his work came to the attention of Avrom Isaacs, and he held his first solo exhibition at the Gallery in 1963. He is considered one of the "Isaacs Group" of artists.

In 1968, a retrospective of his work was held at the McIntosh Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Western Ontario. In 1989, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery curated The Painter and his Model: Markle since '85. The Durham Art Gallery organized Markle retrospectives in 1990 and 2002. In 2003, Anna Hudson for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, organized an exhibition entitled Woman as Goddess: Liberated Nudes by Robert Markle and Joyce Wieland, in which Markle's work was sharply criticized, and Markle called a misogynist by the Toronto Globe and Mail. In 2011, Blazing Figures: A Retrospective of Robert Markle opened at the Gallery de Boer in Owen Sound. (The Art Gallery of Ontario in its "Close-Looking" series discusses one of the angels.) Markle also did wall-sculptures for the Ellen Fairclough Building in Hamilton (1981) and the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (c. 1984), and painted outdoor murals in Mount Forest (1986) and Owen Sound, Ontario (1987).

Personal life and death An accident while riding his motor bike in 1969 left him with two broken arms and internal injuries. After recovering from his accident, he moved with his wife to a farm at Holstein, Ontario, near Mount Forest. About then, he began to examine his Mohawk heritage, followed by a trip to the Caughnawaga reserve.