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Description area
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Jewish Painters of Montreal refers to a group of artists who depicted the social realism of Montreal during the 1930s and 1940s. First used by the media to describe participants of the annual YMHA-YWHA art exhibition, the term was popularized in the 1980s as the artists were exhibited collectively in public galleries across Canada. In 2009 the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec mounted a touring exhibition Jewish Painters of Montreal: A Witness to Their Time, 1930–1948, which renewed interest in the group in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.
This collective included two generations of painters — established artists: Jack Beder (1910–1987), Alexandre Bercovitch (1891–1951), Eric Goldberg (1890–1959), Louis Muhlstock (1904–2001); those in mid-career: Sam Borenstein (1908–1969), Herman Heimlich (1904–1986), Harry Mayerovitch (1910–2004), Bernard Mayman (1885–1966), Ernst Neumann (1907–1956), Fanny Wiselberg (1906–1986); and those just beginning: Sylvia Ary (1923–2011), Rita Briansky (1925), Ghitta Caiserman-Roth (1923–2005), Alfred Pinsky (1921–1999), and Moses "Moe" Reinblatt (1917–1979). As a group during the 30s and 40s, they were united in their choice of subjects — the human figure, Montreal and its people, and the war. As individual artists, their style varied from socialist realism to stylized expressionism with some the subject of recent museum exhibitions in Montreal, Ottawa or New York.