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Figure 1 – lead slide

Figure 2 Ghitta Caiserman-Roth (1923-2005), The Night Shift, 1943 /

Etching on wove paper, laid down on cardboard 17.6 x 12.5 cm (plate)/ Edition: not more than 8.
National Gallery of Canada 36674

The story I tell today begins with a sheet of comments set down in April 1992 by the Montreal
artist Ghitta Caiserman-Roth, who was born in 1925 and whose career stretches from the years of
World War II to her death in 2005. The comments were addressed to Rosemarie Tovell, then
curator of Canadian Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Canada. Tovell was
assembling the materials for her proposal to acquire twelve of Caiserman-Roths prints for the
NGC collection; Caiserman-Roth’s comments ar annexed to Tovell’s argument for acquisition.
Of all the comments, here is the one that explains the image you see on the screen. “During the
war years”, wrote Ghitta Caiserman-Roth, “I studied in New York and would come back to
Montreal during the summers to work in the war plants. I worked on both day and night shifts.
This etching is a self-portrait in a dream about the shell examining I did… my feet are in water…
the shells have wings and are flying around, and this gives the etching a surreal quality.” 1

A self-portrait – in a dream. In a space marked by surrealism, to be sure; in a space whose

narrative structure also recalls the early renaissance. A self-portrait in three times, three stages
perhaps. Closest to us, Ghitta Caiserman – as she still was in 1943, at eighteen years of age –
with her feet indeed in water, standing or sitting at a conveyor belt, examining the artillery shells
at a war plant. Perhaps the British Munitions factory in Verdun, first set up in 1916 and re-
established by Defense Industries Ltd in December 1940, as we can glean from the promotional
material produced by Talonbooks for Montreal playright David Fennario’s 2014 work…

Figure 3 Ghitta Caiserman, The Night Shift / David Fennario, Powerhouse

… Motherhouse. It’s worth a small quote from Fennario’s publisher, a quote informed by the
research of historian Serge Dürflinger: “Consisting of two small plants and having 250
employees at the outset, it became operational in May 1941, producing limited quantities of TNT
and cordite (for ammunition). By 1943, the factory had been renovated with subsidies from the
Canadian government to include 40 new buildings and rail sidings that linked the factory directly
to train lines. DIL-Verdun obtained contracts and guidelines from the Department of Munitions
& Supply; its primary client was the Canadian government, though the factory supplied
ammunition to other Allied nations as well.”2

The photograph on the cover of Motherhouse gives us a sense of mimetic correspondence to

certain aspects of Caiserman’s etching. The munitions workers – who evidently came to number
6800 in all at the height of production at Defense Industries Ltd – sport the same wide-collared
white overalls as the three Ghittas; their heads, also just like the Ghittas’, are covered with a
white cap, which for each of the Ghittas frames a face that indeed bears a resemblance to the face
that greets us in the self-portraits and portraits of Ghitta Caiserman;

Figure 4 Ghitta Caiserman – Night Shift + self-portrait 1939 / F B Taylor

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… such as this self portrait from 1939, when the artist is fourteen years old – already an
accomplished and strong handling of her own body and face, both framed by a landscape of
squiggly skiers set in some pastel Laurentian or Mount Royal winter sport fantasy; which I
contrast here, across the detail from Night Shift, with an etched portrayal by Fred Taylor made
some 10 years later. The strong eyebrows, the stern expression, the diamond mouth and the well-
defined jawline and, in both Night Shift and Talor’s portrayal, the fringe-cut hair, enable us to
establish a repertoire of Ghitta Caisermans. In 1949, she has become Ghitta Caiserman Pinsky.
During her time in New York Ghitta had met Alfred Pinsky, or Alfie as he was known to so
many through the decades, a fellow Montrealer and, like Ghitta, a dedicated left-wing activist.

Rosemarie Tovell’s acquisitions report gives us the overall context of theses years: “Among the
artists active during the Second World War, Ghitta Caiserman-Roth stands alone in her depiction
of biting socio-political commentaries on the war.

Figure 5 Ghitta Caiserman – five political works from NGC collection

War Profiteer, 1946, lithograph on wove paper 44.7 x 31.6 cm; image: 36.1 x 28 cm
Purchased 1992 NGC 36675
War effort, 1944 lithograph on wove paper, 31.7 x 48.3 cm; image: 25.3 x 30.7 cm, Purchased 1992
NGC 36672
Freedom USA 1944 lithograph on wove paper 48.9 x 31.6 cm; image: 37.6 x 17.5 cm Purchased 1992
NGC 36677
Mademoiselle Coutu gouache on kraft paper 80.4 x 48.9 cm Purchased 1992 NGC 36682
Unconditional surrender lithograph on wove paper, laid down on cardboard 45.4 x 32.5 cm; image: 37.5 x
28.8 cm Purchased 1992 NG 36678

“…Her political activism and outlook were acquired during her student years in New
York from 1939 to 1944. There she studied with such “left wing” artists as the twins,
Raphael and Moses Soyer and Harry Sternberg at the Art Students League… Caiserman-
Roth’s 1943 and 1944 prints were pulled during Harry Sternberg’s print classes at the Art
Students League. Because she had only limited access to the printmaking facilities,
Caiserman-Roth was only able to print very small editions, the largest being not more
than eight. They were not really meant for commercial release and, with the exception of
Night Shift, were never exhibited. (Night Shift was exhibited at the Art Association of
Montreal Spring Exhibition in 1943). Apparently these prints were first shown in 1987 at
the exhibition, Jewish Painters and Modernity, Montreal 1930-1945 mounted by the
Saidye Bronfman Centre.”

Here, Rosemarie Tovell refers to a groundbreaking exhibition that was organized by my

colleague Esther Trépanier. It proved to be a major step forward in our understanding of the
contributions made by Montreal’s largely immigrant Jewish community to the development of
modernist art practices in the city. Building in part on the landmark Canadian Painting of the
Thirties exhibition organized by Charles C. Hill in 1973 at the National Gallery of Canada, the
Jewish Painters and Modernity project enabled Trépanierto undertake extensive first-hand
research among the artists, men and women, many of whom had been active in the 1930s and
were still working in the 1980s. Twenty years later, Trépanier was able to revisit the project, first
in order to update and enrich the long-out-of-date catalogue, and second in order to organize a
new exhibition titled Jewish Painters of Montreal / Witnesses to their time, 1930-1948. This
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exhibit was subsequently presented at the McCord Museum in Montreal. In this context,
Trépanier presents Caiserman-Roth’s work chiefly in a section devoted to the topic of Artists and
the War, alongside Harry Mayerovitch, Moe Reinblatt and Louis Muhlstock, and at the end of the
book, in a section entitled The Next Generation: Early Work. The 2008 version of Trépanier’s
exhibition goes even further in showing the significant contributions made by women artists to
the engagement with modernist art practices in the Montreal environment. In this, Trépanier
followed in her own footsteps: in 1998, her study of Painting in Québec 1919-1939

Figure 6

surveyed not only the visual record left behind by the generation of Prudence Heward, Lilian
Torrance Newton, John Lyman, Edwin Holgate, Louis Muhlstock, Jack Beder, Adrien Hébert,
and so many others working with landscape, cityscape, portraiture and incipient abstraction in the
interwar years, but, crucially, she engaged systematically with all of the major anglophone and
francophone critics of the period, to describe for the first time the context of reception of these
practices. Two years later, her study of Marian Dale Scott provided again both an exhibition and
a monograph that established a full retrospective critical examination of a major twentieth-
century career. Later, as director of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec from 2008 to
2011, Trépanier initiated a joint exhibition/catalogue series devoted to establishing a new
dissemination programme for studies in Quebec art history. The first of these intiatives was the
project Femmes artistes du Québec au XXe siècle, a survey that begins with the generation of
Helen McNicoll and comes up to the present time with artists such as Betty Goodwin, Geneviève
Cadieux and Dominique Blain, to name just three. For the section of the 20th century that falls
within the long historical span under consideration by this conference, this cartalogue is of course
a rich reference in every respect, and, given our topic, in terms of what it shows us in terms of
self-portraiture. To the varied practice shown by Ghitta Caiserman,

Figure 7 Ghitta Caiserman 1939 / Night Shift / Ghitta Caiserman 1960

… and here I update the slide shown earlier to include a 1960 self-portrait with rosebush, we can
add other images from the period. Now these are all from the collection of the Musée national des
beaux-arts du Québec, so we can’t pretend yet to a comprehensive survey of self-portraiture. Still,
it’s remarkable to see just how much self-portraiture by Quebec women artists has been collected
by MNBAQ. In the case of Mimi Parent, best known for the surrealist constructions she made
after moving to Paris with Jean Benoit,

Figure 8 Mimi Parent (1924-2005)

Autoportrait au chat, 1945 Oil on canvas mounted on card, 75,4 x 78,7 cm MNBAQ
Masculin/Féminin, 1959 Blazer, shirt, hair and tiepin 47,5 x 38 x 12,2 cm Source: Vie des arts,
2004

… the matissian self-portrait of 1945 comes almost as a shock. Other self-portraits by women
artists in the period show a strong sense of resolve. Suzanne Duquet,

Figure 9 Suzanne Duquet (1916-2000)

Le Groupe, 1941 Oil on canvas, 127 x 149,8 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
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… who would go on to be a highly influential teacher at UQAM, includes herself as the

governing figure of the artist this early group portrait. This concern with what seems to also be a
reorientation of the relationship between artist and model is pursued in a different manner by
Sylvia Ary,

Figure 10 Sylvia Ary (1923-) Artist and Model, 1943 Pastel on cardboard, 76,5 x 73,8 cm, Musée
national des beaux-arts du Québec

… who is the half-dressed figure gazing back at us beyond her model and husband, a gaze that
becomes a familiar psychological engagement that goes beyond questions of likeness as we can
see in an earlier, perhaps more traditional self-portrait,

Figure 11 Sylvia Ary Self-Portrait, 1939 Oil on wood panel, 39 x 29 cm, Collection Elijan and
Emmanuel Ary. Source Trépanier 2008: 255

in which a sense of challenge to the viewer seems to emerge. Remarkably, the same is true of two
self-portraits by Rita Briansky made at some ten years’ interval. The first, from 1942,

Figure 12 Rita Briansky (1925- ) Self-Portrait, 1942, Oil on panel, 56,5 x 44 cm

Collection of the artist. Source Trépanier 2008: 258

an intense blend of expressionist brushwork delivered across a Chaim Soutine palette

Figure 13 Rita Briansky (1925- ) Self-Portrait, 1953 Charcoal and dry pastel on paper, 41 x 34
cm, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec

… gives way in 1953 to a stark rendition that pits the darkness of charcoal against the
highlighting of dry pastel, the purpose of the work inscribed across the area of the artist’s jacket.

Something is definitely afoot in these works. It will take many more indepth studies; – just one
important endeavour would be to pick up where Esther Trépanier left off in 1948 in order to
follow the Jewish women artists throughout their careers. In a sense, the work Trépanier carried
out with the Femmes artistes du Québec au XXe siècle project is a crucial step in that direction. A
project that would accord attention to Ghitta Caserman-Roth would perhaps begin with the prints
from the 1940s collected by the National Gallery in 1992, from among which the beguiling Night
Shift

Figure 14 – Caiserman Night Shift

... still retains the enigmatic structure across which Ghitta Caiserman distributes three instances
of her likeness. And what of this enigma? What of this dream image, this playfully erotic
meditation that in all kinds of ways seems to hearken forward to the work of our contemporary,
Cynthia Girard?

Figure 15 – Caiserman Night Shift / Cynthia Girard

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There is a fascinating reversal at play between Caiserman’s Night Shift and Sylvia Ary’s Artist
and model

Figure 16 – Caiserman Night Shift / Sylvia Ary.

In Ary’s case, the artist’s back and backward glancing face inscribes the sign of skin, nudity and
erotic tension through the configuration of roles ascribed to artist and sitter. For Caiseman, it’s
the fishing figure at upper left, sitting legs apart, legs bare, , fishing pole emerging away from her
vagina to hoist and swing the phallic munition shells from one seated Ghitta, stationed at the
conveyor belt that is both inside and outside the factory structure that forms her backdrop, to
another, seated in what seems ot be read as a meadow giving on to a fenced rise at the left, a hillet
at the right. Up here, the fisherwoman appears to be the dreamer, her head wrapped not only in
the factory cap but in a mist surrounded by stars dotting a night-and-day-sky.

There are two directions to go from here, and in reaching some kind of conclusion, for now, I’d
like to invoke one and then the other. It seems to me that on the very partial record drawn up by
the sequence of images I’ve presented to you today, it would be fair to say that women artists in
Quebec are exploring, in the 1940s, a range of new strategies that allow them to investigate for
themselves what the traditional conception of the self-portrait has to offer – the rehearsal of
likeness of one’s own, and aksi the willingess to redistribute that likeness in reconfigurations of
traditional conceptions of physical and symbolic space. Ghitta Caiseman’s early work also seems
to point to an interest in place.

Figure 17 – Caiserman Night Shift / Self-portrait 1939

Laurentian mountains, Mount Royal, the British Munitions factory in Verdun, are called on as
vectors of identity for the social and political landscape through which the artist seeks to define
herself, perhaps, but also her experience. One of the most well-know examples of this connection
between the artist’s sense of her own body and its place within a meaningful, symbolic space that
we have from the 1940s is Françoise Sullivan’s documented dance performance work of 1948,

Figure 18 Françoise Sullivan (born in 1925, lives and works in Montreal) performing Danse dans
la neige, 1948 / Photographs by Maurice Perron (1924-1999) / Musée national des beaux-arts du
Québec

… a work that she later title Danse dans la neige.

… two photographs from the series taken by Maurice Perron on a very cold and sunny day in
February 1948 of Françoise Sullivan performing her improvised choreography in tribute to the
season of winter, a work that the artist would later title Danse dans la neige. In 2007, Louise
Déry and the Galerie de l’UQAM produced, in collaboration with Françoise Sullivan, a
reenactment of this project under the title of The Sullivan Seasons. Sullivan’s wonter
performance was intended as one of four dance interventions in both countryside and city. After
telling the story of the filming of the first project, Summer , at Les Escoumins in 1947 by
Sullivan’s mother (a 16mm film now lost): Louise Déry continues: “When winter came, it was
snowy mountain scenery near Mount Saint-Hilaire that provided the backdrop of the second
segment. While the destiny of Quebec modernity was being played out in that month of February
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1948, François Sullivan created the second season. This time, her witnesses and accomplices
were two friends who like her, were part of the Automatiste movement and (signatories) of the
manifesto Refus Global: Jean-Paul Riopelle and Maurice Perron. The choreography, which had
not yet been given the title Danse dans la neige, was executed in a landscape of lunar cold and
boreal lighting.” Sullivan herself recalled the day in the text Je précise that she wrote for the first
publication of the photographs as an album under the name Danse dans la neige in 1977: “On
that day, all the countryside seemed to whisper… the brisk air reddened our cheeks. The ground
was rough and study under our feet. The snow looked like age-old glaciers. Some winter birds
ppassed by overhead and dry weeds crackled ounder our feet. I let the movements come, vigorous
in the cold, their physical source, as they grew, accentuated themselves in their own emotive
logic… I danced with light feet on the rough slopes of winter. I turned round in the cold wind and
ran under the sun. the sun became overcast at afternoon’s end and the gestures became evocative
of northern melancholy. I let rhythms flow, I perceived the space of day – cut it and shaped it.” 3

Figure 19 Night Shift + Danse dans la Neige

Through both Night Shift and Danse dans la Neige, I think it’s possible to posit, at the very least,
what women artists in Québec are tackling what it is that the representation of self can do in
terms of structuring into the very conception of the artistic image a redefinition, certainly a
reworking at the very least, of its psychic and phenomenological structures – and purposes. The
1940s certainly seem like fertile ground for more study. It’s tempting to read these works for the
types of preoccupation with medium, performance and iconology that will be more and more
explored from the 1960s onwards. It’s tempting to see Ghitta Caiserman and Françoise Sullivan
as pioneers of approaches to the use of figuration that will lead to a wide range of artistic
explorations many of which have yet to be fully documented and assessed against the prevailing
emphasis on abstractin that has so marked this period, although it should be said that even
Sullivan’s fellow Refus Global signatory, Marcelle Ferron, will give us this Self-Portait in 1967.

Figure 20 Ghitta Caiserman / Françoise Sullivan / Marcelle Ferron, Autoportait 1967

In 2007, art historian Édith-Anne Pageot published the article « Paysages, dépaysements. La
construction de mythes identitaires dans l’art canadien moderne et contemporain » in the
International Journal of Canadian Studies. Looking at post 1960s concern with ecology in many
contemporary artistic pratices, Pageot described the loss of ‘nation’ as a strong cultural referent in
Canadian art since Borduas – since Refus Global – although she finds the loss to be gradual, to be
part of a shifting sense of priorities. “It has to be said that throughout the 1960s, the nation could
still be (emphasis mine) a structuring referent of identity, capable of regulating other referents
such as class, ethnicity, sexual identity or generational position, among others.4 ” Edith-Anne
Pageot’s remarks make no claim for self-portraiture, but in considering her remarks while
meditating on works such as Night Shift and Danse dans la neige, I think we can still pay
attention to the where that is re-staged in these images, the where of Northrop Frye’s Where is
here? Here, it turns out, is where the body is inscribed, a body of the symbolic order of the artist
as person, a body of the symbolic order of the collectivité. In Quebec art, across the decades,
across centuries,

Figure 21 Françoise Sullivan contrasted to Joseph Légaré, Le Canadien (1832)

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… artists turn time and time again to these spaces to assist in the construction of a symbolic
order. In Joseph Légaré’s time, some idea of the nation and its collectivité is arculated through
the young betuqued man reclining, in possession and possessed of his emblematic nature his
ontological reality as being physically and linguistically made to mean this land. It’s the encoding
of a social order for Quebec in the 1830s. In the 1940s, a world and more later, this order has
been many times recast. Fashioning her personal and political identity as an engaged communist
artist between Montreal and New York in wartime, Ghitta Caiserman’s triple self-portrait seems
to locate sexual experience and imagination together with the historical imagination that is partly
fashioned by the individual’s political experience of her home city that has become the site for
the industrial production of lethal weaponry. In negotiating the changes to the social and political
order of Quebec in the immediate post war world, Françoise Sullivan’s performance is the
creation of a powerful visual phenomenon that crosses her dance trainging with the poetry of a
photographic engagement with Quebec landscape at Mont Saint-Hilaire.

Figure 22 final slide – Caiserman / Sullivan

In both cases, the body is at stake in the construction of meaning, no other body but that of the
artist – represented, verified, re-enacted through mimesis and resemblance, renewed encodings
for the constant craving for likeness and recognition of the distributed image of the self, or indeed
the image of the distributed self, imagining itself at work in the world.

Thank you.
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Epilogue

The problem of the self-portrait: Marie Carani, 1994

Carani approaches the topic of self-portraiture in her text, and comes to the topic from the wider
system of domination of the female subject by male artists in their working relationships with
female models and in the function of the work of art as a site, a vector, of erotic possession, that
comes to perpetuate a patriarchal message, an ideological domination, that is fulfilled and
reproduced at the level of the social body as a whole. I give you her remarks in translation: “What
marks so deeply the masculine artistic milieu comes to govern the few isolated women artists
who maintain a professional practice with difficulty and in spite of the numerous obstacles placed
in their way by the authorities of first the royal, and then the bourgeois art academies, in order to
thwart their emergence or their influence as a constituted group (Greer 1979). This is why the the
isolated women painters who were known and admired in the last third of the nineteenth century,
on both sides of the Atlantic”, and here Carani gives a slew of examples,5 “are for the most part
visually and formally centred only on themselves, on these particularly obsessive forms of
narcissism (and of domestic pleasure) that are intimate portraits of women as mothers or of girl-
children, and of attentive husbands, as well as complacent self-portraits. Furthermore, serving
especially as self-promotion in the masculine structures of the european and North American art
world, this production of self-portraits, discussed at length by Germaine Greer (1979), assists and
perpetuates several of the principal foundation myths of those discourses of gender that support
existing frameworks of identity and inequality. This is especially so of an idealized (and by the
same token necessarily restrictive) identification of women with the natural universe, that is, to
nature; an identification that also holds for the conventional and particularly vulnerable position
of the female model in artistic imagery, just as it holds for the definition of woman solely by her
traditional domestic and nurturing functions that are arch-known and arch-coded.
This thematic segregation in the visual treatment of woman reigns with force over the end of the
nineteenth century in English Canada and in Québec. For over a hundred years the most
traditional, conventional and comforting forms of iconographic representation of woman have
been triumphant in painting and sculpture; the religious woman, chaste and pure, the mother at
the service of husband and children or the serving woman, respectful of masculine authority. All
one has to do is to leaf through certain volumes of Quebec and Canadian art history to see the
complacency and the the perverisity of this message on women, as articulated by artists such as
Robert Harris (Harmony, 1886), Paul Peel (Devotion, 1881; A Venetian bather, 1889), Wyatt
Eaton (The Harvest Field, 1884), George Reid (Mortgaging the Homsestead, 1890) and by the
Montrealer William Brymner (Two Girls Reading, 1898).

1
Ghitta Caserman-Roth, memorandum addressed to Rosemarie Tovell, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the
National Gallery of Canada, April 23 1992. NGC Archives information to follow
2
Fighting from Home: The Second World War in Verdun, Quebec (UBC Press, 2006), quoted in Notes on the WWII
Munitions Factory at Verdun, Quebec, http://talonbooks.com/meta-talon/notes-on-the-wwii-munitions-factory-at-
verdun-quebec, accessed 2015-05-04
3
(Françoise Sullivan, Je précise, in Danse dans la neige (Montreal, 1977), quoted in Déry, Les Saisons Sullivan,
Galerie de l’UQAM 2010 [2007], p. 166.
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4
Édith-Anne Pageot « Paysages, dépaysements. La construction de mythes identitaires dans l’art canadien moderne
et contemporain », International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes, n° 36,
2007, p. 287-305. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/040786ar

5
such as the British Emily Mary Osborn (Mrs. Sturgis and Children, 1855) and Edith Hayllar (A Summer Shower,
1883) or indeed the Americans, Lilly Martin Spencer {The Young Husband: First Marketing, 1854; The Young
Wife: First Stew, v. 1856), Cecilia Beaux (The Last Days of Childhood, 1883-1884; A Little Girl, 1887) and Mary
Cassatt (Mother about to Wash Her Sleepy Child, 1880; Young Woman in Black, 1883; Baby in Dark Blue Suit,
Looking over His Mother's Shoulder, 1889)