A Dealer for “Living Art”: Selected Works from the Max and Iris Stern Donation to Montreal

	Little Girl in Blue

The exhibition will shed light on Stern’s role at the Dominion Gallery, which he ran for more than forty years, first on Sainte-Catherine Street and then from 1950 on Sherbrooke Street. It was a decisive focal point for the dissemination of "living art," that is, art by modern Canadian painters.

Max Stern was born in Münchengladbach, Germany, in 1904, the son of a collector and art dealer. He studied art history in Cologne, Berlin and Vienna before obtaining a doctorate from Bonn University in 1928. He then acquired experience at his father’s Düsseldorf gallery. In 1935, the year after his father’s death, Max extended his field of activity by opening a gallery in London, in co-operation with his sister Heidi and a Dutch art historian. Faced with the rise of Nazism, Stern sold the Düsseldorf gallery in 1937 and moved to London. As a German citizen, he was interned in a refugee camp during World War II. In 1941, he emigrated to Canada, where he was detained in camps for nearly two years.

Listening to Music

In 1942, Max went to work at the Dominion Gallery of Fine Arts, which had been founded in Montreal by Rose Millman the year before. He became her business partner in 1944, and in 1947, he and his wife, Iris, became the gallery’s owners. After the War, Stern was able to recover some of his Old Master paintings that had been confiscated by the Nazis in Cologne. These were exhibited and then sold at the gallery. When Stern arrived in Montreal, the local art market was dominated by a few conservative galleries. On the advice of Maurice Gagnon and John Lyman, he concentrated on living Canadian artists. He signed exclusive contracts with several – Roberts, Lyman, Cosgrove, Dallaire, Scott – an arrangement that enabled the gallery to control the market and provide some financial stability to the artists. The Sagittaires and the Contemporary Arts Society were among the modern artists’ groups that exhibited there. In 1944, the Dominion Gallery held Emily Carr’s first commercial exhibition, which was a big success. Stern was also interested in European and, particularly, French artists such as Kees Van Dongen, from whom he bought a number of paintings. Stern was the first dealer to sell Kandinskys to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the mid-1950s, he met British sculptor Henry Moore, who introduced him to other modern sculptors, and from then on, the Dominion Gallery cultivated this specialty. Stern also obtained exclusive rights over the sale of Rodin’s work in Canada. The Dominion Gallery changed hands in 2000 and was sold to a new owner.

Over the years, Max Stern and his wife, Iris Westerberg, amassed a collection that they donated to various public institutions, in this country and abroad. Montreal was among the main beneficiaries of this generosity. In all, 160 works by Canadian and European artists were given to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery of Concordia University. The earliest Montreal donation dates back to 1959. Subsequent gifts followed at regular intervals, one or more per year, until the gallery owner’s death. In his will, Max Stern bequeathed half the collection to the MMFA and the MACM.

An exhibition catalogue entitled Max Stern, Montreal Dealer and Patron is being produced jointly by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, which is mounting the exhibition Max Stern: The Taste of a Dealer concurrently. The book will include essays by Édith-Anne Pageot, focussing on Stern’s involvement with modern Canadian painters and those who most influenced the direction he took, by François-Marc Gagnon, analyzing the foundations of Stern’s taste and its bearing on his choices as a dealer and collector, and by Michel Moreault.

The co-curators of the event at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are Édith-Anne Pageot, guest curator, and Jacques Des Rochers, Curator of Canadian Art (before 1945). The guest curator for the exhibition at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery is Michel Moreault.

The exhibition at the MMFA will coincide with the inauguration of the sculpture garden dedicated to the donors Max and Iris Stern in front of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion and the Liliane and David M. Stewart Pavilion.

A Dealer for "Living Art": Selected Works from the Max and Iris Stern Donation to Montreal has received funding from the Quebec Ministère de la Culture et des Communications and Heritage Canada’s Museums Assistance Program. It has been organized in co-operation with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery of Concordia University. The exhibition has received additional funding from the estate of Max Stern.