Trees

Like many artists from Central and Eastern Europe who immigrated to Canada between the World Wars, Fritz Brandtner brought with him copious references still unfamiliar to most of his Canadian contemporaries. In 1934, he settled in Montreal, where he founded the Children’s Art Centre with his friend Dr. Norman Bethune. Brandtner borrowed from the major art movements of the first half of the twentieth century, and his teaching style emphasized free expression. During the troubling time when war once again loomed on the horizon, many of his works made use of the same spatial organization, in which figures and elements from nature are enveloped by a luminous energy in a tangled construction, both central and symmetrical.