Gerald Gladstone

Gerald Gladstone (1929-2005) was an important Canadian sculptor and painter. Born in Toronto, Canada, Gladstone was typified as bold, precocious, and prodigious from an early age, and as a child he was as committed to music as he was to painting, teaching himself to play the clarinet and forming a jazz band. He subsequently committed himself to the plastic arts, especially sculpture, for which he had a marked affinity and ability. He was soon earmarked a prodigy by curators and critics.

Gladstone was a member of the important group of artists exhibited by Toronto gallery owner Av Isaacs in the 1950s. The disparate group included artists such as Michael Snow, Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, and Tony Urquhart. His sculptures during that period were peculiarly modernist, especially in a 1950s Toronto art scene noted for its conservativism and traditionalism, with the exception of sculptors such as Sorel Etrog. In 1959, he received his first Canada Council of the Arts grant, relocated to London, England. He studied at the Royal College of Art where he met and befriended the British sculptor Henry Moore. As a result of Moore's influence, Gladstone began a long period of experimentation with figurative sculpture.

In 1967, Gladstone received three major commissions for Montreal's Expo 67, but several years later he was struggling to find work, complaining that his work was misundertood by the Canada Council's arts bureaucracy, a complaint that would persist throughout his career. There was an exhibition of his mid- to late-career plastic cube sculptures and his "Downtown Nudes Series" - a collection of oils on canvas - at the opening exhibition of Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, and in 1973 he produced the "Electric Figure Series", another collection of oils on canvas. Gladstone continued to receive commissions but his flame began to burn less brightly than it did in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his late-career commissions were the "Three Graces", a fountain and bronze sculpture for the Ontario government buildings, "Female Landscape", a fountain and bronze sculpture at Montreal's Place Ville Marie, "Optical Galaxy Sculpture", a fountain and sculpture in Belconnen, Australia, and a fountain and precast concrete sculpture for a Martin Luther King memorial in California.

Gladstone was given a retrospective by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2003, and he died on March 7, 2005.

elected exhibitions

*2003: "Art Gallery of Ontario", Toronto: "Gladstone: Event Horizon"

elected collections

*"National Gallery of Canada", Ottawa
*"Art Gallery of Ontario", Toronto

References

*Martin, Sandra. "Gerald Gladstone, Artist: 1929-2005" in the "Globe & Mail" (March 9, 2005, p. S9).

External links

* [http://www.artnet.com/artist/571041/gerald-gladstone.html Artnet.com] (Gerald Gladstone)
* [http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artist_e.jsp?iartistid=2065 National Gallery of Canada] (Gerald Gladstone)
* [http://www.dittwald.com/torontosculpture/search.php?Artist=Gerald%20Gladstone Toronto Sculpture - Virtual Gallery] (Gerald Gladstone)