Mashel Alexander Teitelbaum

Born February 2, 1921, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Died 1985 in Toronto, Ontario.

Mashel Teitelbaum's ambitions and aptitude were manifest at an early age. He submitted artwork for publication in his adolescence, took sketching trips in his teen years, aspired to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago upon graduating from high school, and pursued painting full-time in 1941 after leaving the University of Saskatchewan after two years of study. In 1950 he studied at the California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco) and Mills College (Oakland) under Clyfford Still, Hassell Smith, David Park and Max Beckmann. He traveled across North America and to Europe seeing art, making contacts and earning a living. Toronto became a base of activity in 1953, however, he regularly pursued interests and opportunities elsewhere and returned to Toronto at their conclusion. He established the New School in Toronto in 1961 where Karl Beveridge, Les Levine, and Arthur Shilling were students.

Teitelbaum was active as a painter throughout adulthood until his death in 1985. He exhibited extensively in Toronto, and in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the country. The combination of abstraction, figuration, and landscape in his oeuvre complicated the reception of his work in his lifetime and posthumously. The Art Gallery of Windsor's five-part exhibition Mashel Teitelbaum: A Retrospective (1992) helped to correct and contextualize the diversity of a body of work that was driven by the artist's elemental desire to explore the properties of paint and the bases of art, regardless of subject.