Writing about artists, specifically a painter’s life and work, can be a daunting and arduous task, fraught with pitfalls. However objective a writer may try to be by maintaining a balance between the man and the work, the art itself always remains subjective, always open to interpretation. At best, how a work of art impacts any given viewer is speculative.
Nevertheless, an examination of the art and life of a painter, intertwined as they may be, often reveals the creative forces that sought expression, rendering them accessible to academics and casual viewers alike.
On October 26, 2025, Andrew Kear, a proud graduate of Huntsville High School, received the prestigious Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Jewish Culture for his work editing and assembling the monumental publication, released in 2024, ‘Mashel Teitelbaum: Terror and Beauty’ (Goose Lane Editions). It is a book of special order that merits the accolades it has garnered for Andrew Kear and for the artistic life of Mashel Teitelbaum, which it portrays.
Approached by Jim Shedden, curator, special projects & director, publishing at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in 2022, with the possibility of publishing a massive, detailed retrospective of the Canadian painter, Mashel Teitelbaum, 1921-1985, Kear points out that he wasn’t overly familiar with Teitelbaum’s work in any substantial sense, “but I love that! I’ve done a couple of exhibitions. Probably the best-known one is an exhibition that I co-created with a group of others, on William Kurelek (1927–1977), a sort of outsider artist. He bucked a lot of trends; he was strange and had different priorities than a lot of artists at the time. So, I like these sorts of artists who are maybe misunderstood a little, maybe doing things a little differently, maybe have challenging personalities, and maybe haven’t gotten the due they deserve.”
Andrew Kear’s multifaceted career had certainly provided him with the necessary experience to spearhead the enormous Teitelbaum undertaking. The aforementioned work on Kurelek took place during his tenure as chief curator and curator of Canadian art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, where he worked for eleven years. In 2019, he joined the Museum London (Ontario) as head of programs. Kear has written and curated exhibitions on a wide range of contemporary and historical Canadian artists. Andrew holds a BFA(Bachelor of Fine Arts) from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a Master’s degree in philosophy and Canadian art history from the University of Toronto and Carleton University. Kear began his career at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery as registrar and assistant curator.
In approaching the works of Mashel Teitelbaum, Kear gathered varied commentators to reflect on the essence of Teitelbaum’s expansive and prolific body of paintings, images, writings, and unpublished poems. Born in Saskatoon, the son of Jewish immigrants, Mashel studied fine arts at the California School of Fine Arts. For most of his working life, he resided in Toronto, but had also taught at the University of Manitoba and studied fine arts in Europe. He worked as an art critic for the Toronto Telegram for over a decade. Ironically, his only son, Matthew, became the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1998, where his father, Marshel, had repeatedly picketed the gallery for their lack of support for Canadian artists.
In his preparations for the project, Kear recognized the enormity that Teitelbaum’s career presented. “I tried to figure out what his priorities were, what his concerns were as a human being and as an artist,” Andrew shared. “A couple of things emerged. The diversity of his eclectic output, [and] he wasn’t really following any trends.”
“He was making stuff that didn’t align with what the art world was really into at the time,” said Kear. “Some of his stuff was really satirical… And then, suddenly in the 70s, he’s like painting landscapes and often painting landscapes that are not in reference to particular landscapes, to something he’s seen, but to a group of seven paintings. In the 80s, we would have called that postmodernism, but it was the 70s. [and] it didn’t quite have the language there to understand what he was actually doing, it wasn’t in the air yet. And so, some of his work was very much praised, and some of it was just like, What are you doing? We do not understand you. He also suffered from pretty severe mental illness, and it manifested at certain times as periods of mania and periods of deep depression,” said Kear.
Perhaps this explains the book’s title and accompanying quote: “What I’m saying I’m painting, in effect . . . is the terror and beauty of life.” — Mashel Teitelbaum.
With his background in writing about fine arts, Kear found himself writing close to 25,000 words on Teitelbaum’s expansive works and delving into the tensions —historical, cultural, and psychological —that drove his output. Kear said his extensive research with his surviving family, friends, and fellow curators was “sort of a biography that really looked at his career in a kind of holistic way.” Including an additional twenty essays and poems on the significant effect this body of art left on those who knew and witnessed Teitelbaum’s life as a painter. The book features over 200 reproductions of artwork spanning the full scope of Teitelbaum’s career. https://gooselane.com/products/mashel-teitelbaum
Kear and his fellow contributors have forged a master book filled with details and insight into the mind and artistic aspirations of a lesser-known, yet great Canadian painter, bringing his life’s work into clearer focus and the attention it deserves.
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Thank you, Mr. McLean for such a well written and well-developed article. Much appreciated.
Congratulations Andrew! I have read your text on Mashel Teitelbaum, not an easy arena, excellent work!
Congratulations, Andrew, on your remarkable achievement!