Louis Muhlstock receiving the H. M. Caiserman Award during Canadian Jewish Congress from Ghitta Caiserman-Roth, H.M. Caiserman's daughter, 1985.
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archives
Stanley Lewis and Louis Muhlstock, Art Exhibit, Jewish General Hospital, 1967.
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archives
Louis Muhlstock, profile and sketch by Lou Seligson, Canadian Jewish News, 1977.
Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Louis Muhlstock and Ghitta Caiserman-Roth, ca. 1955.
Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
1904 - 2001
Louis Muhlstock
Louis Muhlstock was a renowned Canadian draughtsman and painter known for work that captured the marginalized of Depression-era Montreal.
Born in Narajow, Galicia (Austro-Hungary), Muhlstock immigrated to Montreal with his family in 1911. He studied art at the Art Association of Montreal and the Fine Arts School. His first exhibit was at the Royal Canadian Academy in 1925. He left for Paris in 1928 where, until 1931, he studied with Louis Biloul and sketched at the Grande Chaumière, the same Parisian art school where Modigliani and Jean-Paul Riopelle studied. He returned to Montreal in 1931 to become a full-time painter.
Muhlstock was renowned for his sense of humanity. He painted the poor, the destitute and even hospitalized patients. His famous work, Paranka (1932), is of a blind and terminally ill patient. Later he would paint empty rooms and abandoned buildings, symbolizing the angst of his world. In his early works, the ubiquity of the Depression is reflected in the austerity of his creations.
Muhlstock was a member of the Canadian Society of Graphic Artists, the Canadian Group of Painters, the Contemporary Arts Society, the Federation of Canadian Artists and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. He held an honorary doctorate from Concordia University (1978) and was an Officer of the Order of Canada (1991) and Knight of the Order of Quebec (1998). He was also one of the deans of the Jewish Painters of Montreal.
