MICHAEL FORSTER (lots 135-145)

It is the energy that reaches you first… The painter is prodigal; he squeezes the paint out of the tube; like sap it drips and runs and seems to follow its own impetuous course...

Introduction
Born in Calcutta, schooled at Lancing College, Sussex, a student at Central School of Art and Design, London and Académie Colarossi, Paris, Forster emigrated to Canada in his early twenties. In Toronto he found piecemeal work as an illustrator and window display designer. In 1936 he travelled first to New York and then west to Los Angeles where he was taken on as a set designer for Selznick International Pictures. On his return to Toronto in 1938 he met the young painter and critic Paul Duval (1922-2018) who became a lifelong friend, and also the collector Douglas Duncan (1902-1968). Duncan formed the Picture Loan Society with other collector friends, and mounted exhibitions of contemporary art. Forster’s first solo show with Duncan was in 1941. Further exhibitions followed. The following year he was invited to show with the Canadian Group of Painters, the successors to the Group of Seven. And in 1943 his work was included in Four Canadian Artists at the Art Gallery of Toronto, together with three other leading non-objective painters.

Forster’s style at the time was abstract but with strong surrealist landscape elements and contorted figural forms, his work in part stimulated by a major display of Surrealist work in Toronto in 1938 organized by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, and subsequently in response to the torment of the Second World War which Canada entered in 1939. In 1943 Forster became a Canadian War Artist, first stationed on a merchant marine ship out of Halifax plying its trade in the West Indies. He was subsequently based on the Isle of Wight accompanying submarine patrols in the Atlantic. A large exhibition of his and other official War Artists was held at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa in spring 1946.

After the War his interest in abstraction was increasingly fuelled by the ideas of automatism and free gesture expounded by André Breton. Newly married to Adele (née Davis), whom he had met in Ottawa, the couple moved to Montreal where he wrote a contemporary art column for the newspaper The Standard. In 1951 his increasingly experimental work was included in two shows at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The following year he was also the subject of a joint exhibition there with Louis Muhlstock (1904-2001). Critic Jonathan Ayre wrote enthusiastically of Forster at the time: ‘It is the energy that reaches you first… The painter is prodigal; he squeezes the paint out of the tube; like sap it drips and runs and seems to follow its own impetuous course; the forms seem to run riot like tropic vegetation. But they are always under control; the structure is there.’ (Dennis Read, ‘Michael Forster, Canadian Artist’ in Michael Forster, exhib. cat, Messum’s London, 2013, n.p.).

For the next ten years Forster and Adele lived in Mexico, which had become a popular destination for Canadian artists. The couple settled first in San Miguel de Allende, and then in Mexico City. His work was very well received, he befriended the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), had a show with Galeria Proteo in Mexico City in 1954, and was given a prestigious solo exhibition of eighty of his works at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Mexico City in 1960. But despite Forster’s burgeoning critical success there the couple returned to Canada in 1963.

Settling in Ottawa, Forster picked up where he had left off, reconnecting with collector Douglas Duncan and art critic Paul Duval, and becoming the subject of a rolling series of exhibitions in Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo, New York State, and Oakville Ontario. He also had his first show in London in 1973 at the Upper Street Gallery. Tragically Adele died from cancer in 1974, and a year later Forster left Canada for England where he settled in Treen, Cornwall with his recently widowed sister. He continued to paint with his customary energy and intelligence for the next twenty-five years. He sent work back to Canada for a series series of exhibitions, including in Hamilton (1977),Oshawa (1993), Toronto (1996, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2011 & 2013). He also showed with Galerie d’Art Déclic in Luxembourg, and was represented in the UK by Messum’s on London's Cork Street. In 1993 he married again, to Gloria Ochitwa, a longtime friend from Canada.

MICHAEL FORSTER (BRITISH 1907-2002)
LANDSCAPE
signed with initial and dated 1978 lower left; signed Michael Forster, numbered 149L and with the artist's estate stamp on the reverse
acrylic on board
54.5 x 72cm; 21 1/2 x 28 1/4in
66 x 83.5cm; 26 x 33in (framed)