27.12.1923–24.09.2012
Bruno Bobak
Bruno Bobak was born in a Galician colony near Skalat and was taken by his parents to Saskatchewan at the age of two. At nineteen he joined the Canadian Army and became the youngest official war artist of Canada in the Second World War. After the war he taught for more than thirty years, first in Vancouver, then in New Brunswick, and painted mostly in watercolour.
Biography
Bobak won first prize in an army art competition in uniform, not in a studio. After that he was appointed an official war artist.
He was born on 27 December 1923 in the colony of Wawelówka near Skalat, in what was then Poland (now Ukraine). He was christened Bronislaw; “Bruno” came only later, in Canada. In 1925 the family emigrated and settled in Saskatchewan. Bobak later lived in Toronto. He studied art there from childhood: at the Art Gallery of Toronto with Arthur Lismer and Gordon Webber (1933–1937), then at the Central Technical School with Carl Schaefer and Elizabeth Wyn Wood (1938–1942). In 1942, straight after high school, he joined the Canadian Army and served in Europe with the Royal Canadian Engineers. By some accounts he also served with the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, for which he painted pictures and watercolours. After winning the army competition (in 1944, according to some accounts), he became one of the official war artists and was the youngest of them. While in Britain, according to some accounts, he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the City and Guilds Art School in London. It was in London that he met the artist Molly Lamb, whom he married in 1945.
After the war they lived briefly in Ottawa, where, according to some accounts, Bobak worked for the government’s exhibition commission. In 1947 he moved to Vancouver to teach at the Vancouver School of Art. Thirteen years later, in 1960, the Bobaks moved for the last time: Bruno became artist in residence at the University of New Brunswick and later director of its Art Centre. In the same year, according to some accounts, he won first prize at an exhibition of contemporary art in Vancouver.
His main medium was watercolour, but he also made woodcuts, that is, prints from carved wooden blocks. One of his best-known watercolours, “The Farmer’s Family” (1970), is in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton. In 1998 Canada Post issued a stamp showing a detail of it in the Masterpieces of Canadian Art series. It seems telling to me that for the stamp a peaceful subject was chosen rather than a war scene.
He belonged to the Canadian Group of Painters, the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, Etchers and Engravers, the British Columbia Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 1971 he received the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, as well as the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal. He also won the Jesse Dow Prize of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Jefferys Award of the Canadian Society of Graphic Art. In 1983 the Sir George Williams Art Galleries at Concordia University in Montreal organized a touring retrospective of his work. In 1984 he received an honorary degree from Saint Thomas University, and in 1986, on retiring, an honorary degree from the University of New Brunswick. In 1995 he and his wife became Members of the Order of Canada (by some accounts this happened in 1985). His work is held in collections in Canada, the United States, Poland and Britain. Library and Archives Canada holds the joint fonds of Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak, with material dated 1930 to 2000: drawings, prints, watercolours and photographs.
Bruno Bobak died on 24 September 2012, aged 88. He lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, to the end.
Profile notes