Ghitta Caiserman-Roth was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923 to a Romanian-Jewish family.[6][7] Her parents were Sarah Wittal, the founder of a children's wear company called Goosey Gander, and Hananiah Meir Caiserman, a civic leader in the Montreal Jewish community and a union organizer and activist. Both parents were heavily involved in socialist causes which had a significant impact on Ghitta's art.[7][8]
Caiserman-Roth returned to Montreal in 1947 and opened the Montreal Artists School with her first husband, Alfred Pinsky. They opened the school with artists Barbara Eckhart and Harold Goodwin. Many of the students were war veterans and Caiserman-Roth served as the principal. However, the school only ran until 1952 and was then sold.[13] During a 1948 trip to Mexico, she encountered the socialist mural movement, after which she started to incorporate mural forms along with socialist themes into her work.[2] Caiserman-Roth studied political murals as they explored Mexico bringing fresh ideas back to the McGill Ghetto where they lived until 1956.[14]
Caiserman-Roth recalls that her first major sale was to A.Y. Jackson; her first major public gallery sale was of her painting entitled Backyard, which she sold to the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1949.[15] She continued successfully as a practicing artist, receiving numerous awards and memberships, and having her work featured in solo and group exhibitions.[16] She has been represented in over 100 collections, both public and private.[11][17]
Caiserman-Roth’s father, Hananiah, ran a salon out of their family home in Montreal and this was where her earliest influences began. Artists and writers would gather there to discuss social and political change.[13] Her father reviewed art exhibitions and exposed her to many Montreal artist and writers. One of the most memorable to Caiserman-Roth was "Yud-Yud" Segal who introduced her to Marcel Proust and Romain Rolland. Not only was she heavily influenced by literature but by the painter Louis Muhlstock. After his return from artistic study in France. They would take many walks together and she learned the difference between "seeing" and merely "looking at". Muhlstock was incredibly sensitive to his environment and this had a large influence on Caiserman. Later on she attributed her free-range imagination and varying degrees of abstractionism to Muhlstock.[13]
Her early childhood experiences play heavily into the relationships depicted in her paintings, especially between mother and child. Her mother, Sarah Caiserman, expressed her love of art by designing clothing for her children. Caiserman-Roth recalls sitting in piles of her mother's fabric enchanted by the colours, textures and patterns. This experience was heavily drawn upon when she painted First Steps (1956), depicting her own daughter.[19]
Her first formal influence was her art teacher, Alexandre Bercovitch, who taught her through private lessons at her family home in Montreal in 1932. While painting under his tutelage, at the age of eleven, Caiserman-Roth received an Honourable Mention at the Art Association of the Montreal Spring Exhibition.[11] Bercovitch was the epitome of bohemian and she recalls his "bulging blue eyes" with fondness.[13] He heavily inspired her work with pastels and she was deeply moved by his dedication to the craft. Bercovitch also had an incredibly fondness for New York City, the city that Caiserman-Roth aspired to move to.
While studying at the Art Students League in New York, Caiserman-Roth started learning printmaking from Harry Sternberg. Sternberg aimed to communicating social messages through art, specifically through printmaking. According to Caiserman-Roth, he showed his students the works of Goya, Daumier, Posada, and the revolution-focused works of Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco as exemplars. Caiserman-Roth described her exposure to their socialist art as "eye-opening" given her middle-class background.[12]
She also learned about technique, both conventional and unconventional, from working with Jennifer Dickson at Montreal's Saidye Bronfman Centre from the late 1960s to 70s. From Dickson, she gained an understanding of the unique medium of etching. Caiserman-Roth stated that the year and a half in Dickson's class was "exciting and developmental."[12]
She was also influenced by her experiences working in war factories in Montreal and Halifax. By young adulthood much of her art was influenced by her experiences working in war factories in Montréal and Halifax, her work embraced the working class life and explored socialist themes.[20]
Sources of inspiration
Based on her education and influences, Caiserman-Roth established herself as a figurative artist concerned with the human condition and worked through various media: painting, lithography (printmaking), etching, and drawing.[17] She highly valued symbolism and the combination of conventional materials and techniques with unconventional ones.[12]
In the early 2000s, she expressed concern for the domination of monetized private studios and their potential corruption of conventional methods of printing, especially with the introduction of photography into printmaking. Ultimately, she upheld printmaking as a combination of form and content and acknowledges that new techniques are necessary:
"We look for a fusion of how it is done with what it says. The tradition of printmaking going back to Rembrandt and remembering Hayter is a rich brew of past and present. However, rules are made to be broken, because this is how we push the frontiers out further ... through deeper self knokwledge and the occasional breakthrough into new forms and ways of doing things."[12]
Caiserman-Roth has given various artist's statements to attribute her artistic inspiration from a multitude of broad and personal sources: her perceptions, visual observations, memories, dreams, imagination, and her experimental impulse; politics, psychoanalysis, and family; her techniques, reading, music, and most consistently, nature. She transforms the starting material through synthesis, symbolism, and a fusion of form and theme.[18][11] She notably said,
"My art comes from the 'vocabulary of art.' My personal motto is: 'With shape and a line and some colour I can go far.' I love to play with vocabulary and meaning."[17]
Movement
Ghitta Caiserman-Roth was part of Jewish Painters of Montreal. The group was an artist collective that depicted expressionistic images of social realism during the 1930s and 1940s. Modern Canadian painting was defined by this generation that drew its inspiration from rise of socialism, the great depression and the effects of war. The painters were heavily influenced by the social effects of fascism and the struggle of the working class. The style was later referred to as Social Realism; a term popularized in the 1980s by art historian Esther Trepanier.[21]
Caiserman-Roth was part of the Young Women's Hebrew Association (YWHA), along with other female artists Rita Briansky and Sylvia Ary and it was from the annual art exhibition of the YWHA and Young Men's Hebrew Association that the Jewish Painters of Montreal group was born.[22]
Caiserman married painter Alfred Pinsky in 1945. The couple had one daughter, Kathe, in 1954 and divorced in 1959. Caiserman re-married Max Roth, a well-known Montreal-based architect, in 1962.[24] Kathe legally changed her surname to Roth at the age of 18.[7]
^ abcdeCaiserman-Roth, Ghitta (2000). "About Printmaking". Women Artists in Canada. Collections Canada. Retrieved 18 June 2019.
^ abcdWilliam, George and Caiserman-Roth, Ghitta. Ghitta Caiserman-Roth: A retrospective view. (Montréal, Québec: Art Galleries of Concordia University, 1981.)
^Brown, Michael. Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on January 20, 2017)
