Born in Danzig in 1896, Friedrich Wilhelm Brandtner came to Canada in 1928 and
settled in Winnipeg, then in Montreal in 1934, where he became a Canadian citizen
in 1937. He died in 1969. Like many artists from Central and Eastern Europe who
immigrated to Canada during the interwar period, Brandtner came to his new homeland
with copious references unknown to most of his Canadian contemporaries and infused
the country’s art milieu with new sources of inspiration. Deeply interested
in and open to the major art movements of the first half of the twentieth century,
Brandtner’s works are inspired by the formal techniques and social concerns
of German Expressionists such as Kirchner, Feininger, Kandinsky and the Bauhaus
artists, among others. They also draw from Cubism and Picasso’s oeuvre from
between the wars, as well as abstraction. Brandtner was a Canadian pioneer in
abstraction.
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“Study to woodcut” 1941
9 1/2"
x 7 1/4"
Ink drawing
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