Bruno Bobak and Molly Lamb Bobak

A new biography details the troubled marriage of two of Canada's war artists.

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Can two artists have a successful marriage?

Back in the 1950s, the woman who would become Mary Pratt was told by an art professor at Mount Allison University, Lawren P. Harris Jr., son of the Group of Seven painter, that “there could only be one artist” in the family and that artist “is Christopher Pratt.” Mary did not take the advice. Artistic rivalry contributed to a marital collapse.

Harris could have just as well have passed along that advice to his friend, the future Molly Lamb Bobak, wife of Bruno Bobak. In the Bobaks’ case, Molly was more popular and commercially successful than Bruno. That made for a rocky marriage.

Bruno was jealous of his wife’s success, frequently complaining that Molly was dominating him and draining his self-confidence. He also called her a lousy housekeeper. It took many years of marriage before Molly confessed to her diary that she was being abused, verbally and emotionally.

The troubled marriage is chronicled, in intimate detail, in the new book Anything but a Still Life: The Art and Lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak, published by Goose Lane. The author is Ottawa’s Nathan M. Greenfield, best known for his history books about the Second World War. The Bobaks were both soldiers in that war, serving as official war artists. Molly was the first Canadian woman to serve overseas as a war artist.

Greenfield relies on the frank diaries Molly kept throughout her life. Bruno had no such diaries. Therefore, much of the Bobaks’ marriage is presented from Molly’s point of view. Bruno’s views were undoubtedly different. This was also the case with 2019’s Art and Rivalry: The Marriage of Mary and Christopher Pratt, by Carol Bishop-Gwyn. Mary, but not Christopher, kept a diary. Both books portray the husbands as the villains in the marriage. But are we getting the full story?

Molly was born Feb. 25, 1920, in the Vancouver area, according to earlier biographies of the artist. Greenfield reveals Molly was well into her 60s before she discovered she was actually born in a small New Brunswick town and was registered with a name she did not recognize: Joan Mary Mortimer Lamb. She recorded the discovery in her diary  on Sept. 16, 1986, but did not name the place of her birth, her mother’s original hometown.

Previously, Molly had known that her mother, Mary Williams, was the live-in maid of her father, Harold Mortimer-Lamb, and his wife. Molly was raised in the Burnaby home alongside her mother, her father’s wife and her half-siblings. She had always been told she was born in British Columbia.

Harold Mortimer-Lamb was a successful industrialist and a lover of the arts. Various members of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr were frequent guests as Molly grew up. In fact, Molly christened her only son, Alexander, in honour of A.Y. “Uncle Alex” Jackson. The Bobaks also had a daughter, Anny.

Both Bobak children refused to be interviewed for Greenfield's book and, without their permission, he was unable to quote from Molly's letters held by Library and Archives Canada.

Molly and Bruno married in 1945 and settled in Vancouver. In 1960, Bruno was appointed artist-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. The couple lived there until their deaths, his in 2012 and hers in 2014. Both died of cancer.

While living in Fredericton, Molly also spent considerable time at Galiano Island, off B.C.’s West Coast. Her mother had lived there after leaving her father. Molly’s daughter, Anny, moved there as an adult, providing her mother with a refuge from her troubled marriage. In later years, Molly bought her own cabin on the island.

Molly is best known for her war art and for her later crowd scenes, which tended to be joyous and filled with movement. Her style varied from very representational to impressionistic: “I’m not Emily Carr,” she said. “I’m just a popular painter.”

Molly was so popular that, in 1972, for example, her income was $120,000, the equivalent of $577,000 in 2019 dollars. Very few artists earn that amount. Among her fans: Brian and Mila Mulroney, despite Molly being a diehard New Democrat.

Bruno earned far less with his German expressionist-style paintings, many depicting nudes, some very erotic. Greenfield deconstructs many of those nude paintings, which he maintains reveal the problems in the latter years of the Bobaks’ increasingly sexless marriage. For many years, Bruno had an extramarital affair with Carolyn Cole, a family friend married to CBC radio personality Leon Cole and, later, the mother of jazz singer Holly Cole.

Neither Bruno nor Molly embraced abstraction, the favoured genre of the post-war art establishment. That hindered them from becoming the darlings of major art museums and galleries.

Molly had definite ideas about art and was critical of Mary Pratt’s technique of projecting slides onto the canvas before painting. Mary, Molly wrote, had “no idea of the ‘old’ language of art.”

She was also critical of Mary’s painting, This is Donna, a portrait of Christopher’s model-cum-lover Donna Meaney. She called the painting “sickening” and termed it, along with Mary’s other paintings of Donna, a settling of accounts.

“Mary got back at Christopher the only way she knew would hurt him,” the Pratts’ biographer told the Bobaks’ biographer. “She painted Donna in a series of works – and did so better than he had.”

Unlike the Pratts, the Bobaks never separated, although Molly threatened to leave Bruno several times. But after his death, she confessed that she missed him. ■  

Anything but a Still Life: The Art and Lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak, by Nathan M. Greenfield. Goose Lane, 2021. 

Correction June 18, 2021, 2:00 p.m. This post has been updated to clarify that both Bobak children refused to be interviewed for Greenfield's book, meaning he could not quote from Molly's letters at Library and Archives Canada.

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