Eva Mendel Miller (courtesy Saskatoon Star PHoenix)
Eva Mendel Miller, the daughter of Frederick Mendel, who endowed the former Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon has died. She was 100.
Miller, who died Sept. 5 in Calgary, was born in Germany but fled with her family prior to the Second World War, eventually setting in Saskatchewan in 1940.
She studied painting with leading artists of her day, including Hans Hoffman, George Grosz and Goodridge Roberts. An oil painter and watercolorist, she concentrated on collage in later years. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in France and Canada since the early 1940s.
Miller inspired her father to begin his collection of modern paintings and advised him on purchases that eventually formed the nucleus of the Mendel Art Gallery.
After moving to Canada, Miller did intelligence work in Ottawa. She was commended by the Royal Canadian Navy for decoding a message to a German prisoner of war, which pinpointed the location of the German battle cruiser the Graf Spee. The ship was scuttled soon afterward.
She married her husband, the late doctor of tropical medicine Max Miller, in 1947, and the couple had three daughters.
Source: Obituary, Saskatoon Star Phoenix