Michael Snow in Montreal in 2013. (photo by Matias Garabedian, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Michael Snow, one of Canada’s most celebrated artists, has died at age 94. The multidisciplinary master was involved in painting, sculpture, photography and film for much of the last century, winning plaudits at home and across much of the globe.
“He was Canadian art’s most extreme polymath, a man as curious as Leonardo da Vinci and we are a much richer culture for it,” Marc Mayer, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, said in an interview Friday.
The Toronto-based Snow died Thursday. Details of his passing were not immediately released by his family – his wife is renowned curator Peggy Gale. However, it was known that Snow had various health problems during the past year that required hospitalization. Nevertheless, friends say Snow remained in good spirits and demonstrated his sharp intellect until the end.
News of Snow’s death quickly travelled around the Canadian art establishment Friday but, illustrating the scope of his fame, was first publicly announced online on Spanish and French websites dedicated to the world of cinema.
“My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor … sometimes they all work together.”
Tributes immediately poured in.
“Michael Snow was one of the most significant – if not the most significant – artists of his generation,” said Diana Nemiroff, former contemporary art curator at the National Gallery. “His art spanned many media, from painting and sculpture to film, photography and beyond, and demonstrated incredible versatility. His work, especially his experimental films, gained him international recognition. His departure is a great loss for our country.”
Kitty Scott, a contemporary art specialist who served as deputy director of the National Gallery, described Snow as “a great experimental artist.”
Michael Snow, “Flight Stop,” 1979, 60 suspended fibreglass Canada goose forms surfaced with tinted black and white photographs, installation view at Eaton Centre, Toronto (photo by Giorgio Galeotti, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
“This highly influential figure worked across media, but was most known for his films where images unfold and transform over long periods of time,” Scott said. “In an era that has seen an explosion of images that are absorbed at an unbelievable pace, Snow made the argument for long, slow looking and the pleasures and challenges inherent in the act of seeing. Whether looking at one of his paintings, sculptures, photographs or films, we were opened up to new ways of perceiving the world around us thanks to his unique perspective.”
To most Canadians, Snow’s best-known work is Flight Stop, a flock of three-dimensional geese suspended from the ceiling of Toronto’s downtown landmark shopping mall, the Eaton Centre. During the winter holiday season in 1981, the mall decorated the geese with red ribbons. Snow saw the ribbons as a desecration of his art. He went to court – and won – affirming the artist’s right to the integrity of his work.
Michael Snow’s “Green Belt,” a 1963 oil on canvas, sold at auction in 2018. (courtesy Heffel)
Within the world of fine art, his most iconic works include his Walking Woman series, which explore the world of negative space using stencils and mirror-image cut-out space in works depicting walking women. That series included Venus Simultaneous, from 1962. “It is painting, collage, relief, and sculpture all in one,” Martha Langford wrote in her biography, Michael Snow: Life and Work, published by the Art Canada Institute in Toronto.
Internationally, Snow is perhaps best known for the experimental 16mm film Wavelength, made in 1966-67. This 45-minute colour film “catapulted him out of the painter’s studio, where it was shot, into the international avant-garde,” says Langford.
“He (Snow) describes the film as ‘a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.’ The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows until the frame is filled with a black and white photograph of waves pinned up between the middle two windows.”
Snow was born in Toronto on Dec. 10, 1928. His father was Gerald Bradley Snow, a veteran of the First World War, a civil engineer and surveyor. His mother, Antoinette Levesque, was Quebecoise and ensured young Michael and his sister, Denyse, had something of a bicultural upbringing by spending considerable time in the Chicoutimi region of Quebec. In a demonstration of the links between Snow and Quebec, in 2008 the artist-run centre Séquence in Chicoutimi, inaugurated a new exhibition space, the Galerie Michael Snow.
A self-taught musician, Snow played jazz in a series of bands and served as an intermission pianist as a young man. “In Toronto, Detroit, and other centres, he sat in with some of the greats, his taste and style evolving from the New Orleans tradition through the more creative forms of bebop,” writes Langford.
In the early 1960s, Snow and his first wife, Joyce Wieland, also a celebrated artist, moved to New York. Their careers took off. In 1970, Snow had a mid-career retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario and was the first artist featured in a solo exhibition at the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He returned to Toronto in the early 1970s, says Langford, as an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artist, a filmmaker and a musician.
In subsequent years, Snow’s work was acquired and exhibited by most major galleries in Canada.
The National Gallery of Canada described Snow as “a giant in the art world.”
“Snow’s influence spans multiple generations; his legacy one of transforming in unprecedented ways the relationship between the artwork and the viewer,” the gallery said in a statement. “His creative experiments challenged perceptions and ultimately changed how we might understand art, the world and one other.”
Starting in the 1980s, Snow, Gale and their son, Alexander, divided their time between winters in Toronto and summers in Newfoundland.
Snow never stopped creating and exhibiting.
The polymath, as Mayer calls Snow, saw an intimate relationship between all the genres of work he tackled. An often-quoted 1967 remark by Snow reflects just how entwined they were: “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor … sometimes they all work together.”■
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