Œuvres d'art

“He was a kind of magician,” says Joyce Borenstein.

"He could transform a country village into a painting blazing with color.”

Influenced by Van Gogh and Soutine, Borenstein was a painter of "wrenchingly strong colors and writhing shapes," as critic Lawrence Sabbath has noted. He worked from the heart and was totally dedicated to his craft

Born in 1908 in Kalvaria, Lithuania, Borenstein was the son of a rabbinic scholar whose wife died of influenza in 1918, the year of the great plague. The family immigrated to Canada in 1921 by way of Danzig and Liverpool. Dropping out of school, Borenstein toiled in a garment factory and learned to be a cutter. Not cut out for the shmatta business, he enrolled in art classes at the Monument National. Often, he spent his days sketching on Mount Royal or St. Helen's Island. In 1938, he met Judith, who sustained him through years of rejection and disappointment. She was a lifelong admirer, being impressed by the honesty and spontaneity of his paintings. They spent summers in an old school house in the Laurentians, and in winter, he could be seen with a palette painting street scenes of Montreal.

[Walter] Klinkhoff, a fan, gave Borenstein his first solo exhibition in 1958, and a second one in 1961. Sir George Williams University (Concordia) mounted a Borenstein retrospective in 1966. Borenstein had many years left when he succumbed to cancer. He died on Dec. 15, 1969, two days after being admitted to the Jewish General Hospital. Thirty years later, he is fondly remembered by those who had the fortune to meet him. "He was a kind of magician," says Joyce Borenstein. "He could transform a country village into a painting blazing with color.” Need one say more?

Excerpt of Sheldon Kirshner, “Sam Borenstein worked from the heart”, Canadian Jewish News, December 16, 1999. Vol. 29, Iss. 49, 11.