Two recently acquired works are watercolour paintings of mountain flowers by Annora Brown. She gained extensive knowledge of Alberta’s flowers by travelling throughout the province, taking long hikes to study different flowers in full bloom. Her knowledge and talent led the Glenbow Foundation to commission Brown to paint 200 pictures of Alberta wildflowers. It took her three years to complete this assignment, because so many admirers would buy pieces along the way. In the end, she completed 500 pieces. Annora Brown taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts, now The Banff Centre, from 1945 to 1950.
Harry Wohlfarth also taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts from 1954 through 1967. In 1970 the Tiburian Academy of Rome (the former Royal Italian Academy) presented its Great Gold Medal to Wohlfarth during an invitational one-man exhibition at the Academy. He was only the 5th person to receive the gold medal in the art field in the 150 year history of the Academy. Wohlfarth was also a gifted mountaineer and adventurer. The painting, entitled The Climbers, is an image from an expedition to the Mount Everest area in which Wohlfarth participated.
Bern Smith lived in Banff from 1987 until his death earlier this year. In his freelance commercial art career, Bern illustrated more than 900 Harlequin romance book covers. But Bern is best known for his fine art, and particularly for his beautiful mountain landscapes. The Whyte Museum has been very fortunate to acquire from his estate six exquisite plein air watercolour sketches depicting scenes in the Canadian Rockies.
Over the past decade or so, Les Graff has sought inspiration and has sharpened his artistic skills by taking an annual pilgrimage to the Canadian Rockies to spend several weeks sketching. These trips have focused on the Kootenay Plains area on the North Saskatchewan River, Bow Lake and Yoho National Park, areas where Graff found the shapes, forms and colours available to inspire his work and sharpen his artistic skills. Abstract paintings and pencil drawings, these small studies, comprised of several hundreds of examples, form an interesting body of work in the development of the artist’s oeuvre. In a much-appreciated act of generosity, he offered to donate 100 pieces from this group to the Whyte Museum’s permanent collection over a three-year period. The Whyte Museum wishes to extend its appreciation to Les Graff for making this highly relevant collection of works available to us, further strengthening our ongoing efforts at collecting important mountain art.
The Whyte Museum wishes to thank Mr. and Mrs. Donald and Marlene Campbell of Calgary for their generous donation of two works of art, one by Zelda Nelson and the other by Les Graff. The Les Graff work adds to our collection by this inspired Alberta artist, recently featured in an exhibition here at the Whyte entitled Landscape As Metaphor - A Retrospective. This Nelson painting is entitled “Mt. Assiniboine.”
When he found out that the Little Bow Hutterite Colony in southern Alberta was to be flooded upon completion of a nearby dam, award-winning documentary photographer George Webber visited the inhabitants. He hoped they would allow him to photograph them at work and at play, before their homes disappeared forever. Over the next four years Webber witnessed and photographed, gently and unobtrusively, the daily life in the colony and finally its abandonment. Thanks to George Webber for his donation of five 11x14 silver gelatin photographs from this series.
Edward Burtynsky is one of Canada’s most respected photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are in the collections of several major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Whyte Museum is extremely grateful to receive a donation of twenty photographs by Edward Burtynsky for its contemporary photographic collection. This donation forms the core of this exhibition.
We have recently acquired another wonderful work by Nicholas de Grandmaison, a painting of Jimmy Simpson. De Grandmaison’s daughter, Sonia, brought us the painting along with the story of finding it in the trailer he used as a mobile studio. The canvas was found rolled up under a seat, along with four others. We are very grateful for this donation. It adds to our already strong collection of de Grandmaison’s colourful characters of the Canadian Rockies. The painting was brought in and donated by Tamara de Grandmaison. Copyright is held jointly by her, her sister Sonia and her brother Nicholas.
Regular readers of The Cairn over the years will recall various articles on the generosity of the late Hans Gmoser and his wife Marg in donating significant collections from his career as a guide, film-maker and heli-ski entrepreneur to the Whyte Museum. The major gift occurred in 1995 and included ten feature-length films on climbing and skiing as well as numerous short films, archival records, photographs and some of his climbing gear. These collections are now part of the Hans Gmoser fonds in the Archives, and are regularly used for research by those seeking information on mountaineering and skiing history in the Canadian Rockies and the Yukon. Recently, a significant addition to the collections has been made by Marg Gmoser, who is moving house and wants to insure that Hans’ materials are kept together and available for posterity. The donation includes some of Hans’ most personal items, including the ice axe he used for many years, his compass, his gaiters and his guiding badges, as well as significant recognition and awards he received over the course of his life, including his Order of Canada. These additions to what is already one of our most important collections, considerably enrich it and provide us with the opportunity to include a fine representation of artifacts in future mountaineering exhibitions as well as further strengthening the research materials. We realize that it was difficult for Marg to part with these treasures and wish to assure her and the family that they will be well-kept, well-appreciated and well used in the years ahead in interpreting Hans’ important place in Canadian Rockies history and culture.
