Robert Markle
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August 25, 1936
Robert Markle | |
|---|---|
| Born | Robert Nelson Markle August 25, 1936 Hamilton, Ontario |
| Died | July 5, 1990 (aged 53) Mount Forest, Ontario |
| Education | Ontario College of Art |
| Known for | Painting |
| Spouse |
Marlene Shuster (m. 1958) |
Robert Markle (August 25, 1936 – July 5, 1990) was a Canadian painter of the female nude.
Markle was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1936. In 1954, he began attending the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where he met his wife, Marlene Shuster.[1]
Since his wife worked at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, his work came to the attention of Avrom Isaacs,[2] and he held his first solo exhibition at the Gallery in 1963. He is considered one of the "Isaacs Group" of artists.[1] In 1965, he participated in a group show called Eros '65 at the Dorothy Cameron Gallery in Toronto. A police raid on the show led to an obscenity trial which Cameron lost. She had to close the gallery but the media attention brought Markle celebrity status.[3]
In 1968, a retrospective of his work was held at the McIntosh Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Western Ontario. In 1989, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery curated The Painter and his Model: Markle since '85. The Durham Art Gallery organized Markle retrospectives in 1990 and 2002. In 2003, Anna Hudson for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, organized an exhibition entitled Woman as Goddess: Liberated Nudes by Robert Markle and Joyce Wieland, in which Markle's work was sharply criticized, and Markle called a misogynist by the Toronto Globe and Mail.[4] In 2011, Blazing Figures: A Retrospective of Robert Markle opened at the Gallery de Boer in Owen Sound.[1]
Markle's work has been collected by public institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[5] The Robert Markle fonds (SC076) in the Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, documents his life and work. There is also a J.A. Wainwright – Robert Markle collection in this repository.
Markle taught at The New School of Art (founded in 1965) from around 1966 to 1976. In 1977, he was a founding member of Art's Sake Inc., an artist-run post-secondary art school in Toronto, where he also taught. In addition, Markle taught at the University of Guelph.[1]
