Winnipeg writer gave prestige to Inuit art

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This article was published 23/04/2002 (8857 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Canadian art world has lost one of its seminal figures with the death of a prominent Winnipeg artist, historian and writer.

George Swinton died peacefully on Sunday morning due to complications caused by congestive heart failure. He had turned 85 last Wednesday.

Respected for his many years teaching at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art and at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Swinton was best known as a groundbreaking writer on the subject of Inuit art.

“He saw it as a significant art form that demanded critical attention on a level with other important art forms,” said Darlene Wight, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s curator of Inuit art.

“He gave it prestige. He was so knowledgeable about world art that he could put it in context.”

The third edition of Swinton’s definitive 1972 book Sculpture of the Eskimo was released in 1999 under its revised title, Sculpture of the Inuit, by Toronto-based McClelland & Stewart.

“Like his work, he was a classic,” Douglas Gibson, president and publisher of M & S, said yesterday.

“I and my colleagues all mourn his loss. I visited him in Winnipeg in October and took away memories of a remarkable man, one of the great Canadians of our time.”

Swinton earned numerous friends and foes in the art establishment for his contentious views that much of what has been sold as Inuit art in recent years is mere product for tourists.

“He always stood up for what he believed was right,” said his daughter Moira, 49.

“That’s a rare thing.”

Ken Lochhead, a retired U of M art professor, says he knows no one who had a greater love for people and art than Swinton.

“He was a masterpiece of the human condition,” said Lochhead, now in Ottawa.

“He was a wonderful teacher.”

Swinton’s paintings have hung in the WAG and the National Gallery in Ottawa, among several institutions. He was inducted into the Order of Canada and was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy.

Born in Vienna, Austria, he became an enemy of the Nazis (though he was not Jewish) and fled to Canada during the Second World War.

He earned a degree in economics and political science from McGill University in Montreal. His passion for Inuit art began as a hobby. In fact, he never completed his formal education in fine arts, though he attended the Art Students League in New York in the late 1940s.

In 1954, he was hired by the U of M and first travelled north for the Hudson’s Bay Co. in 1957.

“I became famous through my hobby because I remained an amateur,” he told the Free Press’s Gordon Sinclair in 1997.

“Therefore, I didn’t have tunnel vision. I wasn’t an expert.”

Moira and her twin sister Nelda say a wake for their father is slated to begin at 2 p.m. May 4 at the Art Collector’s Club, 421 McDermot Ave.

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