At Sir Adam Beck Collegiate Institute, he was taught by the author, illustrator, artist, and art therapist Selwyn Dewdney (he and his wife, Irene, became the boy’s second parents after his mother died). Throughout his childhood and teenage years, he took little interest in school, which he described as time spent “waiting between recesses and the summer holidays.” But that is where his art education began, well and early. Why didn’t Chambers finish his masterpiece?ī orn in London at Victoria Hospital, on March 25, 1931, Jack Chambers grew up in a modest Baptist home, the son of a welder. As the exhibition’s curator, University of Toronto professor Dennis Reid, explains, “All of the show’s themes are in that painting.” But while it was once regarded as a work of hope and possibility, it’s now a mystery. And now, forty-one years after it was first exhibited, it’s in the spotlight once again as the AGO opens a new retrospective called Jack Chambers: Light, Spirit, Time, Place, and Life. It was the one significant piece left unfinished when he died. Although he defied the odds and lived for another nine years, adopting a macrobiotic diet, travelling to India for spiritual treatments, and-despite periods of extreme fatigue-creating more than thirty major works, he never completed Lunch. Not only was Chambers breaking art market records, they gushed, but judging from the exhibition’s unfinished work, Lunch, he was about to do it again. When the retrospective moved from the VAG to the Art Gallery of Ontario, the reviews were equally enthusiastic. Viewers noticed that although the faces of the Chambers family were just taking form, a phenomenal composition was emerging from the canvas. It was included in the show because, as Chambers wrote in a piece for Artscanada magazine (where he previewed the work-in-progress), it embodied perceptual realism. Called Sunday Noon (and later renamed Lunch), it was a portrait of the artist sitting down to a winter’s midday meal with his wife and two young sons. More than a hundred paintings were exhibited at the 1970 retrospective, but the buzz surrounded one that remained curiously unfinished. Before perceptual realism, wrote Geoffrey James in Time, Chambers was “not smiled upon by the Canadian art establishment.” Many of the cognoscenti had dismissed him as a copyist, but as Alan Walker observed in Canadian magazine, he was praised now for “his poetic sensibility and his subtle colouring.” Along with Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Greg Curnoe, and Tony Urquhart, Jack Chambers had arrived as one of the most notable artists of his generation. 2 in a style he called perceptual realism, which he adopted in 1968, reinvigorating his reputation as an artist. Reviews of the exhibit unanimously asserted that at age thirty-nine the country’s best-paid artist had hit his stride. 2, put him front and centre in the Canadian art world. In September 1970, the Vancouver Art Gallery opened a retrospective exhibition of his paintings, which, coming just months after the fracas surrounding the sale of Sunday Morning No. He can’t get mad at me.’ ” But for Chambers, the discord couldn’t have come at a better time. “Of course, he stayed friends with Jack,” says Poole. Greg Curnoe, the well-known London painter, was so angry he stopped speaking to Poole, believing she had undermined the Canadian art market. But until recently, I thought I was underrated and underpaid.” Schwendau, a local financial consultant, bought the piece for its asking price, and overnight Jack Chambers became “Canada’s highest-earning artist.” He told the press, “Now I think I’m getting about what my work is worth. She was skeptical about making the sale, but in June 1970 Eric A. “To put that amount in perspective,” says Poole, “it was five times” what had been paid for his last major painting, 401 Towards London No. 2, a picture of his pyjama-clad three- and four-year-old sons watching television in the family living room. Still, she was stunned the following spring when Chambers demanded $25,000 for Sunday Morning No.

Wow classic unfinished business