Gerald Gladstone

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Gladstone, The Three Graces, fountain & sculpture, 1972

Gladstone, Downtown Nudes, oil on canvas, 1970s

Gerald Gladstone (1929-2005) was an important Canadian sculptor and painter, born in 1929 in Toronto, Canada. From an early age, Gladstone was typified as bold, precocious, and prodigious. As a child, he was as committed to music as he was to painting. Gladstone taught himself clarinet and formed a jazz band. He soon, however, committed himself to the plastic arts, especially sculpture for which he had a marked affinity and ability. He was soon earmarked a prodigy by curators and critics.

Gladstone was a member of the important group of artists exhibited by Toronto gallery owner Av Isaacs in the 1950s. The disparate group included artists such as Michael Snow, Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, and Tony Urquhart. His sculptures of the period were peculiarly modernist in a 1950s Toronto art scene noted for its conservativism and traditionalism (with the exception of sculptors such as Sorel Etrog, for example). In 1959, he received his first Canada Council of the Arts grant and Gladstone re-located to London, England. He studied at the Royal College of Art where he met and befriended the British sculptor Henry Moore. As a result of Moore's influence, Gladstone began a long period of experimentation with figurative sculpture.

In 1967, Gladstone received three major commissions for Montreal's Expo 67. A few years after, he was struggling to find work. Gladstone complained that his work was misundertood by the Canada Council's arts bureaucracy, a complaint that would persist throughout his career. He had an exhibition of his mid to late-career plastic cube sculptures and his Downtown Nudes Series - a collection of oils on canvas - at the opening exhibition of Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. In 1973, he produced the Electric Figure Series, another collection of oils on canvas. Gladstone continued to receive commissions but his flame began to burn less brightly than it had in the 1950s and 60s. Among his late-career commissions were the Three Graces, a fountain and bronze sculpture for the Ontario government buildings, Female Landscape, a fountain and bronze sculpture at Montreal's Place Ville Marie, Optical Galaxy Sculpture, a fountain and sculpture in Belconnen, Australia, and a fountain and precast concrete sculpture for a Martin Luther King memorial in California.