Aba Bayefsky
{{Short description|Canadian artist}}
{{Infobox artist
| name = Aba Bayefsky
| honorific_suffix = {{Post-nominals|country=CAN|CM}}
| image = AbaBayefsky.png
| caption =
| birth_name =
| birth_date = {{birth date|1923|04|07}}
| birth_place = Toronto, Ontario, Canada
| death_date = {{death date and age|2001|05|05|1923|04|07}}
| death_place = Toronto, Ontario, Canada
| nationality =
| field =
| training =
| movement =
| works =
| patrons =
| influenced by =
| influenced =
| awards =
}}
Aba Bayefsky {{Post-nominals|country=CAN|CM|RCA|size=100%}} (April 7, 1923 – May 5, 2001) was an artist and teacher.
Career
Bayefsky was born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, the second son of a Russian-born father and a Scottish-born mother.{{cite web|title=Holocaust art of Aba Bayefsky|website=Canadian Museum of History|url=https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/treasure/291eng.shtml|access-date=27 September 2018}} He studied at the Central Technical School. During his teens, he attended classes at the Children's Art Centre of the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he was encouraged by such artists as Arthur Lismer, Erma Sutcliffe, Dorothy Medhurst, and A. Y. Jackson. He later studied at the Académie Julian in Paris.
Bayefsky enlisted in the RCAF in October, 1942, and was made a Flight Lieutenant. He was appointed an Official Second World War artist in December, 1944, assigned to depict airborne operations over north-west Europe. He entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation and recorded what he saw in sketchbooks (these were destroyed in a fire later).{{cite book|last=Celinscak|first=Mark|title=Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Concentration Camp|year=2015|publisher=University of Toronto Press|location=Toronto|isbn=9781442615700}}{{cite book |last1=Murray |first1=Joan |title=Canadian Artists of the Second World War |date=1981 |publisher=Robert McLaughlin Gallery |location=Oshawa |page=30|url=http://library.gallery.ca/search~S1?/amurray%2C+joan/amurray+joan/1%2C1%2C152%2CB/frameset&FF=amurray+joan+1943&32%2C%2C152 |access-date=23 July 2022}} But Bergen-Belsen became a part of his creative imagination. The Canadian War Museum has 9 works by Bayefsky of scenes in Bergen-Belsen.{{cite journal |last1=Brandon |first1=Laura |title=Reflections on the Holocaust: The Holocaust Art of Aba Bayefsky |journal=Canadian Military History |date=2012 |url=https://carleton-ca.academia.edu/LauraBrandon |access-date=20 October 2024}}
After the war, he was an instructor at the Ontario College of Art. In 1958, he was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and in 1979, he was made a member of the Order of Canada. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bayefsky maintained an interest in tattooing and produced a series of portraits of tattooed people from Toronto and Japan.{{Cite book |last=Jelinski |first=Jamie |title=Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada |publisher=McGill-Queen's University Press |year=2024 |location=Montreal and Kingston}}{{Cite journal|last=Jelinski|first=Jamie|date=Spring 2018|title="An Artist's View of Tattooing": Aba Bayefsky and the Tattoo Scenes of Toronto and Yokohama, 1978–86|url=https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/jcs.2017-0062.r2|journal=Journal of Canadian Studies|volume=52| issue=2 |pages=451–480| doi=10.3138/jcs.2017-0062.r2 | s2cid=150354531 |via=Project MUSE|url-access=subscription}}
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20070930181239/http://www.canadianencyclopedia.ca/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0000576 Aba Bayefsky] at The Canadian Encyclopedia
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20070807150024/http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/exhibits/art_qp/page_22_bayefsky.htm Profile from Archives Ontario]
{{Authority control (arts)}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bayefsky, Aba}}
Category:Canadian academics of fine arts
Category:Canadian people of Russian-Jewish descent
Category:Canadian people of Scottish descent
Category:Jewish Canadian artists
Category:20th-century Canadian painters
Category:Canadian male painters
Category:Members of the Order of Canada
Category:Members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
Category:Royal Canadian Air Force officers
Category:Royal Canadian Air Force personnel of World War II