A Tribute to Norman Bethune:
the mural and political cartoons of Avrom Yanovsky

Avrom Yanovsky, Bethune Mural, acrylic on Masonite, 1964, Yanovsky Family, Toronto.

Curated by Dr. Anna Hudson

Yanovsky was born in Krivoirog, Ukraine in 1911 and came to Canada with his mother, grandparents, and brother in 1913. They settled first in Winnipeg, where he studied with LeMoine FitzGerald at the Winnipeg School of Art. In 1930 he moved to Toronto and enrolled at the Ontario College of Art to study under Yvonne McKague Housser, John Alfsen, and Rowley Murphy. In 1931 he helped to form the Progressive Arts Club and, in the late 1930s, an artists’ union in Canada. In 1938, he won a scholarship to the American Artists’ School in New York. During the war he worked with John Grierson at the National Film Board of Canada. In 1945-46 he was an instructor of Saturday Morning Classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto. By the late 1940s, he was publishing his cartoons and painting murals. From 1963 through 1970 he was involved in the administration of the Canadian Society of Graphic Art. He died in Toronto in 1979.

This exhibition features Avrom Yanovsky’s mural tribute to Dr. Norman Bethune, who remains best known as a hero in the People’s Republic of China. He is remembered in Canada as a surgeon and inventor who developed a mobile blood-transfusion service, a political activist and an early proponent of a universal health care system. The mural (19 x 7 feet/5.8 X 2.1 metres) was painted for the Communist Party of Canada and covered an entire wall at the Norman Bethune-Tim Buck Educational Centre, 24 Cecil St., Toronto. The mural, completed in 1963-65, has never been exhibited since being removed from its original location.

Also included are over sixty politcal cartoons by Avrom (as he was known professionally) published between 1950 and 1972. The ink drawings, with their collaged and corrected compositions, are the original cartoons published in newspapers nationally, most commonly in the Worker and The Canadian Tribune, and internationally through World News Services. All are animated by a cast of easily recognizable characters: the money bag, the banker, the capitalist, and the politician – with his sidekick, the police or military. Yanovsky saved the leading role for the worker: an idealized representation of labour who endured the endless greed and buffoonery of capital and political power.