Born under the dreams of a Stefanoff

David Sherman

I have few memories of early childhood. Perhaps because most were best forgotten. I do remember kosher salami sandwiches on Wonder Bread, a treat since our daily bread was rye, kimmel, corn and pumpernickel.

My parents’ neighbourhoods of choice, as we moved up a unionized working man’s economic ladder, were contingent on the proximity of a Jewish bakery. Childhood memories are mostly of a teacher here and there, skating until feet froze, Ed Sullivan and a large painting that hung over the sofa.

I’d sit on my knees and stare at the picture of men sitting around the table, mesmerized by their smiles, the pensive looks regarding a conversation I’d never hear, their lined faces and the thickness of the oil paint.

The artist was Christo Stefanoff, a stranger to me until lately. I remain transfixed by his medium of choice -- palette knife and oil on cardboard. Despite my mother’s angst, a familiar sentiment, I loved to trace my fingers along the ridges of the paint left by the palette knife. It’s a work of art I could see but also feel. I was part of it.

The painting had arrived on our walls before I arrived in the world, brought from Europe by an uncle who died before I met him. But the men in the painting stayed are still with me today, my singular inheritance, hanging on our wall. On occasion, it stops visitors in their tracks.

My mother was not a bastion of sanity but through her disorders, physical and mental, she knew of my attachment to Stefanoff’s depiction of five men at ease with each other and the world. Perhaps that was part of its fascination. They were at peace with whatever their lot in life was. Broad smiles, deep thoughts that stoked my imagination. Some, drinking coffee wearing turbans, were Muslim. Beliefs of others in hats, drinking from shot glasses, are indeterminant. Somehow, as my hair greys, they continue to bring me peace.

Yes, perspective of the scene is skewed a touch but  it mattered not a whit. Perhaps it made the piece all the more real. Whose perspective is not skewed one way or another.

In my inexpressible joy of this work are dreams I can not elucidate and secrets I cannot imagine. There was sanctity, embodied by my habit of stashing the occasional five-dollar-bill birthday gift in an envelope behind the painting. I slit the paper backing behind the cardboard and slid my treasure in the one place I was sure no one would discover. In the sacred was a little boy’s surety.

As I aged, I would take a time out now and then to track the artist. The McGill University library revealed nothing but in the early years of the Internet I came across a museum dedicated to the artist not far from where I live now, the Laurentians, the chain of peaks and valleys 100 kms north of Montreal. It was a coincidence too incredible even for the worst of Hollywood’s screenwriters but there it was.

A history of Stefanoff was a phone call away except no one answered. Later the phone was disconnected as was I. Again.

Reisa sent a photo to an appraiser she knew and the reply was that the piece’s value was maybe $250. Curious because when my mother had the piece re-framed, in the days of a new art form that consisted of Ozzie and Harriet, Donna Reed and Ed’s really big show, she rejected a $5,000 offer.

Now there’s AI and I plugged in a photo of the painting and what I knew – oil with palette knife on cardboard – and out popped a history of the mysterious, mythical artist that continues to haunted me.

Born in Bulgaria in 1898, a teacher pushed him to take formal art training. He was a prodigy and was taken on as a protégé by a Czech painter. His talent was recognized immediately and he was an instant success, rewarded with title of professor by the tsar of Bulgaria.

According to AI, “In the interwar years he became genuinely internationally famous. While in Vienna he developed the palette-knife technique that would define his entire body of work. In 1927 he worked in the studio of the celebrated Hungarian portraitist Philip de László, and Hungary’s regent Miklós Horthy purchased one of his paintings. From there his career exploded — a decade of travel across Europe, the Middle East, and even the United States, painting Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, Benito Mussolini, Spanish president Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, Swiss president Giuseppe Motta, poet Rabindranath Tagore, and, during a stop in Hollywood, Greta Garbo …”

In 1934 he arrived in Poland, married a Polish woman, joined the anti-Nazi underground until arrested and tortured by the Nazis. He somehow was released to hide in the mountains and paint.

He and his family were captured again. His five-year-old died in a concentration camp, Stefanoff and his wife, Irena, were separated and lived in camps until war’s end.

He became a sort of court painter in the Netherlands after it was liberated by the Poles and created what is said to be an impressive series of work on the Warsaw Uprising and the ruins of the city after Nazis flattened it to avenge the revolt.

AI tells us, “A Montreal-newspaper review from 1952 described those Warsaw canvases as “magnificent like fragments of epopee (long epic poem) — grandiose, mystical, more issued from the heart than the brain.”

Fearing the rise of communism in Eastern Europe, in 1952 he chose to come to Canada. He planted fresh roots in Val David, up the road from where I live now, the year after I was born.

Says AI: “He threw himself into Quebec life: a 1952 solo show at Antoine’s Art Gallery in Montreal featured over sixty works, from pencil sketches to large oil triptychs, and a follow-up exhibition that November — patronized by Quebec’s Minister of Culture — was devoted entirely to Laurentian landscapes.”

He also painted Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, Samuel Bronfman, of bootlegging and booze fame, and a Canadian governor-general. In 1960, he opened his own gallery. His plans for a large $1 million artists’ colony in Val David would not happen. He died of a brain hemorrhage a few weeks after presenting the plan and was buried at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery in Montreal. He was 67

Again, from AI, Dutch researcher Frans Wauters grew up surrounded by his work and mounted a 2024 exhibition, “Christo Stefanoff, Forgotten Painter of War and Peace,” at the Maczek Memorial in Bulgaria. His paintings sell today for between a few hundred to a few thousand.

But, what price can I put on a painting I have looked at in awe all my life?

Wauters says he was “born under a Stefanoff painting.”

I know the feeling.