15 Facts About Bertram Brooker

Bertram Richard Brooker was a Canadian abstract painter.

In Portage la Prairie, Bertram Brooker worked with his father at the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in a menial capacity.

Bertram Brooker attended night school and was, as a result, given clerical work at the railway.

From 1911 to 1914, Bertram Brooker was active in local theatre productions in Portage and Neepawa.

Bertram Brooker directed a play called Much Ado About Something at the Portage Opera House, and he seems to have acted in a number of local productions.

Bertram Brooker moved to Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 to become the business manager of Marketing and Business Management magazine.

Bertram Brooker served as the magazine's editor and publisher from 1924 until 1926.

In 1936, Bertram Brooker's novel Think of the Earth became the first work to win the Governor General's Award for Fiction, although very few copies were sold.

Around 1922 to 1924 Bertram Brooker began working on a series of non-objective paintings inspired by a profoundly mystical experience during a visit to the Presbyterian church in Dwight at the Lake of Bays in Ontario around 1921.

Bertram Brooker began painting in an abstract style, and in 1927 held his first exhibition, sponsored by his friends Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto.

Bertram Brooker was one of the first Canadians to paint in this style, although Kathleen Munn Henrietta Shore and Lowrie Warrener made abstract paintings in advance of 1927, but these were not presented in solo exhibitions before Brooker.

In 1931 Bertram Brooker was embroiled in a controversy about nudity in art when a painting of his was removed from the Ontario Society of Artists 59th Annual Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto exhibition because it contained nudity.

Bertram Brooker later wrote the essay "Nudes and Prudes" in 1931 as a rebuke.

Bertram Brooker was elected a member of the Ontario Society of Artists.

Bertram Brooker was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters and belonged as well to the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour.