Arnaud Maggs After Nadar: Pierrot Turning 2012 Courtesy Susan Hobbs Gallery / photo Toni Hafkenscheid
This past Saturday, November 17, Montreal-born artist Arnaud Maggs passed away at the Kensington Hospice in Toronto.
The 86-year-old artist had recently been in the process of putting together a solo show for the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The show, and a related Steidl catalogue, will proceed to launch in May 2013. It will feature a work Maggs hadn’t exhibited in 22 years: his Andre Kertész 144 Views.
Renowned for his creative energy, Maggs was a graphic designer and commercial and fashion photographer until the age of 47, when he switched his focus to art-making.
Known for a serial photographic approach, Maggs melded the best of the formal and the expressive.
As his friend Michael Mitchell wrote in the Fall 2010 issue of Canadian Art, “Maggs has used the medium of photography to make us pay attention to many things. He began with the shape of human heads in 64 Portrait Studies, from 1976–78. After recording the heads and faces of the famous (such as Kertész and Joseph Beuys) and of friends in subsequent works, he moved on to the elegance of numerals (The Complete Prestige 12” Jazz Catalogue), the pathos of child labour and death announcements (Travail des enfants dans l’industrie and Notification), the tales an address book has to tell (Répertoire), Parisian signs (HOTEL) and the sad beauty of stains and mould (Contamination).”
In March 2012, Maggs debuted a new series of work, After Nadar, in which the artist turned the camera on himself. It provided a career overview of sorts in self-portraits of Maggs costumed as the 19th-century French pantomime Pierrot. (Parisian photographer Nadar once made a series of images of Pierrot, providing part of Maggs’s inspiration.)
This year, Maggs also won the $50,000 Scotiabank Photography Award, of which the upcoming Ryerson Image Centre exhibition and Steidl book are a part.
As Ann Thomas, curator of photography at the National Gallery of Canada, noted at the time of the SPA win, Maggs’s “unswerving and affectionate eye” and his ability to elevate “both the idea of human identity represented through the photographic portrait and the idea of cultural evidence garnered through the traces that everyday things leave behind.” As SPA co-founder Jane Nokes put it, “Arnaud Maggs is the master of the archival image… His extraordinary use of the ordinary is a wonder.”
Also notable this year was a National Gallery of Canada survey of Maggs’s work entitled “Identification.”
Surviving Maggs are his wife, artist Spring Hurlbut; two sons, Lorenzo and Toby, and daughter, Caitlan; their mother Margaret Frew; nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren; his sister Heather Cook and brother Derek Maggs; and numerous nieces and nephews.
A statement from Maggs’s Toronto dealer, Susan Hobbs, indicates that a public memorial will be held at University of Toronto’s Hart House in the near future.
