Dr. Max Stern also put on the only commercially successful Emily Carr exhibit in his lifetime.
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In 1951, artist EJ Hughes was so broke he was considering getting a job at the post office or going back into the army.
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But then Montreal art dealer Dr. Max Stern went to lunch with the artist loren harris at the UBC Faculty Club.
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Hanging on the walls were two Hughes paintings, and Stern was intrigued.
“Both were from ships,” said a Sept. 22, 1951, story in The Vancouver Sun. “One was from fishing boats, the other was a ferry approaching land.”
Harris told Stern that Hughes lived in Victoria and Stern took a ferry there to try to find him. In the British Columbia capital, he “raised up a huge taxi bill” by going to various addresses looking for Hughes, to no avail.
But Stern was determined, telling Sun art writer Gwen Cash, “I’ll catch him if he takes me to the North Pole.”
Cash suggested to Stern that he try the RCMP, who discovered that Hughes lived in Shawnigan Lake, about 50 km north of Victoria.
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Cash accompanied the search.
“Driving there on a hot, stinky afternoon, we found Hughes painting in the attic of a tall old clapboard house built on a ledge behind some aspen trees overlooking the lake,” he wrote.
Cash wrote that Hughes was “a tall, thin young man with intense blue eyes, a thin black mustache, and an air of grand, if somewhat squiggly, sincerity.”
Stern bought all the artwork Hughes owned, 14 oil paintings, four oil sketches, and 32 “lovely pencil sketches.” The price was $500.
But it was not an isolated deal. Stern agreed to buy every painting Hughes produced in the future, providing the artist with much-needed financial security.
Stern would remain Hughes’s dealer until Stern died in 1988, working with Stern’s Dominion Gallery until it closed in 2000. Hughes became one of Canada’s most prominent artists: one of the paintings hung at UBC, “Fish Boats , Rivers Inlet,” sold for $2,041,250 at a Heffel auction in 2018.
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Cash wrote that “there is probably no artist more typical of British Columbia than Edward J. Hughes,” but that he had been “an honorless prophet” in his home province until Stern arrived: “It took an art expert from Montreal to find out. ”
“It’s the story of emily carr all over again,” Cash wrote.
In fact, Stern was Emily Carr art dealer also. In 1944, she met the 72-year-old Carr in Victoria and convinced her to hold an exhibition in Montreal.
“I took a taxi and drove to her house and found her sitting in the sun with a cat on her lap,” he told Maclean’s magazine in 1966. “I said, ‘I’d love to see your paintings.’ These were in a large room with a wall completely stacked with them – there were over 400 of them in there. We took them out and I was speechless.”
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Carr predicted that he “would not sell a painting” because “my paintings don’t sell.” But Stern sold 54 of the 60 works he brought to East and promptly sent Carr a check.
“She replied, ‘I HAVE NEVER SEEN A CHECK SO BIG,’ and in a subsequent letter described it as a ‘shock of joy,'” Dorothy Eber wrote in Macleans. She died the following March. Ella Stern’s show of hers was the only public (commercial) success that she knew as a painter”.
Stern He was born and raised in Germany, where his father owned a prominent art gallery in Düsseldorf. Stern earned a doctorate in art studies before joining his father at the gallery, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Jewish family was persecuted and he had to close the gallery and liquidate its assets.
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Stern fled to England in 1937 and Canada in 1940, but was interned as an “enemy alien” until 1941, when a member of the Birks jewelry family sponsored him and obtained his release.
In Montreal, he joined the Dominion Gallery and decided to promote Canadian artists, rather than the European artists who were popular at the time.
He and his wife had no children, and most of his estate was donated to McGill and Concordia universities in Montreal and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The estate initiated the Max Stern Restitution Project, which aims to recover 400 works of art that Stern lost during the Nazi era.
