Jerry Santbergen 1942 - 2002

Two large-scale fluorescent canvases, once stretched at angles to hang on large walls, have damage resulting from a show at the Centennial College in Toronto, 1969.

Purchased from the Carmen Lamanna Gallery and loaned to the College by A.E. Golden of Toronto, the damage may have been from flung food or coffee.

The original purchase by A.E. Golden was “to satisfy legal fees incurred by Mr Santbergen and are security on account of same fees.”

In July 1969 (Regina Leader-Post), “Santbergen was released from jail on $3000 cash bail after spending nine days in jail on two hashish possession charges. Friends scraped up the bail for Santbergen, whose paintings hang in the Rowan Gallery in London, the Guggenheim in New York and the National Gallery in Ottawa. Recently when bail was set at $3,000 cash or $5,000 property, the court refused to acknowledge his unsold paintings as property. They are valued at about $24,000 by Carmen Lamanna, the gallery owner who handles Santbergen’s works.”

Jerry Santbergen, explaining his position to the Ottawa police.

In a prior event with police, a December, 1968, opening at the Ontario Art Gallery, Jerry Santbergen had an unfortunate run-in with the law, but this time for trying to tear his own painting off the wall of the Canadian Arts ‘68 exhibition shortly before Premier John Robarts was about to open the exhibition. “Before a packed house, he tried to yank his eight-foot-square canvas off the wall” reported The Vancouver Sun. “I’m gonna take it down and burn it” he said at the time.

Jerry (Gerrardus) Santbergen, born in 1942 in Klundert, Netherlands, died January 2, 2002 from complications from alcoholism, liver and pancreatic failure. He was 59 years old.

An artist who circulated in the Toronto scene during the 1960s he was very much caught up in the avant garde, abstract, and large-scale ambition of his contemporaries. Represented by the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, his fluorescent paint on canvas pieces were included in some group exhibitions at the time.

In 1967, Barry Lord for artscan (June/July) provides an overview of “Spring ‘67 shape of the season” and includes mention of “Painting 1966 acrylic on canvas” by Santbergen at the Art Gallery of Ontario: “Jerry Santbergen, a young artist who moved from Regina to Toronto last year … recent exhibition at the Pollock Gallery included works in which the uneven stretching of his canvases was used simply and effectively to create surface tensions in rhythm — advance, recede, advance again. This contour variation is meaningfully integrated with bold, minimal colour-forms and two-dimensional cropping of the image.”

“Canada: Art d’Aujourd’hui” organized by the National Gallery of Canada, in conjunction with the Department of External Affairs, in Paris at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, was mostly panned by critics of the day. Richard Simmins, writing in artscanada April, 1968: “A strong selection committee had the opportunity of pulling together a tremendously exciting exhibition … diverse, urbane, of the moment. Fearing a few rough edges and the odd bit of eclecticism it compromised and produced an ill-assorted show which offended everyone and excited no one.” Arguably, Jerry Santbergen is in some good company where Simmins pans the artists who “[pass] for the Canadian avant-garde” as including “Iain Baxter, David Bolduc, John Chambers, Greg Curnoe, Charles Gagnon, Jacque Hurtubise, Les Levine, John Meredith, Jerry Santbergen, Henry Saxe and Joyce Wieland.”

Unfortunately, according to Simmins and other critics, this moment in Canadian art history “is not a genuine reflection of the best work being done in Canada today. It is second rate. Ten years too late.”

Further, artscanada October/November 1970 reviews a group show Carmen Lamanna curated with 12 artists in Lausanne, summer of 1970. The writer, Dorothy Cameron, is mostly complimentary throughout the review, however, damned again are poor David Bolduc, Iain Baxter, and Jerry Santbergen, who is singled out with: “Damaged and dated, the green-striped shaped-canvas by Jerry Santbergen served only as a sad reminder of over-promise unfulfilled.”

A last mention of Jerry Santbergen in news articles of the time was for his 23-foot mural that once hung at Pilot Tavern in Toronto. He and his wife, Naili, coated themselves with paint and rolled around on the canvas. This was created in 1969, a year after Santbergen declared he was quitting art. However, mentions of Jerry Santbergen in newspaper articles all but completely disappear after 1969. Though he seemed to quit and return to art, it is more likely that he changed course again and left the art world when the decade changed.

The National Gallery of Canada holds one of his painted abstract canvases, as does the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection and the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University.