Jordan Michael Smith in Smithsonian Magazine:
Norval Morrisseau was certain. “I did not paint the attached 23 acrylics on canvas,” he wrote in a typed letter in 2001 to his Toronto gallery representative, who had sent him color photocopies of works that had recently sold at an unrelated auction.
Morrisseau, then in his late 60s and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was the most important artist in the modern history of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the “Picasso of the North.” He had single-handedly invented the Woodlands school of art, which fused European and Indigenous traditions to create striking, vibrant images featuring thick black lines and colorful interiors of humans, animals and plants, as though they had been X-rayed and their insides were visible and filled with unusual patterns and shapes. He was one of the first Indigenous painters to garner national attention and the first to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. “Few exhibits in Canadian art history have touched off a greater immediate stir,” swooned the Canadian edition of Time magazine after Morrisseau’s sold-out 1962 debut exhibition in Toronto.
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