Aba Bayefsky
Canadian artist
title: "Aba Bayefsky" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1923-births", "2001-deaths", "canadian-academics-of-fine-arts", "canadian-people-of-russian-jewish-descent", "canadian-people-of-scottish-descent", "jewish-canadian-artists", "20th-century-canadian-painters", "canadian-male-painters", "members-of-the-order-of-canada", "members-of-the-royal-canadian-academy-of-arts", "artists-from-toronto", "royal-canadian-air-force-officers", "royal-canadian-air-force-personnel-of-world-war-ii", "20th-century-canadian-male-artists", "world-war-ii-artists", "20th-century-canadian-war-artists"] description: "Canadian artist" topic_path: "history" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aba_Bayefsky" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Canadian artist ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox artist"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | Aba Bayefsky |
| honorific_suffix | |
| image | AbaBayefsky.png |
| birth_date | |
| birth_place | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| death_date | |
| death_place | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| :: |
| name = Aba Bayefsky | honorific_suffix = | image = AbaBayefsky.png | caption = | birth_name = | birth_date = | birth_place = Toronto, Ontario, Canada | death_date = | death_place = Toronto, Ontario, Canada | nationality = | field = | training = | movement = | works = | patrons = | influenced by = | influenced = | awards = Aba Bayefsky (April 7, 1923 – May 5, 2001) was an artist and teacher.
Career
Bayefsky was born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, the second son of a Russian-born father and a Scottish-born mother. He studied at the Central Technical School. During his teens, he attended classes at the Children's Art Centre of the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he was encouraged by such artists as Arthur Lismer, Erma Sutcliffe, Dorothy Medhurst, and A. Y. Jackson. He later studied at the Académie Julian in Paris.
Bayefsky enlisted in the RCAF in October, 1942, and was made a Flight Lieutenant. He was appointed an Official Second World War artist in December, 1944, assigned to depict airborne operations over north-west Europe. He entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation and recorded what he saw in sketchbooks (these were destroyed in a fire later). But Bergen-Belsen became a part of his creative imagination. The Canadian War Museum has 9 works by Bayefsky of scenes in Bergen-Belsen.
After the war, he was an instructor at the Ontario College of Art. In 1958, he was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and in 1979, he was made a member of the Order of Canada. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bayefsky maintained an interest in tattooing and produced a series of portraits of tattooed people from Toronto and Japan.
References
References
- "Holocaust art of Aba Bayefsky".
- Celinscak, Mark. (2015). "Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Concentration Camp". University of Toronto Press.
- (1981). "Canadian Artists of the Second World War". Robert McLaughlin Gallery.
- (2012). "Reflections on the Holocaust: The Holocaust Art of Aba Bayefsky". Canadian Military History.
- Jelinski, Jamie. (2024). "Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada". McGill-Queen's University Press.
- Jelinski, Jamie. (Spring 2018). ""An Artist's View of Tattooing": Aba Bayefsky and the Tattoo Scenes of Toronto and Yokohama, 1978–86". Journal of Canadian Studies.
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::