Mira Godard, the Bucharest-born art dealer who represented a stellar roster of Canadian visual artists including Christopher Pratt, Alex Colville, Joe Fafard, Mary Pratt, Jean McEwan, Takeo Tanabe and the estate of David Milne, died in Toronto after a long illness on Monday.
Although Godard guarded her age as though it were a state secret, a spokesperson for Toronto’s Mira Godard Gallery said she was born in 1928. She fled her homeland with her family after Romania slipped behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1940s, settling first in Zurich and then Paris before moving to Montreal in 1950.
For more than three decades, she was a leading national and international dealer, beginning with her purchase, almost on a whim, of the Agnes Lefort Gallery (which represented Jean-Paul Lemieux and Paul-Émile Borduas, among other luminaries) in Montreal in 1961. From that base, she followed the money and power shift to Toronto, establishing the Marlborough Godard Gallery on Hazelton Avenue in the Yorkville area in the early 1970s and then opening a showcase gallery in booming Calgary in 1979, only to be forced to retrench during the onerous recession of the early 1980s.
Fluent in at least three languages, raised in a cultured background, possessing a keen eye and a sharp nose, she was a pioneer in treating the visual arts as a business -- she had an MBA from McGill University -- rather than a vocation. She didn’t just appreciate the work her artists produced, she sold it and made them world-famous, at least in Canada. As Alex Colville said about her in a Saturday Night profile, back in 1981, “Nothing stops her. No stone is left unturned. People may criticize her for that kind of thing, but I like it.”
A full obituary is forthcoming.
