Fine Art on the Kill Floor: the Perehudoff Murals

I first saw the murals in 1977 while filling out a form to work at Intercontinental Packers. For those of us unskilled in physical labour and untutored in art history, the murals were an exotic glimpse of what was to come on the job. The canvasses swarmed with furious activity. White-garbed, well-muscled humans, as pristine as surgeons, bent to their labours in various work stations.  What kind of place is this, I wondered.

I didn’t work there very long, cycling through various jobs from measuring sausage casings to trimming fat off organs and separating the trachea from the lungs of beef carcasses.  The smell was overwhelming, but there were compensations.  We were paid weekly, there was a company store that sold Mitchell’s meat products at a bargain rate to staff, a doctor was on site and conditions were sanitary.  And the Mendel/Mitchell family had a sprawling history, from Hitler to Hollywood.

Fred Mendel, a German Jew who could read the writing on the wall, migrated to Saskatoon in the late 1930s, acquiring a slaughterhouse that he would expand into a chain of meat-processing facilities across Canada and overseas to Australia.  Intercontinental Packers fed England during World War Two.

Mendel and his wife Claire established a significant art collection and used the boardroom of their Saskatoon office to display Group of Seven luminaries including A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and Lawren Harris along with a major Cornelius Kriegkoff.  They invested heavily in Canadian art and in the city that welcomed them before the war.

Claire and Fred’s daughter Johanna married Cameron Mitchell, a movie star most famous for playing the easy-going cowboy, Buck, on the TV series The High Chaparral. Their son, Fred Mitchell, took over the family business and by all accounts ran it well until he died of cystic fibrosis at age 51. Intercontinental Packers was bought up by Schneider’s and the Saskatoon plant was torn down in 2010. 

But before they razed the building, the Perehudoff murals had to be saved. Conservators used the strappo technique – literally stripping the acrylic paint off the plaster and transferring it to another medium (cloth) for preservation.

These murals are currently on display at the Remai Modern Museum along with a room of landscapes by Perehudoff’s wife, painter Dorothy Knowles. 

The young William Perehudoff was a farmer who studied art history on his own and learned to paint through correspondence classes. He was working at Intercon to supplement his farming income when he pitched a 3-month project to Mendel to let him paint murals depicting the operations at the meat-packing plant.  Mendel, always the art benefactor, agreed to pay Perehudoff his hourly wage while he created three murals.  Perehudoff painted Cubist forms using a conventional fresco technique of painting directly onto the plastered walls of the reception area.

Perehudoff would later refine his work at art college, becoming famous for his colour-field paintings in the 60s and 70s.  He is considered to be one of Canada’s leading Modernist painters, and these early commissioned murals, so different from his later work, are still visually and historically rich artifacts of our time and place.

In the early 1960s the Mendels endowed Saskatoon with paintings and funds to build the Mendel Art Gallery on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River.  Here is how his grandson, Fred, explains the gift:

The purpose of the Mendel was to highlight the very best of what Canadian art had to offer, and to ensure that a uniquely Canadian voice, indeed a Prairie voice, indeed a Saskatchewan voice of local artists could be given birth and nurtured to grow and evolve in the community. This was the mission and success of the Mendel Art Gallery.... Even Joni Mitchell was influenced by Fred Mendel’s art consciousness and her own art was shown at the Mendel Art Gallery.

Mendel Art Gallery photo by Liam Richards / Star-Phoenix

With the opening of the spectacular Remai Modern Gallery, the core pieces of the Mendel Collection have been moved to their own gallery in the $85 million dollar building. Rather than closing the beloved Mendel Art Gallery and Observatory, the City of Saskatoon will re-purpose the old Mendel as a new Children’s Discovery Museum, opening later this year. 

Next week we’ll show you some of Dorothy Knowles’ landscapes and tell you more about the Remai Modern Museum. 

Clear eyes.  Full heart.  Can’t lose.