TheStar.com | Obituary | Norval Morrisseau, 75: Famed native painter
Norval Morrisseau’s death yesterday at Toronto General Hospital, at age 75 after a long and feisty battle with Parkinson’s disease, won’t end of the gritty story of the great Anishinabe painter once called “the Picasso of the north” who signed his canvases “Miskwaabik Animiki” or Copper Thunderbird.
Born and raised in isolation near Thunder Bay, Ont., a member of the Order of Canada, Morrisseau was the sole Canadian painter shown at Paris’s Georges Pompidou Centre in 1989 as part of the French celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
He “spearheaded a cultural renaissance in First Nations arts and culture in the ’60s,” Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said in a statement yesterday. “He taught us to be proud of who we are.”