Pflug, Christiane

Sybille Christiane Pflug (née Schütt) (1936-1972), German-Canadian realist painter, was born in Berlin, Germany and died of an intentional overdose at Hanlan’s Point, Toronto Islands. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Pflug was sent alone to live with family friends in the Austrian Tyrol town of Kitzbühl where she remained until her early teens. In 1953, Pflug left Germany for Paris to study fashion design. On a train to Paris in 1954, she met Michael Pflug (1929-,) a German medical student and aspiring artist. At his urging, and with the encouragement of artist friends Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenès, Christiane, who had no formal art training, began to paint. The Pflugs married in 1956 and moved shortly afterwards to Tunis, Africa where Michael had accepted a medical internship. In early 1958, Christiane and Michael held the first joint exhibition of their work at l’Alliance Française in Tunis. Christiane and the couple’s two young daughters, Esther and Ursula, joined her mother in Toronto in 1959 while Michael remained in Africa. In 1960, after completing his medical studies in France, Michael joined his family in Canada and soon began medical practice. The Pflugs settled in North Toronto, where Christiane painted her immediate surroundings including several series of city landscapes from her window, a series of interiors with dolls, and larger portraits of her daughters and her art dealer, Avrom Isaacs. In late 1962 Christiane held her first solo exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto and was represented there until 1967, at which point Michael assumed all management of her work. She was the recipient of Canada Council grants and participated in several major national shows, winning the purchase prize at the 1964 Winnipeg Biennial. Despite her lack of formal training, she taught briefly at the Ontario College of Art in 1969. Christiane Pflug’s work is represented in several Canadian public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, as well as in
Canadian corporate collections and private collections in Europe and North America. She died, committing suicide, on the Toronto Islands in April 1972.