Somewhere Waiting: The Life and Art of Christiane Pflug

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

In her 1966 painting Kitchen Door with Ursula, Christiane Pflug painted
the view from inside the kitchen looking out over the balcony to a
winter cityscape. The open glassed door is angled in such a way that the
viewer expects a reflection of the interior, but instead it reflects the
child sitting outside, coatless, in a landscape of early spring.
Pflug’s paintings—of dolls, children, dead birds, city streets
without people—are always memorable for the exquisite realism of their
presentation and for what one reviewer called her “frightening air of
unreality.”

Art historian Davis has caught something of this ambiguity in her solid
biography of the artist. The facts are presented in a dispassionate
manner, and interpretation of bizarre behavior is kept to a minimum,
allowing the reader to draw conclusions.

It is a sad story, even though Davis’s expertise helps us to trace
the success of the artist. Christiane was working in Paris when she
married a medical student who wanted to be a painter. Michael Pflug
became a doctor, but the central passion of his life remained art, and
in particular the art of his wife. They moved to Tunis, where her art
began to develop, and finally to Toronto. She attracted Avrom Isaacs as
her dealer until Michael decided that she should no longer sell to
private clients but should keep her work for the large public galleries.

The personal side of the story is an intriguing horror. It becomes
clear that Christiane might not have continued to paint without
Michael’s passion and involvement in her work. At the same time, his
obsessive need for control of her life and her work was not healthy, and
toward the end of her life his behavior became extraordinarily cruel.
Christiane killed herself in 1972. She was in her mid-thirties.

Michael Pflug has continued to collect her work as it returns to the
market and to donate items to public galleries.