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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63170 Medium Norval Morrisseau: Copper Thunderbird and the problem of forged paintings

Read the following passage.

A. Every painting sold on the first day. That was the result in 1962, when the Pollock Gallery in Toronto showed the work of Norval Morrisseau, an Anishinaabe artist from Ontario. No Indigenous artist had shown work in a Canadian gallery of contemporary art before, and the show turned him into a celebrity almost at once. Success had a price, however. Critics gave his art mixed reviews, calling it modern, primitive or a combination of both, and his private life was also closely watched.

B. Morrisseau was raised by his mother's parents at the Sand Point reserve beside Lake Nipigon, and his grandfather taught him the stories and cultural traditions of his people. At the age of six he was sent to a residential school, and at St. Joseph's Indian Residential School in Fort William he was mistreated. As a boy he wanted to draw sacred subjects such as the Thunderbird, but some community members and relatives discouraged him, because Anishinaabe protocols forbid sharing ceremonial knowledge. When he was nineteen he became critically ill, and his family arranged a healing ceremony, in which he was given the name Miskwaabik Animiiki, or Copper Thunderbird.

C. His career after 1962 had high and low points. For Expo 67 in Montreal he designed a mural showing bear cubs being nursed by Mother Earth, but when organizers raised concerns, he left the project rather than censor his drawing. In 1973 he was arrested for public drunkenness and held for six months in Kenora, where he was given an additional cell to use as a studio. He was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1978, and in 2006 the National Gallery of Canada showed a retrospective of his work, its first for a contemporary Indigenous artist. He died in 2007 of complications of Parkinson's disease.

D. Forged paintings became a serious problem. Before his death, Morrisseau knew that fraudulent works were being sold under his name, but authorities did not take his claims seriously. In 2019 the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that a Toronto gallery had sold the musician Kevin Hearn a painting with unreliable and likely false documents. In March 2023 police charged eight people in connection with a forgery ring that operated out of Thunder Bay from 1996 to 2019, and more than 1,000 paintings were seized. Critics argue that the ring was able to run almost unchecked for over twenty years, and that the slow response shows how the claims of Indigenous people have often been played down.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
While he was locked up, he was given extra room so he could keep making art.

- 2.
During a ritual to cure a serious illness, he was given a new name.

- 3.
He was treated badly at a school he attended in his early childhood.

- 4.
Judges decided that a buyer had received a painting with misleading paperwork.

- 5.
Buyers took every picture in his 1962 Toronto show within a single day.

- 6.
Reviewers were divided over what kind of art he was making.

- 7.
He dropped a wall picture planned for Montreal instead of changing what it showed.

- 8.
Police began their inquiry after members of his family complained about the copies.

- 9.
Investigators took away over a thousand works in the fraud inquiry.

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