Sculptor and Artist - Leo Mol 1915-2009

Leo Mol was a sculptor and artist whose bronzes earned a distinguished place on Parliament Hill, in Vatican museums and in his beloved home of Winnipeg. Mr. Mol earned an international reputation as one of Canada’s leading sculptors.

Mr. Mol’s work included paintings, drawings, porcelain figurines and stained glass windows. He has created over 90  stained-glass windows, including 30 for Ss Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in Winnipeg. But he is best known for his bronze sculptures. The first breakthrough in his art career came when he won an international commission to do a five-metre tall sculpture of Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko in Washington DC (1964). Working in the classical tradition, he won numerous other international competitions including ones for monuments to Taras Shevchenko in Buenos Aires (1971), to Queen Elizabeth II in Winnipeg (1970) in the courtyard by the Centennial Concert Hall, and to former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in Ottawa (1985). He executed numerous busts of well-known figures, including Winston Churchill (1966), Dwight D. Eisenhower (1965), John F. Kennedy (1969), Popes Paul VI (1967), John XXIII (1967), and John Paul II (1982), and Cardinal Yosyf Slipyj (1971). To commemorate the Millennium of Ukrainian Christianity in 1988, he created bronze monuments of Saint Volodymyr the Great for the Ukrainian communities in London (England), Winnipeg, and Toronto. 

In 1992, the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden was established in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park and features roughly 300 works, including life-like bronze casts of people and animals outdoors, and oil paintings and pastels in an indoor gallery.

Mr. Mol as a young teenager moved to Vienna to start his art apprenticeship then studied at the art academies in Leningrad from 1936 to 1940, and later continued his studies in Berlin and The Hague. He fled war-ravaged Europe, immigrating to Canada as farm hand in Saskatchewan on New Year’s Day, 1949, and moved to Winnipeg months later.

Long-time friend and art dealer David Loch described Mr. Mol’s gift: “Leo always [sculpted] from life and in doing that, then captured the character of the individual. A lot of portraits you see they’re so stiff, they just leave me stone cold - they’re not even a likeness, really, but how do you get the character to come out in a piece of sculpture?”

LEO  MOL

Leo Mol was born Leonid Molodozhanyn on Jan. 15, 1915, in Polonne, Novohrad-Volynskyi county, Volhynia gubernia (Ukraine). Mr. Mol was a past president of the Manitoba Society of Artists and the Sculptors’ Society of Canada and was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Allied Artists of America. For his contribution to Canadian art he was awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Winnipeg and Alberta (1985) and, was appointed Officer to the Order of Canada (1989) and received the Order of Manitoba (2000). Monographs about him have been written in English by Canadian art historian Paul Duval (1982) and in Ukrainian by Dmytro Stepovyk (1995). In 1994 Canada’s National Film Board produced the documentary Leo Mol in Light and Shadow.

Leo Mol died on July 4, 2009, in Winnipeg. He was 94 and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for several years. He leaves his wife, Margareth.

From The Canadian Press and Dr. Daria Zelska Darewych