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Robert Markle (1936–1990) was a Mohawk painter, writer, musician, and educator from southern Ontario. He is best known for his exploration of the female nude and his interest in capturing the female body in motion.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Markle moved to Toronto in 1954 to attend the Ontario College of Art. He quickly realized the limits of a formalized arts education, and he was expelled before completing his degree. However, during his time at the Ontario College of Art, he met his wife, model, and lifelong muse, Marlene Shuster.

Markle continued to develop his art practice outside of the academy. He often frequented the burlesque halls on Younge Street and Spadina Avenue where he developed his fascination with depicting the female body in motion. Taking burlesque dancers and his wife Marlene as models, Markle experimented with the nude figure across a variety of mediums, mainly producing tempera and acrylic paintings and ink drawings, but he also explored photography, collage, printmaking, wood sculpture, and neon. No matter the medium, a signature feature of his work was that his figures often lacked identifiable faces and were depicted wearing high heels. 

The erotic nature of Markle’s work meant that it was not displayed without controversy. His first solo exhibition was held in 1963 at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto and Markle later became associated with the Isaacs Gallery Group, a group of artists known for their avant-garde artworks and their drinking. In 1965, Markle’s work was included in an exhibition titled Eros ’65 at the Dorothy Cameron Gallery. The exhibition was raided by morality police and a number of his works were seized and identified as obscene. The event resulted in an obscenity trial, a lot of media attention, and a wider national debate about censorship and the difference between erotic art and pornography.

Committed to art education, from 1966 to 1976, Markle taught at the New School of Art, a Toronto art school established in 1965 that was conceived as an alternative to the Ontario College of Art. In 1977, he was a founding member of Art’s Sake Inc, an artist-run post-secondary art school in Toronto. He also taught at the University of Guelph.

In 1970, Markle was involved in a motorcycle accident and broke both of his arms. With a reduced capability to use his hands during recovery, he continued to paint using a large shaving brush and created expressionistic images that continued to explore the curves and movements of the female body. Around this time, he moved to a farm near Holstein, Ontario, and he began to more closely examine his Mohawk heritage.

Markle’s work has been widely exhibited. A retrospective of his work was organized by Tony Massett at Durham Art Gallery from 2002 to 2003. This exhibition was followed by Woman as Goddess: Liberated Nudes by Robert Markle and Joyce Wieland at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from 2003 to 2004. J.A. Wainwright published Markle’s biography Blazing Figures: A Life of Robert Markle in 2010. His work has been collected by many significant institutions including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Philadelphia Museum, among others. Markle passed away in an accident in 1990 after his car struck a tractor.