Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  Jackson was not in London to enjoy the acclaim because he had been sent back to Canada in October. Varley, though, was able to bask in the critical ovations. The Observer celebrated him as “the most distinguished and forceful of the Canadian official artists,” and in the Nation he was commended for having conveyed to spectators “the original effect of horror.” In the Daily Telegraph the distinguished art historian Sir Claude Phillips, a one-time keeper of the Wallace Collection, called him an “ultra-modernist” and praised For What? and Some Day the People Will Return for their “genuine power. There is nothing here of sentiment, nothing indeed of personal passion. We find a massive objectivity, a sense of all-pervading tragedy, of human will overpowered by Fate.” 21

  Varley quickly became the toast of London. He was given honorary membership in the Chelsea Arts Club, the legendary institution founded in 1891 by James McNeill Whistler. Its reputation for decadent bohemianism (the annual Chelsea Arts Ball was the most notorious event in the social calendar) appealed to Varley. Here within the famous white walls he received a “very warm greeting” from Augustus John and “quite enjoyed gassing” with his fellow painters.22 More work quickly came his way. The Canadian War Records Office commissioned him to paint an eleven-foot-wide panel and Lord Beaverbrook requested a portrait of his ten-year-old daughter, Janet. So great was Varley’s success that he began contemplating a permanent move back to England. He wrote to Dr. MacCallum asking for two of his works—Indian Summer and Squally Weather, Georgian Bay—to be shipped to England so they might be included in the Royal Academy’s annual summer exhibition. He informed Maud that he planned to take “full advantage of the tide” that was flowing in his direction.23

  The promise of the Algonquin Park School, checked by the war, finally appeared on the verge of fulfilling itself. Back in Toronto, J.E.H. MacDonald, for one, was optimistic. “They will return,” he wrote of the two triumphant war artists. “They will interpret for us with deeper insight the distinctive beauty of the land they have served. May their countrymen leave their old apathy behind them, the old condescension, the old ridicule . . . and arouse themselves to an appreciation of their efforts!” 24

  But if the promise was soon fulfilled, the old apathy would not be laid to rest so easily.

  JACKSON WAS AWAITING passage to Siberia when the cwmf exhibition opened in London. He had returned to Canada to prepare for embarkation to Vladivostok to chronicle in paint the Canadian army’s fight against the Bolsheviks. Provisioned with twenty tubes of white paint to depict the Siberian snows, he awaited his orders in vain. “I have been in readiness to proceed to Siberia for the last six weeks,” he wrote to Eric Brown in early January, “and as practically the whole expedition has gone and left me here with no further orders it looks as though they do not intend to have an artist with the force.” 25 He managed instead to get sent to Halifax to work, like Frank Johnston and more than a dozen other painters, on the Home Work Section of the Canadian War Memorials Fund. His task was to paint the troopships as they returned from Europe laden with Canadian soldiers.

  In Halifax, Jackson was reunited with Arthur Lismer, likewise working for the Home Work Section. Lismer was officially commissioned by the Canadian War Records Office in June 1918, soon after which he contributed Convoy in Bedford Basin. He was intrigued by the zigzag patterns on the ships, a style of camouflage known as “dazzle painting” recently developed by the British marine painter Norman Wilkinson. Cubist experiments with colour and form had influenced its abstract patterns: “We did that!” Picasso, according to legend, exclaimed to Gertrude Stein on seeing camouflaged military vehicles rolling through Paris in 1915.26 Dazzle-painted ships were regarded to be of sufficient artistic merit to warrant an article in The Studio. Enthusing over the patterns as if over a Cubist or Vorticist masterpiece, the journal’s correspondent commended the stripes and curves “in black and white or pale blue and deep ultramarine” and the appearance of “hopeless confusion” that was in reality a “perfect order.” 27 Although Lismer faithfully recorded the dazzle-painted convoy, these harlequin patterns were as close as he would come to Cubism or abstraction in his own art.

  Lismer took his duties seriously, placing himself in some peril to get his sketches. He went to sea on both a minesweeper and the 225-ton torpedo boat hmcs Grilse. He visited a seaplane station and even took a trip underwater in one of the Royal Canadian Navy’s two submarines. In doing so he defied German U-boats, rough seas and possible collisions. Six of the Grilse’s crewmen had been washed overboard in a storm in 1916, and collisions and groundings claimed two Halifax minesweepers.28 He also braved the new danger arriving at Canadian seaports. Halifax was on the front line of the influenza pandemic, and on the day he boarded the minesweeper in October 1918 the newspapers were reporting four deaths from the Spanish influenza in Halifax (including three returned soldiers), together with a dozen new cases.29

  Lismer was delighted to be reunited with Jackson. If Varley had found Jackson subdued and chastened, to Lismer he was as obstinate and peppery as ever. “You may guess Alex & I have been having some great old ‘chins’ on all kinds of subjects,” he wrote to MacDonald. “He is of course just as stubborn an old knocker as ever & every blessed individual & subject that comes under his consideration gets either a raking or a wee modicum of praise.” 30

  Jackson for his part claimed the two men spent their time “swapping experiences . . . considering plans for the future, and looking for subjects to paint.” 31 If they had plenty of plans for the future, there were few subjects to paint. By the time Jackson arrived in Halifax in February, most of the troopships were diverting to other ports. He therefore spent his time sketching in Nova Scotia villages such as Herring Cove. “I think you’ll find that Algoma has a rival when you hear him,” Lismer wrote to MacDonald.32 Jackson finally got a chance to paint a subject for the CWMF when the dazzle-painted RMS Olympic—sister ship of the Titanic—arrived in Halifax Harbour in March, carrying hundreds of Canadian soldiers.

  Jackson was discharged from the army in the middle of April. “After an absence of four and a half years,” he later wrote, “I set about trying to revive my interest in painting the Canadian scene, and to regain the excitement which had sustained me in the months before the war.” 33 He returned first to Montreal, where he saw an exhibition of Tom Thomson’s paintings curated by Harold Mortimer-Lamb at the Arts Club. Although he was able to see the tremendous strides taken by his former protege in the last two years of his life, his pleasure at the sheer brilliance of the works was mitigated by what he saw as the lukewarm reaction of the Montreal critics. He wrote a dispirited letter to Eric Brown complaining that Thomson’s works had failed to “wake them up” in Montreal: “It has been a revelation to many of the younger artists but rather frowned upon by the academics who call it crude and fail to see its tremendous vitality.” 34 Disgusted, as ever, by the conservatism of Montreal, he soon returned to Toronto and reclaimed in the Studio Building the space he had once shared with Thomson.

  “Some day if we are not all broken down old war horses,” he had written to MacDonald from London a year earlier, “we will push the movement on. Poor old Tommy, he should have lived to be the grand old man of the school. But tho’ life is full of sad disappointments we’ll play the game and go treasure hunting yet in the north land.” 35

  BOOK III

  1 THE SPIRIT OF YOUNG CANADA

  SPEAKING OF THE invention of Cubism, Georges Braque once referred to himself and Picasso as two mountain climbers joined by a safety rope.1 After the war, the Canadian painters likewise decided to hitch themselves together for mutual protection. One of the “plans for the future” discussed in Halifax by Jackson and Lismer no doubt included the launch of a group of Canadian artists. “The only way we will ever get anywhere,” Jackson had insisted to Lismer in a letter of May 1918, “will be by a group of us working together.” 2

  The previous fifty years had witnessed many artists in Euro
pe and America forming groups and staging exhibitions independent of officially recognized art associations. The most famous case was that of the group of French painters, spurned by buyers and scorned by critics, who exhibited together in Paris in April 1874 and, thanks to a satirical review, earned the name “Impressionists.” Many other artists since then had realized the most effective way to confront and perhaps overcome ossified academies and dyspeptic critics was by collective action. Groups banding together in France to lobby the public and collectors had included the Nabis and the Salon de la Rose + Croix, and in Germany the Berlin Secession and the Munich Secession both broke loose from conservative academies (and in the case of the Munich Secession fragmented even further into Der Blaue Reiter). The pattern was repeated in America as, led by Childe Hassam, the group that became the Ten American Painters resigned from the Society of American Artists in late 1897 and the following spring staged their own exhibitions at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York. A decade later Robert Henri resigned from the selection committee of the National Academy of Design and launched The Eight at the Macbeth Gallery.

  Canada got its own breakaway group in 1907, when a number of painters resigned from the OSA and formed an invitation-only exhibiting society called the Canadian Art Club. It ultimately grew to thirty-five members and included Curtis Williamson, William Brymner, Horatio Walker and Edmund Morris. The club lost momentum and direction after Morris drowned in 1913, folding two years later. Despite its members’ professed aim to “produce something that shall be Canadian in spirit, something strong and vital and big,” 3 little was intrinsically Canadian about the Canadian Art Club beyond, perhaps, Morris’s portraits of the indigenous peoples of the Prairies. Nor was it (in distinction to so many of the age’s other breakaway collectives) especially modern. Several members who joined after 1913—notably Suzor-Coté and William H. Clapp—used Impressionist brushwork and high-keyed colours; most other members favoured the muddy and vaporous Dutch or Barbizon styles that were the dernier cri among wealthy Toronto and Montreal collectors in the first decades of the twentieth century.

  As Jackson and Lismer discussed plans for a group exhibition, early in 1919 matters of rivalry and secession were once again brewing within the OSA. Lawren Harris and Frank Johnston had been chosen, along with the portraitist E. Wyly Grier, to serve on the OSA’s three-man selection committee for the society’s 1919 exhibition. These selection committees (unlike so many of those on the Continent) always conducted themselves without reproach or scandal. Although occasionally roasted by the critics and perennially underappreciated by the public, no member of the Algonquin Park School was ever denied a place on the walls of the OSA’s annual exhibitions. But in 1919 Harris and Johnston sparked controversy by rejecting a pair of paintings by Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles.

  This rejection was a deliberately provocative act, a gauntlet tossed at the feet of Toronto’s artistic old guard. The fifty-three-year-old McGillivray Knowles was a prominent figure in the art worlds of both Canada and the United States. She was a member of both the Royal Canadian Academy and, in New York, the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Her paintings regularly featured in both the OSA and New York exhibitions; two of them hung on the walls of the National Gallery in Ottawa. Her uncle was F.M. Bell-Smith, former president of the OSA and a specialist in Rocky Mountain landscapes. Her husband, Farquhar McGillivray Knowles, was equally redoubtable: a one-time student of William Merritt Chase, he had served as vice-president of the OSA between 1905 and 1908. His success with commissions from Toronto’s financial aristocracy (he painted murals for the Eaton family’s music room) meant he was able to furnish his studio with oriental carpets and other extravagant exotica. The couple regularly hosted a salon in their house at Spadina and Bloor.

  Snubbing so eminent an artist was bound to cause controversy, the flames of which Harris took the opportunity to fan in an interview with the Toronto Daily Star. He explained that since artistic tastes had “changed more in the last ten years than in the four hundred years previously,” the only way to avoid “squabbles” was for the OSA to hold two separate exhibitions: one for the work that “the older men consider meritorious,” the other for “what pleases the younger men,” who were more apt to “produce something really significant.” 4

  Harris had no desire to avoid squabbles, and his proposal for a schism within the OSA was frankly absurd: the purpose of an art exhibition was not to impose on artists a single house style or highly selective range of subjects. His wish to clamp down on artistic dissent by banning offending works from exhibitions smacked of some of the worst excesses of the Continental juries of the previous century. Harris’s high sense of his artistic mission was expressed around this time by Jackson in a letter sent to (but never published in) the Montreal Daily Star. An art exhibition should be a place, Jackson declaimed under the pseudonym “Rough Stuff,” “where artists searching for truths not yet interpreted show us their efforts, experiments and discoveries”; it was not a “showroom where artists who yearly repeat themselves send samples of the wares to be had in their studios.” 5

  The rejection of Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles’s paintings could not exactly be justified on stylistic grounds. Her subjects might have been tame—she specialized in small pictures of barnyard animals—but she had moved beyond a muzzy, Barbizon-influenced style to broken-brushwork explorations in light and colour that owed much to what Farquhar (her former teacher) had learned from William Merritt Chase. By 1919 this style of Impressionism was several decades out of date in most parts of Europe, but there would have been many empty stretches of wall at the annual osa exhibitions had Harris managed to get all of it banned from view.

  Harris’s rebuff to McGillivray Knowles was discreditable for another reason. Women faced difficulties in the Canadian art world far more insuperable than those experienced by Harris and his friends in the Algonquin Park School. Although contributing from a quarter to a third of the paintings at Canadian exhibitions, women had no voting rights in societies such as the osa or the Art Association of Montreal. They were denied membership in the Arts and Letters Club and its Montreal equivalent, the Pen and Pencil Club. The Canadian Art Club had been almost as exclusive: only one woman, Laura Muntz Lyall, ever had her work hung at its exhibitions. Finally, the Royal Canadian Academy might have elected McGillivray Knowles to an associate membership, but only a single woman, Charlotte Schreiber, elected in 1880, held full academician status. More than fifty years would pass before a second female artist, Marion Long, received the same honour in 1933.

  McGillivray Knowles was the perfect target for Harris. She was a woman who painted successfully in a “foreign” style favoured and practised by “older men.” She made few concessions to Canadian subjects and even lived abroad for part of the year in New York. By denying her a chance to show her work at the osa, he and Johnston were sending a clear message about the direction that they—the “younger men” (the use of the gender-specific noun was revealing)—wished Canadian art to take in the years following the war.

  HARRIS’S PUBLICITY OVER the McGillivray Knowles affair did him little harm when the 1919 osa exhibition opened at the Art Gallery of Toronto (as the museum had been newly christened) in the first week of March. If Jackson drew the critical attention in 1913 and MacDonald in 1916, by 1919 it was Harris’s turn to be both extolled as leader of the new movement in Canadian painting and castigated as a purveyor of crude and tasteless canvases.

  Although he blocked Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles from showing two small paintings, Harris elected to exhibit no fewer than eight of his own. Two of them, Snow v and Snow vi, were from his series of Fjaestad-inspired snowy landscapes. He also exhibited six urban scenes, including Outskirts of Toronto and a second view of Earlscourt called Shacks, Earlscourt. The sheer volume of wall space devoted to Harris, together with the eye-catching colour of his works, meant he inevitably attracted a good deal of critical attention. The photographer Lew
is W. Clemens, writing for Toronto Sunday World, believed the raw power of these works emphatically announced Harris’s position as the “most important leader” of the modernist movement in Canadian art. His work “possesses strength in colour composition and tone,” wrote Clemens. “Anyone who is at all interested in the art of Canada should not under any circumstances miss seeing this exhibition.” 6

  Not everyone was so enthralled. Harris’s bright colours and scenes of urban destitution unsettled the reviewer for the Toronto Telegram, who wrote an article entitled “Noisy Chaos of Colour in osa Exhibition.” He found the exhibition to be “dominated by the astonishing canvases from the workshop of Lawren Harris . . . This year Mr. Harris has pressed the very brightest tubes upon his palette, and has let his brush, knife, trowel, shovel or whatever tool he has used run away with itself. The pictures shout from the walls, and quite disturb the equanimity of the show.” The reviewer for The Weekly Sun was likewise taken aback by their gaudiness. Perplexed by the brazen and seemingly eccentric use of colour, he attempted to describe Snow vi to his readers: “The trees are mauve with patches of yellow—road mauve—houses orange with yellow snow on roofs. Sky green. Now I know that snow under strong sunlight is yellow, and that the shadows are mauve, and so are tree trunks . . . But certainly the colours are exaggerated.” 7 More than five years after the Hot Mush controversy and three years on from The Tangled Garden, some in Toronto were still dumbfounded and affronted by a few strokes of chrome yellow and cobalt violet.