Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  HARRIS SHOWED NONE of his Algoma paintings at the osa in 1919. The reason was that, three weeks after the exhibition closed, the Art Gallery hosted a special exhibition for the “younger men” who were trying to “produce something really significant.” Arranged through the offices of Sir Edmund Walker, the gallery’s president, the special exhibition, prosaically entitled Algoma Sketches and Pictures by J.E.H. MacDonald, A.R.C.A., Lawren Harris, Frank H. Johnston, was staged at the Art Gallery of Toronto from April 26 to May 19.

  The three-man show numbered 145 works, almost as many as the entire osa exhibition. MacDonald presented 2 large canvases and 36 studies, Harris 2 canvases and 45 oil sketches, and Johnston, a tireless worker with a prolific output, offered 60 works. A dozen of Johnston’s paintings were large canvases, all completed over the previous six months. His speed of execution might have been the result of his studies in Robert Henri’s studio: Henri encouraged his students to produce colour sketches at great speed. Man Ray, one of his students in 1912, later recalled: “One had to make a drawing and even a colour sketch in twenty minutes.” 8

  Whereas Harris and MacDonald (if not Johnston) were known well enough to Toronto gallery-goers in 1919, the name Algoma probably meant little. But this far-off land of steelworks and iron mines was presented to curious visitors to the Art Gallery of Toronto as the new proving ground of modern art in Canada. They were greeted by a series of manifesto-like sayings called “Algomaxims” inscribed on placards and strategically placed along the central hall.

  Avant-garde collectives often issued manifestos to drive home their philosophies. The most famous was the “manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence” unleashed in 1909 by the Italian Futurists. The Algomaxims, by contrast, were a series of mild pleas for understanding that lacked the punch and vitriol of many earlier manifestos. “The blue glasses of Prejudice spoil all colour-schemes,” read one. “If you never saw anything like that in nature do not despair,” urged another. “The more you know the less you condemn,” a third primly admonished. Others were more gnomic: “Even the artist has not seen all there is.” One Algomaxim succinctly epitomized the philosophy of the painters in the Studio Building: “The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country.” 9

  The three men were no doubt braced for bad reviews as the show opened. One Algoma painting already unveiled to the public at the osa, MacDonald’s The Wild River, had drawn hostile notices across the board. MacDonald used short brushstrokes similar to Cézanne’s “constructive-stroke” method to create flattened surfaces of rusty reds and forest greens in camouflage-like patterns. The experiment was not deemed a success. The Wild River was panned as a “large colour riot,” a “chaotic composition,” the victim of a “distorted colour scheme,” and a work “badly in need of sorting and tidying up.” 10 Even two people highly sympathetic to MacDonald, Eric Brown and Barker Fairley, failed to find anything to appreciate. Such reviews must have been dispiriting for MacDonald at a time when he was hoping to recover his health and repair his finances.

  The Algoma paintings, hung a month later, received a better audience. Even Hector Charlesworth, evidently removing his blue glasses of Prejudice, commended them in Saturday Night, calling them “vital and experimental”—not qualities he was necessarily known to plump for. The reviewer for the Mail & Empire regarded their work as a continuation of the project of the Confederation poets. He proselytized enthusiastically on the painters’ behalf, gallantly pushing for public acceptance: “The work of these young artists deserves enthusiastic recognition and support. In their work the spirit of young Canada has found itself.” 11

  The painters did not delight in the enthusiastic support of the public. Visitors kept their chequebooks safely in their pockets, and not one of the 145 works was sold. But a successful precedent had at least been set for “a group of us working together”: a small band of like-minded artists showing their visions inspired by the “spirit of young Canada.”

  IN 1916, WHILE based at Shoreham Camp, Jackson wrote longingly of the end of the war and a “grand reunion of all the revolutionaries.” 12 That reunion, tragically minus Thomson, was finally happening. Fragmented and dispersed by the war, the Algonquin Park School began reassembling in the spring and summer of 1919, following a hiatus of almost five years. Suddenly it became possible to begin planning a group effort larger than the Algoma exhibition.

  The Studio Building gradually filled with its former inhabitants. To make room for Jackson, the gramophone-loving manager of Art Metropole, Alex G. Cumming, was evicted from the building (taking with him several Thomson paintings acquired from the artist in a direct barter for pigments).13 By the end of the summer of 1919, Lismer and Varley, too, were back in Toronto, the former as vice-principal of the Ontario College of Art. When the vacancy for this position was announced in April 1919, MacDonald urged him to “sit down and write a poetic letter of resignation” to the board in Halifax so that he could “get back to the front line trenches here.” 14 Only in Toronto, he believed, could a Canadian school of painting be established. Lismer was happy to oblige. The visit from the voluble Jackson made him realize how isolated he was in Halifax. “I’ve profited greatly,” he wrote to MacDonald, “but the situation here is really too apathetic . . . I really want to get back to Toronto and amongst the crowd again.” 15 He duly resigned and, after curating a valedictory exhibition at the Victoria School of Art and Design—fifty-three of his own works, arrived in Toronto in August. Shrewd and sensible as ever, he used his payment of $2,250 from the CWMF to purchase a “little home” in Bedford Park, a suburb near Yonge and Lawrence.16

  Fred Varley was not so prudent, and the usual indigence marked his return. Although he was still on the army payroll, his high living in London, including the $715 he paid on his Hampstead studio, meant he arrived home poorer than when he left Toronto sixteen months earlier.17 His plans to establish himself in England had quickly unravelled. He had returned to Belgium and France for a second tour of duty in March, four months after the armistice. Still in uniform, he visited Arras, Sanctuary Wood, Ypres and Vimy Ridge to get material for his new commission, Night Before a Barrage, the eleven-foot-wide panel for the prospective museum of war art in Ottawa. Returning to his Hampstead studio in May he painted German Prisoners and The Sunken Road—further examples of the shocking reportage that won over the London critics. But his success in London was not reprised. His offering for the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, Indian Summer—the work painted after his visit to Algonquin Park in 1914—failed to attract notice. Restless and discouraged, he began dreaming of a return to Canada. “The boys here can’t understand why I want to go to Canada again,” he wrote to Lismer in May, “but then they haven’t been there and they don’t know about the hundred bigger chances for progression out there than here. It’s no use telling them.” 18

  Varley on the loose in London, restless and discouraged, was a prescription for trouble. A dozen years earlier, in 1907, he fell on desperate times while trying to support himself as a newspaper illustrator. Homeless and deprived of all possessions but a cat that perched on his shoulder as he roamed the streets, he once went three days without eating. For several months, neither Maud (whom he had met the year before) nor his family knew his whereabouts.19 Although not reduced to such beggary in 1919, he had once again disappeared from view. For two months Maud grew increasingly desperate until he resurfaced in the middle of July with the dubious explanation that he had “nothing to say.” 20 In fact he had been having an affair with a twenty-seven-year-old Londoner named Florence Ann Fretton. If for Varley the affair was the result of boredom and the fact that he was, as the long-suffering Maud put it, “fond of the ladies,” for Florence it was a desperately passionate attachment. What she called her “fatal fascination” with Varley drove her to the edge of a nervous breakdown.21 However intense, the relationship lasted only a matter of weeks. On the first of August, in Liverpool, Varley boarded the
Lapland for his return passage to Canada and a reunion with Maud. Florence was unwisely encouraged to continue her fatal fascination by writing to him in Toronto.

  VARLEY ARRIVED IN Toronto in time for the cwmf exhibition at the Canadian National Exhibition. The first cne since the end of the war called for great celebrations—what was advertised as “an epoch-making event.” 22 The Prince of Wales was in attendance, the band of the British Grenadier Guards played and a captured U-boat was on display. Visitors were treated to a spectacular pageant called the “Festival of Triumph” and the sight of Billy Bishop performing aerobatics over the exhibition grounds.

  Dog shows and displays of livestock and tractors usually took centre stage at the cne, while “second-rate paintings” (as Jackson called them) stayed in the background. But art featured much more prominently in 1919, with 447 works from the cwmf on display. The paintings had already appeared in June at the Anderson Galleries in New York. The show was politely received by the Americans. Nash, Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis, along with two other “Futurists” (as the New York Times called them), Edward Wadsworth and William Roberts, attracted most of the commentary and carried away the laurels as the “most immediately arresting” and “most persistently interesting.” 23 The positive reviews and the large numbers pressing through the turnstiles proved New Yorkers had come a long way since the dark days of the Armory Show six years earlier—though Nevinson, visiting the city, caused an uproar by taking the opportunity to denigrate American painting as a thing of “little importance” and America itself a place of “mental sterility.” 24 Of Jackson and Varley, not a word appeared in the American press. Even Paul Konody saw no need to mention them in a lengthy piece he wrote in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, though he did find space enough to puff Richard Jack’s “vividly rendered battle episode.” 25

  Some Canadian critics, viewing the paintings for the first time two months later at the cne, were less sympathetic than those in New York. Never before had examples of Cubism and Vorticism been exposed to the Canadian public. Augustus John once scoffed at what he saw as the laughable incongruity of Vorticists in the Canadian War Memorials Fund doing work for a country as backward and benighted as Canada. Wyndham Lewis was obliged to reduce Vorticism, sneered John, “to a level of Canadian intelligibility—a hopeless task I fear.” 26 Alas, John’s remarks about Canadian ignorance proved accurate when one of the works produced for the cwmf, David Bomberg’s Sappers at Work, was rejected. The young painter was sent back to his studio to produce a tamer version. And while the British press praised the cwmf exhibition at the Royal Academy, the man who opened the show, Sir Robert Borden, grumbled that many of the works were “so modern and advanced that one could neither understand nor appreciate them.” 27

  Bomberg, Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis were virtually guaranteed to put the frighteners on certain elements of Toronto’s population. “Cubist monstrosities,” declared the Toronto Globe, whose critic expressed the hope that Canada would not “provide a permanent home for such rubbish.” Hector Charlesworth likewise bemoaned the approach of the avant-garde British painters, complaining that “the experimental themes of the up-to-the-minute painters are unsuitable to heroic themes” 28—which rather missed the point. The exhibition at least was popular with the public: in the first two weeks, more than 100,000 people visited the art exhibition, attendance figures that in some ways justified Sir Edmund Walker’s boast that the exhibition was “one of the greatest events in Canadian history.” 29

  The most popular work in the exhibition, in terms of crowds drawn and reproductions ordered, was the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Byam Shaw’s The Flag. Byam Shaw produced a sentimental work straight out of the Victorian era. Expressing the grief and loss felt by so many Canadians, it showed a dead soldier clutching the Red Ensign (Byam Shaw’s title was a misnomer: technically, Canada had no official flag). Stretched beneath the paws of the statue of a pedestalled lion, the soldier is ringed by the mourning families for whom his sacrifice was made: beshawled mothers, bravely resolute children, widows prostrate with grief, grim and bearded patresfamilias. Byam Shaw even quoted in the left-hand corner of the work one of the most famous of all Victorian paintings of grief, Frank Bramley’s 1888 A Hopeless Dawn.

  However poignantly and eloquently Byam Shaw spoke to the pride and grief of the nation, The Flag was a work that, artistically speaking, looked backward instead of forward. Neither it nor any of the other large-scale battle scenes were, in Jackson’s opinion, faithful documents of trench warfare. Nor did he believe them to be examples of good art. Writing in The Lamps, he complained of “the futility of fine craftsmanship used without passion or dramatic conception.” For Lismer, they were “posthumous pictures of battlefields, frozen in action” and showed “detail without fervour . . . incident without intensity.” 30

  NEITHER JACKSON NORE Lismer, nor anyone else, seems to have taken much notice of the work of a Canadian painter of both fervour and intensity on display at the CNE in 1919.

  At thirty-seven, David Milne was a year younger than Varley, three years older than Lismer and Harris, and the same age as Jackson. He was born five years after Tom Thomson, in a weather-beaten log farmhouse near Burgoyne, Ontario, thirty kilometres southwest of Owen Sound. A descendant, like Thomson, of Scottish Presbyterians, he enjoyed the same “apple-eating, cow-chasing” childhood in rural Ontario: fishing, catching frogs, collecting and drawing plants. Sensitive and introverted as a child, he later described himself as a “slow ripener” 31—yet another trait shared with Thomson. After graduating from high school, he took a teaching course at the Model School in nearby Walkerton and in 1900 began his career as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse near Paisley. But Milne was too talented and ambitious to remain in schoolmasterly obscurity. Three years later, with a correspondence art course and a handful of freelance illustrations for Canadian magazines under his belt, he moved to New York City. There he began three years of study at the Art Students’ League under Frank Vincent DuMond (soon to teach Thomson’s older brother George) and Robert Henri (later to teach Frank Johnston).

  Milne’s education continued in New York’s numerous museums and galleries. Regular visits to Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue—later known simply as 291—exposed him to the latest European trends. “In those little rooms under the skylights,” he later wrote, “we met Cézanne . . . Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi.” 32 He began showing his own work at the Montross Gallery, whose owner hoped to give exposure to “the men who have something fresh to say.” 33 In 1913 a critic for the Christian Science Monitor condemned him as an “extremist,” but the New York Times praised his “brilliant, daring and successful modernity.” 34 His reputation as a talented member of the avant-garde was confirmed when he became one of only three Canadians who exhibited work at the Armory Show (the others were Ernest Lawson and a twenty-five-year-old native of London, Ontario, named Edward Middleton Manigault). He painted scenes of urban life and embarked on painting excursions into the Pennsylvania woods and along the Hudson Valley, to which he moved in 1916. He returned to Canada early in 1918 to serve with the Canadian army, shipping overseas in September. He was stationed at Kinmel Park Camp, near Rhyl in north Wales, an area made famous by the work of the British watercolourist David Cox.

  The panjandrums of the Canadian War Records Office were blissfully ignorant of Milne and his reputation. He learned of the organization only when he spotted a picture of a dazzle-painted troopship in the window of a London art dealer, complete with a card announcing its purchase by the cwRo for 200 guineas, “or some such unbelievable sum.” 35 Immediately he made his way to the cwro’s Tudor Street offices, where he quickly impressed Konody as “a provocative designer of the rarest distinction.” 36 A number of his watercolour sketches of Kinmel Park Camp were hastily added to the Canadian War Memorial Fund exhibition in London and then included in the showings at the Anderson Galleries and the cne.

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p; Milne spent the summer of 1919 on the Continent, painting battlefields at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. He seems not to have crossed paths in London with either Varley or Beatty, though he shared many of the aesthetic concerns and techniques as the painters in the Studio Building. By 1911 he had adopted a style in which he abandoned atmospheric effects in favour of exploring decorative forms in the landscape through side-by-side dabs of bright Fauvist colour—what a critic for the New York Times admired as “extremely effective, intensely modern and competent blots and splashes of colour.” 37 One of his works at the Armory Show, Distorted Tree, showed a leaning evergreen with criss-crossed branches perched on a rocky hillside blanketed in scintillating snow. With its cool blues clashing with bright oranges, it was a coruscating Hot Mush vision of the winter landscape. Appraising such work in 1912, an American critic celebrated his “genuine effort . . . toward cutting loose from formulas that have served for twenty or more years for the purposes of finding newer and more effective methods of reporting the facts of the natural world.” 38

  If Milne’s search for new and effective methods of reporting the natural world seemed perfect for the Matisse-and-mackinaw world of the Studio Building, the chance to join the Canadian painters slipped quietly away. After arriving back in Canada aboard ss Belgic in late September 1919, he was demobilized in the grounds of the CNE a month after the CWMF exhibition closed. He and his American wife, Patsy, stayed for several days at the Walker House Hotel on Front Street. Milne briefly considered living and working in Toronto, though it was a city he barely knew and one in which he had no contacts or connections. The Canadian War Memorial Fund’s champion in Canada, Sir Edmund Walker, was either unaware or unconcerned that Milne was in the city. That he, Eric Brown and Lawren Harris would not have interested themselves in an expatriate painter who was unrepresented in any Canadian public collections, and who used daringly modern methods in his landscapes and urban scenes, seems incomprehensible. But Milne met none of the painters from the Studio Building, and his prospects in Toronto, a city with no equivalent of galleries such as the Montross, discouraged him. In November, six weeks after his demobilization, he returned with Patsy to their former home in Boston Corner, New York. There, with apparently little knowledge of the activities and aspirations of Young Canada, he began roaming the Taconic Mountains armed with sandwiches and a Thermos bottle, in search of “hills to sit on while painting other hills.” 39