Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  The trauma of war haunted even the Algoma paintings. At some point on the 1919 Algoma expedition the painters had come across the aftermath of a forest fire. Johnston’s Fire-Swept, Algoma and Beaver Haunts, with their charred, naked trees in sharp silhouette, evoked the brutalized landscape of Flanders at least as readily as the Canadian wilderness Elysium that was supposedly Algoma. Fire-Swept called to Bridle’s mind, not unreasonably, “a Hunswept village.”

  Jackson too painted this no man’s land of scorched earth. He claimed that after returning from the battlefields of Europe he “wasn’t satisfied to paint anything that was serene” and wanted instead “to paint storms . . . things that had been smashed up.” 17 One of his first compositions since his return to Ontario, First Snow, Algoma, revealed his enthusiasm for this wrathful, tormented style born of the war and influenced by the work of other war artists such as Paul Nash. If Lismer was right that Jackson’s success in catching the desolation of Flanders came from his excursions into “the rugged north country of Canada,” 18 his paintings of the rugged north were now suffused with his experience of the Western Front. Even the maple saplings in the foreground—spatterings of poppy-coloured red—seemed to recall the Great War.

  Bridle’s review in the Canadian Courier was provocatively entitled “Are These New Canadian Painters Crazy?” A supporter and enthusiast, Bridle concluded they were not: “They are not decadent, but creative. They go direct to nature. Their aim in art is greater virility”—(Bridle’s favourite word)—“and they have got it.” But if the painters were not crazy, neither were they new. For much of the past decade, their work had been copious and eye catching; anyone setting foot inside an osa exhibition since 1912 or 1913 could not have escaped it. Sixteen of the works had already hung on the walls of other exhibitions, including Jackson’s Terre sauvage (shown under the title The Northland) and MacDonald’s The Tangled Garden. MacDonald also showed The Wild River, already doubly exposed in Toronto, once at the 1919 osa exhibition and then again at the Algoma exhibition two months later.

  Familiarity did not breed contempt. A growing acquaintance with these works and their Hot Mush style, together with exposure to progressive painters such as Bomberg, Nash, Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis, meant the reviews and the public reactions were not what (judging from their manifesto) the members of the Group of Seven expected and possibly even desired. Jackson wrote to his mother that the exhibition was “attracting quite a lot of attention even if it is not understood.” 19 In fact, with Hector Charlesworth failing to pass comment in Saturday Night, the reviews were full of both understanding and praise. “Seven Painters Show Some Excellent Work,” declared the headline in the Daily Star. Its reviewer, Margaret Fairbairn, was sympathetic as always to their cause. She commended the “vitality” of Varley’s portraits, the “brilliant passages of colour” in Carmichael’s landscapes and the “Japanesy effect” of Jackson’s Nova Scotia scenes. The review in the Mail & Empire proved equally gratifying. “Young men seeking to interpret Canada in original manner,” read its headline. If The Tangled Garden was included as an incitement to critical riot, the riot failed to ignite. After the cwmf exhibition, the object of such outrage and insult in 1916 no longer seemed subversive and shocking. The Tangled Garden, noted the Mail & Empire, “does not seem radical at all. It is gorgeously decorative.” For Fairbairn, MacDonald’s “riot of colour” was to be praised for its “intense feeling.” 20

  FRED VARLEY WAS, for many people, the biggest revelation at the 1920 exhibition. Hitherto little known in Toronto, he continued his ascent through the ranks of Canadian painters with a clutch of glowing reviews for his portrait of Vincent Massey, evidently the most widely admired work in the show.

  Varley’s portrait was commissioned to hang in Hart House, named for Massey’s grandfather and officially opened in November 1919 as a place of culture and recreation exclusively for male undergraduates within the University of Toronto (Vincent Massey railed against the “evils of co-education”).21 Hart House’s committee originally balked at the thought of a “modernist” like Varley painting Massey’s portrait. The commission was secured thanks only to the efforts of Barker Fairley and Massey himself, an enlightened patron who in 1918 purchased fourteen paintings from Tom Thomson’s estate. He paid $25 for each sketch after spending a day going through what he called the “brilliant little panels” painted by Thomson in the open air.22

  Varley spent many weeks on the portrait in the winter of 1919–20. After renting space in the Studio Building following his return from Europe, he moved his studio, late in 1919, into Tom Thomson’s shack. Empty for almost three years, the “shack-studio,” as Varley called it, was “not very presentable . . . I want Harris to get busy and make it habitable and fit for visitors as well as work,” he had written impatiently to Eric Brown at the end of November.23 Harris was in no special hurry to repair the shack: Varley was already three months in arrears with his rent for the Studio Building. But the refurbishment took place in due course, and Vincent Massey, the thirty-three-year-old Oxford-educated professor of history and scion of the Massey-Harris dynasty who had been reared in the “Mansion District” on Jarvis Street, found himself sitting for his portrait in the primitive shack. The humble setting might well have contributed to the mood celebrated by the critics: they praised the expressiveness and informality of the work, which, as Bridle enthused, displayed an “intense emotionalism” projected onto the subject.24

  Frank Johnston likewise garnered enviable reviews. Jackson, though, was little impressed. “The two weakest men in the Group, Johnston and Carmichael, they like most,” he griped to his mother. “They really should be in a different sort of show.” 25 Many of Johnston’s works did show a delicacy and precision at odds with the paint-

  slinging efforts of his peers. Even Fire-Swept, Algoma, despite its vision of a tree-stump Golgotha, was vigilant in its colour harmonies: the despoiled woodland was portrayed in an adroit symphony of violets, greys, mauves and camouflage green. Fire-Swept, Algoma was painted in oil, but one reason for Johnston’s finespun technique was that his preferred medium was actually egg tempera instead of oil paint. Tempera did not readily lend itself to the Hot Mush technique. Its quick-drying properties meant it was brushed thinly and evenly onto the canvas or panel, making impasto and other such “painterly” techniques impossible. The deep saturations of oil paintings were replaced by more subtle variations of tone.

  Johnston owed this more exquisite approach to his Philadelphia teacher Daniel Garber, a virtuoso in carefully blended pigments and dexterous integrations of colour quite different from the straight-from-the-tube style of many Post-Impressionists. Atmospheric effects were not completely forsaken, and like Garber he aimed to produce poetically evocative works. The style, as Jackson caustically noted, won over both the public and the critics. Whereas in past years the unrestrained palettes of MacDonald and Harris drew mordant reviews, in 1920 a critic commended Johnston for his “lovely colours” and “imaginative quality,” and Bridle praised his “prodigious fancy” and “wonderful eye.” 26 Added to this acclaim was the fact that the National Gallery of Canada purchased Fire-Swept, Algoma for $750.

  The National Gallery still remained one of the few patrons for the painters. Eric Brown purchased two other works, Jackson’s Night, Georgian Bay (painted in 1913) for $200 and Harris’s Shacks for $1,000. Brown had hoped to buy three more but faced resistance from one of the gallery’s trustees, a Montreal senator named Arthur Boyer. The son of a foodstuffs merchant who became one of Montreal’s largest landowners, Boyer protested at Brown’s efforts to buy work from the Group of Seven exhibition. According to Brown, he objected “violently” to all of the paintings.27

  The members of the Group might have been expecting ridicule or abuse or indifference, but in 1920 Senator Boyer was a rare detractor. Among the wider public the response was a mild indifference: little more than two thousand people attended the exhibition during its three-week run
. Although the painters could attract good critical notices and possessed friends in high places such as Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker, they still needed to win over the collectors and captivate the public imagination. Only three works sold apart from those destined for the collection of the National Gallery: two sketches by Carmichael and one pastel by Robert Pilot. The remainder, removed from the walls at the end of the three-week run, were returned to the painters’ studios.

  THE GROUP OF Seven’s exhibition was still under way when yet another expedition set off for Algoma in the middle of May. This time the party was made up by Harris, Jackson, Dr. MacCallum and (making his first visit) Lismer. They travelled by ACR to Mongoose Lake, 120 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie, staying in a cottage on the lake rather than, as on past trips, in a boxcar. The end of the month saw them back in Toronto.

  The sluggish sales of their work meant the painters needed to occupy themselves with what Jackson called “the bothersome business of earning a living.” 28 (He once complained that Canadian painters were forced to subsist on “remuneration on which a street car conductor would starve.”)29 If few Torontonians took interest in their paintings, the Group of Seven was at least in demand as designers. Over the next few months the painters turned their hands to a variety of commissions. Some designed Christmas cards, and MacDonald produced artful ex libris, including one for the library of Hart House and another for the headmaster of Upper Canada College. Jackson took a commission for $200 to paint a 150-foot-long mural of a northern landscape in the Toronto factory of Kent-McClain, a large company selling bookcases and store fixtures. Jackson’s wooded hills looked down on the carpenters as—ironically—they began turning boards of timber into shelves and cabinets. The firm’s owner, R. Watson McClain, was so delighted with the result that Jackson received a $100 bonus.30

  One of the more intriguing projects diverting the painters from their oil paintings was the design of stage sets for the theatre at Hart House. Besides its gymnasium, squash courts, library and “swimming bath,” Hart House boasted a handsome 450-seat theatre. Vincent Massey was determined to free Canadian drama from what he called “alien influences” 31—the American and British touring companies whose productions filled Toronto’s theatres. He also hoped to introduce a European-style “Little Theatre” akin to Dublin’s Abbey Theatre or New York’s Washington Square Players. His wish to provide more recondite and experimental drama was fulfilled when Roy Mitchell returned to Toronto to became the theatre’s director in 1919 following his tenure as technical director at the avant-garde Greenwich Village Theatre. In Toronto he had staged experimental productions at the Arts and Letters Club between 1911 and 1916. A theosophist since 1909, he often directed works—Maeterlinck’s Interior, W.B. Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters, Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office—whose authors were themselves inspired by theosophy.

  Mitchell’s debut Hart House production, in November 1919, was the Irish playwright Lord Dunsany’s The Queen’s Enemies. Jackson designed the stage set soon after returning from his first trip to Algoma: an underground Egyptian temple whose details he researched at the Royal Ontario Museum. Lismer was busy a few weeks later painting those for the second production, Master Pierre Patelin, a

  fifteenth-century French farce. Christmas 1919 saw the curtain rise on Harris and MacDonald’s set (which incorporated an eight-foot-high stained glass window) for The Chester Mysteries. During the Group of Seven exhibition in 1920, Mitchell presented Euripides’ The Trojan Women, with Lismer again working as set designer. Harris then set to work on the staging for Basil Macdonald Hastings’s controversial 1912 play The New Sin, a sardonic tale of inheritance, suicide and capital punishment.

  A newspaper was soon enthusing that the Hart House Theatre was rivalled in its technical prowess only by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The claim might have been exaggerated, though the theatre did indeed boast “absolutely the last word in staging effects and electrical equipment.” 32 The only thing lacking in the enterprise was Canadian content in the plays themselves. A 1920 article in the Canadian Bookman lamented that “suitable pieces were not available . . . The supply of Canadian material, of even a passable sort, has been so small as to prevent a genuine Canadian dramatic offering.” 33

  This lack of Canadian scripts was not down to a lack of talent. Indigenous Canadian drama faced conditions far more difficult than indigenous Canadian painting. The walls of Canadian exhibitions (if not the walls of Canadian collectors) were at least filled with Canadian paintings. Canadian theatres, by contrast, were filled with British and, especially, American productions. In 1911 the Montreal theatre critic B.K. Sandwell wrote “The Annexation of Our Stage,” a manifesto-like article calling for Canadian theatres to be liberated from American monopolistic control. “Canada is the only nation in the world,” he pointed out, “whose stage is entirely controlled by aliens.” 34 How could a national drama ever develop with such a barrier in place? A few months before Hart House Theatre opened its doors, an article in the Canadian Bookman echoed Sandwell with a call for “our own plays in our own theatres.” The author asked, “Where are the Canadian playwrights? . . . I mean persons of Canadian descent, or adoption, who have written plays the subject matter of which deals with some intrinsic part of Canadian life, past or present, and whose plays are directly artistic representations of Canadian life, or interpretations of Canadian temperament.” 35

  Hart House created a stage beyond the reach of the American companies; it now remained for Canadian playwrights—several of whom would be directly inspired by the nationalism of the Group of Seven—to take up their pens. As Lismer wrote, in 1920 there was a job to be done, in literature no less than in painting.

  THE 1920 EXHIBITION at the Art Gallery of Toronto was only the first of numerous Group of Seven ventures. The first aim of the group was, as one Algomaxim affirmed, to make Canadians feel at home in their own country. But members of the group also entertained ambitions of making their name on an international stage. Their art was aimed not merely at the two to three thousand people who attended art exhibitions in downtown Toronto. Hoping to take their vision well beyond the walls of the Art Gallery of Toronto, they wanted to prove to the wider world, not merely to Canadians, that Canadian art was modern, vital and unique—that Canada, as Jackson wrote, could produce artists as well as soldiers.

  The United States was the obvious place to stake a claim. Americans remained as blissfully ignorant about Canadian painting as they did about everything else north of their border. Even the most well-intentioned and erudite Americans made fools of themselves whenever they set foot on Canadian soil or pronounced on matters Canadian. Walt Whitman, taking a steamer up the Saguenay in 1880, had sincerely believed himself to be entering, artistically speaking, virgin territory. Wrapped in his grey greatcoat, he stood on deck gaping in wonder at a landscape that, as he related in Specimen Days, went “to a further extreme of grimness, of wildness of beauty . . . than perhaps any other on earth.” He was astonished that these cliffs and capes should be unpainted, unversed and indeed virtually unknown. “They have stirr’d me more profoundly than anything of the kind I have yet seen. If Europe or Asia had them, we should certainly hear of them in all sorts of sent-back poems, rhapsodies, &c., a dozen times a year through our papers and magazines.” 36

  The Saguenay was neither unpainted nor unversed. In 1856 Kingston-born Charles Sangster published his 1,262-line “The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay,” with its description of the Saguenay “winding, like a rivulet, / Through the thick woods and reverential hills.” 37 These woods and hills were a favourite sketching ground for Quebec artists at least since Otto Jacobi and C.J. Way worked there in the 1860s, and Lucius O’Brien, in the year of Whitman’s voyage, deposited Sunrise on the Saguenay, his RCA diploma work, in the National Gallery.

  J.E.H. MacDonald, an avid reader of Specimen Days, would have noted this irony. Yet Whitman’s blind spots about Canadian culture were, he mu
st have realized, the fault of Canadians—who had failed to make themselves heard—at least as much as that of Whitman.

  As early as 1918 Eric Brown began making plans to tour Canadian paintings—ones “as modern in character as possible”—through the United States. Asked by the Association of American Art Museum Directors to put together a show, he leapt at the chance. “There is the deepest ignorance across the border of Canadian painting,” he wrote to Frank Johnston, “and now they are anxious to see it, I want to startle them as much as possible, and I want to have a specially fine representation from Toronto which includes practically all that is modern and original.” 38

  A receptive audience might have been expected for the Group of Seven despite the routine American ignorance about and scorn for Canadian culture. The group’s nationalist rhetoric would have struck a familiar and sympathetic chord with many American painters and critics. Although blessed with an immense population and a prolonged independence from colonial rule, Americans for many decades shared with Canadians both feelings of cultural inferiority and aspirations for a culture independent of Europe. American hopes for a national culture were most resonantly expressed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous Harvard address in 1837. Americans, he declared, needed to end their “long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” and create a distinctively American culture.39