Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  The reviews were equally predictable. The Mail & Empire was generous and supportive, stating that the artists “have at least attempted to depict something new in a new manner.” Perennial detractors voiced their usual demurrals: “the methods of the theatrical scene painter” (Charlesworth) and “what happened to the fence in the rear of the home of Mr. Two Dimensions during the coal strike” (the Toronto Telegram’s description of one of Harris’s shack paintings).

  The most telling and disturbing complaint came from a long-time ally, Augustus Bridle, who lamented the lack of individuality among members: the painters were, he noted, “becoming rather more alike.” Bridle also pointed out the sometimes cursory efforts. With a one-year-old daughter and a new full-time job as a designer at

  Sampson-Matthews, Carmichael enjoyed none of the same leisure to travel and paint as Jackson or Harris. He exhibited only a single work, Leaf Pattern, which showed him to be, Bridle claimed, a “roving poet who has very little time to get the big, serious things.” Varley meanwhile “seems moody and impatient,” uninterested in “most of the things seen in the north.” 6

  Two years into their great adventure, there was already the need for an infusion of fresh blood that the members seemed incapable of administering.

  THE FOREWORD TO the 1922 Group of Seven catalogue included a wonderful rhetorical flight: “In the midst of discovery and progress, of vast horizons and a beckoning future, Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of a great adventure.” All roads in 1922 led, though, to the familiar destinations, underlining the essential regionalism of the painters. Harris spent the summer of 1922 at his property in Allandale before returning to the North Shore of Lake Superior, this time with Carmichael. They made their way to Port Coldwell, near the southern edge of Lake Nipigon, where the Prince of Wales camped three years earlier. Lismer returned to the Bon Echo Inn (after continuing his association with Merrill Denison by acting in his most recent play, From Their Own Place, staged at the Arts and Letters Club). Jackson painted in Quebec in the early spring and Georgian Bay in the late autumn.

  MacDonald went farthest afield, spending six weeks near Petite Rivière, Nova Scotia. He visited his old friend Lewis Smith, the newly appointed head of the Art Department at Acadia Ladies’ Seminary in Wolfville. He tried painting seascapes but—unexpectedly for an artist who executed rapids and waterfalls with such dexterity—found the sea hard to capture. “I have been attempting to sketch the waves, but find this very difficult,” he wrote to his wife, Joan. He was hoping to find a “heroic subject” but instead, like Jackson in Quebec, concentrated on humbler scenes of human occupation.7 Different from the forbidding scenes of Africville painted by Harris a year earlier, MacDonald’s Nova Scotia paintings showed a quiet habitation and bustling industry: the entrance to the harbour, a bridge spanning the river, a team of oxen hauling a load of hay, a church by the sea. If some of these images seemed to peddle the myths and clichés of Longfellow’s Evangeline, they did so with good reason: MacDonald was preparing to illustrate Grace McLeod Rogers’s Stories of the Land of Evangeline for McClelland & Stewart.

  Harris was likewise at work on a book illustration for McClelland & Stewart—in his case, the endpapers for a work of his own. The autumn of 1922 saw the publication of his collection Contrasts: A Book of Verse. In publishing poetry, he was straying onto ground equally fraught with controversy. In Canadian literature as in Canadian painting, modernists and the old guard were at daggers drawn. Conservative critics abhorred free verse, the first Canadian example of which, Arthur Stringer’s Open Water, appeared in 1914. In language worthy of a Group of Seven catalogue, Stringer argued in his preface against the “necrophilic regard for . . . established conventions,” and claimed the purpose of poetry was to “elucidate emotional experience.” 8 Unsurprisingly, many critics took a dim view of such developments. Saturday Night urged Stringer not to turn his back on metre and rhyme, and elsewhere literary modernism and free verse were indignantly denounced by Canadian critics as “intellectual Bolshevism” and “the foetid breath of decadence.” 9

  In Contrasts Harris proved to be a modernist in both style—all of the poems are in free verse—and subject matter: most deal with the urban degradation and isolation explored by earlier poets such as Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot. Toronto the Good became, in Harris’s poetry, a “pestilential city” (“City Heat”), a place “ever shrouded in smoke” (“A Note of Colour”), where “garbage-reeking lanes” were “littered with ashes, boxes, cans, old rags” (“A Question”). Like Eliot, whose The Waste Land was published that same autumn, Harris reveals how the sordid modern metropolis destroys the old rituals and rhythms of the natural world, as the inhabitants—what Harris calls “blind, driven people” who swarm to “the daily grind”—are compelled by irrational machine-age forces they cannot understand. The result is fragmentation, isolation and a spiritual death in the age of the soul’s degradation.

  Although Harris’s paintings of urban poverty were often garishly bright, the colourful swirls and charged brushwork of his canvases gave way in Contrasts to a pared-down language of pained but detached observation of urban blight. The critics did not warm to his approach. He received a rebuke in Canadian Forum—a publication that usually defended modernism—from none other than Barker Fairley, who lamented the “appalling laxity of the vers libre habit, now rife on this continent” that had tempted Harris into publishing “an extremely bad book of verses.” Almost as harsh an assessment came from an even more esteemed literary figure, Lucy Maud Montgomery. “I liked a few things in it,” she wrote in a letter to her friend Ephraim Weber. “But the straining after originality displayed by so many modern writers often reveals the poverty of their thought . . . Free verse strikes me as laziness.” 10

  Montgomery, in her Anne and then her Emily novels, depicted a Canada—pastoral and picturesque, held together by bonds of family and community—very different from both Harris’s portraits of craggy wilderness solitudes and his scenes of urban isolation. He and the “Queen of Canadian Novelists” (as she was christened in 1923)11 may well have met a year earlier, when Montgomery—whose own (dutifully rhyming) collection of verse McClelland & Stewart had published in 1916—attended a dinner at the Arts and Letters Club in honour of her fellow pei novelist Basil King. What she made of Harris’s paintings, a world away from the “green, untroubled pastures and still waters” of Avonlea, has not been recorded.12

  THE FIRST FEW years of the Group of Seven’s existence had seen little in the way of offensive and malicious reviews. Jackson’s 1921 prophecy that opposition would arise threatened to go unfulfilled. Controversy arose, however, as in September of that year the National Gallery opened its doors for the first time since the war. It moved back into rooms in the Victoria Memorial Museum vacated after the 1916 fire on Parliament Hill. Once again it shared quarters with the dinosaurs from the Canadian Museum of Nature. A few years later, Lismer described the premises as a “pitiful ramshackle,” and E. Wyly Grier claimed the building looked “as though it might fall down and bury its own pictures.” 13

  Sometime after the reopening, Charlesworth paid a visit to Ottawa. It was not the ramshackle state of the building that offended him so much as the contents. Indignant at what he saw, he wrote an article in Saturday Night arguing that the Group of Seven were overrepresented. Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker were devoting far too much wall space, he believed, “to experimental pictures of unproven quality.” 14

  When Charlesworth’s article appeared in early 1922, the National Gallery owned some fifty paintings by Thomson and the Group of Seven. Even more cause for alarm, for opponents like Charlesworth, was the statistic that in the years 1920 and 1921 the Gallery spent $5,400 on paintings by the Group of Seven, compared with only $7,500 by all others.14 For two consecutive years, that is, almost 42 per cent of the gallery’s entire acquisitions budget was devoted to acquiring work by a group of painters who, despite wide and assertive p
romotion, had singularly failed to motivate other patrons or museums to reach for their chequebooks.

  This “genteel graft” (as Charles Murphy called it) was about to end. Several months before Charlesworth’s article appeared, a new regime came to power in Ottawa. In December 1921 Mackenzie King’s Liberals defeated Arthur Meighen’s Conservatives and formed a minority government. King was not at all sympathetic to modern art. “The modern art,” he later wrote in his diary, “is a perversion . . . Nature robbed of her shades and moods . . . decayed trees made to do duty as works of Art.” He had nothing but revulsion for the Group of Seven and their “so-called ‘Canadian Art’—futurist impressionist stuff.” He found Harris and Thomson especially repellent: their landscapes looked like the work of “a man suffering from leprosy.” 15 He much preferred the healthier-looking trees of Homer Watson and Carl Ahrens, both personal friends. Ahrens’s landscapes he called a “burst of sunshine.” 16

  Coming to power in 1921, King could not help noticing that Ahrens was still unrepresented in the national collection. According to Ahrens’s second wife, Madonna, Sir Edmund Walker felt a “bitter enmity” towards the painter, vowing never to allow any of his work through the doors of the National Gallery—possibly as revenge for Ahrens’s 1916 attack on MacDonald and Thomson.17 Despairing of his prospects, Ahrens had even left Toronto a year earlier to live and work at the art colonies in Woodstock, New York, and then on the Massachusetts coast at Rockport.

  King despised both Walker (“a very vain man, full of himself & what he has done”) and Brown (“a conceited ass, a bit of a fool as well”).18 Both remained in their positions, but within a month of King’s election three new trustees—Auguste Richard, Newton MacTavish and Warren Y. Soper—were appointed to the board of trustees of the National Gallery. MacTavish, the editor of Canadian Magazine, was a former member of the Canadian Art Club and a personal friend of King. Soper was an even closer and more long-standing friend. Founder of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, he lived in a Rockcliffe Park mansion so grand it would in due course become the residence of the American ambassador. Among his expensive art collection were a number of paintings by Ahrens.

  When, therefore, King wrote a familiar litany in his diary in October 1922—“We must follow a plan of encouraging Canadian art”—he was not referring to the “futurist impressionist stuff” produced by the Group of Seven. That same month he personally intervened to force the board of trustees to purchase an Ahrens. “If Sir Edmund Walker doesn’t fall in line,” he wrote menacingly in his diary, “we will ask his resignation as chairman of the Art Advisory Committee.” 19 Walker duly fell in line, and a few weeks later the Gallery took shipment of a woodland scene called The Road. The painting cost $2,500, more than double the price ever paid for work by a member of the Group of Seven. Sensing opportunity, Ahrens promptly upped stakes in Rockport and moved back to Toronto.

  To King’s political muscle was added Charlesworth’s continued attacks in Saturday Night. In December 1922, eight months after his first swipe, Charlesworth again launched himself at the National Gallery. He reproached Brown for neglecting many “worthy” artists in favour of the “experimental” Group of Seven, producers of “depressing and disappointing” works of art. A few weeks later he accused the gallery’s “apparent obsession in favour of one school of Canadian painting” of “destroying the individuality of young artists.” 21

  Neither criticism was entirely just (Brown’s task of assembling a representative national collection was surely an invidious one). Certainly the Gallery was heavily promoting the Group of Seven across the country and abroad as well as purchasing examples of their work, but it was not, despite its limited budget, neglecting other artists. Soon after reopening it staged an exhibition of the work of the Ottawa-based teacher and painter Peleg Franklin Brownell, and in 1922 works were purchased from established artists such as Suzor-Coté and Ernest Fosbery as well as the timid and reclusive Beaver Hall painter Emily Coonan, recipient of the first National Gallery Travel Grant. It bought the Confederation-era watercolours Chaudière Falls, Lake Champlain and Mouth of the Kaministiquia by Sir Daniel Wilson, the first president of the University of Toronto. Other landscapes were acquired from painters—Frederick S. Coburn, John Y. Johnstone—who worked in more traditional Tonalist styles that could not have alarmed even Mackenzie King.

  Debate did not take a rational turn as the rebarbative Jackson entered the fray. Ignoring the physical travails and cross-country expeditions of his many predecessors, he justified the group’s canvases on the basis, as usual, of the pioneer-style get-up-and-go that had supposedly gone into their production. “We have spent weeks in the bush, camping till the snow drove us out; lived in tents and shacks and trailed all over the north country to find out how to interpret our own country in terms of art.” 22 Charlesworth reasonably replied, “To hold that artists like the Homer Watson of his prime, Carl Ahrens, Archibald Browne and Suzor-Coté, who interpret with poetic truths the moods of the older and more pastoral sections of Canada, are less worthy and less national in spirit because they do not camp out in the late autumn and paint the wilds in a harsh, strident mood is to talk nonsense and very misleading nonsense at that.” 23

  But for Jackson, as ever, latitude and Fahrenheit were the measures of quality and integrity in Canadian painting. And, as ever, his argument was a specious one. Sir Daniel Wilson’s luminous water-colours might have looked anodyne fifty years after composition, but they were the products of long canoe trips through territories as yet unopened by the CPR or the ACR: well-appointed cabooses were not transport options when Wilson painted them in the 1860s.

  THE STAKES IN this debate between the Group of Seven and their detractors were raised after plans were announced for a 1924 British Empire Exhibition in London. According to its promoters, the exhibition was intended to open new markets, foster trade and make “the different races of the British Empire better known to each other.” 24 A 216-acre site was purchased in the North London suburb of Wembley, and work began on palaces of engineering and industry. There was also to be a “Palace of Arts” where the participating dominions and dependencies would display their finest artistic wares. Canada would be allowed to show a total of three hundred paintings, pieces of sculpture and other artifacts.

  The task of selecting Canadian works for foreign exhibition was usually, though not always, assumed by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Founded in 1880 at the behest of the Marquess of Lorne, the RCA was meant to be the custodian of the fledgling nation’s visual heritage. It held juried exhibitions and drawing classes, it offered prizes, and each newly elected academician was obliged to deposit a diploma work in the National Gallery. Although one president protested that “it is no part of my duties,” the RCA usually presided over the selection of works to represent Canada abroad.25 It took charge of Canada’s artistic offerings at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 and at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The Canadian government, however, appointed committees to oversee the Canadian representations at a number of other foreign exhibitions.

  In 1923 Eric Brown seized the initiative on behalf of the National Gallery. He contacted the British authorities and asked for the gallery to be given responsibility for Canada’s display at Wembley. The British and Canadian governments agreed, funds were set aside for the task, and Brown and his trustees set to work assembling a jury. Realizing they had been outmanoeuvred, the RCA fought back under its new president, the Montreal-based portrait painter George Horne Russell. It passed a motion claiming—not entirely truthfully—that for the previous forty years it alone had exercised the function of choosing paintings, while Horne Russell protested that “laymen” rather than professional artists were arrogating the RCA’s powers and privileges.

  Charlesworth predictably was aghast at these developments. He published an article in Saturday Night fretting that the National Galle
ry would make predominant “the younger and more freakish schools of landscape.” The walls of the Canadian display would be covered, he feared, with “crude cartoons of the Canadian wilds.” 26 One of his main objections to the Group of Seven was that they ignored the lyrical subjects traditionally favoured by Canadian landscapists: the misty cascades, the knotty oaks, the sentimental evocations of a vanished or vanishing rural world. Instead they chose to depict, in a hard-edged style, an uncongenial topography of beaver swamps, fire-ravaged hillsides, and icy lakes. Bell-Smith and O’Brien had painted the Rockies to promote them as a tourist destination, but the works of the Group of Seven would have, Charlesworth believed, quite a different effect. He complained that the freakish landscapes would be a “bad advertisement for this country” and that the Department of Immigration and Colonization should “intervene to prevent such a catastrophe.”

  Charlesworth was deadly serious. Canada traditionally used world’s fairs and other international expositions to lure immigrants into the country.27 As John Sylvester MacKinnon, director of the Canadian Industrial Exhibits for the Wembley exhibition, declared, “We want to show the people of the world that Canada is a good place in which to live.” 28 Mackenzie King expressed hopes in the British press that Canada’s display at Wembley would make clear to the world “something of the capacity of Canada, not only to furnish new avenues for profitable trade and investment, but also to provide homes for countless numbers from the Old World.” 29 (Jackson once joked that prospective settlers should be “confronted with a Group of Seven show as a means of weeding out the weaklings.”)30

  Brown and Walker were unrepentant. They hoped to stage a display that, liked or loathed by the British (and by potential immigrants), would at least reveal that Canadian art was—as they believed the Group of Seven’s paintings to be—distinct from that of other lands. As Walker wrote in his diary, “I feel sure that whether our modernists are liked or not, the existence of a form of plastic art which is distinctly Canadian must be admitted.” 31