Defiant Spirits
Page 43
If some Canadian businessmen were reluctant to expose their wares at Wembley, not so Canadian painters. The Canadian section of the fine arts display, hung by Eric Brown, was made up of 267 pieces of art, including 215 paintings. The exhibition was billed by Brown as “the most important exhibition of Canadian art ever held outside the Dominion.” 12 The fact that Canada was the only dominion to issue a catalogue for its fine arts exhibition indicated how seriously Brown took his task. There was even a supplement to the catalogue, A Portfolio of Pictures from the Canadian Section of Fine Arts, whose cover (like that of the catalogue) was designed by J.E.H. MacDonald. Unsurprisingly, the distinctiveness of Canadian art was repeatedly stressed, the supplement confidently declaring that “a vigorous and national school of painting” was “springing up” in Canada.13
Despite Charlesworth’s fears, the Group of Seven’s offering of thirty-four paintings made up less than a fifth of the display, to which were added seven paintings by Tom Thomson. The exhibition was widely representative of recent Canadian art. Established international artists such as Cullen, Gagnon, Morrice (who died in Tunisia three months earlier), Watson, Walker and Milne were on show. So too were the Beaver Hall painters Sarah Robertson, Kathleen Moir Morris and Henrietta Mabel May, together with more than two dozen other female artists. The woman whose work Thomson so admired, Florence McGillivray, was represented by Labrador Fishing Stage. RCA stalwarts included Horne Russell and Wyly Grier. Suzor-Coté and Ozias Leduc were among the strong Quebec contingent, and from the West came the Saskatchewan painters James Henderson (with First Nations portraits) and the former Prairie homesteader and Slade School alumnus Inglis Sheldon-Williams.
The contributions from the Group of Seven included paintings shown at their 1920 exhibition: Carmichael’s Spring and Autumn Hillside, Harris’s Shacks, Jackson’s Terre sauvage, Varley’s Vincent Massey. The Northern Ontario vignette of a pine tree on a windy lakeshore was a recurring motif, reinforced by Lismer’s A September Gale, Georgian Bay (shown at the 1921 Group of Seven exhibition), Varley’s Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay and Thomson’s The West Wind and The Jack Pine. The latter two paintings flanked Thomson’s Northern River, making up a remarkable triptych.
Although the exhibition did not include critical casus belli such as MacDonald’s The Tangled Garden or Jackson’s Assisi from the Plain, members of the group could have been forgiven a few trepidations about their reception by British critics. Since 1923 an exhibition of their work, “Modern Canadian Painters,” had been doing the rounds of American museums. In contrast to their first American tour, the reviews this time were modest, mixed and, in general, unenthusiastic. At Wembley, though, the painters fared much better: so well, in fact, that the exhibition would eventually be celebrated, in Saturday Night of all places, as a “red-letter day in the history of Canada’s status among the nations of the world.” 14
This remark was extravagant wishful thinking. But there was no doubt that many British critics sincerely regarded Canadian painting in general, and the landscapes of the Group of Seven in particular, as among the most vital and exhilarating forces in modern art. A number of British critics praised exactly the qualities in the paintings—the bold simplifications and flamboyant colours—detested by Charlesworth and Ahrens. “Canada, above all other countries,” announced the May issue of The Field, “has reason to be proud of her contribution, uniting as she does a pronounced love of nature coupled with a vigorous and a definite technique.” The critic for the Morning Post, a London daily, was equally enthusiastic. He suggested that whereas painters from Australia and New Zealand were content to “follow the ideas and methods of the Mother Country artists,” Canadian landscapists (he singled out Gagnon and Morrice as well as Thomson, Jackson, MacDonald and “Alfred” Lismer) were striking out on their own to create “the foundation of what may become one of the greatest schools of landscape painting. In their pictures are signs of new vision and feeling for the physical and spiritual significance of nature in both its static and dynamic moods.” 15
This combination of a passion for nature and a sense of the landscape’s moods and spiritual significance led the reviewer for The Times to compare the younger Canadians to the visionary Russian painter Nicholas Roerich, then at the zenith of his popularity following a hugely successful American tour that witnessed his celebration as the “Walt Whitman of painting.” 16 The Times reviewer was impressed by MacDonald’s The Beaver Dam and—most of all—by Thomson’s The Jack Pine. He regarded Thomson’s elegiac painting as not only the best work in the Canadian section but also the finest painting in the entire Palace of Arts. It was, he wrote, the “most striking work at Wembley.” 17
The best review of all came from C. Lewis Hind in the Daily Chronicle, a paper whose sales exceeded those of The Times and the Daily Telegraph put together. The sixty-two-year-old Hind was one of England’s most knowledgeable writers on modern art (he claimed to be the only man in London able to discuss Matisse without losing his temper). In 1911 he published The Post-Impressionists, an attempt to explain Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh to the British public. “Expression, not beauty, is the aim of art,” he told them in his reasonable and measured tones. Echoing Roger Fry, he went on to describe how art is “always decorative and emotional,” and how “rhythm and emotional expression are nearer to the heart of things than representation and photographic realism.” 18
This view of art as decorative and emotional favourably disposed Hind towards the work of the Canadian landscapists. He had nothing but praise for their “bold, decorative landscapes” that emphasized “colour, line, and pattern” in a way that reminded him of work created by “the younger artists of France.” But the Canadians were surpassing even the French, producing “the most vital group of paintings produced since the war—indeed, this century.” 19 Higher or more gratifying praise would be difficult to imagine.
BACK HOME IN Canada, Hector Charlesworth was appalled at these critical genuflections. “Flub-dub, every word of it,” he snorted in Saturday Night. In another column, histrionically entitled “Freak Pictures at Wembley,” he claimed Hind and other critics had been hoodwinked into complimenting the younger Canadian painters thanks to a “fairly effective lobby” (led, presumably, by the hard-working Eric Brown). The British public was being hoaxed by “insincere and splashy pictures painted to create a sensation rather than to record beauty and emotion.” He concluded the column by once again voicing fears about the Group of Seven’s deleterious effects on immigration: “The pictures do undoubtedly provide a sensation for jaded palates, but we are quite sure that no stranger to this country having looked on them would ever want to visit our shores. From the standpoint of business they are as bad an advertisement as this country ever received.” 20
Charlesworth betrayed a typically Canadian anxiety about the country’s image abroad—the same disquiet behind the absence of First Nations people at Wembley. The reviewer for The Times, in his otherwise positive review, called the paintings “a little crude, leaving plenty of room for refinement.” 21 The words plunged Charlesworth into a panic that the British were happily confirmed in their prejudices that Canadians were savages, “crude and commonplace in taste and ideals.” 22 In fact, the painters were celebrated by the British (as they had been by Raymond Wyer and a number of American critics) for their modernity in the same way that in 1919 Sir Claude Phillips extolled Varley as an “ultra-modernist.” As the reviewer for The Times observed: “It is here, of all the Dominions, that the note is what we understand by ‘modern.’” Far from letting down themselves (or the country) as uncultured colonials, the painters were, in the eyes of critics like Hind, art-world sophisticates familiar with international trends that they were adapting to their own original ends.
The reviewer for The Field predicted that, given the strength of the display, the time would come when the British began buying Canadian paintings for their public collections. Hind even called for the purchase of “two o
r three for the Tate Gallery,” home of Britain’s international collection of modern art. The West Wind was put forward for consideration by the Tate’s trustees, along with Lismer’s A September Gale and MacDonald’s The Beaver Dam. In the end, the Tate purchased Jackson’s Entrance to Halifax Harbour for £88 15s., or almost $450. The choice might have owed as much to the exploits of the Canadian Corps as it did to Jackson’s artistic flourishes.23 Whatever the motive, the work became the first painting by a Canadian to hang on the gallery’s walls.
Engaging the gears of the Group of Seven’s publicity machine, Eric Brown put together for consumption back home a collection of laudatory press clippings called Press Comments on the Canadian Section of Fine Arts, British Empire Exhibition. Harris’s friend Fred Housser began writing a book that two years later would see print as A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven. His wife, Bess, meanwhile celebrated the purchase of Jackson’s painting in the pages of Canadian Bookman. “It is the seal of genuine approval upon the many laudatory comments in the English press since the opening of the exhibition at Wembley,” she wrote. “It is a justification of the so-called ‘modern’ work . . . It means encouragement to all young Canadians who are endeavouring to express something which is truly innate and to find themselves honestly native to their land.” 24
There is, of course, an irony that the seal of approval for an art intended to mark artistic independence and make Canadians feel at home in their own country should have come, not from Canadians themselves, who by and large stubbornly still refused to grant their approval, but from the former colonial masters. Still, this approval perhaps needed to come from beyond Canadian borders. Part of the project of Eric Brown and the Group of Seven had been to dispel the ignorance about Canadian culture that prevailed abroad. Claims for a modern and distinctive style can only be legitimately made—in the case of Canada or any other country—if they are recognized and validated beyond the national borders. Anything less smacks of parochialism.
There might be another reason why the affirmation needed to come from Britain. A prophet is not without honour but in his own country, especially if that country is Canada. Merrill Denison believed Canadians were unwilling to accept other Canadians as artists and writers because of a national inferiority complex, “an intellectual timidity born of a false feeling of inadequacy or inability.” More recently a sociologist has argued that Canadians have an “aversion to conspicuous and colourful success.” 25 That inferiority complex and aversion to success drove talented artists abroad and forced the ones who stayed to toil in obscurity and subsist on meagre wages. It made Canadians consumers rather than producers of culture, importers rather than exporters, “provincial and imitative” (in the words of C.W. Jefferys) instead of sophisticated and original.26 The triumph at Wembley was a step, the Group of Seven and their supporters believed, towards overturning this state of affairs.
Besides the positive reviews in the British press, there was another indication that Canadian art was being taken seriously abroad. When the British Empire Exhibition closed in November 1924, the paintings were dispatched on a tour of Britain, first to the Leicester City Art Gallery (in November) and then the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow (in December). If in 1913 some visitors to the MacDowell Club in New York were puzzled that Canadian painters seemed to be neglecting the fiercer aspects of their landscape, in 1924 the reviewer for the Glasgow Herald praised how the “rugged grandeur” and “solemnity of the great expanses” had been captured with “fidelity and power.” 27
Jackson’s painting was not the only one in the collection to remain in Britain. Before the exhibition left town, the Leicester City Art Gallery purchased Frederick Loveroff’s Snow on the Hillside. The thirty-year-old Loveroff was a former student of MacDonald and George A. Reid at the Ontario College of Art. His personal experiences, as a Doukhobor immigrant to Saskatchewan, mirrored those of thousands of other new Canadians. Raised in a sod house near Rosthern, as a young man he had homesteaded (like Sheldon-Williams) on the Saskatchewan prairies and—in what was still apparently a must for Canadian landscapists—became a proficient canoeist. By the early 1920s he was represented in the National Gallery and painting northern landscapes in a lively modern style. His work showed how the dicta of the Group of Seven were already inspiring a younger generation of painters across the country.
EPILOGUE
THE END OF THE TRAIL
IF THE GROUP of Seven received the “seal of approval” from British critics at Wembley in 1924, they still faced bitter struggles on the home front. These struggles would long outlast the collective, and even the lives of all its members.
Success at Wembley meant the painters began taking even more seriously their role as founders of a national school. As their geographical ambitions expanded beyond Georgian Bay and Algoma, they began (in Jackson’s words) treating “the whole of Canada as a sketching ground.” 1 He was embellishing the facts because, when he made this claim in 1925, none of the painters had painted on the Prairies, reached the West Coast, or come anywhere close to Canada’s permafrost latitudes. But many of them did add mountains to their repertoire. In the summer of 1924, Varley, Harris, Jackson and MacDonald (and, though he was no longer a member, Frank Johnston) all ventured west by rail to paint in the Rockies.
Jackson would become the most indefatigable traveller in the group. In 1926 he painted in the Skeena region of British Columbia. He then became the first member of the group—but by no means the first Canadian painter—to reach muskeg and icepack. In 1927, accompanied by Dr. Frederick Banting, an Arctic aficionado and amateur painter, he went to Ellesmere Island on board the sealing steamer Beothic. The following year, he and Banting went to Great Slave Lake, and in 1930 he returned to the Arctic, this time with Harris, the pair of them hoping, as Jackson later wrote (with a typically patronizing attitude towards Canadians’ acquaintance with their own geography), “to give Canadians some idea of the strange beauty of their northern possessions.” 2
Harris, however, was attempting to do more than merely send postcards of the North to his fellow Canadians. Four years after painting Above Lake Superior, he portrayed radiant northern tranquility in an even more austere style in another canvas, North Shore, Lake Superior. Here the clouds, landforms and even the tree stump itself were reduced almost to the point of abstraction, giving the landscape an otherworldly quality. In 1931 the painting would win the Baltimore Museum of Art Award at the Pan-American Exhibition of Contemporary Painting in Baltimore, confirming Harris’s credentials as one of the most important painters on the continent. It would also attest to how he was laying aside the nationalist ethos of the group in favour of explorations of mystical realms.
Besides widening their geographical interest, the group also began encouraging other young Canadian artists, acting as a catalyst for painters in regions beyond Ontario, including many women. As a female journalist observed, the painters encouraged women “whose work indicated the same vigorous attitude, the same frank and un-traditional conception of the mission of the painter.” 3 The Montreal painter Sarah Robertson was invited to show work at their 1925 exhibition. Prudence Heward, Bess Housser, Mabel May, Pegi Nicol and Sarah Robertson all shared wall space with the men in 1928. Overtures were also made in French Canada. In 1926 the group held their exhibition jointly with a show called Art in French Canada, which featured works by young Quebec painters, such as Edwin Holgate and Anne Savage, as well as bringing to the attention of English Canadians well-established artists such as Cullen, Gagnon and Ozias Leduc.
In 1927 the members of the group made their most significant alliance when they met a virtually unknown fifty-five-year-old painter from Victoria named Emily Carr. For many years Carr had dwelt in artistic isolation. The poor receptions given her work in Vancouver in 1912 and 1913 meant she all but gave up painting and spent fifteen years running a Victoria boarding house and breeding bobtail puppies. But in November 1927, on a visit to Toron
to, her solitude ended when she met Harris, Lismer, Jackson and MacDonald. She was profoundly affected by her visit to the Studio Building. “Oh, God, what have I seen,” she wrote rapturously in her journal. “Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me . . . Oh, these men, this Group of Seven, what have they created?—a world stripped of earthiness, shorn of fretting details, purged, purified; a naked soul, pure and unashamed; lovely spaces filled with wonderful serenity . . . Jackson, Johnson, Varley, Lismer, Harris—up-up-up-up-up!” 4 Returning to Victoria, she would begin a long and productive period of artistic self-confidence and critical success that would make her one of Canada’s most accomplished and beloved artists.
1927 was also the year that the Group of Seven, in the person of Lawren Harris, made another connection: a long-overdue alliance with international modernism. Underwriting some of the costs himself, Harris arranged for the International Exhibition of Modern Art, assembled by the Société Anonyme in New York, to open at the Art Gallery of Toronto. Abstract art predominated, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Stella and Constantin Brancusi were introduced to a Toronto audience. Harris and Lismer, along with Katherine Dreier, president of the Société Anonyme, gave speeches before a crowd of almost four hundred. More than ten thousand people (twice the number who ever attended a Group of Seven show) filed through the exhibition, and no fewer than thirteen features and reviews—surprisingly, most of them positive—appeared in the Toronto papers. If they had in no small way stirred this curiosity about modern art, the Group of Seven was also, suddenly, overshadowed. “It made our paintings, by contrast, seem quite conservative,” Jackson later reflected.5 The writing was on the walls of the Art Gallery of Toronto, inscribed in the languages of Cubism, Surrealism and geometric abstraction.
THE GROUP OF Seven had effectively been a Group of Six since the departure of Frank Johnston in 1921. A seventh member was not added until 1926: twenty-eight-year-old Alfred Joseph Casson, Frank Carmichael’s assistant at the design firm Rous and Mann. A painter who specialized in images of Ontario villages, he was a safe but somewhat uninspired choice. Three years later Edwin Holgate, who had painted with Jackson in both Quebec and British Columbia, was invited to join. His membership took their number to eight and brought into the group a painter, besides Varley, interested in the human form. Holgate’s presence nevertheless kept alive the myth of the Canadian painter as a hardy outdoorsman: he claimed to paint en plein air in temperatures of –31 degrees Fahrenheit, when “his colours congealed and refused to stay where they were put.” 6 Finally, in 1932 the group effectively became a “Group of Nine” when an invitation was extended to the forty-two-year-old Winnipeg artist Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. The group had therefore included a total of ten painters as well as the shade of Tom Thomson.