Defiant Spirits (22 page)

These good omens proved to be a false dawn for the Algonquin Park School. The
Toronto Daily Mail & Empire
gave the show a positive review, headlining its article “Ontario Artists do Daring Work.” Commenting on
The Elements,
the
Mail & Empire
reviewer noted that the work was “almost post-impressionistic in its lack of realism
. . .
All the lines are grotesque, the artist having apparently laboured to secure this effect, and the colours of the various elements are challenging in the extreme. Although the picture is not realistic, it does suggest a driving gale.”
16

Not everyone was pleased with these garish exploits. Although recently full of praise for their “virile” style, Margaret Fairbairn expressed reservations about “their use of strong, even violent, colour.”
The Tangled Garden
seemed to her, at first glance, nothing more than “a purposeless medley of crude colours,” and
The Elements
resembled “a whirl of chaotic shapes.” She believed Thomson, too, was in danger of overreaching himself with his “fearless use of violent colour which can scarcely be called pleasing.”
17

A week later the assistant editor of
Saturday Night,
Hector Charlesworth, expressed even greater reservations. Charlesworth had previously praised the “pigmentary enthusiasm” of the painters, but in a review headlined “Pictures That Can be Heard” he claimed to dislike the “experimental pictures” on show in 1916. MacDonald was, he believed, the “chief offender.” He made a self-conscious repetition of the famous 1877 attack by John Ruskin on Whistler: MacDonald was guilty of “throwing his paint pots in the face of the public.” In a repeat of the sophomoric Hot Mush insults from 1913, he dubbed MacDonald's paintings “A Hungarian Goulash” and “A Drunkard's Stomach.”
18

The forty-three-year-old Charlesworth, known by MacDonald, a fellow redhead, as “Copper-head Hector,” was a former music critic with the
Mail & Empire.
19
He knew little about and cared less for modern painting. His magazine,
Saturday Night,
was a deeply conservative and sometimes blatantly racist organ. A 1906 article entitled “Chinamen” had denounced the “slant-eyed Asiatic” with his “yellow skin” and “unmanly humility” as a “yellow stain” on “a white man's country” such as Canada. Five years later, another article attacked “the Negro” as “indolent, prodigal, and shiftless.” French Canadians meanwhile were “insular,” “bigoted,” “ignorant” and “narrow.”
20
Although Charlesworth himself probably did not subscribe to these repellent views, he was writing for a magazine whose readership by and large feared change, whether the “yellow stain” appearing in British Columbia or the bright stains of colour appearing in modern art.

Charlesworth's malicious assault was exactly the kind of response MacDonald had been dreading ever since his 1913 plea with the critics to show “an open eye and perhaps a little receptivity of mind.” Charlesworth did not even represent the nadir of opinion. An even more mean-spirited attack came from the painter Carl Ahrens, a friend of Charlesworth. In an interview with the
Toronto Daily Star,
Ahrens deplored the “blustering spirit of post-Impressionism” on show at the
OSA
in 1916. The exhibition featured, he lamented, “samples of that rough, splashy, meaningless, blatant, plastering and massing of unpleasant colours which seems to be a necessary evil in all Canadian art exhibitions these days
. . .
Nobody visiting the exhibition is likely to miss having his or her sense of colour, composition, proportion and good taste affronted by some of these canvases.”
21

The fifty-four-year-old Ahrens was an interesting character.
22
A native of Winfield, Ontario, he specialized in soft, elegant landscapes painted in close tones that belied his turbulent nature and adventurous past. The grandson of a German nobleman, he followed up youthful escapades in Lesser Slave Lake and the Dakota Territory with stints as a button-dyer in Waterloo and a dentist in Nebraska. In 1887 he downed his dentist's drill and a few years later moved to New York City to study painting under William Merritt Chase. He had exhibited his work since the 1890s, specializing in woodland interiors whose idyllic moods and narrow tonal range suggested the prevailing taste for Barbizon and Hague School landscapes. According to his second wife, he regarded the act of painting as “an intensely sober and even mathematical problem
. . .
The laying on of color in flat masses in the modern manner was an anathema to him.”
23
He had found a generous patron in the Toronto barrister Malcolm Mercer, but in 1916, with Mercer in uniform overseas, Ahrens, like so many other artists, had fallen on hard times. In the spring of 1916 he was preparing to take up a post as a game warden at Kawartha Lakes.

Ahrens possessed a wanderlust and a love of the outdoors, and the previous three summers he had lived and painted in Leith, Thomson's hometown on Georgian Bay. But the artists in the Studio Building found his works too tepid for their tastes. His comments in the
Daily Star
might have been revenge for a 1911 review by Lawren Harris that disdained his works as “docile and inoffensive.”
24
Ahrens himself proved anything but docile and inoffensive. His wife described him as a “virile masculine figure” with a “cruel streak.” Those who had felt the force of his wrath, she claimed, “did not quickly forget.”
25
His interview with the
Daily Star
concluded on a note of astonishing malice: he claimed the paintings showed not only “an absolute lack of knowledge of drawing, colour, and design” but also “a hermaphroditic condition of the mind.” He then concluded, “I feel that these young persons who are indulging in these pastimes would gain a much higher standing before men if they gave their now mis-spent efforts to the destruction of the Hun.”

“Hermaphrodite” had long been a euphemism for homosexual.
26
The obvious implication was that the use of bright and “unpleasant” colours was an indication of effeminacy, a sign that the artist was an “Oscar Wilde type.” This was not the first time modernist painters saw aspersions cast on their masculinity or sexuality, since in 1910 reviewers of Roger Fry's
Manet and the Post-Impressionists
dismissed the French painters as “unmanly” and “girlish,” and the term sometimes used to describe Post-Impressionism—“greenery-yallery”—became synonymous with homosexuality.
27

For the Canadian artists recently celebrated for their “virility”—for their brawny boulders and priapic pines—this challenge to their masculinity must have been unexpected. Some of them, Thomson in particular, seemed to offer examples of the sort of paddle-and-axe-wielding masculinity that MacDonald was busy depicting in his murals for Dr. MacCallum's cottage. Indeed, within a few weeks of Ahrens's vitriol,
Saturday Night
published an article by its resident sketch writer and satirist, Peter Donovan, jocularly recounting how the typical Canadian artist was now a “husky beggar” who pulled on a pair of Strathcona boots and set off into the “northern woods” with a rifle, a paddle and enough baked beans for three months. “He can't work in peace,” wrote Donovan, “unless he has a bear trying to steal his bacon or a moose breathing heavily down his neck.”
28
But Ahrens, with his reference to hermaphrodites, conjured for readers of the
Daily Star
clichés of a different nature: images of “long-haired effeminate freaks” in velvet suits and silk cravats.

THOMSON'S EXPLOITS WITH paddles and axes might have proclaimed a northwoods masculinity, but he had failed to fulfill society's most important criteria for manhood. These were succinctly described in 1919 by Franz Kafka (who also failed to fulfill them) as “marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come.”
29
Thomson had also, of course, failed another important test of manhood: he had not enlisted in the Canadian armed forces.

Carl Ahrens, in his attack on the Studio Building painters, did not scruple to raise the controversial issue of enlistment. He implied that they were cowardly as well as epicene, since his injunction for them to fight the Hun contrasted their “mis-spent efforts” with the dangers being faced by young Canadians on the Western Front.

The suggestion that the painters should be shouldering rifles in the trenches of Europe was a timely one. Eighteen months into the war, Toronto and other Canadian cities were still stickered with recruitment posters, while gramophones in the armouries and other recruiting offices blared hastily composed patriotic songs such as “Your King and Country Want You” and “Canada Fall In!” Three hundred thousand Canadians had fallen in by the start of 1916, and Prime Minister Borden was promising to raise the country's manpower commitment to half a million. Britain enacted conscription with the passing of the Military Service Act in January 1916, but with fierce opposition, especially in Quebec, Borden was reluctant to introduce such a measure to Canada.

Tactics turned more desperate as recruitment stalled in the face of long casualty lists and seemingly endless battles. Recruiting offices mushroomed all over Toronto, while sergeants wearing red, white and blue rosettes stalked the streets in search of likely young men. Recruitment drives were held at Massey Hall, and in August 1915, more than 100,000 people gathered in Riverdale Park to watch fireworks and hear marching bands play “Rule Britannia,” “Tipperary” and “The Maple Leaf Forever.” The festivities were punctuated by an event becoming increasingly common. The
Daily Star
reported how “two gay young ladies” had made their way through the crowd, “each carrying a small sofa cushion, the ends of which they had opened. And to the astonished and outraged young men standing around the girls were joyously doling out the white chicken feathers that stuffed their cushions.”
30

These gay young ladies were members of the Order of the White Feather, first instituted in Britain in the early weeks of the war when Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald deputized thirty women in Folke-stone to place white feathers—symbols of cowardice—in the lapels and hatbands of men not in uniform.
*
The
Toronto Daily Star
began reporting this “quaint” treatment of “slackers” (as it called them) before the end of September 1914.
31
Life soon proved difficult for young men in Canada as well. A December 1915 front-page headline in the
Toronto Daily Star
referred darkly to “unmarried slackers.”
32
A popular song by Muriel Bruce called “Kitchener's Question” blared out from recruiting stations. It included the lines: “Why aren't you in Khaki? / This means you! / Any old excuse won't do
. . .”
33
Even children got into the act, using yellow chalk to draw stripes down the backs of unsuspecting men.
34

By the spring of 1916, around the time of Ahrens's accusations of cowardice and effeminacy, the rhetoric was becoming increasingly heated. A speaker at a mass rally in Toronto described as “degraded,” “cruel” and “selfish” the voluntary system that saw some men “do their duty” in Europe while others stayed at home.
35
A young art critic and journalist named Helen Ball—who panned the Algonquin Park painters in a
Toronto Daily News
review—wrote that a husband lying in a “rough grave in France” was easier to bear than “a shirker by your side.”
36
Hoping to get more young Canadian men into khaki, Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragette turned arch-imperialist, embarked on a cross-country tour in 1916. Her main ploy was to use young women to chastise the so-called slackers and shirkers, often using the language of sexual shame. “How will you like to think,” she asked a Vancouver audience, “that the man you love has allowed other men to do his duty for him while he sheltered himself behind the sacrifice of other men?”
37

Ahrens's own white feather to the painters, delivered in the columns of the
Toronto Daily Star,
must have been particularly wounding to Thomson. As a six-foot-tall, physically fit, unmarried man with no dependents, he must have already attracted the attention of the women in the Order of the White Feather. The incessant chorus from posters, recruiting offices and newspapers would also have been difficult to avoid or ignore. According to Fred Varley, everyone was “worrying” Thomson about enlisting.
38
For a man of physical strength and personal courage to have his bravery and masculinity challenged—whether by young women on Toronto streetcars or by Ahrens in the
Daily Star
—would have been distressing and infuriating in the extreme, and no quotations from Norman Angell could have offset the humiliation.

Thomson left Toronto at the end of March, within days of Ahrens's published comments in the
Daily Star.
He set off for another long sojourn in Algonquin Park, his place of sanctuary and renewal.

MACDONALD WAS THE one who took up the cudgels on behalf of the “hermaphroditic” painters insulted by Ahrens. On March 17, the day after the article appeared, he wrote a long and angry letter to the
Toronto Daily Star.
The letter was never published, or else MacDonald, in a moment of sober reflection, thought better of committing such intemperate language to print.
39

MacDonald began his letter by stating that the Canadian landscape required from painters “courageous and thorough experiment.” He admitted that inspiration for the experimental style of the painters in the Studio Building had come from “French innovators” as well as from Constable and Turner (no mention was made of the Scandinavians). He then rounded on Ahrens, calling his paintings “droning hurdy-gurdy repetitions
. . .
The merit of an Ahrens' picture is its ‘tone,' no problems of difficult drawing are attempted, the colour is feebly limited, the design may be described as putting a hole in the carpet, its only variation being in placing the hole.” Pointing out that Ahrens painted in an outdated Barbizon style, he loftily declared, “Our country requires more than this for its expression and the artist who does not recognize the fact is not worthy of the name.”