Defiant Spirits (47 page)

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 or 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.

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 Toronto, 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.

Yet the group was fragmenting as it expanded. The first member to leave Toronto was Varley. In 1926, still struggling financially, he accepted an offer to become head of drawing and painting at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. He claimed he wanted to “try out many adventures in paint,” and indeed he made more of a mark on the West Coast than he ever did in Toronto, becoming, according to one colleague, “the artist who laid the foundation stone of imaginative and creative painting in British Columbia.”
7
His personal life, though, remained badly out of control. His marriage did not survive his tenure in Vancouver, and eventually he left Maud and their four children following affairs with several of his students.

The Group of Seven faced hostile reviews through the 1920s. Their 1928 exhibition was greeted by a headline in the
Toronto Telegram
proclaiming “Junk Clutters Art Gallery Walls.” The author complained that the paintings “were not even Canadian, but following in the rut of the so-called ‘modernists' who have afflicted the whole world.”
8
And as late as 1932 a journalist in Vancouver named J.A. Radford (the man who wanted Canadian art to concentrate on cows and “handsome women”) castigated them for their “hideous and unnatural modernism.”
9
Increasingly, though, they became the target of those who wished to see Canadian art move beyond nationalism and what were in danger of becoming visual clichés of the forested wilderness. The Group of Seven style was quickly becoming the “official” one, as much of an orthodoxy as the older artistic styles they had worked so hard to overturn. The British-born painter Bertram Brooker, who exhibited abstract works in Toronto in 1927, wrote of their April 1930 exhibition that it “rings the deathknell of the Group of Seven as a unified and dominant influence in Canadian painting
. . .
The experimentation is over, the old aggressiveness has declined.”
10

The last Group of Seven exhibition was staged in December 1931. An impetus for change came a year later, with the death of J.E.H. MacDonald at the end of 1932. MacDonald's contribution to Canadian art extended well beyond the controversial
The Tangled Garden
and Algoma masterpieces such as
The Solemn Land.
Unable to earn a living from his painting, he had begun teaching design at the Ontario College of Art in 1921 and then became principal of the school in 1929, influencing a generation of students. Exhausted from years of overwork, he died of a stroke in his office at the college at the age of fifty-nine.

Within several weeks of MacDonald's death, the Group of Seven officially disbanded, its members merging into a larger body of several dozen artists called the Canadian Group of Painters. The emphasis on nationalism remained, but by the 1930s other concerns were coming to govern many Canadian artists. In 1938 the art critic Graham McInnes deplored what he saw as the “excessive nationalism” inspired by the Group of Seven.
11
In the same year, believing the Canadian Group of Painters was failing to provide inspiration or leadership, the Montreal artist John Lyman (having finally returned to Canada in 1931) formed the Eastern Group of Painters. “The talk of the Canadian scene has gone sour,” he wrote. “The real Canadian scene is in the consciousness of Canadian painters, whatever the object of their thought.”
12

The Group of Seven—especially Jackson, Varley and Harris, along with Thomson—had all attempted to use the landscape as a vehicle to express emotion, or what Emily Carr perceptively called the “naked soul.” But the group's repeated emphasis on national identity and the landscape of the Canadian regions ultimately gave way to more insistent attempts by painters to express what Lyman had called their “consciousness”—interior landscapes of sensation and emotion. Many young painters believed that should not be limited to visual perceptions or the imitation of nature. The riddle that (according to Northrop Frye) had long haunted Canadians—“Where is here?”
13
—became less important than the more introspective “Who am I?”

Harris himself ultimately abandoned both landscapes and urban scenes. In 1930 he wrote to Carr, “I cannot yet feel that abstract painting has greater possibilities of depth and meaning than art based on nature and natural forms
. . .
I have seen almost no abstract things that have that deep resonance that stirs and answers and satisfies the soul.”
14
By the mid-1930s, however, he did turn to abstraction, the move partly precipitated by the emotional and domestic crisis that had been building for more than a decade. In July 1934 he left his wife, Trixie, and, in a ceremony later that summer in Nevada, married Bess Housser, recently abandoned by her husband. The ensuing scandal—which saw Jackson taking the side of Fred Housser—forced Harris and his new wife to leave Toronto for Hanover, New Hampshire, and then for Santa Fe, New Mexico. He would not return to Canada—to Vancouver—until the outbreak of the Second World War.

The 1940s and 1950s would witness the triumph of abstract and nonrepresentational art in Canada, with the Automatistes (led by Paul-Émile Borduas) in Quebec and the Painters Eleven in Toronto. Their art moved away not only from the Canadian landscape but also, in many cases, from the object itself. By this time the nationalistic concerns of the Group of Seven seemed remote. In 1970, on the fiftieth anniversary of their first exhibition, the abstract painter Ron Bloore, a member of the Regina Five, denigrated their “limited accomplishment” as a “provincial, romantic movement” that became a “powerful conservative force in English-speaking Canada.” As Jackson complained, the Group of Seven was disparaged as “a mere symptom of nationalism in a backward country.”
15

BLOORE'S ATTACK AND Jackson's lament do not tell the full story. In the same year that Bloore wrote his harsh appraisal, Dennis Reid, at different times a curator at both the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, was able to observe that the members of the Group of Seven occupied a position in the Canadian cultural pantheon “shared only with a few hockey stars and a handful of beloved politicians.”
16

Indeed, for many decades Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven were celebrated as Canadian icons. Frank Carmichael and Frank Johnston (who in 1927 changed his name to Franz) died during the 1940s, but the members who survived them lived long and productive lives, able to appreciate the affection in which the public held them. By the middle of the century, reproductions of
The Jack Pine, The Solemn Land
and
A September Gale
adorned the walls of virtually every Canadian schoolroom. During the Second World War, silkscreen copies were hung in barracks overseas to boost morale and remind those involved in the war effort of the Canada they were fighting for. In 1967, and then again in 1995 to celebrate the group's seventy-fifth anniversary, stamps were issued featuring their portraits and paintings. Their works have influenced Canadians at a nuclear level. Who can look at a bent pine tree or snow-stooped spruce without thinking of the Group of Seven?