by Marilyn Baker
School of Art, University of Manitoba
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Catharine M. Mastin (ed.) The Group of Seven in Western Canada. Essays by Catharine M. Mastin, Robert Stacey, Marcia Crosby, Liz Wylie, Anna Hudson, Ann Davis. Toronto: Key Porter Books in association with the Glenbow Museum, 2002. 1-55263-439-6 $ 60.00.
Catharine M. Mastin is the General Editor of a book which is also the catalogue for a travelling exhibition of the same name: The Group of Seven in Western Canada. For anyone out there who doesn’t know this: The Group of Seven was an Eastern Canadian artists’ organization in existence from 1920 to 1933. Numerous colour illustrations make this a very nice publication and a fitting accompaniment to the exhibition which includes over 244 works by eight of the ten artists who were at one time or other Group of Seven members. The exhibition begins in the year 1914 and carries at least some of the artist’s careers into the 1960s. The six catalogue essays cover a similar time frame.
Lawren Stewart Harris, Alexander Young Jackson, Frank H. Johnston, Arthur Lismer, James Edward Hervey MacDonald, Frank H. Varley, and Franklin Carmichael made up the original group. Johnston resigned in 1924, MacDonald died in 1932, and other members were added: Alfred Joseph Casson in 1926; Edwin Holgate in 1931; and L. L. FitzGerald in 1932. Despite the fluctuation in numbers of members the name of the organization stayed constant, at least in part because the Group of Seven moniker had become a flag for the Group’s claims. Eric Brown, Canada’s National Gallery of Art director, is oft quoted as saying that there was never a great country without a great art. [1] Undeniably the Group of Seven cast themselves, were cast and are still being cast in that great Canadian drama.
Make no mistake about it, however, this was an old boys’ club, something that gets no consideration at all in the book’s essays. Students who accompanied me to one viewing of the show asked: “Where is Emily Carr.” Apparently she appeared in Group of Seven sponsored exhibitions, but was never a member. She receives brief but passing mention in some of the essays in the catalogue and is not represented at all in the displays, an editorial decision oddly out of step with our times.
The Winnipeg Art Gallery mounted as an accompaniment to The Group of Seven in Western Canada exhibition a prelude of sorts in an adjacent gallery; it included work by Canadian painters Frederick Marlett Bell-Smith, Thomas Mower Marten, John Hammon; J. W. Beatty, and G. Horne Russell, all from their permanent collection. The Hammon painting, the “C.P.R. Station,” had, in fact, been commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway and is a particularly noteworthy reminder of the importance of the railway in settling and thereby enabling a nation. In her book Mastin includes only one illustration to represent these early Canadian landscape artists, a work by George Home Russell entitled “Kicking Horse Pass,” 1900. According to Mastin:
The artists of the late 1800s had approached mountain painting through the doctrine of the Sublime, a vision that stressed the awesome forces of nature’s power .... [the) group artists were not unaffected by this legacy, their art was more personally motivated, driven by the search for an Edenic refuge to which they applied such terms as “paradise,” “heaven,” and “promised land.(p.60)
The Wag display was thus a further visual corrective to Group of Seven rhetoric which has tended to devalue and/ or erase from serious consideration the numerous noteworthy 19th and early 20th century Canadian artists who painted the Canadian scene—and Western Canada—impressively before the Group of Seven ever came on that scene.
Catherine Mastin authors the Introduction which is simply titled: The Group of Seven in Western Canada. In it she explains the rationale for the exhibition: “their activities outside Ontario and Quebec were crucial to the realization of their nationalistic purpose.”; but she concedes her own awareness of the group’s shortcomings, among other things: “a lack of sympathy for multiculturalism.” She also attempts to forestall criticism by explaining away any limitations that might be perceived concerning the essay topics: “Aware that we could not cover in one publication, address all aspects of the Group’s interests in Western Canada, we have focused on what we feel to be the most significant themes and the strongest art.” (p. 29)
In Chapter One:” East Views West: Group Artists in the Rocky Mountains” Mastin focuses on the work done by the Group in the West in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a useful framework for reading the other essays and seeing the show. Her major emphasis is Harris, followed by coverage of MacDonald, then Jackson. Johnston and Lismer receive only the briefest of mention. (Franklin Carmichael and A.J. Casson apparently never painted the west.) Johnston has the stronger connection to Manitoba (he was principal of the Winnipeg School of Art from 1921-24). His few canvases in the exhibition seemed too few to me. Unfortunately from these his influence on FitzGerald or FitzGerald’s influence on him, a question in the literature, cannot be sorted out. [2] For the most part Mastin’s beginning essays are a straightforward consideration of the art of the Group of Seven in western Canada. Her discussion of their Canadian Romanticism as opposed to other Romanticisms was unconvincing to me at least, a carryover of Group of Seven nationalistic rhetoric into the 21st century. She writes: “they challenged (my emphasis) the predominantly European Romantic traditions....” (p. 35) [3] The presumption of course is that if this is a truly nationalistic art it is going to look different from other nation’s art.
In Chapter Two: Robert Stacey focuses on West Coast artist Frederick Varley in an essay entitled “Heaven and Hell: Frederick Varley in Vancouver.” As his title forewarns, Stacey serves up a colourful tale which, however, has a familiar ring to it. According to Stacey, Varley is the heroic loner encumbered by wife but inspired by muse, his mistress Vera, who in the end, however, proves faithless. [4] Along with agonizing, womanizing and struggling to stay alive, certain of Varley’s paintings also seem to follow French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s similar preoccupations with the self (and himself). Stacey casts Varley in the role of suffering artist, caught between Christ and Satan. [5] For his part Varley portrays himself as a “tomb-sprung Christ” in the painting Liberation, 1936-37 and then as some “bar-bound Satan” in Liberation II (1943). Further European Romantic connections litter the surfaces of Varley’s canvases, as Stacey identifies not only German artist Casper David Friedrich, but Norwegian artist Edward Munch, and Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler — as all being alive there. Unlike Mastin, however, who sees a clearly Canadian Romanticism in her artist’s paintings, Stacy apparently feels no need to downplay the very obvious European affinities.
Varley’s painting titled “Dharana” further suggests Varley’s debt to Gauguin and in this instance to his well known painting: “Spirit of the Dead Watching.” While Stacey concedes that it may very well be a “story” he is telling —that doesn’t stop him from telling it. “Varley,” he writes:
... seeing Vera kneeling on the top step of the hut porch,.... commanded her to “freeze” (which she literally almost did) so that he could capture her expression on the nearest available medium: a scrap of insulation paper ripped from the wall. (p. 72)
Following Stacey’s discussion of Varley is the third essay by Marcia Crosby. In Chapter Three, Crosby discusses Edwin Holgate and A. Y. Jackson, members of the Group of Seven, and other Canadian artists who were involved in painting the Indians of the West, their artefacts and habitat. In stance Crosby’s essay could hardly be further from Stacy’s romantic “genius-sizing.” Indeed, where Mastin and Stacey see romantic sensibilities in them there mountains, Crosby finds villainy afoot in the form of arrogant and condescending Canadians. At the very least there is something delightfully twisted about her angle.
It is the early ethnographic posturing of Marius Barbeau whom she especially abhors and the racist and patronizing views which, in her opinion, both artists arid scholars have brought to their studies of Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples: Although over thirty years had passed since Jackson’s trip west, his belief about the death of “real” Indians was the same in 1958 as it was in 1926. This was no different than what many others espoused long before and after these dates. In remembering his time on the Skeena, his conclusion was that “[t]the big powerful tribes—Tsimsyanbs, Tlingit and Haidas—[had] dwindled to a mere shadow of their former greatness. They produce little today in the way of art. One native said to me sadly, ‘We are no longer Indians, neither are we White people “(32)
Here, Jackson makes a common assumption that Barbeau and many others will make: When ‘Indians” were no longer making what outsiders called ‘art,” it was a sign of the disappearance of Native peoples into the half-world of people classifiable by race alone. They were now without authentic culture, shadows of their former selves. The Indians Jackson once knew are woven into his autobiography, gradually fading into the past, until finally he sees, “...the end of much of {their} picturesque and colorful life.”
For Jackson, even the totem poles were not what he saw as authentic Indian art. “The poles were not ancient in origin, having been made possible only when the white man’s tools became available to the Indians.” Although Jackson, like Holgate, spent only a few weeks there and never returned, he speaks with authority about Tsimpshian and Gitksan culture. (p. 99)
Her essay is entitled” T’emlax’am: an ada’ox” and reflects recent tendencies in academic discourse to assign blame to an individual or group for ideological faux pas common to a particular time and place. I encountered this one in Canadian Forum of 1928 while writing this review:
And from there on, the Crees, the Chipewayans and the Eskimos fought and killed each other each time they met. And the war between them went on and on for a long, long time, until the white man came and laid down his laws. [6]
In Chapter Four Anna Hudson also discusses A. Y. Jackson in an essay entitled “The Legend of Johnny Chinook: A. Y. Jackson in the Canadian West and Northwest.” Jackson fares better in Hudson’s hands than in Crosby’s though together they give a particularly clear picture of his travels westward, his artistic eye, his awareness of and simultaneous blindness to the subtleties of the places he chose to visit and record. Hudson can be both poetic and amusing when she writes:
A great glacial boulder rises in the centre of the painting like some Cold War sci-fi extraterrestrial on the atomic frontier, caught in a theatrical spotlight. The composition closely matches Lawren Harris’s celebrated Isolation Peak, painted twenty years earlier. Jackson found that famous mountain form again, reduced in size, in the Barren Lands, impressed on the Canadian landscape like an indelible national trademark.(p.133)
Hudson utilizes the old fashioned tools of the Art Historical discipline — compositional and stylistic analysis — to good advantage while also adding contour to the familiar litanies which she situates amidst an intriguing survey of economic development and change in Alberta, from agriculture to mining to global politics.. Her essay is an impressive mix of observation and imagination. With no particular political agenda., she provides the reader with an excellent feel for past times and symbolic gesturing, be it while painting canvases or building roads in the north.
Though Manitoba’s Lionel Lemoine FitzGerald was only a member of the Group of Seven for one year, by word count, he receives more than his due which should please Manitobans : all of Chapter Five, by Liz Wylie, and half of Chapter Six by AIM Davis. Wylie’s coverage of FitzGerald in “The Prairie Art of L.L. FitzGerald.” is primarily biographical and for the most part respectful. She does allude to one possibly risque detail of his life: FitzGerald’s well-established friendship with the lovely Irene Heywood. Later Irene Heywood Hemsworth, she was a favourite student of his at the Winnipeg School of Art and theirs was a relationship which continued to the end of his life though by then she had married the notable Canadian musician and composer Wade Hemsworth and was embarked on a career as an art critic for the Montreal papers. Certainly her family were not pleased by Irene’s “friendship” I have been informed by close relatives; her father was after all a well known Anglican clergyman. The illustration of one of FitzGerald’s most sexually potent works, which Wylie tells us Fitz gave Irene as a present, neither confirms nor denies details of their friendship. Wylie writes:
Prairie Fantasy was a personal gift to a former student of FitzGerald’s who was leaving Winnipeg that year with her family.... In Prairie Fantasy, the landscape contains personal iconography: the phallic bulrush-like form in the centre strains upward to touch the shape above it, a private conceit devised by the artist, apparently to represent lovemaking. Certainly there is a joyousness and sense of abandon in the swaying forms, gentle rhythms, and warm colours of the grasses, rolling hills, and fanciful cloud formations of the hot prairie afternoon. (p. 144)
In Chapter Six, the final essay, Ann Davis is more concerned with abstraction than life. She continues Wylie’s discussion of FitzGerald whom she considers alongside Lawren Harris. Both men, she says, found spiritual sustenance in nature studies and reward in their striving after abstract forms. Davis’ essay is entitled :”Celestial Spirit and Objective Nature: FitzGerald’s and Harris’s Adventures in Abstraction.” She casts FitzGerald and Harris as heroes once again but this time because they “dared [my emphasis] to explore abstraction, a new and often unpopular type of painting...” (p.179) but apparently it was worth it, she writes. They achieved “the universal and timeless.” (p. 144) It is probably only theosophists and art historians who take such claims at face value and Davis is certainly not alone in upholding and propagating them once again.
Davis favors a compositional and stylistic analysis of both artists and she positions her artists and their work as part of an evolutionary arc. She also documents Harris’ personal struggle to formulate an abstract art through excerpts from letters he wrote to Emily Carr: In 1930 Harris writes to Carr whom he has befriended:
I cannot yet feel that abstract painting has greater possibilities of depth and meaning than art based on nature and natural forms.... To you and me and many others the representational as representation means nothing—the spirit everything—but we cannot get the spirit without the use of representation in some degree or altogether (it does not matter which) so we use the representational in our own place here—and we sensed the spirit first and always through the life and forms of nature. (p. 167)
Finally he does come around however:
I am convinced that there are equivalents in nonobjective painting which are more expressive, moving and elevating than any possible representations of them in paint. (p. 174).
Davis also adopts another popular cliche of art historical writing. She casts FitzGerald and Harris as precursors in the line of Canadian abstractionists. She writes:
As abstract painters their influence in Canada was immense, particularly in Western Canada, where they were among the very first. The Winnipeg Show in 1955 included a large number of abstracts and created a storm of controversy, but during the 1950s and 1960s there was a sea change, led by artists such as Tony Tascona, Winston Leathers, and Takao Tanabe. Much of the altered public attitude is a tribute to FitzGerald. On the west coast, Harris similarly prepared the way for B.C. Binning, Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, and others.” (pp. 179-180)
There remains in place the assumption that achieving the abstract is somehow a higher attainment than other artistic objectives. In fact, much of what FitzGerald valued in art was dealt a death blow by the turn towards abstraction in the 1950s in Winnipeg and the closure of the Winnipeg School of Art which coincided with it.
Davis’ treatment of the spiritual emotional force behind FitzGerald and Lawren Harris’ similar preoccupations are carefully written. She uses Harris’ own words to explicate his work and inner struggling. One certainly can’t quarrel with an artist’s right to make statements about his/her own art work, but one can perhaps challenge the idea that when you have quoted an artist’s words you have said all that needs saying.
The book/catalogue for this exhibition is an interesting document not only for its illustrations and enjoyable (if flawed) essays, but as well for the insight it offers into the difficulties of writing about art dispassionately not only in our time but at any time. That there is so much about FitzGerald in it should please Manitobans.
1. See: Charles Hill The Group of Seven, National Gallery of Art, Ottawa, 1995. This is the catalogue for an exhibition held in 1995 and 1996. The complete title is The Group of Seven — Art For A Nation.
2. Roger Burford Mason, A Grand Eye For Glory, A Life of Franz Johnston, Dundurn Press, Toronto, Oxford, 1998, pp. 41-51. Mason writes: “Interestingly, one of the most talented of the students Johnston nurtured during those years was Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, already a mature man and an excellent painter, who was influenced stylistically by Johnston at first, but broke free to create his own style in his later work.”(p.43) I think this is highly questionable. See: Marilyn Baker, The Winnipeg School of Art, The Early Years, The University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, 1984 for a discussion of Johnston in Winnipeg.
3. About Johnston she writes: “The Romantic quality of Johnston’s engagement with the country is evident...” (p. 45) Presumably this was a non European Romanticism. Yet when talking about Lismer she observes:
Viewed from the Opabin Plateau across Lake O’Hara, Cathedral Mountain reminded Lismer of a great Gothic cathedral, whose structure he sought to capture through angular, cube-like forms: “buttresses and pillars, towers and supporting weights like a vast piece of architecture. (p. 46)
She brings us but does not even try to account for the implications of MacDonald’s fantasies about Walt. Whitman as glimpsed in the Canadian Rockies:
Crowded in the range with him were the politicians and the war generals and the millionaires and orators and writers of the day. Now we see him looming up, a “going to the Sun Mountain” or a “Mount Resplendent”, or a Cathedral Peak”...but more and more he surely stands a main peak in the range of American Life and Letters. In that part of the sky are Lincoln, Lee, Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell. Some of them are sinking among the lower peaks, but I am sure that great white one with deep blue shadows is Whitman. (p.55)
During his absence in the frozen East, his former helpmeet has applied a recent inheritance to the purchase of this rough refuge. Now after three years of separation, Maud is rebuilding the nest, assuming that her errant husband will resume his domestic duties and act his age. Varley, furious and cunning, is formulating other plans.... hi 1926 Varley left his adoptive Toronto to head up the department of drawing and painting at Vancouver’s new school of art and design (VSDAA).. Looking back in the mid 1940s, he would recall of his B.C. decade, and especially of 1934:...(p.64) ...Golden, thanks to the companionable ship of a distractingly beautiful student at the VSDAA: Vera.... (p. 65).
5. See, for example, Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, “Paul Gaug-uin’s “Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake”: The Artist as Initiate and Magus,” Art Journal, Summer, 1987, pp.22-28 and Bradley Collins, “Van Gogh and Gauguin on the Couch,” Art in America, December, 1989, pp. 57-63. I confess I had to laugh when Stacey informed the reader that Varley sought solace far from Vancouver, in Ottawa, and when that failed concluded:: “small wonder that his alienated imagination should turn far northward, to the Arctic.” (p. 84) It is probably unnecessary to mention here that Gauguin left France for Tahiti.
6. Thierry Mallet “The Battle of the Drums, Canadian Forum, 1928, pp.682-684.
Page revised: 17 October 2012
