FINA 160 Intro to Canadian + Aboriginal Art History – Distance Education This course is designed to offer a comprehensive overview of contemporary thought within the visual arts from a Canadian and Aboriginal perspective. Art making extends beyond the traditional disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture, and fine art has come to appropriate, incorporate, and interpret images from the media and popular culture in order to make politically charged statements, and to subvert our notions of what we consider art. The course focuses on key movements in Canadian art, as well as issues and debates in Canadian art history, including the place of aboriginal art in art history; the way notions of gender, class, and ethnicity were constructed at different periods; the impact of artist organizations, cultural policy, and institutions of art on art production and exhibition; and the social role of the artist. Course Content [for this specific offering of this course] This course will explore the necessity of critical thought in research and to the ideas and practices in contemporary Canadian and Aboriginal visual art production. This course is designed to be both online lecture and online discussion orientated, so you are required to read the assigned material, and to have questions prepared to facilitate online dialogues. Course Learning Outcomes [e.g. skills, knowledge, values, and attributes] Students who successfully complete this course will gain a comprehensive knowledge of key debates shaping contemporary Canadian and Aboriginal visual art discourse. In addition, students will significantly hone their critical and visual interpretation skills – both of which will enhance their effectiveness in entering into their respective professions. Conceptual Skills • • • perception: critical thinking and visual literacy research skills, application, translation and imagination: visualize and develop an idea in a complex way communication and expression: the relationship of idea to material and/or process Critique Skills • • • • gain ability to assess work in terms of concept, craft, and experimentation begin to analyze work as a group in relation to content and form development of a critical vocabulary including specific interdisciplinary terms for participation in online discussions gain confidence to share discoveries, which allows them to witness and learn from each other Materials list [texts, materials and equipment required or recommended] • Text: Edited by Whitelaw, Foss & Paikowsky. “The Visual Arts in Canada – The Twentieth Century.” Oxford University Press. Don Mills Ontario 2010 ISBN: 978-0-19-542125-5 (bound) ISBN: 978-0-19-543459-0 (pbk.) • Additional Readings: Readings compiled from sources and posted to Blackboard Okanagan College: Course Outline Syllabus/Course schedule Lecture Topic Readings 1 Colonialism, belonging and what is Aboriginal? Text: chapter 17 Reading: McLeod, “What is Native Studies” Kulchyski & “Indigenous Studies” Chapter 1-4 Reading: Kocur & Leung: Gerardo Mosquera, “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems around art and Eurocentrism”, pp 218225 Text: chapter 1 2 Group of Seven + Pioneers in Canadian Abstraction 1920’s Text: chapter 2 + 3 3 Emily Carr: Modernism, Cultural Identity and Later Pioneers 4 1930’s + 1940’s Montreal: The automatistes and Modernist representational painting 1940’s + 1950’s Text: chapter 4 + 6 Text: chapter 7+ 8 5 Making Painting Real: Toronto, Vancouver Text: chapter 9 + 11 6 Sculpture before 1960; Installation since 1960 Text: chapter 12 + 15 Text: chapter 10 + 18 Reading: Daniel Francis, “The Vanishing Canadian” pp16-43 Reading: Maria Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian” pp266-291 Text: chapter 13 7 Aboriginal Art + Creation Stories 8 The New Figuration: From Pop to Postmodern 9 Video Art in Canada Watch video resources Text: chapter 19 10 Designing Canada Text: chapter 5 11 Short history of Photography Text: chapter 14 12 Into the 1980ʼs + 1990ʼs At the turn of the Millennium Text: chapter 16 + 20 13 Final Exam Five Important things to Remember • • • • • • • Take risks. Calculated risk-taking paired with committed effort is more important than a specific outcome or product. Taking an intellectual risk and coming up short is more educational than having a safe “right” answer. Asking the right question is often better than knowing the right answer. Something is better than nothing. Always hand in some kind of work, even when you are not pleased with your efforts or your results. An F (~55%) for poor work is much better than a 0 for missing work. Following instructions accurately is often essential to success. Your first idea is not necessarily your best idea. Demonstrated critical thinking/research Audience Heidi Maddess February 14, 2010 FINA 160 Canadian + Aboriginal Art History Module 1 Colonialism, belonging and what is Aboriginal? Within a museum setting, objects are put on display to tell us about the larger narratives: who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Yet our understanding of history, culture and identity constantly shifts over time. Consistent with this constantly shifting over time is how change is an inherent part of tradition. Though museums would deny they are political institutions it is clear that they are rooted in colonial practices- making them political spaces. Museums mandates are - to collect, to preserve, to interpret and to educate. This automatically sets up a power hierarchy as the museum decides what to collect, exhibit and how the cultural objects are to be defined. They are creating meaning that may or may not be in line with the objects or cultures on display. “In a multicultural society there cannot be a definition of culture as a finite body of knowledge shared by all members of a culture.” – McLoughlin p1 Dominance here- of the settler over the Aboriginal- meant a monopoly of ‘knowledge over ignorance’. Yet the museum presents a neutral, authorless and educational experience. “Marginalization in the museum setting is accomplished by the erection of barriers which demarcate the distance between the exhibited and the exhibitor: the creation of the Other. The Colonial Other is that which is not self-defining: he or she exists in opposition to those who have the power to construct and enforce boundaries of race, gender, and ethnicity. The Other is marked by difference—in location, time, colour, custom, history or gender. It is not a difference that is defined by characteristics of its own identity or subjectivity (in other words, by its femaleness, blackness, or Indianness), but by absence; by its not being male, white or First World. Fixed as the subaltern in seemingly inescapable binaries (tradition/progress, past/present, spirituality/rationality, myth/science, craft/art), the Other is at one and the same time inferior (for they are marked by lack) and threatening. His or her presence outside those boundaries is a continued reminder of possible vulnerability.” McLoughlin p2 Contemporary First Nations artists do not forsake the past as they choose to bring in the present at will. This means they stay relevant in today’s societymaking new relationships with new viewers while continuing to comment on injustices of the past. Exhibitions are constructs or representations to garner confidence by the viewer that the museums are neutral spaces. Many First Nations (Aboriginal) communities would not agree that any object within a museum is neutral but far from it. The act of collecting cultural objects is in reality allowing the museum to create the sense of the Other- the primitive that cannot withstand assimilation into the Euro-Canadian society. We must be aware when entering museums they are not objective and authorless- they are creating a narrative for us. The museum age is considered to be between 1875 and 1925 where commissioned collectors and those seeking enumeration for cultural objectsanything and everything associated with traditional culture. This acquiring of anthropological artifacts was due to the belief system that Aboriginals were a dying breed and could not withstand assimilation into the Euro-Canadian settlers’ society. Though museums are appointed keepers of other people’s material and are selfappointed interpreters of others’ histories- creating the Other, they are encountering increased resistance. This is occurring due to awareness, critical thinking and research in post-colonial theory. It is always very important to carefully examine someone’s motives in communicating. Whenever reading something, ask yourself, ‘what are the authors motivations? Why did he/she choose to devote a great deal of time and effort to one particular thing in exclusion of others?’ On this post card, the red coated Mountie smiles warmly as he reaches out to shake hands with Chief Sitting Eagle who is dressed in a colourful feather headdress, buckskins and beads. There is a caption on the postcard that reads, “Here indeed are the symbols of Canada’s glorious past. A Mountie, resplendent in his famed scarlet greets the Chief Sitting Eagle, one of Canada’s most colourful Indians”. This image of reconciliation and equality, presented in such a picturesque manner, invokes an older mythology of Canadian identity which Academic specialist Eva Mackey calls “Benevolent Mountie Myth”, a myth based on the story of the Westward expansion of the nation at the end of the nineteenth century. The RCMP, representatives of British North American justice, are said to have managed the inevitable and glorious expansion of the nation (and the subjugation of Native peoples) with much less bloodshed and more benevolence and tolerance then the violent US expansion to the South. This benevolent gentleness, it was believed, was a result of naturally superior forms of British justice, and was an important element in the mythologies of Canadian national identity emerging at the turn of the century. The image of the Mountie and the ‘Indian Chief’ places a representative of the state and a representative of minority culture – colonizer and colonized – in a friendly, peaceful collaborative pose. Represented as if they are equal. This is very different then the images of the American cowboys chasing and killing ‘Indians’. The cowboys as rugged individuals in contrast to Mounties as representatives of the kind and benevolent state – the state that supposedly treated, and still treats, its minorities more compassionately than the USA. Multiculturalism frames Canada’s policy in official government ideology as ‘a fundamental characteristic of Canadian heritage and identity’. The cultural mosaic vs. the cultural melting pot of the USA. In the 1980’s there began a bit of a crisis in feminist and post modernist critiques so that academics were forced to grapple with historical and present-day issues of colonialism, imperialism and power. This lead to the exploration of how dominant forms of culture was constructed. In this mass-media age of Dancing with Wolves, of O.J. Simpson, of affirmative action programmes, and of the ‘multicultural marketing’ seen in most advertisements, taking apart multi-cultural tolerance is important not just in Canada, but on a broader scale. In the ‘global marketplace’, television screens, advertising, literature, popular culture and academia are now filled with complex and contradictory images of pluralism, images that do not simply erase difference, but often highlight and celebrate particular forms of diversity. Meanwhile the hegemony of the market becomes stronger, the ‘white backlash’ grows louder, and the marginalized populations have fewer choices. The important question in this context is not ‘How does dominant power erase difference?’ but rather, ‘How might we map the ways in which dominant power maintains their grip despite globalization’? First Nations art encompasses many forms – including the traditional arts, ceremonial or religious arts, utilitarian arts, art produced for the tourist market, as well as the contemporary or fine arts. Throughout the course we will continue to explore current trends and recent developments in First Nations art. Norval Morrisseau Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, was an Aboriginal Canadian artist. Known as the "Picasso of the North", Morrisseau created works depicting the legends of his people, the cultural and political tensions between native Canadian and European traditions, his existential struggles, and his deep spirituality and mysticism. His style is characterized by thick black outlines and bright colors. He founded the Woodlands School of Canadian art and was a prominent member of the “Indian Group of Seven”. An Anishinaabe, he was born March 14, 1932 on the Sand Point Ojibway reserve near Beardmore, Ontario. In accordance with Anishnaabe tradition- his maternal grandparents raised him. His grandfather, Moses Potan Nanakonagos, a shaman, taught him the traditions and legends of his people. His grandmother, Grace Theresa Potan Nanakonagos, was a devout Catholic and from her he learned the tenets of Christianity. The contrast between these two religious traditions became an important factor in his intellectual and artistic development. At the age of six, he was sent to a Catholic residential school, where students were educated in the European tradition, native culture was repressed, and the use of native language was forbidden. After two years he returned home and started attending a local community school. At the age of 19, he became very sick. He was taken to a doctor but his health kept deteriorating. Fearing for his life, his mother called a medicine-woman who performed a renaming ceremony: She gave him the new name Copper Thunderbird. According to Anishnaabe tradition, giving a powerful name to a dying person can give them new energy and save their lives. Morrisseau recovered after the ceremony and from then on always signed his works with his new name. After being invited to meet the artist by Robert Sheppard, an early advocate of Morrisseau was the anthropologist Selwyn Dewdney, who became very interested in Morrisseau's deep knowledge of native culture and myth. Dewdney was the first to take his art to a wider public. Jack Pollock, a Toronto art dealer, helped expose Morrisseau's art to a wider audience in the 1960s. The two met in 1962 while Pollock was teaching a painting workshop in Beardmore. Struck by the discovery of Morrisseau's art, he immediately organized an exhibition of his work at his Toronto gallery. One of Morrisseau's early commissions was for a large mural in the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67, a revolutionary exhibit voicing the dissatisfaction of the First Nations People of Canada with their social and political situation. In 1972, he was caught in a hotel fire in Vancouver and suffered serious burns on three-quarters of his body. In that occasion he had a vision of Jesus encouraging him to be a role model through his art. He converted to the apostolic faith and started introducing Christian themes in his art. In 1978, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2005 and 2006, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa organized a retrospective of his work. This was the first time that the Gallery dedicated a solo exposition to a native artist. In his final months of his life, the artist used a wheelchair and lived in a residence in Nanaimo, British Columbia. He was unable to paint due to his poor health. He died of cardiac arrest—complications arising from Parkinson's disease on December 4, 2007 in Toronto General Hospital. Norval Morrisseau was honoured with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award during the NAAF Awards held at the Sony Centre in Toronto on March 22, 2008. Morrisseau was a self-taught artist. He developed his own techniques and artistic vocabulary, which captured ancient legends and images that came to him in visions or dreams. The native community originally criticized him because his images disclosed traditional spiritual knowledge. Initially he painted on any material that he could find, especially birch bark, and also moose hide. Dewdney encouraged him to use earth-tone colors and traditional material, which he thought were appropriate to Morrisseau's native style. The subjects of his art in the early period were myths and traditions of the Anishnaabe people. He is acknowledged to have initiated the Woodland School of native art, where images similar to the petroglyphs of the Great Lakes region were now captured in paintings and prints. His later style changed: he used more standard material and the colors became progressively brighter, eventually obtaining a neon-like brilliance. The themes also moved from traditional myth to depicting his personal struggles. He also produced art depicting Christian subjects: during his incarceration, he attended a local church where he was struck by the beauty of the images on stained-glass windows. Some of his paintings, like Indian Jesus Christ, imitate that style and represent characters from the Bible with native features. Daphne Odijig Daphne was born in Wikwemikong, on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. Coming from a native background – Potawatomi and Odawa – she was proud of the art and culture of her ancestors. Her artistic side ran in the family, with a grandfather who was into carving, sketching and painting and a father who painted and was a talented musician, the apple did not fall far from the tree. Daphne grew up on a dairy farm along with three siblings. She had dreams of becoming a teacher, but got sick with rheumatic fever and was forced to miss school. She was upset about this at the time, however it proved fortunate because while at home she was able to get to know her mother and grandfather, who both passed away when she was 18. Soon after her loss, she left Wikiwemikong for Parry Sound, Ontario. Daphne changed her last name to “fisher” (an old English translation of Odjig) because of some racism she experienced in Parry Sound. Then, during World War II, she relocated to Toronto for work. It was here that she met her first husband, Paul Somerville. Paul was moved to the West Coast for military duty and this is where Daphne raised their two sons. It was only once that her boys were in school that she was able to focus on her painting. Her first works were very realistic due in part to the instruction of her teachers. However she soon began to experiment with other styles of painting including cubism, realism and expressionism. She visited many art galleries and studied art books to study other artists and their work; her paintings dealt with a variety of themes including human suffering, relationships, culture and importance of family. In the 1960’s, Daphne was encouraged by her sister in law to paint scenes from Manitoulin mythology. She also began to focus on writing and illustrating several children’s books based on Ojibwa culture. Her work helped bring light to many people who knew little about Native culture at the time. In 1972 Daphne’s work was put on display at a Winnipeg art gallery. This exhibition featured her and two other noted artists work. This was a very important exhibition because it was the first time that Native artists were featured in an Art Gallery. By 1973, she co-founded the Professional Native Indian Artists Association – again helping to bring light to Native art and culture. By 1976, they had moved back to British Columbia, near Lake Shuswap. It was here that she was commissioned to paint a 4-part mural ‘The Indian In Transition’. With this piece she was able to express her true emotions and some human truths. Kenojuak Ashevak Kenojuak is the most revered Inuit artist living in Canada today. Her imaginative drawings, prints and carvings are sought the world over and reflect her experiences and life in the North. "Drawing out of your imagination is a lot better to me anyway. What you see in your head is what you try to put on drawing...I try to make mine look attractive enough." While her imagery is varied, she is best known for her eloquently designed animals and birds, especially the Owl. Like many Cape Dorset artists, Kenojuak spent most of her life living on the land in a manner not unlike that of her ancestors. Born at the south Baffin Island camp known as Ikirisaq in the fall of 1927, she grew up travelling from camp to camp on south Baffin and Arctic Quebec. Her family was hunters and trappers and moved from place to place depending on the availability of food. She lived in an igloo icehouse during the winter while travelling, but preferred the humuq or winterized tent, which was insulated with moss and heated with a kudlik or stone lamp that burned seal oil. As a very young woman, Kenojuak was married to Johnniebo and lived with him in various camps including Keakto, a scenic area of rolling hills and inland lakes near Cape Dorset. While living at Keakto in the late 1950s, both Kenojuak and Johnniebo first experimented with carving in stone and drawing when encouraged by James Houston, the Federal Government's administrator for the area. They moved to Cape Dorset in 1966 to be nearer schools for their children and continued to work closely together until Johnniebo's untimely death in 1972. Kenojuak and her children still live and work in Cape Dorset, Northwest Territories. Kenojuak's work has been represented in the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative 's annual print collection since 1959 and has been shown in numerous exhibitions in Canada, the United States and in Europe since that time. Her work has been included in many private and public collections and she has received several special commissions including this latest "Radiant Owl" edition for the Artists For Kids Trust. Alex Janvier Born of Dene Suline and Saulteaux descent in 1935, Alex Janvier was raised in the nurturing care of his family until the age of eight. At this age, the young Janvier was uprooted from his home and sent to the Blue Quills Indian Residential School near St. Paul, Alberta. Although Janvier speaks of having a creative instinct from as far back as he can remember, it was at the residential school that he was given the tools to create his first paintings. Unlike many aboriginal artists of his time, Janvier received formal art training from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary and graduated with honours in 1960. Immediately after graduation, Janvier took up an opportunity to instruct art at the University of Alberta. Alex Janvier has been painting for over 40 years and has created a unique style, his own “visual language,” informed by the rich cultural and spiritual traditions and heritage of the Dene in northern Alberta. Alex Janvier was born on Le Goff Reserve, Cold Lake First Nations, northern Alberta in 1935. At the age of eight, he was sent to the Blue Quills Residential Indian School near St. Paul, Alberta, where the principal recognized his innate artistic talent and encouraged him in his art. Mr. Janvier received formal art training from the Alberta Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary (now the Alberta College of Art and Design) and graduated with honours in 1960. In 1966, the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs commissioned him to produce 80 paintings. He helped bring together a group of artists for the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo ‘67, among them Norval Morrisseau and Bill Reid. In recent years, flowing, curvilinear lines and more abstraction have characterized his work. His unique language has made its mark, cementing his legacy as one of the country’s foremost painters. Alex Janvier lives in Cold Lake, Alberta. www.alexjanvier.com/ The title Morning Star refers to the morning star as a guide or a means of finding direction. Janvier explains: "My people had used the morning star as a guide light in the early mornings of the winter hours. They would leave camp... maybe 4 o'clock in the morning and head in some direction... According to the stars in the sky, and especially that one, they pretty well have an idea the direction that they are going to." Janvier similarly views his painting as a guiding light. Features included in the painting reflect common aboriginal values and philosophies. The circle motif represents the circle of life: spiritual and physical, human and natural. Human life, for example, is believed to make a complete circle; a person dies and then life starts again. Likewise, the colours used are meaningful. Among the Chipewyan for example, white, yellow, blue and red are significant colours, seen more frequently than others. Among Native groups generally, these colours are often seen in regalia. In addition, the creation of four distinct areas of colour is important. The number four is significant for Native Peoples: 4 seasons, 4 cardinal points, and 4 directions. Janvier refers to these as "natural indicators". The painting is a commentary on the clash of cultures that took place after Europeans arrived in North America and encountered Native peoples. This is one of the major themes addressed in the Museum's permanent exhibitions. The white central circle represents the morning star, the source of all creation. The geometric lines of colour radiating out from the centre (similar to the porcupine quillwork traditionally used by the Dene to decorate clothing and other objects) represent the various aboriginal cultures; each is a separate colour yet, when viewed together, they have the appearance of unity. That ring, representing the Native value system, is juxtaposed with a ring of more organic forms, representing the appearance of European ideas and beliefs. The juxtaposition of geometric and organic symbolizes the struggle between the two value systems. Each of the four distinct areas of colour in the outside ring represents a period in Native history In the yellow quadrant, a balance of colour and shape reflects a time when the First Peoples were in harmony with nature, with the Great Spirit, and with each other. However, also represented in this yellow area is the arrival of Columbus in 1492, which changed the world of the First Peoples forever. In the blue quadrant, a lack of decoration signifies the weakness of Native culture, overwhelmed by European culture. According to Janvier, the more Christianized Native people became, the more they turned to organic, flowing designs and the less they produced geometric designs. The red quadrant depicts a time of revival and a new optimism. Struggle and disenchantment give way to a new determination on the part of First Peoples to take charge of their own future. The last quadrant, white to link back to the white centre of Morning Star, portrays healing, renewed self-respect, reconciliation and restructuring - a return to a state of harmony. It represents the period following the point at which Janvier created Morning Star. Of Morning Star, and of his work in general, Janvier has said, "I am painting and I am also telling the story of the way things happened to me and to my tribe and to my people and it's a true story." Morning Star was a gift of Ralph and Roz Halbert of Toronto, Ontario, to the people of Canada. Janvier is hopeful about the future of aboriginal culture and art, noting that many people are recovering traditional values and practices. According to Janvier, belief in Mother Earth and the Great Spirit is the basis upon which future generations can reclaim true spirituality and freedom as aboriginal people. "Janvier's calligraphic lines are always in motion, recalling natural phenomena like the motion of branches in the wind. The symbolism he ascribes to color is that of the Dene. And his compositions which often flow outward from the centre in four directions, refer to the four cardinal points of the native cosmos, the points of the compass, and the seasons." Nancy Tousley, art critic, Calgary Herald Carl Beam Carl Beam was born Carl Edward Migwans on May 24, 1943, in M'Chigeeng First Nation. His mother, Barbara Migwans was the Ojibwe daughter of Dominic Migwans who was then the Chief of the Ojibways of West Bay (later renamed M'Chigeeng First Nation). "The Beam family's true name derives from miigwaans which means little feather or bird. He was raised by his grandparents Dominic and Annie for most of his young life. His exceptional qualities were observed by his elders at a young age, and he was given the name "Ahkideh", from aakode' meaning "one who is brave" in the Ojibwe language." He was sent to Garnier Residential School, in Spanish, Ontario, from the age of ten until he left as a young man. After working at a variety of jobs, from construction work on the Toronto Subway, to working as a millwright in Wawa, Ontario, Beam entered Kootenay School of Art (1971). He went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in 1974, and entered into post-graduate studies at the University of Alberta, (1975–76). He left the University of Alberta over a dispute about his thesis on native art, and returned to Ontario. The direction of Carl Beam's visual style was firmly established by the late seventies. In 1979 Beam met and married his wife, Ann Beam. "In developing his work over the years, Beam has been accompanied by his wife, Ann, herself and artist and a former teacher at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Often they have worked as collaborators". At this time he incorporated multiple photographic images onto a single picture plane. "He disregarded the illusory deep space of Renaissance depiction, in favour of a flat tableau, where a dialogue of multiple images could take place". At this time his photographic imagery was achieved primarily via screen process, photo etching, Polaroid instant prints, and a solvent transfer technique also used by Robert Rauschenberg. The family moved to Peterborough, Ontario, and in 1984, Beam was commissioned to make an artwork for the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. Living in the east end of Peterborough, Ontario, Beam created an early set of large format etchings, consisting of nine prints. There are many signature images in this print collection, which Beam later used to form the image backbone of his iconic work The North American Iceberg. This work was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, making Beam the first artist of Native ancestry to have his work purchased into the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada as contemporary art. His last body of work was in process until the time of his passing in 2005. Robert Johnson titled it Crossroads from the blues song. The work included images of pop stars, gangsters, scientists, native leaders, politicians, writers and poets, musicians (Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Manson, Jerry Garcia, Britney Spears, John Lennon), TV personalities (Martha Stewart), animals, and birds. He had completed Plexiglas works, and 22"x30" paper works for Crossroads and was in the middle of a suite of etchings at the time of his passing. Carl Beam received the Governor General's Award for Excellence in Visual and Media Art in 2005. Jackson Beardy Jackson Beardy's life began on July 24, 1944 on Garden Hill First Nation, an OjiCree community on the shores of Island Lake in northeastern Manitoba. Forty years later, on Dec. 7, 1984, it came to an end. The fifth child of 13 born to John Beardy and Dinah Monias, Jackson was given a special task at a very young age. He would live with his grandmother, his father's mother, and learn from her the traditional stories of the Cree people. But his education in legend and tradition was cut short when he turned seven and government policy of the time demanded he go away to residential school. Beardy attended Portage Indian school in Portage la Prairie, 50 km west of Winnipeg and hundreds of kilometres away from home. He spoke no English when he arrived at residential school-only Cree and that was forbidden, as were many of the traditions that had up to now been a way of life for Beardy and his classmates. Beardy learned to speak, read and write English, but the more he learned to meet the demands placed on him to adopt white ways, the more disconnected he became to his Native heritage and the things his grandmother had worked so hard to instill in him. But while his residential school experiences slowly chipped away at Beardy's connection to his culture, they also opened up doors for the young student that allowed him to hone his artistic talents. Beardy attended the Technical Vocational school in Winnipeg from 1963 to 1964, where he studied commercial art. He finished the course, but without experience, couldn't find work. He began to create art- reconnecting with the stories his grandmother had passed on to him in his childhood, combining them with the art techniques he had learned, capturing the resulting mix in paint on canvas. He worked for a time in the display department of the Simpson Sears department store in Winnipeg, but lost the job when health problems began to plague him. Beardy had begun to drink after leaving residential school-one of the ways he tried to cope with the feelings of isolation that he felt-and he soon developed ulcers. Problems related to his drinking would plague him for another decade, until he gave up alcohol in 1974. The ulcers would continue to be a problem for the remainder of his life. Beardy was hospitalized for the ulcers and after his release; he decided to return home to Garden Hill reserve. His homecoming wasn't all he had hoped it would be. He was seen more as an outsider than as a member of the community returned, a view that was strengthened by the art he produced. The images Beardy created in his work were taken from oral tradition, and many people were not receptive about capturing them in a visual form. Beardy had his first art exhibit in 1965 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. In 1966 he took some art classes at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba. In 1967 he went to Montreal as a consultant for the Canadian Indian Pavilion at Expo '67. He received commissions to produce works of art to commemorate both Canada's centennial in 1967 and Manitoba's centennial in 1970. It was in 1970 when one event presented Beardy with both a great accomplishment and a bitter disappointment, and illustrated the struggle Native artists faced in their attempts to be recognized and respected. One of the highlights of Beardy's artistic career was his involvement in the exhibition Treaty Numbers 23, 287 and 1171, in which his work was featured alongside that of Daphne Odjig and Alex Janvier. The exhibit, held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1972, marked a movement toward having the work of Native artists showcased in art galleries rather than museums, a sign that their art was finally making the jump from being appreciated for its anthropological merit to being viewed as true art. That same year, Beardy was awarded the Canadian Centennial Medal. Beardy was one member of a group of Native artists who formed the Professional Native Indian Artists Association, better known as the "Indian Group of Seven." Beardy, along with fellow group members Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, Carl Ray, Joseph Sanchez and Eddy Cobiness, worked to promote Native control of Native art and to change the way the world looked at Native art, shifting the emphasis from the "Nativeness" of the art to it's artistic merits. Like other members of the group, Beardy's work is categorized as being part of the New Woodland school, a style of art characterized by its use of black outlining, blocks of pure, undiluted color and X-ray views. Beardy drew inspiration from much of his artwork from the stories of his people, translating myths and legends from the oral tradition into the visual, presenting his interpretation of the stories through paintings and prints, rendering the images on canvas, birch bark or beaver skins. While capturing the essence of the stories he had learned as a young child and relearned as an adult, Beardy's work reflected traditional Native viewpoints about the interconnectedness of the universe. In the early 1980s, Beardy was living in Ottawa, acting as art advisor and cultural consultant to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, which took up much of the time he would have normally been spending on his art. In 1984, he left Ottawa and returned home to Winnipeg, where he began work on a new series of prints. In mid-November, Beardy suffered a heart attack. He recovered, but an infection set in a few weeks later and he died. Rebecca Belmore Ojibway, Rebecca was born in Upsala Ontario 1960. She currently resides and works in Vancouver. Her 4 ½ minute video called The Blanket shows a dark –haired woman wrapping and unwrapping herself in a red and black Hudson’s Bay point blanket while she moves about a snow-covered Manitoba landscape. The video is not without a sense of anger (the blanket has a poisonous history in relations between white and native Canadians), but The Blanket is also lyric, elegant and sensuous. She works within narratives of resistance and imposed accommodation and the adaptation and self-directed transformation. Brian Jungen Brian Jungen was born in 1970 on a family farm north of Fort St. John, British Columbia. His father was Swiss born and immigrated to British Columbia with his family when he was three years old. Jungen's mother was Aboriginal, a member of the Dane-zaa Nation. Jungen was seven years old when both his parents perished in a fire. After which his fathers’ sister and her husband raised him. Jungen recalls his mother's ability to adapt objects to new uses, something he now famously does within his artistic practice. He recalls, "She was constantly trying to extend the life of things, packages, utensils. Once we had to use the back end of a pickup truck as an extension for our hog pen." In 1988 he moved to Vancouver to attend the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He graduated four years later with a Diploma of Visual Art. After which he moved to Montreal and New York City prior to returning to Vancouver. In 1998 he took part in a self-directed residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta. This residency would become the tipping point in his career. As it was there that he began to work on his now famous Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005); a series of sculptures he created by disassembling and reassembling Nike Air Jordan sneakers to resemble Northwest Coast Aboriginal masks. He would go on to explore his interest in using sports paraphernalia creating sculptures out of catcher’s mitts, baseball bats, and basketball jerseys. Jungen has stated that it is a deliberate choice to create works out of materials produced by the sports industry; an industry that appropriates Aboriginal terminology, such as the team names The Chiefs, Indians, Redskins and Braves. However Jungen's work is not exclusively tied to his heritage. He has stated, "My involvement with my family and traditions is personal - it's not where my art comes from." His interest in architecture and in particular Buckminster Fuller is also evident in his practice with his creation of multiple shelters for humans, animals and birds. Overriding the majority of his work is Jungen's ability to disassemble and reassemble objects maintaining the integrity and meaning of his source material and yet creating new possibilities for meaning Shape shifter (2000) / Transmutation (2000). Brian Jungen was the winner of the inaugural Sobey Art Award in 2002 and the 2010 Gershon Iskowitz Prize. Brian is a key figure in Vancouver’s art community. In 2006, an exhibition of Jungen’s work was held at Vancouver Art Gallery and in the UK, Jungen exhibited People’s Flag at the Tate Modern. Jungen’s practice re-crafts modern commodities into sculptural objects, entertaining a dialogue between his firstnation ancestry, the global economy and the object of art. "I experiment until I can find a way I can manipulate them [the source material] or take advantage of their iconography, without completely changing them. I like the fact that people can still recognize what the source material is."- Brian Jungen Rita Letendre Rita Letendre was born in Drummondville, Quebec, Canada in 1928, but moved with her parents to Montreal in 1941. Beginning her career as an artist, during the 1950's and early 1960's in Montreal she participated in the Automatist movement and painted with that intuitive strategy. Her style became abstract. She has created murals as large as 60 feet by 60 feet as well as the smallest silkscreen work. Her work has evolved through various media, from brush to spatula, pastel, silk-screening, airbrushing and back to pastel. She has had more than 65 solo exhibitions. Rita Letendre is a leading exponent of the abstract colorist movement. Her artwork is widely collected throughout North America by governments, public galleries and private organizations (click for partial list) Her work has been exhibited in Paris (France), Rome (Italy), London (England), Tel Aviv (Israel), Osaka (Japan), as well as in the major cities of the U.S. and Canada, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. One of the points to remember about colonialism is the way that it makes whatever culture it's currently trying to colonize out to be a dead culture. This can be seen devastatingly in Canada's policies of assimilation (residential schools, Indian act laws etc.), or even the tendency to look at certain traditions as a historical re-enactment. It disintegrates that particular culture, it also makes the members of that culture cling to the way things were without realizing that they are living members of that culture, not some dying race. It stops that culture from changing and suiting the needs of current generations, which kills it off for good, as it becomes something other than what they do every day. As a result that culture becomes an antiquity, a historical relic. Canada’s Native people are still referred to officially in three broad categories by government for administrative purposes, and in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: The Inuit are the people who originally lived in the Arctic. Their language is Inuktitut, but it has several dialects that differ considerably from place to place. Christopher Columbus called the First Nations “Indians” when he landed in North America, because he thought he had reached India. Many now prefer to call themselves First Nations, though many still call themselves Indians in everyday conversation. The Canadian Government under the Indian Act as Status Indians still legally categorizes them in three categories. Those who have lost their legal status are called Non-Status Indians. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau tried to get rid of the Indian Act, but First Nations political groups insisted on keeping it, because it defines their special status. The Métis, are the group of people who resulted from the mixing of European and Native men and women. The Métis developed a unique culture that included elements of both European and Native ways and artifacts (clothes, tools, means of travel, etc.). They pride themselves on their distinctiveness from both the cultures from which they are descended. In the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada's First Peoples are referred to as Indians, Inuit, and Metis. The Charter recognizes the special Aboriginal Rights of Inuit, Indians, and Metis. References McLoughlin, Moira. (1993). Of Boundaries and Borders: First Nations’ History in Museums. Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 18, No 3. Phillips, Ruth. (1988). Indian Art: Where do You Put It? Muse 6, 3:65 Townsend-Gault (1998). First Nations Culture: Who Knows What? Canadian Journal of Communication. Vol 23, No 1. FINA 160 Canadian + Aboriginal Art History Lecture 1: Colonialism, belonging and what is Aboriginal? Colonialism • the control or governing influence of a naEon over a dependent country, territory, or people. • the system or policy by which a naEon maintains or advocates such control or influence. • the state or condiEon of being colonial. • an idea, custom, or pracEce peculiar to a colony. Pluralism • A condiEon in which numerous disEnct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society. • The belief that such a condiEon is desirable or socially beneficial. History of Contemporary Aboriginal Arts in Canada • While art has been produced by First Peoples since Eme immemorial, and is known to most Canadians as arEfacts in museums, its inclusion in the euro‐western paradigm of fine art is recent (1950s and 60s).iii • The contemporary period of Inuit art began in the late 1940s. When the federal government recognised the potenEal economic benefit it acEvely encouraged the development and promoEon of Inuit sculpture. Further to this, Inuit‐owned cooperaEves were established in the 1950s and 60s in most ArcEc communiEes, as well as art markeEng agencies in southern Canada.iv • Contemporary First NaEons art began to be noEced as a parEcular type of arEsEc producEon during the early l960s with the work of the Woodland School of Art and Legend Painters Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, and Carl Ray.v • Expo 67, a turning point in the history of Aboriginal arEsEc expression, provided the first opportunity for Aboriginal people from all parts of Canada to work on a project designed and realized enErely by them. For the tepee‐shaped “Indians of Canada Pavilion,” arEsts from different cultures created murals blending Western technique with Aboriginal ideas and concepts. vi • Storytelling has always been a vital part of the cultural idenEty of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. Stories are told to teach lessons, strengthen cultural Ees, to entertain, and to keep history alive.vii Arts & Culture in Canada – Fact Sheet August 2008 conEnued • The 2001 census reported that about 3,100 Aboriginal people were arEsts in 2001, accounEng for 2.4% of Canada’s 130,700 arEsts. However, evidence suggests the number is much larger as there are arEsts in art forms outside of those recognized in the standard census definiEons of occupaEons. Further to this, many Aboriginal arEsts do not idenEfy with the Western definiEon of art and arEsts.4 • The two most common arts occupaEon groups for Aboriginal arEsts are arEsans and cragspersons (1,300) and painters, sculptors and other visual arEsts (500). • Aboriginal arEsts are naEonally and internaEonally acclaimed in a variety of disciplines including Rebecca Belmore and Alex Janvier (visual arts), Douglas Cardinal (architecture), Zacharias Kanuk (film making), Jim Hart (sculpture), Tanya Tagaq (music), Tompson Highway (theatre) and Santee Smith (Dance). Arts & Culture in Canada – Fact Sheet August 2008 In 2001, British Columbia was home to the largest number of Aboriginal artists, with almost one-third of the country’s Aboriginal artists (about 900 artists or 29% of the Canadian total). These artists account for 3.8% of all artists in B.C. In Alberta, 2.6% of all artists are Aboriginal. This Edward Cur-s photograph is a copy of the first photomural in the pre‐contact sec-on. En-tled "Nootkan harpooner, 1915," it appears alongside the Coastal food processing display on the mezzanine level. BC Archives, HP 074515." This photograph is taken from Cur-s's film, In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914). A short segment of the film featuring the arrival of the canoes replays con-nuously in the First Peoples exhibit. BC Archives, HP 074718 The Edward Cur-s photograph of two Nuu‐chah‐nulth women in cedar‐bark aUre is a copy of a prominent photomural in the exhibit. The woman in the canoe was iden-fied by Alice Paul as Virginia Tom. Royal BC Museum, PN 5419. This is a photograph of a por-on of a portrait gallery in the First Peoples exhibit Royal BC Museum, PNB 13200/IIA This Edward Cur-s photograph en-tled “Kwakiutl man, 1914” features one of the four males displayed on a wall in the portrait gallery. BC Archives, HP 74472 Edward Cur-s photograph of woman siUng. “Francine Hunt of Fort Rupert”. Note her abalone earrings and cedar‐bark cape are similar to those worn by the “Kwakiutl Girl” in the Portrait Gallery of the First Peoples exhibit. Wife of George Hunt. BC Archives, HP 074505 less than 500 years ago, the only people living in Canada were the Aboriginal people of Canada. "Aboriginal" means the original inhabitants, the people who were here first. The words "Native" or "Indigenous" are also used, and mean the same thing. TAH CHEE by Charles Bird King c1816-1835 George Catlin 1796‐1872 As early as the 1830s Europeans and many First Nations people bemoaned the change that trade with the white cultures was having on the native way of life. George Catlin himself mocked the change from a proud Indian chief to an epaulette sporting befrocked dandy with beaver top had swaggering with umbrella, sword, and a fan, while smoking a cigarette. Self Portrait, date unknown George Catlin Pigeons Egg Head, 1838 Canadian Museum of Civilization, First Peoples Hall, Ottawa Canadian Museum of Civilization, First Peoples Hall, Ottawa Canadian Museum of Civilization, First Peoples Hall, Ottawa Earliest examples to date 1880, oldest BC Native art to exist. Carved of cedar Museum of Anthropology UBC Vancouver Totem Pole, Haida Kunghit, Ninstints/Skunggwai Museum of Anthropology UBC post card – artist unknown Norval Morrisseau “My art speaks and will continue to speak, transcending barriers of nationality, of language and of other forces that may be divisive, fortifying the greatness of the spirit that has always been the foundation of the Ojibwa people.” Norval Morrisseau Norval Morrisseau Copper Thunderbird Merman Ruler of the World, acrylic, 1969 Norval Morrisseau Bear Spirit, acrylic, 1970 Daphne Odjig Internationally recognized and renowned artist Daphne Odjig was born September 11, 1919 and raised on the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island (Lake Huron), Ontario Canada. Her father and her grandfather, Chief Jonas Odjig, were Potawatomi, descended from the great chief Black Partridge. The Odjig family was among the Potawatomi who migrated north and settled in Wikwemikong after the war of 1812. The Potawatomi (Keepers of the Fire) were members with the Ojibwa and Odawa, of the Three Fires Confederacy of the Great Lakes. • • • • • • • The first, and as of November 2009, the only First NaEon woman arEst to show at the NaEonal Gallery of Canada Order of Canada Order of BriEsh Columbia Seven Honorary Degrees NaEonal Aboriginal Achievement Award Governor General’s Laureate, Visual and Media Arts (Canada’s highest honour in the field of visual arts) Expression Award, NaEonal Film Board of Canada, in recogniEon of work that champions Canadian cultural diversity Daphne Odjig Mirror of my soul (Van Gogh & Picasso, date unknown Daphne Odjig Tribute to the Great Chiefs of the Past, 1975 Daphne Odjig Unknown title, unknown date Kenojuak Ashevak Kenojuak Ashevak Loons protect the owl, stone cut stencil print, 2002 Kenojuak Ashevak Radiant Owl, stone cut print, 1996 Kenojuak Ashevak Alex Janvier Alex Janvier Where the Big Fish Live, 1973 Alex Janvier The insurance on the tee pee, 1972 Alex Janvier Good, Soil, Road Alex Janvier Morning Star variation on original installation in the Canadian Museum of Civilization Ottawa (1993), unknown date Alex Janvier "My people had used the morning star as a guide light in the early mornings of the winter hours. They would leave camp... maybe 4 o'clock in the morning and head in some direction... According to the stars in the sky, and especially that one, they pretty well have an idea the direction that they are going to." Carl Beam Carl Beam Unknown – The Whale of Our Being, 2001-2004 Carl Beam Beam entered the new millennium with the body of work entitled The Whale of Our Being, in this work "Beam examines the calamitous moral fallout from what he perceives as a profound spiritual absence in contemporary society, symbolized by a great whale of primordial proportions". featuring large photo emulsion works on canvas, constructions, large scale paper works, and ceramics. "Compared to earlier work, The Whale of Our Being exhibits a positively baroque complexity, a dizzying assortment of references, sometimes printed in overly saturated, fluorescent colour. Mystery, for instance, is pinkDay-Glo-coloured pink. The colour in Summa ranges from Day-Glo yellowgreen to orange; the images from Einstein and the Hubble Telescope, and astronaut, and Sitting Bull to and image of the First Nations, and more besides."His imagery had become vast and all inclusive, in The Whale of Our Being "He re-examines the media construction of violence and infamy and the public fascination with celebrity". Said Beam at a panel discussion for the Beyond History exhibition in 1989, "If an artist has a legitimate premise, there is nothing which isn't within their field of enquiry". Carl Beam Jennifer Lopez Rules – The Whale of Our Being, 2001-2004 Jackson Beardy Our Language, Jackson Beardy Windsong, Jackson Beardy Loons on Red, Jackson Beardy Life Cycles, 1976 Rebecca Belmore Speaking to Their Mother, Wood Gramaphone1991-92 Rebecca Belmore The Great Water, Installation 2002 Rebecca Belmore State of Grace, 2002 Brian Jungen Brian Jungen Untitled, ink drawing on paper, 1996 Brian Jungen Untitled, ink drawing on paper, 1996 Brian Jungen Prototype for New Understanding #4, Nike Air Jordans, hair, 1998 Brian Jungen Prototype for New Understanding #13 Detail, Nike Air Jordans, hair, 2002 Brian Jungen New Understanding, Nike Air Jordans and hair, 1999 Rita Letendre "My new pictures seem more aggressive, more intense, to me. I feel like a space pushing against its barriers. Light and colour, and sometimes the absence of colour, have always been the key elements in my painting. With its different values, colour reflects the shades of life. But light, from the first shock of birth to the last breath of life - light is my life." Rita Letendre Festival of the Gods, Oil on canvas, 1996 Rita Letendre L'esprit protecteur des ancêtres, Oil on canvas, 2009 Gerdald R. McMaster Conversations with…, mixed media, 1988 Gerdald R. McMaster Roman Layman Met Some Shaman, acrylic on canvas, 1992 Lecture/Module 2 Notes Canadian Art in England Leading up to the First World War, Canada (emerging nation) went through a complex and contested transformation. “Various agencies, cultural institutions, and individuals were attempting along many fronts to imagine and establish a singular, modern national identity that would clearly signal the independent status to which the nation aspired politically and for which it sought international recognition. Until 1900 the Dominion had closely identified itself with its dominant colonial parent.”2 Canada’s attempts to proclaim independence as a homogeneous national identity reaffirmed its allegiances and dependencies to her models for enterprise- Britain and France. Foreign policy, developed at the time of the war, was to maintain imperial solidarity while assert independence from England. Here we can see, “the first signs that declarations and constructions of colonial dependence and independence as well as of national difference and similarity were entwined in contradictory and even paradoxical ways.”2 Many factors within Canada rebelled against this nationalist project. Even though the war is usually cited as consolidating the drive to independence, it did not assist in unifying the nation. Difficulties arose between: English and French speaking groups – the latter bitterly opposed to the introduction of conscription as each were distinguished by its own identity, history, and cultural agendas and the repression of many ethnic and immigrant groups whose members were not British. The result was that those who wanted to foster and articulate a homogenous nationality faced both a coercive element within and resistance from without. 2 Canada was young and did not possess core qualities deemed essential to nationhood. As a recently colonized area it was lacking cultural stories, deep history or a long-inhabited land that the present occupants could trace their ancestry, thereby justifying their claims to the unified territory. Canada also faced challenges because of it’s vast and diverse geography, which contained differing colonizing and immigrant groups, and a broad spectrum of resident indigenous populations pre-dating colonization. Indigenous peoples were seen as a single essentialized race of “Indians“. It was repeatedly stated in many forms that these Indigenous peoples were collectively on the edge of either extinction or complete assimilation and since they were seen as racially distinct from the colonizers and as having a different, and potentially competing, history. Despite the prevalence of a “discourse of disappearance,” Native peoples were still asserting their presence and still agitating for the resolution of land claims and other outstanding problems, especially in western Canada. We can see how the proliferation of disappearance theories started the hierarchical relationship between Euro-Canadian settlers and Indigenous settlers- actively repressing Native cultures, identities, and ceremonies. “Bertram Booker, an artist and cultural broker of the period, addressed this condition in1929 in his summation of the arts of Canada: “Geographically we are not unified… Racially we are split ‘forty ways’ … Historically we have no past as a people.” He concluded: “We are not yet a people!” Instead, according to Brooker, the nation could give up being a “colony” and become “our homeland” only when we “forget the old countries”. 2 Thus there needed to be decisions about who would belong to or be excluded from this constructed identity, who would be “Canadian” and who would be “Other”. “What the qualities of this identity would consist of, what forms it would be represented in, who had the authority to speak of and for it, and how to deal with the lack of some essential items.” 2 On the artistic side, programs were going well. The paintings of the Group of Seven, formed in 1920, were presented as embodying an autonomous, modern, visual culture rooted in the soil, severed from colonial ties. The Group of Seven was necessary in the new vision of Canadian identity and yet their work aligned themselves with England by focusing on the land such as British painters had been doing for some time. After several failed careers Eric Brown emigrated from England to Canada and re-birthed himself an expert on art – English nationalistic landscape painting to be specific. “Eric Brown’s competence in and knowledge of a British nationalist tradition expressed through a native English landscape, although second-hand, provided him with a life-long career in Canada, where he was soon introduced to Byron Edmund Walker, the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, who had become chairman of the Advisory Arts Council to the National Gallery in 1909.” 2 Walker, the consummate Canadian capitalist, thoroughly understood the relationship between political power and cultural formations and was a staunch supporter of maintaining close ties with the empire. In 1911 he “led the way” in bringing down Wilfred Laurier’s Liberal government, during this crisis, Walker hired Brown as curator in 1910 and appointed him director in 1912. The following year, under Robert Borden’s new Conservative government, which Walker helped to form, the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) was given official status as an autonomous entity. It would, unlike many of its counterparts, intervene directly in the formation and direction of a national art. The major problem seemed to be fostering and displaying an image of national difference and independence that at the same time remained loyal to the empire, which was an imperative for Walker. 2 A mandate to underwrite a unique national art founded in landscape and paralleling that developed in England appeared as soon as Brown took office at the NGC. By 1912 he was publically calling for such. From this moment, he took a concentrated interest in the painters who would later officially form the Group of Seven in 1920. Despite claims in the conventional narrations of the Group’s history that its members faced opposition and neglect before being vindicated, they were, since their first appearance, the handmaidens of the NGC, and consequently of the state, in the birth of this identity invested in the visual arts. Within a year, Brown, despite a limited acquisitions budget, was buying significant quantities of their work as well as works by Tom Thomson, with home the Group was associated but who would die before its actual formation. By 1914 Brown was communicating with and receiving advice from the Group’s two principal members: A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris. The Studio, the illustrated leading English Art Journal, defined art for a broad English-speaking public both at home and it the dominions and colonies, was an important site for the construction of the rural landscape as essentially British. It also became the primary vehicle for soliciting recognition of Canada’s emerging independent national imagery at the imperial centre. Canada’s new emerging imagery of the Group of Seven was to be defined s the opposite to the tonal, peaceful, cultivated landscape of Britain – that is, as an open, empty, wild and geographically situated in the North – although both represented nonindustrialized landscapes. This dualistic relationship (mediated through nature) between civilized centre and wild periphery was a trope already familiar in England in depictions of other areas on the margins of the empire, namely Ireland. It was also to become essential to the formation of the image of Canada. 2 “Canada as a country possesses such a striking individuality that it was inevitable that sooner or later a generational of landscape painters would arise who would see her without let or hindrance from European traditions, conventions, or teaching” – that is, those learned in Paris.” – Brown In 1920 two critics from London were brought to Canada to view and write about the work: Lewis C Hind and P.G. Konody. Konody. Hind was well known, having been one of the founders of the journal The Studio. He wrote extensively on British landscape painting, including works by J.M.W Turner. Taking time out from what amounted to heavy-handed sarcasm, the reviewer did note as a redeeming feature that Hind had turned his attention to the landscapes of the dominions, which were almost unknown. Konody already had some experience with Canadian art and its claims to nationhood. During the war, he had worked closely with Canada’s agent in London, the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, who, like his friend Walker, also possessed both financial and political clout. Beaverbrook’s political assignment was to pursue a policy of maintaining solidarity with England and the empire while at the same time promoting Canadian independence. Konody had connections and experience in the Pictorial Propaganda Committee – linked to the two of the major press barons in England – Lord Beaverbrook and Beaverbrook’s business partner, Lord Rothermere, for whom Kondoy also served as art advisor – the critic occupied a prominent position within British art circles. While in Canada he and Hind “visited the Canadian National Exhibition, and their laudatory opinions of the new landscape panting here published in the papers”, providing proof of “foreign recognition” and additional validation from the centre, which would have confirmed the correctness of Brown’s claims of 1916. 2 In a review of the Royal Canadian Academy (RCA) exhibition in 1921, art critic Ramsay Traquair acknowledged that the “most interesting exhibits were in landscape. A number of painters are taking their inspiration from the wild scenery of the Canadian woods.” By the time the Group of Seven was actually in place in 1920, Brown, together with others sympathetic to the cause and with the aid of the Group itself, had constructed, reproduced, and put into circulation a critical jargon and historical narrative that articulated how their works sprang from the land itself; were not subject to outside, or at least to colonial and continental, influences; were modern and new. By the mid-1920s the project, with the active support and even subsidization of various institutions beyond the NGC, had undergone several trials and, despite the occasional oppositional voice at home and abroad, appeared secure. The final stage in the ratification process presented itself in the two shows of Canadian art held as part of the British Empire Exhibitions at Wembley in 1924 and 1925. Location was important because England was the colonial parent, the so-called “mother country,” from whom the maturing nation was, at the time, gaining its own autonomous cultural and political identity. In both politics and art, Canada was returning ritualistically to the colonial centre for recognition of its independence and difference gained during the war, while at the same time redeclaring its solidarity with the empire. Much rode on these shows, in which various audiences and publics compared Canadian modern landscapes with those from other areas of the empire, such as Australia, India, New Zealand, Burma, and South Africa, as well as England. 2 These exhibitions in England of the empires dominions were promoted, by King George V, as featuring all the races of the empire, the indigenous populations of Canada were conspicuous by their absence. Wembley became for Canada, a site for the “symbolic erasure of Indian presence. Given this absence, neither establishing the racial “difference” between the colonizer and the colonized populations nor constructing a knowledge about these populations was an issue for Canada. Thus the Canadian art exhibition invested with this aim was exclusively a showcase for white artists. Most of the British critics proved highly receptive to the Group’s landscapes and to their message of national unity. The NGC collected the reviews from both exhibitions, which highlighted the Group, and handed them to the Canadian press for national distribution to the widest possible audiences across the country. British critics were now ready and able to distinguish and critically appreciate the Group of Seven and their project and to fully recognize the aspirations and uniqueness – that is, the modernism, nationality, and difference – of the new Canadian landscapes. Critic Konody praised the exhibitions to the elitist as the journals he wrote for were for a privileged audience. He went beyond describing the paintings but also into the key elements of the narrative that had been put forth in Canada. He cited their unified stance, pointed out the philistine public opposition to their work, reinforced their direct relationship with the land, named their pioneering father figure as Tom Thomson, outlined their successful forging of an independent national identity, and noted the absence of any European influence, which implied that the work sprang up spontaneously from the soil, without colonial precedent, and that it was therefore truly Canadian. England in Canadian Art “The British Empire Exhibition has for the first time made possible the assembling under one roof of the paintings of today, not only from the United Kingdom, but from every Dominion of the Crown. Now first can be seen in one place how the Daughter Nations have developed their art from that English School which is represented so splendidly in the Retrospective Galleries.” - Lawrence Weaver, “Introduction,” Catalogue of the Palace of Arts British Empire Exhibition, 8 “Conventional narratives of Canadian art invariably view the critical responses to the two Wembley shows as a vindication of the agenda of the Group of Seven and the National Gallery and the triumph over both the Royal Canadian Academy. This success is then presented as confirmation of the Group’s independent nationalist, and modernist position. The statement of purpose for the overall exhibition by Lawrence Weaver the director of the United Kingdom Exhibits in the Palace of Arts, which included the Canadian works as one part, indicates that another imperial agenda as of yet unaccounted for, was also at work at Wembley. Weaver’s statement raises several questions. Are his claims about the purpose of the larger “art of the kingdom” exhibition and those made by Eric Brown for the smaller Canadian section mutually exclusive and in conflict, or can they be reconciled? Can derivation and dependency be compatible with independence and autonomy? In other words, were the works of the Group able to express both solidarity with the empire and national independence?” 2 Giving Weaver’s claim validity means questioning the assertions that the new Canadian landscapes were without colonial influence, born from the land, autochthonic, native, indigenous, and modern. It also means examining the possibility that the Group of Seven’s compositions were, as has been suggested from the inks between Canadian and English national landscapes found in The Studio, deeply indebted from the very beginning to the colonial parent from which they were also meant to signal separation and difference. This broader view is given added impetus by recent writings demonstrating that, in order to properly and completely decipher works of art, audiences must already be versed in the codes by which these works are constructed, and that a group identity and a sense of inclusion and belonging can be shared by those having access to these codes, while those without such access can be case as outsiders. Given that the works by the Group displayed at Wembley were, by and large, the first British experiences of the new Canadian landscape painting outside of scattering of articles in The Studio Journal, some problems in either accepting their claims or deciphering them should have been anticipated, especially among those critics who were not previously familiar with the work or competent in its complex, subtle, and sometimes contradictory claims. That no such difficulties seem to have occurred appears problematic, given the assertions of newness and difference. Yet the complex understanding and appreciation by the English critics suggest that the Group’s works were fully legible in England because, in some manner, they recapitulated the already familiar subject matter, pictorial conventions, painting practices, and nationalist content of British landscape traditions. Paradoxically, this would mean that the positive responses of the English critics, which have been taken as proof of the independence of Canadian art, also confirmed the independence of that art on English precedents. The Group’s works and the unified national identity that they signaled were, very much like the Dominion’s political institutions of the time, largely monocultural, Anglo-Canadian, and colonially derived. They would also ensure that the representations of Canadian nature and nationhood would appeal to the particular competencies of British audiences already familiar with the forms and the issues of the work from their own history of landscape painting. Such competencies would have been “mythologized and therefore naturalized as part of a shared heritage” – that is, a heritage shared by both England and Englishspeaking Canada. Landscape painting in Europe itself had difficulty getting recognized as a high caliber subject matter as history painting, in the mid-to-late 1700s. Earlier English landscapes had originated, in large part, as portraits of the estates of the new landed gentry and were intended to take the place, one assumes, of a hall of titled ancestors in order to prove title to the land under surveillance. Throughout the late 1700s, the transition was effected when figures such as Thomas Gainsborough promoted landscape as and independent genra. While it became endowed with other possibilities, English landscape painting never fully lost this claim to entitlement and possession of the land. Tom Thomson Tom Thomson, the brilliant, pioneering Canadian artist, was born near Claremont, Ontario, on August 5, 1877, the sixth of ten children born to John Thomson and Margaret Matheson. Two months later, the family moved to their new home, eleven kilometers northeast of Owen Sound. It was in this quiet rolling countryside, overlooking the shores of Georgian Bay that Thomson grew up. He was raised in a rural area and received education locally, though he fell ill frequently and was out of school for periods of time. During the times he remained at home where he was encouraged by his Victorian household to appreciate the arts- drawing, music and design.6 As an adult, he became an avid outdoorsman and expert canoeist, preferring to spend his time at Algonquin Park, working as a guide – until the onset of winter would force his return to the city. This lifestyle offered only minimal wages, yet it afforded Thomson the freedom to paint in the natural setting he so cherished. Tom had a restless start to his adulthood. Unsuccessful at enlisting for the Boer War in 1899 due to his flat feet, Tom apprenticed as a machinist at Kennedy’s Foundry in Owen Sound for 8 months. In 1901, he moved to Seattle, where he became proficient in lettering and design, working as a commercial artist. In Seattle he became quite close to a woman of the name Alice Lambert who was at least 14 years his junior. A rebuff of a marriage proposal to the high strung daughter of a minster is rumoured to be the reason for his return to Canada. By 1905, he had returned Canada to work as a senior artist at Legg Brothers, a photoengraving firm in Toronto. He began using oil paints in 1906 while working in the commercial design world. His first attempts were tentative and amateurish. In 1909 Thomson joined the staff of Grip Ltd., a prominent Toronto photoengraving house, and this proved to be a turning point in his life. The firm’s head designer, artist-poet J.E.H. MacDonald, contributed much to Thomson’s artistic development, sharpening his sense of design. Fellow employees included Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley, Franklin Carmichael and Franz Johnson - all adventurous young painters who often organized weekend painting trips to the countryside around Toronto. After Tom’s death, these men, together with Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson, would go on to form Canada’s first national school of painting, the Group of Seven. 6 In 1912, inspired by tales of Ontario’s “far north”, Thomson traveled to the Mississagi Forest Reserve near Sudbury, and to Algonquin Park, a site that was to inspire much of his future artwork. It was during this same year that Thomson began to work for the commercial art firm Rous and Mann. He was joined there by Varley, Carmichael and Lismer. Later the same year, at J.E.H. MacDonald’s studio, Thomson met art enthusiast Dr. James MacCallum, a prominent Toronto Ophthalmologist. 6 When out painting on location, Thomson would use a small wooden sketch box, not much bigger then a piece of letter-sized paper, to carry his oil paints, palette, and brushes; his small painting boards were safely tucked away from each other in slots fitted in the top. Sitting down in the canoe, on a log or rock, with the sketch box in front of him, he would quickly capture the landscape around him. In 1913 Thomson exhibited his first major canvas, A Northern Lake, at the Ontario’s Society of Artists exhibition. The Government of Ontario purchased the canvas for $250 a considerable sum in 1913, considering Thomson’s commercial artist’s weekly salary was $35 in 1912. That same year, Dr. James MacCallum guaranteed Thomson’s expenses for a year, enabling him to devote all his time to painting. Taking leave from his work as a commercial artist, Thomson returned north. Thomson’s home base when he visited Algonquin was Mowat Lodge, a small hotel in the tiny community of Mowat at the north end of Canoe Lake. Thomson would stay at the Lodge in the early spring, as he waited for the lakes and rivers to break up before he would go camping, and again in the late fall. Painting and fishing competed for his attentions in the park. He was not only an active guide for his colleagues from Toronto, but also for other summer park visitors. Thomson’s moodliness and difference was commentated by many. Lawren Hairris referred to “his remoteness, his genious, his reticence.” 6 Art critic Charles Hill notes that it appears that painting was not something Thomson learned easily, and the process was accompanied by much self-doubt. Jackson recounted that in the fall of 1914 in Algonquin Park Thomson threw his sketch box into the woods in frustration. Jackson claimed that Thomson “was so shy he could hardly be induced to show his sketches.” Despite the war, Europe, was in creative ferment. It seems preposterous in retrospect, t hat anything done by Thomson or the Group of Seven during this period of Western Art could be deemed either revolutionary or interesting. And yet what they were doing was severing ties to what they had known of European art and the maters. Not just taking one step backwards to propel them forward but to take ten steps backwards and take a running start to propel them forward into what we know know as the manifestation of a Canadian style. From 1914 to 1917 Thomson spent the spring and fall sketching, and acted as a guide and fire Ranger during the summer in Algonquin Park. He became an expert canoeist and woodsman. He spent the winter in “Thomson’s Shack”, a construction shed outside the Studio Building in Toronto. It was here where he painted his now famous canvases, The Jack Pine, The West Wind, and Northern River, among others. Many of Thomson’s paintings from Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park strike an interesting balance; his imagery is at once innovative, but rooted in careful observation. His artwork changed dramatically: from painting every detail in an almost photographic manner in his earlier work, to capturing the true spirit of the landscape around him. Within a six-year period, he had developed a strong personal style of bold colour combinations, expressive brush strokes and unique images of the Northern landscape. 6 Art historians have noted that Thomson paintings from this period show the artist’s appreciation of the rugged beauty of Algonquin Park. The bold immediacy of Thomson’s sketches was to define a new style of painting that would be attributed as uniquely Canadian and would shape how generations of people think about the Canadian landscape. Thomson was able to convey the dynamism and volatility of nature, breaking away from the traditional detail style of painting in his earlier works, to bold splashes of colour and non-traditional compositions. His paintings came to suggest the drama of the woodland, and the forces of nature on the forests and lakes. Thomson found beauty in the most uncommon scenes – Jackson wrote: “To most people Thomson’s country was a monotonous dreary waste, yet out of one little stretch he found riches undreamed of. Not knowing all the conventional definitions of beauty, he found it all beautiful: muskeg, burnt and drowned land, log chutes, beaver dams, creeks, wild rivers and placid lakes, wild flowers, northern lights, the flight of wild geese and the changing seasons from spring to summer to autumn.” 6 These were important times spent in Algonquin, bringing together Thomson and his fellow artists to exchange ideas, techniques, stories and philosophies, and inevitably building strong collegial bonds. Thomson’s confidence as a painter really developed during these years, encouraged and coaxed along by his peers. Thomson, the man, also found peace. He was seeking freedom from the repressive confines of Victorian family life, and escape from the hustle and bustle of Toronto’s art world where he never quite fit in. It was in the solitude of Algonquin’s lakes and woods that he became himself. 6 Tom Thomson died sometime between July 8, when he was last seen, and July 16, 1917, when his body was found floating in Canoe Lake. The cause of death was recorded as accidental drowning. And though his death was officially recorded as accidental due to drowning, his demise has become one of Canada’s greatest mysteries. In September of 1917, those that knew him lost an inspiring colleague, a great friend and their guide to the north woods. This untimely loss prompted a clarification of his artist friends’ vision for Canadian art; it strengthened their resolve and gave rise to the formation of The Group of Seven. The interest in Tom Thomson, the man, his art and the myth has increased dramatically over the years since his death. With strong support from the Thomson family, the Gallery’s collection of Tom Thomson’s artwork has grown over the years to become of national significance. Visitors from around the world travel every year to visit the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound to see the exquisite collection of works and memorabilia of one of Canada’s greatest mythic figures. Lawren Harris (1885-1970) Lawren Harris met the other artists who were to form the Group of Seven through the Arts and Letters Club. He had been a founding member of the Club and had a background very different to the other members of the Group. Harris was born in Brantford, Ontario and was an heir to the Massey-Harris fortunes, which supplied him with an independent income. A wealthy, conservative and religious upbringing in Toronto provided him with many privileged experiences. His education included St. Andrew's College and the University of Toronto. At age nineteen, he travelled to Europe to study art in Germany for three years. In 1908, he toured through the near East with a writer and had the illustrations he made there published in "Harper's Bazaar." Harris was an enthusiast and organizer. The idea of the Studio Building, where all Group members could work, originated with Harris, who paid three quarters of the cost, while Dr. McCallum contributed the rest. After his discharge from the army, where he taught musketry at Camp Borden, Harris persuaded the Algoma Central Railway to lend him a boxcar and so began the first trips to Algoma. Harris invited artist friends - all expenses paid - and outfitted the boxcar as a studio on wheels with bunks, tables, chairs, a stove, shelves, a canoe and a 3-wheel jigger for short runs up and down the tracks. The last Algoma trip was in 1921. At this time, Harris and Jackson travelled to the North Shore of Lake Superior. Harris became widely known for paintings of this area. Here, the starkness and bareness of the landscape corresponded with the direction in which his paintings were moving. Lawren Harris was convinced that art must express spiritual values as well as portraying the visible world. To him, the role of the artist and the function of art was to reveal the divine forces in nature. He gradually moved toward greater abstraction and thus more complete expression of his philosophical views. Harris was doing much more than trying to paint the northland as he saw it. His goal was to incorporate his spiritual feeling for the landscape into his work. After 1924, he no longer dated or signed his works because he did not want them to be tied to a specific artist or place. While Lawren Harris continued to explore new ideas, he also continued to be a driving force behind the Group of Seven. As A.Y. Jackson claimed: "Without Harris there would have been no Group of Seven. He provided the stimulus; it was he who encouraged us to always take the bolder course, to find new trails." One of the pivotal figures in the development of landscape painting in this country and a founding member of the Group of Seven, Harris was also a leading abstractionist who believed that colour and form were capable of expressing spiritual truths. Although he studied in Europe and was solidly based in its painting traditions, Harris felt that the realities of the Canadian landscape required something different—something less academic than the British style and more substantial than that of the French impressionists. Around 1915, he and his colleagues found resolve in the example of Scandinavian artists such as Gustav Fjestad, who combined an awareness of issues of verisimilitude with a strong sense of design. While the artists who became the Group of Seven are most renowned for their depictions of the landscapes of rural Ontario, they were essentially city dwellers, as is reflected in Harris' early images of Toronto. Red House, Yellow Sleigh, c. 1920, is a fine example of Harris' early treatment of colour and light, and the almost visceral quality of his paint. However, Harris came to believe that the landscape outside the city was more spiritually rewarding and began to work farther afield. Beginning in 1918, he sponsored sketching trips for himself and his colleagues, such as A.Y. Jackson, to the Algoma region of Ontario and, later, to the northern shores of Lake Superior. The Lake Superior landscape was admirably suited to Harris' purpose; although foreboding physically, it was, by virtue of its isolation, a "pure" and "spiritual" place. In representing it, Harris began to simplify his palette and forms to create images, which have an iconic quality. First Snow, North Shore of Lake Superior, 1923, is one of the finest of these works. A stark image, it is animated by an exceptional, revelatory light which pours over the foreground and silhouettes the background hills. The use of a reduced colour palette and the elimination of a place of purchase for the viewer give the image an unworldly quality, a distance and purity, which Harris felt, were lacking in the urban situation. Harris' belief in the purity of the northern landscape derived from his lifelong commitment to theosophy and from his readings of Blavatsky, Ouspensky and others. Throughout the late 1920s, Harris' work has less and less direct relation to the human world, culminating in austerely reductive landscapes of the Rocky Mountains and the Arctic. The reductive nature of these works led inevitably to abstraction. In 1937, Harris moved from Toronto to the United States, becoming involved with the Transcendentalist group in Taos, New Mexico. The abstract paintings he executed there have a coolness and intelligence, which is entirely divorced from the romantic connotations of landscape. Their rigour and lucidity are unique in Canadian painting, and had a profound influence on the practice of abstraction in this country. Harris moved to British Columbia in 1940 and became a leading figure in the Vancouver arts community. He was a strong supporter of younger artists and of the Vancouver Art Gallery, and was instrumental in the gallery's acquisition of its important collection of works by Emily Carr. In his later years, Harris' abstractions became more organic in form but continued to express his belief. Lawren Harris was one of the major leaders of Canadian art for many decades. His life spanned eighty-five years and in that time his philosophy constantly moved him to explore new approaches towards his existence, and his art. Throughout a long lifetime of searching his work passed through five major periods; ranging from the impressionistic Toronto "House" paintings of the early 1900's, through richly pigmented landscapes of Algoma, dramatically designed compositions of the North Shore of Lake Superior, the blue and white mystical compositions of the Arctic and Rockies to his last phase of total abstraction. Harris's canvases from his voyage in 1930 to the Arctic on the government supply ship "Beothic" were largely symbolic or complex pictorial designs. He was influenced by the writings of Kandinsky's: CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART, and he subsequently incorporated symbolic color into facets of his work. The yellows and blues held a mystical significance; yellow for intelligence and blue for conveying spiritual illumination. Lawren Harris painting "Algoma Hill" sells for $1.38 million November 21st 2005. TORONTO - A Lawren Harris painting once locked away in the dark of a hospital "broom closet" came back into the light of public admiration Monday, selling at a packed downtown auction house for $1.38 million. The canvas, Algoma Hill, was bought by an anonymous collector through an agent attending the Sotheby's sale of Canadian art, held in association with Ritchies. Spirited bidding for the painting reached $1.2 million, but with the buyer's premium charged by the auction house the total cost topped $1.38 million. The price is not a record for a Harris -- that benchmark was set in May 2001, when Canadian art connoisseur Ken Thomson paid $2.43 million for the 1930 work Baffin Island -- but it did match the upper estimate for the 117-by 137centimetre oil on canvas and board. "The hammer price on the Harris was $1.2 (million), which is great," said auctioneer Hugh Hildesley, who travelled from Sotheby's New York office to conduct the first half of the 221-lot sale. "It's a wonderful painting," he said of Algoma Hill, completed in 1920, the year that Harris, then 35, founded the Group of Seven. The painting, a landscape from an area north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., sets the delicacy of skeletal trees amid flaming red bushes and moss-covered stone against the stark background of a castle-like hill of rock executed in smoky shades of blues, purples and mauves. While his later works, marked by a more abstract style and beloved by poster and print shops, command the highest prices, "for this type of Harris it's a very strong price," said Hildesley. "And it was really good to see it do well, because it deserved to." Yet the ownership of Algoma Hill, rendered with the bold brush strokes and strikingly contrasted palette so prized by Harris aficionados, had been mired in controversy. Almost 80 years ago, the canvas was donated to Toronto Western Hospital (now part of the University Health Network) by Toronto financier Edward Rogers Wood and his wife, Agnes Euphemia Smart Wood. For some years, the painting had hung on a hospital wall, but at some point it was put into storage for safekeeping - described as a "broom closet" by one art expert invited in a decade ago to appraise the work. But when the University Health Network decided to sell the Harris in 2001, the Wood descendants insisted that the painting was a loan, not a gift. The debate continued until a deal was brokered earlier this year, with the hospital network and the Wood heirs agreeing to split the proceeds from Monday's auction. Another Harris painting, Colin Range, Rocky Mountains, sold for $77,250, while his work Row of Six Houses brought down the gavel at $485,500 (all figures include buyer's premium to the auction house). With almost $8.4 million in total sales, Monday's auction set a record for Canadian art sold by Sotheby's Canada, said president David Silcox. Deep-pocketed bidders among the well-heeled crowd of about 250 to 300 people who jammed Ritchies' downtown action site also set records for the works of 10 Canadian artists, including $117,000 paid for a David Milne watercolour, Entrance to the Zoo, and $163,500 shelled out for Group of Seven member J.E.H. MacDonald's Spruce and Maple, Algoma. Another highlight of the sale, Abstract Composition by Jean-Paul Riopelle, sent the bidding up to $485,500. A group of 19th-century Cornelius Krieghoff paintings on offer included his masterpiece Portrait of John Budden, which sold for $405,000, well above the estimate of $200,000 to $300,000. "Overall, prices were extremely strong, with many of the paintings going way above their high estimates," said Hildesley. "What is really encouraging is that the prices were strong across the board, which means that the market is gaining greater breadth, which is something you always look for." J.E.H. MacDonald (1873-1932) Born in Durham, England, J.E.H. MacDonald emigrated to Canada in 1887 with his English mother and Canadian father. He studied at the Hamilton Art School and the Central Ontario School of Art and Design, in Toronto, Ontario. MacDonald worked at Grip Ltd. from 1895 to 1911, when Lawren Harris persuaded him to start painting full time. In 1922, MacDonald accepted a full-time teaching position at the Ontario College of Art. His fellow artists described him as a quiet redhead of frail stature, with the dreamy air of a poet and philosopher – a “romantic.” On sketching trips, when MacDonald was not drawing, he was forever engrossed in a book. Among MacDonald’s most accomplished works are rugged landscapes of the Algoma, Ontario, and region. Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) Arthur Lismer emigrated from Sheffield, England to Toronto, Ontario, in 1911. Soon after, through his employment at Grip Ltd., he would meet Tom Thomson and some of the other artists that would one day comprise the Group. In the years leading up to 1920, Lismer often joined these artists on sketching trips to Algonquin Park and Georgian Bay, Ontario. Lismer was always full of energy and possessed a barbed wit. With pencil and paper always at hand, he delighted in creating clever cartoon drawings of his artist friends – and those perceived to be enemies of their art. Nothing pleased him more than targeting the establishment and all things pretentious. With a strong commitment to teaching, Lismer established one of the most successful children's art programs in North America. An active promoter of the Group of Seven and the author of many articles on Canadian art, Lismer continued to paint throughout his lifetime. F.H. Varley (1881-1969) A native of Sheffield, England, Frederick Horsman Varley first studied art at the Sheffield School of Art. He completed additional studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, in Antwerp, Belgium. Encouraged by childhood friend Arthur Lismer, Varley immigrated to Canada in 1912, where he discovered employment in the field of commercial design. After serving as an official war artist during World War I, he became increasingly interested in painting the human figure. The landscape, however, continued to captivate him as an artistic subject. Frank Johnston (1888-1949) Frank Johnston was born in Toronto, Ontario. Like many other Group members, he joined Grip Ltd. as a commercial artist. Although an original member of the Group, Johnston's association was brief. He participated in the 1920 exhibition, but by 1921 had left Toronto to become principal at the Winnipeg School of Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba. From an exhibitions perspective, Johnston had long wanted to go his own way – which was in keeping with his energetic, ambitious and strong-willed character. Johnston's career in the post-Group years also led to work with department store art galleries. Over the years, a clear shift in the style of Johnston's art is evident. His earlier works express a strong decorative interpretation of the landscape. His later pieces evoke much greater realism, revealing his strong fascination with the qualities of light. Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945) Franklin Carmichael’s artistic talent was evident at an early age – sufficiently so, that his mother enrolled him in both music and art lessons. As a teenager growing up in Orillia, Ontario, Carmichael worked in his father’s shop as a carriage striper. Working on the scrolled decorations of the carriages, he practiced his design, drawing and colouring skills. In 1911, his interest in art took him to Toronto, where he studied art at the Central Technical School and the Ontario College of Art. Carmichael spent twenty-one years of his life working as a commercial artist and designer, and the remaining fourteen years of his career teaching its methods to others. When Carmichael arrived in Toronto in 1911, he was hired as an office boy at Grip Ltd. The head designer was J.E.H. MacDonald, one of the most prominent men in his field at the time. Carmichael joined the Sampson-Matthews firm in 1922, probably as head designer under the art directorship of J.E. Sampson. Among his projects at Sampson-Matthews, Carmichael worked on the illustration and design of a number of promotional brochures as well as advertisements for newspapers and magazines. In step with the fashions of the times, his work increasingly reflected the flat, simplified design popular in the 1920s. In the 1920s Carmichael also created illustrations for stories, mostly in magazines. The distinctive commercial art of Franklin Carmichael is among the finest examples of design work by the Group of Seven. Although sketching in many locales around Ontario, including Georgian Bay and the North Shore of Lake Superior, the La Cloche Hills, the site of the family cottage, became a favourite painting location. Primarily a watercolourist, Carmichael was the youngest member of the original Group of Seven. A.Y. Jackson (1882-1974) A native of Montreal, Québec, Alexander Young Jackson left school at the age of twelve and began work at a Montreal printing firm. In 1906, he began studying art at the Art Institute in Chicago. A year later, he enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris, remaining in France until 1912. An Impressionist influence is clearly apparent in his work from this period. Group of Seven founding members Harris and MacDonald were sufficiently impressed by Jackson's work that, in 1913, they invited him to move to Toronto. The following year, he shared space with Thomson in the Studio Building on Severn Street, remaining there until 1955, when he re-located to the Ottawa area. A.J. Casson (1898-1992) Alfred Joseph Casson was born in Toronto, Ontario, and spent his childhood in the southern part of the province – in Guelph and Hamilton. When his family returned to Toronto, he began attending art classes and working as a freelance commercial designer. While at Rous and Mann, Casson worked under the watchful eye of Franklin Carmichael. The young artist soon began accompanying Carmichael on weekend sketching trips. A superb watercolourist, Casson (together with Carmichael and F.H. Brigden), founded the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour in 1925. The following year, he accepted an invitation from Carmichael to join the Group of Seven. Best known for his depictions of the rural settings of southern and central Ontario, Casson was the Group's youngest member. He died at the age of ninety-four, and is buried alongside other Group members in the cemetery on the McMichael grounds. Edwin Holgate (1892- 1977) Born in Allandale, Ontario, Edwin Holgate was raised in Montreal, Québec after his family moved there around the turn of the century. Holgate began studying art at an early age, under the tutelage of William Brymer. He spent several years in Paris, returning to Can...
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