by King, James;
FIGURE 21. Michael Snow (left) and Av Isaacs.
While students at OCA, Snow, Graham Coughtry, and some other students had congregated at the tiny Greenwich Art Shop (ten feet by twenty feet) at 77 Hayter Street, where the proprietor, Winnipeg-born Av Isaacs, “did good framing cheap.” He would also, as Michael recalled, “hang [our] work and try to sell it!”1
Isaacs moved from Winnipeg to Toronto when he was fifteen years old. He graduated with a degree in political science and economics from the University of Toronto in 1950, and then he and a friend opened a framing business. After a year, he bought his partner out.
“Greenwich,” named after New York City’s Greenwich Village, was the bohemian area near where OCA was located (on Gerrard Street West between Bay and Elizabeth Streets). There were small galleries, framing shops, and coffee houses — even a French restaurant. From 1946, the centre of the village was the after-hours jazz club, House of Hambourg, which began to attract devotees of avant-garde jazz, art, poetry, and drama.
Not far away, Spadina Avenue, as Peter Goddard observed, was the “stomping ground in the 1960s for one of the most mercurial, argumentative, hard-drinking, and seriously talented coteries of artists in Canadian art history — I mean Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, Robert Markle, and the rest of the gang that had second- or third-floor studios up and down Spadina Avenue and along College Street, showed mostly at the Isaacs Gallery and drank at Grossman’s Tavern.”2
For a time, Av Isaacs shared living quarters with Coughtry. Six years later, on February 1, 1956, he officially opened the Greenwich Art Gallery at 736 Bay Street, near Gerrard Street West.* It was not very long after taking this momentous step, that he became discouraged: he was not selling very much, and the Roberts Gallery, which had sell-out exhibitions of mostly traditional artists, was extremely successful. Isaacs soldiered on, however, confident that he had a good instinctive eye.
Snow remembers: “Once Av felt convinced of the quality of intensity in someone’s work — and of course this decision was ‘intuitive’ — he was surprisingly trusting and confident.” That confidence eventually led to a new group of Toronto artists, whose work did not have a unifying stylistic or iconographic thread — they included Snow, Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, Dennis Burton, William Ronald, and Robert Varvarande. In fact, there was not really a consistent look to an Isaacs artist, because the dealer was only on the lookout for the “quality of intensity.”
As Snow fondly recalls, Isaacs was a very collaborative dealer: “We would agree on a date when an exhibition would be possible. I generally described what I was working on and planning to show. When it came time for the exhibit, he usually saw the work for the first time when it was delivered. I always planned what might go where, but hangings were always interesting, with the two of us deciding mutually what would look best.”3
FIGURE 22. Dennis Burton, Egypt Asleep, 1966.
If it can’t be said that there was a common style found in the works of the members of the Isaacs stable, it can certainly be said that the gallery owner enabled a group of artists to produce a distinctive body of work independent of anything else in Canada. He literally gave space for new works to emerge in a wide variety of directions. Everything was a work-in-progress. Isaacs’s taste evolved, too. As he recalled, his artists also evolved rapidly.4 Most of those he took on had not reached the age of thirty.
FIGURE 23. Graham Coughtry, Two Figures XI, 1963.
Dennis Burton’s career began with what could be called second-generation abstract expressionism, but by the mid-sixties his interest turned to making images of women inspired by “skin books” from the States; this fetishistic work is influenced by the bright colours of some American pop art, especially that of Andy Warhol. Coughtry’s work showed a plurality of influences: the dynamically moving, slashing tormented figures in Francis Bacon, the colour values of Pierre Bonnard, and the photo studies of wrestling male figures in Eadweard Muybridge. Gordon Rayner’s work is even more eclectic in its sourcing than Coughtry’s.
If the work of each of these emerging artists was vastly different from each of the others shown by Isaacs, this observation is particularly true of Snow. The connection of Snow with these other young men was really improvised music, particularly when the Artists’ Jazz Band was formed.
New directions in the arts emerged in the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. There was the celebrity status of the country folksinger Gordon Lightfoot, who performed in the coffee houses in Yorkville. Bob Dylan, in transition from acoustic to electric guitar, appeared at Massey Hall. The Art Gallery of Toronto became the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1966; this was accompanied by an interest in the acquisition of cutting-edge contemporary art.
The commercial gallery scene was rapidly expanding: Barry Kernerman opened the Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1956 (closed in 1959); Dorothy Cameron opened the Here and Now Gallery from 1959 and then the Dorothy Cameron Gallery from 1962; later, there was the Park Gallery, the Jerrold Morris International Gallery, the Mazelow Gallery, and Gallery Moos. But success could be fraught: Dorothy Cameron’s Eros ’63 exhibition was shuttered by the Morality Squad, and Cameron was subsequently found guilty of displaying obscene material.
Before this time, groups such as the Ontario Society of Artists, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, through their juried shows, had controlled what was put on display. The Canadian Group of Painters — founded when the Group of Seven disbanded — had become fusty and had no connection with truly contemporary art. All of a sudden, in the mid-fifties, there were collectors anxious to see and buy innovative work: Ayala Zacks, Charles Band, the Bronfmans in Montreal. Robert Fulford, especially in his columns for Mayfair and the Toronto Star, eagerly proselytized trail-blazing Canadian art. Young artists felt that the art world was coming into its own in an exciting new way. And there was a glimpse of hope that the public’s perception of art was changing.
In the winters of 1954 and 1955, Snow entered work at the annual OSA exhibitions; the Canadian National Exhibition in 1955; and the 1st and 2nd Winnipeg Art Shows in 1955. However, his most important early venue was Hart House, where he had a two-man show with Graham Coughtry January 3–17, 1955. The checklist shows that A Man with a Line, Woman with a Clarinet, Wall Panel I, Blue Panel (Wall Panel V), and Colin Curd About to Play were among the twenty-two works displayed by Snow.5 Coughtry, heavily influenced at the time by Francis Bacon and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, showed nudes in which the figures seem to emerge from inside the surface of the canvas.
This exhibition turned out to be a succès de scandale rather than a succès d’estime. The only review was in the University of Toronto student newspaper, the Varsity, but Nathan Phillips, the mayor of Toronto, ordered three images of nudes to be removed because, according to what a newspaper reporter told his office, they were obscene. There was a photograph taken of Nathan Phillips, the newly elected mayor of Toronto, standing puzzled before a Snow painting. The mayor also objected to the title of one of Snow’s paintings, and was quoted as stating that the title of one, though intended as a pun, was certainly objectionable — according to Coughtry, he was referring to Woman with Cock in Her Hand — which shows the woman holding a rooster.6
When Coughtry was asked why the show contained so many nudes, he flippantly responded: “[B]ecause every damn tree in the country has been painted.”7 Despite this contretemps, Snow was completely aware of what he was trying to accomplish: “All I want to do is present some kind of moving image using all the [elements] of painting — It must end up being an object which rewards, invites, provokes contemplation, awareness — ‘A painting is a small experience in feeling and thinking, that is, living.’”8
The most successful early exhibition of Snow’s work was at the opening show of the Greenwich Art Gallery, on February 1, 1956, which was devoted to works by Snow, Coughtry, William Ronald, Gerald Scott, and Robert Varvarande. In her review in the Globe, Lotta Dempsey was sui
tably impressed and approvingly quoted Isaacs: “While these five young painters represent diverse directions in painting, their work suggests, I believe, a common standard of artistic integrity, and it is my earnest intention to adopt this standard and grow with it as it grows, rather than trying to adjust to any mythical ‘level of public taste.’”9
Varvarande’s work was figurative, but in a misty, quasi-abstract manner; Scott’s well-turned, mannered portraits were perhaps the most traditional pieces of art on display; Ronald’s single work was an abstract in the manner for which he was already well known; Coughtry’s contributions were figure drawings; Snow showed three collages, including Man at a Desk, A Night, and The Mirror. The reviewer for the Varsity was awestruck: “The best of Bohemia … turned out to acknowledge their own in an atmosphere which was full of smoke and the feeling that something was happening.”10
Snow had taken a job at Graphic Associates — a firm producing animated films and some commercials — run by George Dunning, who had been so impressed by what he saw at the Coughtry-Snow exhibition early in 1955 that he telephoned Snow to offer him a job. He informed the young artist that he was interested in hiring “fine art” artists rather than commercial ones.
As Snow recalls, that was his first contact with film. There was some live filming, but the firm specialized in animation. To his amazement, he became director of that department — just before the place closed. Eight years older than Snow, Dunning had trained at OCA and then worked at the National Film Board. After Graphic closed, Dunning worked in London, England, and was the director and chief animator of the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine (1968).
At Graphic, Dunning told Snow that he could make his own short films and could even use the animation camera and cameraman as long it did not cost the company any money. “This is how,” Snow recalled, “my first film, A to Z [an animation four minutes long and filmed in 16 mm] came about in 1956. It uses the kind of Klee-influenced drawing that Dunning admired and was done as cut-out animation, in which one moves elements of the drawing in each frame.” He continued:
I was inspired at that time by studying the music and visual art that moved me the most and then imitating and modifying it. In art, the examples of Klee, Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, and others were models to consider. But my fascination with film came about through my introduction to it as a particular process — learning what it was/is from the inside, as it were, adding frame to frame, twenty-four frames passing in one second on the screen.11
Graham Coughtry was also hired at Graphic to learn animation “from the teeth up.” He and Snow were not above using their jobs to their personal advantage. Once, they telephoned the National Ballet, claimed to be from a film company making a documentary, and asked if they could visit to lay the groundwork. “So,” Coughtry recalls, “we went down and met a lot of them and we ended up having these wonderful parties in Mike’s basement, but the whole thing was just a pure scam. It was just a way to meet long-limbed, beautiful girls.”12
Snow was never interested in traditional narrative cinema; movement entranced him. Moreover, the artists who fascinated him were not filmmakers; his interest in surface became transformed when he tried to understand how a series of drawings could be animated. Snow has described how he started by animating the “vases, flowers, tea cups floating.” In A to Z, the chairs and tables are sexually active as they attempt to mate with each other.
Later, when Snow began to make films, he would exploit the sense of cinematic movement he had learned in A to Z.
FIGURE 24. Michael Snow, still from A to Z, 1956.
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* However, the Greenwich Art Gallery was in operation from late 1955. It became the Isaacs Gallery in 1959. In 1961, the Isaacs Gallery moved to 832 Yonge Street.
CHAPTER SIX:
GESTURES
At Graphic, Snow met Joyce Wieland, two years younger than he. She was from a lower social stratum than Michael. Emotionally, she and Michael were also vastly different. Although Michael may have been more vulnerable than he appeared, he was inwardly a confident person, probably because of the considerable approbation bestowed on him as a child by his parents. Joyce, who had never completely recovered from losing both her parents as a young child, had no such reservoir to draw upon.
The two fell in love — Joyce hopelessly so. In their relationship, there was an inequality between the person who loved too much and the person who was more detached. Some of Joyce’s friends felt that she should have become involved with a more-fatherly person than the slim, handsome Michael.
Donna Montague felt “they just seemed a natural somehow. Joyce was shy and Michael encouraged her to believe in herself.” Graham Coughtry maintained they were “made for each other.”1 And work at Graphic was fun. After hours, the three made a film — a spoof, based on the Salada Tea commercials they were making at Graphic. One segment was based on Hamlet. Coughtry “was Hamlet and Mike played the ghost and Joyce was Ophelia. [In an attempt to lift his son’s depression, the ghost offered Hamlet a cup of tea.] For all of us there was a common thread I can only call Dada … the humour, the craziness.”2 In another section of this joke film, Wieland plays a victim assaulted on Grenville Street who was comforted by a cuppa.
FIGURE 25. Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, 1965.
Michael and Joyce were totally committed artists. Their work shares few stylistic similarities; however, before she met Michael, Joyce had a well-developed interest in film, and this fascination was a shared preoccupation. Each could talk to the other and receive honest feedback on all sorts of issues. There was a negative side of this relationship, though. They were both dedicated to their work and often fell back on each other when they reached an impasse. But while Joyce was jealous of his work, she knew that he did not feel the same about hers. Increasingly, she became despondent because her love for him was not reciprocated in a way accessible to her: “I learn a little more every day about love. Too bad I’ve learned this so late.… Never show a man what’s in your real heart. Especially a conceited bastard like Mike.”3
In autumn 1956, the two moved in together, taking an apartment over Clean-it-eria Cleaners at 312 College Street, just west of Spadina in Kensington Market. There was a studio for Michael on the third floor. That September they married at Toronto City Hall. After the ceremony, the newly married couple and their two witnesses went to the Walker House Hotel on Front Street (near the Royal York). There was a celebration party that evening on Roxborough Drive.
The couple did freelance animation jobs, and Michael played in various bands. He was zealous in overseeing their precarious finances, and Joyce delighted in cooking, cleaning, and other domestic chores. In those days, she referred to herself as Joyce Snow.
On January 8, 1958, the couple withdrew $1,003.88 from their bank account, travelled to Florida, and, shortly thereafter, flew from Miami to Havana, which they explored for a few days. Most of their time was spent at La Boca, near Trinidad, an isolated hill town on the coast. They knew little about Castro’s revolt against Batista, although the rebels were in hiding in the mountains near them. Their only experience of the hostilities occurred when they learned that a bomb had exploded in a theatre that they had walked past half an hour earlier.
Michael’s most vivid recollection of his time in Cuba involved a parrot that he, Joyce, and some locals attempted to teach to speak. The bird was completely resistant to their efforts, despite the many long hours of practice. When he and Joyce headed back to Havana, Michael constructed a cage so that they could take the parrot with them. Almost the moment they arrived in their hotel room in that city, the bird, to the amazement of the couple, began to speak. Not only did he talk, but the animal repeated all the phrases and sentences he had been taught — and he did so in the variety of accents of his teachers. Michael wanted to take the talented bird back to Toronto, but because of the hurdles involved in trying to import the creature, he abandoned his efforts and found a new home for it in Cuba.
/> After this extended visit, the couple returned to Toronto and moved in to a new apartment on the ground floor of the Manhattan, an apartment building on the corner of Charles and Church. Soon after, Snow shared a studio with another artist, Robert Hedrick, above a furniture store on Yonge Street near Elm. In the foyer of their apartment was a suit of Japanese armour — bought at auction by Marie-Antoinette — and a stove, which she also gave them. The stove remained there unused, since Joyce was content with the old-fashioned one that came with the flat.
Upon returning to Toronto from Europe, Snow had played in Dixieland groups, and, after his stay in Cuba in 1958, he became the pianist in Mike White’s Imperial Jazz Band, which performed in the Basin Street nightclub of the Westover Hotel. Those gigs could lead to some interesting events. The penis of the bass player was especially large, and he would often play with it hanging out. At one party, he took his penis out and hit Michael on the head with it.4
Through White, Snow performed with many celebrated guest performers, such as George Lewis, Rex Stewart, Jimmy Rushing, Paul Barbarin, Edmond Hall, and Cootie Williams. At this time, Snow began, as he recalled, to be interested in “more ‘modern’ groups, in which I was influenced by Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis.” That transition had begun even when he was playing in White’s band, when Snow became part of a risk-taking rhythm section consisting of Terry Forster, bass; Larry Dubin, drums; and himself. According to him, “that rhythm section was interested in modern jazz and we used to play in a fairly modern way with the Dixieland front line. It was interesting what happened: the Dixieland people hated it because we didn’t play right, and the modern people didn’t like it either, because the horns were old-fashioned to them … [it was a] typical kind of mix-up, but sometimes it was really extraordinary music.”