by Lewis Desoto
Elsewhere in the world, the war in Europe ground on for four long years; a revolution in Russia overthrew the czar; women in Canada were given the vote, grudgingly, province by province; the CBC commenced national radio broadcasts; and the first exhibition by the Group of Seven took place in Toronto. But for Emily, consumed as she was by the requirements of each day, the world had shrunk. In 1919 her sisters Edith and Clara both died. Gone were the days of travel and exploration. She painted, but her output was severely curtailed and her outings to sketch were limited to the immediate neighbourhood. She had sporadic contact with other artists who passed through Victoria, and here and there she occasionally exhibited a picture or two. But the necessity of earning money left her tired and without the spark that is essential for creativity. The artist in her did not die, but lay dormant.
Many years later she would write about her years as a landlady, dramatizing them in one of her most popular and best-loved books, The House of All Sorts, but for fourteen years, until 1927, Emily Carr became, as she said herself, a little old lady on the edge of nowhere.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Canadian Artist
In 1927, at the age of fifty-six, Emily Carr despaired of ever realizing the vision she carried within herself. She assumed that her career as an artist was over. There had been no major works or exhibitions in over a decade. But sometimes in life it can seem as if fate is at work. Call it a conjunction of disparate events, call it serendipity or just coincidence. Nineteen twenty-seven was Emily’s annus mirabilis—a miracle year. Seemingly overnight she was plucked from obscurity and placed in a national spotlight, beginning the incredible flowering that would be her greatest achievement.
This is what happened. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa was planning a major exhibition entitled Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. Emily’s work came to the attention of the gallery’s director, Eric Brown, and he visited her studio, selecting paintings, rugs, and pottery for inclusion in the exhibition.
In November, Emily travelled to Ottawa for the opening. The works on display consisted of Native art and artifacts, mixed with the paintings and sculpture of such contemporary Canadian artists as A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, and Edwin Holgate. A number of women artists were also included, among them Pegi Nicol, Anne Savage, and Florence Wyle. Emily had the greatest number of works, twenty-six paintings, as well as rugs and pottery. She was also asked to design the cover of the exhibition brochure, which she did, using borrowed Native motifs, and which she signed “Klee Wyck.”
Her visit to Ottawa, as well as Toronto and Montreal, was a revelation. She saw for the first time the works of the Group of Seven painters, and met some of them, as well as a number of other artists. She was praised for her work, and for the first time, she found herself in the company of artists who shared her interests and, more importantly, accepted Emily as one of them.
When she looked at the paintings by Harris and others in the group, Emily saw, as she noted in her journal,
a world shorn of fretting details, purged, purified; a naked soul, pure and unashamed; lovely spaces filled with wonderful serenity.... I think perhaps I shall find God here, the God I’ve longed and hunted for and failed to find. Always he’s seemed nearer out in the big spaces, sometimes almost within reach but never quite. Perhaps in this newer, wider, space-filled vision I shall find him . . . above the swirl into holy places.
The transformation of Emily’s fortunes might have seemed like a sudden apotheosis but, with hindsight, we can see that many strands in her life were slowly coming together, and the point where they all met was where Emily happened to be waiting. And when the strands separated again, she was one of them, a major tributary.
Early twentieth-century Canada was a tentative enterprise, a nation in transition from colony to independence. Many political thinkers believed in a vision of Canada as a country united from sea to sea, incorporating not only English Canada but also the French and the Native populations, and distinct from both Britain and the United States.
In politics, in commerce, and in culture, people looked within their borders for national autonomy and identity. The provinces had been gathered together under a federal system, and a national railway helped bind them together. But Canada’s past, and its identity, were closely entwined with those of Britain and France. Most people traced their origin to Europe. The new Canada needed its own myths and images, drawn from its own landscape.
Artists were part of the turning away from colonial attitudes. Many rejected, as irrelevant to the Canadian experience, both the English landscape tradition and the domestic imagery of French Post-Impressionism. They wanted something that was authentic to their own country—in both style and in subject—and that was also modern. But, as yet, there was neither a national art style nor a movement comparable to those in Europe.
One fact dominated the imagination of the country: the wilderness. Nature is formidable in Canada. It evokes awe and terror and an impulse to come to terms with the mystery of its vast spaces. Some painters believed they could capture the spirit of the country through landscape painting, by showing both the physical and spiritual essence of the lakes, forests, and mountains. Europe had landscapes, but none as sublime and majestic as Canada’s, and none that were as yet unpainted.
In the 1920s a handful of like-minded painters in Ontario joined together and called themselves the Group of Seven. They shared an interest in painting the landscape. But not just any landscape. They wanted to paint something unique to Canada, in a style that was also unique to Canada. The position they took was radical: they would paint in a modernist style and they would paint the wilderness. Perhaps even more radical, for the times, was the idea that through direct communion with the wilderness, a truly Canadian style and technique could arise that would be the visual definition of the nation.
In building an image of themselves, the group drew on two symbols: that of the prospector and of the trapper. Both represented straightforward, hardy outdoorsmen in the best Canadian tradition. Not for these painters the convenient studios and comfortable drawing rooms of the cities. They travelled by canoe and lived in shacks and tents as they explored the uninhabited regions of the country.
When Emily met members of the group, and saw their paintings, she was struck by how much their intentions echoed hers. She, too, had been striving to define her experience in relation to a unique, sparsely populated landscape, and to find an original style in which to paint it. She wrote in her journal of the group, “I know that they are building an art worthy of our great country, and I want to have my share, to put in a little spoke for the West, one woman holding up my end.” In the beginning, the group met with derision from both public and critics, but gradually their enterprise began to succeed. They also had their supporters, notably in Eric Brown, the director of the National Gallery. Brown favoured not only the development of the group’s nationalistic impulse, but also the promotion of modernist styles. However, for better or for worse, the group was based in Ontario. Although some of its members made painting trips to the West, they could not be considered representative of the nation as a whole. This fact was not lost on Western artists, who protested their exclusion from exhibitions at the National Gallery.
A colleague of Brown’s, Marius Barbeau, an ethnographer from Ottawa’s Victoria Memorial Museum, had an overriding interest in the Native arts of the West Coast. Barbeau was familiar with totem poles. He saw them not only as something unique to Canada, but also as having stylistic similarities to the abstract elements in modern art. Brown and Barbeau planned the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern together, intending to point out the similarities between the new modern painters and Native traditions. Modernist painting originated in Europe, and members of the Group of Seven were influenced by it, but by linking the Canadian version to Native art a historical precursor and inspiration could be established, suggesting a shared identity.
Both Barbeau and Brown knew of Emily Ca
rr. As early as 1921 the Victoria painter Sophie Pemberton, who had achieved such success in London and Paris so many years before, recommended Emily’s paintings to Harold Mortimer-Lamb, an arts patron from Vancouver. He in turn sent an enthusiastic letter to the director of the National Gallery. Not much came of it, but at some point Barbeau visited Emily in Vancouver and bought two of her paintings. It was he who suggested that Brown also visit her.
While the 1927 exhibition was not quite propaganda, it did have an agenda, both didactic and nationalist. Emily Carr fit that agenda as a modernist, as a Westerner, and as someone who embodied the hardy, pioneering spirit that the Group of Seven promoted as specifically Canadian. The fact that she also made use of Native motifs further recommended her to the organizers.
Most of the works Emily exhibited had been made some time before 1927, but now, as a result of the attention, she threw herself into developing her “Indian” pictures, with the added inspiration of the paintings she had seen in Toronto, especially those of Lawren Harris. The effect on her of seeing the group’s work was revelatory. Her diary entries from the trip to eastern Canada are passionate and effusive. She felt that, at last, she had seen a truly Canadian art, and that there was a place in it for her own work.
Emily returned to Victoria brimming with confidence. She immediately set out on a sketching trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands, and then on another up the Skeena River, effectively recapitulating the trips she had made years earlier. But now she went as a mature artist, not so much interested in ethnographic investigation or to make records, but as a painter returning to her source of inspiration. And although her style absorbed the influence of Harris and the group, it developed along its own original lines. The group had staked out their part of the country and now she did the same with hers. She shared some of their interests but defined herself as separate, as a woman, and as a Westerner. She wanted to paint what had not yet been painted, and through her own sensibilities.
Emily began to exhibit much more, and to achieve wider recognition. Above all, she was taken seriously as an artist at last. Success, one could call it, although sales were still few and far between.
In the following decades Emily Carr’s paintings would be constantly on exhibition, not only locally, but also in Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Amsterdam, and London. She would travel again, to eastern Canada as well as to New York and Chicago, not as a student but as an artist the equal of any other. And when she settled down once more in Victoria, the woman who had once felt so isolated and lonely would receive a constant stream of visitors—artists, students, journalists, academics, and even the merely curious who had heard about the famous painter in their midst.
Following that landmark year of 1927, her work would evolve into the distinctive style we know today. All the threads of a lifetime would come together—the landscape, the modernist palette and styles, the Indian motifs, the desire to make a Canadian art, her spirituality—all of it synthesized in paintings of intensity and power. She would also begin to write stories and biographical works. In her lifetime, she became as well known for her writing as for her painting.
Emily had always had admirers, but now, on more than one occasion, the word “genius” was linked to her name. Many people were simply astonished that they had never heard of her before. Once she had been regarded as an outcast and misfit. Now, increasingly, she was seen as someone who represented her place and time, and something much more. In 1939, when the exhibition entitled A Century of Canadian Art was mounted at the Tate Gallery in London, Emily Carr would be represented by four paintings and be described as a truly original and distinctive “Canadian” painter.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lawren
Emily’s most significant and fruitful encounter on her 1927 trip was her meeting with Lawren Harris, one of the founders of the Group of Seven. His was the work that most impressed her and with which she empathized most strongly. In her diary from the period she writes, “Those pictures of Lawren Harris’s, how I did long to see them again . . . I have never felt anything like the power of those canvases. They seem to have called to me from some other world, sort of an answer to a great longing.”
Harris invited Emily to visit him in his studio on a couple of occasions. They spent long hours in conversation. They seemed to have an immediate affinity for each other. Following these visits Emily wrote down detailed descriptions of the paintings she saw in the studio, and a few pages later, describing the view from the train, she uses the same lyrical language, as if she were seeing the landscape through Harris’s eyes.
Harris completely supported the nationalist enterprise in which the Group of Seven was engaged, but it was apparent to Emily that he also thought of art in religious and mystical terms. He told Emily that she had got the spirit of the country into her paintings, and he probably meant “spirit” in more ways than one. Harris saw the originality in Carr’s approach to her subject matter. He understood the contribution she was making to the new Canadian art. He wrote to her saying, “I feel there is nothing being done like them in Canada . . . their spirit, feeling, design, handling, is different and tremendously expressive of the British Columbia Coast—its spirit perhaps far more than you realize.”
Harris and his wife were very much interested in theosophy, a school of thought whose adherents saw the northern landscape as a source and expression of the divine force that animates the world. This struck a chord in Emily’s always latent religiosity. She felt that Harris had succeeded in expressing a spiritual essence in his work. “Although the rest of the Group pictures charm and delight me, it is not the same spiritual uplifting,” she wrote in her journal of December 1927. Harris’s paintings “satisfy a hunger and rest the tired in me and make me so happy . . . they make my thoughts and life better.... It is as if a door had opened, a door into unknown tranquil spaces.... I seem to know and feel what he has to say.”
Harris recommended some books to Emily, and before she left Toronto she managed to find two of the titles, one on art and the other on some of the mystical ideas in which he was interested. She read the books, thought about them, and discussed them with Harris in the correspondence that subsequently developed between them. Of these letters, Emily commented in her journal, “They were the first real exchanges of thought in regard to work I had ever experienced. They helped wonderfully.” Although they were separated by age (Harris was fourteen years her junior) and by background, it is clear that the two artists had a strong friendship. In Harris, Emily had found a mentor, a teacher, and something of a soulmate. Although, in her journals, she deprecates her own work in comparison to Harris’s, it is evident that she saw herself as his equal. She admitted that his work influenced her, not that she wanted to paint like him, and that he was after something she wanted, too.
Another mentor influenced Emily, the painter Mark Tobey. Almost twenty years younger than Emily, he had travelled widely, and was considered a progressive and modern painter who also had an interest in the mystical aspect of art. He made her acquaintance on visits to Victoria, and communicated some of his ideas about the formal directions painting should take. However, writing about him in her journal, Emily said, “He is clever but his work has no soul. It’s clever and beautiful. He knows perhaps more than Lawren, but how different.”
Harris was not the only artist to appreciate and promote Emily’s work—younger artists, like Max Maynard and Jack Shadbolt, were constantly trying to arrange exhibitions for her as far afield as New York—but Harris remained her most forceful champion. One of Emily’s best-loved paintings, The Indian Church from 1929, was purchased from an exhibition in Toronto by Harris, and hung in his dining room. When Emily dropped Native motifs from her subject matter and began to paint only the forest, it was at the suggestion of Harris. In a letter, he advised her to “Put aside the Indian motifs, strike out for yourself, Emily, inventing, creating, clothing ideas born of this West, ideas that you feel deep rooted in your heart.”
When Emily was
despondent or depressed, she often expressed herself in letters to Harris, who would write back with calm, fatherly advice. “For goodness sake, don’t let temporary depression, isolation, or any other feeling interfere with your work.... When we enter the stream of creative life, then we are on our own and have to find self-reliance.” Their correspondence flourished and their friendship continued over the years, with Emily visiting Harris and his wife in Toronto and receiving visits from them in Victoria. Through Lawren and Bess, she was also introduced to a wider circle of artists and intellectuals.
After Emily passed away, Harris was one of the pallbearers at her funeral and one of the trustees of her paintings and sketches. Growing Pains, Emily’s autobiography, is dedicated to Lawren Harris.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Some Ladies Prefer Indians
Around the time of the 1927 exhibition, an article on Emily Carr appeared in the Toronto Star Weekly with the title “Some Ladies Prefer Indians.” While the article in some ways misrepresented both Carr and the Native people she had visited, it was indicative of the degree to which Emily’s name was being associated with images of Native art.
But who were these Indians?
“Indian” was a word used generically to describe the original inhabitants of Canada before the European arrival. The word has been replaced in common usage by other terms: Aboriginal, Native, First Nations. The peoples that Emily Carr encountered on her travels comprised the Salishan, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Nisga’a, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit. All of these tribes were linked, either through trade and shared customs or through language.
From the first encounter between European and Native, the relationship was contentious and fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings. As European settlers spread throughout British Columbia, the Native communities suffered disruptions and stresses that altered their way of life. Traditional trade and hunting and fishing practices were curtailed or superseded by the cash economy in the form of logging enterprises and the many canning factories that employed Natives. Native land was appropriated, and legislation was enacted to hinder Native land claims. At the same time, various government bodies banned certain ceremonies, like the potlatch, all with the intent of assimilating Natives into the wider economy and community. Many of the villages that Carr visited were abandoned, either because they were inhabited seasonally, or because the population had been decimated by diseases such as smallpox and measles. Sometimes entire communities were relocated by the government when their land was appropriated.