by Ross King
J.W. Morrice, a Montreal native who had lived for many years in Paris. Members of the Arts and Letters Club, Harris and MacDonald among them, chartered a cpr carriage to transport them to the exhibition. A friend later said that Harris “deplored our neglect of the artist in Canada,” 2 and so it must have been chastening for him to realize that, in order to see works of such quality and variety, one needed to catch the train to Buffalo.
The exhibition that opened on January 4, 1913, entitled Contemporary Scandinavian Art, was yet another impressive international show. Harris and MacDonald would already have known Scandinavian art by reputation because Canadian artists had long taken an interest in Nordic painting. Twenty years earlier, in 1893, paintings from Norway, Sweden and Denmark struck a resonant chord with several young Canadian artists at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. C.W. Jefferys, twenty-four years old at the time, noted that “their painters were grappling with a landscape and climate similar to our own.” He felt “a natural affinity to them, rather than to the London, Paris, Munich and Dusseldorf Schools. We became northern-minded.” 3
In 1913 there was still much in Scandinavian art to make impressionable young Canadian painters turn northern-minded. “You will see here,” the Swedish-American curator Christian Brinton announced on opening night, “the fantastic forms which the snow assumes, the freshness of the fields in springtime, the flow of water, and the contour of the clouds mirrored in the shining face of the sea.” 4 The forty-two-year-old Brinton, author of Modern Artists, was a tireless promoter in America of contemporary European painting. For the Albright he had assembled a collection of 165 works by some of Scandinavia’s most prominent modern painters. Although no contributions came from the Swedish avant-garde collective De Åtta (The Eight), Brinton did pay tribute in the exhibition catalogue to what he called these “earnest disciples of progress”—students of Henri Matisse led by Isaac Grünewald.5
The Eight were Scandinavia’s only most recent disciples of progress. For the previous thirty years Scandinavian art had been enjoying a golden period. Young Swedish, Danish and Norwegian painters, trained in Italy, France and Germany, had returned to their countries to interpret their northern landscapes in adventurous new styles that made them among the most celebrated painters in Europe. “After us, the Scandinavians,” the French painter Ernest Meissonier had predicted shortly before his death in 1891.6 Optimism about the power of Scandinavian art was related to a widespread conviction that the civilization of Western Europe—urban, industrialized, rootless—was entering a decline. For an apostle of progress such as Brinton, Scandinavia’s virtue was “its remoteness, its scenic picturesqueness, and the comparative lateness with which its inhabitants entered the concert of so-called European civilization.” 7 The decadent and enfeebled culture of Europe could be invigorated (so proponents of Northern European art believed) by a half-civilized race of poets and artists from Europe’s rugged northern latitudes—what one critic celebrated as the “wild men of the North.” 8
This philosophy, as well as Brinton’s poeticizing about Scandinavia’s “perpetual snow” and “grandiose and eccentric meteorological phenomena,” had obvious parallels to the American and, even more especially, the Canadian situation. For was not Canada, too, a remote northern land of perpetual snow and spectacular scenery, with a vigorous stock of people not yet domesticated by the bonds of culture? Since Confederation, many Canadians had been identifying themselves—in sharp distinction to the races and nations of supposedly softer and lazier latitudes—as a hardy northern race. They were, in the words of Robert Grant Haliburton, the “Northmen of the New World.” 9 If the northern wilderness was to preserve and progress culture through its health and vigour, where could it be found in greater abundance than in Canada?
Canada had intriguing parallels with Norway in particular, a country that, as Brinton observed, was emerging from the “early, formative years of her artistic development.” 10 Both nations had until recently been ruled by others. Norway was a province of Denmark for more than four centuries until, in 1814, it achieved partial independence thanks to a political union with the Kingdom of Sweden; parliamentary rule was achieved in 1884 and independence from Sweden only in 1905. Such prolonged political subservience naturally led Norwegian artists to explore national identity—and this identity was constructed around their northern landscape. A movement known as “National Romanticism” developed in the 1840s, followed forty years later by the “New Romanticism” of nationalist-minded painters, led by Gerhard Munthe, based at a farm named Fleskum in Bærum, near Oslo. Founding the Lysakerkretsen (Lysaker Society) to promote Norwegian nationalist values, Munthe had even launched the idea of a special Norwegian palette of colours—blue-green, bright reds, deep violets, indigo, bold yellows—that he believed reflected the unique Norwegian landscape.11 Although none of Munthe’s works was on show in Buffalo, nationalism was one of the keynotes of the Albright exhibition, with Brinton evaluating the paintings through the lens of the perceived national characteristics of the different Scandinavian countries.
Harris would later call his trip to the Albright with MacDonald “one of the most rewarding and exciting experiences either of us had.” 12 Accustomed to misty paintings of French riversides and Dutch coasts, the two men were enthralled by the vivid images of the boreal forest, the vast biome that encircles the top of the globe like a coniferous crown, encompassing Canada as well as Scandinavia. They were particularly struck by the work of landscapists such as the Symbolist painter Harald Sohlberg, a Norwegian, and the Swede Gustaf Fjaestad (a former speed skater who in 1891 set the world record for the English mile). Snow was unexpectedly rare in Scandinavian paintings prior to the 1890s, but Sohlberg and Fjaestad had turned to wintry images to convey specific national characters and a distinctive Nordic symbolism.13 These razor-sharp images of hoarfrost, pristine snow and bristling pines against steel-blue skies struck the Canadians as fresh and new after the mellow, beeswaxed glow so prominent in Toronto exhibitions.
Harris and MacDonald began to envision the possibilities of an art that would emphasize what Harris later called “the power and clarity and rugged elemental beauty of our own land.” 14 Or as MacDonald prolixly enthused, the “feelings of height and breadth and depth and colour and sunshine and solemnity” raised by these paintings of “the soil and woods and waters and rocks” meant both artists became determined to do much the same thing with the Canadian landscape.15
THERE WAS MORE in the Albright exhibition to intrigue Harris and MacDonald than depictions of forests, mountains and snow. After all, for the better part of a century Canadian painters in great profusion had been depicting forests, mountains and (less frequently) snow: the walls of the osa exhibitions had been thronged with images of Muskoka and the Rockies. It was, rather, the particular style of some of the Scandinavian painters that excited the two Canadian artists. The clear light, jagged peaks and pinnacled pines of the northern latitudes evidently called for a style different from the misty riverbanks and cultivated fields of Europe’s more southerly regions. A number of the Scandinavians used strong colours and expressive, rhythmic forms taken from 1890s artistic movements such as Synthetism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau. The Danish painter J.F. Willumsen had been a friend and disciple of Paul Gauguin, and many of his canvases (eight were at the Albright) showed the influence of Gauguin’s saturated colours and distorted perspectives.
The purpose of these startling compositions and bright, seemingly arbitrary colours was an emotional effect. European art movements of the previous decades had emphasized the importance of the painter’s emotional and psychological responses. Van Gogh stressed that he painted what he felt rather than what he saw, writing to his brother Theo that “instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully.” 16
A number of the Scandinavian painters at the Albright likewise wished to capture and express emotional stat
es in their landscapes. Their motto was expressed by the Swedish painter and critic Richard Bergh: “Every landscape is a state of mind.” 17 Sohlberg, a Symbolist, hoped to create, in the words of an American reviewer, “nothing less than a new form . . . that shall express with greater intensity the new feelings and emotions aroused in man by all the objects of the natural world.” 18 He was not interested in offering photographic images of the Norwegian countryside: he specialized in what Brinton called “emotionally intense landscapes.” 19 He experimented with glazing techniques in order to create heightened colours and intense feelings.
Another Norwegian Symbolist, Edvard Munch, offered even more emphatic emotions and visions. He too believed a physical landscape produced a set of feelings that he then attempted to capture in pigment: “It is these feelings which are crucial,” he once wrote, “nature is merely the means of conveying them.” 20 Harris must have taken a special interest in Munch’s six paintings, since he was the man for whom Franz Skarbina had resigned his post and then founded the Group of Eleven. In 1913 Munch claimed he was “quite faded and classic,” no longer among “the wildest things of Europe.” 21 He was living in Norway with his beloved fox terrier, Mr. Phipps, and enjoying excursions through the fjords on his motorboat. An outcast no more, he was a Knight of the Royal Order of Saint Olav and by far the most renowned and financially successful of the Scandinavian painters on display at the Albright. He was in fact, as Brinton acknowledged, one of the most famous artists in the world, his reputation “second to that of no living contemporary.” 22 Although scarcely appreciated by everyone (his name “still rankles in the memory of many an outraged patron of art,” noted one reviewer),23 he was a salutary example of how controversy and notoriety could coalesce, in the short space of a decade or two, into acceptance and fame.
Something more than Munch’s celebrity must have drawn Harris and MacDonald to his works. There was in much Scandinavian art, and in Northern European art in general, an attitude towards nature quite different from, say, the French art of the previous fifty or sixty years. By the nineteenth century, natural scientists had unwoven the rainbow (as John Keats lamented). Following in their wake, Realist and Impressionist painters such as Gustave Courbet or Claude Monet drained the natural world of any transcendent dimension. Many French painters in the second half of the nineteenth century regarded the landscape as a setting for social recreations such as picnics and promenades, or as a site on which to examine—like a scientist on a field trip—atmospheric or meteorological effects in the changing seasons and at various times throughout the day.
Courbet and Monet both painted seascapes at Étretat on the Normandy coast, but their pictures of remarkable geological formations such as Needle Rock—as in Courbet’s Cliff at Étretat after the Storm or Monet’s Étretat, Gate of Aval: Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbour—were descriptive images of sunlight, water, reflections and human activities such as fishing or sailing. No attempt was made, despite the appearance of the looming rocks or the fact that Monet often worked in gales of wind and rain, to convey a sense of the awesome majesty of nature. Interest was in the specific and the momentary. “For me,” Monet once claimed, “a landscape does not exist in its own right, because its appearance changes at every moment; but it is brought to life through the air and the light, which continually vary.” 24 The English painter and critic Roger Fry wittily paraphrased this kind of statement when he characterized the Impressionist as someone who believed he could not paint the same river twice.25
In contrast, a later generation of European artists concentrated on the more timeless and objective features of a landscape. They sought something more than the sun-sparkled surface pursued by the Impressionists. The Cubist Robert Delaunay spoke for many when he wrote that beneath the “contingent and obvious” features of the landscape painted by the Impressionists lay a “universal reality with the most profound effect of depth.” 26 The painter was to communicate with these depths—to seek the “universal reality” beyond the superficial visual phenomena of the natural world.
For more than twenty years Munch had been struggling to discover an artistic means by which to express the mysteries—what he called the “sanctity” and the “grandeur” 27—beyond the world of appearances, which in his case often included the coastal landscape at Åsgårdstrand, a small beach resort near Oslo. Rather than merely capturing the external forms of the natural world, he wished to penetrate its primal mysteries. He used the Nordic landscape as a setting for psychological dramas, and his tortured images disturbed many Scandinavian-American visitors to the Albright who had hoped to see pretty pictures of their faraway homeland. “No one can say that these visions of sickness, these passionate wild longings, high notes in paint, are there to please the mob,” observed one critic.28
Munch’s powerful forms of expression appear to have intrigued Harris and MacDonald almost as much as the pictures of mountains and snow. Munch’s response to the landscape in his paintings was not unlike the experience of the visitor to the “eerie wildernesses” of the Canadian northlands: “A profound awe, a cosmic fear, is the keynote of these canvases,” as Brinton observed. “He is as a child who sees terror in the most familiar shapes, or a man who shudders on the brink of an abyss.” 29 MacDonald recognized how Munch’s objective was not fidelity to nature but emotional truths and a deep symbolism. “He aims to paint the soul of things,” MacDonald would later remark, “the inner feeling rather than the outward form.” The result was that he created, in MacDonald’s words, a “remarkable, painful and yet irradiating art.” 30
One of Munch’s most famous paintings was on show at the Albright—The Sick Child, an unsettling recapitulation of the death of his older sister from tuberculosis when he was thirteen. MacDonald praised this “beautifully composed” work as “feeling enveloped in a veil of colour.” 31 Also on view were a number of Munch’s landscapes, such as Starry Night, first shown at a Berlin gallery in 1893 and then again at the 1902 exhibition of the Berlin Secession. Showing the coast at Åsgårdstrand, this nocturnal scene reveals Munch’s passionate empathy with the northern landscape and his unsurpassed ability to capture what MacDonald, describing Munch’s landscapes, called the “mystical quality” of the northern summer evening.32 It evokes emotion through colour and dramatic line rather than merely recording, through close attention to visual detail, the effects of stars reflecting in the black water. Mysterious forms and reflections haunt the inky, blue-black landscape, turning geography into a mental state—an obscurely menaced loneliness and isolation.
EDVARD MUCH’S PAINTINGS were precisely the kind of work, full of “lyric exaltation” and “passionate unrest,” that Brinton referred to when he wrote of the “peculiarly Northern” aspects of the Scandinavian paintings at the Albright.33 But it was Gustaf Fjaestad, then in his mid-forties, whose work most impressed MacDonald: his paintings were, MacDonald wrote, “perhaps the most attractive of all.” 34 Fjaestad specialized in eerily beautiful northern landscapes that were at once both meticulous observations of nature and stylized decorative designs. If his photographic illusionism made him one of the most popular painters in the Albright exhibition, what appealed to MacDonald was his application of ornamental patterns to what seemed a familiar northern landscape: the “decorative foliage of his snow-hung boughs” possessed, MacDonald claimed, “a delicate charm we had never seen in art before.” 35
Fjaestad’s stylized landscape designs (some of which were woven into tapestries by his sisters Anna and Amelie) featured sinuous lines of vegetation or ripples of water that owed much to Art Nouveau, the popular and elegant international style of illustration developed in the 1890s and described by a German art historian in 1901 as “the cult of the line.” 36 For the previous two decades, Art Nouveau designs had adorned everything from architecture, posters and spoons to Émile Gallé’s mushroom-shaped lamps and Hector Guimard’s iron and glass signs for the Paris Métro. Fjaestad, who also worked as a cabinet-maker, app
lied them, like many other designers, to furniture, often incorporating Scandinavian motifs.
Art Nouveau was a stock-in-trade of any commercial designer of the age, and an 1898 press advertisement for Grip Limited was done in a distinctive Art Nouveau style.37 MacDonald himself was one of the style’s most accomplished practitioners in Canada, having done many such designs in his commercial work both at Grip in Toronto and at the Carlton Studios in London. Not until January 1913 did it occur to him to apply its hallmarks—stylized vegetative shapes, blocks of colour, sweeping curves and meandering outlines—to the Canadian landscape. These “true souvenirs of that mystic north,” as he later called Fjaestad’s paintings, “had a great Canadian inspiration for us.” 38
The example of Fjaestad might have served Harris and MacDonald in one more important way. In 1897 Fjaestad had become a member of the Rackenmålarna, or the Racken Group, a colony of artists and craftsmen (including his wife, Maja) living near Lake Racken in Sweden. This cooperative effort, combined with the similar examples of The Eight in Sweden and the Group of Eleven in Berlin, no doubt made the two Canadians realize that a national art movement, attempting to forge a new style, would need to be a group effort. If the Scandinavian painters gave them an inkling of a style, what remained was to find new members for a group. And so began what Harris would later call “an all-engrossing adventure.” 39
TWO MONTHS AFTER visiting the exhibition of Scandinavian art in Buffalo, Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald received American exposure of their own. In March 1913 a small selection of their works was included in an exhibition of Canadian painting staged at the MacDowell Club in New York City. The somewhat ambiguous reception given these Canadian works may well have served as a further prompt for the two young painters to become “northern-minded.”