Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  The gesture spoke volumes about the esteem in which Canadian politicians and businessmen held the country’s artists. It must also have confirmed in the prince’s mind the prejudice, held by so many others, that Canada was a land merely of canoes, ranches and codfish—an outdoor country untouched and untroubled by the trappings of higher culture.

  IN THE MIDDLE of November, less than two months after returning from their latest Algoma trip, Harris, MacDonald and Johnston applied to the Art Gallery of Toronto for permission for another exhibition. This time they envisaged a more encompassing show than the recent Algoma one. Scheduled for the following spring, it was projected to feature the work of nine artists.22 This exhibition would take to a new level Jackson’s plan to confront timid collectors and unfriendly reviewers by gathering together a band of like-minded painters of Canada.

  Details were refined over the next few months. Early in 1920, while on his way to Georgian Bay for some winter sketching, Jackson met with Harris in Allandale to discuss matters. He hoped to widen the franchise beyond the walls of the Studio Building by recruiting painters from Quebec. Soon afterwards, he wrote a letter instructing his sister Catherine, in Montreal, to arrange for works by three Quebec artists—including his friends Randolph Hewton and Albert Robinson—to be sent to the Art Gallery of Toronto for what he called “a special group show in May . . . about six of us with one or two specially invited ones.” 23 The third Quebec painter would be Robert Pilot, a stepson of Maurice Cullen recently returned from studies at the Académie Julian in Paris after serving in the Canadian army. Cullen himself would not be invited.

  A second meeting was held in March 1920. Present on this occasion were Harris, MacDonald, Lismer, Varley, Johnston and Carmichael (Jackson would certainly have joined them were he not still snowshoeing around Georgian Bay). The venue was 63 Queen’s Park, the Romanesque-revival mansion that Harris and his wife inherited following the death of Trixie’s mother in 1917. A stone’s throw from the Ontario Legislature, this castle-like building, with its round tower and coach house, made an improbably opulent location for disaffected artists to deplore their lot and lay their plans. These were not hand-to-mouth rebels living in cold-water flats and artistic isolation. Neither were they youths. Carmichael was the youngest, at almost thirty, while Johnston was approaching his thirty-second birthday, Harris and Lismer were both thirty-four and Varley thirty-nine. MacDonald, a few weeks from his forty-seventh birthday, was the elder statesman.

  These men, along with Jackson, had dominated the art scene in Toronto for much of the previous decade. The National Gallery held more than a dozen of their paintings. They had friends in high places, notably Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker. Several occupied positions of power themselves: Lismer was vice-principal of the Ontario College of Art and, along with MacDonald and Johnston, a member of the OSA’s executive committee. The spirit of the meeting was captured by Lismer, an incessant doodler and caricaturist, who marked the occasion with a pencil sketch of Harris. He portrayed him in a jacket and tie, casually sprawled in an armchair, with a cigarette on the go and his feet perched on an ottoman: the self-confident leader informally presiding over a meeting of friends.

  Altogether, ten artists would be invited to show their work at this special exhibition: the three Quebec painters plus Jackson and the six men who plotted strategy at Harris’s house. Conspicuous by his absence was Bill Beatty. A one-time leader of the group determined to produce what he called a “national art,” Beatty had since been sidelined. Part of the problem was undoubtedly his obnoxious personality: Augustus Bridle called him a “glorious, truculent bigot, ready for action with either fist or vocabulary.” 24 More to the point, perhaps, was his refusal or inability to adopt the Hot Mush style regarded by Jackson as essential to capturing the Canadian landscape. Both Jackson (after the trip to the Rockies in 1914) and Varley (after his tour of duty as a war artist) were dismissive of what they regarded as Beatty’s moonshine-and-mist idiom. Beatty also confessed a strange—and, to Jackson, atrocious—admiration for the French painters William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.25

  There was, of course, another more poignant absence. Tom Thomson, had he lived, would certainly have been involved in the exhibition. He, more than any of the other painters in the Studio Building, had demonstrated the new spirit of painting in Canada. His attachment to the northern woods, the dramatic power of his compositions, his teeming brushwork and sumptuous colour—all revealed his passion for painting the Canadian landscape in a resoundingly modern style.

  THE MATTER OF a name for the new group was settled either at the meeting in Harris’s house or very soon afterwards. The seven Toronto-based painters, with the exception of Lismer and Varley, were all Ontario regionalists, concentrating almost exclusively on Georgian Bay, Muskoka and Algoma. But their ambitions to bestride the national stage meant they needed to brand themselves with a title less geographically limited than the designation—the Algonquin Park School—by which they were occasionally known in the press. They also needed a name to evoke the fact that they were, as Harris boasted a year earlier, “younger men” destined to “produce something really significant.”

  Harris and several of the others were familiar with the secessionist movements launched over the previous quarter century by the groups of young modernists responsible for so much controversial innovation. Starting with the Belgian group Les xx in the 1880s, most had plumped, rather unimaginatively, for numerical appellations summing up the number of members. There had been the Society of Six, formed in California in 1917 with the former Montrealer William H. Clapp as a leader, and no fewer than three avant-garde collectives named themselves, after head counts, for the number eight: The Eight (Henri’s group in New York), De Åtta (Isaac Grünewald’s group in Sweden) and the Nyolcak in Hungary (a “Group of Eight” formed in 1910 and influenced by Cézanne and Expressionism). There had also been the Ten American Painters and, of course, Franz Skarbina’s Group of Eleven in Berlin. With these various integers already claimed, and with what appeared to be a core of seven Toronto painters, the name the “Group of Seven” naturally suggested itself.

  There might have been, at least for Harris, certain satisfyingly mystical connotations to the number seven. His involvement in theosophy had deepened by the time he hosted the other painters at his home. In the summer of 1919 he expressed to MacDonald his admiration for “dear mystics” such as the Irish theosophist AE (a.k.a. George Russell), Annie Besant and “a whole flock of old Eastern Johnnies.” 26 The mystical importance of the number seven was repeatedly stressed in theosophical writings. In The Secret Doctrine H.P. Blavatsky declared, “Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is septenary.” 27 Elsewhere she observed that “a peculiar solemnity and mystical significance has been given the Number Seven among all people, at all times.” This essay went on to elaborate, with absurd precision and dubious logic, the vital role played by this number in shaping the fortunes of the Theosophical Society. Everything from her street address in New York (17) and the day she sailed for India (December 17, 1879), to the moment the engines started (7:07 AM) on her voyage from Bombay to Ceylon, was triumphantly produced as evidence of a “septenary fatality” ensuring the success of the society and the proof of its teachings. This numerological obsession survived Blavatsky’s death. Harris undoubtedly knew Annie Besant’s 1909 work The Seven Principles of Man, as well as the various articles on the “seven worlds” and the “seven periods of evolution” published by AE in the Irish Theosophist.28 The septenary fatality probably had a less secure and less preposterous hold on Harris than on Madam Blavatsky and other theosophists—though it might have been no accident that the exhibition was scheduled to begin on May 7 and close on May 27, a total of twenty-one days.

  Lismer was worried, however, about certain other connotations of the number seven. A name echoing famous secessionist movements might suggest a schism within the OSA and deep divisions in
Toronto’s artistic community. Jackson and Harris enjoyed and even courted controversy, but Lismer, like MacDonald, was more temperate and diplomatic, ever ready to pour oil on troubled waters. He was swift to reassure his friend Eric Brown. “We are having a show at the Toronto Art Gallery in May,” he wrote to him a short time after the meeting at Harris’s house. “It will be a group show . . . The ‘Group of Seven’ is the idea. There is to be no feeling of secession or antagonism in any way, but we hope to get a show together that will demonstrate the ‘spirit’ of painting in Canada.” 29 There was to be none of the incendiary rhetoric and malice-aforethought provocation of the Futurists. It would be a straightforward appeal to what one of the Algomaxims had called the “broadminded people” of Canada.

  3 ARE THESE NEW CANADIAN PAINTERS CRAZY?

  A.Y. JACKSON WROTE that, after the Great War, Canada’s climate was hostile to art. “There had never been,” he claimed, “less interest in painting.” 1 That was not strictly true, not least because of the

  perennial void of public interest in painting in Canada over the previous fifty years. The year 1920 was hardly an auspicious moment, however, to launch a modernist exhibition in Canada or anywhere else.

  The Great War had taken a terrible toll on modernist artists. The Toronto painter Estelle Kerr was not exaggerating when she wrote at the end of 1916 that “ultra-modern art” had been “killed by the war.” 2 Some of Europe’s most innovative artists died on the battlefield; many others were physically or psychologically damaged. August Macke, a member of Der Blaue Reiter, was killed in the first month of the war. “How much is lost for all of us,” lamented his friend and fellow painter Franz Marc. “It is like a murder.” 3 Marc himself died eighteen months later at Verdun. Other casualties included the Vorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the English painter Isaac Rosenberg and the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Erba and Ugo Tommei. The Cubist pioneer Georges Braque was severely wounded, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner suffered a mental breakdown and the Expressionist Max Beckmann what he called “injuries of the soul.” 4 Countless other young artists died in obscurity, denied the chance to develop their talents and make their names. The Montreal-born painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, who operated a progressive school of painting in Hampstead, lost sixteen former students.5

  Those who came through the war more or less unscathed adopted tamer styles. In 1920 Paul Konody wrote in the Toronto Globe that people on both sides of the Atlantic equated modernism—much of which had come out of Germany—with “the spirit of unrest” that led to the Great War.6 Appalled by the technological horrors of the war, neither the public nor the artists themselves showed much appetite for modernist innovation. Wyndham Lewis claimed the shattered geometrics of Vorticism felt “bleak and empty” after the war.7 Rejecting abstract art, he turned to novels and journalism. David Bomberg travelled to Palestine and painted restful landscapes. Marsden Hartley abandoned abstract portraits of German soldiers in favour of pastel sketches of New Mexico. Braque and Picasso forsook Cubism, Picasso opting for a more classical three-dimensional style that took its inspiration from, among others, Ingres. Leading Futurist Gino Severini renounced Futurism and turned to Giotto. Beckmann painted religious scenes. French journals resounded with condemnations of the avant-garde, and in England any painting that tried to recapture the daringly experimental spirit of the pre-war years was anathematized as “Junkerism” or “Prussian in spirit.” 8

  The only place where modernist art could still be seen—in what appeared to be its strange and unsightly death throes—was in Germany. In June 1920 the First International Dada Fair opened its doors in Berlin. Dadaism responded to the horrors of the Great War not with a revival of classicism but with outrage, rebellion and a self-

  conscious and theatrical absurdity. “Art is dead,” declared a sign at the Berlin exhibition. The provocative works on display—a wooden head stuck with metal debris, the effigy of a German officer with a pig’s head—seemed a grotesque parody of modernist aesthetics, a calculated affront to art and art lovers alike. In an inversion of the usual artist-critic relationship, one of the exhibitors, the Austrian Raoul Hausmann, casually dismissed their work. “Straight away one must emphasize,” he wrote in the catalogue, “that this Dada exhibition consists of the usual bluff, a cheap speculation preying upon the public’s curiosity—it is not worth visiting.” 9 Many critics were inclined to agree.

  In comparison with the First International Dada Fair, the exhibition that opened a month earlier at the Art Gallery of Toronto was subdued and wholesome. It did not preach nihilism or the death of art but declared instead that Canadian art was alive and well. In any case, anyone who feared an outbreak of radicalism or revolution would have been reassured by the sight of tailcoats and strings of pearls on opening night. A stiff formality prevailed, the atmosphere akin to a wedding reception or the first night of an opera. One young visitor described the opening as a white-tie event with a receiving line and “ladies with evening dresses and white gloves.” Everyone was “terribly polite” even though “nobody had any idea what some of these paintings were all about.” 10

  The works were nowhere near as baffling to the audience as this visitor, A.J. Casson, insisted. Anyone puzzled by the works could purchase for 15¢ a mimeographed leaflet with a logo designed by Carmichael and a list of the works on display. This improvised catalogue included a foreword, an Algomaxim-style manifesto that declared—in terms hardly subtle or new—the aims and ideals of the artists. This piece might have been composed by Barker Fairley: he at least had been proposed for the task at the March meeting.11 The thirty-three-year-old Yorkshire-born professor of German literature at the University of Toronto, whose expertise was the poetry of Goethe and Heine, made an unlikely champion of Canadian art. But apart from his academic specialization he was the editor of The Rebel (undergoing its relaunch as Canadian Forum) and a friend of several members of the new group. He was an admirer and promoter of Varley in particular, regarding it as his life’s mission “to make Varley known to the world.” 12

  If Fairley composed the foreword, he did so in close consultation with members of the group, since it rehashed many of their usual arguments. It declared that the Group of Seven held “a like vision” concerning Canadian art: “They are all imbued with the idea that an Art must grow and flower in the land before the country will be a real home for its people.” A unique style of art was needed, one differing not merely from “the Art of the past” but likewise from “the present day Art of any people.” This new Canadian art was therefore to be fresh and unprecedented, beholden to no tradition. This claim did not entirely bear the weight of evidence, but at least the painters were sincere in their ambition to interpret “the spirit of a nation’s growth” by using a defiant style of painting.

  In the midst of these passages of optimism and idealism a bitter note was sounded. The painters expected to be greeted, the foreword announced, “by ridicule, abuse or indifference” because their work differed so drastically from “the commercialized, imported standard of the picture-sale room.” These debased tastes among “so-called Art lovers” had queered the pitch for the members of the group and their vibrant new style of painting. Although they cleaved to a democratic view of art—it was “an essential quality in human existence,” not the preserve of an elite—the painters expected to find little favour among the wider public at which their art was supposedly aimed. Their paintings would be understood and accepted, sighed the foreword, only by a “very small group of intelligent individuals.” 13

  A contradiction therefore stood at the heart of their venture. The group saw themselves as patriots and populists whose landscapes were meant to appeal to all Canadians as Canadians and to foster a sense of beauty in everyone from captains of industry to pale seamstresses and fatted tradesmen. They believed, however, that their experimental modernist style would find favour only among the most discerning critics and collectors, those uncontaminated by the corrupt tastes
of the many. In its pessimism that the group’s efforts at nation building would be appreciated by only a small elite, the foreword veered dangerously close to Sadakichi Hartmann’s claim that the fine arts were by the few and for the few.

  From this daunting challenge, visitors moved to the works themselves, more than 140 of them. Anyone expecting a straightforward reprise of the Algoma exhibition, with its unremitting sequence of landscapes, would have been taken aback by the variety of work on offer: portraits, war pictures, fishing villages and (in the case of Harris) scenes of Toronto’s slums. As Augustus Bridle wrote in an enthusiastic review, visitors were treated to “plateaus of brûlé and Laurentian hills; battlefields and dead men; Hebrew shacks and Italian cottages; old barns and ploughed fields; spring blossoms and gorgeous autumn; cold winterscapes and trails; ships and harbours; woodland tapestries and rainbows.” 14

  As in the Algoma exhibition, Johnston, with eighteen canvases, was the most prolific. The most versatile was Harris, who, as Bridle pointed out, refused “to be identified solely by one type of picture.” 15 Besides Algoma landscapes such as Autumn, Algoma, he exhibited eight portraits (including one of his friend Fred Housser’s wife, Bess) and five urban scenes. Among the latter was another in his Earlscourt series, Shacks, in which the shabbiness of the tightly packed, jerry-built homes of “shacktown” was offset by a pigmentary gusto and lively brushwork. The ebullience was captured by the prose of Bridle, who described how the canvas “shouts in reds, greens and blues. Harris . . . revels in gorgonesque blobs of broken and patched roughcast. He delights to swat himself in the eye with pink fence-boards, yellow windows and blue doorways that zip out of the naked plaster like poppies stuck in skulls.” 16

  The reference to poppies and skulls indicates how, to Bridle and many other visitors, the exhibition must almost have been as redolent of the Great War as the cwmf exhibition eight months earlier. Varley submitted his arresting The Sunken Road—a corpse-strewn battlefield scene called by Bridle a “cadaver picture . . . an epic of necrosis”—and many of his other works likewise evoked the scars and torment of battle. These emphatic echoes were hardly surprising considering both the immediacy of the war in the spring of 1920 and the service record of the Group of Seven: four had worked for the cwmf, and a fifth, Harris, spent almost two years in uniform. Of the invitees, Hewton and Pilot both served overseas, and Robinson worked in a munitions factory at Longue Pointe.