Glenbow showcases little known Canadian modernists
SPOTLIGHT 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group runs at the Glenbow Museum until Jan. 27. Jacques Des Rochers will give a talk on Saturday, Oct. 22 at 1 p.m.
In September of 1923, the Toronto Sunday World ran a caricature depicting an epic war being waged in the Canadian art world.
“The Battle of the Paint Brushes” was meant to illustrate the conflict between conservative traditionalists and modernists over what Canadian works would be sent to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park in London. The selection would be overseen by the National Gallery of Fine Arts, as opposed to the more conservative Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. This caused a good deal of tension, with the administration of the Academy even suggesting a boycott.
Among the modernists who displayed in London were members of the Group of Seven, arguably the most famous collective of Canadian artists. It was their moment in the sun, generally considered the point in history when they achieved international recognition.
But there was a lesser-known group of homegrown artistic rebels who also showed at Wembley Park that year.
“We always present Wembley as a pivotal exhibition for the Group of Seven,” says Jacques Des Rochers, curator of Quebec and Canadian Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. “We forget that 12 artists from Beaver Hall Group were also showing works.”
The Beaver Hall Group were a short-lived collective of Canadian painters in Montreal who were contemporaries of the Group of Seven but had a wildly different esthetic. While Group of Seven member have become Canadian icons for their landscape paintings, Beaver Hall painters never reached the same level of notoriety in art history, despite the bold innovation of their work.
Opening Saturday at the Glenbow Museum, 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group is an expansive exhibition that puts a spotlight on these artists, who generally depicted modern life of Montrealers in the 1920s in stunning portraits and urban landscapes.
“We want to put Montreal on the map because it was really happening at the time but we’ve forgotten there were so many good painters showing together,” says Des Rochers, who curated the exhibit.
“What was very different than the Group of Seven esthetic was that they were born in an old city, almost 300 years old at the time, and they had a deeper sense of the urban setting. It was a city with a deeper memory, a deeper story. Most of their works have an urban context or inhabited landscapes. It’s very rare that you would see a painting without (people) or a painting that doesn’t show a landscape that has been worked by the inhabitant.”
This is in stark contrast to the Group of Seven’s depictions of untouched Canadian wilderness. The Beaver Hall Group had roughly 20 members, most of them anglophone, who met while students at the Art Association of Montreal. Beaver Hall’s official lifespan as a group was brief, lasting only from 1920 to 1923 in a building that housed studios and exhibition spaces in a neighbourhood nestled between Montreal’s downtown and business district.
As the exhibit makes clear, the members possessed a wide range of styles but were generally seen as embracing modernity, vibrant colours and the excitement of Montreal during the jazz age, the only city in North America not under prohibition at the time. While the paintings rarely make direct reference to jazz, the style of the artists was often compared to the genre by champions and detractors alike. Not unlike jazz in the 1920s, the work excited some and made others uncomfortable.
The group also had an equal number of male and female artists, a rarity for the times. In fact, the prevalence of female painters has often had the Beaver Hall Group incorrectly labelled an all-women group, a misconception that sprang from much of the female painters’ work being viewed through “feminist lens” since the 1960s, Des Rochers said.
“This is the first time we are making it clear that there was parity between men and women, it was not a group of women,” he said.
“This is a lot more interesting, because then it is not a ghetto. It was not a time when women and men were seen as equal. There were a lot less opportunities for women.”
The exhibit is a result of painstaking searches through private and gallery collections throughout Canada. The featured works come from 70 lenders and include pieces that may have otherwise been lost to history.
Prudence Heward’s 1928 oil on canvas, The Immigrants, is a case in point. The painting depicts two apprehensive- looking women huddled together on a ship, possibly bound for a new world. While the artist’s 1928 work At the Theatre, exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and 1929’s Rollande, housed at the National Gallery of Canada, were featured on commemorative stamps by Canada Post in 2010, The Immigrants is from a private collection in Toronto and hasn’t been publicly seen since 1948.
“It’s a marvel,” said Des Rochers. “This is a new masterpiece of Canadian art that we had lost.”