The forgotten nudes of Canada
Thousands of academics have gathered in Toronto this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on everything from whether poutine is a form of cultural appropriation to the ampersand as a symbol of gentrification. In this week-long series, the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research. Jake Edmiston reports.
Staff at the Canadian National Exhibition of 1927 built a barrier around a painting of a naked woman to keep people at a distance, afraid that the art might provoke spectators to lash out, to touch it or “caress it.”
Toronto newspapers printed more than 100 letters to the editor both defending and lambasting the painting. But the most riled letter-writers saw it as part of the degradation of polite society — already teeming with “cigaret-smoking youth” in the street and women “flapping their sex before the eyes of man.”
The controversy around John Wentworth Russell’s A Modern Fantasy is one of several case studies in new research by University of Lethbridge assistant professor Devon Smither.
In her paper, to be presented to the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences on Wednesday at Ryerson University, Smither looks at why the nude never took hold in Canada in the first half of the 20th century — even as the Canadian artists behind the genre were celebrated in Europe.
“The nude could not break the hold of the landscape painting on the Canadian imagination, and the controversy over the nude signals the genre’s ultimate failure as a modality of modernist expression,” Smither writes.
The artists who painted them have been mostly forgotten in a country that largely considers its national art to be landscapes and the Group of Seven. The reason, Smither argues, isn’t just because of Canada’s brand of prudishness.
“The nude was much too complicated,” she said in an interview on Tuesday.
Smither’s work focuses on the nudes painted in Canada between 1913 and 1945, through two world wars and an era of “nation-building” when the country was still trying to define its own visual art movement.
“The nude was not going to answer that call,” she said, because the nude was connected to uncomfortable social anxieties about gender, race and sexuality and about “women getting the vote and moving up in the world.”
The Group of Seven answered the call instead — with “empty landscapes, tamed, pristine and ready for the taking,” painted by masculine “frontiersmen” who braved the Canadian wilderness with sketchboxes on their backs in a way that was off-limits to “genteel women of the 1920s,” Smither said.
The Group of Seven, which also met with criticism early on, was aided by a cohesion never experienced by the nude painters in the country. They were one unified group painting postimpressionist landscapes, while the nudes varied wildly in style — surrealism, expressionism, cubism, postimpressionism.
“The general public wasn’t going to say, ‘Oh, the nude is great! I like the cubist ones and I love the expressionist ones, and I make sense of it all,’ ” Smither said.
In the interwar years, there was at least one nude in each of the 150 exhibitions held in Canada, according to research by Michèle Grandbois, who curated a 2009 exhibit on Canadian nude paintings.
Smither focused on about 50 nude paintings and photographs, trying to figure out the subtle details that somehow made them controversial. Prudence Heward’s paintings of nude black women, for instance, met with “some deeply racist criticisms,” in part, because the paintings showed subjects looking “slumped over” with their arms closed in a way that didn’t make them “open and available to a male gaze,” Smither said.
Russell’s A Modern Fantasy — which caused the ruckus at the CNE in 1927 — was in the style of a classic, acceptable nude. Russell’s subject was reclined on a bed, in a pose similar to Titian’s 16th-century Venus of Urbino. But Russell’s woman wore a hat.
She was too close, too real, Smither said, as if the woman “like anybody’s middle-class wife, who has just taken off her clothes but left her hat on, lying on the divan in the living room.”
So Russell returned to Paris, where he was warmly received. “He said, ‘Well, if you guys can’t understand my art and you’re not going to like me, then I’m going back to Paris,’” Smither said.
“And he, too, is a name that has been forgotten in the annals of time.”