Our home and native land
VAG exhibition explores different ways of viewing Canadian landscapes.
A new exhibition of paintings at the Vancouver Art Gallery tells several different stories about how the Canadian landscape was depicted from the 19th century into the 20th century.
While the exhibition isn’t meant to be a comprehensive history of the landscape in Canadian art, it does give a hint of the kinds of shows art fans can expect to see when the permanent collection galleries open in the new Vancouver Art Gallery building proposed by Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron.
Ian M. Thom, senior curator-historical, said that the 150 works in the exhibition include about 70 paintings loaned by a pair of collectors in Toronto who wish to remain anonymous.
“The idea is to show people in the landscape, or pure landscapes, and how artists have related to the landscape over time,” he said.
One of the exhibition themes is the gradual disappearance of people from landscape paintings as the works move from the 1840s to the 1940s.
A typical example from an earlier work is The Royal Mail Crossing the St. Lawrence by Cornelius Krieghoff. It’s a dramatic, romantic portrayal of a group in a canoe overcoming treacherous water and ice to deliver the mail and, by so doing, assert British sovereignty and control over the landscape.
Later paintings by artists such as Arthur Lismer and Lawren Harris, from the Group of Seven, and David Milne, show mountains and water or snowcovered forested scenes without people or any obvious narrative imposed on them.
“In the 19th century, the landscape was something that one had to deal with or conquer in some sort of way and grow to become comfortable with,” said Thom, the show’s curator.
“In the 20th century, (the landscape) became an aspect of Canada that artists and other Canadians were fiercely proud of.”
Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven also includes works by popular artists such as Tom Thomson and Emily Carr.
Another theme is how indigenous people were depicted in a land they named and lived in long before Europeans and other settlers arrived. The difference between the indigenous/settler visions is neatly shown in two adjacent works by the entrance to the exhibition on the first floor of the VAG.
The bigger of the two paintings is Portrait of Zacharie Vincent by Quebec painter AntoineSébastien Plamondon. Vincent, from the Huron-Wendat First Nations, was influenced into becoming one of the rare indigenous painters of the era by Plamondon’s portrait. Although Vincent is shown as a young bourgeois European figure, what sets the work apart are Vincent’s eyes: they’re staring up and off the canvas. The dreamy look could have been Plamondon’s way of visually portraying Vincent’s differences.
Right next to it is a self-portrait by Vincent as an older man from the VAG’s permanent collection. Vincent painted himself as inhabiting two worlds: he’s in traditional Huron clothing while holding a paint brush and an artist’s palette, the traditional tools of a western painter. But unlike Plamondon’s portrait, the eyes are staring directly at the viewer. He’s portrayed himself as someone who knows exactly who he is.
As the didactic panel succinctly says, “this work asserts Vincent’s agency over the way he is represented in art, reclaiming his image from the hands of artists of European descent.”
Another group of paintings was made by artists who were given free passage out west by the CPR. After its completion in 1885, the railway realized it could sell more tickets and encourage more settlers by promoting the landscape of the west.
It did that by giving free passage to artists, photographers and writers.
One of the artists who took full advantage of the offer was Frederic M. Bell-Smith.
As a result of one of his 10 trips to Western Canada, he painted Fishing Fleet, Mouth of Fraser River.
With Mount Baker in the background, it shows dozens of small sail boats on the water. What’s odd about the painting is that the boats are supposed to be those of fishermen, but there’s not a net or fishing rod to be seen. Rather than depicting a group of fishing boats, it looks more like a yachting regatta.
Another group of works is by modernist women painters.
Among them is a remarkable work of three women on an Indian reserve in North Vancouver by Irene Hoffar Reid.
The painting transforms an everyday outdoor scene into something memorable by its stylized trees and elongated houses that resemble a distillation of coloured forms in space.
Thom said that when the new and expanded Vancouver Art Gallery opens in 2021, it will have a considerable amount of space dedicated to the permanent collection.
The new gallery will also have galleries with works that will be open to members of the public at no charge.
Thom said one of the challenges for curators is to figure out not only what stories to tell, but how to tell them in the new building.
“Can you tell those stories with what you’ve got? Do we have to arrange loans?” he said.
“With this exhibition, one of the things I wanted to do was tell a larger story than what the collection could tell,” he said.
“We have to think about what we might do in the future. I think over the next few years we’ll be exploring how that might work.”
Can you tell those stories with what you’ ve got? With this exhibition, one of the things I wanted to do was tell a larger story than what the collection could tell. We have to think about what we might do in the future.
IAN M. THOM SENIOR CURATOR, VANCOUVER ART GALLERY