Fifty years of Alex Janvier at the AGA
Art Gallery of Alberta offers retrospective of artist’s career
iconography; the gorgeous early development of his signature style in black and white — his name signed with his treaty number, 287; colourful movement to his famous white backgrounds; work mirroring his masterpiece dome in the National Gallery; map-based protests against land abuse; impressionistic portraits of the Bill Reid and the so-called Indian Group of Seven. Like an ancient summit, the show gathers more than 90 pieces from private and gallery collections continentwide, and includes never-before-displayed early experiments bursting with aggressive colour, borrowed from the artist’s collection.
“The importance of Alex historically,” AGA curator Catherine Crowston explains as the paintings are being hung, “is that he is one of those artists who moved aboriginal art out of the margin — out of the idea of being a decorative, craft-based tradition — moving aboriginal art into the art mainstream culture.”
The story of the native modernist explodes at its seams with difficult ironies, with heroic mentors and institutional villains. Janvier more than once escaped hell, and memories linger.
“They told us we were savages and taught us to hate our grandparents,” Janvier says on the phone from Cold Lake, where he lives with his longtime wife Jacqueline, who runs their gallery. (A new, larger gallery is being built nearby.) “They took everything from us and told us it was evil.”
One of the most interesting pieces in the AGA show, Blood Tears, details deep wounds against Janvier and his people in red on its back. “It never ends, it just kept going,” he wrote.
Yet Janvier frequently mentions those who believed in him and supported him, especially University of Alberta professor Karl Altenberg, who arranged four summers of respite away from residential schooling.
It’s a difficult subject, Crowston admits: “No, but it is true, the director of the residential school was the one who arranged for him to have art lessons, who recognized that he had an ability and supported that.”
Of Rev. Bernet-rolande at the Blue Quill Indian Residential School, Janvier notes: “He was the first one to see something there, to see I had some talent.”
In two conversations, Janvier is fittingly abstract, quickly shifting along his own curves of interest.
Ask him about a specific person or painting and memories of early rejection or terrible government policies emerge, though often expressed with his gruff wit.
Janvier, born in 1935, was taken off the Le Goff reserve in the Cold Lake area in a cattle truck and physically abused as a child in the imposed residential system. Now on display at the AGA, his Our Lady of the Teepee was sent to the Vatican to represent native art when he was young.
Later, after graduating from art college in Calgary in the ’60s, prejudice kept him not only from work, but from sometimes being able to rent a hotel room.
In the ’90s, Bell’s palsy even briefly threatened his ability to paint in a style of fishtail curves and circles you can practically recognize from space.
Aboriginal history is rife with references to the four directions; Alex Janvier’s compass is more complex, like any good hunter’s. “It’s a lifelong quest,” Janvier says over the phone. “I’m alive, I’m above ground. As long as I’m capable of handling that brush, I’ll be doing something.”
In the coming months, we’ll be able to experience the artist’s impact with unprecedented perspective.
The Art Gallery of Alberta’s show title Alex Janvier is perfectly chosen. The new show, which opened to the public on Friday, is a survey, though that’s like saying Elk Island Park is a checklist of wildlife.
Mapping a truly significant lifetime of experimentation, we see Janvier’s childhood oils on Masonite recontextualizing Catholic
His epiphany came in 1959. Janvier, in his third year of art college in Calgary, was in a watercolour class when his style materialized in an instant.
“I made some strokes and said, ‘My God, this is me!’ It’s unexplainable. I think it was a spiritual experience, because it wasn’t taught.”
The eponymous show, which spans more than the 50 years it claims, has Janvier considering all his work.
“Sometimes I get totally amazed with some of the things I came up with. When you think back it was reasonable to do that, but you see it later on and think, ‘How in the world did I come to that?’
“I’m proud of all the periods, because it was like going upward. A staircase to heaven, or something like that,” laughs the Order of Canada recipient. “I was never quiet. My mind and activity was really energetic, creative and something was always on the go.”
“Really,” Crowston muses, “the show could be twice as big and still be interesting.”
“I have lots of time,” Janvier decides of his ongoing artistic quest. “But what the heck do they say in Latin? Tempus fugit. Time flies, time runs away. I learned that a long time ago.”