Visual Arts
VISUAL ARTS DAVID MILNE: MODERN PAINTING
At the Vancouver Art Gallery until September 9
In February of this year, when
David Milne: Modern Painting opened at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, England, it was met with many laudatory reviews in the British press. One critic, however, dismissed Milne’s work as mediocre and repetitive, causing outrage and indignation among Canadian art lovers. How could anyone—anyone—denigrate the work of such a singular and innovative Canadian artist? Unthinkable.
Recently landed at the Vancouver Art Gallery, this multi-institutional retrospective was curated by Sarah Milroy, a long-time freelancer recently appointed chief curator of the Mcmichael Canadian Art Collection, and Ian A.C. Dejardin, executive director of the Mcmichael since 2017 and previously director at the Dulwich. The two also worked together on acclaimed exhibitions of Emily Carr and Vanessa Bell.
Eclipsed in his time by the Group of Seven, Milne is now recognized as one of our nation’s leading 20th-century painters. Between his birth in Bruce County, Ontario, in 1882 and his death in Bancroft, Ontario, in 1953, he honed an utterly individual approach to both art and life (the latter influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden). Milne led, by choice, a rural, frugal, and often isolated existence. Which is not to say that he distanced himself from the leading edge of modern art. During his learning years in New York City, 1903 to 1913, he was exposed to the avant-garde painting of both Europe and the United States. His 1912-1913 street scenes, such as Fifth Avenue, Easter Sunday, suggest he was looking keenly at Maurice Prendergast while juxtaposing jewellike particles of colour with broad passages of brilliant white. The Pantry, an interior in which figure and ground merge in a flat field of reddish brown, is clearly influenced by Henri Matisse.
Milne developed his own distinctive brand of modernism while living in the small Upstate New York community of Boston Corners between 1916 and 1920; his painting further evolved to the tough and startlingly abstract landscapes he produced at Six Mile Lake in northern Ontario in the mid-1930s.
(The show ends with these works, although Milne continued to paint, mostly in watercolour, until a year before his death.) The curators also draw our attention to the extraordinary watercolours of abandoned First World War battlefields he produced in 1919, his “shattered” brushstrokes echoing the blasted landscapes around Ypres, Passchendaele, and Vimy Ridge.
As many art historians have observed, Milne’s true subject was painting itself, although it seems he still needed a figure, landscape, or still-life arrangement on which to hang his experiments in line, form, colour, and tonality. One of the most distinctive aspects of his painting style, as seen in Gentle Snowfall, is the thin, dry-brush application of his medium, by which he weaves passages of bare canvas into the overall composition. Another distinctive element is his startling use of nonnaturalistic colours, such as the matte black that predominates in both the water and foliage of Reflected Forms. Yet another characteristic of his art is his X-ray–vision depiction of trees, their skeletal trunks and branches brightly articulated within the flattened and generalized body of foliage. Parallel to his innovations in oil, Milne also developed an individualistic approach to watercolour, varying from dry brush to wash, sometimes within the same work, such as Bishop’s Pond in Sunlight.
Arriving 33 years after the last major Milne retrospective, this exhibition is a fine tribute to the artist, serving to introduce him to a new generation of Canadian viewers as well as to the wider world. As for any snooty, colonialist naysayers lurking
out there, well, open your eyes and minds. Brilliance resides here. > ROBIN LAURENCE
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: COLLECTED WORKS At the Rennie Museum until November 3
During a recent media tour of
Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works, the acclaimed American artist spoke about the idea of “embodiment” and how it is essential to his creative process. “If you make a thing,” he said, “it looks like what it claims to be about.” Every aspect of an individual work of art, whether formal or material, must reiterate or “embody” the idea behind it. Marshall paused in front of his 2002 photo triptych Heirlooms and Accessories, whose white frames he made himself and inlaid with rhinestones. “Even if you don’t know what it is,” he said, “encoded in the structure of the thing are enough elements to give you a road map to start to figure out what’s going on.”
One of an impressive range of works on view at the Rennie Museum, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and mixed-media installations, Heirlooms and Accessories is both deeply reasoned and deeply troubling. It is constructed around an infamous and widely circulated photograph of the lynching of two black men in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. The focus here, however, is intentionally shifted away from the brutalized black bodies (the photo reproduced in each panel of the triptych has been “ghosted” so that it serves as a faint backdrop) to three white women, of different generations, who
are part of the mob at the crime scene. Not that they exhibit any fear of being identified as accessories. The face of each woman, gazing with appalling indifference at the camera, has been isolated and foregrounded within the framing image of a locket. And each locket is attached to a chain that echoes the ropes around the necks of the two hanged men.
The dominant metaphor here is that the violent crimes and physical traumas committed against Africanamericans, starting with slavery and still manifest today, are “structurally embedded” in American society. They’re a legacy handed down through generations of American whites, just as family heirlooms might be handed down. This analogy is made all the more unsettling by the suggestion of a jewellery box conveyed by the rhinestone-inlaid frames.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, raised in South Central Los Angeles, and based for many years in Chicago, Marshall has witnessed more than his share of protest, violence, and destruction. He is not interested, however, in registering his own experience of contemporary incidents or occurrences. “I don’t buy this internal drive to make work that comes from a personal place,” he said, “because that kind of work is only relevant to the person who makes it.” Instead, he wants to participate in “the long historical conversation”. He does this by re-examining African-american stories from a measured distance, framing them within deconstructed elements of the western art-historical canon and, at the same time, marrying them to aspects of Africanamerican visual and literary culture.
His 1986 painting Invisible Man, for instance, poses questions about presence, absence, and the challenges of painting blackness within the context of Ralph Ellison’s eponymous 1952 novel. Untitled (La Venus Negra) ,a painting with collage elements, employs voodoo veves or symbols while examining ideas of African-american beauty.
Marshall’s mixed-media installation Untitled (Black Power Stamps) is from an exhibition he created in the late 1990s, speaking to the culture and politics of the 1960s, particularly the American civil rights and black liberation movements. Five block-printed text works on paper read “Black Is Beautiful”, “Black Power”, “We Shall Overcome”, “By Any Means Necessary”, and “Burn Baby Burn”. Read sequentially, these slogans suggest that, in the arena of racial politics, unrealized aspiration inevitably leads to violent revolution. Complementing the prints are an enormous “ink pad” and five greatly oversized “stamps”, sculptures that bear the same words and attach an oddly bureaucratic element of authority to them.
Other works in the exhibition, which spans some three decades of Marshall’s career, address the failure of social housing projects in Los Angeles and Chicago, the commercializing of tragic events in African-american history, the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Afrofuturism, and the co-opting of African tribal sculpture in the quest for an authentic Africanamerican art form. Both individually and collectively, they create an experience for the viewer that is rich, deep, and thought-provoking. > ROBIN LAURENCE