Books unravel the portraits of Canadian artists
Stories of David Milne and Annie Pootoogook come to life on the page
David Milne, by Ian A.C. Dejardin and Sarah Milroy, Philip Wilson Publishers, 208 pages, $71.95
In the introduction to “David Milne,” the eponymous volume that goes along with an exhibition of the Canadian painter’s work coming to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in October, co-curator Sarah Milroy calls Milne “one of Canada’s best kept secrets.” That’s a mild stretch — the Art Gallery of Ontario has a permanent study centre devoted to the artist, open to the public — but everything’s relative. Compared to his contemporaries in the Group of Seven, whose particular fascinations with the Canadian wilderness have been wrung nearly dry over the decades, Milne’s a near-unknown.
The book looks to offer some reasons why: Milne’s back-andforth across the Canada-U.S. border, and his canny elision of a heroic Canadian nationalism left him comfortably outside a prescriptive notion of Canadian art in the first half of the 20th century. That left him free to be what he was: a Modern artist grappling with seismic shifts both in art and the world itself.
Tracking him from his days as a war artist during the First World War, Milroy and Dejardin assemble a compelling portrait. One chapter of the book features the inclusion of a conversation with photographer Edward Burtynsky who, like Milne, shared a fascination with mines as a subject of artistic inquiry.
That’s just one way Milne departs from this country’s overshadowing painterly myth — the Group painted industrial scenes, too, but they’ve been footnoted against their wilderness efforts — and, you could argue, stands ever-so-slightly above it. I think that’s what the exhibition and its accompanying book might mean to slyly suggest. But let’s wait for the show in the fall.
Annie Pootoogook: Cutting Ice, by Nancy Campbell, Goose Lane/McMichael Canadian
Art Collection, 176 pages, $45
Only a handful of tragedies in Canadian cultural history (Gord Downie, Tom Thomson) measure up to the heartbreaking death of Annie Pootoogook, whose body was found in the Ottawa River in 2016.
A police investigation remains open, with no end in sight; what we do know is Pootoogook, who was 47, had been living on and off the streets for years, addicted to alcohol and drugs. What took her to the water that September night may never be known.
The McMichael Canadian Art Collection waited a full year before putting Cutting Ice, an exhibition it was reluctant to bill as a memorial, on view in September of last year. With the release of the book of the same name, it allows itself a fuller eulogy.
The book treads carefully in spots, including long histories of the Indigenous craft imperative hatched by the federal government in the 1950s, and how it affected Inuit artistic production. But it also lays out how a workaday commitment to producing cultural product for a southern market became the eventual staging ground for a new, unbridled form of northern expression, with Pootoogook at its fore.
Pootoogook was a groundbreaker, wilfully departing from the economic imperatives of expectation for Inuit art — soapstone carvings, animistic drawings — choosing instead to render in coloured pencils scenes from her daily life. These could be mundane, joyous or harrowing: carving seal meat on the kitchen floor, a romantic entanglement or a child smashing bottles of alcohol to stop her parents from drinking.
Pootoogook’s unflinching pursuit to capture the world as she saw it won her many accolades. In an essay by curator Nancy Campbell, who brought Pootoogook south for the first time in 2006 for a Power Plant show, a full biography is revealed: of a happy childhood, a lineage of artists and a quiet iconoclast straining at the forces that restricted her.