How war altered artist’s vision
Milne saw Europe as ‘ first tourist’ of Great War Canadian’s works being shown at Met in New York
Remembrance Day, south of the border, comes in the form of Veterans’ Day. But New Yorkers visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art today have a Canadian vision of what soldiers faced in World War I. Filled with a number of haunting war scenes, the exhibition is “ David Milne Watercolours: ‘Painting Toward the Light.’ ”
Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario’s curator of prints and drawings, Katharine Lochnan, “Painting Toward the Light” opened Tuesday in Manhattan, after some three months in London at the British Museum, the first solo Milne show outside of Canada. Closing at the Met Jan. 29, the show returns home to the AGO, Feb. 25 to May 21.
Milne was born in 1882 near Paisley, Ont., where, as he wrote, “ drawing was the only subject I failed in at public school.” In 1903, he immigrated to New York — “ the centre” as he called it — where he joined the Arts Students League. The Met version of “ Painting Toward the Light” understandably emphasizes his New York period, during which he exhibited five watercolours in the famous 1913 Armory Show, the groundbreaking exhibition of modern art that was a first in America. But it’s Milne’s drawings done during the 1918- 1919 period he spent in Britain, northern France and Belgium that are among the most memorable in the exhibition. He died in 1953, having moved back to rural Ontario in 1929.
Arriving in Europe too late to witness the fighting, he nevertheless could not avoid seeing the “ wildness of war wreckage,” in his words, battlegrounds with “ boots often with socks and feet in them, and, over all, the sweet sickish, but not offensive, smell of death.” Row upon row of white wooden crosses are shown stuck in the bombed- out ground in Courcelette From the Cemetery. A watercolour over graphite drawing dated July 26, 1919, it is however as chilling as winter itself and speaks to the shock Milne felt looking at how “ the earth had been torn up and torn up and torn up again.”
In the French town near where the Battle of the Somme was fought, the artist found himself alongside a special detachment sent to tend to Canadian graves. Following a brief ceremony, the chaplain and burial crew left for the next gravesite, leaving Milne alone again with the graves. That was it, he wrote later, “ Canada’s official farewell to the men who won, and lay beside, Courcelette.” Milne called himself “ the first tourist of the war,” says Rosemarie Tovell of the National Gallery in Ottawa, who contributed the section on Milne’s war work to the exhibition catalogue, David Milne Watercolours.
“ He was 37 years old at the time, already a mature man and not a young kid. He understood what had happened. The experience changed his art completely. Before the war, he had a more bucolic vision of the landscape. He didn’t after it. The war changed him completely.” pgoddard@thestar.ca