Exhibit opens London’s eyes to Emily Carr
LONDON— Emily who? That was a question frequently asked last month about a Canadian artist who has, almost unbelievably, never before been given a show in London. But now the question has been memorably answered.
“We’re opening a big art exhibit about a woman from Canada no one has ever heard of,” said the distinguished looking man with white hair seated near me outdoors on a warm, sunny afternoon at the café of the Dulwich Picture Gallery last week.
That woman, of course, is Emily Carr, who became legendary for painting the dark forests and glittering coast lines of British Columbia, and for her expeditions to capture the magic of First Nations totem poles and bring them to the attention of all Canadians.
Carr’s name is very familiar to Canadians, but not nearly as familiar to the public elsewhere. Being ignored in Britain seemed a cruel irony, since she was born to British parents (in Victoria, B.C., in 1871), had a very British upbringing and came across to some people in Canada as terribly English.
The exhibition had not yet opened to the public when I visited Dulwich and, at the café, I surmised the man at the next table was an invited insider, possibly a current or former board member of this historic gallery on the outskirts of London.
The show, From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, is a spectacular co-production of Dulwich and the Art Gallery of Ontario, where it will appear in a somewhat different manifestation in the spring of 2015.
It’s a bold, complex and expensive undertaking, and a huge risk. But within days of its official opening last weekend, it was already clear the exhibit is a smash hit in the rich, crowded and hugely competitive culture world of the British capital.
Based on the sensationally positive response of the critics, I’d wager that Carr, who died in 1945 after a career that had as many downs as ups, is on her way to becoming a belated superstar of the international art world.
“We were aiming for a more dramatic, insightful structure for this exhibition than straight chronology,” says Toronto-based Sarah Milroy, who was recruited by the AGO to co-curate the show in partnership with Ian Dejardin of the Dulwich gallery. “We wanted to stun the British public into submission.”
Mission accomplished, if we can take the word of leading London art critics.
“If ever there was a heroine of true grit in the history of art it was Emily Carr,” declared Laura Cumming in the Observer. “Carr’s landscapes of the high skies, wild bays and deep forests of the Pacific west coast of Canada — whispering with sound, radiant with inner movement and mysterious light — are as exhilarating as the places they represent.”
Karen Wright in the Independent was just as laudatory. “This is a beguiling show, and deserves to be one of the biggest blockbusters of the season.”
In the Daily Telegraph, Richard Dormant declared, “Mounting an exhibition of any unknown artist is often risky, but when the artist is an ornery proto-feminist from the backwoods of Canada who has never had a show in this country before, you are asking for trouble. What a relief, then, that the gamble . . . has paid off.”
Instead of merely presenting Carr’s greatest hits, the exhibition at the Dulwich includes a stunning collection of First Nations objects, many of which were secured from institutions in Britain.
In Toronto, there will be a different take on First Nations art, with different loans.
The exhibition was triggered when Dulwich had a huge hit with an exhibition called Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of
Seven. Michael Koerner, a key player and benefactor and former board chair of the AGO, suggested that Dulwich and the AGO would be perfect partners for an Emily Carr show.
In London, the show has the goal of introducing an unknown artist. But in Toronto it will have a differ- ent goal: to present Carr’s work in a new way and allow the public to see her freshly and, in particular, freeing her from the issue of appropriating aboriginal culture.
That’s partly because some objects could not travel out of Britain and also because, as Milroy explained in an interview, Canada is at a different stage of dealing with colonialism.
Carr went to San Francisco to study art when she was still a teenager and she also spent some years in England (1899 to 1904) and Paris (1910-11).
But in mid-life, she had to face the fact that buyers weren’t responding to her work and consequently stopped painting for 15 years, from 1913 to 1927.
A breakthrough came when she was 56. The National Gallery of Canada included some of her work in an exhibition called Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. Carr travelled to Toronto and Ottawa and met Lawren Harris, a driving force in the Group of Seven, who encouraged her to resume landscape painting.
There’s one entire room devoted to Carr’s brooding images of trees with thick trunks in dark forests, and one of her masterpieces, Happiness (1939), captures the mysterious soul of a special tree.
Her greatest late works include Indian Church (1929), which shows a church threatened by a surrounding forest, and Sky (1936), which is dazzling and radiant by contrast with her brooding images of dark forests. The exhibition continues in Dulwich through March 8, 2015. The Toronto incarnation opens at the AGO in April. It is certain to be one of the most unmissable shows of 2015. mknelman@thestar.ca
“We wanted to stun the British public into submission.” SARAH MILROY SHOW CO-CURATOR