IT'S IN THE CARDS
McMichael gallery opens its vault to showcase classic seasonal greetings from Group of Seven artists,
“This house was made for Christmas,” Signe McMichael once famously declared about the modern pastoral estate she and her husband, Robert, built near Kleinburg in the 1950s. With its multiple open hearths and forests of towering pines all around — not to mention its owners’ staunchly traditionalist world view — she was absolutely right.
Even this week, with a late-fall drizzle not giving much away to the winter wonderland just around the corner, the old house had a throwback sense of festivity to come.
The McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s careful handling of its founders’ fraught legacy is never too far from mind, as Robert fought to the last to keep the museum’s vaults locked tight from modern and contemporary work he believed would damage the legacy of his beloved Group of Seven and their peers. But if there’s one time of year to let such auld acquaintance be forgot, as they say, and embrace the simple sentimentality of the season, well, this is it.
This year, Signe’s words about the festive season become the title of a show of Christmas cards, which isn’t as cutesy as it seems.
Make no mistake: it’s certainly that, but the show is also a showcase of talents from the canon of Canadian artists, many of whom — like a good chunk of the Group of Seven — got their start as graphic or commercial artists.
Blossoming into professional painters, many of them kept up the practice of card-making for their friends and family, lending their holiday greetings the powerfully personal touch of their talents.
And about that traditionalist legacy: While you’ll find the familiars here in great number — Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, A.J. Casson and friends — a few abstractionists, such as Kazuo Nakamura and Harold Towne, sneak into the mix, but none more welcome than Jack Bush.
Bush, who also began as a commercial illustrator, blossomed in his later years into one of the world’s great abstract painters, as a major retrospective at National Gallery of Canada made clear.
Far from the robust abstraction of his legacy, Bush’s cards are warming tributes to his personal life as a family man and man of faith, for whom the holidays brought special meaning he seemed bursting to share. Here, he ties it up with a bright red bow.
Many of the artists kept up the practice of card-making for their friends and family, lending their holiday greetings the powerfully personal touch of their talents