Shaping the nation’s identity with a paintbrush and canvas
Why did I choose Emily Carr to be part of this book? Why not Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, or any other member of the Group of Seven pantheon, since they were recognized a decade before Carr and their work is equally well-known? These were all artists who wrenched the attention of Canadian art lovers away from pallid imitations of European art and focused them on the dramatic spaces of our own country.
I asked myself “Why Carr?” recently as I stood in front of one of her best-loved works, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1935), in the Vancouver Art Gallery, which now holds the bulk of her paintings. The canvas shows a lone, spindly tree, surrounded by brutally logged land, reaching up to a pearly pale sky painted with undulating circular strokes. The scorned tree could almost be a self-portrait for this defiant artist — her solitary, single-minded reach to selffulfilment, while the landscape is desecrated around her.
Carr is here partly because she had a pioneer’s resolve to make this land hers and to become part of it herself. Thomson and the Group of Seven were evolving their nationalist mission with the support of each other and the new nation’s small cultural elite. Carr developed her vision in isolation, while on the other side of the country. Once she was discovered by the eastern establishment, her art and her national reputation exploded.
But she’s also here because she tells Canadians, then and now, about far more than the awesome magnificence of Canadian space. By looking inward, she gave us an outward identity. She began with a terrain denser and wilder than anything seen in Algonquin Park; her forests were brooding and claustrophobic. In mid-career, she painted the carvings and cultural artifacts made by the Indigenous inhabitants of North America, who were ignored by the Group of Seven. In her later works, she infused her works with an erotic sensibility that few Canadian artists have equalled. And she captured not only the lush colours of the Pacific rainforest but also its despoliation by the logging industry. Carr never romanticized the wilderness, and she recorded how the resource industries — the basis of Canada’s prosperity — were already gobbling up the scenery.
In the 1990s, Emily Carr’s depictions of coastal Indigenous culture were criticized as cultural appropriation. Marcia Crosby, a Haida/Tsimshian art critic, argued that Carr invested carved poles with “a meaning that has to do with her national identity, not the national identity of the people who own the poles. . . . The colonization of images in order to create a new Canadian mythology is parasitic.” But these days, scholars are more likely to point out that Carr had great empathy for dispossessed peoples, even if she romanticized their culture. Gerta Moray, a Carr scholar, points out that Carr championed First Nations in the face of AngloCanadian derision and asserted “their honour, dignity and the coherence of their traditional way of life and beliefs.”
Today, there is a certain ennui with our national wallpaper — a feeling that our obsession with landscape stifled any Canadian shift to the new kinds of art that Carr had seen in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Perhaps that is why no Canadian artists from the early 20th century ever established international reputations or foreign sales: while they were still painting landscapes, the art world moved on. It took a completely different group of artists — the Quebec intellectuals and artists, including Paul-Émile Borduas and JeanPaul Riopelle, who in 1948 published Refus global — to launch surrealism and abstraction in Canada.
Yet Emily Carr’s reputation has quietly grown. In 2012, a small selection of her work was included in Documenta XIII in Kassel, Germany, in an international exhibition of pioneering female modernists. In 2014, the first European solo exhibition of her work, mounted by London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, was ecstatically reviewed: “The best artist nobody knows,” according to one British headline writer; “Canada’s very own Van Gogh,” according to another. An exhibition entitled Mystical Landscapes, including works by Emily Carr, will open at the Art Gallery of Ontario in October, 2016 before moving to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2017.
As a child, Carr developed her artistic vision of this “wonderful new land;” today, her vision is recognized as richer and more complex than that of her contemporaries. By finding her place, she gave Canadians then and now a larger sense of ours.
Copyright 2016 by Charlotte Gray. From The Promise of Canada: 150 Years — People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country by Charlotte Gray, published by Simon & Schuster Canada. More information: PromiseOfCanada.ca See Charlotte Gray at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on Tuesday. ifoa.org/events