Group of Seven’s elder statesman
J.E.H. MacDonald, or Jim to his friends, including those far more famous ones among his Group of Seven crew, was the group’s elder statesman, though far from the top of its marquee.
MacDonald didn’t have Lawren Harris’s loopy chutzpah or unpredictable stylistic veers, nor Tom Thomson’s radically electric brushwork (not officially a group member, I know), nor A.Y. Jackson’s sturdy commitment to self-promotion. Instead, he’s been comfortably ensconced on the lower half of the roster alongside supporting actors like Frank Johnston, Frederick Varley, Franklin Carmichael, or the perennially underrated Arthur Lismer, who to my mind nearly outweighs them all. So when a MacDonald solo exhibition pops up at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, it seems reasonable to ask why. Group fatigue would have seemed to set in long ago, what with seasons of Harris hogging the spotlight with auction records and a crossborder star turn convened by, of all people, Steve Martin. Looking to the lower end of its batting order would seem to be a natural turn for a museum like the McMichael, beholden to the Group’s legacy but overexposed on its star power — a quiet gesture to keep the home fires burning, if a little less brightly. If all this leads you to consider this a tokenistic gesture toward the senior MacDonald, though, you’d be wrong. In the low-slung galleries, walls are painted a deep charcoal-black, casting the entire show in an enveloping gravitas. It sets the tone:
This is open advocacy for a supporting character thrust into the limelight. In the hands of the gallery’s director Ian Dejardin, who curated the show, it’s a fully felt endeavour.
MacDonald’s full-sized paintings are few here, with his sketches, crafted out in the open, being the lifeblood of the whole affair.
It’s an opinion some may not share, but this is both a mercy to the artist, who thrived, liberated, in the immediacy of the sketching moment, but seemed to wilt a bit in studio, producing technically accomplished works that can feel a little lifeless.
Harvest Evening Moon, a 1917 composition of haystacks at dusk, seems to pay homage to Monet without any of his beatific luminosity.
Forest Wilderness, an undulating landscape from 1921, is one of MacDonald’s bestknown works, but has a mechanical regularity that blunts a visceral appeal. With its odd confluence of like tones and textural flatness, War Canoes, a big canvas from 1913 of Indigenous paddlers stabbing their way across a mountain lake, borders on blandness, with the eye having nowhere to land. But anyway, those sketches: As an opening salvo, Dejardin puts tiny works from as early as 1908 (MacDonald was born in 1873) under the painter’s watchful eye (a floor-to-ceiling photo of the grandfatherly MacDonald greets you at the door). The first, a 1908 snowfilled vista in Toronto’s High Park, is thin and precise, made with the lightest of touches. Within a year, though, MacDonald has leapt into bold, gestural gloop, embracing the surging realm of Impressionism with boundless gusto. A 1909 sketch, October Clouds, roils, ground and forest in murky green and black the product of thick blots of paint stabbed quickly with a brush, with clouds and sky made by kinetic swipe. How an artist travels the divide between that spontaneous moment and the inevitable deliberation of the studio experience is a bridge, for some, too far. I’m one who often thinks that Thomson’s sketches have an electricity his major paintings, while often astonishing, never really match — a hobbling to which MacDonald is by no means immune. A key moment in the show comes as Dejardin puts his rapturously kinetic sketch for Leaves in the Brook, from 1918, right alongside the painting it begat in 1919. They’re so astonishingly similar, right down to the placement of exact leaves on rocks, that the painting feels less a transmutation of the sketch than a direct copy, as though MacDonald, not able to recapture the rush of vision and emotion that moved him in the moment resorted instead to facsimile.
It helps explain why the show is so sketch-heavy, and not simply for the latter’s inevitably far greater numbers. The phases of the artist’s painting career are tracked along a dutiful timeline, from Algoma wilderness to Nova Scotia in the 20s to the Canadian Rockies in the 30s, but the sketches run through it almost as an electrocardiogram of MacDonald’s energies and interests. The Nova Scotia sketches feel fussy, more controlled, the artist maybe feeling unmoored, which he maybe was. A pair of paintings in the middle gallery, Harvest Evening and Algoma Waterfall, both from 1920, feel like they could have been made by two different artists. The first is tightly controlled, while the next is a gaudy and hectic mess, the picture tumbling together in a panic of ungainly forms and unstable colour schemes — purple stone and hunter-green trees, a night sky above a landscape apparently washed in unforgiving light.
It’s awkward, like MacDonald trying on a younger man’s ill-fitting clothes, trying to be something he’s not — something he seems to realize, with no work even remotely like it appearing again.
Into the Rockies, there’s another retreat in the full-sized canvases into a hoary precision, big blocks of mountains rendered faithfully in form with soft, hazy colour. They feel invitingly promotional, a pleasant emotional void. But step sideways into little sketches like 1929’s Above Lake O’Hara, a wind-whipped pine clinging to crag of rock in the snow, and MacDonald, again, comes alive. Larch Lake, also 1929, is riveting with implied dread, something MacDonald’s paintings never seem to have: A spindly larch, sickly yellowgreen, sprouts in the foreground, the sky obliterated by looming monoliths of shale behind it. It’s one of few moments where nature feels like a threat here. Other works, like the fussy Lodge at Lake O’Hara, with its Hudson’s Bay Blanket blanket draped over a bench at the fireside, can feel torn from a tourist brochure. Pieces like that may show MacDonald’s skill, which is abundant, but they keep his soul, on such full-blooded display just across the room, closely guarded — a weird duality that may well represent the man himself. You walk away from MacDonald thinking he had his moments, though not everything he did was great.
The show puts that much on clear view, and maybe that’s as it should be. Uncomplicated icons lionized in the service of tidy history is surely the Canadian way, but one we’re finally moving past.