A masterful portrait of resistance
A Black man sits slightly hunched on a drape of pale fabric, one leg crossed in casual repose. His expression suggests a fierce intelligence with ennobling intensity — that elusive moment, rarely grasped in portrait sittings, where the subject becomes as much an author of the piece as the artist.
Shirtless, he gazes upward and away, in command of the scene. The image is frank, forthright and self-possessed, a tribute by the artist to his subject. It’s exquisitely rendered, a charcoal drawing with such precision and subtlety of shading, that it’s clearly the work of a master of the form.
It’s so strikingly contemporary, it feels as though it could have been made last week. It put me in mind of the gorgeously elegant graphite portraits of Black Lives Matter members by Cyrus Marcus Ware, on view last summer at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Every. Now. Then.
The image is just as Torontonian, though generations removed. It was made by Franklin Carmichael, one of the less-celebrated members of the Group of Seven, in 1913-14, when he was in his early 20s while a student in Antwerp, Belgium. Soon after, the group would cement its reputation as a gang of heroic artistic chroniclers of the untamed Canadian wilderness, a project that began in earnest with the death of their woodsiest associate, Tom Thomson, in 1917.
Up to then, group members had frequently painted urban scenes and portraits — Lawren Harris’s portraiture is a woefully under-explored realm, subsumed by his transcendental mountainscapes and icebergs — until a narrative of the Canadian wild was crafted by the group as a nationalist project.
In hindsight, its singlemindedness produced damn- ing exclusions, namely of Indigenous people inhabiting those disappearing wilds. This image, on view at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s Director’s Cut exhibition, is another of those things: A snippet of Canadian social and cultural history relegated to the margins while narrow myth-building took hold.
The exhibition as a whole, cu- rated by director Ian Dejardin from the museum’s own collection, is remarkable, filled with spectacular, little-seen works, but this one stood out for me. It speaks of a time when our national fables weren’t yet fully constructed, and in their current dismantling, it slips right into place.
It tells a broader truth: That Carmichael’s interests ranged into diversity, urbanity and socioeconomic division — all elements of 1920s Toronto as industrialization took hold. A Black man would have been a risqué subject for Carmichael, marginalized as African-Canadians were in the evolving colonial cultural myth. (The Royal Ontario Museum’s recent Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art put a fine point on the depth, persistence and brutality of that exclusion in our cultural history.) As the Group ethos took hold, images like these faded deep into the background for their counterpoint to a mission meant to be single-minded. We don’t know why Carmichael chose to portray him; the piece is simply untitled, his name not preserved. It’s an undeniable masterwork but one, over all the years, I’ve never seen. I suspect, like Harris’s portraits and images of industrial decay, it might have been seen to muddy a simplistic myth that cast Canadian art as the exclusive realm of postImpressionist purity, unsullied by the complications of the real world. But the world is complicated, and always has been.
The group can be part of that truth, not a retreat from it.
Director’s Cut continues to Nov. 18, 2018. For more information, please see mcmichael.com