Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, 2010
504 pp., illus., $36.95 hardcover
Canada’s art has always been self-conscious, and Canadian artists have felt compelled, by dint of relative obscurity and overshadowing by larger, louder art spheres and traditions, to reflect on their own position relative to the rest of the world.
To say that Canada has pondered the question of its own identity is a cosmic understatement. Even so, when the McMichael Canadian Art Collection inquired about his willingness to write a book commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the first show by the Group of Seven, Ross King worried that there might not be enough material to find a fresh angle on this Canadian cultural legend.
Since the group of friends came together at a design firm in Toronto in 1913, its seven original member painters (eight, including Tom Thomson, who died in 1917) have come to be portrayed as isolated woodlands artist-heroes. King sets out very specifically to “disrupt [this] traditional narrative,” as he puts it: “the myth of them going North, with ‘their minds as blank as their canvases’….”
The Group of Seven has served as an icon of Canadian art — indeed, of Canada — since around 1920, when members organized the group’s first official exhibition for the Ontario Society of Artists. Their jagged landscapes, with stark wildness and assertive colours, shapes, and brush strokes, came to define Canada as the “True North.”
As King shrewdly observes, the group’s iconic status has obscured the reality of the fight it took to build that myth. He sets out to recuperate the marvel of the Group of Seven in Defiant Spirits by chronicling the broader context in which its members worked. Besides a series of Toronto patrons, a larger national and international milieu also shaped the group’s quest for identity and for a “distinctly Canadian art.” Around the turn of the century, the fervour that came to be called modernism had already seized and shaken the international art world with new ideas about perspective, colour, and technique in painting, replacing notions of the painted, idealized landscape as contemplative and curative, a “pictorial balm for weary eyes and shattered nerves.”
King notes, however, that “the one thing that Canadians had in common, it seemed obvious for anyone who travelled across the country … was a vast landscape and a northern geography. “[Group members] wanted to say they were doing something distinctively Canadian, that the colours, the landscape was very different from Europe and America, and called for different artistic means. ... But they also wanted to shake up Canadian art.” The Canadian public was initially unreceptive.
The breakthrough finally came in 1924 at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, England, the largest Canadian art show ever held outside the Dominion. The many paintings by the Group of Seven were hailed as “vigorous” and “the foundation of what may become one of the greatest schools of landscape painting.”
King is nothing if not a master of context. Several of his non-fiction books have amplified artistic or historical moments, including The Judgment of Paris (on French Impressionism), which won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction in 2006 and went on to become a New York Times bestseller.
In this book, however, he never fully abandons himself to any of the eight characters he follows over a period of more than two decades — nor, ultimately, to the grandeur and brilliance of their work. Defiant Spirits is a work of journalistic diligence, of interest, respect, and deep knowledge of a subject. But it is not a work of love.
Interestingly, in the book’s final pages, its tenor shifts. Noting that contemporary (academic) detractors identify in the Group of Seven’s paintings an unseemly, imperialistic, or chauvinistic perspective — veneration of the individualistic hero and of “heroic survival in the face of adversity” over a more urban, genteel sense of Canadian multiculturalism — King’s passion for his subject matter is suddenly vivified. He rallies the larger context he’s provided to ascertain the group’s talent, innovation, determination, integrity, and courage.
And as he amply demonstrates, the Group of Seven ensured that the touristic ideal of Canada, including pallid views of nature that drew more from English pastoral tradition than from any first-hand experience, gave way to a unique identity forged from northern forest and vast wilderness, with an adroit measure of artistic savvy and flair.
— Mariianne Mays Wiebe (Read bio)
Mariianne Mays Wiebe is a poet and writer with an interest in creative processes across the disciplines.