Defiant Spirits Read online

  Van Gogh and Cézanne were only two of the “moderns” to whom Jackson could have looked for inspiration. His sixteenth-month stint in Europe between the autumn of 1911 and early 1913 coincided with radical and far-reaching developments in the art world. These were the years the American art historian Meyer Schapiro would later call “the heroic period in which the most astonishing innovations had occurred.” 28 Jackson would not necessarily have been aware of all these innovations, but some, as a young artist rubbing shoulders with other young artists, he could hardly have avoided. During his third interlude in Europe, Cubist works appeared at the 1911 Salon d’Automne, and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began experimenting with collages and developing Synthetic Cubism. Italian Futurism arrived in Paris, two exhibitions of the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) toured Europe, and a second Post-Impressionist exhibition was staged in London. In Cologne the Sonderbund-Ausstellung devoted an entire room to the work of Edvard Munch. Wassily Kandinsky published the profoundly significant Concerning the Spiritual in Art, whose account of the “language of form and colour” outlined the principles on which much modern art was beginning to develop. Perhaps most innovative of all, during this time both Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay achieved total abstraction.

  Jackson, like Lawren Harris, was coy about his European influences, but it is revealing that he spent his second sojourn in Paris, early in 1912, in a studio on the west side of the Jardin du Luxembourg. His address was 26 rue de Fleurus; his neighbours directly across the narrow street, at number 27, were Gertrude and Leo Stein, the two great American enthusiasts for European modernist art. The pair hosted Saturday salons for both expatriates and Parisians in rooms bedecked with Picassos and Matisses. According to one visitor in 1912, the young American painter Marsden Hartley, the walls of “27” (as the apartment was known) were “all afire with epoch-making ideas and at least two vivid people under them.” 29

  Jackson, in Paris at the same time as Hartley, might likewise have been invited into “27” to meet some of these vivid people, because in the pre-war years the Steins were generous hosts who welcomed many young artists.30 If so, he would not have been the first Canadian art student to cross the threshold. In 1909 the painter John Goodwin Lyman, from Montreal, was introduced to the Steins by his American cousin.31 Even without a similar entree or invitation, Jackson certainly would have known about these painters and intellectuals with their epoch-making ideas.

  Leaving Paris in the spring, Jackson once again made his way to the fishing village of Étaples, two hundred kilometres north of Paris. Nestled among the sand dunes and thick fogs of the Côte d’Opale, Étaples had been the site since the 1880s of a thriving American artistic colony whose members at various times included the American Impressionist Frederick Carl Freiseke and the African-American painters Henry O. Tanner and William Edouard Scott. Numerous expatriate Australians, such as Hilda Rix Nicholas, also painted at Étaples. In the summer of 1912 Jackson worked there with the Australian landscapist Arthur Baker-Clack, known for his brilliant colours: according to Jackson, Baker-Clack “revelled in colours he could not afford.” 32 From Étaples, Jackson crossed the Channel to visit cousins in the north of England before returning to the Continent with them for a group expedition to Italy. It was there, in the autumn of 1912, inspired by the bright palette of Baker-Clack as well as the bold examples of Post-Impressionism, that he painted Assisi from the Plain.

  BY THE TIME he returned to Canada at the beginning of 1913, A.Y. Jackson had therefore developed a personal mode of expression, indebted to both Impressionism and Van Gogh, in which he painted with vivid colours in a loose, sketchy manner, eliminating detail and applying his paint in thick layers.

  Jackson was coming to believe that this style was the appropriate one for depicting the Canadian landscape, but his results were drastically at odds with the glossy surfaces, suffused light and harmonious blending of subtle tones found in the works favoured by Montreal collectors. From France in May 1912 he had written a letter to the Montreal Herald deploring how Canadian connoisseurs, despite living in a “brilliant atmosphere, surrounded by colour,” inexplicably preferred the “low-toned” and “gloomy” paintings of the Hague School.33 “I hope it pokes someone in the eye,” he wrote to his mother of his letter. “It’s time someone did a little kicking and made a noise.” 34

  Jackson also bemoaned these tastes in a letter to another relative, pointing out that as wealthy Canadians “buy only the works of dead artists, it’s kind of hard on the ones still living.” 35 He did manage to sell one of his paintings to a Montreal architect, but within weeks the work was returned after an ultimatum from the architect’s wife: “either she or the canvas had to go.” 36 Jackson’s fortunes were about to change, however, as a more sympathetic patron for his work suddenly stepped forward.

  Revolted by the hostile reception of his work at the Art Association of Montreal, Jackson retreated to Émileville, sixty-five kilometres east of Montreal, with a painter friend, Randolph Hewton, a Montrealer and former student at the Académie Julian whom he met the year before in Paris. The twenty-five-year-old Hewton worked, like Jackson, in a modern style of flattened forms and, in works such as Afternoon, Cameret, checkerboard patterns of colour. Here, in maple sugar country, the two men painted landscapes and earned money helping the farmers in the sugaring-off season. Works Jackson produced included Early Spring, Émileville, Quebec and Morning after Sleet, the latter showing blue and aquamarine shadows on the snow, with birch trees in the middle ground.

  While in Émileville, Jackson received a letter from J.E.H. MacDonald, whom he seems never to have met, though with whom he had been corresponding.37 MacDonald reported that a Toronto painter named Lawren Harris wished to buy a work of his called The Edge of the Maple Wood, painted in 1910 and seen by Harris at the 1911 OSA exhibition. Harris was probably less interested in the painting than he was in Jackson. He could, after all, have tried to purchase the work at any point in the preceding two years. It was an accomplished piece, Impressionist in its broken brushwork but not atypical, in its restricted range of sepia and umber, of many other works offered for display at OSA exhibitions. It included a tumbledown farmhouse and even a snake fence of the sort that crawled picturesquely through so many Canadian landscape paintings of the period.

  While painting The Edge of the Maple Wood in March 1910, Jackson had written despondently to his mother: “Nothing doing in the way of selling pictures. So I guess it’s really all over now.” 38 But this painting was to be, in so many ways, the most important of his entire career. Whatever impression the work made on him in 1911, two years later Harris had no doubt been made aware of Jackson through the reviews in the Montreal newspapers. News of a Post-Impressionist suddenly appearing in Montreal, a painter whose work bore comparison to “the most advanced of the Futurists,” would certainly have caused Harris to take notice. He clearly regarded Jackson, on the basis of the panicked responses in the Montreal press and the quality of The Edge of the Maple Wood, as a potential recruit. For when Jackson replied to MacDonald, telling him that the work, like all his paintings, was still for sale, Harris sent him a cheque along with a letter reporting that a Canadian art movement was under way in Toronto.

  Jackson wrote back with enthusiasm: “It really looks as though the sacred fires were going to burst into flame in Toronto by the faithful efforts of yourself and MacDonald.” He added, “It seems like a dream. So scared I’ll wake up.” 39

  THERE DID INDEED appear to be reason for optimism in Toronto. Among other things, in 1913 the city finally opened its first public art gallery, the Art Museum of Toronto. The museum had been incorporated by the Government of Ontario in 1900, but because of the lack of both a venue and holdings (William Cruikshank’s sketchbook, donated in 1909, was its first acquisition) it had no material existence for a dozen years. The problem of space was finally solved thanks to the will of Goldwin Smith, one-time Regius Professor of History at Oxford and
author in 1891 of Canada and the Canadian Question, a book that argued for Canada’s union with the United States. When Dr. Smith died in Toronto in June 1910, without having achieved the desired American union apart from, on a personal level, an advantageous marriage to a wealthy American-born widow, he left a fortune of more than $800,000. The bulk of the money migrated south to Cornell University, where he had taught for a mere two years in the 1870s (he left when he belatedly noticed the presence on campus of female students). His library went to the University of Toronto, and the house, one of the grandest in the city, a stately brick mansion known as The Grange, to the Art Museum of Toronto.40

  Since the new museum would not officially open until June, the 1913 OSA exhibition took place, as it had for the previous few years, at the Public Reference Library. Shortly before it opened, the director of the National Gallery in Ottawa, Eric Brown, published an article in a book called Canadian National Problems. Brown was an Englishman who arrived in Canada in 1910 to become the National Gallery’s first full-time curator. Although he wore tweeds and a monocle, he was an eager outdoorsman who loved camping, canoeing and (as his wife later wrote) “leaving behind civilization to explore the bush, lakes and mountains.” 41 These outdoor pursuits disposed him favourably towards paintings of Canada’s rugged landscape. His piece for Canadian National Problems, entitled “Canada and her Art,” was remarkably upbeat, making confident pronouncements about Canadian art: “A national spirit is being slowly born . . . There are painters who are finding expression of their thought in the vast prairies of the far West, in the silent spaces of the North, by the side of torrent and tarn, and in the mighty solitudes of the winter woods.” 42

  The 1913 OSA exhibition included many examples of these “silent spaces” and “mighty solitudes” that Brown implied were synonymous with the Canadian national spirit (but that the critic for the New York Sun had found singularly lacking at the MacDowell Club). Among the plentiful Canadian landscapes were C.W. Jefferys’s A Bright Day in Saskatchewan and A Prairie Trail, Tom McLean’s Through the Pines and North Country, and Fred Brigden Jr.’s In the Hardwood Bush, Northern Ontario. There was even a contribution from Princess Patricia, the twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the daughter of the Duke of Connaught, governor general of Canada since 1911: she exhibited a view of Lake Louise.

  MacDonald and Harris were, for the second year running, the two most prolific painters, with MacDonald showing several of his Georgian Bay paintings—one called The Lonely North—along with views of rapids along the Magnetawan River. Harris exhibited four paintings; one of them, an urban scene entitled The Corner Store, proved the most popular in the entire show. Less popular, perhaps, but drawing none of the hostile comment they had received in Montreal, were four canvases by A.Y. Jackson. These works had been sent to the exhibition before Jackson retired to Émileville. Probably the sight of them, as much as for The Edge of the Maple Wood, excited Harris, for they were painted in the vigorous modern style that so appalled the Montreal critics. They were, however, European rather than Canadian scenes: two views of Assisi, one of sand dunes near Cucq, France, and a fourth called The Yellow Tree. By purchasing The Edge of the Maple Wood rather than these European canvases, Harris was trying to wean Jackson from Continental subject matter—though not the Continental avant-garde—and point him in the direction of more indigenous scenes.

  The work of these three young painters caught the attention of the reviewer for the Toronto Daily Star, Margaret L. Fairbairn, who was struck by the forcefulness of their work. A knowledgeable commentator on the arts, she wrote that the exhibition was “dominated almost entirely by the younger men, who, casting aside formulas, start out to record only what are their own individual impressions. The result is virile work, fearless brushing, strange, crude colour.” 43

  This was something of an embellishment: the brushwork and “strange, crude colour” were nothing like as bold as what had been on offer at the Armory Show. The reviewer for the Toronto Daily Mail & Empire noted, in fact, how the “wave of artistic excitement” that swept over the United States in the previous few weeks had “scarcely touched Toronto.” 44 But Fairbairn’s comments note perceptively how MacDonald and Harris, along with Jackson, were beginning to experiment with a more audacious and “virile” style of painting that would move away from the muzzy tones and gentle pastoral beauty of many Canadian landscape paintings.

  BY 1913 THE new Canadian art movement in Toronto had another recruit: Tom Thomson exhibited one of his works in public for the first time. That he should have exhibited nothing before reaching his mid-thirties indicates both a lack of confidence and a desire for perfection. He had few illusions about his talent as a painter. In Seattle, any designs failing to meet with his approval he would “burn up,” according to his brother Ralph, “or smear with cigar ashes or the ends of burned matches.” 45 He took a similarly incendiary attitude towards his paintings. Harris claimed he would sometimes sit in disgust before a freshly painted picture and “flick burnt matches at it in a kind of whimsical scorn.” 46 He once made a bonfire of his paintings in Algonquin Park. The proceedings were witnessed by a twelve-year-old girl who found herself impressed by the “beautiful” effect of the burning oil paints.47

  A loner by nature, Thomson nonetheless thrived in the encouraging atmosphere of a group. MacDonald, Varley, Harris and Lismer all urged him to develop his talent, and early in 1913 he painted A Northern Lake for exhibition at the annual osa show. A restrained effort, thinly painted in murky tones, it featured a composition to which Thomson would return many times in the years to come: a foreground of boulders, a horizontal band of water in the middle ground and a shore in the distance, all framed by the rigid, vertical trunks of bare trees.

  The canvas had none of the fearless brushing or crude colour Fairbairn noted in the canvases of some of the other young painters. But it suitably impressed the Government of Ontario’s selection committee, which purchased it for $250. Thomson benefited from the fact that this three-man committee consisted of his old teacher William Cruikshank and—possibly even more decisive—two members of the Madawaska Club, a group of University of Toronto professors, all fishing and canoeing enthusiasts, who in 1898 purchased land and then built a clubhouse for their outdoor recreations at the mouth of Go Home River on Georgian Bay. Their leader was the physicist

  W.J. Loudon, a keen outdoorsman who had followed up his Notes on Elementary Mechanics (1909) with The Small-Mouthed Bass (1910). In 1913 Dr. Loudon served on the Government of Ontario’s selection committee, and he was no doubt as favourably disposed to northern scenes as the third member, Dr. John Seath, a former teacher and inspector of schools who had been Ontario’s superintendent of education since 1906. Dr. Seath was a charter member of the Madawaska Club. Like Loudon, he was a friend of Dr. James MacCallum, who had purchased Island 158 because of its proximity to the club and who might have done some string pulling in order to see his young protege represented in a public collection.

  Questions of influence peddling aside, to have sold his first exhibited painting to the provincial government was a tremendous boost to a painter lacking in self-assurance. In purely practical terms, the $250 Thomson earned from his painting was the equivalent of almost two months’ wages. It gave him the courage, like MacDonald a year earlier, to quit full-time paid employment (he had recently been part of an exodus from Grip Limited to a rival firm, Rous and Mann). He cashed his government cheque in $1-bills and, visited later that day by Arthur Lismer at his latest boarding house, on Wellesley Street, tossed the bills into the air in an uncharacteristic fit of exuberance. Later he pinned the money to the wainscotting of his attic room so that he could see it all at once. Such behaviour was slightly odd from a man who had inherited $2,000 from his paternal grandfather, but presumably he felt that his $250, unlike the legacy, had been properly earned. It was, in any case, to mark the beginning of a new stage in his life.

  8 THE HAPPY ISLES


  ARTHUR LISMER HAD reasons of his own for celebrating: the Government of Ontario had likewise purchased one of his works from the 1913 OSA exhibition. Featuring tree stumps and waste ground surrounded by a fringe of pine trees, The Clearing looked like a scene from the heavily logged areas of Northern Ontario. In fact, it was painted in the Toronto suburbs, in York Mills, on the site where ground was being cleared for a new subdivision. Although Lismer received $250 for the work, he could hardly afford Thomson’s heedlessness, since he had a wife and, from the middle of May, a daughter to support. Part of his money was spent on a cot and a baby carriage.1 To earn extra money, he took a summer job at the Ontario College of Art (as the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design was rechristened in September 1912). It was the start of a teaching career at which he would excel throughout his life.

  Lismer, like Varley, was hoping to paint farther afield than the Toronto suburbs. Sheffield was a dismal industrial city described by one resident as an “enduring cloud of smoke” occupied by a “pale-faced teeming population.” 2 But Toronto, for Lismer, was scarcely an improvement. Like MacDonald, he found it drab and grey. “Toronto is a good place,” he once said. “Good to get out of!” 3 So far he had painted at York Mills and on the banks of the Don River, but he was mesmerized by Thomson’s accounts of Algonquin Park and the Mississagi Forest Reserve—and mystified that most Torontonians seemed uninterested in such places. “If the country’s half as stirring as Tom’s sketches seem to indicate,” he wrote to a friend, “in Heaven’s name why are so many of Canadians always talking about their stomachs, their money, etc.?” 4 He found Torontonians obsessed with getting and spending. “They can argue and discourse for hours on the dollar and the ways and means of getting it,” he wrote, “but they can’t talk on any other subject intelligently. My present opinion is that they are all ‘swank,’ to put it broadly.” 5