Defiant Spirits Read online

  The MacDowell Club, at 108 West 55th Street, was founded in 1905 with the plan—rather like Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club—of staging plays, readings, musical recitals, art exhibitions and occasional displays of morris dancing. According to the New York Times, its aim was “to nurture the fine arts and protect them against the coldness of a commercial age,” and to “seek out embryo Millets, Beethovens, Shakespeares, and help them along the thorny path which leads to Parnassus.” 40 Into this bonhomous den of artistic goodwill came, in the first week of March, paintings by some of Canada’s most renowned artists: Bill Beatty, William Brymner, William Clapp, Maurice Cullen, Clarence Gagnon, E. Wyly Grier and C.W. Jefferys, together with ones by Harris and MacDonald.

  Americans were not disposed to hold Canadian cultural productions in any esteem. The arrogance and antipathy with which New Yorkers regarded Canada would be demonstrated a few months later when Rupert Brooke, visiting the city and eagerly anticipating his impending trip through Canada, was warned by New York friends to give the country a wide berth: they spoke scornfully of the “Philistine bleakness” of the “country without a soul” lying somewhere to the north.41 For many Americans Canada was a place to slay deer, catch salmon and build lakefront monstrosities, but not to find artistic innovation. Their prejudices appeared to be confirmed by the fact that so many Canadian artists, exasperated by poor prospects in their homeland, had fetched up hopefully in New York, “drawn thither,” as Brooke observed, “for the better companionship and the higher rates of pay.” 42

  The reviews of the Canadian paintings at the MacDowell Club were sparse and mixed. The most resonant remarks were made by a reviewer for the New York Sun. In an article entitled “Softer Aspects of Northern Country at the MacDowell Club,” the critic found himself perplexed that, with the exception of “one or two wintry aspects by J.E.H. MacDonald,” the savagery of the Canadian wilderness—what he called “the essence of the Dominion”—was largely unrepresented. Having had his idea of Canada nurtured, perhaps, by the poems of Lampman and Campbell, he lamented that there was “nothing that bears out the traditional fierceness of the climate of the country above the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes.” The only paintings that came anywhere close to capturing this essence, he believed, were Jefferys’s Saskatchewan landscapes, though these, with their thin and meticulous applications of paint, were executed in an outmoded style. “No one,” he concluded, “has quite conveyed that sense of boundless breadth and solitude that so readily stirs the visitor in Canada.” 43

  Given how they were hoping to convey exactly this kind of eerie grandeur, the reproach must have stung Harris and MacDonald. The critic’s observations echoed Harold Mortimer-Lamb’s five-year-old lament that “the spirit of the great northland” continued to elude Canadian painters. In contrast to the Scandinavian display at the Albright, there was nothing in the MacDowell Club exhibition that showed either the rugged elemental beauty of the land or a formal experimentation capable of conveying it. Much work still needed to be done to capture the savage heart of the Dominion.

  7 THE INFANTICIST SCHOOL

  WHATEVER ITS EFFECT on Harris and MacDonald, the exhibition at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo was far from the most important or influential art exhibition staged in the United States in 1913. Of vastly more consequence was the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York City. Opening on February 17 in the 69th Regiment Armory Building, it quickly came to be known as the Armory Show. As one critic at the Albright exhibition predicted, the “wildest and most incomprehensible flights” of the painters in Buffalo, such as Edvard Munch, “will appear mild and quite orderly by comparison with what you will see in the forthcoming International Exhibition of Modern Art.” 1

  The Armory Show ran in New York until March 15, before moving on to Chicago and then Boston. Organized by the newly formed Association of American Painters and Sculptors, it introduced the American public to many of the latest developments in European painting and sculpture, including works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. On opening night one of the organizers, John Quinn, declared, “The members of this association have shown you that American artists—young American artists, that is—do not dread, and have no need to dread, the ideas or the culture of Europe.” He made what turned out to be a prophetic announcement: “Tonight will be a red-letter night in the history not only of American but of all modern art.” 2

  Young American artists might have been ready to embrace the ideas and culture of Europe, but not so the public and many critics. The Continental avant-garde had in the previous few years developed a fearsome reputation. Just over two years earlier, in the autumn of 1910, an exhibition called Manet and the Post-Impressionists caused huge controversy in London. The exhibition’s curator, Roger Fry, coined the term Post-Impressionism to describe the styles of exhibited artists such as Georges Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse—men who, Fry explained in his catalogue, celebrated “individuality” and “self-expression” over a literal representation of nature.3 Much of the British press responded to these works with an astonishing fear and hostility. One newspaper denounced the artists as “the analogue of the anarchical movements in the political world.” Others attacked the paintings as “hysterical daubs,” “crude intolerable outrages,” “childish rubbish” and “sickening aberrations.” A doctor at Bedlam, the lunatic asylum, wrote a paper arguing that Post-Impressionism was the result of “degenerates,” “hysterics” and “paranoiacs” who had managed to “turn their unhealthy impulses towards art.” 4

  The even more challenging works that crossed the Atlantic in 1913 received an equally belligerent reception. The critics and the public alike were appalled at the apparently childlike drawing, distorted shapes and carelessly vigorous brushwork, all executed in shockingly bright or unnatural colours. Royal Cortissoz, the influential critic for the New York Herald Tribune and author of Art and Common Sense, called the paintings “freakish things” and denounced Post-Impressionism as “a gospel of stupid license and self-assertion.” 5 Another critic complained that Kandinsky’s work looked like “fragments of refuse thrown out of a butcher’s shop.” Matisse was denounced as “essentially epileptic,” and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was said to resemble an explosion in a slat factory.6 Teddy Roosevelt stomped through the building, waving his arms and shouting, “That is not art!” The Metropolitan Opera star Enrico Caruso mocked the artists by doing postcard caricatures of their works and handing them out as souvenirs. An effigy of Matisse was stabbed, beaten and burned by enraged American art students, and in Chicago the Vice Commission was summoned to investigate the canvases for moral turpitude.

  Although rare enough in the United States, such scenes were unheard of in Canada. Canadian art criticism had traditionally been respectful and constructive, with little of the vitriol or doltish scoffing that marked so much of that in Europe, especially in France. There had been no real succès de scandale, no critical rumpus, in the history of Canadian art. Canadian painters inspired apathy rather than outrage. Shocking new European movements, such as Cubism or Futurism, seemed a world away.

  Reverberations of the hysteria over Post-Impressionism were soon felt in Montreal, a city as conservative and unadventurous in its artistic tastes as Toronto. A month after the Armory Show opened in New York, the same heated rhetoric was heard at the annual spring exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal, one of the most important showcases for contemporary Canadian art. Canadian decency and propriety were under attack, the critics appeared to believe, from dangerous and debased foreign influences. “Post-Impressionists Shock Local Art Lovers at the Spring Exhibition,” blared the Montreal Daily Witness, a Protestant newspaper founded in 1860 to promote temperance. The headline continued: “Screaming Colours and Weird Drawing Cause Much Derisive Comment.” The paper’s reviewer proceeded to attack a landscape entitled Assisi from the Plain for its “prodigality of paint and studied car
elessness of handling.” 7 On the same day, the critic for the Montreal Daily Herald called the painter of Assisi from the Plain a member of the “Infanticist School,” claiming (with gross overstatement) that his works were “as contemptuous of all precedent as the most advanced of the Futurists.” 8

  Canadian art had found its bête noire, its own shocking equivalent of Matisse or Picasso. He was a thirty-year-old Montreal native named Alexander Young Jackson.

  A.Y. JACKSON HAD returned from prolonged studies in France only a few weeks earlier. Another artist might have been shaken by such an unfriendly reception in his hometown, but the pugnacious Jackson (“outwardly rather gruff and blunt,” according to a friend)9 was not one to be cowed by insults or abuse. He would later write that his father, who abandoned his wife and six children following various unsuccessful business ventures, was “lacking in initiative.” 10 Lack of initiative did not run in the family, and throughout his life

  A.Y. Jackson—“a mixture of vaulting ambition and remarkable amiability” 11—would show himself to be courageous, combative, persevering, resourceful and, on occasion, overbearing and unjust.

  Jackson’s father’s failed businesses and abrupt departure had plunged the respectable middle-class family into financial distress. Alex Jackson was therefore expected to work from a young age. His mother took him to a phrenologist to discover what occupation might suit: after feeling the boy’s head, the phrenologist believed he had discovered a lawyer. At thirteen, however, Jackson began his career more humbly as an office boy in a lithography firm; after six years and a transfer into the art department he was taking home $6 a week. Because his time was spent designing labels for beer bottles and cans of tomatoes, he began studying painting in night classes, including at the Council of Arts and Manufactures and the Art Association of Montreal. One of his instructors at the latter was the dean of Montreal art instruction, William Brymner, who had studied in Paris for seven years in the 1880s and (a rare thing in Montreal) took a liberal view of modern developments in painting. “If a man wants to paint a woman with green hair and red eyes,” he once told a student, “he jolly well can.” 12 Probably inspired by Brymner’s example, Jackson made his first trip to Europe in 1905, aged twenty-three. In a passage coinciding almost exactly with that of Lawren Harris on his way to Berlin, he crossed the Atlantic on a steamship with his brother Harry. On board was a crew of drunken deckhands, a consignment of Canadian cheddar, and four hundred head of livestock.

  Jackson spent several weeks touring England, France and Belgium before returning to Montreal. Soon afterwards, a strike in the lithography business persuaded him to try his luck in Chicago, to which his feckless father had absconded to work as a salesman for a company specializing in Masonic regalia. The younger Jackson quickly found employment with a firm of commercial designers, “drawing corned beef labels and all that kind of truck at $15 a week.” 13 He studied four nights a week at the Art Institute, where one of his teachers was the well-known illustrator Frederick Richardson and where a student the previous year had been Georgia O’Keeffe. He also attended lectures by visiting luminaries such as the Art Nouveau designer Alphonse Mucha, a friend of Gauguin.14 In March 1907 Jackson went to the exhibition staged at the Art Institute, Painting by Contemporary German Artists, featuring work by members of the Berlin Secession such as Lovis Corinth, Walter Leistikow and Franz Skarbina. “Some very powerful paintings,” he wrote his mother. “I will go several times and study them out.” 15

  Although thrilled by the work on show at the Art Institute, Jackson regarded his time in Chicago as “a kind of necessary exile to prepare my way to Paris.” 16 In September 1907, when he was twenty-four, his exile ended. He had earned enough money making labels for corned beef that he was able to return to Europe to study at the Académie Julian in Paris, a private art school where a month’s worth of lessons cost $5.

  Founded in 1868 by a circus wrestler and sometime painter, the Académie Julian offered instruction as rigorous as that in the conservative École des beaux-arts, with a strong emphasis on draughtsmanship and the nude.17 Jackson’s teacher, Jean-Paul Laurens, then in his late sixties, was a figure from another age. A member of the prestigious Académie des beaux-arts, he enjoyed a long career painting grandiose historical subjects—heroic victims committing suicide or resigning themselves to their executions in authentic period costume—of the sort that for much of the nineteenth century had covered the walls of the Paris Salon by the acre. Although ferociously republican and anticlerical in his politics, he was rigidly orthodox in his aesthetic beliefs. Realism and Impressionism had passed him by, and he favoured “established tradition” (as Jackson later noted) and strongly disapproved of Cézanne.18 One of the lessons he set for his students was a composition called Dante and Virgil in the Inferno, Watching the Lost Souls Drift By. “We have over a week yet to do it,” Jackson reported to his mother, “but it isn’t exactly in my line somehow.” 19

  As in Chicago, Jackson sought out extramural inspiration, becoming so fanatical that he sometimes skipped classes to visit galleries, museums and special exhibitions. More art could be seen in Paris than anywhere else in the world. The English painter C.R.W. Nevinson, studying in Paris around the same time, described how he was able to see “literally hundreds and hundreds of pictures” merely by peering in gallery windows as he walked the streets.20 Numerous exhibitions were also to be seen. A few days after arriving in Paris, Jackson went to the Grandes Serres de l’Alma for an exhibition of the Seurat-inspired Italian Neo-Impressionists known as the Divisionists and touted in the catalogue as “a group of painters that is one of the living forces of Italian art today.” 21

  Following six months at the Académie Julian, Jackson embarked on an artistic pilgrimage to Florence, Venice and Rome. The summer of 1908 he spent painting seascapes and sand dunes among a colony of expatriate artists at the fishing port of Étaples on the English Channel near Le Touquet. It offered, he wrote his mother, “old houses, canals, woods, seashore, fishing boats, sand dunes and any variety of subjects.” 22 He translated this seaside atmosphere into a painting called Paysage embrumé (Misty Landscape). Although accepted for exhibition at the annual Paris Salon, it attracted little attention.

  Jackson next spent several months in a village south of Fontainebleau in the heart of Barbizon country (from which he made regular trips into Paris to see new exhibitions). In the summer of 1909 he travelled to Holland and Belgium, sketching windmills and cathedrals. He also visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, “one of the finest picture galleries in the world,” he told his mother, adding effusively that besides Rembrandt it had work by Hague School artists such as the Maris brothers and Anton Mauve, whose works were so popular in Montreal.23 Back in Canada in 1910, he used his sketches from the Low Countries to create on the bedroom wall of his aunt’s home in Berlin, Ontario, a Dutch-themed mural: sheep, steeply pitched roofs and Antwerp Cathedral. This frieze was, along with a portrait of his Aunt Geneva’s dog, his first commission.

  Jackson was less enamoured of the painters of the Hague School when he returned from Europe following a third tour of duty in 1911–13. He found himself laden with canvases impossible to sell to the Dutch-mad Montreal collectors. His lack of success stemmed from the fact that by 1913 he was moving dramatically away from the style favoured by these collectors. On this third trip to Europe, Jackson had discovered colour and been even more definitively exposed to the Continental avant-garde. If somehow he had not already studied them during earlier visits to Europe, by 1912 he was certainly absorbing the influences of what he later called his “gods in art”: painters such as “Cézanne, Van Gogh and other moderns.” 24

  CÉZANNE AND VAN Gogh were as important for Jackson as for so many other painters working in Europe in the first dozen years of the twentieth century. Van Gogh’s posthumous fame and influence were dramatically increasing at this time thanks to regular exhibitions in Vienna and Berlin, a 1905 exhibition at the Stedelijk M
useum in Amsterdam, and the landmark 1910 show Manet and the Post-

  Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London; this latter exhibition had included twenty-one works by Cézanne, twenty-two by Van Gogh and thirty-seven by Gauguin. Jackson was not in Europe for the London exhibition (which Arthur Lismer made a point of attending: he travelled from Sheffield down to London to see it). He probably saw Van Gogh’s work in Paris as early as January 1908, when a hundred of his works went on display at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, along with, simultaneously, another thirty-five at the Galerie Eugène Druet.25

  Likewise, although he missed by a month the Cézanne exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in January 1910, Jackson almost certainly saw fifty-six of Cézanne’s paintings and drawings at the retrospective of his career staged at the 1907 Salon d’Automne. This was a landmark exhibition, a hugely important moment in modern art when Cézanne became, in the words of Gertrude Stein’s brother Leo, “the man of the moment” who was “important for everybody.” 26 Laurens might have disapproved of Cézanne, but it is difficult to imagine a young painter like Jackson, only a few weeks in Paris, missing such an important event. Other painters whose works Jackson could have seen at the 1907 Salon d’Automne—which featured 1,748 works by 571 artists—were Matisse, who showed 7 paintings, and Maurice de Vlaminck.

  Jackson would have taken away from these painters new techniques and new visions of the world. Van Gogh, especially, was revelatory for many young painters, with his intense, often clashing colours, his spontaneous brushwork, and his fluid patterns and skewed perspectives. The impulse behind the radical styles of Van Gogh and other moderns was described by the art critic Laurence Binyon in his defence of Fry’s exhibition: the aim of these painters, he claimed, was “to get behind the appearance of things, to render the dynamic forces of life and nature, the emotional significance of things. Away with imitation, let us get to primal energies and realities.” 27