Making and Marketing a Canadian Art Icon: Tom Thomson
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Making and Making and Marketing a Canadian Art Marketing a Canadian Art Icon: Tom Icon: Tom Thomson Thomson Leighann C. Neilson 132 Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Abstract Purpose - The paper traces the making and marketing of Thomson, his myth and his art, up to the 1950s. It argues that family members, fellow artists, Canadian art institutions and patron Dr. J.M. MacCallum, acting as ‘citizen marketers’ collaborated to establish and maintain the reputation of Tom Thomson. In order to do so, they shaped his story to conform to the classic tragic hero myth. Design/methodology/approach – traditional historical narrative approach based on archival research. Research limitation/implications – digital copies of archival records were used. Keywords - arts marketing history, Tom Thomson, Canadian art. Paper Type – research paper. On July 8th, 1917, Canadian artist Tom Thomson paddled his grey-green canoe away from Mowat Lodge, in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, and out onto Canoe Lake. It was the last time he would be seen alive. A few hours later, an overturned grey-green canoe was spotted off Big Wapameo Island by a family of summer visitors on a fishing trip. When this sighting was reported the next morning to Shannon Fraser, owner of Mowat Lodge, he recognized the distinctively colored canoe as Thomson’s. By Tuesday morning, July 10th, an alarmed Fraser initiated the search for Thomson by informing Park Ranger Mark Robinson’s office that Thomson was missing. That same day, Fraser sent telegrams to Thomson’s family in Owen Sound and to his patron, Dr. James MacCallum, in Toronto. The telegrams read simply, “Tom’s canoe found upside down. No trace of Tom since Sunday.” [1] Thus began one of the ‘great unsolved mysteries in Canadian history’ [2]. How Thomson died, under what circumstances and even where his body was finally laid to rest, after it surfaced eight days later, remain unanswered questions. Over the intervening years, the legend of Tom Thomson has continued to fascinate academic researchers, journalists, art lovers and other Canadians [3].It is of interest to economic, business and marketing historians because the making and marketing of Thomson serves as an historical example of the construction of an iconic brand. Sherrill Grace (2004) has argued that interest in Thomson has fluctuated over the last 100 years, with a wave of interest following his mysterious death until the first biography in the 1930s, a lapse until the 1950s, and fairly steady interest since. If this is so, it provides us with an excellent opportunity to examine what actions caused the up- tick in interest, and thus by extension, to identify the processes involved in creating a cultural icon. Tom Thomson was a friend and forerunner of the Group of Seven, artists who sought to establish an art that was truly Canadian. Born in Claremont, Ontario in 1877, Thomson worked as a successful commercial artist in both Canada and the United States (Murray, 1991). In the last five years of his life he produced the body of art work on which part of his legend as a Canadian art icon is based. The recent ‘Masterpiece in Focus’ exhibition of Thomson’s paintings The West Wind and The Jack Pine at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa described the works as “iconic images… represent[ing] the grandeur and beauty of a uniquely Canadian environment.” That his work was good and “closely identifiable with the spirit of Canada” (Harris, 1948, p. 39) is an argument that has been well-established. But that alone can’t account for his iconic position almost 100 years later. The first purpose of this paper is to investigate what other forces were at play in establishing Thomson as “the most legendary of Canadian artists” (Cameron, 1999, p. 185). Tom Thomson is more than an icon in the art world – he has become a brand whose meaning resonates with Canadian values and ideology. What went into the making and marketing of the Tom Thomson ‘brand’? I will argue that family members, fellow artists, Canadian art institutions and his patron, Dr. J.M. MacCallum, worked to establish and maintain the reputation of Tom Thomson. None of these people were professional marketers, instead they operated as ‘citizen marketers’, performing many of the tasks traditionally assumed by channel intermediaries in the art world. The image they created of Thomson takes its form from the characteristics of the tragic hero as explicated by another CHARM 2017 Canadian icon, literary critic Northrop Frye. Thomson-the-brand speaks to us because its brand Proceedings personality [4]has been scripted to highlight the parallels between Thomson’s life and development as an artist and that of the nation his paintings came to represent – Canada. What Becomes an Icon? Does Thomson qualify to be considered an icon? The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Barber, 1998, p. 133 701) among its definitions of the word ‘icon’ includes “an object of particular admiration, especially as a representative symbol of something.” How much and what kind of admiration must an object receive to be considered ‘iconic’? Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, Martin Kemp (2012, p. 3), argues that the adjective ‘iconic’ has been applied so liberally to people and things of passing celebrity as to become debased and meaningless. He prefers instead to distinguish between the ‘very famous’ and the ‘iconic’ by suggesting that: An iconic image is one that has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognizability and has come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large numbers of people across time and cultures, such that it has to a greater or lesser degree transgressed the parameters of its initial making, function, context, and meaning… the very famous still tends to reside within the parameters of reference that governed its original making. Kemp goes on to note that truly iconic images “accrue legends to a prodigious degree” and that “an extraordinary image demands an extraordinary explanation, ideally involving some kind of ‘secret’.” Among his examples of iconic things, people and images, Kemp includes the Coca-Cola bottle, Che Guevara and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. He draws attention to the way that Guevara, and especially certain stylized images of Guevara based on Alberto Korda’s 1960 photographic portrait, have come to embody youthful idealism and passionate rebellion. Guevara’s positioning as a ‘rebel with a cause’ appealed to a generation of American students who were politicized by the war in Vietnam. In explaining the appeal of the Mona Lisa, Kemp (2012, p. 142) notes that “some artists can make their image live in an uncanny way that transcends the inert material they are using… It is a question of working the spectator’s mechanisms of perception, of giving them enough to see what is needed but not giving them so much that they have nothing left to do.” Kemp’s writing is useful to the current exercise in that it establishes, first, the possibility that both a person/artist and product/artwork may become icons and also because it points to characteristics of each which may tend to make them more susceptible to becoming iconic. An initial examination of Thomson as icon suggests that in many ways he fulfills Kemp’s definition. Although his work was originally known only to a small group of people – colleagues he worked with at Rous & Mann [5] and Grip Limited, prominent design and photo-engraving shops in Toronto – with the exhibition of his first major canvas, A Northern Lake, at the 1913 Ontario Society of Artists Exhibition, Thomson met with unusual commercial success. The painting was purchased by the Government of Ontario [6]. That painting, and others which followed, have come to symbolize the Canadian nation. Today, “his paintings are frequently reproduced as symbols of the Canadian nation in such varied forms as postage stamps, coins, coasters, and posters. They are iconic in Canada… Thomson is, for many, the important Canadian artist…” (Cameron, 1999, p. 185). Interestingly, artist, art work and legend blend together to create this iconic brand. In 1947, fellow artist Arthur Lismer wrote of visiting a school and asking the pupils to name one Canadian artist, “The answer came immediately Jack Pine! The integration of personality and subject was complete” (p. 62). How are Icons Made? How did Thomson become an iconic figure? Sherrill Grace (2004, p. 6) observes that the Tom Thomson we think we know has in fact been ‘invented’ by many creators, each using his life story as the raw material for their cultural output [7]. In a way, Thomson was ripe for (re)invention. As Grace further explicates (2004, p. 3), “[B]ecause he was so little known in his lifetime and left so little behind him in personal markers of identity (few letters, no memoirs, no journals; no intimate friends, spouse, or children), it is easy for others to imagine the man and invent a life for him; his outlines is there, full of suggestion, but it is empty, inviting others to fill in the gaps.” This quote is reminiscent of Kemp’s (2012, p. 142) comments about giving spectators of an art work “enough to see what is needed but not giving them so much that they have nothing left to do.” Biographers, playwrights, poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, art historians and curators, musicians, and television scriptwriters have all mined the deep vein that is Tom Thomson. I want to focus on this process of invention or construction. Howard Becker (1974) challenged the idea that great art is created by artistic geniuses, individuals specially endowed by the gods, demonstrating instead that it is the outcome of a network of collaborators.