Western Spirits

De l’oreille gauche Queen’s and drank himself to death. Eugene on the front stoop of the This guy had an aneurysm.” anatomy building. The air was warm, Eugene had biographies for the and our dissection was over. We said Haircut specimens. He knew them all but was farewell to Max and shook Ezekiel’s against giving his body to Science. He hand for good luck. Outside the Throughout my adult life, wanted a cemetery burial. anatomy museum the maples had thick my barber, leaves, the campus was fragrant with a quiet gentleman, On the wall of the students’ lounge blossoms, and it was hard to concentrate has trimmed my hair were black and white photographs of on exams. Eugene told us how he had in a cyclic rhythm former students. They huddled in their put the specimens into bottles years ago. much like the tide lab coats and smiled over half-naked ca- “It takes ages to make a museum,” or the phases of the moon. davers lying under sheets. You never he said. I took him for granted. saw such big smiles. In their out- stretched hands were scalpels, mallets, Anatomy was on the east campus He told me yesterday retractors and body parts. The oldest and Arts on the west. In May, we saw that he was old and sick — photos dated from before World War I. Arts students sleeping on the grass, had cut my hair Everyone looked terribly happy, ex- playing baseball and tennis, or kissing for the last time. cept the cadavers. on the lower campus. After a while we After World War II, Eugene began took our books and went back to the We both had tears to appear in the pictures. anatomy museum. in our eyes. “You do a wonderful job,” we said. It was a fine place to study. It had “I keep them looking good,” Eugene the wonderful stillness of death. Robert C. Dickson said. “Moist.” Family Physician “It’s a lost art. Like the old Egyptians.” Ronald Ruskin Hamilton, Ont. Psychiatrist Near the end of that year we sat with Toronto, Ont. Lifeworks Western spirits he Group of Seven in Western Canada, and thematically. The large opening T a travelling exhibition organized by section is devoted to the Rockies, fea- the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, chal- turing mainly landscapes by Lawren lenges a widely held and erroneous view Harris, J.E.H. Macdonald and Arthur that Canada’s most celebrated painters Lismer. The West Coast is represented focused their work almost exclusively on by Frederick Varley, and the Prairies by central Canada. The sheer scope, quality Lionel Lemoine FitzGerald and A.Y. and range of this ambitious, first-class ex- Jackson (including his most famous hibition testify to their extensive involve- painting of rolling foothills, Alberta ment west of Ontario. Rhythm, 1947). The exhibition con- Glenbow curator Catharine Mastin cludes with a major section devoted to has amassed the largest collection ever the abstractions of Harris and FitzGer- of paintings done by the Group about ald.† Thomas Moore Photography, Toronto Arthur Lismer, 1928. Cathedral Moun- the West and in the West. The result is It is fascinating to compare the ap- tain, oil on canvas, 122.0 cm × 142.5 an impressive and compellingly fresh proaches of the different artists in the cm. Collection of the Montreal Museum look at the Group of Seven.* The show the Group of Seven, whose identities of Fine Arts; gift of Sidney Dawes, 1959. is effectively organized both regionally and personal styles tend to be fused *The Group of Seven was an artist’s collective formed in 1920 and dissolved in 1932. The original seven members were Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. Macdonald, Franklin Carmichael and Franz Johnston (who showed only with the group’s first exhibition). A.J. Casson joined in 1926, Edwin Holgate in 1931 and Lionel Lemoine FitzGerald in 1932. Tom Thomson died before the group was formed. †Casson and Carmichael never went to the West. One small segment of the exhibition presents the depictions of Northwest First Nations by A.Y. Jackson and Edwin Holgate, who worked closely with ethnographer Marius Barbeau in the Skeena River project in 1926. 204 JAMC • 21 JANV. 2003; 168 (2) The Left Atrium into a cultural monolith. A case in point leagues; his interests and passions is the different strategies employed by lay elsewhere. In 1926 a teaching Harris, Macdonald and Lismer in their job took him to BC. Among his depictions of the Rocky Mountains. best paintings are evocative por- Harris’s hallmark mountain land- traits of his lover and student Vera scapes, such as Isolation Peak (c. 1931) and Weatherbee. In a small, intimate Mount Lefroy (1930) are austere, cool, re- portrait, Vera’s sensuality is en- mote and silent, while MacDonald’s are hanced by the exaggerated asym- painterly, warm, richly coloured and full metry of her eyes and her emanat- of life. In effect, Harris’s smooth painting spirituality is suggested by the ings are translations of actual mountains lush application of an unusual into idealized icons, existing outside of colour complement of green and real time or space, unaffected by weather purple. Vera was also the model for or any other transient variable of the nat- Varley’s haunting and elusive Carlo Catenazzi, Art Gallery of Toronto F. H. Varley, c. 1932. Dhârâna, oil on can- ural world. Macdonald, on the other Dhârâna (c. 1932), which invokes vas, 86.4 cm × 101.6 cm. Collection of the Art hand, revelled in the beauty and variety spiritual practises of both Hinduism Gallery of Ontario; gift from the Albert H. of nature. He expressed his very personal and Buddhism in its reference to a Robson Memorial Subscription Fund, 1942. devotion to a specific place, Lake meditative phase of yoga. Vera sits O’Hara, in carefully observed views seen on the steps of the porch of their from near and far, in rain, snow and sun. house at Lynn Valley, surrounded and stated and ironic response to the classic Yet both men were seeking and express- enveloped by the landscape. Her head Group of Seven icon: the soaring lone ing the spiritual in nature — the arcane thrust upward, her body erect and immo- tree, seen against a majestic panorama of symbolism of Theosophy for Harris and bile, Vera’s complete absorption by the water and distant shore, heroically buf- the animating undercurrents of Tran- cosmos is revealed through the brilliant feting the northern gales of the Ontario scendentalism for Macdonald. use of colour, which submerges her in a wilderness. FitzGerald turned to the pro- Lismer interpreted the mountains in sea of rich blue impasto. Varley’s other saic rather than the sublime, choosing his weighty, sculptural terms. He constructed famous BC landscapes are all here, too, subjects among the ordinary, unremark- heavily outlined, massive structures on comparable in their use of modernist de- able scenes of city life, as in the backyard canvas that seem strangely anthropomor- vices — high-keyed, arbitrary colours, view of Doc Snyder’s House (1931), his phic and somewhat menacing. An exam- agitated brushwork and visionary distor- most famous painting. But it is FitzGer- ple is his best-known mountain painting, tions — to the work of Vincent Van ald’s exquisite abstracts of the 1950s that Cathedral Mountain (1928), whose insis- Gogh and Edward Munch. In the psy- are the jewels of this exhibition. Subtly tent materiality makes a telling contrast to chological intensity of his art, Varley modulated in the most refined gradations the pared-down, otherworldliness of projects the image of the archetypal, of luminous soft colours, these tonal Harris’s Mountain Forms (1928). alienated Modern artist. works present shifting spatial planes in Frederick Varley never shared the The art of Lionel Lemoine FitzGer- lyrical evocations of the prairies. overtly nationalistic aspirations of his col- ald, who lived and taught art in Win- Remarkably, almost all of the most fa- nipeg, reveals a lucid and fo- mous works by Varley and FitzGerald are cused mind. His small-scale, in this show, as well as the best known of calm, reflective and intensely Harris’s pristine mountain landscapes. In- personal work seems the very deed, the most striking aspect of the exhi- antithesis of the quintessential bition on the Group of Seven’s Western Group of Seven nationalistic connections is the inclusion of so many mantra. Yet, he was invited to canonical masterpieces of Canadian art. join the Group in 1932, an indi- cation that the more bombastic Monique Westra phase of “art as nationalism” Artist, Writer, Art Historian was over by that time. The Calgary, Alta. modest subject of The Little Plant (1947) is a close-up view The Group of Seven in Western Canada of an ordinary potted plant set will be on view at: the Art Gallery of in front of an upstairs window Nova Scotia (Halifax) until Feb. 2; the Lawren S. Harris, 1928. Mountain Forms, oil that gives onto a wintry subur- Winnipeg Art Gallery Feb. 22– May 18; on canvas, 152.4 cm × 177.8 cm. Collection of ban backyard. The awkward, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria June Imperial Oil Limited. upward striving of this scrawny, 1–Sept. 14; and the National Gallery of indoor plant seems an under- Canada (Ottawa) Oct. 10 – Jan. 2, 2004. CMAJ • JAN. 21, 2003; 168 (2) 205.

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