Totem Poles, Kitseukla, 1912
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Glenbow Museum
Saturday, October 27 - Sunday, January 27
More in: Visual Arts
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Surprisingly, the size and wealth of Calgary has not yet dictated that it be a permanent and important player in the display and collection of Canadian art. People are baffled by the fact that no major gallery exists here with collecting in its mandate. Enter the Glenbow Museum — once again, it is filling the city’s art historical void as it serves as the last venue of a cross-Canada tour of Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon.
Though Carr may not instantly bring to mind edgy art and avant-garde ideas, she is the most written about artist in Canadian history and, like her or not, she is an asset to the country’s artistic progress. Carr, 1871-1945, lived and worked on Canada’s West Coast, primarily on Vancouver Island, and studied art in San Francisco in the 1890s. Many today are quick to associate her work with West Coast First Nations people as well as with the notorious boys’ club, the Group of Seven. This, however, is not the full picture of this enigmatic artist. Though her first exhibition was in Paris at the Grand Palais in 1911, it was not until an exhibition in Ontario in 1927 that she was “discovered” in Canada. The enormous exhibition mounted at the Glenbow does not follow a chronological pattern but instead strives to present a complete picture of the themes of Carr’s life as well as correct the myths surrounding her and her distinctive work.
The exhibition itself is divided into seven rooms, each with its own subject. The first room is a partial re-creation of the exhibition of Canadian West Coast art, held at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in 1927. There were 300 pieces in total shown in this exhibit, including 26 of Carr’s paintings, a few of her rugs and pottery pieces and a significant amount of West Coast native art, giving an overall feeling of ethnography to the installation. Eric Brown, the director of the NGC, originally mounted the show as a means to validate native art, something that Carr saw herself doing through her painting. The images shown in this room are expressive and colourful but very much grounded in realism. The adjoining gallery highlights her steps toward a more overtly modern style and draws from a retrospective exhibition that was organized by wealthy Group of Seven front man Lawren Harris. In this gallery, the works appear less pictorially convincing but show off the developed West Coast style for which Carr is known.
Several of the rooms beyond these look at Carr’s relationship with nature, as well as her continuing investigation of native culture. Though her more spiritual visions of nature are alive with pulsations of line and colour, her more settled depictions of the land and of totem poles carry with them an obvious political edge that this exhibition, as a whole, handles well. In the late 1800s, the native tradition of the potlatch was made illegal and many pieces of the communities’ art, such as the totem poles, were taken away to museums. Carr’s portraits of these poles bear a sense of confrontation and urgency in their tight cropping and in the expressiveness of the features of the figures on the poles. Further along, a room discussing Carr’s relationship to the changing landscape of the West Coast shows how logging and industry transformed the supernatural beauty of Vancouver Island.
The final sections of the exhibition examine how the public viewed Carr and how she viewed herself. A vast contrast can be seen in the self-depreciating cartoon sketches of herself when compared to the staunchly formal self-portraits — the commonality that remains is isolation. Carr viewed herself as disconnected and outside of any artistic culture. Geographically, this held some truth but, artistically, the proof is in the paintings. Her progress as a modern artist so closely follows that of modernism itself that it is impossible to claim that she was not influenced by the traditions of Europe or even of other Canadian artists. After her trip to France in 1910, her colour palette brightened and her lines became free and experimental. Is it a coincidence that the Fauves were shining like stars in Paris at that time? Or, that she viewed the bold colours Gauguin used to record his vision of the natives of Tahiti? This does not diminish her clout as an artist by any means. It does, however, add her to the long list of artists who viewed themselves one way and wanted the world to follow suit.
Emily Carr: New Perspectives does well in applauding the merit of this significant artist, while, ultimately, not putting her on a pedestal. It is an exhibition that is balanced, didactically clear and demonstrates the importance of Carr to Canada’s artistic lineage.
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