Susan Benton, Author at Daily Art Fixx

Emily Carr: 1871 – 1945

December 13, 2016 By Susan Benton

Emily Carr, Canadian artist and author, didn’t became famous until she was in her late 50s, but is now probably one of the most famous female artists of this country. Her paintings are undeniably original, as was she – a free spirit and rebel, born to a British family in the constrained Victorian era. She was fascinated and accepted by the aboriginal people of the West coast, and the intersection of her two worlds would forever impact her life and art. Like the work of the members of the Group of Seven, whom she was ultimately considered a part of, her art was unlike any that had been seen before, and it would change the face of Canadian art.

Contrary from the Start

Emily Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia on December 13, 1871, during a freak winter storm, which seems to be appropriate. She once said that she “was contrary from the start”. She was the youngest of five sisters and had one younger brother. Her father, British by birth, became a successful business owner. The death of first her mother, and then her father when Emily was still a young girl, left her in the care of her unsympathetic and rigid older sister. Emily had always been a rambunctious child, more interested in nature and drawing than in the expected pursuits of girls of the period, and she was perplexing to her sisters.

Determined to be an Artist

Somehow Emily convinced her skeptical guardian to allow her to go to San Francisco’s, California School of Design in 1889. Three years later, she returned with a knowledge of classical art practices and set up shop as an art teacher in the Carr family home.

In the summer of 1898, Emily visited her sister Lizzie, who was a missionary in an isolated aboriginal village on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The attraction to the people was quick and mutual, and would influence Carr and her art forever. Carr was delighted by their openness and sincerity, which she found lacking in her own society. The group gave her the nickname of Klee Wyck, The Laughing One, which many years later would be the title of an autobiographical book penned by Carr.

Back in Victoria, an unwanted engagement offer (her belief was that marriage and art for a woman could not co-exist), and an unreciprocated love would cement Carr’s path as a single woman, living for her art. Carr decided to continue her studies in England at the Westminster School of Art and in private studios, learning 19^th century British watercolour techniques and style. After five and a half years, she returned disappointed, but was very happy to be back in her beloved Western Canada.

Her family was equally disappointed, but for different reasons. They saw that her time in Britain had done nothing to quell her rebellious spirit or her avant garde behaviour. In 1910. she travelled with her sister Alice to Paris for further study. This time however she was not disappointed and was inspired by “the Post-Impressionist style with a Fauvist palette”. “She developed her own bold, colourful, post-impressionist style of painting, which she brought back to Victoria in 1912.”

The Draw of the Indigenous People

Having earlier seen the impact of the white settlement spread in British Columbia on the aboriginal way of life, Carr “had announced that she wanted to document the villages and the art of the people”. She spent six weeks travelling north to the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Skeena River, and capturing her observations of the Haida, Gitksan and Tsimshian totems and life.

However, her paintings, which were supposed to be an attempt to truthfully document the situation, were heavily influenced by her “French style” and were brilliantly coloured and ultimately seen as inaccurate. The provincial government, who she had thought would be interested in her work, was not. “Painted in 1912, her richly coloured War Canoes, Alert Bay would not have looked out of place alongside the paintings of Matisse and Derain in the Salon Fauve in Paris.”

By 1913, Carr had amassed a significant number of works, but her depiction of colourful trees, and magical landscapes with totem poles were also not well received by the public. She was forced to look for another way to support herself. For almost fifteen years, she gave up her artwork and built an apartment house, which she was then forced to turn into a boarding house due to the faltering of the economy at the time.

She rarely painted during these hard years and her reputation as an eccentric was intensified by her “odd behaviour” including owning a pet monkey who was her constant companion, the odd netting that she wore on her head, her living room chairs held in the air by a pulley system, and her menagerie of various other animals. It wasn’t until the 1920s that she started painting again.

A Renewed Spirit

Her bold and energetic paintings were ultimately not to remain unappreciated. In 1927, Carr was invited by the National Gallery of Canada to participate in the exhibition of West Coast Aboriginal art. Carr attended the opening and met the group of artists that would finally give her the feeling of belonging that had been absent all of her life. Lawren Harris, and other members of the Group of Seven, were shaping a new direction for the art of Canada, one that she understood and felt a great affinity for. Lawren Harris, as he had with other unique artists, took Emily into the fold and provided mentorship and support. Theirs was a relationship that would last a lifetime. The next ten years would be her most prolific period of painting, and would also see the formation of a new, more inclusive group of artists called the Canadian Group of Painters.

“Carr began to paint the bold, almost hallucinatory canvases with which many people identify her – paintings of Aboriginal totem poles set in deep forest locations or the sites of abandoned Indigenous villages. After a year or two she left Aboriginal subjects to devote herself to nature themes. In full mastery of her talents and with deepening vision, she continued to produce a great body of paintings freely expressive of the large rhythms of Western forests, driftwood-tossed beaches and expansive skies, like Indian Church (1929), Loggers’ Culls (1935), and Heart of the Forest (1935).”

A New Chapter

In 1937, Carr suffered her first of many heart attacks, and as a result of her physical limitations she stopped painting, turning to writing as a gentler expression of her creativity and perspective. Her first book, Klee Wyck, a collection of short stories based on her experiences with Aboriginal people, was published in 1941. However, passages about native people’s positions, and Carr’s support of them, were censored and never appeared in print. The book won a Governor General’s Award, and sections of it were read over the CBC radio, positioning Emily Carr as a well-known Canadian author. She wrote four other books, two of them published posthumously, that have been printed in more than 20 languages.

Emily Carr died in Victoria on May 2, 1945, after checking herself into St. Mary’s Priory to rest. Amazingly, a Victorian woman, blazing her own trail at a time when art as a career for women was unfathomable, succeeded in depicting the primordial forests and coasts of British Columbia, Canada in such a way that more than 60 years after her death, her paintings are at the forefront of Canadian art, at home and abroad.

Sources: telegraph.co.uk, virtualmuseum.ca, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, Life & Times of Emily Carr (CBC, 1997)

Jean Paul Lemieux: 1904 – 1990

November 18, 2016 By Susan Benton

Jean Paul Lemieux (1904-1990), painter, illustrator, teacher and art critic is one of Canada’s, and Quebec’s, most heralded international artists. Recognized for his painting of the landscape and cities of Quebec, Lemieux was received as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1966. The following year he received the Canada Council Medal, and in 1968 he became a Companion of the Order of Canada. His paintings are in high demand and have demanded multi-million dollar bids to obtain them.

Family and Education

Jean Paul Lemieux was born into a well-to-do family on November 18, 1904. His father, Joseph Flavien, was a Greenshields Ltd agent, and was often away on business. Lemieux and his sister, Marguerite and brother, Henri were raised primarily by their mother, Corinne Blouin, and grew up with all of the privileges of the affluent English- and French-speaking communities in Quebec city. While they wintered in the city, long happy summers were spent at a countryside resort. Inspired by a visiting artist and the waterfall by their summer abode, Lemiuex painted his first watercolour in 1914.

In 1916, Corinne and the children moved to Berkeley, California due to the health issues of Marguerite. The family moved back to Montreal the following year however, where Jean Paul attended College Mont-Saint-Louis and then Loyola College, all the while taking watercolour lessons. In 1925, Lemieux apprenticed in the studio of Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor-Cote. In 1926, Lemieux enrolled at École des beaux-arts de Montréal where he won several awards and distinctions, but he had his own mind about painting and only one of his teachers, Edwin Holgate, was to make a lasting impact on him. Both Holgate, who taught engraving, and Lemieux were particularly interested in illustration, and Lemieux illustrated two novels, La Pension Leblanc by Robert Choquette (1927) and Le Manoir Hanté by Régis Roy (1928).

Upon graduating in 1929, Lemieux went to Paris for a year to study illustration and life drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Colarossi. On his return to Montreal, he and his friends launched JANSS, a commercial and advertising art company, but it was only to operate for six months in the tough post-crash economy. After a brief visit, to his sister who was now married and living in California, and to museums and art galleries in New York and Chicago, Lemieux returned to Canada to earn his teaching diploma at the École des beaux-arts in Montreal.

While studying, Lemieux continued to paint and he began to exhibit his work of portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes. His style was “influenced by the aesthetic of the Group of Seven and by the regionalist principles of American Social Realism; from Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) he assimilated a rigorous approach, and from Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), the use of symbolism”.

The Artist, the Teacher and the Critic

In 1935, upon graduation, Lemieux was hired as an assistant teacher of drawing and design at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. In 1936, he joined the staff of École du meuble, which included Maurice Gagnon and Marcel Parizeau. He moved again the following year to the École des beaux-arts de Québec, in Quebec City. In June of 1937, Lemieux married Madeleine Des Rosiers, a fellow artist, and former classmate.

The couple successfully exhibited together, each selling one painting to the Musée de la province de Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), but Madeleine gave up her career for her husband’s which was already gaining attention. In its critique of a 1938 show, La Presse described Lemieux as “the most impressive painter of the younger generation.”

Along with teaching and painting, Lemieux also worked as an art critic from 1935 until 1945, writing for magazine and newspapers including Le Jour, Regards, Maritime Art, and Canadian Art. Writing gave him a broader public voice to share his support of “the transition to modernity in art, the necessity of openness to contemporary European and North American trends and the democratization of art”.

By the mid-1940s, Lemieux had rejected the direction of Canadian painting which was “moving farther away from the figurative”. He was creating works that satirized urban and rural life, and that drew from the Italian primitives and naïve art. The years from 1940 to 1946 would become known as his primitivist period. Despite his nonconformist style at the time, he was considered “an artist in the first rank of young Canadian painters”, and his work was included in a UNESCO show, with work from 25 other countries, taking Lemieux to an international level as a painter.

Lemieux and his wife supported the retention of Quebec culture and in the social-realist vein of the time, Lemieux lampooned the English bourgeois. However, he began to feel afraid of appearing reactionary, and as a result Lemieux was publicly quiet from 1947 to 1951, only producing studio works and some oil landscape paintings. His return in 1951 marked a new personal vision for landscapes that no longer reflected the Group of Seven or the American Social Realist painters. His more classic and formal landscapes with haunting, rigid figures were further developed during his sabbatical in France from 1954 to 1955, supported by a grant from the Royal Society of Canada.

A Growing Reputation

Lemieux’s reputation in Canada and internationally grew significantly over the next ten years with solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City, participation in biennial exhibitions organized by the National Gallery of Canada and in exhibitions at the Bienal of São Paulo, the Brussels International Exposition, the Pittsburgh International Exposition, and the Venice Biennale. His work was also included in exhibitions of Canadian painting in Warsaw, at MoMA in New York, at the Tate Gallery in London, and at the Musée Galliera in Paris.

In 1965, after 30 years of teaching and inspiring young painters of Canada, Jean Paul Lemieux retired from the École des beaux-arts de Québec to focus solely to painting.

In 1967, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts toured a retrospective of his work, to the Musée du Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) and the National Gallery of Canada, in celebration of Canada’s Centennial. The same year, Lemieux was commissioned to paint a mural in the Charlottetown Confederation Centre and ten years later, the official portrait of the then Governor General of Canada, Jules Léger, and his wife. Lemieux was only the second Canadian artist commissioned to paint an official portrait of a reigning monarch. The unveiling was met with some surprise due to the painting’s relative casualness, but Lemieux described it as “a Canadian painting, nothing to do with the formal English representations of the Queen”.

A Return and a Transformation

In the 1970s and 80s Lemieux returned to illustration with Gabrielle Roy’s, La Petite Poule D’eau (1971), Louis Hémon’s, Maria Chapdelaine (1981), and in 1985, Canada-Canada, a collection of writings by prominent Canadian authors.

In 1974, The Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs organized an exhibition of Lemieux’s work in Moscow, Leningrad, Prague and Paris.

The 70s and 80s would see a dark transformation in Lemieux’s work, and though the works were shown in Quebec and Montreal, they were largely ignored by the public and the critics. “The serenity and nostalgia of his classic period (1956–1970) gave way to a new, tragic Expressionist period (1970–1990)…with works [that] communicated his existential distress about the future of humanity.” “The haunting silence and sense of unease of his paintings [of the 50s and 60s] became, in the 1970s, horrific visions of ruined cities, annihilated by nuclear attacks.”

Despite this shift, his entire body of work, and his national and international reputation would earn him honorary degrees from Universite Laval (1969), Bishop’s University (1970), the Universite of Montreal (1980) and Concordia University (1985).

Jean Paul Lemieux died in Quebec City on December 7, 1990, at the age of 86, shortly before the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

Sources: gallery.ca, mcmichael.com, aci-iac.ca, mnbaq.org

Lawren Harris: 1885-1970

October 23, 2016 By Susan Benton

Lawren Harris, April 25, 1926, photographed by M.O. Hammond

Lawren Stewart Harris (1885–1970), one of Canada’s most important and influential painters, was also the driving force behind the famous Group of Seven, and the founding member and first president of the Canadian Group of Painters. Through his life and work, he inspired three generations of artists to paint unbridled by convention, and along with his contemporaries, changed the art of a nation.

A Child of Privilege
Lawren Harris was born on October 23, 1885 in Brantford, Ontario, into a well-to-do and well-connected family. “The unusual name Lawren was the consequence of parental compromise: his mother wanted to call him Lawrence; his father preferred Lorne.” His grandfather had founded a farm machinery business which merged in 1891 with a rival company and become the giant manufacturer Massey-Harris Co. Ltd. His father, Thomas Morgan, worked as the secretary of the business and his mother Annie was a minister’s daughter. The family was Baptist and Lawren’s childhood was spent in an affluent and religious household.

When Lawren was just nine, his father died of kidney failure and the family moved to Toronto. Lawren attended St. Andrew’s College, a private boy’s school, Central Technical School and the University of Toronto. From his early years he had a penchant for art and during his teenage years, and on, he painted incessantly, searching for his own style and meaning in art. In 1904, he travelled to Berlin, Germany to further his art studies. Over the next four years he took advantage of his liberty to pursue whatever attracted him and he took up the violin, sketched on the banks of the Spree, and went hiking in the Alps.

A Wealthy Young Man and Ardent Artist
In 1908, Harris returned to Canada, a young man confronted and grappling with profound juxtapositions. He belonged to the wealthy establishment and yet railed against convention. He was raised as a Christian but had been introduced to theosophy in Germany. He saw his country as new and modern, and yet the art of the time was a traditional European-style. He was an artist dedicated to his craft, yet he did not have to struggle to survive as did many of his contemporaries. He was a rich man capable of collecting the best art on offer, but he strove to be an artist who could, through art, change the way his countrymen saw and depicted Canada.

For the next two few years, as always unrestricted by financial concerns, he sketched in the Laurentians, in Haliburton and in Lac-Memphrémagog, Québec, as well as drawing and painting that which he knew well, the houses in Toronto. His Ward paintings became known for their hopeful and colourful depiction of the downtown homes that were in fact quite gray and rundown, many without running water or sewage systems. The area was a stark contrast to Lawren’s own life of luxury. While “working” as an artist, he mingled as a social equal with bankers, industrialists and doctors, and met his future wife. Beatrice “Trixie” Phillips was a young socialite, the daughter of a millionaire, and the pair wed in 1910 and had three children—Lawren Jr., Margaret and Howard.

One of Lawren’s favourite places was the newly formed Arts and Letters Club, essentially an elite boys’ club for Toronto society. Many of Toronto arts establishments were conceived at the club and it was a magnet for writers and artists. One of those artists was Jim MacDonald, who launched an exhibit of oil sketches of the Canadian North which attracted Harris’s interest. He and MacDonald became fast friends and shared their mutual interest in the American transcendentalists (MacDonald had named his son Thoreau). MacDonald introduced Harris to his illustrator colleagues—Arthur Lismer, Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, Fred Varley and Tom Thomson—names now associated with the Group of Seven. They also included A. Y. Jackson, a Montreal-native and fellow artist, who they met at the club. In January 1913, Harris and MacDonald took a train to the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox) in Buffalo, to see an exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian art. That one exhibition would inspire them to create a new art for Canada, and influence their work for years to come.

Studio Building (1913) – National Gallery of Canada Archives

The group met regularly and synthesized around the idea of a new art movement in and for Canada. In their midst was the man who had the means to support this bold and rebellious venture. The first step was providing a place for them to work and to live if necessary. In 1913, Harris hired the architect Eden Smith to build the Studio Building for Canadian Art. The building cost $60,000, and Harris along with his crony James MacCallum, a Toronto ophthalmologist and art collector, foot the bill.

“The work they (the group) produced was visceral, vivid and controversial.” They became known in the press as the Algonquin School (because of their paintings of the north). Critics were extraordinarily harsh at first saying that they lacked skill and that their paintings were like “a gargle or glob of porridge” and dubbed “The Hot Mush School.” by art critic H. F. Gadsby.

The First Great War
The First World War paused the work of the group. Some became war artists and others saw active duty overseas. Harris’s heart condition kept him in Canada at Camp Borden in Barrie where he taught musketry.

Already deeply saddened by the unexpected death of Tom Thomson in 1917, the death of Harris’s only sibling, Howard, a decorated veteran, in France at just 31 years old, impacted Harris profoundly. On May 1, 1918, Harris was discharged from the Army, suffering from depression, chronic sleeplessness and confusion. He found a way out through the spiritualism that he had first discovered in Germany. He joined the Toronto Theosophical Society, quit drinking and smoking, and gave lectures on theosophy and art.

A Driving Force for Canadian Art

Group of Seven Exhibition Catalogue -1920 Art Gallery of Ontario (Art Museum of Toronto)

Within a month of his discharge from the army, Harris with renewed inspiration, organized the first of the “kitted-out boxcar” trips to Algoma, Ontario. Though born a privileged city boy, he loved and felt at home in the wilds of Canada. This love of the untouched landscapes reignited his passion for a new art for Canada. He fiercely believed that art could shape Canada’s identity. And to that end, he bankrolled the first official Group of Seven exhibition in 1920 at the Art Gallery of Toronto.

The last Algoma trip was in 1921, when Harris and A.Y. Jackson travelled to Lake Superior’s North Shore. Harris’s large spiritual paintings of a barren landscape, burned years earlier, became his trademark. “By the early 1920s, Harris had developed into a magnificent landscape painter… he reduced the shapes of mountains, shoreline, trees, lakes and clouds, always parallel to the picture plane, to their essentials for an austere, monumental effect.” And he was not alone in the philosophy and direction of his art. Kandinsky and American Transcendentalist writers such as Emerson and Whitman were inspiring artists internationally. “Harris’s landscapes now grew increasingly non-representational. By the late ’20s, he’d turned away from the style that made him famous and advocated on behalf of abstract art.”

In 1926, Harris joined the newly formed Société Anonyme, an organization founded by Katherine Dreier, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp to promote avant-garde art. In their show, The International Exhibition of Modern Art, Harris’s work hung alongside that of Pablo Picasso and Georgia O’Keefe, and his was the only Canadian work included in the exhibition.

In 1930, in a letter to Emily Carr, a fellow painter, he wrote, “The true artist is outside of social recognition…. Society lives by rule, creed, what is and what isn’t done. The artist lives from within not without.” That same year Harris travelled and produced his famous paintings of the Arctic.

A Personal Scandal and Exodus
In 1934, after 24 years of marriage, Harris left Trixie to marry Bess Housser, a painter who had worked and exhibited with the group, and the wife of a school chum. The decision resulted in Harris never again residing in the place of his youth and great influence. To avoid the fallout of the scandal, the couple left Canada and moved to New Hampshire. Harris joined Dartmouth College as artist-in-residence.

In the spring of 1938 they moved again, this time to Sante Fe, New Mexico where Harris was part of the founding of the Transcendental Painting Group in 1939. In 1940, they returned to Canada, but four provinces away, to Vancouver, British Columbia. Harris visited Toronto in 1948 for a retrospective of his work at the Art Gallery of Toronto, the first ever for a living Canadian artist. Over the next three decades, his work in Vancouver continued to explore abstraction inspired by nature.

Lawren Harris died on January 29, 1970. His body is buried in a small cemetery alongside Bess, who died a few months earlier, and some of the other Group of Seven members, on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.

A National Legacy
In 1948 and 1963 Harris was the subject of two retrospectives. After his death, the Art Gallery of Ontario produced the exhibition Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, 1906–1930 in 1978 and in 1982–83, a national travelling exhibition of his drawings. In 2000, the first solo exhibition in the U.S. was at the Americans Society Art Gallery in New York. In 2015, a touring exhibition of Harris’ work, curated by American actor, comedian and writer Steve Martin, opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. Much of Lawren Harris’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Harris’s own work and the work done by the Group of Seven, supported and encouraged by Harris, is now considered to be the iconic art of Canada, just as Harris had envisioned. The group’s work is highly sought after by collectors and by the turn of the 20th century was already demanding millions at auction. The love affair with the Group seems to be ongoing. Harris’s 1930 painting “Mountain and Glacier” sold at auction for $4.6 million in 2015.

The film below, Where the Universe Sings, is an intimate portrait of the artist’s life and the expansive landscapes that inspired him. (White Pine Pictures in association with TVO)

The images and videos in this post are for educational use only and may not be reproduced without the owner or copyright holder’s consent.

Sources: gallery.ca, macleans.ca, 50years.mcmichael.com, torontolife.com, mcmichael.com, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca

Takao Tanabe: Painting, Printmaking

September 16, 2016 By Susan Benton

Takao Tanabe, considered one of Canada’s leading painters and printmakers, has shown work nationally and internationally for over sixty years. Though he studied in New York, Tokyo and London, it was his native area of the coast of western Canada that attracted and inspired him to move from the Abstraction painting of his youth to landscape, the painting that he has become most known for. A self-described minimalist painter, his painting and his teaching have garnered him many awards including the Order of British Columbia, the Order of Canada and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Takao Tanabe was born Takao Izumi in the small village of Seal Cove (now Prince Rupert) on September 16, 1926, the son of a commercial fisherman. The fishing village on the coast of northern British Columbia was primarily a Japanese-Canadian community and Takao spent the summers of his youth in fishing camps on the Skeena River. The family moved to Vancouver in 1937, however just a few years later, they were forced to leave their home. The 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. at Pearl Harbor in World War II saw the Canadian government impose restrictions on Japanese-Canadians and the family was interned at a “relocation” camp in British Columbia as Japanese aliens. The young man, along with his two older siblings, were then moved to eastern Manitoba as indentured workers on a sugar-beet farm.

At the end of the war, Takao, now with the last name of Tanabe, after his mother’s family, went to Winnipeg in 1946. He began courses at the Winnipeg School of Art and also attended the University of Manitoba.

In 1950, Tanabe studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School in New York. His work reflected the major genre of Abstract Expressionism that was taking hold in America after World War II. He was fortunate enough to take drawing classes from Hans Hofmann, a major artist of the Abstract movement. Tanabe was to remain an Abstract painter, “using geometric shapes, flat spatial planes, perspective and bold colours in a range of mediums”, for more than twenty years.

Tanabe returned home to Canada in 1952, exhibiting to good reviews in Vancouver and taking a few classes at Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta. Over the next ten years he would have the opportunity to travel and learn different aspects of painting and art in England and Japan. In 1953, he was the recipient of an Emily Carr scholarship and was able to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, England. By 1957, Tanabe was gaining recognition and had a one-man show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as exhibits across the country, and internationally – at the Bienal de São Paulo and in Milan.

Support from the Canada Council for the Arts allowed Tanabe to visit Japan in 1959, where he learned the arts of calligraphy and sumi-e (Japanese ink painting) at the Tokyo University of Arts. His new knowledge impacted his painting, and by the early 1960s he was creating Japanese-influenced ink drawings (Falling Water, 1967).

Tanabe returned to Vancouver in 1961 to teach at the Vancouver Art School and was to stay there for seven years, during which time he painted large-scale murals. In 1968, he went back to the States, working in Philadelphia and then in New York City until 1972, when an offer from Banff Art Centre in Alberta, Canada, not only brought him back to Canada but also coincided with a significant change in his work.

“After 22 years of painting abstract painting, I decided it was time to try something else…painting landscape…” he said. His week-long journey across the prairies to his new position inspired a whole series of landscape painting reflecting the flat and vast prairies. Tanabe has said that it is “simpler for my brain to think in series”, and indeed he has painted many landscape series including a series of 20 of the mountains in winter.

After seven years at Banff, and after influencing hundreds of students, Tanabe and his wife moved to Vancouver Island in 1980 where he could paint full time in a place of which he has said, “If you know B.C., you know the variety of landscapes and seascapes…islands, mountains, and valleys. It’s got a prairie-like atmosphere up in the Cariboo area…you don’t have to go look anywhere else…nothing holds a candle to the variety of views that BC offers.”

When last we checked, Tanabe still paints in his rural B.C. studio every day. His work, purely devoted to nature, explicitly without the human intervention in the landscape (railway lines, telephone poles, silos, etc.) and with the smooth finish of the artist who wants the paint to look as though it “just floated on”, has been collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and many other public and private galleries. He is well known for “his transcendent light and atmosphere, which fluctuates from delicate and misty to stormy and brooding in his landscapes”, and his work appeals to collectors and is in high demand – perhaps for the meaning that Tanabe sees in the weather it depicts.

In 2000, Tanabe said in his artist statement for an exhibition of his work in B.C., “However much we desire order and clarity in all the details of our lives, there are always unexpected events that cloud and change our course. Life is ragged. The typical weather of the coast is like that, just enough detail to make it interesting but not so clear as to be banal or overwhelming. It can be a metaphor for life.”

Sources: www.heffel.com, www.gallery.ca, www.ngcmagazine.ca, Exhibition catalogue Takao Tanabe: Wet Coasts and Dry Lands (Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, B.C., 2000), at p. 13

Gustave Caillebotte: 1848-1894

August 19, 2016 By Susan Benton

Gustave Caillebotte has only recently been recognized as a significant contributor to the Impressionist movement, more than seventy years after his death. His independent wealth, allowing him to be a major art collector and financial supporter of some of the most well-known Impressionist artists, overshadowed his own contribution to and impact on the art movement of his time. Art historians who have reevaluated his paintings and drawings now assert that his unusual use of varying perspective is particularly commendable and sets him apart from his more famous peers.

Caillebotte was born on August 19, 1848 to Martial Caillebotte and Celeste Daufresne. Gustave’s father had inherited the family’s military textile business and was also a judge at the Seine department’s Tribunal de Commerce. Gustave had two younger brothers Rene (1851-1876) and Martial (1853-1910). The family were well off and in 1860 purchased a summer home just south of Paris, in Yerres. Though Gustave didn’t spend much time focused on art as a child, it is believed that the summers spent at Yerres correspond with the time that Caillebotte began to draw and paint.

Caillebotte went to law school, earning his degree in 1868 and his license to practice in 1870. However, not long after he was drafted into the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Caillebotte was never to return to law. He began instead to study painting seriously, perhaps inspired by his visits to the studio of painter Leon Bonnat. He also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1872, but did not stay long.

In 1874, he inherited his father’s fortune, followed by his mother’s in 1878, providing him with the opportunity to study art and paint without the need or burden to sell his work to support himself. The lack of sales of his paintings contributed to the lack of recognition of his work. In fact, many of his paintings are still owned by his heirs.

His financial situation also allowed him to help fund Impressionist exhibitions and support his fellow artists and friends. He amassed a collection of more than seventy works, including masterpieces by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley. Interestingly, a self-portrait shows some of the works he had purchased in the background of his painting. Though he donated his personal collection to the Musée d’Orsay, only two of his own works were included, another contributing factor to his relative unidentified influence on Impressionist art.

Caillebotte was also able to explore other interests because of his freedom from financial obligations including stamp collecting (his collection is now in the British Museum), orchid horticulture, yacht building, and textile design.

Over a period of six years, Caillebotte participated regularly in and supported Impressionist exhibitions. In 1876 in the second such exhibition, Caillebotte showed eight of his own works. One of the works, Floor-scrapers (1875), now seen as an early masterpiece, was considered “vulgar” by some critics because if its subject of laborers working on a wooden floor. It has been suspected that that is the reason it was rejected by the Salon of 1875. Caillebotte’s subjects of his exhibited work were the people and places he saw in and around Paris. Featuring skewed perspectives and modern subjects, the canvases reflect the changing landscape of the capital following the devastating war and the necessary rebuilding, and the new vision of a modern city.

Caillebotte’s style is most closely linked to Realism but his work was also strongly influenced by his Impressionist associates, and his style and technique varies considerably among his works. Caillebotte painted many domestic and familial scenes, interiors, and portraits. Many of his paintings depict members of his family; scenes of boating, fishing, swimming, dining, card playing, piano playing, reading and sewing all done in an intimate, unobtrusive manner which observes the quiet ritual of upper-class life. Caillebotte also painted some still-life food and flowers, and a few nudes.

Caillebotte’s paintings of urban Paris are his most striking and most well-known: The Pont de l’Europe (Le pont de l’Europe) (1876), and Paris Street; Rainy Day (Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, also known as La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie) (1877). Photography was just coming into common use at the time, and Caillebotte may have used this new technology in planning and executing his works.

Caillebotte had purchased a home on the Seine River at Petit-Gennevilliers near Argenteuil, in 1881. He moved there permanently in 1888. Caillebotte’s stopped painting large canvases in the early 1890s and also stopped showing his work at just 34 years old – another factor in keeping his work in the background compared to that of his colleagues. He spent much of his time gardening, building and racing yachts with his brother, Martial, and visiting with his friend Renoir. Though Caillebotte did not marry, the fact that he left a large annuity to Charlotte Berthier, a woman eleven years his junior and of the lower class, seems to support other evidence that he had a long-term serious relationship with her.

Caillebotte died of pulmonary congestion while working in his garden in 1894, at age 45, and was interred at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Sources: gustavcaillebotte.org, bbc.com, nga.gov

Tom Thomson: 1877-1917

August 5, 2016 By Susan Benton

Thomas John (Tom) Thomson, arguably Canada’s most intriguing, and perhaps its most iconic artist, was born on August 5, 1877 in Claremont, Ontario, the sixth child of ten to John and Elizabeth Thomson.

The Thomson Family

The Thomson clan who moved to a farm in Leith shortly after Tom’s birth, were a musical family and at an early age, Tom played both the violin and the mandolin, as well a number of other instruments. His childhood days were spent with his eight brothers and sisters (the ninth sibling had passed away at just 9 months old) fishing, sailing, swimming, reading, dancing and playing mandolin and coronet in the village band. A favourite pastime was drawing caricatures for the amusement of his friends.

A fun-loving and pleasant child by all accounts, Tom was, as are many children of large rural families, independent and adventurous. He was apt to find his own way rather than following the constructs of the Scottish family traditions he was born into. The family farm was located beside Georgian Bay and Tom was drawn to the vast, beckoning water and rugged landscape. Though he had health issues as a child, in adulthood, the wilderness seemed to bring out his strength and stamina.

Tom’s Early Career and Fellow Painters

Tom had a restless start to his adulthood. Unsuccessful at enlisting for the Boer War in 1899 due to health reasons, Tom apprenticed as a machinist at Wm. Kennedy and Son’s Foundry in Owen Sound, but lasted only 8 months before he quit. Still undecided on a career, he briefly attended business school in Chatham. In 1901, he moved to Seattle, Washington to join his brother George at his business college.

George Thomson had arrived in Seattle in 1899, had studied law and then operated The Acme Business College. His brother Henry had joined George shortly after, followed by brothers Tom and Ralph in 1901. Tom studied at Acme and enrolled in penmanship, but left after six months to begin his career as a commercial artist, responsible for designing, drawing and lettering advertisements. George also attended the college, but later returned east to study at The Art Student’s League in New York. He like Tom, eventually devoted himself to painting, and exhibited his entire life.

In the gold rush town of Seattle, Tom also met and was smitten with the beautiful young Alice Eleanor Lambert, who by some accounts only giggled when the ardent young Tom proposed causing him to abruptly return home to Canada in 1905.

His first job on returning home was to work as a senior artist at Legg Brothers, a photo-engraving firm in Toronto. He acquired the strong design skills evident in his art (Northern River, 1914-1915), in the Toronto commercial art world. Thomson joined Grip Limited, Engravers, in 1909, a prominent Toronto photo-engraving house. This position proved to be a turning point in his life. Grip’s senior artist was J.E.H. MacDonald (1873–1932), who encouraged his staff to foster their talents by painting outdoors in their spare time—in the city’s ravines and the nearby countryside. Over the next three years Albert Robson, Grip’s Art Director also hired Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) and Fred Varley (1881–1969), both fresh from England, and Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945). Through MacDonald, Thomson also met Lawren Harris (1885–1970) at the Arts and Letters Club, a meeting place for men interested in literature, theatre, architecture, and art. Thomson was encouraged to paint by his colleagues, who saw an unusual and burgeoning talent in their colleague. When Robson moved to Grip’s main competitor, Rous and Mann Limited, in the fall of 1912, most of his loyal staff, including Thomson, followed him.

Algonquin Beckons

Tom’s love of the wilderness had taken him on his first visit to Algonquin Park in the spring of 1912 with a sketch kit in hand. He returned again that fall for two months. Thomson encouraged his Rous and Mann colleagues to join him, where they painted together and became known informally as the Algonquin School. Unfortunately, the progress of this informal group of artists would be interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. They would not formally come together again until after Tom’s death to form Canada’s first national school of painting, the Group of Seven.

In May of 1913, Thomson went to Algonquin Park on his own and spent the spring and summer there. On his way back to Toronto, Thomson stopped in Huntsville and may have visited Winifred Trainor, whose family had a cottage on Canoe Lake, and who he may have spent time with in Algonquin Park. Later, she was rumoured to be engaged to Thomson for a marriage in the fall of 1917, but the records are not conclusive.

In 1913 Thomson also exhibited his first major canvas, A Northern Lake, at the Ontario’s Society of Artists exhibition. The Government of Ontario purchased the canvas for $250 a considerable sum at that time, considering Thomson’s commercial artist’s weekly salary was $35. That same year, Dr. James MacCallum, a prominent Toronto Ophthamologist and collector saw the “truthfulness” of Thomson’s early sketches and guaranteed Thomson’s expenses for a year (2014), enabling him to devote all his time to painting. MacCallum also introduced Thomson to A.Y. Jackson (1882–1974)—an artist who had recently returned from his third visit to France. Thomson would soon be sharing studios with A.Y. Jackson and then Franklin Carmichael at the Studio Building which Lawren Harris along with MacCallum were financial partners in the construction of to support a new movement in Canadian art – a new way of representing the ruggedness and wilderness of a relatively young country.

By 1914, Thomson had become enchanted with the north, preferring to spend his time fishing, painting and canoeing, sporadically acting as guide, firefighter or a park ranger (in subsequent years), in Algonquin Park, until the onset of winter would force his return to the city. He wintered in a fixed-up modest shack behind the Studio Building in the Rosedale area of Toronto. Working his sketches up into larger canvasses, he waited for early spring and the chance to return to Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park where he found a landscape which inspired him and offered the solitude he loved to paint in.

Thomson’s Work Gains Recognition

1914 was also a turning point for Thomson as an artist. The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, under new director Eric Brown (and advised by board member Lawren Harris), began to acquire Thomson’s work, first Moonlight, 1913–14, from the Ontario Society of Artists exhibition for $150; then Northern River, 1915, the following year for $500; and a year later Spring Ice, 1915–16, for $300. Such recognition was remarkable for an emerging, unknown artist, though the money he received was not sufficient to live on. Thomson, however, never paid much attention to managing his career. He didn’t even give titles to most of his paintings or date them.

Thomson’s work reflected his exposure to Arts and Crafts design, the work of his artist friends, and contemporary Scandinavian art, as seen by Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald in a Buffalo exhibition in January of 1913. His canoe trips resulted in many sketches of the light and seasons of Canada’s north. By late 1915, Thomson’s approach to landscape painting became more imagination-based. He often sought some natural feature corresponding to his pre-existing ideas, or painted landscapes in his Toronto studio from memory. Thomson’s design experience permeates his late canvases, which feature stylized tree branches and flat areas of strong colour (The Jack Pine, 1916-1917).

A Tragic End; An Incredible Legacy

On July 8, 1917, Thomson paddled across Canoe Lake and disappeared. His body was found 8 days later. Though ruled an accidental drowning, the cause of his death is surrounded by skepticism to this day.

When Thomson died, his iconic painting The West Wind, with its single tree bent against the strong prevailing winds, was found on his easel in his studio in Toronto. Some feel the painting is unresolved, unfinished, as was Thomson’s life. Others see it as representation of a determined, solitary spirit finding his place in the northern ruggedness of Canada.

In September of 1917, J.E.H. MacDonald, Dr. MacCallum and J.W. Beatty (another painter and friend) built a stone memorial cairn on Hayhurst Point, overlooking Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park. The cairn’s inscription was composed by Thomson’s friend, painter J. E. H. MacDonald, and reads:

TO THE MEMORY OF TOM THOMSON ARTIST, WOODSMAN AND GUIDE WHO WAS DROWNED IN CANOE LAKE JULY 8TH, 1917

HE LIVED HUMBLY BUT PASSIONATELY WITH THE WILD

IT MADE HIM BROTHER TO ALL UNTAMED THINGS OF NATURE

IT DREW HIM APART AND REVEALED ITSELF WONDERFULLY TO HIM

IT SENT HIM OUT FROM THE WOODS ONLY TO SHOW THESE REVELATIONS THROUGH HIS ART AND IT TOOK HIM TO ITSELF AT LAST.

Thomson’s death was a tragedy for his fellow artists – they lost an inspiring colleague, a great friend and their guide to the north woods. This untimely loss prompted a clarification of their vision for Canadian art; it strengthened their resolve and gave rise to the formation of The Group of Seven in 1920. Though, Tom Thomson did not live to see the birth of the Group, his name became synonymous with the radical group of painters who would create and reflect a unique Canadian identity through painting.