Lifeworks: Western spirits

The Group of Seven in Western Canada, a travelling exhibition organized by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, challenges a widely held and erroneous view that Canada's most celebrated painters focused their work almost exclusively on central Canada. The sheer scope, quality and range of this ambitious, first-class exhibition testify to their extensive involvement west of Ontario. Glenbow curator Catharine Mastin has amassed the largest collection ever of paintings done by the Group about the West and in the West. The result is an impressive and compellingly fresh look at the Group of Seven.* The show is effectively organized both regionally and thematically. The large opening section is devoted to the Rockies, featuring mainly landscapes by Lawren Harris, J.E.H. Macdonald and Arthur Lismer. The West Coast is represented by Frederick Varley, and the Prairies by Lionel Lemoine FitzGerald and A.Y. Jackson (including his most famous painting of rolling foothills, Alberta Rhythm, 1947). The exhibition concludes with a major section devoted to the abstractions of Harris and FitzGerald.† It is fascinating to compare the approaches of the different artists in the the Group of Seven, whose identities and personal styles tend to be fused into a cultural monolith. A case in point is the different strategies employed by Harris, Macdonald and Lismer in their depictions of the Rocky Mountains. Harris's hallmark mountain landscapes, such as Isolation Peak (c. 1931) and Mount Lefroy (1930) are austere, cool, remote and silent, while MacDonald's are painterly, warm, richly coloured and full of life. In effect, Harris's smooth paintings are translations of actual mountains into idealized icons, existing outside of real time or space, unaffected by weather or any other transient variable of the natural world. Macdonald, on the other hand, revelled in the beauty and variety of nature. He expressed his very personal devotion to a specific place, Lake O'Hara, in carefully observed views seen from near and far, in rain, snow and sun. Yet both men were seeking and expressing the spiritual in nature — the arcane symbolism of Theosophy for Harris and the animating undercurrents of Transcendentalism for Macdonald. Lismer interpreted the mountains in weighty, sculptural terms. He constructed heavily outlined, massive structures on canvas that seem strangely anthropomorphic and somewhat menacing. An example is his best-known mountain painting, Cathedral Mountain (1928), whose insistent materiality makes a telling contrast to the pared-down, otherworldliness of Harris's Mountain Forms (1928). Frederick Varley never shared the overtly nationalistic aspirations of his colleagues; his interests and passions lay elsewhere. In 1926 a teaching job took him to BC. Among his best paintings are evocative portraits of his lover and student Vera Weatherbee. In a small, intimate portrait, Vera's sensuality is enhanced by the exaggerated asymmetry of her eyes and her emanating spirituality is suggested by the lush application of an unusual colour complement of green and purple. Vera was also the model for Varley's haunting and elusive Dhârâna (c. 1932), which invokes spiritual practises of both Hinduism and Buddhism in its reference to a meditative phase of yoga. Vera sits on the steps of the porch of their house at Lynn Valley, surrounded and enveloped by the landscape. Her head thrust upward, her body erect and immobile, Vera's complete absorption by the cosmos is revealed through the brilliant use of colour, which submerges her in a sea of rich blue impasto. Varley's other famous BC landscapes are all here, too, comparable in their use of modernist devices — high-keyed, arbitrary colours, agitated brushwork and visionary distortions — to the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Edward Munch. In the psychological intensity of his art, Varley projects the image of the archetypal, alienated Modern artist. The art of Lionel Lemoine FitzGerald, who lived and taught art in Winnipeg, reveals a lucid and focused mind. His small-scale, calm, reflective and intensely personal work seems the very antithesis of the quintessential Group of Seven nationalistic mantra. Yet, he was invited to join the Group in 1932, an indication that the more bombastic phase of “art as nationalism” was over by that time. The modest subject of The Little Plant (1947) is a close-up view of an ordinary potted plant set in front of an upstairs window that gives onto a wintry suburban backyard. The awkward, upward striving of this scrawny, indoor plant seems an understated and ironic response to the classic Group of Seven icon: the soaring lone tree, seen against a majestic panorama of water and distant shore, heroically buffeting the northern gales of the Ontario wilderness. FitzGerald turned to the prosaic rather than the sublime, choosing his subjects among the ordinary, unremarkable scenes of city life, as in the backyard view of Doc Snyder's House (1931), his most famous painting. But it is FitzGerald's exquisite abstracts of the 1950s that are the jewels of this exhibition. Subtly modulated in the most refined gradations of luminous soft colours, these tonal works present shifting spatial planes in lyrical evocations of the prairies. Remarkably, almost all of the most famous works by Varley and FitzGerald are in this show, as well as the best known of Harris's pristine mountain landscapes. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the exhibition on the Group of Seven's Western connections is the inclusion of so many canonical masterpieces of Canadian art. Monique Westra Artist, Writer, Art Historian Calgary, Alta. Figure. Arthur Lismer, 1928. Cathedral Mountain, oil on canvas, 122.0 cm х 142.5 cm. Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; gift of Sidney Dawes, 1959. Photo by: Thomas Moore Photography, Toronto Figure. Lawren S. Harris, 1928. Mountain Forms, oil on canvas, 152.4 cm х 177.8 cm. Collection of Imperial Oil Limited. Figure. F. H. Varley, c. 1932. Dhârâna, oil on canvas, 86.4 cm х 101.6 cm. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario; gift from the Albert H. Robson Memorial Subscription Fund, 1942. Photo by: Carlo Catenazzi, Art Gallery of Toronto ...

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