Revisioning the "Culture of Nature" in Canadian Visual Culture Studies: John Russell and An/Other Case of Modern Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
67 This essay looks at how the of continues to haunt the historiography of Canadian visual culture studies and draws on a case study from the 1930s in order to complicate that his- tory. Normalized through selective practices of artists, critics, and collectors from the 1920s to the 1940s in English Canada, the painting of Canadian landscape was codified through the elision of nationhood with wilderness painting in the well-known work of the Group of Seven and many of their peers. One of those peers, John Wentworth Russell, painted Canadian landscapes with a near oppositional vision. This case study examines how Russell's work overtly contradicts the practice of the Group of Seven. In situating nudes in the parkland setting of Toronto Islands, he set off a storm of controversy that reveals contemporaneous ideas about the land, nature, and the city in the 1930s. The author argues that while a culture of (wild) nature dominates the historiography of Canadian visual culture, Russell's significant output suggests that the apparent intractability of wilderness painting did not go unchallenged, and close attention to the details of Russell's decade- long skirmish with the Group of Seven provides further insight into an alternate culture of nature. Le present article examine comment la « culture de la nature » continue de hanter l'historiogra- phie des etudes sur la culture visuelle canadienne et s'inspire d'une etude de cas des annees 1930 pour complexifier cette histoire. La peinture des paysages canadiens, normalisee avec des
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.081 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".