Defiant Spirits (37 page)

Milne spent the summer of 1919 on the Continent, painting battlefields at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. He seems not to have crossed paths in London with either Varley or Beatty, though he shared many of the aesthetic concerns and techniques as the painters in the Studio Building. By 1911 he had adopted a style in which he abandoned atmospheric effects in favour of exploring decorative forms in the landscape through side-by-side dabs of bright Fauvist colour—what a critic for the
New York Times
admired as “extremely effective, intensely modern and competent blots and splashes of colour.”
37
One of his works at the Armory Show,
Distorted Tree,
showed a leaning evergreen with criss-crossed branches perched on a rocky hillside blanketed in scintillating snow. With its cool blues clashing with bright oranges, it was a coruscating Hot Mush vision of the winter landscape. Appraising such work in 1912, an American critic celebrated his “genuine effort
. . .
toward cutting loose from formulas that have served for twenty or more years for the purposes of finding newer and more effective methods of reporting the facts of the natural world.”
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If Milne's search for new and effective methods of reporting the natural world seemed perfect for the Matisse-and-mackinaw world of the Studio Building, the chance to join the Canadian painters slipped quietly away. After arriving back in Canada aboard
ss
Belgic
in late September 1919, he was demobilized in the grounds of the
CNE
a month after the
CWMF
exhibition closed. He and his American wife, Patsy, stayed for several days at the Walker House Hotel on Front Street. Milne briefly considered living and working in Toronto, though it was a city he barely knew and one in which he had no contacts or connections. The Canadian War Memorial Fund's champion in Canada, Sir Edmund Walker, was either unaware or unconcerned that Milne was in the city. That he, Eric Brown and Lawren Harris would not have interested themselves in an expatriate painter who was unrepresented in any Canadian public collections, and who used daringly modern methods in his landscapes and urban scenes, seems incomprehensible. But Milne met none of the painters from the Studio Building, and his prospects in Toronto, a city with no equivalent of galleries such as the Montross, discouraged him. In November, six weeks after his demobilization, he returned with Patsy to their former home in Boston Corner, New York. There, with apparently little knowledge of the activities and aspirations of Young Canada, he began roaming the Taconic Mountains armed with sandwiches and a Thermos bottle, in search of “hills to sit on while painting other hills.”
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THE LAST SOLDIER killed in the Great War was a Canadian. Two minutes before the guns fell silent on the Western Front, a German sniper killed Private George Pierce in the Belgian village of Ville-sur-Haine. Private Pierce's cruelly pointless death emphasized the enormous Canadian sacrifices: 60,661 dead and many tens of thousands more wounded.

The Great War was by far the most traumatic event endured by the country since Confederation. Many believed the heroism and sacrifices of the war years could cement a foundation for the elusive national identity. “Canada is only just finding herself,” Lucy Maud Montgomery had written in 1910. “She has not yet fused her varying elements into a harmonious whole. Perhaps she will not do so until they are welded together by some great crisis of storm and stress.”
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That crisis of storm and stress had come at Ypres, at Vimy Ridge, at Passchendaele. By the end of the war it had become axiomatic that “a true Canadian nation” (as Talbot Papineau called it) was being born on the battlefields of Europe. A charismatic Montreal lawyer and decorated officer in the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, Papineau wrote in 1916 that the Second Battle of Ypres represented “the birth-pangs of our nationality.” He himself died at Passchendaele, joining the ranks of those whose deaths in a distant land would, he believed, help Canada become “a nation respected and self-respecting.”
2

Papineau's hopes seemed to be fulfilling themselves as Canada took its first tentative steps towards sovereignty and self-respect in the months following the armistice. Sir Robert Borden had been the principal author of Resolution
ix
at the Imperial War Conference in 1917. Its objective for Canada to become an autonomous nation and gain a voice in foreign policy was realized two years later when Borden led a delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and then when Canada became a member of the League of Nations. This new role in global politics was undeniably the result of Canada's participation in the war. When the United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing (a one-time supporter of American neutrality) tried to veto Canadian representation at Versailles, he was bluntly reminded by Lloyd George that Canada lost more men in the war than the United States.
3

Any optimism about a new Canadian nationhood was tempered by the profound social, political and racial divisions exposed by the war. Borden wrote gloomily in his private diary on the day the armistice was signed: “The world has drifted from its old anchorage, and no man can with certainty prophesy what the outcome will be.”
4
The immediate outcome, in Canada at least, was unemployment, inflation, industrial unrest and riots. Waves of industrial action in the months following the armistice climaxed with the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council calling a general strike on May 15, 1919. On
June 21 a non-violent protest ended with a charge by the Royal Northwest Mounted Police that left one striker dead and the streets of Winnipeg occupied by federal troops. The authorities hastily turned their attention from pacifists to the perceived threat from Bolshevism. Borden believed there existed in Canada what he called “a deliberate attempt to overthrow the existing organization of Government and to supersede it by crude, fantastic methods founded upon absurd conceptions of what has been accomplished in Russia.”
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Police raided labour temples in Vancouver, Regina and Winnipeg. Printing presses were seized and the houses of foreigners searched. Anyone suspected of anarchist or communist sympathies was swiftly deported.

Political as well as industrial unrest divided the country. The violent clashes in Winnipeg tragically reprised the anti-conscription riot in Quebec City in the spring of 1918, when a crowd ransacked and burned the office of the military registrar after a twenty-three-year-old named Joseph Mercier was arrested at a bowling alley for failing to produce his conscription papers. The crowd broke into a hardware store in hopes of finding firearms and attacked the offices of the
Quebec Chronicle,
whose owner, Sir David Watson, was a veteran of Vimy Ridge and Commander of the Canadian 4th Division. The Easter Monday anniversary of Vimy Ridge arrived with Quebec City under military rule and soldiers on horseback charging through fogbound streets with swords drawn. Shots from the crowd were met with machine-gun fire, leaving four civilians dead, sixty-five under arrest, and relations between English and French Canada smouldering in ruins.
6

Four months later, there had been further unrest and more military rule, this time in Toronto. On the night of August 1, 1918, Greek waiters forcibly ejected a disabled and inebriated veteran from the premises of the White Cafe at Yonge and College. For the next three days, mobs in their thousands, led by returned war veterans, ran riot through the streets, fighting the police and demolishing more than forty Greek-owned businesses. One of the country's finest achievements, Canada's Hundred Days, began with Toronto under martial law and the city's downtown core a shambles of shattered glass and looted shops and restaurants.

This ugly and shameful display of xenophobia raised wider questions about the place in Canada of the many tens of thousands of non-British immigrants who had arrived over the previous two decades. Pink-faced Canadians were still in the majority in Toronto, but the Prairie provinces and British Columbia offered a more multi-hued complexion. The Prince of Wales voiced the fears of the Toronto rioters when, alarmed at the number of recent immigrants from all lands in Western Canada, he wrote to his father, King George
v
, that Canada must be kept British: “It is up to the Empire and particularly the
uk
to see that its population is British and not alien!!”
7

Poverty, unemployment, strikes, riots, class polarization, enmity between French and English, hostility to immigrants—what, if anything, could heal Canada's scarred and broken body politic?

A.Y. JACKSON, FOR one, believed that artists could serve a palliative function in society during such troubled times. Two months after the end of the Winnipeg General Strike, he published an article in the
Canadian Courier
entitled “The Vital Necessity of the Fine Arts.” The fine arts were not a side issue, he wrote, since they could serve as “the common meeting ground for all classes” and become “one of the most potent factors in overcoming the problems of social unrest.”
8

How was this artist-led transformation of society to come about? Jackson believed the unrest could be quelled if the fine arts were allowed to provide society, from top to bottom, with a visual makeover. Cities such as Toronto were notoriously unlovely, but all that could be changed. The ugly manifestations of crass and uneducated tastes—“silly furniture, badly proportioned houses, worse pictures and tiresome wallpapers”—would be transformed into things of beauty as artists and designers made beautiful “what before was only dull and pretentious. Instead of going to museums to peer at dim darkened old masters we will see beauty all about us.” Those who saw beauty all about them did not, presumably, riot in the streets.

Jackson's appeal was neither new nor original. Many others believed the fine arts could play an active role in creating a better and healthier society. For the previous two decades, social and moral reformers in Canada, Britain and America had been hoping to tame violent passions, improve morals, inspire patriotism and uplift the spirits of their populations—especially the more downtrodden and aggrieved enclaves—through a provident use of everything from architecture and monuments to music and public murals.

This type of civic reform (known in the United States as the City Beautiful Movement) had a strong advocate in Canada in the painter and architect George A. Reid, principal of the Ontario College of Art and former president of the
OSA
. Reid was a founding member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada, the Toronto Guild of Civic Art and the Toronto Theosophical Society. He had been promoting the beautification of Toronto since the 1890s, donating two of his murals to adorn the entry hall of City Hall when a full program was rejected owing to lack of funds. In 1909 he was involved with Sir Edmund Walker and others in drafting the
Report on a Comprehensive Plan of Systematic Civic Improvements in Toronto,
an elaborate plan to transform the city's visual appearance and moral complexion. It championed turning the unsightly metropolis into a miniature Paris: wide boulevards, attractive government buildings, opera houses, concert halls, art museums, public murals, a waterfront, a system of parks and other green spaces.

The philosophy of the City Beautiful Movement conveniently overlooked the fact that social disaffection and moral decay thrived in Paris despite the Beaux Arts architecture, spacious boulevards and thronging art museums. But the point was that art was not an ivory-tower pursuit removed from the everyday life of society. Art was too important, Jackson believed, to become “a rich man's hobby.”
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In one of his public lectures Reid spoke of his wish “to cultivate a taste and appreciation for art” among the people of Toronto and to make it “a part of everyday life.”
10
This democratic view put them at odds with some avant-garde theorists, such as the American Symbolist poet and self-styled “King of the Bohemians,” Sadakichi Hartmann. In 1910 Hartmann proclaimed that “art is by the few and for the few.” It was preposterous, he claimed, to believe “a pale seamstress or a fatted tradesman” could experience the same joy in contemplating a work of art as a critic or a connoisseur.
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But Reid and Jackson wanted to reach out to pale seamstresses, fatted tradesmen and indeed everyone else. The health of Canadian society, they believed, depended on it.

Although Toronto's bureaucrats paid little heed to Reid's 1909 report, painters in the Studio Building besides Jackson shared his ideas. Reid was Lismer's superior at the Ontario College of Art and both a former teacher of MacDonald and, with his City Hall murals, one of his first sources of artistic inspiration.
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Lismer's indoctrination in the ideas of John Ruskin meant he shared Reid's aspirations to educate and enlighten the socially disenfranchised. In Halifax Lismer took art out of the galleries and into the community, bucking the school governors who believed the fine arts were “an exclusive & cultured subject for the edification of the few.” As he remarked in one of his own public lectures, if the “art impulses of a nation” were stirred, people would be able to rise above their “trivialities and differences.”
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These “art impulses,” in other words, would promote a cohesive national identity and a healthy society. Trivialities and differences existed because Canadians, even after the shared sacrifices of the war, still possessed no strong or agreed sense of themselves as a nation. The country's “confused elements” (in Laurier's phrase) stubbornly frustrated any broad definition of nationhood.

The familiar obsessions of Canadian art—the desire to capture or produce something distinctively Canadian in spirit—therefore returned with a new urgency after the war. Canada needed men and women who could communicate with a wide audience and tell what Lismer called “the Canadian story” in a way that would enrich the “national consciousness.”
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Reid's plan to do the job with public murals came to naught, but the Canadian War Memorials Fund demonstrated how effectively art could begin to foster a national identity by telling this Canadian story. What Lord Beaverbrook did for Canadian soldiers now needed to be done, in paint and print, for the Canadian people as a whole. As Lismer later wrote, many artists and writers in Canada “began to have a guilty feeling that Canada was as yet unwritten, unpainted, unsung
. . .
In 1920 there was a job to be done.”
15

If the painters in the
cwmf
provided the inspiration for a new program of national self-definition, so too did the men commemorated in their works. Canadian soldiers had distinguished themselves in Flanders, MacDonald believed, in a way exemplary of the national character. “In initiative, energy, and stamina, they have established a distinctive Canadian character,” he wrote a few months after the armistice. “They have made new inroads of achievement in a no man's land of tradition and precedent.” The same qualities could now be used by artists. As Jackson expressed this idea in his usual breviloquent style: “We are no longer humble colonials. We've made armies, we can also make artists, historians and poets.”
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THE CWMF EXHIBITION at the
CNE
closed on September 6, 1919. Little more than a week later, several painters from the Studio Building returned to paint in Algoma for the second successive autumn. Jackson was now part of the expedition, which again included Harris, MacDonald and Johnston but not, on this occasion, the group's cook and general skivvy, Dr. MacCallum. Lismer was unavailable because of duties at the Ontario College of Art and Carmichael because of his job at Rous and Mann and the demands of a young family. Varley, now renting premises in the Studio Building, was either uninvited or, busy with his other projects, chose not to participate.

The expedition followed almost exactly the same itinerary as 1918. The men took the train to Sault Ste. Marie and once again hired a specially adapted carriage from the Algoma Central Railway. This year the car was the fabled
acr
10557, previously used as an office for the company's work crews. It was comfortably outfitted with a table and chairs, a stove, a water tank, a sink, cupboards and shelves, a coal box and, of course, bunks. The exterior, freshly painted in a bright red, was decorated by the artists with the skull of a moose, sprigs of holly and the painted motto
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Their meals were a campsite menu of pork and beans, scrambled eggs and bacon, porridge, and toast and marmalade.
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