Defiant Spirits (44 page)

Varley's artistic career remained thwarted. His champion, Barker Fairley, fretted over his slim chances for success in Canada. “I have come to the conclusion that Varley's prospects as a painter are just as precarious as they were ten years ago,” he wrote to Eric Brown, “and that there seems nothing for it but to try to push him out of Canada into London or New York. The support Varley received here in the past two or three years
. . .
all reduces itself to the enthusiasm of a handful of people, including yourself, whose united efforts do not seem to suffice to carry the man indefinitely.” The portraits for the Massey family brought money and acclaim, but Fairley recognized the limited market for his friend's skills since “his work is not unoriginal enough for commissions to come in unsought.”
37

Fairley did manage to find work for him. By the end of 1921 Varley was at work on portraits of such worthies as Irving Heward Cameron, a recently retired professor of surgery at the University of Toronto. Known as the “philosophical surgeon,” Dr. Cameron had served overseas with John McCrae, with whom he made translations from Latin and Greek.
38
A more debonair sitter was Huntley Gordon, the
Montreal-born star of Hollywood films such as
The Million Dollar Dollies, The Frisky Mrs. Johnson
and
My Lady o' the Pines.
As if to compensate for his folly and indulgence, Varley also began a series of portrait sketches of Maud and the children.

THE GROUP OF Seven's tour of American art museums ended in January 1922 in Muskegon, Michigan. Once known as the “Lumber Queen of the World,” Muskegon made an apt location to conclude an exhibition featuring so many scenes of Canada's timber-producing regions. In Muskegon, as elsewhere, from Worcester to Moose Jaw, the painters earned their reputation as modernists. The reviewer for the
Muskegon Chronicle
praised the “crudeness” and “ruggedness” of “these big splotchy things” as evidence that the Group of Seven were “radical in their methods” and had “seceded from the older schools.” Gratifyingly, he declared that the thirty paintings “make evident with a loud clear voice that Canada has something to say in the realm of painting.”
1

The American tour may have been a critical success, but after fifteen months of travel, the hoped-for sales to American collectors and museums failed to materialize, and all but one of the paintings returned to Toronto. The lack of sales to institutions should not have been surprising or discouraging. American museums were not yet committed to buying Post-Impressionist art—even works by Cézanne or Matisse, or homegrown artists such as Marsden Hartley—in any quantities. Although the first Cézanne entered an American public collection (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in 1913, almost no other examples of European or American modernism were purchased by American museums prior to the early 1920s.
2
It was in fact a rare coup that Lawren Harris's
A Side Street
was bought in 1921 by the Detroit Institute of Arts. But it proved the lone sale (and even it was eventually rejected, repatriated across the Peace Bridge in 1956). Commercial prospects were scarcely better in Canada, apart from those to the National Gallery or a few cognoscenti such as Dr. MacCallum and Vincent Massey.

Casting a cold eye on this dearth of commercial success, Hector Charlesworth pronounced for the first time on the Group of Seven as a collective. The artists had only themselves to blame, he wrote, because “they keep on producing stuff that people will not buy.” People did not want to hang on the walls of their homes pictures of swamps and slums: they wanted “horses hitched to a logging sleigh; the familiar old snake fence, with a woods in the distance.”
3
In fact, this appraisal was too sanguine about public tastes, since few Canadians wanted images of Canadiana of any kind on their walls. In 1910 Frances Anne Hopkins had lamented, “I have not found Canadians at all anxious hitherto for pictures of their own country.”
4
A decade later, little had changed. In the early 1920s, only 2 per cent of all paintings sold in Canada were done by Canadian artists.
5

LACK OF COMMERCIAL success or international impact failed to bring about a change in tactics. By 1922 the painters had settled into what had become an undeviating routine. In March they showed a small number of works at the
osa
exhibition, followed by a larger display for the third Group of Seven exhibition in May. The foreword to their catalogue repeated many now-familiar doctrines about challenges to convention, new methods, the impossibility of a European style capturing the autumn pageantry of our northern woods, and so forth.

Two new invitees appeared at the group's 1922 exhibition, but neither did anything to expand the collective's profile or heighten its aesthetic power or credentials. They were merely made up of two friends, the painter and printmaker William J. Wood and the historian and teacher Percy J. Robinson, an amateur painter and a member of the Madawaska Club. Their inclusion was disappointing in view of the calibre of other painters who received no invitations. Florence McGillivray, now living in Ottawa, would have been an inspired choice to enhance the exhibition. Likewise Peter Sheppard, a gifted painter of wilderness landscapes, maritime scenes and majestic Toronto cityscapes. The latter in particular, in works like
The Building of the Bloor Street Viaduct
(1916) and
The Arrival of the Circus
(1919), marked him out as a rare talent, well versed in modern painterly techniques and possessed of a visionary approach to the urban landscape.

Nor were invitations issued to any of the Beaver Hall painters, despite the critic for
La Presse
praising them (the women in particular) as the most exciting and accomplished artists showing work in Montreal. The approach of these Montreal painters, who eschewed nationalism in favour of individual expression, probably disqualified them from the holy-old-mackinaw tone of the Toronto shows. In any case, no safety rope linked Beaver Hall Hill and the Studio Building. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was to be no breakthrough for the Group of Seven in 1922. Attendance was much the same as in previous years—some 2,800 people—and no sales were made.

The reviews were equally predictable. The
Mail & Empire
was generous and supportive, stating that the artists “have at least attempted to depict something new in a new manner.” Perennial detractors voiced their usual demurrals: “the methods of the theatrical scene painter” (Charlesworth) and “what happened to the fence in the rear of the home of Mr. Two Dimensions during the coal strike” (the
Toronto Telegram
's description of one of Harris's shack paintings).

The most telling and disturbing complaint came from a long-time ally, Augustus Bridle, who lamented the lack of individuality among members: the painters were, he noted, “becoming rather more alike.” Bridle also pointed out the sometimes cursory efforts. With a one-year-old daughter and a new full-time job as a designer at
Sampson-Matthews, Carmichael enjoyed none of the same leisure to travel and paint as Jackson or Harris. He exhibited only a single work,
Leaf Pattern,
which showed him to be, Bridle claimed, a “roving poet who has very little time to get the big, serious things.” Varley meanwhile “seems moody and impatient,” uninterested in “most of the things seen in the north.”
6

Two years into their great adventure, there was already the need for an infusion of fresh blood that the members seemed incapable of administering.

THE FOREWORD TO the 1922 Group of Seven catalogue included a wonderful rhetorical flight: “In the midst of discovery and progress, of vast horizons and a beckoning future, Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of a great adventure.” All roads in 1922 led, though, to the familiar destinations, underlining the essential regionalism of the painters. Harris spent the summer of 1922 at his property in Allandale before returning to the North Shore of Lake Superior, this time with Carmichael. They made their way to Port Coldwell, near the southern edge of Lake Nipigon, where the Prince of Wales camped three years earlier. Lismer returned to the Bon Echo Inn (after continuing his association with Merrill Denison by acting in his most recent play,
From Their Own Place,
staged at the Arts and Letters Club). Jackson painted in Quebec in the early spring and Georgian Bay in the late autumn.

MacDonald went farthest afield, spending six weeks near Petite Rivière, Nova Scotia. He visited his old friend Lewis Smith, the newly appointed head of the Art Department at Acadia Ladies' Seminary in Wolfville. He tried painting seascapes but—unexpectedly for an artist who executed rapids and waterfalls with such dexterity—found the sea hard to capture. “I have been attempting to sketch the waves, but find this very difficult,” he wrote to his wife, Joan. He was hoping to find a “heroic subject” but instead, like Jackson in Quebec, concentrated on humbler scenes of human occupation.
7
Different from the forbidding scenes of Africville painted by Harris a year earlier, MacDonald's Nova Scotia paintings showed a quiet habitation and bustling industry: the entrance to the harbour, a bridge spanning the river, a team of oxen hauling a load of hay, a church by the sea. If some of these images seemed to peddle the myths and clichés of Longfellow's
Evangeline,
they did so with good reason: MacDonald was preparing to illustrate Grace McLeod Rogers's
Stories of the Land of Evangeline
for McClelland & Stewart.

Harris was likewise at work on a book illustration for McClelland & Stewart—in his case, the endpapers for a work of his own. The autumn of 1922 saw the publication of his collection
Contrasts: A Book of Verse.
In publishing poetry, he was straying onto ground equally fraught with controversy. In Canadian literature as in Canadian painting, modernists and the old guard were at daggers drawn. Conservative critics abhorred free verse, the first Canadian example of which, Arthur Stringer's
Open Water,
appeared in 1914. In language worthy of a Group of Seven catalogue, Stringer argued in his preface against the “necrophilic regard for
. . .
established conventions,” and claimed the purpose of poetry was to “elucidate emotional experience.”
8
Unsurprisingly, many critics took a dim view of such developments.
Saturday Night
urged Stringer not to turn his back on metre and rhyme, and elsewhere literary modernism and free verse were indignantly denounced by Canadian critics as “intellectual Bolshevism” and “the foetid breath of decadence.”
9

In
Contrasts
Harris proved to be a modernist in both style—all of the poems are in free verse—and subject matter: most deal with the urban degradation and isolation explored by earlier poets such as Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot. Toronto the Good became, in Harris's poetry, a “pestilential city” (“City Heat”), a place “ever shrouded in smoke” (“A Note of Colour”), where “garbage-reeking lanes” were “littered with ashes, boxes, cans, old rags” (“A Question”). Like Eliot, whose
The Waste Land
was published that same autumn, Harris reveals how the sordid modern metropolis destroys the old rituals and rhythms of the natural world, as the inhabitants—what Harris calls “blind, driven people” who swarm to “the daily grind”—are compelled by irrational machine-age forces they cannot understand. The result is fragmentation, isolation and a spiritual death in the age of the soul's degradation.

Although Harris's paintings of urban poverty were often garishly bright, the colourful swirls and charged brushwork of his canvases gave way in
Contrasts
to a pared-down language of pained but detached observation of urban blight. The critics did not warm to his approach. He received a rebuke in
Canadian Forum
—a publication that usually defended modernism—from none other than Barker Fairley, who lamented the “appalling laxity of the
vers libre
habit, now rife on this continent” that had tempted Harris into publishing “an extremely bad book of verses.” Almost as harsh an assessment came from an even more esteemed literary figure, Lucy Maud Montgomery. “I liked a few things in it,” she wrote in a letter to her friend Ephraim Weber. “But the straining after originality displayed by so many modern writers often reveals the poverty of their thought
. . .
Free
verse strikes me as
laziness.
”
10

Montgomery, in her Anne and then her Emily novels, depicted a Canada—pastoral and picturesque, held together by bonds of family and community—very different from both Harris's portraits of craggy wilderness solitudes and his scenes of urban isolation. He and the “Queen of Canadian Novelists” (as she was christened in 1923)
11
may well have met a year earlier, when Montgomery—whose own (dutifully rhyming) collection of verse McClelland & Stewart had published in 1916—attended a dinner at the Arts and Letters Club in honour of her fellow
pei
novelist Basil King. What she made of Harris's paintings, a world away from the “green, untroubled pastures and still waters” of Avonlea, has not been recorded.
12

THE FIRST FEW years of the Group of Seven's existence had seen little in the way of offensive and malicious reviews. Jackson's 1921 prophecy that opposition would arise threatened to go unfulfilled. Controversy arose, however, as in September of that year the National Gallery opened its doors for the first time since the war. It moved back into rooms in the Victoria Memorial Museum vacated after the 1916 fire on Parliament Hill. Once again it shared quarters with the dinosaurs from the Canadian Museum of Nature. A few years later, Lismer described the premises as a “pitiful ramshackle,” and E. Wyly Grier claimed the building looked “as though it might fall down and bury its own pictures.”
13

Sometime after the reopening, Charlesworth paid a visit to Ottawa. It was not the ramshackle state of the building that offended him so much as the contents. Indignant at what he saw, he wrote an article in
Saturday Night
arguing that the Group of Seven were overrepresented. Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker were devoting far too much wall space, he believed, “to experimental pictures of unproven quality.”
14

When Charlesworth's article appeared in early 1922, the National Gallery owned some fifty paintings by Thomson and the Group of Seven. Even more cause for alarm, for opponents like Charlesworth, was the statistic that in the years 1920 and 1921 the Gallery spent $5,400 on paintings by the Group of Seven, compared with only $7,500 by all others.
14
For two consecutive years, that is, almost 42 per cent of the gallery's entire acquisitions budget was devoted to acquiring work by a group of painters who, despite wide and assertive promotion, had singularly failed to motivate other patrons or museums to reach for their chequebooks.

This “genteel graft” (as Charles Murphy called it) was about to end. Several months before Charlesworth's article appeared, a new regime came to power in Ottawa. In December 1921 Mackenzie King's Liberals defeated Arthur Meighen's Conservatives and formed a minority government. King was not at all sympathetic to modern art. “The modern art,” he later wrote in his diary, “is a perversion
. . .
Nature robbed of her shades and moods
. . .
decayed trees made to do duty as works of Art.” He had nothing but revulsion for the Group of Seven and their “so-called ‘Canadian Art'—futurist impressionist stuff.” He found Harris and Thomson especially repellent: their landscapes looked like the work of “a man suffering from leprosy.”
15
He much preferred the healthier-looking trees of Homer Watson and Carl Ahrens, both personal friends. Ahrens's landscapes he called a “burst of sunshine.”
16