Still Controversial, Sixty Years On

Shortly before her death in the spring of 1945, Emily Carr told her confidant, Ira Dilworth, that the next generation would probably “scoff ” at her honours and consider her “trash.” It did not happen quite like this. Carr’s contemporaries were successful in keeping her name and her reputation before the Canadian public, apparently defying the wheel of fashion.

They did this in several ways. In 1945 the joint executor of Carr’s artistic work, former Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris, helped mount the exhibition “Emily Carr: Her Paintings and Sketches” at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). Travelling from Toronto to Ottawa, Montreal and then to Vancouver, the exhibition exposed Canadians to 177 oil paintings, water colours, oil-on-paper sketches, charcoal and brush drawings produced during the artist’s long career. Moreover, Carr’s literary reputation—she received the Governor General’s Award for Klee Wyck four years before her...