Cold Comforts

The introduction to Winter Count: Embracing the Cold serves notice that the paintings in the National Gallery of Canada’s big exhibition by the same title are not to be taken lightly. Jean-François Bélisle, the museum’s director and CEO, repeatedly leans into words like “endurance,” “resilience,” and “survival.” As he puts it in this handsome and bilingual book, “Winter teaches that beauty and brutality can coexist.”

It sounds daunting. Thankfully, the actual art gathered for this seasonal survey is heavy on beauty and light on brutality. In fact, only a handful of the 164 works in Winter Count evoke hardship. From impressionist superstars to Group of Seven heroes, from Scandinavian snowscape specialists to Inuit printmakers, these pages brim with delight in winter scenes along with the pleasures of cozy interiors.

Some of the pieces might serve as reminders that harsh weather demands respect. Yet nobody who looks at Jeannie Alivaktuk’s Kamiit (1987), for instance, will think of fending off frostbite; the only possible reaction to her motif of round-eyed owls rendered in sealskin is to be charmed. Even Cornelius Krieghoff’s Crossing the Ice with the Royal Mail, Quebec (1862) leaves the viewer less worried about the danger of navigating a river’s ragged floe than struck by how splendidly the mail boat’s red-painted gunwale stands out against all that whiteness.

Bélisle’s introduction seems bent on framing winter art as weighty enough to warrant blockbuster treatment. But as the book’s separate essays on Canadian, European, and Indigenous art focus on particular pieces, the curators can’t help reflecting the lightheartedness that predominates. Most of the many artists represented seem energized either by what people do in wintertime or, more important, how the world looks in winter light.

When it comes to revelling in the effects of sun bouncing off snow and ice, the show is anchored in impressionism. Anabelle Kienle Ponka, senior curator of European, American, and Asian art, explains that progressively colder winters in France through the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with innovations in portable painting gear, allowed Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and others to closely study the season. Monet’s superb snowy scenes, highlights of the exhibition, would influence several Canadians. Pissarro, whose stock has risen lately, partly on the strength of Anka Muhlstein’s recent biography, Camille Pissarro: The Audacity of Impressionism, painted more than a hundred winter scenes. The excellent examples here include Piette’s House at Montfoucault (1874), in which the painter proves how snow’s whiteness requires a fair amount of blue.

Canadian artists who spent time in France in the nineteenth century, notably James Wilson Morrice, Maurice Cullen, and Clarence Gagnon, are all given their due. Moving into the twentieth century, Winter Count notes that future Group of Seven heavyweights Lawren S. Harris and J. E. H. MacDonald were inspired by their visit to Buffalo, New York, in 1913 to see an exhibition of Scandinavian art, which featured Swedish painters such as Gustaf Fjaestad and Anna Boberg — both among the book’s Nordic revelations. Indeed, so much European virtuosity is on display that a Canadian might begin to feel a gnawing unease. Isn’t winter supposed to be our thing?

So it comes as a relief that the home team holds its own. The heavy branches of Harris’s iconic Snow II (1915) look better than ever. Katerina Atanassova, the museum’s senior curator of Canadian art, draws attention to lesser-known names too, such as Charlotte Schreiber, one of the first professional post-Confederation women painters, who has a way with children playing with sleds. As Atanassova writes, “Her paintings on the Credit River triumphantly transform the subject of winter from a hardship to one of pure joy.”

Joy also pervades several Inuit prints and drawings of interior scenes, especially depictions of traditional games. Annie Pootoogook’s Composition (Christmas), from 2006, shows a family unwrapping presents, as a boy in blue plays with a blue remote-controlled truck. Seeing Pootoogook’s domestic idyll not far from Jack Chambers’s Sunday Morning No. 2 (1968–70), in which two boys watch TV with a snowy suburb on view through their living room window, provides a prime example of how the juxtapositions in Winter Count can chime beautifully.

The exhibition’s title comes from the traditional practice among First Nations on the prairies of keeping a visual record of community history by drawing images on buffalo hide to represent significant events of each passing year, as measured from the start of one winter to the first snowfall of the next. An essay by the show’s Indigenous curators emphasizes the way artists respond to “the cyclical nature of time, as experienced through winters.”

If Winter Count occasionally touches on themes of memory and history, it is far more often about how the season strikes the eye in the moment. This immediacy is nowhere more evident than in the closing section, which addresses winter’s relationship to abstraction. Here Wassily Kandinsky’s Murnau with Locomotive (1911), with a simplified black train plowing through a white landscape laced with icy blue, neighbours Itee Pootoogook’s Floe Edge, Winter (2009), with an Arctic seascape distilled to blue sky, darker blue water, blue-tinged ice. Viewed separately, these paintings show what two artists, widely separated by history and geography, could do with winter light. Putting them in close proximity makes the case about what winter light can do to artists.

The cover image of David Blackwood: Myth & Legend, and also the first of Blackwood’s epic prints to greet visitors to the retrospective by the same name at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is January Visit Home (1975), in which a lone man with his back to the viewer stands on a frozen shoreline, gazing over a swath of the North Atlantic toward a looming cliff encased in ice and snow. The dramatic composition calls to mind the nineteenth-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808–10) or his famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (circa 1817). Subject of a major survey at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, Friedrich was the master of the Rückenfigur: an isolated individual, portrayed from behind, contemplating a forbidding vista. The device implies a profound bond between the mysteriously faceless figure and the romanticized landscape.

In other words, January Visit Home is a psychologically charged, implicitly autobiographical work. This makes it an unexpected entry point for a retrospective on Blackwood, whose prints are usually seen as preoccupied with history rather than introspection. The artist, who died in 2022, was beloved for his images of outport lore: sealers, ships, villagers at home. As Stephan Jost, the AGO’s director, writes in the book’s foreword, “The exhibition highlights Blackwood’s sacred process of making but is also about what he held most dear: his family and their history in the remote fishing village of Wesleyville, Newfoundland.”

Born in 1941, Blackwood took up the exacting medium of intaglio printmaking in 1959 as a newly arrived student at art school in Toronto. He lived in Ontario for the rest of his life but applied his formidable etching skill to producing blue-hued narrative scenes from his childhood and earlier generations. His breakthrough series from the early 1960s, The Lost Party, depicted a 1914 sealing disaster. His best-known piece, Fire Down on the Labrador (1980), features a burning schooner and icebergs afloat in the top third, while the bottom two-thirds is occupied by a stupendously huge whale.

Many of his prints faithfully memorialize a bygone seafaring way of life. But, like the mythic leviathan in Fire Down on the Labrador, the fantastical often lurks beneath the surface. In Molly Glover Leaving Bragg’s Island (1985), a man watches from a dock as a woman stands, arms aloft, in the prow of a departing boat, apparently calling down otherworldly forces from a brooding sky.

Magic realism shares space with realistic realism in Blackwood’s oeuvre. His Wesleyville isn’t unlike Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, the fictional town that stands in for Aracataca, the real Colombian backwater where the future Nobel laureate was born in 1927. Elderly aunts and grandparents filled García Márquez’s boyhood head with oral history and outlandish tales, all fodder for his seminal fiction. Blackwood’s prints similarly reflect a childhood in which communal memory and the uncanny intermingled freely. His fascination for what the old folks said doesn’t make his art less modern. Humanity still overwhelmingly lived on farms and in small towns when the painter, like the author, was young; the global majority had migrated to big cities by the time he died. Memories of rural folkways took on imaginative potency in an epoch defined by headlong urbanization.

As a celebrated artist working not far from Toronto, Blackwood forged an important relationship with the AGO. This book includes a revealing chapter drawn from the institution’s Blackwood archives, including his diaries, sketches, and newspaper clippings. In these materials, his obsession with Newfoundland history and his artistic ambition are interwoven. He was never merely an illustrator of past times, any more than Márquez was a folklorist. Blackwood’s impulse was deeply subjective, as January Visit Home announces.

Even more telling is the way an old door he salvaged from a shed in Wesleyville and hauled back to Ontario fired his imagination. In one of several prints featuring this relic, Autobiography (2010), he etched the names of hundreds of people he met throughout his life. The tiny letters look as if they might have been incised into the door’s rough wood by countless seasons of awful weather. In the end, Blackwood made his technique seem like an extension of the very elements in the place he never truly left behind.