My book, Picturing the Land: Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500–1950, focuses on five concepts of territory that informed the production of Canadian landscape art over 450 years: nomadic, Arcadian, Edenic, sedentary and universal. Georgiana Uhlyarik suggests that I devised these concepts; she appears unfamiliar with the important position they occupy within Canadian art history today.
Uhlyarik notes that my book claims that Canadian landscape art was largely informed by European conventions. Unfortunately then, the book does not recognize the nationalistic nature of Canadian landscape art. A more accurate description of the book’s position would state that, while Picturing the Land highlights important differences in the Canadian work, it demonstrates that most Canadian artists upheld the superiority of European and American art schools, publications, museum collections, styles and even subject matter.
Uhlyarik regrets that Picturing the Land removes “itself from aesthetic deliberations” and “a profound respect” for the artist by not using works of art that could form “a compendium of excellence.” Thus, and remarkably, she rejects art historical scholarship of the last 30 years. Uhlyarik supports her position by stating that, if the book’s illustrations formed an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she is a curator, visitors would be aghast at the lack of “excellence.” Understandably, curators must mount exhibitions for “customers” who want to look at art that has long been established as the most “beautiful” or the most valuable. But Picturing the Land has no such goal. It answers questions raised by dominant types of landscape art. For example, why did the French and the English use the same European landscape conventions up to 1760? To respond, it is important to use some of Uhlyarik’s “excellent” art, as I do, and some “less excellent” examples, so that the history of Canadian landscape art becomes a discussion of art informed by particular social, economic and political conditions rather than a matter of star figures followed by groupies.
Finally, I do not believe I should have used Terry Smith’s Australian Art or Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory as a model, rather than the five concepts of territory, as Uhlyarik proposes. Canada’s bifurcated settler culture is quite unlike Australia’s monolithic one, while Schama’s work is, as your reviewer says herself, a “rhapsody.” Art historians rejected the production of rhapsodies a long time ago.
