Canada on Canvas

The few survey textbooks on Canadian art are, for the most part, out of date, out of print and meagrely illustrated. One of my colleagues bemoans the fact that Ralph Greenhill and Andrew Birrell’s Canadian Photography, 1839–1920, published in 1979, is still the one and only text on the history of photography in Canada (currently out of print in both the original and revised editions) as often as she is given the opportunity to do so. This history needs to be written, she insists. And I want to agree.

Ever since Giorgio Vasari chronicled The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects in the 1550s, the history of art, singular, masculine, European and, including, of course, only “the most excellent,” has been shaped by the telling and retelling of the magical story of who begat whom and which ism heralded the next. It is different now, no doubt, in the age of all things plural, all things post- and all terms negatively prefixed. We agree that exploring and understanding the history of any subject can no longer be in service of the master narrative. History, we have come to believe, is messy and contradictory, shifty and mercurial—and most of all, incomplete. So, how do you write that? Can the survey format survive and adapt? Is it still a desired and useful model?

While well aware of its shortcomings, we are still enchanted by the power of the survey. Even though I was trained in the age of social art history, I remember dragging home Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History, as generations before mine did Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition. Apparently, we still yearn to write, read and teach a comprehensive history delivered in broad strokes, universal concepts and efficient structures. Besides being persuasive—especially if well written and illustrated—the survey is also enviably practical. It is neat, as it forcibly organizes unruly material (and these days necessarily discloses its organizing principles). It is declarative, for it is in the business of making sweeping statements (while acknowledging its subjectivity). It is manageable, as it is after all contained in one book.

Our honest need to tell the story of Canadian art combined with our fondness for surveys has led to the periodic publication of a few art historical texts on the subject. During the past decade or so there have been several attempts to redress the dearth of such scholarly Canadian art books. Big topics such as indigenous art, abstraction, the 20th century and women artists have been tackled, among new editions of existing surveys. There have also been some attractive coffee-table books.

In Canadian art history, however, there is no bigger story than landscape painting. Many have built their professional reputation and cultivated authority by writing about this country’s landscape art and artists, with intensive focus on Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. In Picturing the Land: Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500–1950, Marylin McKay’s project of taking on the gargantuan task of providing “a comprehensive view of Canadian landscape art” from 1500 to 1950 is at once admirable and unenviable. Or as Clive Robertson summarized his assessment of a similar task—the survey of Canadian 20th-century visual arts—“a project that … is both brave and necessarily foolhardy.” While there have been many publications on the topic (as her 35-page bibliography attests), McKay’s Picturing the Land is the first to engage the topic on such a scale.

The book’s premise is direct and plainly stated. McKay considers the production of landscape art by French and English Canadians over the course of nearly half a millennium as rooted in and dependent on “contemporary western modes of landscape representation” and on an audience well versed in these traditions. She approaches her subject more or less chronologically and sets out to negotiate the difficult and contentious terrain of French and English traditions in both Europe and Canada. She maintains an impressive balance between these parallel trajectories.

Up until now, considerations of landscape were in and of themselves part of a national quest to define Canadian identity. The most recent swell of pride precipitated by Canada’s centenary created a bundle of such publications and exhibitions. This book does no such thing. In fact, Chapter 9, dedicated to the cult of the Group of Seven and a discussion of the xenophobia, anti-Semitism and misogyny of those times, might be downright shocking for the uninitiated.

By not engaging in a genealogical proposition of landscape art in Canada, McKay is presented with a real opportunity. She conceives of her project in contrast to studies that went before. Dismissive of an identity-building exercise, her organizing principle is to assess landscape art production and its related activities according to her choice of five western concepts of territory—nomadic, Arcadian, Edenic, sedentary and universal—which unfold in succession during the process of colonization. In the shadow of Simon Schama’s extended rhapsodic meditation Landscape and Memory, it is intimidating to tread the territory of nature as cultural construct, whether the project is a textbook, an exhibition or a work of art. By comparison with Schama’s, McKay’s categories seem clinical.

Her aim is to characterize ways in which Canada’s land was imagined over 450 years by proposing that these five deep-seated European conventions were the ones predominantly at work in landscape production until 1950 when, she states, the concept of territory no longer dominated art here. (A puzzling assertion, as her scope could have easily extended to today. Landscape art continues to be an important genre in Canada, as her examples in the epilogue attest.) In other words, she argues that landscape artists in Canada were never able to shed their inherited European conventions and that the stylistic expression through which they depicted the unique physical realities of the Canadian environment was always informed by Eurocentric concepts of territory. There is no independent national school of landscape painting; there are only satellite campuses. Regrettably, in her proposition the contribution of the artist becomes mimetic or, at best, predetermined.

Furthermore, McKay’s definitions and application of these five concepts are didactic and inevitably lead to limiting declarations at the beginning of her chapters. In Chapter 1, we are told that “art maps were produced within a nomadic concept of territory.” In Chapter 6 she sums up, “they [post- Confederation French Canadian artists] worked with a sedentary concept of territory.” The chapters then unfold to document the concept and its visual manifestation. Employing these terms as a means of exposing colonization also produces such curious sentences as: “Art that is based on the nomadic concept of territory naturally focuses on wilderness land and the active processes of conquest and penetration. With space travel, the concept is still active today.” Or, the Arcadian concept “is alive and well within the many ecological movements coming out of urban centres today.”

McKay’s five categories do allow for a more inclusive and broader range of objects and artists than previous surveys have done, such as early maps (otherwise the first 250 years of this survey would be only a preface), works on paper, photography and a whole chapter reconsidering the importance of depictions of farmland in national identity-building efforts. Her use of the categories, however, favours “reading” the pictures in place of aesthetic evaluation. And her reading is not always convincing.

An important and interesting discussion of the concept of the noble savage begins with a too literal reading of Samuel de Champlain’s Carte géographique de la Nouvelle France from 1613. She suggests that a depiction of two couples, one Algonkin, the other Abenaki, in an inset panel of the map demonstrates the European attitude that “Native people could be ‘boxed in.’” This type of syllogistic use of language to interpret an image recurs repeatedly in the text and thus detracts from the overall ambition of her project. It is important to make note of this, especially as art historical scholarship, as well as curation, has removed itself so deliberately from aesthetics deliberations that at times it risks treating the painting, the drawing or the map as mere diagrams or illustrations derivative of complex ideas. Tom Thomson’s The West Wind, for example, is not a painting about camping, in my opinion, even though it is true that Thomson camped.

Categories are equally neat, declaratory and manageable as surveys and only as useful as any organizing exercise can be. Does categorization allow for a deeper understanding of the ever elusive meaning of a work of art, or of the rich context in which it was created? Does it lead to new and fuller considerations of the material?

Terry Smith’s approach to exploring Australian landscape art in Transformations in Australian Art is profoundly more useful (and apt because of comparable colonizing-settler histories). Unlike McKay, he asks questions. Fundamental ones such as “why is landscape such a dominant subject in Australian art, so central to national symbolism, and so ubiquitous a presence in our personal efforts to shape a sense of self?” and “how has it happened that a category of painting which emerged in the sixteenth century in the Netherlands came, two centuries later, to dominate artistic practice in the distant colonies of a rival power, and eventually, when those colonies became a nation state, to lodge at its symbolic heart?”

Thinking about McKay’s book, I wondered what an exhibition considering this time span and scope would look like. Would the illustrated works be the ones included in such a project? (Unlikely, as the majority of illustrations are from only two collections, the National Gallery of Canada and Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.) Does an exploration of the work created in Canada, or any other country, necessarily classify it as nationalistic mythologizing?

Contending with the canonical position that landscape art occupies in Canada continues to be one of the biggest challenges that defines historical art curating in this country. Installing the Canadian collection in a public institution is very much like producing a survey publication on the topic. For the majority of visitors (tourists and residents both), this installation might be their first exposure to art in Canada. For others it would be a chance to encounter and engage with both familiar and less known works and artists steadily over many visits. The galleries must satisfy many criteria and are at once limited by space and by the collection and its talismans (The West Wind, for instance, is always on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and if it is not, a panel explains its absence). These are practical parameters that have a profound effect on what, how, where and when a work is exhibited. The one predetermining factor is why. None of this restricts meaningful interpretation of the collections.

Being determined not to create a genealogy of Canadian art, but rather to propose a different engagement with this material, demands an organizing principle that makes sense of the complexities, yet does not oversimplify. More importantly, I would argue, it requires a profound respect for the artists, their skill, subjectivity and commitment to the making of art in Canada.

Picturing the Land is not a compendium of the “most excellent.” It is decidedly a compilation of the numerous types of depictions of this land and writings about them. The written record includes both contemporaneous writings and recent scholarly considerations of the material. McKay wades through a wealth of such material in her extended examinations, quoting from it extensively and often. The impressive compilation of texts and sources make this a useful publication. (The book is peppered with orthographic errors—inexplicable for a publisher of this repute.)

For students, curators, scholars and interested individuals, Picturing the Land serves as a reliable reference book on the existing scholarship on Canadian landscape art. It does not, however, address the question that might lead to a productive discussion on the subject: what is the real contribution that artists in Canada have made to the larger engagement with landscape as a genre?