First, Violin

Edna Jeanette Taçon thought of herself as Canadian and American, because she was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1905, grew up in Goderich, Ontario, and became active in the Canadian art scene (specifically Toronto’s) in the 1940s but lived most of her life in New York, where she died in 1980. She lost her father, Richard MacDougall, a talented violinist, at the age of six, and was given up by her mother, Mathilda Marshall. Jane MacFarlane, a Scottish-born Presbyterian widow from Goderich, adopted her, and in 1924 they moved to Toronto so that Edna could further her study of music, especially the violin. Five years later, after a long engagement, she married the English-born painter Percy Henry Taçon, who taught at Central Collegiate Institute in Hamilton, where the couple settled.

Edna’s music mentors included Géza de Kresz, Sir Ernest MacMillan, and Nathan Milstein, and she was good enough to play concerts across Ontario and in New York. Possessed of a strong work ethic, even as she split her time between multiple places, working alongside the avant-garde artists Lawren Harris and Hilla von Rebay, she intertwined music with visual art. While visiting New York for concerts, she likely saw work by such non-objective painters as Wassily Kandinsky and Rudolf Bauer, whose influence sharpened her interest in the connection between music and art. Rhythm, form, and colour (as Kandinsky insisted) were ways of creating emotional intensity and influencing the soul.

Starting with collage, Edna Taçon began to develop her non-objective style. Primavera, from around 1940, balances delicate floating forms with matte paper colours, though the almost khaki background works against the delicacy. Magic Carpet came roughly a year later. The Art Gallery of Ontario associate curator Renée van der Avoird describes it as “dozens of minuscule slices of paper that come together in a dense composition.” I find Magic Carpet more alluring than Primavera because the shaggy edging confirms the carpet texture and the floating amorphous forms dominate the centre with a “magical” buoyancy.

Even her best art — from the precise, solid geometric shapes of her collages to a more expressive painterliness in the glowing colours of her oils — prompted radically different critical opinions. Some felt her work was “over-complicated and lifeless,” as the Canadian Review put it in November 1941, in its assessment of her solo show at Eaton’s Fine Art Galleries (described by van der Avoird as “the first exhibition dedicated to non-objective art in Canada”). Although Taçon’s conjunctions of colour and design were recognized, the Evening Telegram found that “it is strictly necessary to consult the catalogue as to what the artist had in mind.” Her strongest champion, the Globe and Mail art critic Pearl McCarthy, resorted to sweeping generalizations when addressing her sharp, striated triangles enveloped by swirling biomorphic forms, without explaining what these had to do with contexts other than geometry.

Little documentation of Taçon’s early design work survives, except for a December 1941 window display, Diamond Christmas, for a jeweller on Fifth Avenue in New York. Not much of her own writing is available. And there are few records of her personal life — such as her unhappy marriage to Percy, who blocked her from returning to Canada, disparaged her to others, and claimed she had abandoned her two sons to further her career. Nonetheless, she is now honoured with an attractive coffee-table book, Edna Taçon, which is essentially an album of souvenir photographs, gallery posters, assorted letters, newspaper clippings, diary extracts, and pamphlets. It includes a selection of paintings, sketches, and collages (most in full colour), an interview featuring her grandson Carl Taçon, and a significant essay by van der Avoird, who curated the current Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition of her work in close consultation with her family.

The four-page interview between van der Avoird and Carl Taçon adds much to the personal side of the artist’s story. Edna, who called Carl her “moon child” because of his Cancerian temperament, had already lived in New York for over thirty years before the two met. She had worked at and been sponsored by such organizations as the Guggenheim Foundation and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, where she crossed paths with Jackson Pollock.

Edna, who perhaps wished she was French, took thirteen-year-old Carl to galleries and the Museum of Modern Art, where she showed him Picasso’s Guernica. “The things in her apartment amazed me,” he tells van der Avoird. He recalls “a Picasso etching, a baby grand piano, her Venetian glass collection, and her own paintings, which hung throughout the apartment, as well as art books and countless cookbooks.” Indirectly, Edna taught her grandson to “rejoice in beauty and to find pleasure in small things. Not just momentous things.”

The bond between grand-mère and grandson —“a lot of memories from a short period of time, over just a few encounters”— helps us appreciate how Taçon’s work changed from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, as she found emotional and financial support from her second husband, Paul Arnold, following her traumatic break from Percy, who destroyed a trunk that she had filled with mementoes, sketches, and personal items. “He tarnished her reputation,” Carl explains, “so there wasn’t a lot for her to come back to in Toronto.”

In 1986, six years after Edna died, Carl was studying art at York University, where he contacted the art historian Joyce Zemans. “Due to her non-conformist behaviour in a highly conformist era,” he wrote of his grandmother, “she did not receive the recognition in Canada which she deserved.” Zemans agreed to help organize an exhibition, Kathleen Munn and Edna Taçon: New Perspectives on Modernism in Canada, which opened at the Art Gallery of York University in 1988 before travelling to six other venues.

In his conversation with van der Avoird, Carl Taçon suggests how the complexity of his grandmother’s identity affected her artwork:

He also notes that while Edna was “very determined” to pursue her passion of “making art and music,” she was rather “soft-spoken.”

Carl’s perspective on Edna’s personal and aesthetic identity is fleshed out by van der Avoird, who detects the influence of non-objective artists (principally Kandinsky) on Taçon’s work: “geometric forms, invented shapes, and colour that she described as ‘a means of expressing the inner life — call it soul, spirit or mind . . . all conditions and outbursts of the soul.’ ” Just as Kandinsky and his contemporaries often titled paintings with musical terms, such as Improvisation and Composition, Edna followed suit, using the allegory of music to describe or reference her work, as with the undated Fugue and Sonata. Both Taçon and her fellow Canadian Bertram Brooker believed that music offers an escape from physical reality, “allowing one to be transported to a world of aesthetic exaltation or ecstasy.” Like Brooker, Taçon utilized abstraction to explore how visual forms might relate to musical ones. Works such as Tonal Poem, from 1945, and Improvisation No. 2 and Gaiety, both from 1946, exemplify her power to evoke musical associations or moods through paint. As van der Avoird notes, the process of painting, like music, was intuitive and “rooted in creative imagination, an embodied choreography of line and colour that is open to each viewer’s own interpretation and emotional associations.” The whole point was a feeling of ecstasy in the outburst of soul.

Perhaps, ultimately, Taçon’s ecstasy was better felt in her excellent hat designs and window displays than in her often overly decorative paintings, which differed radically from Kandinsky’s startlingly supple biomorphic forms that seemed to be microscopic organisms. Moreover, Kandinsky’s theories of colour and geometry found vivid expression in a confluence of art, music, and spirit, whereas Taçon was a more hushed artist, content with smaller designs, imitative of Kandinsky but with far less texture and dramatic verve.