Defiant Spirits (14 page)

Jackson, by contrast, had already absorbed numerous influences during his travels. His exposure to European art, both Old Masters and the avant-garde, was extensive. He was also steeped in modern painting theories and techniques. Much of this exposure came through his dedicated—almost maniacal—extramural efforts. As a young art student in Chicago and then Paris, he had been desperate to learn the technique of painting. “I must learn to paint or my name is mud,” he wrote to his mother from Paris in 1908. Since he was taught painting and colour theory at neither the Art Institute of Chicago nor the Académie Julian, he knew that to become what he called a “paint-slinger” he needed to read as many books and magazines, and to attend as many art exhibitions, as possible. He became an artistic omnivore, gourmandizing on lectures, exhibitions, books, periodicals and, presumably, conversations with other students. In Chicago he went to the library of the Art Institute and “read all the magazines,” even telling his mother of his plan to spend the 1906 Christmas holidays in the library, “where they have all the Art Magazines and books on art that you could wish for.”
20

In Paris these studies continued unabated. Jackson joined the American Art Association of Paris (the headquarters of English-speaking art students) because “it's the cheapest way of seeing all the art magazines. Besides they have quite a library.” He soon buried himself in a “big, long serious” book on the history of art. He also visited numerous art museums and attended multiple exhibitions (on a quick trip to London in 1908 he visited five museums in two days). “My painting is still pretty punk,” he complained to his mother in 1908, before announcing he was off to see the Franco-British Exhibition—“one of the finest art exhibits ever brought together.” Four years later, “Have been seeing lots of exhibitions,” he wrote breathlessly from Paris, “which is very necessary.”
21

EVIDENTLY RECOGNIZING THE sheer raw talent of his studiomate, Jackson began tutoring Thomson in the first weeks of 1914. Clearly the two men got along on a personal level. Jackson called Thomson “a good companion” and “a friendly chap.”
22
He even invited Thomson to accompany him on visits to a family friend, Christina Bertram, the widow of a wealthy Toronto industrialist. Mrs. Bertram, a patron of the arts, lived in La Plaza Apartments at the corner of Charles and Jarvis, a short walk from the Studio Building. She fed the two men and mended their clothing. They gave her some of their sketches in return.
23

Thomson no doubt realized there was much to be learned from his self-confident new studiomate. Jackson began describing to Thomson some of the trends in modern art, in particular the techniques of the Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and his use of what Jackson called “clean-cut dots of colour.”
24
Seurat and his followers took up the optical theories of scientists such as the American Ogden N. Rood, a physicist (and part-time painter) who believed that light was the product of an oscillation of adjoining colours. The Neo-Impressionists (as an 1886 review christened them) abandoned broad, blended strokes to apply their paint in separate dots or dashes of unmixed pigment (the “clean-cut dots”) in the belief that the mosaic-like blobs would blend in the eye of the viewer to produce pulsatingly vibrant canvases.

Jackson had first-hand experience of these works. Besides the exhibition of the Italian Divisionists, he probably saw the Seurat exhibition in December 1908 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which featured one of his most famous works,
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.
He could likewise have seen the work of Seurat's disciple Paul Signac at numerous Paris exhibitions, such as one at the Galerie Druet in the summer of 1911 that included paintings by another Neo-Impressionist, Henri-Edmond Cross. By this time, Cross and Signac, in search of more expressive powers, had enlarged their dots and begun using coarser, thicker brushstrokes to create separate squares of colour—what Signac called a “divided touch” and an English critic “large brick-like rectangles.”
25
This broader and looser touch, sometimes known as the second phase of Neo-Impressionism, was the ne plus ultra of Parisian painting at the time of Jackson's first sojourn in Europe.
26

Thomson not only heard about various new trends in European art, but he also saw his new studiomate in action. The two men were probably first introduced in Harris's studio at Bloor and Yonge in November 1913, at the time when Jackson, using sketches done on Georgian Bay, was painting
Terre sauvage,
one of his first important canvases. Thomson would therefore have seen taking shape on Jackson's easel something very different from many of the “second-rate paintings” on show each summer at the Canadian National Exhibition.

In
Terre sauvage
(initially known as either
The North Country
or
The Northland
), Jackson worked the Shield landscape that he once believed resistant to pictorial composition into a haunting vision of backwoods remoteness: black spruce rising above a foreground of Precambrian rock into a steel-blue sky. These rocks and trees became the building blocks of his artistic experimentation. Georgian Bay's sharp colours, smooth contours of granite and statuesque vegetation allowed him to explore elements of the new styles he had seen in Europe. His determination to paint in this manner, despite his lack of sales and the vociferous attacks in Montreal, showed both his strength of character and the value of the support established by MacCallum and Harris. He continued working in the Hot Mush style, using a bold palette and simplified but expressive forms, such as distended trees and swirls of cloud.

The final title of the painting (adopted in 1920) seems to allude to the “eerie wildernesses” described by the Confederation poets—the hostile and untamed land of forest and snow beyond the bounds of civilization. Yet
Terre sauvage
is no straightforward depiction of the harsh Canadian barrens. Topographical veracity was less important to many modern painters than emotional values and visual effects. “Sitting down in nature and copying what you see is not the way to make a painting,” Signac once cautioned.
27
If the Impressionists tried to give objective depictions of the natural world by means of an almost scientific study of the chromatic effects of light and shade, by the end of the nineteenth century their successors—the “paint-slingers” whose work Jackson so admired—were freely manipulating the visual data of the landscape. The process was described by Matisse's friend Simon Bussy: “I draw from nature the elements necessary to my composition, I reassemble them, I simplify them
. . .
I transform and twist them.” Unlike the Impressionists, Bussy was not concerned to render effects of light and atmosphere. He sought instead, he claimed, “the equilibrium of volumes” and “the rhythm of lines.”
28

In
Terre sauvage,
Jackson ignored atmospheric effects and deliberately distorted the forms of the landscape. That he was not merely transcribing the scene as he actually saw it can be seen from the fact that he did not paint the sky beneath the rainbow darker than that above—the well-known meteorological phenomenon shown in Joseph Wright of Derby's 1795 painting
Landscape with Rainbow.
In Jackson's painting, the swell of the earth and the arrangement of the trees have little to do with arboreal precision or the rules of single-point perspective. The warped-looking jack pine, the indistinct foreground, the weirdly elongated spruce that recall the flame-like cypresses in Van Gogh's 1889 paintings such as
A Wheatfield with Cypresses
and
The Starry Night
—together with the rainbow on the left, these dream-like effects show Jackson translating the raw data of nature in order to communicate aesthetic emotions. The result is a unique and personal vision of the “primal energies and realities” beyond the physical world of rocks and trees.

THE STUDIO BUILDING quickly became a smaller and more exclusive version of the Arts and Letters Club, a place for lively exchanges of opinion. According to Jackson, “There was the stimulus of comparison and frank discussion on aims and ideals and technical problems which resulted in various experiments.”
29

Lawren Harris was inevitably at the centre of these discussions. He was painting his own experimental work as Jackson worked on
Terre sauvage.
Using a sketch of fire-swept hills done on a trip to the Laurentians with Fergus Kyle five years earlier, he began a canvas nicknamed “Tomato Soup” by the others because, Jackson claimed, he would drag his brush through several pigments and then “slap it on the canvas” in hopes of achieving vibrant colours.
30
The actual process was probably more measured, since the end result,
Laurentian Landscape,
made use of a technique known (after its inventor Giovanni Segantini) as the “Segantini stitch.” Segantini had adapted Seurat's brushwork in the 1890s to create narrow, stitch-like hatchings that gave his Alpine landscapes a moiré effect, like a phosphorescent tweed.

Where exactly Harris learned this technique remains unclear, but before his premature death from peritonitis in 1899 Segantini had been one of the most famous painters of his day (Austria, Italy and Switzerland all claimed him as their own). An English catalogue of his works was published in 1901, and leading journals such as
International Studio, Scribner's
and
The Artist
carried studies and reproductions of his paintings. Americans such as Marsden Hartley (who saw Segantini's work reproduced in the January 1903 issue of
Jugend
) revealed his influence. Harris could easily have learned about Segantini through this kind of “graphic traffic” (as art historians call such exchanges of images), and it is likely that he also heard about him from Jackson. Thirty-seven of Segantini's works had gone on display at the Italian Divisionist exhibition seen by Jackson in Paris in 1907.

Segantini probably held a special fascination for Canadians like Harris, Jackson and Thomson, obsessed as they were with painting remote locations in inclement weather. Living in a hut high above
St. Moritz, he had painted the surrounding mountains in the most bitter conditions, wearing furs in winter and even a custom-made body-warmer, a tin-plated receptacle filled with hot coals. This kind of performance—which won him a reputation as a kind of Nietzschean Superman—was bound to appeal to the “men with good red blood in their veins” searching for virile interpretations of their own rugged landscape.
31

TOM THOMSON MAY still have had, as an acquaintance later claimed, a “disbelief in himself,” “fits of unreasonable despondency” and an “erratic and sensitive” temperament.
32
But his faith in his abilities as an artist began to grow under the tutelage of Jackson and Harris. One indication of his growing self-confidence was the fact that in February 1914, within a month of moving into the Studio Building, he chose to exhibit five paintings in the exhibition
Little Pictures by Canadian Artists
staged in the Public Reference Library.

The annual
Little Pictures
exhibitions were inaugurated a year earlier. According to a report in
The Studio,
the aim was to popularize the work of younger painters “in the homes of middle-class citizens, where wall space is insufficient for the display of large canvases.”
33
Middle-class citizens might have had neither the money nor the wall space for the large and expensive paintings of established artists, but the modestly sized and even more modestly priced canvases of little-known painters such as Thomson (whose price tags at the exhibition ranged from $20 to $25) were within reach of most middle-class Torontonians. His paintings were therefore priced roughly the same as many of the least expensive ones in the picture galleries in Eaton's and Simpsons. In fact the
Little Pictures
exhibition in some ways marked an attempt by Toronto artists to steal a march on the department stores by appealing to much the same clientele.

Thomson's paintings nevertheless failed to sell. Undeterred, he submitted one of his other paintings, a nocturne called
Moonlight,
to the 1914
OSA
exhibition. It carried a considerably higher price tag of $150. This canvas showed how his sense of form was sharpening and his technique proving more impetuous as he used staccato brushwork to capture the effect of moonlight on the broken surface of a lake. A correspondent for
The Studio
praised his work as “striking in treatment,” and
Moonlight
was purchased by the National Gallery. Thomson was soon afterwards elected to membership in the Ontario Society of Artists.
34

There was encouragement for other painters in the Studio Building as well. The “Post-Impressionist” style of the Hot Mushers showed few signs of causing the same hysteria as elsewhere. The
Toronto Daily Star
took a lenient view of the younger painters at the
OSA
exhibition. “Young Canada,” wrote its critic, Margaret L. Fairbairn, was represented by “rising artists” who shocked the conservatives and “the average person” with canvases “covered in daubs of paint apparently put on with a shovel.” She urged her readers, “Never mind. Some shocks are extremely beneficial.”
35

Even more rewarding was a review in
The Studio.
The Toronto correspondent for the prestigious international journal reported that under the leadership of A.Y. Jackson, “some six or seven rising men” had begun experimenting with crude form and emphatic illumination in order to evoke the Canadian landscape. He perceptively noted that the painters were following “Norwegian-French protagonists”—that is, their expressive landscapists were redolent of the ateliers of Munch, Cézanne and Gauguin. Pointing out how they used coarse canvas and painted with flat brushes, he claimed the effect of their work was “that of raised embroidery, or
appliqué
work, with sharp contrasts of light and shade and crashing bars of colour.”