Defiant Spirits (48 page)

Tom Thomson, in particular, was cherished as an embodiment of the Canadian spirit. As early as 1930 a writer called him the “crystallization of the Canadian consciousness.”
17
In 1949 Hugh MacLennan ranked him alongside Champlain, Frontenac and Sir John A. Macdonald in his list of the “Ten Greatest Canadians.”
18
Twenty years later, Pierre Berton included him as one of his twenty-five greatest Canadians. He has inspired poetry, plays, novels, films and—in Canada's answer to
jfk
's assassination—conspiracy theories.
The West Wind
and
The Jack Pine
are probably Canada's most recognizable and beloved paintings, the latter not least because it was featured on Canada Post's ten-cent stamps between 1967 and 1971. Thomson's cairn at Canoe Lake and the shack where he painted—now at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario—have become sites of pilgrimage. Even his smallest panels fetch seven-
figure prices. In November 2007 his painting
Winter Thaw
was sold for $1,463,500. Six months later,
Pine Trees at Sunset
was knocked down for $1,957,000.

Yet if hockey stars and politicians have maintained their popularity, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the members of the group were in danger of slipping from the public imagination. Thomson and the Group of Seven failed to make any impression in the
CBC
's 2004 poll
The Greatest Canadian.
This list of one hundred Canadians found room for fourteen singers, ten hockey players, assorted television actors and comedians, a professional wrestler and a government accountant. The only artist to make the list—well down the rankings at number eighty-five—was Emily Carr.

What is the reason for this eclipse? Undoubtedly the Group of Seven is no longer seen to represent Canada in the way they did even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s. The patriotism and nationalism that they promoted are seen by many as outdated and unattractive ideologies. Peter C. Newman has observed that to be a Canadian nationalist is to be “a goofy thing
. . .
like a butterfly collector.”
19
And we are told by the experts that we now live in a “post-national” age where our loyalties are not to countries but to various sub- and supranational collectives.
20

Even the trademark of Thomson and the group, the solitary pine tree, has come under attack. The lone krummholz pine on the edge of a windswept lake supposedly emphasizes the rural pioneer spirit over the urban cultural mosaic. The author of a paper prepared in 2005 for the Department of Canadian Heritage wrote (with no detectable whimsy) that the jack pine from the “xenophobic Canadian Shield” plays up “heroic survival in the face of adversity” at the expense of “the modern verities of Canada's encounter with diasporic identities, ethnic diversities, and transnational linkages.” He offered instead a supposedly more encompassing symbol: the “quintessentially mobile goose.”
21
The heroic jack pine so beloved of the painters was dismissed by another academic as an unfortunate case of “arborescent territorialization.” She put forward an even more pictorially unpromising substitute: a rhizome, a creeping rootstalk that has “uncompromising tubular propagations.”
22

However bizarre at face value, these arguments highlight the way many Canadians no longer identify themselves or their country with the Shield landscape of pine, boulder and lake, or with the age of lumberjacks and pioneers. As late as 1946 Wyndham Lewis could be firm in his belief that the “monstrous, empty habitat” of the Canadian wilderness—a place “infinitely bigger physically than the small nation that lives in it”—would continue to dominate Canadians both psychologically and culturally.
23
This monstrous habitat was of course already vanquished and vanishing by the time the Group of Seven took up their brushes (Jackson admitted that even the Arctic had been “robbed
. . .
of much of its terrors” by the time he arrived).
24
But for the group, as for so many other Canadians of earlier generations, our shared ancestor and our common denominator were geography. The land was what held us together, and more specifically a particular attitude to the land as both a dangerous, impregnable wilderness and a place of grace and refuge. Canadians were defined by their day-to-day engagement with this remote and rugged landscape. This encounter was what everyone had in common, from the Bessarabian peasants and Romanian Jews homesteading on the Prairies, to the Doukhobors clearing forests and planting orchards beside the Kootenay, to the Toronto businessmen taking rest cures by paddling the shorelines of Lake Muskoka.

If this shared ancestor now seems remote, the reason is not a matter of ethnicity or immigration: twice as many immigrants came to Canada in 1912 as arrived in 2006. More likely it is because Canada has become largely urban and post-industrial. In sociological terms, it is a
Gesellschaft
where shared values, traditions and beliefs are thin on the ground. For the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, it was self-evident that Canadians were not, historically or typically, an urban people. In 1901, only 40 per cent of the Canadian population lived in urban areas, compared with 2001 when almost 80 per cent lived in cities of ten thousand people or more. As an encyclopedia of world geography notes, Canada is now one of the most urbanized nations on the planet, its northern wilderness “far removed from the everyday life of most Canadians working in office blocks in large urban centres.”
25
And with the wilderness criss-crossed by highways, overflown by jet airplanes, harvested or polluted by industry, packaged by tourism and receding before the suburban sprawl, its possibilities for shaping feelings of identity have evidently diminished.

Most Canadians not only fail to identify themselves with their country's hewers-of-wood and drawers-of-water past, but in English Canada at least, they also identify themselves with very little history at all. One of Canada's most eminent historians, Ramsay Cook, has remarked that English Canadians have a severely underdeveloped historical consciousness. One of the problems, he writes, is that Canada does not have an agreed-upon national history, a grand and encompassing narrative of its origins and trajectory.
26
History is a nightmare from which anglophone Canadians—troubled by the complex implications for nationhood of things such as the British Conquest of 1760, the spiriting away of indigenous land rights, the suppression of the Northwest Rebellion, the $500 head tax imposed on Chinese immigrants, the
Komagata Maru
incident—are trying to awake.

The most common attribute of twenty-first-century Canadians is not a confrontation with the rugged wilderness but—as the 2005 report for the Department of Canadian Heritage argued—the experience of immigration and ethnic diversity. This experience is virtually identical to that of every other Western democracy, but as the introduction to the
Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples
points out, all Canadians share in this “common national founding myth
. . .
a tradition of migration that began well before the dawn of recorded history and endures to our day.”
27
The Group of Seven is certainly judged severely by some as the focus of Canadian identity has turned from the vast landscape to the “small nation” that lives in it. The curator of a recent Group of Seven exhibition, the granddaughter of Frank Carmichael, lamented that the painters made no effort to reflect “the complexity of Canada's multicultural composition.”
28
Most common is the accusation that they created images of Canada that are largely empty of people, in particular empty of Aboriginal Canadians.
29

In fact, far more people appear in the group's paintings than is generally acknowledged, including immigrants and Aboriginal Canadians (and Jackson was an early and enthusiastic champion of the Tsimshian artist Frederick Alexei). There is a certain pecksniffery in arguments about the “erasure” of the Aboriginal in the Group of Seven landscapes, given how Edmund Morris, a knowledgeable and sympathetic painter of First Nations portraits, is today completely ignored and almost utterly forgotten.
30
But the perceived exclusions by the group have been reproached in the Korean-born photographer Jin-me Yoon's
A Group of Sixty-Seven,
created in 1996. This intriguing montage places before one of Lawren Harris's most famous works,
Maligne Lake, Jasper Park,
sixty-seven members of Vancouver's Korean community—a reminder of what Harris, with his attention fixedly on the landscape, failed to include in his canvases.

There may be another reason why the brash nationalism of the Group of Seven resonates so little today. Even the most jingoistic Canadian would have to admit that Laurier's confident prophecy—“Canada shall fill the twentieth century”—went unfulfilled. Few Canadians today can feel Laurier's optimism for their country's place in the world. Canada did not reach a population of 80 million, nor did it become—at least in the eyes of opinion-makers abroad—influential in world politics. Asked why their newspaper offered virtually no coverage of the October 2008 federal election in Canada, editors for
The Times
airily explained that Canada “is not a big player on the world stage.” Nor, apparently, is Canada seen by those in developed countries as the “golden land” of a century ago. When Hector Goudreau, Alberta's minister of employment and immigration, arrived in Britain in 2008, in a Clifford Sifton–like quest to lure prospective immigrants to Canada, his mission was greeted with much scoffing in the British press. A journalist for the
Daily Telegraph
claimed that any Briton contemplating a move to Canada was invariably met “with boggle-eyed horror, as if they had unveiled a suicide pact.” She added for good measure that “sneering at Canada” was a habit deeply entrenched in the British and American psyches. How such evaluations, with their combination of ignorance and malice, would have pained and infuriated the Canadian nationalists of the 1920s.
31

WHATEVER THE VALIDITY of the criticisms of the Group of Seven, their achievements were undeniably tremendous. They modernized the landscape idiom in Canada, importing elements of the European avant-garde and helping to end the dominance of the Barbizon and Dutch schools of atmospheric painting that by the turn of the twentieth century were outdated in most parts of the Western world except among collectors in Toronto and Montreal. They also awakened an interest in art, and in Canadian art in particular. In 1928 an exhibition of Canadian art in Vancouver attracted 65,000 visitors, causing one astonished observer to remark that if a stranger came to town he would think the people of Vancouver more passionate about art “than the citizens of Florence, or Chelsea, or Montmartre.”
32

By mid-century, or even earlier, the art of the Group of Seven might have seemed (as Jackson noted in comparison with the Société Anonyme) positively tame. But the members of the group, unlike so many other modern artists, remained dedicated to creating an art that was widely accessible to the people. Art appreciation was not, for the group, a private affair that demanded a high level of education or a special sensibility. They believed art could enhance common experience. Compare that with how Clement Greenberg, mentor of the Painters Eleven, railed against the democratization of culture, or how some modern (and postmodern) art has seemed bent on proving Clive Bell's snobbish assertion that “the masses of mankind will never be capable of making delicate aesthetic judgments.”
33

Some of their greatest legacies lay beyond the walls of studios and art galleries. For many years they were at the forefront of a cultural awakening in English Canada, a stirring of artistic self-confidence that could never have developed as quickly or as richly without them. Many writers, and then later composers and musicians, tried to do in print and song what the group did in pigment. Self-consciously “Canadian” themes were rendered in vibrant and innovative forms. Much of the poetry of F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith would have been unthinkable without the pathfinding of the group. Smith's most famous poem, “The Lonely Land,” was inspired by both a colour reproduction of
The Jack Pine
and works at the group's 1925 exhibition.
34

Ditto the Group of Seven's influence on the plays of Merrill Denison and Herman Voaden. The latter, a playwright and director who married his Canadian nationalism to avant-garde literary techniques and experimental stagecraft, saw the painters as the heralds of far-reaching artistic developments in Canada. They were “the first to strike out boldly,” he wrote in 1928. “They carved new materials out of our landscape and evolved a different technique to handle them.”
35
Later, in music, came Harry Freedman, Claude Champagne and Violet Archer, all animated by visions of the group's paintings. The architect Arthur Erickson, who designed the Canadian pavilion at Expo 67 and the Canadian Embassy in Washington, acknowledged the influence of Lawren Harris.
36
More conspicuous still was Glenn Gould, who attributed his fascination with the North to their imagery, and who loved what he called the “Group of Seven woebegoneness” of Northern Ontario.
37

The final judge of their importance should be the paintings themselves. If we forget the group's nationalist agenda, if we forget the political agendas of their critics, and if we look at the canvases and panels themselves, only the most churlish could deny that they produced some works of virtuoso design and emotional intensity that would grace any art museum in the world: Jackson's
The Red Maple,
MacDonald's
The Solemn Land,
Harris's Lake Superior paintings, Varley's portraits and war scenes, Thomson's sketches of Algonquin Park. Like the photograph of Donald A. Smith driving the Last Spike, or Terry Fox's radiant silhouette in the soft-focus coronas of a police car's beacons (another vignette of individual triumph over adversity), their works have become part of the national memory bank. Together, they have given us one of the best responses—however incomplete it must inevitably be in a country so differentiated and so vast—to that most difficult and most Canadian of questions: “Where is here?”