Wyndham Lewis on Canadian Painters
By Jan Cox
Wyndham Lewis spent the Second World War on the North American continent, the majority of his time in Canada, the land of his birth. Lewis returned to Britain in August 1945 and was doubtless gratified a year later to receive a request from Joseph Ackerley, literary editor of The Listener, to review a book entitled Canadian Painters (1945; Phaidon Press). The book covered Canadian art up to the founding of the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933. This request enabled Lewis to reprise a piece he had read to a class of Canadian students in July 1943, but which he had ‘written [...] for a non-Canadian public’ (Rose 359). Lewis’s piece of about 4,000 words, reproduced in full in Wyndham Lewis in Canada (1971) under the title ‘Nature’s Place in Canadian Culture’, was cut to just over 1,800 words for The Listener article. Fortuitously for Lewis, the book Canadian Painters was chiefly concerned with the artists known as ‘The Group of Seven’, a discussion of whose pictures formed the nucleus of Lewis’s own earlier lecture.
Canadian Painters was edited by Donald W. Buchanan, who was soon to become assistant director of the National Gallery of Canada, and later the organiser of the fine arts exhibition at Expo ’67 in Montreal. Buchanan’s three-man committee for the selection of the pictures to be reproduced in the book were Martin Baldwin (Art Gallery of Toronto), H. O. McCurry (National Gallery, Ottawa) and the painter Alexander “A.Y.” Jackson. Jackson is the significant figure, in that he had met Lewis at the London offices of the Canadian War Records at the end of the First World War (Mastin 28); at that time, Lewis produced A Canadian Gun Pit (1918; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) for the Canadian War Memorials. Lewis did not have a happy experience during his wartime stay in Canada (‘this sanctimonious icebox’) and, as George Woodcock relates, ‘A. Y. Jackson was almost alone among Canadian painters in trying to make Lewis feel welcome in the country of his birth’ (Woodcock 8). Lewis confirmed this when he wrote that Jackson accorded him ‘a royal welcome. He received me, coming from a foreign milieu, like a brother [...]. Jackson has demonstrated that for him there is only one art, though there are many nations’ (Wyndham Lewis, Woodcock 27). Lewis’s wife added that Jackson’s ‘generous friendship and help were given with unaffected simplicity’ (Gladys Anne Lewis, Woodcock 21). It therefore comes as little surprise that Lewis confessed to Malcolm MacDonald (UK High Commissioner in Canada and son of Ramsay MacDonald) in August 1943 that ‘the main object of my article was to do a personal service to Jackson’ (Rose 359).
However, Lewis’s approach to Canadian painting from a personal viewpoint does not negate his well-thought-out views on the country’s art and its relationship to nature and topography. Lewis begins his Listener piece with the view that ‘the Canadian consciousness must always to a peculiar degree be implicated with nature’ (Lewis 267). For Lewis, the landscape is, by virtue of the ‘pull of nature’, integral to Canadian art, despite the presence of the ‘Machine Age’ cities of Chicago and Detroit across the border. Lewis recognises that this affinity with landscape is an aspect of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but perhaps brings his European experiences to bear when discussing the French-Canadian preference for portrayal of the figure, since the French-Canadian artist whom Lewis discusses, Clarence Gagnon, is essentially a landscape artist also, albeit one who populates his works with small figures. Catharine Mastin says of Lewis’s outlook on Canadian Art:
Virtually the only positive remarks Lewis made about the Canadian art scene were on the subject of the Group of Seven, a nationalist landscape-painting movement that had been launched in 1920 and was considered somewhat passé by the younger, more socially committed regionalists and modernists of the 1930 and 40s. (Catharine Mastin, The Talented Intruder, Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, 1992/3, 60.)
The Group of Seven
The Phaidon book Canadian Painting and Lewis’s article are dominated by the painters known as the Group of Seven. The book contains 84 black-and-white reproductions, with group members J. E. H. Macdonald (nine works), Tom Thomson (ten), A. Y. Jackson (nine) and Lawren Harris (seven) dominant. Similarly, three of the four colour reproductions are by MacDonald, Thomson and Jackson.
The group had its genesis in the meeting between James Macdonald and Lawren Harris. Macdonald, in turn, introduced Harris to other graphic artists who, like himself, were working for the commercial art firm Grip Ltd. in Toronto — Lismer, Carmichael, Johnston, Varley and Thomson. The only name missing from the initial ‘Group of Seven’ is that of the Montreal-based Jackson. Harris recalled that:
In 1910 at an exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists we saw a painting [by A. Y. Jackson] entitled The Edge of the Maple Wood. It stood out from all the other paintings as an authentic, new expression. It was clear, fresh, and full of light, luminous with the sunlight of early Canadian spring...that painting is significant because it marked the first time that any Canadian painting had contained such startling variety. (Lawren Harris (1948), Light for a Cold Land, Peter Larisey, 1993, 28.)
At this juncture, we have a discrepancy between the recollections of Harris and Jackson. Harris claims that after this exhibition ‘at once I wrote to Jackson’ and that ‘a lively correspondence’ then followed (Murray 27). However, Jackson describes how he received a letter from MacDonald in 1913 that suggests that he and Harris were not in direct communication with each other:
Macdonald’s letter was about Edge of the Maple Wood, the canvas I had painted in 1910. If I still possessed it, he wrote, a young Toronto artist, Lawren Harris, wanted to buy it...The immediate result of MacDonald’s letter was that Harris bought my canvas.... A second result was that I began my association with the artists responsible for changing the course of Canadian art for many years to come. ( A. Y. Jackson, Light for a Cold Land, Peter Larisey, 1993, 27.)
What is not in dispute is that Jackson met MacDonald and Harris in May 1913 and that Jackson then spent the summer and autumn painting, with plans to go to New York as a commercial artist. However, Harris and Dr. James MacCallum were undertaking the construction of the Studio Building in Toronto, a place where artists could work in hospitable surroundings for an inexpensive rent. An adjoining shack was inhabited by Tom Thomson whenever he returned from his expeditions to the Mississauga country. Jackson was offered a place at the studio, together with a year’s expenses, and this persuaded him to stay in Toronto. It is likely that Harris financed Jackson’s disbursements, in addition to the majority of the cost of the Studio Building. He was by far the wealthiest of the artists, as his father was Thomas Morgan Harris, a prosperous manufacturer of agricultural machinery under the name of Massey Harris, which later merged to form Massey Ferguson.
In the interim, an event of great significance occurred when, in January 1913, MacDonald and Harris visited an exhibition of modern Scandinavian art at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, New York, just across the border from Toronto. Harris recalled that:
Here was a large number of paintings which corroborated our ideas. Here were paintings of northern lands created in the spirit of those lands and through the hearts and minds of those who knew and loved them. Here was an art bold, vigorous and uncompromising, embodying direct, first-hand experience of the great North. As a result of that experience our enthusiasms increased and our conviction was reinforced. (Lawren Harris (1948), Light for a Cold Land, Peter Larisey, 1993, 32.)
The two artists were inspired by the way that a modern interpretation could be placed upon the traditional landscape genre, and it is worth mentioning that the work of the Group of Seven resonates particularly closely with the wintry landscapes of the Finnish artist Pekka Halonen (1865-1933). Halonen’s Wilderness (1899; Turku, Taidemuseo) closely resembles the long, bare, light-coloured tree-trunks of Harris’s work, whilst his Winter Landscape at Myllykylä (1896; Helsinki, Ateneum Taidemuseo) possesses an unpopulated vista of folds of snow that one associates with Jackson. Additionally, Halonen was a member of the Group of Seven, a Finnish group founded in 1912!
However, the 1913 exhibition in Buffalo concentrated on painters from Sweden, Denmark and Norway and it is interesting to examine the comments of J. E. H. MacDonald on the significance of two Swedish artists. Macdonald said that Otto Hesselbom’s Our Country — Motif from Dalsland (1902; Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) was:
one we liked especially,[...]not only for its suggestion of Muskoka or Temiskamingue in its water design and wide spaces, but also for the decorative treatment,[...] the rich quiet colour, the detailed drawing of the forest masses, and the fine receding values of the distances shimmering into the sky. (J. E. H. Macdonald quoted in Hanna Martinsen, The Scandinavian Impact on the Group of Seven’s Vision of the Canadian Landscape, 4.)
MacDonald’s own The Solemn Land (1921; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) seems to resonate with Hesselbom’s picture in both title and composition, but MacDonald has then added his own brushwork and agglomerations of colour influenced by his love of a quite different tradition, that of Oriental art. A study for “Our Country” entitled Summer Night: Study was exhibited at an exhibition entitled Northern Lights at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, in 2009.
The other artist whose work was much commented upon by MacDonald was Gustav Fjaestad, described as ‘perhaps the most attractive of all’. Fjaestad’s Winter Moonlight (1895; Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) also featured in the recent Barber exhibition, and Hanna Martinsen was quick to detect the similarity of method between Fjaestad’s picture and Lawren Harris’s Snow (c.1915; sold for C$1.035 million at Heffel’s Fine Canadian Art Spring 2007 auction) of which she says: ‘the individual brushstrokes, each clearly defined, and the different colours, put side by side, create a variation in the colour combinations and give the ground its shading and depth’ (Martinsen 6).
However, Harris’s rectangular brushstrokes, depicting the snow on the ground, do not share a commonality of style with Fjaestad’s method, described accurately by MacDonald as being ‘painted in large pointillism of touches of related colour[...]and seemed to us true souvenirs of that mystic north round which we all revolve’ (MacDonald quoted in Martinsen 6). Instead, Harris’s snow-covered ground appears to use a technique similar to that employed by Van Gogh in placing dashes of bright colour over paler underlay, exemplified by the sky in Peach Blossom in the Crau (1889; Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Moreover, Fjaestad’s picture appears to have more in common with Harris’s later Snow II (c.1916; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) than with the earlier work, in that there is an open vista to the sky rather than an enclosed forest setting. The very close correlation between Harris and Fjaestad occurs in the snow that hangs on the trees in Snow II and Winter Moonlight respectively. Joan Murray describes Harris’s snow as ‘almost sculptural; it has weight’ (Murray 48), whilst Paul Spencer-Longhurst describes how Fjaestad uses his flat, pointillist technique ‘to create volume and visual excitement’ (Spencer-Longhurst 40). Both artists manifest large pendants of snow that look too heavy for the branches that are supporting them. Macdonald concluded:
no Swedish brook or river would speak a language unknown to us and that we would know our own snows and rivers the better for Fjaestad’s revelations. (J. E. H. MacDonald quoted in Martinsen 7.)
The informal Canadian grouping was dispersed by service in the First World War and in 1917 Tom Thomson was found drowned in suspicious circumstances — Lewis hints at the possibility of involvement by native Indians (Lewis, Woodcock 56), but the true story remains shrouded in mystery. In March 1920, when ‘The Group of Seven’ was initiated at Harris’s house, Thomson was regarded as an honorary member and an inspiration to the rest of the group. MacDonald, Harris and Jackson were joined by Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, Frederick Varley and Arthur Lismer. The ‘Group’ only showed together at their first exhibition, as Johnston soon left, but A. J. Casson (1926), Edwin Holgate (1931) and L. L. Fitzgerald (1932) joined the founders until a much broader grouping, the Canadian Group of Painters, was formed in 1933 (Murray 7). Below can be seen Lismer’s drawing of the foundation of the Group of Seven (see the wording ‘Group of 7’ above seated figure), and a photograph of the group at the Arts and Letters club in Toronto. The photograph includes six of the group (Carmichael is missing) plus Barker Fairley, who later taught German literature at the University of Toronto and was an international expert on Goethe. Fairley was connected with Lewis, in that he had reviewed Lewis’s A Canadian Gunpit in The Canada Magazine in November 1919 and was one of the few academics with whom Lewis had contact in Toronto during the Second World War.
|
|
(l. to r.) Varley, Jackson (foreground), Harris, Barker Fairley (non-member), Johnston, Lismer, MacDonald; Carmichael is missing. © The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto |
Charcoal on paper Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto © Art Gallery of Toronto, Gift of Mrs. R. M. Tovell, 1953. By kind permission of Janet Bridges Cauffiel on behalf of The Lismer Estate. |
TOM THOMSON
|
© Ontario Archives, Toronto. |
Lewis said that Thomson was ‘generally regarded as the star member of the school’ (Lewis 268), and that he had been transformed by a meeting with A. Y. Jackson into ‘a remarkable colourist’. The implication is that Thomson’s primitive art of the backwoods had been altered by his encounter with the sophistication of the Paris-trained Jackson into a brief flowering of great art from 1914 until his death in 1917. Lewis might have had Thomson’s The Jack Pine (1916; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada) in mind when he refers to ‘a sometimes crude advertisement of a rich aesthetic vein — rather than a finished achievement of authentic beauty’ (268). Donald Buchanan acknowledges this crudity, but says that Thomson was ‘trying to record in his own honest fashion the strength and clarity of the Algonquin landscape as he saw it’ (Buchanan 12).
|
Oil on Canvas 127.9 x 139.8 cms National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |
The artists of the Group of Seven had been affected to a lesser or greater degree by their experiences of the First World War and felt keenly the need to define what Canada as a nation meant to them. Thomson’s legacy of an interpretation of a nature that was sublime yet modernistic was an inspiration to the others in the 1920s and 1930s. The tree in The Jack Pine possesses a brittle quality as if made of frozen glass that could easily snap. In fact, Joan Murray says that Thomson probably intended to create the effect of stained glass in church, with the red undercoating providing ‘a curiously alive quality’ (Murray 49) that animates the picture.
A. Y. JACKSON
|
© The Art History Archive |
Jackson was a modest, self-deprecating man who was always ready to acknowledge the efforts of others. It was probably this lack of ego and non-threatening manner that appealed to Lewis. Jackson said of the group that ‘up to the present we have not created much that will hold posterity spellbound’ (Murray 23), and that ‘it was [Harris] who encouraged us always to take the bolder course’ (11). Lewis’s assertion that ‘The key-man in this Canadian regionalist school is Alec [sic] Jackson, because without him it is doubtful if it would ever have existed’ (Lewis 268), needs clarification. Jackson certainly supplied stability to the group and remained steadfast in his base in Toronto, but Joan Murray saw Harris as the group’s leader with Jackson as second-in-command (Murray 11), whilst Buchanan declares that Harris was ‘the most intellectual and philosophical of the group’ (Buchanan 18).
Lewis says also that ‘the members of this group have dispersed, have “gone west”, have disappeared or died. Only Jackson is left’ (Lewis 268). The was doubtless true as Lewis saw it — Harris had literally ‘gone west’ and been living in Vancouver since the early 1940s — but the photograph below shows five of the ‘Seven’ at Lawren Harris’s 1948 show, two years after Lewis wrote his article; this evidence rather contradicts Lewis’s opinion.
|
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto © W. O. Crompton, Toronto. |
Lewis saw Jackson as a warrior trying to capture nature on canvas: ‘his painting expeditions are campaigning seasons’ (Lewis 268). Lewis discussed Jackson’s use of colour and said that his use of snow is ‘like a white lava [...]. It is not even white! Often it is a depressing spectral grey, or acidly greenish’ (268). However, I can see no trace of green in Jackson’s snow in such pictures as Barns (1926; Art Gallery of Toronto) and Winter Morning, Charlevoix County (1933; Art Gallery of Toronto), though Jackson does use it to depict the icy surface of Frozen Lake Early Spring Algonquin Park (1914; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada) Instead, Jackson seems to combine white, grey and pale blue into folds of off-white snow. Murray remarks on Barns that ‘the landscape is quintessential Jackson: all rolling horizontal rhythms’ (Murray 81), and it is in achieving a horizontal view of a vast expanse that Jackson is particularly successful.
|
Oil on Canvas 81.6 x 102.1 cms Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto © Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto — Gift from the Reuben and Kate Leonard Canadian Fund, 1926. Courtesy of the Estate of the late Dr. Naomi Jackson Groves. |
|
Oil on Canvas 25" x 32" The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto © The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of the estate of the late Dr. Naomi Jackson Groves. |
In order to halve the number of words from his original article, Lewis was forced to cut a number of literary references. However, as a device for discussing the ‘fascinating ennui’ of Jackson’s snowscapes he mentions a hypothetical ‘grand monotonous book’ in which one traverses towards ones objective on a diet of ‘seal-meat and pemmican’ (Lewis 268), surely a reference to Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in The World (1922). Lewis concludes his piece with another stirring literary metaphor that compares Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick with Jackson’s pursuit of his own ‘elusive Leviathan’, the rugged contours of the Laurentian Mountains in midwinter (Lewis 268).
LAWREN HARRIS
|
© Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. |
Despite Albert Robson’s description of Harris as ‘the group’s “moving spirit” and “genius”’ (Murray 12), he barely gets a mention from Lewis: ‘[Thomson] was a commercial designer — as all of them were at one time or another except Harris’ (Lewis 268). This was perhaps because Lewis had little or no contact with Harris, who spent the Second World War in the United States and Vancouver, or perhaps Lewis regarded Harris in a similar vein to Edward Wadsworth, an artist of private income who didn’t need to work. Also, by 1936, Harris had adopted an abstract style — something unlikely to please Lewis at that time — one which remained with him for the rest of his days. Harris’s best-known work is Above Lake Superior (1922; The Art Gallery of Toronto), which Murray praises for the ‘clarity of its conception’ and its ‘Grandeur, light, tiny peculiarities of landscape, art deco clouds, birch stumps like women’s bodies’ (Murray 69).
|
Oil on Canvas 121.9 x 152.4 cms Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift from the Reuben and Kate Leonard Canadian Fund, 1929. By kind permission of Stewart Sheppard esq. — The Lawren S. Harris Estate. |
Murray remarks also upon what she describes as the ‘vulgarity’ in Harris’s work — the ‘penal [sic] mountains and vaginal clouds’ (Murray 21), exemplified by North Shore, Lake Superior (1926; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada) and Bylot Island (1931; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada), both illustrated in the Phaidon publication. Many of Harris’s works possess a notable verticality — trees, buildings and lighthouses that contrast markedly with the horizontal tendencies of Jackson’s work. Above Lake Superior contains the immediate smooth outline of slim tree trunks that force the background hills to recede into the distance, the whole composition topped with waves of cotton-wool clouds. The strange shaped branch in the central foreground prefigures by over a decade a similar observation by Paul Nash in his Monster Field (1939), based on photographs he took of a transmogrified tree branch.
|
|
B&W Photograph The Government Art Collection © Tate 2009 |
Oil on Canvas Durban Art Gallery, South Africa. © Durban Art Gallery by kind permission of Ms. Jenny Stretton. |
CLARENCE GAGNON
Lewis felt obliged to mention the French-Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon, three of whose works feature in Canadian Painters. This may be to introduce balance, or because Lewis was aware of his French-Canadian heritage, as his ‘paternal grandmother, Romain by name, was French Canadian’ (Fox 49). Lewis refers to Gagnon’s ‘exotic world of brightly-clad peasant puppets’ set amid ‘an innocuous snow’ (Lewis 268) and claims that ‘it would be unfair to count Gagnon’ among the ‘sparkling blue-and-white of the icing merchants’ (268). However, much of Gagnon’s art has a pretty, chocolate-box quality that sits uneasily opposite the austere grandeur of the work of the Group of Seven.
LEWIS IN CANADA
Wyndham Lewis arrived in Canada in September 1939 and remained there until August 1945, a visit interspersed with occasional forays into the United States. Lewis and his wife spent much time in impecunious circumstances at the Tudor Hotel in Toronto until it burnt down in February 1943 (Lewis referred to this time as his ‘Tudor period’ and the milieu features extensively in his 1954 novel Self Condemned). Lewis escaped relatively unscathed from the conflagration, despite an exaggerated account of material losses in the Toronto Daily Star (O’Keeffe 460). He did not have a happy time in Toronto and told Sir Nicholas Waterhouse in January 1942 that ‘this place bores me in the most fearful way’ (Rose 314). The following year Lewis informed Naomi Mitchison that Toronto possessed ‘a provincialism that has no equal for exclusiveness and jealousy’ (Rose 354).
A major problem for Lewis was that he had hoped that his literary and artistic reputation would carry considerable weight in Canada and would lead to regular employment as both lecturer and portraitist. Unfortunately, Lewis found the ‘market’ much more competitive than he had imagined and also discovered that in these wartime years people had much to distract them from art and literature. For example, Group of Seven member Fred Varley ‘only received one official commission throughout the entire war’ (Mastin 39-43). Many potential posts and artistic commissions seemed to slip from Lewis’s grasp despite his best endeavours, exemplified by a proposed portrait of steel magnate Sir James Dunn (O’Keeffe 439-40), whose daughter Anne later married British painters Michael Andrews and Rodrigo Moynihan. However, Lewis did meet with some success and received several commissions from J. Stanley MacLean, who was both the head of the major company Canada Packers and a keen collector of art, including the work of A. Y. Jackson. A portrait of McLean’s daughter Mary was particularly unsuccessful, perhaps reflecting, as Jackson himself suggested, the mutual animosity of sitter and artist (O’Keeffe 429). More promising was a portrait of Lisa Sainsbury who, with her husband Robert, later became a great collector of the work of Francis Bacon. However, this work possesses a rigid quality that Catharine Mastin attributes to Lewis’s imposition of a grid structure on a photograph as a basis for the portrait (Mastin 34). Paul Edwards agrees that both these pictures suffer in comparison to Lewis’s portraits of women from the late 1930s (Edwards 482). Lewis’s portrait of J. S. McLean himself is a much finer piece of work that captures the quiet intelligence of this formidable businessman. It portrays McLean sitting alertly in a dark pinstripe suit, with books to his right and a detail of A. Y. Jackson’s Mining Town to his top left (see below), a reflection of his literary and artistic interests. Lewis pronounced publicly that ‘the painting of this portrait has been for me a great and pleasurable experience’ (Mastin 34), perhaps with an eye to future commissions.
|
Oil on Canvas Private Collection © Wyndham Lewis and the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. |
|
© Maple Leaf Foods Inc. |
Unfortunately, McLean’s employees did not find the picture either great or pleasurable. They had been looking perhaps for a photographic likeness of their employer rather than a work of art and were accordingly disappointed. Comparison with an undated photograph displayed by Maple Leaf Foods Inc., the successors to Canada Packers, suggests that Lewis made McLean look leaner, less lined and somewhat younger than his sixty-four years. The result was that the picture was stored away until its exhibition in 1992 (Mastin 32).
|
Oil on Canvas 1.143 x 0.857 Tate Britain, London. © Wyndham Lewis and the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust |
In Britain in 1942, Lewis was awarded a commission in the sum of £300 by the War Artists Advisory Committee, which was chaired by Sir Kenneth Clark. Lewis wrote to John Rothenstein in August 1943 that ‘the picture representing Canada’s War Effort is finished’ (Rose 363), yet in April 1946 he advised the recently-defunct Committee that ‘my war-picture still requires working on’ (O’Keeffe 514). This extended saga was concluded finally when the Tate acquired the picture, entitled A Canadian War Factory, in 1957, shortly after Lewis’s death.
Lewis and his wife left Canada for the last time in August 1945 and sailed back to England and a return to their pre-war lodgings at Kensington Gardens Studios in Notting Hill Gate. It was from this address that Lewis edited his piece on Canadian Nature and its Painters.
POSTSCRIPT
Lewis’s view of Canadian painting was undoubtedly coloured by his close contact with A. Y. Jackson and a concomitant lack of contact with painters of other genres who were outside The Group of Seven. Catharine Mastin implies that Lewis should have taken a keener interest in contemporary artists, the ‘more socially committed regionalists and modernists’, but Lewis was restricted by his limited finances as to the amount of travel he could undertake. It is a little surprising that there is no evidence of contact between Lewis and David Milne (1882-1953), who spent the war years at Uxbridge, Ontario, and whose Ascension pictures of 1943-44 may have been influenced by seeing Lewis’s Crucifixion drawings at the Picture Loan Society in Toronto (David P. Silcox, Painting Place: David B. Milne, University of Toronto Press, 1996). However, Milne was to some extent overshadowed by the Group of Seven during his lifetime.
One could mention also the fact that the leading female artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) was bedridden in British Columbia from 1937 onwards, and that Edwin Holgate (1892-1977), arguably the most talented portrayer of the human figure in Canada, was in England for most of the war. Lewis also failed to find space for James Morrice (1865-1924), who Buchanan describes as ‘for long known abroad as Canada’s most distinguished painter’ (Buchanan 7), and who had painted with Matisse in Tangiers in 1911-12. As mentioned earlier, Lewis had abridged an earlier article leaving little room to include new material, and his own personal circumstances led him to see Canada as an untamed country battling against nature, with Thomson and Jackson the prime illustrators of the icy vast expanses. Lewis is at his most verbally evocative in his depiction of the atmosphere of the snowy lands, and of the Canadian painter fighting against and capturing nature, in the form of a work of art.
Bibliography
Buchanan, Donald. 1945. Canadian Painters: From Paul Kane to the Group of Seven. London: Phaidon Press.
Edwards, Paul. 2000. Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Larisey, Peter. 1993. Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris’s Life and Work. Toronto: Dundurn Press.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1946. ‘Canadian Nature and its Painters’. The Listener, 29 August, 267-8.
Martinsen, Hanna. 1984. ‘The Scandinavian Impact on the Group of Seven’s Vision of the Canadian Landscape’. Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History, Vol. 53, pt.1, 1-17.
Mastin, Catherine et al. 1992. The Talented Intruder: Wyndham Lewis in Canada 1939-1945. Windsor, Ontario: The Art Gallery of Windsor.
Meyers, Jeffrey. 1980. The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London: Routledge.
Murray, Joan. 1993 [1984]. The Best of the Group of Seven. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
Needham, Gerald. 1984. ‘The Mystic North’. Art Journal. Vol. 44, no. 2, 183-186.
O’Keeffe, Paul. 2000. Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. London: Jonathan Cape.
Rose, W. K. 1963. The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. London: Methuen.
Silcox, David P. 1996. Painting Place: David B. Milne. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Spencer-Longhurst, Paul. 2009. Northern Lights: Swedish Landscapes from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Exh. cat. Birmingham: Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
Varnedoe, Kirk. 1982. Northern Lights: Idealism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting; 1880-1910. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum.
Woodcock, George. 1971. Wyndham Lewis in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia.
[Version 1.00: July 2009]