Emily Carr was, is, a great artist but even her most ardent admirers would admit her prolific production was woefully uneven. Therefore, it’s a pleasure to report that the contents of From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, up Saturday at the Art Gallery of Ontario through early August, are mostly prime Carr.
As you might already know, the exhibition was conceived about three years ago as an installation for the venerable Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London. Under the direction of Ian Dejardin, Dulwich has taken a keen interest in Canadian historical art of late, famously mounting a well-received show of works by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven in 2011-12. The Carr follow-up, curated by Dejardin in conjunction with B.C.-born, Toronto-based art writer/former Globe and Mail art critic Sarah Milroy, had its Dulwich debut last November, completing a successful run there March 15 before being crated and carried across the Atlantic to Toronto.
Speaking earlier in the week at the AGO, Dejardin and Milroy acknowledged that shaping and mounting more or less the same show for London and Toronto was a challenge. After all, Canadians know or at least are familiar with Carr, who died at 73 in Victoria in the spring of 1945. For Britons, though, the irascible, pet-loving painter and writer with a fondness for hairnets and smocks was very much “an unknown quantity” – “the best artist nobody knows,” was how one headline writer put it – so “we had to introduce her,” and introduce her in such a way as to be “a revelation” in a city (London) already drowning in art, noted Dejardin. By contrast, in Toronto, the brief was to make the exhibition “a surprise.”
Wandering among the 100 or so oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and preparatory sketches at the AGO the other day, it was easy to see why From the Forest to the Sea did, indeed, prove a revelation at Dulwich. Carr was presented not as some talented hick from the sticks but as a well-travelled artist, trained in San Francisco, London and Paris, whose best work at once incarnated and transcended the techniques of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, art nouveau and sundry other “isms” of modernity. At the same time, her content – dense, dark, fecund rain forests, totem poles and war canoes, aboriginal villages, tremulous skies, driftwood-scattered beaches, gyrating branches and thrusting trunks – had to have seemed as exotic to the Brits as Gauguin’s depictions of Tahiti or the jungle fever dreams of Henri Rousseau.
By the same token, it’s doubtful the show will be “a surprise” to Canadians, or at least Canadians of a certain vintage. There’s no radical axe being ground here, no grand thesis. What we have rather is a nuanced, smartly conceived, beautifully presented, thoroughly contemporary confirmation of Carr’s complex but single-minded genius. The Carr here is a sort of Miss In-Between – a single, fiercely independent woman in a patriarchal, chivalric society, an artist at once alienated from that society’s anglophilic ethos, irresistibly attracted to the aboriginal cultures right in her own backyard, yet, for all that sympathy and understanding, never able to bridge the gap. An environmentalist in a clear-cut economy, an imagination rooted in the singular landscape and skyspace of B.C., yet forever wondering how to belong in that milieu.
Emily Carr Happiness 1939 Oil on paper 84.8 x 54 cm University of Victoria Art Collection Gift of Nikolai and Myfanwy Pavelic
From the Forest to the Sea abounds with moments of intelligence, small and big. I like the way the colour of the picture walls changes from one, progressively lighter, shade of green to the next, culminating in the pale blue at show’s end. Like how the eight vitrines containing 40 or so indigenous West Coast artifacts have been judiciously positioned throughout the floor space so as to function simultaneously as superb art works in their own right and three-dimensional “reminders” of the wellsprings of Carr’s two-dimensional oeuvre. Like, too, the many salient pairings – of Haida chief James Hart’s carving, in alder, of a raven-shaped bowl alongside a 1931 O’Keeffe-like canvas of a tree trunk; of the iconic Indian Church (1929) with the equally iconic Totem and Forest (1931); of a dainty 1909 watercolour of Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park next to an intense, vibrating oil rendering of the same subject 28 years on.
Positioned at pretty much the exhibition’s midway point, aptly enough, is a selection of seven or eight works from 1927 to 1931. I say aptly because 1927 was the year Carr got her mojo back as an artist after largely forsaking her public ambitions for almost 14 years to build and run a boarding house. That year, close to 30 of her paintings were shown as part of the epochal Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern at the National Gallery in Ottawa. Travelling to Ontario, she met the burgeoning Group of Seven, most notably its leader, Lawren Harris, who told her, “You’re one of us,” and whose “compositional grandeur” and love of colour “hit her like a thunderbolt.” Back on the West Coast, Carr proceeded to work up a style that combined her love of indigenous culture with the bold, simplified forms favoured by Harris.
Today paintings of this period – they include Blunden Harbour, Grizzly Bear Totem and Totem Mother, Kitwancool – are beloved by many and avidly sought by collectors: a 1930 canvas, The Crazy Stair (The Crooked Staircase), for instance, sold at auction in November, 2013, for $3.4-million, still the record for the most ever paid in the resale market for a painting by a Canadian female artist.
To Milroy and Dejardin, however, such works are histrionic, too much of a muchness; it’s Carr pandering “to the exhibition in her head.” And for First Nations’ critics, they’re the quintessence of cultural appropriation. Yet for all the validity of these critiques, this remains the stuff most of the public thinks of when it thinks of Carr and here’s where I’m betting crowds will bunch up the most during the exhibition’s run.
Carr abandoned this focus on aboriginal content in 1931 to turn to capturing what Charles Hill, the NGC’s former curator of Canadian art, has called “the rhythms and pulsating divine presence in nature.” It’s these works (they number more than 25) that make up the last half of From the Forest to the Sea – the best half, “the peak,” in the view of the British art critic Laura Cumming. Writing last November in The Observer, Cumming said: “It feels as if the great firs, oaks and spruces, the birches and maples … are Carr’s own private totem poles. They have a force of personality for her.… [And] you don’t just see [them], you hear them, too.”
One-hundred and forty-four years after Carr’s birth, 70 years after her death from a heart attack, Canadians’ response might not be quite that rapturous. But whatever From the Forest to the Sea may lack in epiphanies for domestic viewers it makes up for in its intelligence, its sensitivity and the poetry of its presentation. Some Carr shows I’ve seen over the years have been slogs. Not this one. Here your appreciation of our Miss Emily will be refreshed and deepened.
From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia is at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from April 11 through Aug. 9 (ago.net).