Authors Maria Tippett and Peter Clarke in their home studio, on South Pender Island, B.C. Tippett died on Pender Island on Aug. 8, at the age of 79.Deddeda Stemler
Curious, courageous, determined, Maria Tippett traced the development of Canada’s visual culture in a dozen books, among them warts-and-all biographies of some of the country’s most venerated artists.
Her books, including definitive biographies of painters Fred Varley, Emily Carr and Bill Reid, helped shift attention to the achievements of artists in British Columbia, her home province.
Often she found her research blocked by various gatekeepers unwilling to share material pertinent to her subjects. But she persevered. While researching the life of Emily Carr in the 1970s, she examined hundreds of the artist’s paintings and retraced Ms. Carr’s travels in California, England, France, throughout the Queen Charlotte Islands and Vancouver Island, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa but could not get access to a trunkful of Ms. Carr’s letters to her confidant Ira Dilworth. The trunk was in the possession of John A.E. Parnall, the registrar of the University of British Columbia, who was then Ms. Carr’s literary executor and beneficiary of her royalties.
Ms. Tippett was so frustrated by his refusal that her friends joked she was working toward a “Carr-diac attack.”
Nevertheless, Emily Carr: A Biography, published in 1979, 34 years after Ms. Carr’s death, went on to win Ms. Tippett a Governor-General’s Award. William French, literary critic for this paper, called it “an almost flawless book that sets a new standard for cultural biography in this country.”
She led a charmed life, living part of the year in Cambridge, England, where she was a senior research fellow at Churchill College, married to the Cambridge historian Peter Clarke, the master of Trinity Hall.
During the summer months, they would return to British Columbia – at first to Bowen Island then later to South Pender, one of B.C.’s idyllic Gulf Islands. There she and her husband began their day at 7:30 a.m. at their writing desks, then discussed what they had written in the afternoon.
It was on Pender Island that Ms. Tippett died on Aug. 8 of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 79.
After her death, flags were flown at half-mast at Churchill College, where in the decade before her retirement she was appointed a “moral tutor” to graduate students, comparable to being a mentor or dean of men (or women). She formed close friendships with students including Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian dissident, whom she encountered at Trinity Hall. His release from incarceration in Russia on Aug. 1, brightened her last week of life, according to her husband.
No one who knew her as a child could have guessed that she would have a successful career as a writer, university lecturer, Cambridge tutor, curator of art exhibitions, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and recipient of prizes and three honorary degrees from Canadian universities.
She was born in Victoria on Dec. 9, 1944, out of wedlock, and placed in foster care as a toddler in the home of George and Violet Tippett. Later, she was adopted by the Tippetts but received little affection from them. At school, her teachers considered her slow. In high school, she was directed into the commercial stream, which did not lead to university. The Tippetts paid for ballet classes and clarinet and saxophone lessons but showed no interest in her education.
After high school, she moved to Vancouver and attended Vancouver City College, before heading for Europe with her girlfriends.
Two years of living and working in the then-divided Berlin opened her eyes and reset her ambitions. She learned German and liked to listen to the news every morning in that language to the end of her life. Her birth name was Marie but she changed it after her Berlin landlady called her Maria. She also realized that she wanted a university education, and in 1971 returned to B.C. to attend the recently opened Simon Fraser University.
“She found that the young faculty in the SFU history department were open to supporting her interest in the arts and politics,” her friend Ann Cowan recalled.
In her memoir Becoming Myself, she wrote: “I was in my element at Simon Fraser University. Encouraged by my professors to combine my passion for the arts with my interest in history, I was making sense of the world through the things that I knew and loved best.”
At Simon Fraser, she met her first husband, Douglas Cole, a Canadian historian, and they collaborated on two early books about art in the west: From Desolation to Splendour: Changing Perceptions of the British Columbia Landscape, and Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art, both issued in 1977.
She was by then already deep into work on the Carr biography, and decided that despite her writing success, she needed to obtain a PhD to be taken seriously in the academic world.
She enrolled at University College, London, to write a doctoral thesis on the Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook and the war art program he created during the First World War so that Canada’s part in that war would not be forgotten. As her thesis supervisor she found the historian Peter Clarke, who many years later, became her second husband after each of them divorced their original spouses and he had shifted from London to Cambridge.
More books followed: Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions before the Massey Commission; the life of celebrity photographer Yousuf Karsh; By a Lady – Celebrating Three Centuries of Canadian Women in the Visual Arts; Between Two Cultures, about the work of the French photographer Charles Gimpel among the Inuit in the 1950s; and a history of Canadian sculpture. She also tried her hand at fiction.
Patricia Bovey, director in the 1970s of the Greater Victoria Art Gallery and later, of the Winnipeg Art Gallery before being appointed to the Senate, said in an interview that Ms. Tippett helped establish the field of cultural studies. “She got in almost on the ground floor.
“Her scholarship was good, and she had a gift for writing for multiple audiences – scholars, art aficionados, and a general readership. Her Emily Carr book is a staple, [as is] her history of Canadian sculpture, [and] By a Lady is widely used in teaching art history; her books on sculpture, the war artists, and on Bill Reid will live on.”
In 1995, B.C. became the first province to open its adoption records and Ms. Tippett, then living on Bowen Island with Peter Clarke for the summer, applied to find out the identity of her biological father. The answer that arrived back was a surprise: George Tippett, her adoptive father was also her birth father. She discovered that she had a full sister in Toronto, a younger brother and several half sisters in Victoria who she had grown up with but had not considered to be blood relations. By then, her father had died and Maria’s revelations were not welcomed by the rest of the family.
Her most provocative book proved to be her biography of half-Haida B.C. artist and silversmith Bill Reid. Ms. Tippett was as candid about his character flaws as she was admiring of Mr. Reid’s enormous artistic talents. She presented frankly his decades-long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, which forced him to delegate the hands-on execution of his art projects to others whom he did not properly credit.
The Globe’s art critic John Bentley Mays wrote that the book “left the personal reputation of Bill Reid in smoking ruins.”
In Bill Reid: The Making of an Indian she also raised complicated questions about the changing nature of First Nations art that is increasingly created for non-Indigenous collectors and removed from the ceremonies and potlatches that it was originally meant for. Mr. Reid’s wife, Martine, hated the book and did not co-operate with Ms. Tippett.
In her biography Stormy Weather, Ms. Tippett similarly refused to whitewash the life of the hard-drinking Fred Varley, a member of the Group of Seven, much to the displeasure of his sons, who tried to have the book withdrawn by its publisher.
Maria Tippett leaves her husband, Prof. Clarke; twin stepdaughters, Liberty (Libby) Plumb and Emily Penny; and her nephew Wesley Kovalou.
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this obituary said Peter Clarke was master of Churchill College at Cambridge University, but in fact he was master of Trinity Hall. This version has been corrected.