Dali House

Having tried and failed to be wilfully scornful of the triumvirate of Great Canadian Painters Bateman, Danby and Trisha Romance, let’s now cast aside the bow and arrow for a look at someone modern and, you know, Canadian, who’s actually matched the spirit of the Group of Seven.

Alex Colville, seen here in a detail from a famous portrait by Arnaud Maggs, was yet another Ontarian, but his folks got him out of there early and took him to someplace real instead, Nova Scotia, when he was still only nine. He showed his gratitude by getting very, very sick, but convalescence in those days meant crayons, and an artist was born in fever. Great stuff.

During that big fight with the Nazis, Colville was a “war artist”, just like some of the Seven, and likened the experience to a novelist training as a police reporter. These war artists were supposed to give the folks back home an accounting of how their tax money was being spent overseas, and it’s likely that many tax bills were promptly paid when Jacques and Gilles Canadien saw Colville’s paintings of the mass graves at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

This business of obtaining and hanging on to freedom, which cropped up in Hitler’s Europe and doesn’t seem to be getting resolved in Bush’s Iraq, got a reading in Colville’s “Horse and Train” in 1954, shown at the top of this post. Hooves pound toward destiny, but unless this nag is mesmerised by the engine’s beacon, surely he can leave that track, right?

Or is the horse being brave? Pig-headed? Stupid? Am I the horse? If so, can I or should I alter my course? If not, does the death of a horse matter to me, especially if its salvation means disrupting the train’s well-planned course?

In 1965 Colville painted “To Prince Edward Island” with a woman on a ferry confronting the viewer through binoculars. Now it’s our turn to be mesmerised, the artist consciously invoking mythology’s Medusa. Eye contact might turn us to stone, our only sin being an admiration for art.

There is sexual politics at work here too, the linked clouds luring us back to the woman’s brazenly returned stare, and there’s no point appealing to her male companion, because he can’t see us. (Or perhaps it’s a good thing her protector can’t see us watching her.)

The National Gallery of Canada says art historian David Burnett claimed the painting “confirms the self-effacement of the man and the clairvoyance of the woman”, but I wouldn’t go that far. Art historians, huh? Is that a real profession or what? Do they get paid for it?

The setting of “Couple on Bridge” from 1992 can safely be called a metaphor for communicating, of course, and there’s definitely some sort of serious discussion going on. The woman doesn’t seem sure at all about what she’s being told, or, as the National Gallery suggests, is she simply ignoring it?

Colville is not to be ignored. Today Canadians have the luxury of many fine artists, and they can pick and choose, but there was a time not that long ago when there were so few that Cornelius Krieghoff is some sort of demigod in the textbooks.

Cornelius David Kreighoff (1815-72) just happened to be reasonably talented when Canada’s first settlers were looking around for somebody to make a picture of what they’d found. More importantly, that bastard Lord Thomson of Fleet, the stupidly rich but miserly newspaper mongrel I once worked for, jacked up the price of Krieghoffs in the 1970s.

Born in Amsterdam, schooled in Germany and in America only long enough to find out that the US army was no fun (he battled the Seminoles in Florida), Krieghoff moved in 1836 to Toronto, where his brother was pioneering photography, then switched to Montreal. He studied some more in Paris, then went back to Canada and nosed around, then moved back to Europe, still painting Canadian scenes, then went back again to Quebec and stayed there longer, then moved to Chicago and died.

He was Dutch to the tip of his beaver-fur paintbrush, though. Just look at “Indian Wigwam in Lower Canada”, from 1848.

In New York and Toronto, Krieghoff went door to door flogging his paintings for $5 or $10, but the subject matter was pretty low-class. In Dusseldorf he’d painted card players, drunks, everyday stuff and, okay, some children, and in the New World he did more of the same, plus wigwams. People, if they were going to buy art at all, wanted some of those fat English horses. So Krieghoff painted houses — the exteriors, not pictures of them.

In Quebec, though, the art-buying public of the day was a bit more sophisticated, so they could see the souvenir value in a canvas showing your typical Canadian countryside, and they went in for portraits, too. Krieghoff had 11 years of relative prosperity.

In all, it’s tallied, he did about 700 paintings. No bible scenes, no mythology and only one nude that proved so scandalous he never went back there again. He did peasants in the raw, rather, and the hovels they lived in, and the stuff they got up to, like sugaring-off in the maple forest, and what could be more Canadian than that? Or more syrupy? Not without justification was he later compared to Hogarth (with hockey sticks).

Curiously, he was the first one to look around and notice the landscape, and maintain an abiding interest in it, even taking some stick for making the fall leaves too colourful (from people who hadn’t seen an Ontario forest ablaze in autumn).

The plaudits rolled in after Krieghoff died (”The richness of his palette was in no way inferior to the finest examples of this genre in the museums of Europe,” said one admirer), and then in the 1900s rolled back out again. Critics have been harsh, particularly about the vulgarly partying farmers.

“He turns out pictures, as a manufacturer would, which are within everybody’s grasp because of the carousing that he depicts, the besotted faces of his figures, the rather crude comedy of his genre scenes, and his autumn landscapes with their violent and loud colours.” That sort of thing.

Cooler heads and deeper pockets prevailed, but even Raymond Vezina, who praised Krieghoff’s “heart”, acknowledged that “certainly he is not a great master …

“But his technique is good, and his compositions are simple and firm. Krieghoff’s work occupies an important place in the evolution of the arts in Canada.”

If Krieghoff was the guppy that climbed out of the primordial ooze, Homer and Horatio got Canadian art up and walking, even if it stooped a bit longer.

Homer Ransford Watson (1855-1936) was called the “Canadian Constable”, and Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde owned samples of his work. The painting pictured here is “Down in the Laurentides” from 1882.

A country boy from Doon, Ontario, he fell in with an artsy crowd in Toronto, briefly studied in the States and was showing his paintings by 1878. Canada’s Governor General grabbed one and gave it to Victoria, and she liked it so much she bought two more.

But Watson got into a collision while trying to promote Canadian art with his detailed pastoral canvases, where “depressing or dangerous” forests have been cleared and rugged nature tamed, and his leadership of the Canadian Art Club and Royal Canadian Academy.

Along came the upstart Group of Seven moaning that Canadian paintings were too European and crowing about some sort of national identity. They were just too strident for the farmboy, and in such a rush to find a new style, he said, that they were forgetting about artistic quality.

Do I hear a harrumph? He died feeling, as one writer has said, “that the modern world passed him by”. And so it did.

Then there’s Horatio Walker (1858-1938), born in Listowel, Ontario, died in St Petronille, Quebec.

A photography apprentice who travelled in Europe and was besotted by Barbizon, he lived in the States while summering on Quebec’s pretty Ile d’Orleans in the St Lawrence, right on the spot where Jacques Cartier camped in 1536, looked around and said, “This is going to be a great country one day if ugly, noisy, war-crazy neighbours don’t move in next door.”

Shown here is (are?) Walker’s “Cows”. Not much to go on, is it?

Not to worry. Someone else will be along shortly.

There is a nice collection of Alex Colville paintings here.