Dali House

“Portrait of Barker Fairley”, done in 1920 by Frederick Varley of the Group of Seven, now hanging at the National Gallery of Canada.

Barker Fairley’s picture of the Group of Seven’s AY Jackson from 1939, now at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

I remember seeing an exhibition of paintings by Barker Fairley some 30 years ago and being positively unimpressed. They were a bleak, washed-out lot. Renewing contact recently with John and Gisela Sommer, at whose Gallery House Sol in smalltown Canada the show was held, prompted me to have another look.

And now I think I see the point.

“Francis Sparshott”, 1957: Fairley depicts his colleague at the University of Toronto, the author of “The Structure of Aesthetics”.

There’s something quite moving in the gaunt portraits and sparse landscapes, particularly the latter. Rather than washed-out, the scenes now seem blindingly bright to me. I wonder, too, if he was consciously stripping away the utensils of the scenery so that we could see the countryside fundamentally naked.

“Dale Fields”, 1975

“People keep asking me if painting is hard work,” he once said. “Painting isn’t work. Painting is making decisions. I make decisions, nothing more.”

There’s an interesting political sidebar to Fairley’s career as well: he and his first wife Margaret Adele were once ridden out of the USA on a rail, their reputations tarred and the Canadian government in no mood to help them remove the feathers.

Fairley, who was born a headmaster’s son in Britain in 1887 — in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in fact, just down the road from my hatchling nest in Lancashire — but who spent most of his life in Canada, was far better known in his time as one of the world’s foremost authorities on German literary beacons like Goethe. He was an academic through and through, a literary and art critic, author of many books, and only then, it seems, a painter.

It was well after he brought his scholarship to the German department at the University of Toronto that Fairley was prodded to take up a brush by one of his former students, Robert Finch, himself a painter as well as a poet.

He couldn’t have needed too much encouragement. By then he’d encountered all of the Group of Seven, though he’d missed out on Tom Thomson, their spiritual heart.

“I knew them all,” he told an interviewer. “I met Jimmie [JEH] MacDonald in the fall of 1917. I never met Tom Thomson, he had died a few months before.”

Fairley began by rendering landscapes in watercolour but, lamenting that “Canada has no tradition of portraits, no tradition of freely painted faces”, soon switched to the human physiognomy in oil (without ever abandoning landscapes).

“Cathy Edmonton”, undated

“Ought not the painting of humanity … draw ahead of the landscape [and] take priority over it?” he wrote in 1939. “Ought it not do so in any age, and especially in this age of intense human conflict and suffering and innovation? There is everything in the world about us, the world of today, to suggest that the luxury of dwelling on empty landscapes is likely to recede in men’s minds and the urgent human issues to assert themselves with growing force.”

This passage is cited in “Barker Fairley: Portraits”, a bound collection he released with art critic Gary Michael Dault in 1981, half a decade before he died 22 years ago this past October, in his 100th year.

The Group of Seven connection easily survives him. Fairley’s works are displayed alongside theirs at the McMichael Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, and in 2004 the Canadian Conservation Institute announced joyously that it had acquired his old paintbox, along with that of the Group’s AY Jackson. Jackson and Fairley had enjoyed several canoe trips together, the classic Group of Seven painting excursion.

The oil-caked wooden boxes had been the keepsakes of Naomi Jackson Groves, AY’s niece, until she died, when the auctioneer got them. They were being raffled off with Jackson’s record player, briefcase, sleeping bag and folding cot.

Though it was at the time awaiting a scientific “analysis of the paints”, the institute reckoned that AY must have used them while he was living in Ottawa in the mid-1960s, prior to a stroke necessitating his retirement to McMichael, which is where I got to meet him on a high-school field trip (as recounted in this post).

How Barker Fairley came to be at House Sol in Georgetown, Ontario, is a facinating story well told by John Sommer in an article he wrote in 1993. He’s shared it with me for the retelling.

Sommer says he learned about Fairley’s art in late 1968 or early ‘69 from Erindale College lecturer Alan Powell, who had agreed to pose for a painting at Fairley’s home in Toronto, at 90 Willcocks Street. Sommer visited the artist there soon after and says he “had the surprise of my life”.

“Black Barn”, 1979.

“He showed me what seemed like hundreds of portraits and landscapes, all of them painted in a restricted palette of browns, dull yellows, greens, lots of black and the occasional red and blue. But within this restriction he had found an enormous range of subtle colour variations that was far from primitive.

“The portraits, in particular, fascinated me. They reminded me of the portraits by the German expressionists, without the hysteria …

“Barker Fairley’s portraits were eminently sensible and at the same time penetrating. They had an unflinching directness that was almost repulsive at first glance, but one warmed to them after awhile, they were so lacking in show. Later, when I met some of his sitters, I realised what an uncanny ability Barker had to catch the essence of a person.”

Fairley painted Sommer’s portrait several times, and John thinks the one below, done in 1970, is the best. It’s now at University College, Toronto.

“I discovered shortly after he started that the chair he was sitting on came close to breaking apart whenever he moved with it forward or backward, as he was in the habit of doing during portrait sessions. I braced myself to come to his rescue, to catch him before he would collapse with the chair, if ever it should come to that …

“In his book ‘Portraits’ he is giving this story a rather neat and flattering twist: ‘It will be apparent from my portrait of him, with his right arm grasping the back of the chair he was sitting in as if he couldn’t stay seated any longer — a position he dropped into after I had started — that he is a man of immense energy and enthusiasm.’

On his first visit to Fairley’s home and studio, Sommer asked to host an exhibition at House Sol and Barker “performed a quick little two-step (a mannerism all his own), he was so happy about my offer”.

The show was held from October 18 to November 6, 1969, and only afterward did Sommer learn of Fairley’s lofty stature as a scholar of German literature.

Still, he was puzzled that Fairley had been painting for 37 years and only one large gallery, in Munich, and a small one in Toronto, had shown any interest.

“I guess that his reputation as a literary scholar made people think of his paintings as the products of a hobby-painter. And his artless style wasn’t fancy enough for dealers and critics.”

Fairley exhibited in Georgetown four more times through the 1970s, on one occasion bringing the painting reproduced below, his just-finished portrait of Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s most distinguished authors. It too now belongs to University College, Toronto.

Articles were being written about him in magazines and major dailies, and the CBC carried a feature about him, but still, Sommer recalls, “no good Toronto dealer showed the slightest interest in his work”.

In 1977, though, Sommer piqued the interest of Toronto gallery owner Marianne Friedland and she drove the 40 miles to Georgetown to see Fairley’s latest exhibition there. Impressed, she not only arranged a show at her gallery for that December, she used her “clever sales expertise” to turn it into “an extraordinary success”.

“It turned almost into a bit of a riot when eager purchasers ordered paintings before the show, with the result that all the paintings were sold before the gallery opened its door … Landscapes that had sold for $250 at our gallery (not exactly peanuts in the early 1970s) sold for $450 and more, and a year later, at his second exhibition at Marianne Friedland’s gallery, his small landscapes sold for $1,000 and more.

“It was a neat triumph of marketing and a happy, long-for vindication for Barker.”

Somewhat less happy was Sommer, who had to sit back as Friedland claimed all the credit for “discovering” Barker Fairley.

“‘The artist who became famous at 90′ was the tenor of all write-ups from then on, and he became, in the last years of his life, a living legend, an oddity.

“He did not like it. That he was finally accepted as a painter, that he enjoyed, and the money he did not mind either. But that his long painting career, from the ’30s to the ’80s, was sacrificed for the sake of a marketing slogan irked him no end.”

“Lila’s Place” 1977

Sommer provides an excellent summation of Fairley’s work.

“How important was Barker as a painter? I have never been able to decide if he was a painter (that is, a human being who lives with his eyes) or if he was an intelligent man with strong opinions about art who became a painter because he disapproved of the direction painting was taking.

“Barker fervently argued that abstract painting was wallpaper. This is nonsense, of course. For my generation abstract painting has been the great eye-opener. All of my most profound visual experiences have been in front of paintings by Kandinsky and Mondrian and Pollock and Motherwell. We can’t all have been in a trance or under the influence of brainwashing.

“Muskoka Lake”, 1970.

“Barker Fairley always said that he never gave a thought to painting until he met JEH MacDonald. He liked the man, and accordingly he liked what he painted. In that way Barker was led to art and soon became a spokesman for the whole Group.

“The truth is that he knew little about abstract painting because he hardly looked at it. Besides the Group of Seven and ’30s painters like Comfort and Schaefer, he knew few painters … Barker’s way of painting was so singular that no further development nor elaboration was possible …

“Barker Fairley was a product of the enlightenment. His ’sanity’ was the most striking thing about him. He had trained his mind on Goethe, the most sane of all the German writers … Barker’s objection was that abstract anything is ‘irrational’ … There it was, the accusation Goethe had hurled at Heinrich von Kleist when the writer had sent him his play ‘Penthesilea’. The olympian attitude is impressive, of course, but it denies an awful lot of our humanity, far too much to be comfortable with …

“He was active until he was almost a hundred years old. His ambition was to reach this magic number, but in the end he did not quite make it. I remember that he suddenly got old and frail.

“The last time I saw him, only a few short months before he died, I took him out in his wheelchair. He had hung a few of his paintings on the walls of the shop where he and Nan bought their bread. He wanted me to see the place and I pushed him up to Harbord Street and into the shop. On the way he confessed that he was tired of life.”

A Google Earth view of Mr Fairley’s neighbourhood — Willcocks Street across the upper left, Harbord Street at lower right.

And this is a view of Huyck’s Point on the almost-an-island Prince Edward County, which sweeps out into Lake Ontario like a lava flow. (Actually, reader Jennifer tells me it’s a man-made island!) Fairley and his second wife Nan had a summer house here. He painted hundreds of canvases in the area.

THE WALDORF INCIDENT

His first wife, Margaret, died in 1967 or ‘68. She’d been dean of women at the University of Alberta, where she met Fairley but she gave up the position when they married in 1913 and moved to Toronto. Two decades later they returned to England and Margaret became active with a Marxist group.

Back in Canada by 1936, she joined the Communist Party, and later she compiled a socialist literary anthology called “The Spirit of Canadian Democracy”.

In 1949 Barker was invited to several American and British universities to speak at commemorations of Goethe’s birth bicentenary. While he was at Columbia University as a visiting professor that March, Margaret joined him in New York for the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace being held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

The conference was organised by the left-wing National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions and backed by Thomas Mann, Aaron Copland and Albert Einstein, but many saw it as some sort of Soviet invasion.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson called the Waldorf Conference “a sounding board for communist propaganda” and Washington denied visas to several prominent leftist foreigners. New York newspapers ran stories on commie subversion.

New York University philosopher Sidney Hook, who’d been rejected as a guest lecturer, set up a counter-conference that focused on freedom of expression. His people rallied at Madison Square Garden and then thousands of anti-communist protesters swarmed outside the Waldorf.

Inside, the opening banquet had just begun when Margaret was told there was a telephone call for her. She and Barker left their table, walked out of the hall and were seized by Immigration Service officials. They were led away, newspaper photographers grabbing the moment, and interrogated for an hour.

Fairley’s 1982 portrait of his second wife, Nan.

Barker was released, but Margaret was told to leave the US or face arrest as a threat to national security, and she boarded a train home.

The Fairleys were front-page news the next day — “actual communists” nabbed in New York.

Barker was allowed to complete his term at Columbia but, probably because he was vice president of the Canadian Council of American-Soviet Friendship, was subsequently refused admission to the US, raising the ire of university officials including its then-president Dwight Eisenhower.

Lester Pearson, Canada’s future prime minister, was in 1949 the minister of external affairs, and he ordered an investigation into the handling of Canadian citizens but stopped short of issuing any protest to Washington. He ultimately endorsed America’s “legitimate desire to strengthen its border regulations in order to hinder the tourist and convention activities of communist agents”.

The ban against Barker Fairley was permanent, but late in life he slipped across the border at Lewiston, as he said, “just for kicks”.

The “Incident” is a symopsis of an article by David Kimmel for the University of Toronto Bulletin.

The images of Fairley’s paintings in this post come from the website of Toronto’s Ingram Gallery, which now handles his work, from ArtNet.com, and, with thanks to John Sommer, from the book “Barker Fairley: Portraits” (Methuen, 1981).