Emily Carr, Untitled (seascape). Photograph: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
The Canadian artist Emily Carr grew up on the fringes of
the British empire. She was a girl, from a deeply conventional family,
thousands of miles from the galleries and museums of Europe and the
American east coast, and shackled by the limited expectations and
options that women of her class and period faced.
How would she feel about the acclaim with which, seven decades after her death, her work is being greeted, most recently in a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery?
The inevitable sense of triumph would, I suspect, be tinged with the
same emotions that coloured her attitude to the art world and the
imperial metropolis: resentment and claustrophobia. Canada’s first true modernist
always yearned to return to British Columbia’s rain forests, wild skies
and indigenous cultures. “This is my country,” she wrote towards the
end of her life. “What I want to express is here and I love it. Amen!”
The west coast landscape gave her the subject and spiritual inspiration
to create canvases that are dramatic and mysterious.
Carr was born in 1871, the youngest daughter of English
immigrants, in Victoria, capital of the newly established Dominion of
Canada’s most westerly province, British Columbia. Dominated by British
settlers, customs and pretensions, Victoria was possibly the most stuffy
and philistine city in North America at the time: children were taught
to speak with English accents and parlours were decorated with pictures
of Queen Victoria. Tree spiralling upwards. Photograph: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery
Yet even as a child, Carr was fascinated by aspects of her
surroundings that most other residents tried to ignore, such as the
wilderness that abutted the neat picket fences. This little British
settlement was surrounded by untracked rainforest, in which virgin
stands of Douglas firs towered in brooding silence. Moreover, across
Victoria Harbour there was a group of Coast Salish people who regularly
paddled their canoes to the fishing wharves, then went door-to-door,
selling hand-woven baskets, fish and berries. They were an exotic
contrast to Carr’s family and their bourgeois neighbours.
Emily’s father, Richard, a merchant, recognised her talent
when she was eight, and arranged private drawing lessons. She was a
headstrong child – an obstinate, square-chinned tomboy who preferred
animals to people and fought with her four sisters. As Paula Blanchard,
one of her many biographers, wrote: “If she was difficult, as she
certainly was, we can applaud her for not allowing Victoria to make her
into an anonymous pleasant lady.”
Carr had a passionate response to the world around her: her
challenge was to acquire the artistic skills required to capture that
response on paper or canvas. British Columbia offered no resources. Both
Carr’s parents died when she was in her teens, and there was little
money and encouragement from her eldest sister, Edith, now head of the
family, to pursue an education at art school abroad. But Carr nagged the
family lawyer until he found funds to allow her to study at the
California School of Design, in San Francisco. By 1890, Emily had
escaped Victoria’s stifling gentility.
During her three years in San Francisco, she received
instruction in portraiture and drawing, discovered that she had a good
colour sense, and enjoyed weekly outdoor sketching sessions. (She had
not entirely shaken off Victoria’s primness: she was too shy to attend
life-drawing classes, which featured nude models.)
A few years later, she managed to leave Canada, travel to
London and enrol at the Westminster School of Art. The teachers there
were dull and old-fashioned (modernism had not yet crossed the channel),
and she found urban life – “the breath of monstrous factories, the
grime and smut and smell of them” – oppressive. She also took courses at
St Ives, in Cornwall, and at Bushey, Hertfordshire, and realised that
working alone in the woods was her preferred style. But the tame English
countryside was not her landscape. Nor did she find her English fellow
students congenial: always sensitive to criticism, she felt despised as a
“colonial”. Stress triggered a breakdown; she spent 18 months
convalescing in a Suffolk sanatorium. Tanoo, Queen Charlotte Islands, 1913. Courtesy of the British Columbia Archives.
Carr returned to Canada, and taught in Vancouver for
several years. She continued to paint, but was exasperated by her
inability to get beyond the conventionally picturesque. In 1907, she
did, however, make an important trip with her sister Alice to Alaska. In
Sitka, a native village that had been a Russian trading post before it
became an American naval station, the Carr sisters discovered
extraordinary examples of west coast indigenous carvings, as well as
totem poles.
The craft and aesthetic of Sitka’s distinctively
non-European culture fired her imagination: she understood its
connection to the natural order of which most European settlers were
oblivious. “The Indian people and their art touched me deeply … By the
time I reached home, my mind was made up. I was going to picture totem
poles in their own village settings.” She also hoped that she might
finally make some money by selling her reproductions of native art to
the new provincial museum in Victoria. But nobody at the museum took her
art seriously.
Adventurous North American artists had been flocking to
Paris for decades, surfing the successive waves of impressionism,
post-impressionism, pointillism, abstraction and fauvism. Carr knew that
the most innovative art was happening beyond Canadian borders, and when
she saw reproductions of Van Gogh or Matisse, she thought they made
“recent conservative painting look flavourless, little, unconvincing”.
But she was also nearing 40, she did not speak French and could still
only scratch a living from her teaching. How could she get to Paris? And
what would Parisians make of this dowdy, reticent, middle‑aged
Canadian?
Somehow, Carr scraped together the funds, and in 1910 she
crossed the continent and the Atlantic again. Although she fled Paris
after only a few weeks (“nearly demented with headaches”), she found a
congenial teacher in a dapper, well-connected English artist called
Harry Phelan Gibb. Thanks to Gibb, Carr would finally get to grips with
the brilliant colours and abstract forms of early 20th-century painting.
She recorded how Gibb’s “landscapes and still lifes delighted me –
brilliant, luscious, clean”. Only the bulging bodies of his nudes
triggered her sense of “revolt”. There was a moment of epiphany one day
as she watched him sketch a scene in front of them. “It was not a copy
of the woods & fields, it was a realization of them. The colours
were not matched. They were mixed with air. You went through space to
meet reality.” Concern for detail was replaced by bold brushstrokes and
colour on the canvas. Carr went back to Canada determined to apply these
lessons to her chosen subject matter.
However, a return to Canada’s west coast also meant a return
to geographic and cultural isolation. Not only was she without kindred
artistic spirits in British Columbia, she also lacked buyers for her
canvases.
For a few years, she struggled on. She made arduous trips
through remote native villages, documenting the art of the Haida,
Gitxsan and Tsimshian peoples and noting the impact of European
immigrants on these once thriving communities. Carr caught the lonely
magnificence of indigenous carvings in her paintings such as The Welcome Man and Alert Bay.
In Vancouver she organised a public showing of about 200
paintings completed during the previous 14 years, including Indian
pictures and avant-garde canvases from France with their brilliant use
of colour. She gave a lecture on her self-appointed mission, explaining
that the indigenous artefacts she had recorded “should be to us
Canadians what the ancient Briton’s relics are to the English. Only a
few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness … ”
Her art and her words sprang not from the newcomer’s sense of
superiority that characterised so many of her contemporaries, but from
the humility she felt before a deep-rooted culture that was rapidly
eroding.
Carr’s feelings were not shared by her contemporaries: they
did not want “relics” hanging on their nicely painted walls, and the
1913 show was neither the critical nor popular success that the artist
had hoped. Carr, always thin-skinned, felt resoundingly rejected.
For the next 15 years, she avoided the easel. She would
recall later how she felt only “a dead lump … in my heart where my work
had been.” Instead, she earned a living from a diverse range of
activities, including running a boarding house, breeding dogs and
rabbits and making rugs and pottery. This dogged, passionate, brilliant
woman became known as “the crazy old lady” who carried a pet monkey on
her shoulder – an image that would endure to this day. Single by choice
and fierce in temperament, she resisted most attempts at friendship and
would retreat into herself. self-portrait. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Yet the young Dominion of Canada was starting to develop an
artistic sensibility of its own. Thousands of miles east, within the
more populated province of Ontario, a group of men a generation younger
than Carr had banded together to form a Canadian school of art. They
canoed the rivers of central Canada and sketched the region’s sparkling
blue waters, pink rocks, gnarled trees and brilliant red-and-orange
autumn foliage. Then, casting aside the techniques of the old masters,
they transformed the sketches into landscape paintings that were
characterised by bright colours and a tactile use of paint. They too had
absorbed modernist trends from Europe, but unlike Carr, they had no
interest in their country’s indigenous inhabitants. The new mythology
they were inventing for the Dominion ignored the mythical beliefs of its
native peoples.
“The Group of Seven”, as this gang came to be called, after
their 1920 show of the same name, was soon acknowledged as the national
school. They had done for central Canada what Carr had hoped to do for
western Canada: capture the grandeur and immensity of the forests and
vastness in a quasi-modernist style. (A selection of their work was
shown at Dulwich three years ago.) Their push for a truly Canadian
vision, distinct from a European or American style, encouraged Eric
Brown, then director of the National Gallery in Ottawa, to look beyond
Ontario’s borders to see what was happening elsewhere in the country. In
1927, he included several canvases by Carr in a show of west coast art,
and he invited the artist to come east.
This was the trigger for the final, glorious stage of her
career. The Group of Seven welcomed her to Toronto. “You are one of us,”
declared Lawren Harris, one of the leading figures. She broke through
her own shyness to have the discussions she had never previously enjoyed
– about technique, aesthetic values, personal style. She returned to
her Victoria home, picked up her brushes again, and let rip.
At first, Carr continued to paint the scenes and carvings of
the native villages she visited, but in a far bolder style. She focused
on the spiritual force that she had always found in nature and that she
now recognised was embodied in indigenous carvings. She slowly
abandoned the Indian material and turned her attention to the mystery
and movement of nature itself. The lush, dank foliage and massive tree
trunks of the Pacific rainforest that she painted are quite different
from the Group of Seven’s boreal landscapes: as Margaret Atwood
remarks, “Her canvases are so green: she takes you right into the
middle of the forest.” Carr also commented on the despoliation of
environment in canvases of logged hillsides, driftwood or jagged tree
stumps. Sarah Milroy, curator of the Dulwich show, points out that Carr
always tried to understand “what was being displaced, arguing for its
humanity and value, and turning a scathing eye on her fellow colonials,
with their superior airs and destructive intrusions”.
Carr’s art continued to evolve as her health failed. Towards
the end of her life, she would still insist on stomping off into the
woods to paint. She would thin her oils with gasoline, then capture on
paper images of trees and skies that pulsate with movement and
sensuality. Wordsworthian rapture infuses her vision.
Unlike so much Canadian landscape art, Carr’s work is not a
macho story of discovery and conquest, but a haunting and occasionally
erotic reminder of mystery. It is also a reflection of a true original.
In the words of Marc Mayer, director of Canada’s National Gallery which
holds a considerable number of Carrs: “There is a fascinating tension
between her urge to record indigenous coastal art and nature, and her
determination to make modernist paintings.”
Carr has not suffered the fate of so many women artists.
Although the Dulwich show is the first major solo show of her work in
Europe, she was recognised as a major artist in Canada several years
before her death, aged 74, in 1945. She was also celebrated as an
author: Klee Wyck, a memoir of her encounters with different
indigenous groups that was published in 1941, won the Governor General’s
award for non‑fiction. Her work has never fallen out of fashion. As
Mayer says. “She is our Georgia O’Keefe, our Frida Kahlo.”
• From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, until 8 March
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق