Page 92 - Studio International - March April 1975

the most superficial area of photography — The History of Painting in the materials he knows better than anyone
the news picture. Szarkowski's hypothesis Canada: Towards a People's else, his own people in his native land.'
is that the formal and iconographic Art The Group of Seven of course got this
character of photographs have made a right and Lord is at his best on them. But
significant contribution to the by Barry Lord 253 pp. 200 black and there are times when the subject should
development of modern visual white and 13 colour illus. be allowed to speak for itself. While it is
vocabulary, in being a continual New Canada Publications, Toronto. entirely to Lord's credit that he is
celebration of the basic qualities of a $6.95. extending the canon in all directions, not
totally realistic image being plucked from just down to the folk or grass-roots, verbal
its surroundings and presented in a Canadian history is in most respects still eulogy is more than some of these simple
totally unreal context. The news unwritten; the annals of Canadian art records should have to bear. And when it
photograph, when divorced from its have not yet fossilized; what is meant by comes to an artist like Frederick Taylor
surroundings, transcends its purpose as 'Canadian-ness' is a serious issue. Two (b. 1906), who got into trouble for painting
illustration/amplification and becomes at recent books aim, in their respective the sweating effort that went into the
once a startlingly direct depiction of an definitions of Canadian art history, to production of tanks (part of the allied
event and a mysterious, ambiguous visual create a wider sense of Canadian culture. capitalist countries' aid' to the Soviet
experience. The concept is an interesting Both assume that something can be done, Union in 1942) there is no suggestion that
one, for it touches on much that still that art should not have to be art- Taylor too might have been the prey of
confuses us when attempting to equate historically determined, that what external influences —Socialist Realism, for
our intellectual and emotional reaction to happens in the eye of the beholder, let instance.
photographs. The body of the book, alone the artist's eye, depends largely on Persuasive as the historian may be on
ninety pictures taken from the files of the his political, his national consciousness, the relationship between an artist's life
New York Daily News and several other and that can be changed. To label Barry and the socio-economic climate, when the
papers, provides, justification for the idea. Lord as a Marxist critic and Dennis Reid critic tries to demonstrate the value of a
Ceremonies, winners, losers, heroes, as a nationalist art historian would be to specific painting we are liable to be
villains, confrontations and disasters all miss the ambivalence that underlies their treated to a description as partial and
fall prey to the examination of the camera shared proposition that 'Canadian art unsatisfactory as any yielded by
and in doing so reveal an astonishing and can and should find sufficient sustenance `objectivity' and other misguided
amusing display of surreal street-theatre in Canada alone'. Western bourgeois standards. The
where fact (the event) and fiction (the Lord's is the evangelical work. He narrative virtues of a painting, the zeal in
photographic reenactment of it) follows the three principles set out by the patriot's stride, the homely simplicity
harmonize in a bizarre and extraordinary Mao Tse Tung in his 1940 essay 'On of an interior, the plausibility of the
fashion. New Democracy' to determine what weather (it's evening — the habitant has
`Wisconsin Death Trip' in its constitutes 'a people's art' : that it finished a long day's work; or it's midday
implications is the most radical of these should be national, scientific (which Lord outside an assembly plant — the workers
five books. It deals with two calamitous glosses as realistic) and democratic. He are all inside, the parking lot is full) are
decades of American rural life, ending in uses these principles to do three things : extolled. And then how they work, in
1900, that saw a wave of disasters — as art historian to determine what to terms of colour and line, mass and energy,
epidemics, suicides, fires — and attempts include in the canon of a people's art etc., factors that are somehow inherent in
to bring a clearer understanding of the history; as art critic to illuminate the the painting itself and not attributes of
alarming 'trap' that surrounded the errors of paintings he must mention but style as long as the subject is right. If it's
people of Jackson County by making a cannot include in that canon, and the wrong you get something like Leduc's
visual as well as an intellectual success of those he can; as social critic, to L'Heure Mauve, painted in 1922 when
reappraisal of the photographs of show how the art has been produced by things were beginning to move in
Charles Van Schaick, the local the historical process, Canada's colonial Quebec, but the artist, unresponsive, was
photographer. Van Schaick left a past and present. turning to tranquil, unpeopled
comprehensive record, and his pictures, The art historian rejects the styles that landscapes. In this twilit snowscape, art
together with accounts taken from a local have been imported from the imperial nouveau biased, "nothing is likely to
newspaper, provide a 'psychological centres and the resulting, blinkered, change except the failing light". It stands
history' underlying the purely factual history of a culture 'in the manner of . . for "the culture of repression, the half-
evidence in an attempt to introduce the For instance, the outmoded, neo-classical smothered Quebecois tradition" which
reader to the experiences of this anxiety- and rococo conventions used by has become "the art of a landscape
ridden community, using techniques far eighteenth- and nineteenth-century occupied only by a dying glow".
outside the conventional documentary portraitists show the artists in double This reading of significant content
ethic. Lesy's method of assembling thrall, to the bourgeoisie, the inevitable leads to an analogy between the idealized
certain images to change dimensions and patrons, with their European pretensions, space of Abstract Expressionism and the
perspectives, enlarging selected portions and to the styles which these pretensions space of Strategic Air Command, the
of others to draw attention to a fact that demanded. But they were capable of bomber armada that the US Air Force
we have already seen in a group portrait, freeing themselves. Lord, who struggles was setting up at the same time. Even
carefully introducing tensions that we throughout the book to dismiss 'style' though the colonial Borduas couldn't
would otherwise overlook, lends a altogether, has located what he calls the handle this space with the confidence of
disquieting edge to the photographs. His `Quebec tradition', not an alternative a Pollock or Kline, all these artists were
choice of text and image combinations style, but "the Quebec artist's way of prey to a formalism which 'like US
serves to increase this, lending factual getting the job done". Vivid colour, corporations, disregards the specific
sense to what was previously only visual dramatic light contrasts and evocative character of any one place, and arrogantly
supposition. 'Wisconsin Death Trip' is shapes seen as an over-all dynamic asserts its universality.'
not altogether successful, being at times pattern — these are the formal qualities of Abstraction has to be dismissed, but
heavy-handed and obscure. However, as a direct and dramatic expression that he
an indication of future possibilities it is an finds in some of the anonymous votive doesn't the effort impute to empty form
a contradictory carrying power ? The
exciting and stimulating book. •
painting of the early Quebec church, in formula Lord prescribes for a truly
Peter Turner Légaré, the nineteenth-century Patriote Canadian art is 'the figure in the
painter whose themes were the effects of landscape', and the only contemporary
fire, plague and landslide on the life of artists who merit inclusion are those
Can-ambivalence the young colony, and in the quiet, working in some more or less figurative
domestic realism of Ozias Leduc who way. But, amongst other objections, it
died in 1955. can be pointed out that figurative artists
A Concise History of It is quite clear that it is the subject
Canadian Painting matter that makes a people's art. To have also been pawns in the compadre
network, based on sycophancy, prestige
by Dennis Reid 319 pp. 144 black and produce anything other than the second- and money. Exhortation cannot solve the
white and 35 colour illus. OUP Toronto. hand the colonial artist must 'create with form/content problem for Lord. Marx