Carr’s giant shadow reaches Montreal

And while interest in the work of Thomson and the Group of Seven has faded considerably over the years — to the point where they are regarded by many as the boring old dinosaurs of Canadian art — Carr still towers high above everyone, much like the giant fir trees so closely associated with her unmistakable style. Her reputation has survived unblemished, more than 60 years after her death, through today’s popular focus on feminism and native art.

That reputation has now been boosted even further with a major travelling retrospective exhibition, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, currently on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Consisting not only of about 150 of Carr’s distinctive works, the exhibition also includes a wide variety of authentic native works, from small totems and statues to brightly painted ceremonial masks, not to mention a few canvases by other Canadian painters who tackled the same subject matter. Mid-19th century glimpses into native life by Paul Kane and works by Carr's contemporaries — including Langdon Kihn, A.Y. Jackson, Anne Savage and Edwin Holgate — illustrate not only Carr’s unique passion but also the originality of her approach to painting.

The exhibition can be divided roughly into two main phases — the early work, for which Carr travelled throughout several First Nations communities along the Pacific Coast and Skeena River interior, and the later, more dramatic canvases for which her reputation would be firmly established.

The first phase is dominated by bright colours and a keen attention to detail in her renderings of native masks and totem poles — produced as much as documentary as fine art due to the early-20th century rush to document and preserve the ancient totems and other native artefacts before they were destroyed through decay or the encroachment of modern society. It can be argued that these paintings alone would have been enough to ensure Carr’s reputation for generations to come, but few of them are well-known today.

However, Carr’s sudden transformation from obscure eccentric to national icon can be seen in all works dated after 1927 — the year she was ‘discovered’ by National Gallery director Eric Brown through the prompting of noted Quebec folklorist Marius Barbeau and art critic Harold Mortimer Lamb. She was invited east to participate in the National Gallery’s Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, and while passing through Toronto met three members of the Group of Seven — A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and Lawren Harris. Though suitably impressed by the first two, she was completely enraptured by Harris’s work and he became a close friend. Carr returned to her easel with renewed enthusiasm; her own painting immediately took on the qualities of Harris’s spiritual expressions through landscape art, and it wasn’t long before her canvases bore their own distinct trademarks of washboard-like rippled skies, halos of light, solid green masses for fir trees and an almost Cubist-like handling of her home province’s lush vegetation.

Though this new course also meant a general veering away from the native subjects and a more concentrated focus on the great forests of the Pacific Northwest, Carr was so dedicated to this newfound style of painting that she even revisited some of her old subjects and repainted them in her dynamic new style.

As a result, this important exhibition is filled with a well-balanced mixture of totems and forests, as well as the inevitable overlap. Carr's images of strange, wooden faces popping up out of the foliage, as if struggling for light against the thick vegetation can be seen as a fitting allegory for a painter whose light continues to shine through the ages.

‘Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon’ continues through Sept. 23 in the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1379 Sherbrooke St. W. Info: 514-285-2000.

Wayne Larsen is the author of ‘A.Y. Jackson: A Love for the Land’.