Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven

by Ross King

Overview

Beginning in 1912, Defiant Spirits traces the artistic development of Tom Thomson and the future members of the Group of Seven, Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley, over a dozen years in Canadian history. Working in an eclectic and sometimes controversial blend of modernist styles, they produced what an English critic celebrated in the 1920s as the “most vital group of paintings” of the 20th century. Inspired by Cézanne, Van Gogh and other modernist artists, they tried to interpret the Ontario landscape in light of the strategies of the international avant-garde. Based after 1914 in the purpose-built Studio Building for Canadian Art, the young artists embarked on what Lawren Harris called “an all-engrossing adventure”: travelling north into the anadian Shield and forging a style of painting appropriate to what they regarded as the unique features of Canada’s northern landscape.

Rigorously researched and drawn from archival documents and letters, Defiant Spirits constitutes a “group biography,” reconstructing the men’s aspirations, frustrations and achievements. It details not only the lives of Tom Thomson and the members of the Group of Seven but also the political and social history of Canada

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781553658078
Publisher:	Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Publication date:	09/25/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	504
File size:	873 KB

About the Author

Ross King is the author of three previous best-selling art history books, including Brunelleschi's Dome, which won the 2001 Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Adult Nonfiction and The Judgment of Paris, winner of the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in Canada. He lives in England, near Oxford.

Read an Excerpt

From Book II, Chapter 8, "The Dweller on the Threshold"

The four men, accompanied by Harris's dog Prince, departed from Union Station early in September on an overnight cpr train to Sault Ste. Marie. At the Soo a specially equipped boxcar awaited them, a mobile studio conveniently fitted, as by Harris, with bunks, windows and lamps, cupboards, a stove, a sink and a water tank. The men also had use of a canoe and a jigger, a three-wheeled vehicle with which they could propel themselves along the tracks until, as MacDonald wrote, "some attractive composition of spruce tops or rock and maple" called for sketching.

Their boxcar was hitched to a northbound acr train and then uncoupled 180 kilometres later on a siding near Canyon, where the steel was laid as recently as the winter of 1911-12. After several days of sketching near the Agawa River they were collected by a southbound train and shunted onto sidings 30 kilometres later at Hubert. A second southbound train then took them 25 kilometres to their final stop at Batchawana.

The painters were mesmerized by the sight of winding rivers, thundering waterfalls and vertiginous granite canyons covered in radiant autumn colour. Harris found in the scenery "a richness and clarity of colour" that made everything in southern Ontario seem "grey and subdued." 41 MacDonald was even more smitten. "It is a land after Dante's heart," he wrote to Joan on September 11, describing how Algoma had "all the attributes of an imagined Paradise," with the sky and "that smooth shimmering infinity of waters" resembling "a glimpse of God himself." To describe his helpless feelings of wonder he used a metaphor from (and here we get some of his erudition) the Revelation of St. Paul, one of the Apocrypha that describes how the apostle was swept into the third heaven to witness a series of visions: "It reminds one of Paul," he told Joan, "being caught up and hearing unutterable things."

Even accounting for hyperbole, this response was remarkable. MacDonald's quasi-religious experience in Algoma duplicated the awe with which so many poets, painters and mystics had gazed on the rugged beauties of the natural world. The question of St. Hilary of Poitiers-"Who can look on nature and not see God?"-had resounded down the centuries. For many years the answer was, very few. The vast scale of natural wonders such as Mont Blanc or Niagara Falls was enough to create in sensitive beholders a kind of religious fervour. The Irish poet Thomas Moore, after visiting Niagara in 1804, wrote to his mother in language MacDonald would echo a century later: "I felt as if approaching the very residence of the Deity; the tears started into my eyes; and I remained, for moments after we had lost sight of the scene, in that delicious absorption which pious enthusiasm alone can produce . . . Oh! bring the atheist here, and he cannot return an atheist."

The century that separated Moore and MacDonald had brought science intrusively into the equation. Suddenly it was possible to look on nature and not see God or feel pious enthusiasm. Early in his life, John Ruskin believed nature to be "animated by the sense of Divine presence" but ended his days complaining (in a classic statement of the Victorian "crisis of faith") that in every biblical verse he could hear the clink of geologists' hammers.

If conventional religion crumbled under these hammer blows, a kind of Romantic pantheism, a belief in the divinity lurking in nature, continued undiminished. Even Van Gogh believed he could draw near to "Something on High" through "long years of intercourse with nature in the country." An American disciple of Walt Whitman named John Burroughs succinctly summed up this attitude: "Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious value." For such people, he claimed, nature "is their church, and the rocks and hills are their altars." Whitman himself was responsible for much of this "spilt religion" (as the philosopher T.E. Hulme derisively called it). Revered by many painters, including both Gauguin and Van Gogh, Whitman was also one of MacDonald's (as well as one of Lismer's) favourite writers: MacDonald called him the "liberator of the soul" and the "patron saint of the modern artist." He must have felt on arriving in Algoma that he had been transported into "these skies and stars, these mountain peaks . . . / These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys" celebrated by Whitman in his account of the "virgin land" of the American continent (which generously included what he called "Kanada").

MacDonald was not certain at first what to make of his Algoma rapture. "I have not assimilated this experience yet," he wrote to Joan. "It is something to be quiet about and think over." But he was not at a loss over what to do with his palette and brush, making a number of remarkable sketches. One, Leaves in the Brook, he would several months later turn into a larger painting of the same name. Rather than mystic amplitude, these sketches present exultant hubbubs of colour akin to Rock and Maple of 1916, this time done in crimson, purples and orange. Depicting leaf-strewn boulders in the middle of a stream, they are, like Rock and Maple, wonderfully scintillating images of moving water. Another compelling sketch of rushing water, done near the falls of the Montreal River, he would turn into The Wild River.

MacDonald's ecstatic response to the Algoma landscape eclipsed for a time his personal worries about health and finances. But as the party prepared to return to Toronto at the beginning of October, the worries revived. He wrote to his wife about an unnamed problem, probably financial: "I am concerned about the problem. It seems as though such things had no existence here, but I suppose they must be faced some day. I hope to get back in good condition to help in their resolution, and in the meantime will do what I can in having the right attitude towards them. I hope you will not be too worried about such things."

The war provided MacDonald with some employment, however grim. Back in Toronto, he found himself busy illuminating honour rolls and-in a poignant reprise of his work on Tom Thomson's cairn- designing memorial tablets for companies who had lost employees overseas.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Book I
1 A Wild Deserted Spot
2 This Wealthy Promised Land
3 Ein Toronto Realist
4 Eerie Wildernesses
5 Life on the Mississagi
6 Wild Men of the North
7 The Infanticist School
8 The Happy Isles
9 Rites of Paysage
10 The Young School
Book II
1 Men with Good Red Blood in Their Veins
2 The Great Explosion
3 White Feathers and Tangled Gardens
4 The Line of Beauty
5 Imperishable Splendour
6 Shades of Grey
7 The Vortex of War
8 The Dweller on the Threshold
9 The Great Konodian Army
Book III
1 The Spirit of Young Canada
2 A Septenary Fatality
3 Are These New Canadian Painters Crazy?
4 Multiples of Ugliness
5 By the Shining Big-Sea-Water
6 Gypsies, Lepers and Freaks
7 Wembley
Epilogue: The End of the Trail
Notes
Selected bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Award-winning art historian King (The Judgment of Paris) recounts the evolution of the Algonquin School in this biography of seven remarkable Canadian artists. On the eve of WWI, a small group of talented painters converged in the art department of the Toronto design firm, Grip Limited. While the firm had introduced the nation to Art Nouveau and metal engraving, its designers had loftier ambitions--to develop an artistic identity for Canada. Head Grip designer J.E.H. MacDonald found kindred spirits in Tom Thomson, Franklin Carmichael, A.Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley. The group's challenge--to capture with "'Canadian' eyes" the harsh landscape of the north on canvas--led to extensive exploration of Algonquin Provincial Park. In 1914, the seven gathered at the purpose-built Studio Building for Canadian Art, where they would hone their skills and their vision, resulting in their first group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1921. After a productive decade and mounting criticism that their work had begun to settle into clichés, the group finally disbanded in 1931. Their paintings reflected what fellow artist Emily Carr called the "naked soul." King's book does an excellent job of exploring the roles of these visionary individuals in the shaping of an artistic cultural identity. With 24 pages of color plates and 43 black and white photos
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Publishers Weekly

"King's book does an excellent job of exploring the roles of these visionary individuals in the shaping of an artistic cultural identity."—Publishers Weekly

"King’s writing is characterized by clarity, compassion, and humanist intelligence. …we feel we’ve actually met these individuals—the goal of any good biography."—Library Journal

"[Defiant Spirits] is a paradigm shift. With his usual spirited prose and faultless research, King makes internationalists out of the Group of Seven"—Canadian Art

From the Publisher

King's (Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling) writing is characterized by clarity, compassion, and humanist intelligence. He brings all these to his comprehensive portrait of the Group of Seven, a collective of modernist painters working in early 20th-century Canada. The artists who made up the group (membership varied over the years) strove for a uniquely Canadian art, rooted in their nation's geography yet with an expressive approach to landscape. Artistically audacious and inspired by the work of avant-garde innovators such as Cézanne, Gauguin, and Picasso, the group had high aspirations, which set them on a collision course with tradition-bound collectors, critics, and most of the public. The personal, political, and aesthetic obstacles they encountered are described here with sympathy, so that we feel we've actually met these individuals—the goal of any good biography. Included are color and black-and-white plates as well as notes. VERDICT While it may lack a detailed scrutiny of working methods or an overarching theory that an art scholar would seek, this book will be of interest to general readers invested in the visual arts of Canada and, more broadly, early 20th-century painting.—Michael Dashkin, Forest Hills, NY

Library Journal