Art: Northern Lights

Mexican painting is as familiar to U.S. art lovers as chile con carne, but the only Canadian art most Americans see are the Indian chiefs and yellow wheat fields on railway posters. This week a handsome book on the subject (Canadian Painters; Oxford University Press, $6.50), appeared to dispel the northern mist.

Compared with the red-pepper frenzy and propaganda punch of the best Mexicans, the 24 Canadians represented seemed as remote from the rush of civilization as the glaciers, jack-pine forests and frozen lakes they liked best to paint.

The Fur Brigade. Among the first was Cornelius Krieghoff, adventuring son of a Dutch wallpaper manufacturer, who fought for the U.S. in the Indian wars and then went over the hill into Canada one night when his regiment camped near the border. He had an illustrator’s eye for detail which rivaled his contemporaries, Currier & Ives. The other big man of his day was Paul Kane, who may have been the real counterpart of “Langdon Towne,” the painter-hero in Kenneth Roberts’ Northwest Passage. To paint wilderness Indians as they really were, he accompanied a Hudson’s Bay Company “fur brigade” on a three-year trek by snowshoe and canoe, came back with sketches for a lifetime of painting.

Help from Paris. It was 1920 before Canada could boast of anything like an “art movement.” Then, led by J. E. H. MacDonald, a handful of painters who were tired of being pushed aside at exhibitions formed the “Group of Seven.” Most of them had studied in Paris, picked up a smattering of impressionism but nothing more radical than that. What united them was a love of the Far North where they spent their vacations.

One of the Seven, Alexander Jackson, once tried to explain why their roughhewn version of Paris’ impressionism was just the thing for painting Canada. Wrote he: “From sunlight in the hardwoods with bleached, violet-white tree trunks against a blaze of red and orange, we wander into the denser spruce and pine woods where the sunlight filters through; gold and silver splashes playing with startling vividness on a birch trunk or patch of green moss. Such a subject would change entirely in ten minutes, and unless the first impression was firmly adhered to, the sketch would end in confusion.”

The “boldness” of the Seven startled huffy Canadian critics, began a row which once reached the floor of the House of Commons. The starkest of the Seven, Lawren S. Harris (whose painting matches Rockwell Kent’s for sober, barren clarity), stopped the debate cold by a passionate outburst: “It is blasphemy to wilt under the weight of ages; to succumb to secondhand living; to mumble old, dead catch phrases; to praise far-off things and sneer at your neighbor’s clumsiness.”

The fight was won. Since 1933, the original Seven had grown to a Group of 28, all of whom caught the fever. But Canada had yet to produce a painter less clumsy, fresher, or more unaffectedly Canadian than Charter Members MacDonald and Harris.