Art Articles & Reviews

Vancouver Art Gallery and National Gallery of Canada present Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, until January 7, 2007 (www.vanartgallery.bc.ca 604-662-4719) For Emily Carr fans, this is it. Gathered in one place are 203 examples of work by and about the most important artist this country has produced. The show is assembled with intelligence and insight, and in these rooms a proper evaluation of her talent as a painter can be made. The first revelation for me was the partial recreation of the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern, which was seen in 1927 at the National Gallery of Canada (and in Toronto and Montreal). Native masks were set above canvases, and carved paddles hung between them. Cases hold wooden rattles, mother-of-pearl inlaid frontlets and ivory soulcatchers. That 1927 show was a watershed in Carr’s life and marked a key moment in this country’s approach to native issues. For those whose knowledge of Carr comes from picture books, it’s invigorating to see these canvases “for real” - the scale and vivid colour of her energetic oils. Many of her earlier works depicting the native villages are populated with dozens of people, painted with an engaged interest and empathy. Carr was a different painter before Lawren Harris made her a modernist. The cavalcade of small rooms at the Vancouver Art Gallery lends itself to intense thematic groups, where the various interests of Carr are emphasized. The erotic power of Carr’s forests rises with the lifting of a hemline of hemlock. The painter repeatedly stroked and massaged the drooping fronds of her cedar, parting them and only pausing to feel the relief of sunlight swooping through. The curators haved taken trouble to introduce work rarely seen by even the most dedicated fans. Carr’s early illustrations surprise us with the supple characterizations she gives to her art students and friends. The magisterial Graveyard Entrance, Campbell River must have shocked the crowd in 1912, and comes to this show from a private collection in Ontario. Some wild and crazy oils have emerged, the blue and greens swirling madly against her manila paper, now toasted to a cinnamon brown. The show is definitely focussed on Carr, and avoids rushing off on many appealing tangents. But paintings significant to the Carr story - examples of paintings of native people by Paul Kane, Langdon Kihn and A. Y. Jackson, and the unique cubist view of her studio by Mark Tobey, to name a few - are generously included. At the farthest reaches of the exhibit, Emily’s own gruff self-portrait is flanked by two estimable paintings of the artist by her dear friends. Nan Chaney’s finely crafted canvas shows Carr as pixyish and animated, with a crafty sparkle in her eyes. On the opposite side is Edythe Hembroff’s mystic and modern rendering of Carr, in shifting tints and flat planes. Most telling is Harold Mortimer Lamb’s famous photo of Carr, intensely posing before her Swirling Trees. We are allowed closer to Carr than any other artist I can name. Carr’s reputation has undergone a thorough consideration in terms of modern issues - dozens of books about her on on display, considering her formal modernism as an artist, her position in terms of native culture, her notions of what we call ecology, her love affairs. The subject is comprehensively aired in the landmark catalogue for this show (Douglas and Mcintyre, Vancouver, 2006, 336 pp., $75). This show will be seen in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary after its Vancouver stop. It is interesting to note that many of the most prominent paintings in this show from the National Gallery and Vancouver Art Gallery are from Victoria collections. Tanoo 1912 and Sombreness Sunlit (BCArchives), Odds and Ends 1939 and Light Swooping Through 1938 (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria), Happiness 1939 (Maltwood Museum) are just a few of the stars on loan from Victoria collections. My only regret is that I had to go to Vancouver to honour Victoria’s most famous citizen. When visitors to Victoria ask “where can we see the Emily Carr paintings?”, the answer is always “somewhere else”. The AGGV does its best, and the Maltwood has one on show at the moment. But why doesn’t Victoria have a shrine to Emily Carr? The Provincial Archives, which is part of the Royal B. C. Museum, has an immense collection of her work but no display space. We should clamour for their constant exposure here. Accompanying the Carr show is Paint (until February 25) which examines the past four decades of painting in Vancouver. Michael Morris ( of Brentwood Bay) is the seminal figure, and contemporary Victoria photo-realist watercolourist Tim Gardner brings the show up to date. On the third floor I enjoyed The Road to Utopia - 75 Years of Collecting (until January 1), with extensive selections of modern formalist photos by John Vanderpant, and the whimsical and wonderful ink drawings by B. C. Binning. In all I spent three and a half hours at the art gallery. You know I enjoyed it.