Art Articles & Reviews

Maxwell Bates (1906-2006) is a constant inspiration to me. The current show of a hundred of his paintings (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1040 Moss Street, 384-4101, until July 2, 2006) sends me out of the gallery and straight to my studio, my mind humming with ideas. Bates’ biography is complex and can be best discovered, along with hundreds of his pictures, at the web site www.maxwellbates.net. In short form, he was born in Calgary, travelled to England on a cattle boat and achieved early fame at London’s Wertheim Gallery. He enlisted at the outbreak of World War Two and was immediately captured by the Germans. He spent the next five years working in the salt mines. Returning to Calgary Bates took up a successful practice as an architect and also studied in New York with expressionist painter Max Beckmann. A stroke in 1961 curtailed his architecture and he retired to Victoria where, until his death in 1980, he was a power in the art community, founding the Limners group of artists. This artist was a poet and an astrologer. He believed our lives are controlled by fate and the stars. His life experiences bore this out, for he had seen mankind at his best and worst. Bates had no tolerance for cant or pomposity, and he deplored the power invested in a uniform or a dogma. On the other hand, he honoured the dignity of all people as they faced the trials of the human condition. His paintings of prairie pioneers in standing doggedly in the wind are Canadian icons. painting by Maxwell Bates, "Standing Woman", 1969 Bates usually painted people, and he portrayed them as characters strutting and fretting their hour upon a stage. They are like tarot cards come to life, like chess pieces or marionettes. Through their costumes and heraldic devices his people take on symbolic significance beyond their day-to-day personalities. Consider his cast of cripples and gypsies trouping through a graveyard beside the fortune teller’s wagon - now there is a subject to set the mind reeling! His human grotesques are always set recognizable conventions. His portrait compositions borrow from Daumier and Goya, his genre scenes recall Rembrandt. Punch and Judy shows and the commedia del’arte influenced his settings. And he had an eye for a pretty girl in a newspaper photo too. This exhibition is carefully selected to present Bates as an expressionist artist. Not for him the sweetness of Impressionism, which curator Michael Morris called “the triumph of the bourgeoisie”. Instead, Bates came from a tradition of rugged, romantic individualists who created secular works in tune with the upheaval of revolution. Eschewing patronage, in his painting Bates is answerable only to himself. Coloured by the experience of modern warfare and the isolation of the man in the modern world, Bates created tableaux worthy of Samuel Beckett. The workman on their lunch hour; the lost souls at a gallery opening: “they all seem to be putting in time,” Robin Skelton has written, “waiting for something to happen that never does, they have no control over what the future holds for them.” Whether it be the beggar king or the scarecrow/crucifix, everyone in this world is crippled emotionally, if not physically. Bates himself understood human limits only too well, for he in his last years he was paralysed on his left side, walked with a brace on his leg and smiled a crooked grin. “His view of humanity and of human society was sombre,” Robin Skelton noted, “but it was not that of a moralist. He was not concerned to judge or condemn.” Beyond this rich poetry, I find Bates’ painterly technique inspiring. Though an excellent draftsman, he never let adademic drawing slow the impact of his images. “Simplicity, directness and intensity: these are the three things I am after,” he wrote. He knowingly incorporated accents of primitivism and cubism in his blunt style. He often incorporated geometric patterning, plastic lace doilies and rough passages of dry paint. He drew into his still-wet watercolours with India ink and let it bleed. He worked over pencil with watercolour and ink and gouache and crayons, layering on colours and imagery until they resulted in a painting as complex and resonant as his own thoughts. This retrospective was created as a centennial project by the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton). The curators were Nancy Townsend of Calgary and Victoria’s Michael Morris. Morris’s guiding intelligence is everywhere in this tribute to an artist he knew and loved. The catalogue, extensively illustrated in colour, contains insightful essays by David Silcox and the late Robin Skelton as well as Morris. As ever, I wonder why the rest of the country (not to mention the world) isn’t more aware of Bates, an artist of unique and engaging profundity. But here is the best of his work for each of us to be inspired by. Discover the web site and plan to visit this show.