15
The Animistic Image
IT IS WORTH CONSIDERING THE Native and Métis trappers—among the toughest men society had to offer—who went off on their long absences in the woods among the black flies dressed in delicately embroidered leather clothes. Pink was usually the dominant colour, flowers the continuing theme. With undyed deer or moose or caribou skins as background, such masses of embroidery stood out as a fine and civilized cover for a man. This silk decoration was in common use until the 1920s. Today an urban man will be more likely to wear something shapeless and artless in order to suggest that he is tough—jeans for example—but will spend his time in the tame and static surroundings of an office and a gym.
The Ojibwa and Cree have no word for art, let alone art for art’s sake. Yet they have always had a great deal of it—some decorative, some more clearly driven by what we would call the imagination or creativity. Marius Barbeau, at the Toronto opening of the famous 1928 show combining West Coast Native objects and contemporary art, explained that “Carving, painting, singing, dramatic art and social standing in the community were all part of each other . . . art was not a luxury to those people; it was the most vital necessity in life, next to food.”1
The separation between art and society, or rather the arts and place, is not so old as we pretend in the west. However, it reached its extreme point in the late-nineteenth century with the arrival of the art for art’s sake movement. At the same time, impressionists, symbolists and post-impressionists were fighting back. And in this century what is often called modernism reached out to the sculptures of animist people—principally in Africa, but also in North America and the Pacific Islands—in search of forces which would help them to break away from the static destiny of the European arts. After all, the arts, once separated from an animist sense of place, became profoundly static. That is the European inheritance.
Now the curious thing is that Canadians and other northerners, by the very nature of their surroundings, were already in the position that the modernists were seeking. What prevented these northerners from seeing their situation in such simple terms was their need to feed even the most animistic of creative impulses through the intellectual conduits of European art. By ‘need’ I mean the need they felt. This is the provincial or colonial reasoning of those who live on the margins.
And so a reading of the theoretical sources of Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Russian and Canadian artists over the last 125 years is a ceaseless series of references to France and other European centres. Even Roald Nasgaard’s The Mystic North—the most complete and imaginative attempt to define the place of northern painting as a school or a movement stretching all around the top of the globe—was rooted in the symbolism and post-impressions of western Europe. And yet, at the same time, he writes of the northerners’ ability, unmatched elsewhere, “to re-establish contact with the primal sources of experience.”2
It is to the European references that the critics and art historians keep coming back. But when you look at the paintings of Edvard Munch, Karl Nordström, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, August Strindberg, James Wilson Morrice, Lawren Harris, Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle, you don’t find those sources on the canvas.
Of course in the technical sense the universal elements are there. There is no such thing as a national technique. Technical influences fly about and painters take what they need from them. More often than not they then produce art which bears no resemblance to its technical origins. The need, in spite of this, to find resemblance is what the poet A.J.M. Smith described as colonialism—“. . . a spirit that looks elsewhere for its standards of excellence.” But in these northern countries the colonialism isn’t particularly apparent on the good canvases, so it isn’t of great importance.
What can be seen on these canvases are the relationships between the northern painters. “I paint not what I see but what I saw,” was Edvard Munch’s motto. But what had he seen? What had they seen? Whatever it was, they did not do so through the filtered lens of rational, controlled pastoralism. Their lens was much more complex because it was permanently out of control, out of focus. “How nature is torn asunder; what disorder! Where is the architectonic or painterly unity that makes the landscape of the south, with its clear and serene lines, so seductive to artists? Where is the classical line? Not here.”3
Many people have written about the links between northern images; mainly they refer to the Group of Seven and the influence of a Scandinavian show seen by Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald in Buffalo in 1913. In part this created a technical connection, in part a connection of intent. But shared animism in our images goes well beyond a conscious or concrete connection. When you walk through galleries of Scandinavian nineteenth- and twentieth-century art or even Russian art, your eye continually falls on similarities with the Canadian. This is more a family of intent and effect than of technical evolution. The colours, intensities of colours, particular uses and combinations of colours are continually familiar. Ivan Aguéli seems to have understood North Africa in the same terms as James Wilson Morrice. Karl Nordström is sometimes reminiscent of Morrice, sometimes of the early A.Y. Jackson; Richard Bergh of Tom Thomson. There is one painting of Nordström’s I keep coming back to—Varbergs fäste—because of its remarkable marriage of geometry and wild colours. If it were hung in a gallery of twentieth-century Canadian painting, most of us passing by would assume that it belonged there. There is the family portrait by Edvard Munch in the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm for which I can think of no other artistic relation than the paintings of Jean-Paul Lemieux. At the same time, the blocks of colour and the light in his portrait of Nietzsche, or in Förtvivian, make you think of Lawren Harris. August Strindberg’s strange non-abstract abstracts in search of an artistic family have the same feel as much of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s work. The Dane Jens Willumsen was doing something quite different from Paterson Ewen, yet the effect is similar, as is that, today, of the Norwegian, Frans Widerberg.
Curiously enough, when Canadians or Scandinavians talk about their painting they often fall into an embarrassed tone over chronology. The feeling is that in order to qualify as creators rather than imitators, those late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century painters should have been painting their pictures a decade or two earlier. This attitude tells us just how deeply the technocratic spirit has penetrated the arts. After all, images are not about competition. First is not best. The order of appearance is only relevant in an anthropological sense. The point of northern painting is not its place in a calendar of international events, along with Grand Prix races and high-jump records. Art does not require a definition of purpose, but if it did, the place to begin might be the search for ways to express not the north, but the northern sensibility through a northern eye.
To worry about a few decades one way or the other is to reduce images to fashion. Rembrandt was old-fashioned in his time, as was J.S. Bach, as was Tolstoy. And technical analysis is not what matters. An obsession with chronology causes the art historian to miss what is really happening.
There is also a certain embarrassment in northern countries about the importance of landscape in these paintings. After all, abstract though they are, even Borduas and Riopelle are pure landscape painters. Borduas’s ‘evacuation of all intent’ was a political approach, not one which could control what we can see in his painting.
What isn’t clear is why this should be a problem. The last century has been dominated, throughout the west, by various forms of landscape, from Cézanne to Picasso. Embarrassment over subject matter is pure provincialism. A sunflower field in Provence is somehow acceptable landscape, as are the hills around Aix, but there is something wrong with images drawn from the north.
If you put aside the particularities of place, what you find is that all of these artists who share the western tradition, from the north to the south, were searching for tools to break the pure-art stranglehold on the European image. It was almost inevitable that this struggle would lead towards the image as an animist object. And so, however hidden in abstraction or mathematical theory, one of the central highways of modernism has been landscape. If anything, the European schools have been more locked into the conventions of landscape as pastoralism than the northern schools. Karl Nordström, for example, found Gauguin’s paintings too decorative—“ornamental simplicity and clarity for its own sake, for decorative purposes alone.”4
Even portraits and realism have sought to integrate the human into the whole. You can see the northern approach to this when you look at the paintings of the Dane Vilhelm Hammershoi. It is as if he were the father of magic realism. You can find Alex Colville in his Five Portraits and Christopher Pratt in his remarkable Dust Dancing in the Rays of Sun, an internal scene looking out. The simple idea of a world seen from inside through windows is repeated endlessly in northern images. In Attila Lukacs there is, of course, some continuation of German expressionism. But above all he expresses the force you are more likely to find in Russian sculptors like Ossip Zadkine or the Lithuanian Jacques Lipchitz.
What strikes me repeatedly when I look at these northern images is the unexpected combination of flamboyance and toughness—the trapper decked out in embroidery. There is no hint of the prettiness of the impressionists. There is rarely a sense of permanency, of the static. It is all uncertainty and tension. Rather than celebrating the intellectual, it is buried in the force of movement and colour. One of the great challenges of European modernism was to break the bounds of perspective, of surface, of gravity, in an attempt to see what we fully see instead of the superficial conventions of mere sight. The northern images broke all of those bounds, but in a completely different way; a more direct manner because the illusion of those bounds was not so easily maintained in an animist culture. You can see Emily Carr doing this in exactly the same way as Edvard Munch: for example, in her Scorned as Timber and Beloved of the Sky and his The Sun II.
What also strikes me is how rarely American images are part of this school. Their impressionists are more pastoral, pretty, still, static, even than the Europeans. Thomas Dewing, Theodore Robinson and Maurice Prendergast are filled with the celebration of comfort—whether warm interiors or pastoral exteriors. These are not interiors looking outside. These are the interior as a warm belly of civilization. What could be more still, less threatening and more controlled than a Winslow Homer? Two pictures stay in my mind—A Woman Walking in the Mountains and a ship seen from The Lee Shore. The waves pound, the woman walks and all is calm and well with the world. There is none of the uncertainty that you might find even in a Morrice, such as Village Street, West Indies, with the earth in movement, a pedestrian apparently struggling against its movement. Or compare the stillness, the frozen, static mystery of Edward Hopper’s urban American scenes with those of Lawren Harris’s houses in Toronto, Halifax and Glace Bay, where the land is alive and heaving, the houses mere temporary structures, unnatural outgrowths.
Harris’s Glace Bay painting is among the most important Canadian statements on social justice, ranking for eloquence with Laurier’s speeches on the Métis Rebellion. And yet he gets to that impact not through an intellectual structure or intent, but via what I can only see as an animist image or object. What are these miners’ houses? The hills to which they clasp seem to have heaved up. Are these tomb-stones planted on top of them? Deformed plants? Extensions of the rock? What you sense is that the inhabitants have been turned into victims, not of the earth but of whatever has caused them to live in this way. It is a portrait of animist integration deformed into something destructive for humans and for the earth.
David Milne was an admirer of the American Maurice Prendergast. Yet Prendergast is filled with that frozen quality of Puvis de Chavannes or even the romanticism of Eugène Boudin, while Milne’s deceptive simplicity and minimalism is filled with a tension which makes perfect sense next to a Paterson Ewen. That same frozen, static quality of Prendergast is there in Andy Warhol—the art of the ironic microscope. It is easy to imagine him as the star courtier in some royal palace in the late-seventeenth, early-eighteenth centuries, amusing and disturbing everyone with his images and his antics. The Ontario painter Greg Curnoe, on the other hand, would have been a flop at court. He had that uncontrolled quality you find so often in northern images.
The very choice of terms—the American ‘hyper’ versus ‘magic’ realism—tells us a great deal about American art as a European continuation and Canadian as a peculiar, northern phenomenon on the margins of western civilization. Why magic? Because these are not examinations; not hyper microscopic blow-ups. They are animist objects. Magic is not really the adjective. It is the noun. These paintings have nothing to do with realism, while the hyper realists have everything to do with it.
Of course I have chosen examples to suit my argument and there are exceptions on all sides. Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning could hardly be called static. There is the turn-of-the-century American black painter Henry Tanner, who displays a force and freedom which is perhaps that of the outsider. Or there is the pure outsider, Albert Ryder, who painted with the force of the naïve.
But these and a few others are the exceptions to the American sensibility. Walk through a retrospective collection of American art. You will be surprised by the controlled, European atmosphere. George Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen is an important nineteenth-century painting. And it is one of the most convincing demonstrations of a European atmosphere. In the 1870s a barge is making its way down a great river, wilderness on both banks. And yet the shore is soft and welcoming, while the boatmen pose on the flat roof of their craft like sedentary European peasants. One of them is dancing in the centre of the boat; dancing in an Heroic, controlled manner. They could be at a village fête.
None of what I am saying is either a compliment or a criticism. Bingham, like Hopper, like Warhol, shows us how America sees and has always seen itself—as both a rational continuation of Europe and as the new centre of that continuity.
The Canadian sensibility is that of the edge, the unknown, the uncontrolled. In the art this produces there is an assumption—sometimes consciously political, sometimes unconsciously creative, sometimes both—that place and art are the same thing; not place in the common, physical sense, but place in the sense of the whole, the animist idea of borderless inclusion.
What’s more, you can see this sensibility filtering down through the artists. Morrice said he would only paint winter in Canada because the autumn was too pretty and the summer too green. That fear of prettiness, of European pastoralism, is there from the first of our great painters. The Group of Seven are his inheritors. They solve the problem of prettiness. But Lemieux also inherits from him an idea of the light, and of reality as something floating and borderless. Put any of his winter portraits beside Morrice’s Return from School.
Somehow the World War One experience of Varley and Jackson reinforced the un-European strain in the painters of their time. It seemed to explode the idea of humans being apart and entrusted with a mission. Varley’s The Sunken Road is truly one of the best pictures we have produced. Heroism is erased, dead soldiers are already part of the earth, there is no shape or meaning to what has happened. The blasted landscape of the war prepared these painters, from Varley to Milne, to look at their own landscape without artifice. Or perhaps it only confirmed their view of what they already saw.
J.E.H. MacDonald’s The Elements appeared in 1916. Men are seen camping on rocks by the water in Georgian Bay. Yet it is the same picture in many ways as The Sunken Road. The men, the rocks, the clouds are one. There is no separateness of the men from the elements, no sense of a possible control. Or when you look, one after the other, at MacDonald’s Tangled Garden or The Wild River, then Riopelle’s Pavane or Untitled, 1947 in the National Gallery, they suddenly appear to be explanations for each other. If there is one other painter Riopelle brings to mind, it is Emily Carr at her most delirious, with the forest swirling about as if it were a tornado’s funnel, sucking the viewer up into some animist nirvana. These are not the relationships of formalized art history. And yet they are there. Look at a Morrice winter scene, one of Harris’s geometrical portraits of the force of nature and a late minimalist Borduas, for example his 3 + 4 + 1 in the National Gallery. There seems to be a line running directly from one to the other.
Barker Fairley wrote of Varley’s war pictures, “They are executed in an impersonal way, neither laboured or mannered,” and of Jackson’s as “detached and excessively scrupulous.”5 In a way this set the tone for everything that followed. Animism is neither romantic nor a matter of style. I’m sure Borduas would have been happy with these descriptions himself.
Throughout this century the energy of creativity has bounced back and forth from Montreal to Toronto. Morrice to the Group of Seven to Les Automatistes, and Borduas to the Painters Eleven. Borduas’s impact on Jack Bush and others in the latter group was only in part painting. They produced a manifesto which purposively echoed Borduas’s Refus global. Even Curnoe claimed some influence from Borduas. All the time, their politics were both aggressive and yet careful. They didn’t want to be used by narrow interests.
“Artistic expression is a spirit, not a method, a pursuit, not a settled goal, an instinct, not a body of rules. . . .” Group of Seven Catalogue, 1922 Exhibition.
“Break permanently with the customs of society, dissociate yourself from its utilitarian values. Refuse to live knowingly beneath the level of our spiritual and physical potential. . . .” Borduas, Refus global.
At first glance these declarations of independence might be confused with the classic act of disassociation from reality so common in the pure-art movements and the accompanying ideas of élitism—‘this is pure art, we do it for art’s sake and expect few to understand us.’ But that was the position of those who refused the idea of place: the Empire painters, anglophone and francophone. Those were the people who, in the guise of universalism, sought the core of their inspiration in the old capitals and saw art as destined for an élite.
“Until an artistic elite is formed, it is useless, I believe, to speak of art in our country. The public isn’t interested . . . we are striving to form an elite ready and willing to take an interest in art and artists.” Fernand Préfontaine, 1918, in Le Nigog.6
At the same time, the Group of Seven were declaring their project to be purposively populist, which is why today’s Empire-obsessed élites still have trouble simply accepting what they accomplished. Yet the Group’s attitude was exactly that of Borduas in his Refus global:
I am convinced that where I can recognize myself in my most intimate self, the most particular, millions of others will also recognize themselves if they follow exactly where I have gone. And I maintain the hope that it will suffice for them to know my paintings well enough in order to recognize in these that same resonance.
This could be a Jungian explanation of archetypes. It is the perfect evocation of animism as an inclusive sensibility. The particular is a reflection of the whole.
In 1950, Borduas set about creating nine small wooden sculptures, “une sorte de géographie mythique.”7 They were simple and abstract. Each one was eventually named after a country. The image of the ‘United States’ evoked power and sport, ‘France’ was extremely abstract and evoked a mythic flame of liberty. The others were more erotic, particularly ‘Canada’ and ‘Russia.’ They were phallic symbols. The most purely erotic was Canada. And it had two heads. A Siamese twin.
“A beauty of dissonance” was the way A.J.M. Smith described the peculiar manner in which Canadians relate to their place. “This is the beauty of strength broken by strength . . .”8 But perhaps the best description is given by Michael Ondaatje on the subject of Paterson Ewen’s pictures. Or are they constructions? Ewen called them “inner phenomenon.” Ondaatje says they are “great metaphors of the heavens.” They produce “an indelible sense of precariousness. . . . Viewer and painter are too far into the form for comfort . . . a remarkable recreation of power . . . a vision of nature beyond the human ego.”9 This is a description of the painting as animist object and could be applied as easily to Borduas or Curnoe, the Group of Seven or James Wilson Morrice.