Emily Carr

Emily Carr is touring the country once again. It seemed only a few years ago that I saw her last retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada, but in fact that was in 1990. Time then, indeed, to introduce her to a new generation, and include lesser-known aspects of her work for those of us who find it overly familiar. The current exhibition, “Emily Carr, New Perspectives,” is organized by the NGC in conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery and travels to Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary.

This is a complex, challenging exhibition that shatters the idea of Carr as a static icon of Canadian art history. Different facets of “Emily” as a person come to light: Carr as she saw herself, and how she was seen through the eyes of her contemporaries. Reproductions of her early cartoon-like journal illustrations, which add a humorous insight into her life and times are shown in spiral-bound booklets. Self-portraits, contemporary reviews, newspaper articles and photographs confirm, to some extent, the image of Carr as an eccentric travelling painter and poverty-stricken, animal-loving landlady, but they also provide an insight into the historical context in which the persona of Carr was constructed. Her own contribution to this construction is shown in drawings such as Self-portrait with Friends, c. 1905–09, where a group of very proper people look down on Emily sitting among her pets. She is dressed in a wide smock and appears to be engaged in a serious conversation with her dog.

Contextual complexities are not limited to Carr as a person and artist, but are extended to highlight the social and political issues her work provokes. In this exhibition, Carr is a time-traveller, shown with all the baggage her work has accumulated over a century. There is a partial reconstruction of a 1927 group exhibition where her work was shown at the NGC for the first time, and references are made to major 20th-century retrospectives. Approximately 150 works are supplemented by maps, photographs and various artifacts of the time, as well as some paintings by other artists. It allows Carr’s art to become a sounding board for changing and unchanging ideas of nature and culture, of nation and First Nations, of appropriation and the value and role of art and artists in society. These are issues that remain unresolved to the present day, and the exhibition adds valuable historical and visual perspectives to ongoing debates.

The 1927 exhibition of Carr’s work is shown to be markedly different from later exhibitions that highlight the influence of the Group of Seven and profile her as an early modern painter influenced by Lawren Harris’s transcendentalism. The “Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern” had been organized by the ethnologist Marius Barbeau of the National Museum and by Eric Brown, director of the NGC. Native art intermingled with works by Carr and other artists—Paul Kane and Langdon Kihn—who had documented native culture in the past. A number of Carr’s paintings of native villages and totem poles were included, as well as some pottery and hooked rugs in which she used Northwest Coast native imagery. Barbeau’s high regard for Northwest Coast art was intensified by his conviction that the cultures of what we now refer to as First Nations were dying. In his catalogue essay, Charles Hill, who has curated the current exhibition together with Johanne Lamoureux and Ian M. Thom, writes: “In defining the roots of artistic production in Canada among the First Nations, Barbeau did create a new chronology of Canadian art. But he relegated this production to the past and denied the validity of contemporary First Nations cultures.” From our present vantage point in time, the chafing irony of the colonizers’ lament for the lost culture of the colonized is abundantly clear. Carr’s love and intuitive understanding of the Northwest Coast native cultures is only one of many points of dispute that have clung to her work in decades of postmodernity. One gallery in the exhibition is a wall of books that have been written about Carr over the years, including a hefty catalogue for the present exhibition which contains essays by the curators and seven other writers.

By choosing to reflect on the various points of view put forward in previous exhibitions, the curators leave the creation of a new underlying premise to the viewers. One such premise, the exhibition provokes me to suggest, is Carr’s desire to find in nature a harmonizing force, no matter how much this desire was countervailed by everyday realities. The assured yet loose brushstrokes of her later works reflect the Romantic idea of a vital energy flowing through nature and subsuming culture, an idea that rests on a belief that nature will always be able to regenerate, no matter what people do to it. The historical reality of the 1930s, the expansion of the city of Victoria and the clear-cutting of ancient forests for lumber and agriculture increasingly contradicted such belief in nature’s power to survive human colonization, but Carr held fast: “If they cut the forests they grow again, covering the scars quickly with new growth which again hides and shrouds its mysteries. Man can’t keep up with its growth. Does he stop his blasting and sawing even a few months, it is hushed back into hidden mystery,” she wrote.

But her belief in infinite regeneration is contradicted within paintings such as Wasteland (“Logged Leavings”) of 1939, Logged-over Hillside, c. 1940, and Above the Gravel Pit, 1937. These are desirous, rather than idealized, images of nature, wishful images that project the Romantic ideal while unable to hide a contradictory reality. Paradoxically, Andrew Hunter notes in the catalogue for the current exhibition, clear-cutting produced open vistas and an expansive view of the sky, which then became the focus of Carr’s transcendent longings: “It was industry that was transforming the landscape, providing the open vistas of her deeply spiritual projections.”

Looking at paintings such as Strangled by Growth, 1931, or Terrible Totem, Koskimo, 1930, it seems to me that Carr, at some level, sensed the incompatibility between her Romantic ideas of nature and those of the Northwest Coast natives. The exhibition does not provide much information on the indigenous art and belief systems of the region, but according to present-day anthropologists such as Sergei Kan and John Cove (not mentioned in the catalogue), the interchanging of “parts” between beings of one life form and another (and the ensuing cunning and power play) is an important characteristic of the traditional culture. Traditional ideas of reciprocity influenced Northwest Coast life and art in Carr’s day as they do in the present. They differ radically from Romantic ideas of the harmonious absorption of human culture by what is seen as a larger, more powerful and unified order of nature. Carr may have begun to sense the discrepancy between the two belief systems. Under the influence of Lawren Harris, native imagery disappeared from her later landscapes; totem poles are replaced by trees to represent images of a vital balance in nature, such as in Tree Trunk, 1931, and Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935.

“Emily Carr: New Perspectives” shows the subtle relocation of her desire for wholeness through nature each time she encounters other people and cultures: the Northwest Coast native villages, the plein-air painting of rural England, the Fauvism and Cubism of Paris and the transcendentalism of Harris and the Group of Seven. Carr used all she had learned and seen during her lifetime to represent the world as a vital unifying energy. The exhibition becomes a flashpoint for a Romantic longing for nature as a subsuming force. It is a longing that persists in our culture and is still capable of blinding us to human exploitation and nature’s real fragility. For this reason, I think it is important to keep the discourse on Carr tied closely to her strong, wishful paintings. ■

“Emily Carr: New Perspectives” was exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from June 2 to September 4, 2006, and will travel to the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

Petra Halkes is an artist and writer living in Ottawa. Her book, Aspiring to the Landscape, On Painting and the Subject of Nature, was published this year by the University of Toronto Press.