Maxwell Bates

Forgive me for presuming that Maxwell Bates is not a household name. Before seeing the exhibition at the Edmonton Art Gallery, “Maxwell Bates: At the Crossroads of Expressionism,” I knew little about him aside from tidbits gleaned in Canadian Art History 101. There are a number of reasons for Bates’s relative obscurity, not the least of which is his enormously varied and at times inconsistent output. But Maxwell Bates was a real artist. In the 1920s, when so many of his contemporaries pursued the Canadian nationalistic penchant for stylized landscapes, he was looking to artists like Goya and Daumier, looking to work that grappled with the complexities of the human condition. Later in his long career, when artists and collectors and bureaucrats had accepted with religious zealotry Clement Greenberg’s pronouncements against, well, almost everything, Bates thankfully ignored contemporary taste and pursued his unusual paintings of scarecrows and puppets and odalisques and farmers and people at parties and in hotels. Despite Maxwell Bates’s remarkable gifts as a painter, the vicissitudes of history seem to have prevented his being seen as a pioneer in Canadian art on par with painters like Emily Carr and Tom Thomson.

His biography alone should be the stuff of legend. For if ever an artist’s life merited being made into a movie, surely the career of Maxwell Bates—even his name is perfect—is too rich to pass up. Here’s the pitch: It’s Calgary in the 1920s. A young man from an upper-crust family defies convention, leaves his father’s prestigious architectural firm to become an artist. To London, where years of poverty and toil result in his discovery and his work is exhibited alongside Britain’s leading artists like Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. His career is interrupted by a decision to join the war effort against Nazi Germany, where he is captured and spends the next five years as a prisoner of war. He returns to Calgary, humbled and afflicted, but continues on with his career as an artist and architect. This is a tale that begs to be told, and if Bates were American, or French, his life would surely be woven into the mythologizing fabric of national culture. Nancy Townshend’s thoughtful and comprehensive exhibition goes a long way in placing his life and art back on the public stage. Although I would still like to see him in a film, his role played by Kenneth Branagh. Maybe Norman Jewison could direct.

I could spend the rest of this review delving into the remarkable story of Bates’s life but I am going to focus on the latter part of his career after London, and WWII, and the prison camp, and begin with the time when Bates had to pick up the pieces and start again. After being freed in 1945 by American soldiers from the prison camp in Unterbreizbach, where he literally slaved in the salt mines seven days a week for five years, Bates returned to Calgary and resumed work in his father’s architectural firm. I can only imagine how traumatic this reintegration must have been, but soon after his return he was busy making paintings again. Indeed, he claims to have learned to paint in his head during his captivity and his release saw a torrent of work that poured forth unabated until the end of his life.

After only four years back in Canada, he travelled to New York and studied with the great Max Beckmann. Bates’s comments about this time are sparse but he credits Beckmann with showing him how to “keep it simple.” I am not sure what Bates really thought of Beckmann but I can’t imagine a more generative and like-minded artist from whom he could draw. It seems that Beckmann had a powerful effect on Bates. Works done after his time in New York possess a boldness and clarity redolent of Beckmann’s strapping graphic sensibility and compelling narrative, and much later in Bates’s career these characteristics would effloresce in brilliantly satirical and emotive paintings like Assassin and Modern Olympia. While in New York, Bates visited a large show of Paul Klee’s, who he claims exerted a greater influence on him than Beckmann. But as Bates was always bound by a figurative and storytelling impulse, he was never as fluid and organic as Klee, who allowed himself the freedom to experiment with principles of abstraction and the purely visual. Bates produced many pieces that absorb the technical, stylistic elements of Klee while never quite achieving their pictorial certainty and originality Where he is strongest is in his direct, dead-pan observations of people and places and it is here that Beckmann’s influence is clear and Bates’s work is the better for it.

In 1961 Bates suffered a massive stroke paralyzing his left arm. Rather than deterring him from work as an artist, this affliction served to free him from his responsibilities as an architect and to pursue his art full-time. He and his wife Cathleen relocated to Victoria and the period from 1961 until his death in 1980 marks the greatest chapter in Bates’s artistic career. A wonderful example of this mature phase is found in Cocktail Party, 1972, wherein he captures the awkwardness and pretense of the “opening night.” People stand around self-consciously. Beneath the surface image, the painted bejewelled heads, underneath the starched shirts, turtlenecks and English tweeds, Bates establishes the subterranean locus of insecurity and lust. Mingling, obligatory wineglasses held out like talismans, the partygoers’ faces are distorted, morphing from carefully projected personae into reflections of the inner condition. Bates’s use of surface and flatness, of arresting colour and composition, to distort the figures and skew the perspective reflects not only his deep understanding of the language of modern art but also demonstrates his ability to use these devices to bolster the poignant psychological weight of the image.

Of the many gems in this exhibition, my favourite is Beautiful BC. Here Bates assails traditional depictions of a coastal landscape of totem poles, mountain passes and panoramic ocean vistas. This is Canada seen through the lens of anxious urbanity and cynicism. Standing behind a large, blue automobile, the viewer’s vision of the ocean is impeded. An attempt to peer beyond the car is caught on the left side by a sign that reads “Private Property Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted,” and on the right side our gaze is met by a blonde woman with garish red lipstick and a tiger-skin coat. In this piece Bates combines his very literate sense of narrative with an eye for the incidental, for the mundane details of our existence that are often overlooked and censored. It is a painting that combines his sympathetic understanding of people with his desire to challenge the banalities inherent in too many representations of the Canadian landscape.

“Maxwell Bates: At the Crossroads of Expressionism” is travelling to Calgary, Saskatoon and Victoria. Go and see this exhibition. Not only does it bring together an impressive 80 works of art, but Nancy Townshend’s exhaustive research presents a generous reservoir of information including examples of his architecture, drawings done as a child, poetry and fiction, and the remarkable Prisoner of War notebook that somehow managed to remain undetected by the watchful eyes of his Nazi captors. It is a remarkable show that has come to change the way I look at the history of Canadian painting. We owe Bates a debt of gratitude, not only for the sacrifice he made when he marched into wartorn Europe, but for the many sacrifices he made in pursuit of an honest, deliberate art that revels in the human capacity for creativity and expression. ■

“Maxwell Bates: At the Crossroads of Expressionism,” curated by Michael Morris and Nancy Townshend, was on exhibit at the Edmonton Art Gallery from February 12 to April 18, 2004. The exhibition will travel through 2006 to the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary, the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Sky Glabush is a painter and writer living in Edmonton.