Peter Aspell

Despite his considerable skills as a colourist and the appealing energy of some of his compositions, the late Peter Aspell is not the best known of West Coast modernist painters. Until now, he has been mostly ignored by public institutions, and his two-part exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery and the West Vancouver Museum was an attempt to redress that condition. The argument given for Aspell’s relative lack of recognition is that he worked figuratively at a time when his more esteemed colleagues, such as Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith, pursued lyrical, landscape-based abstraction. From the 1950s through the 1970s, their art was strongly identified with this place—this moody, rain-forested coast. Aspell’s landscapes, where they exist, are mythic and symbolic, filled with vividly hued figures and exotic motifs floating in a dreamlike space. A far cry from the local.

Even in the 1980s, when Vancouver audiences awoke to European Neo-Expressionism and American New Image painting, Aspell’s often angst-ridden works stimulated little curatorial interest (although he did exhibit in commercial galleries and at international art fairs). With the artist’s prolific output posed against this record of institutional neglect, curators Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and Darrin Morrison chose to present not a full retrospective but a selection of paintings and drawings produced from the late 1980s until the time of his death in 2004. As with many of his peers, Aspell worked in series, and those represented in the two galleries included satirical portraits of ‘types,’ such as popes, industrialists and dictators; mythical, regal and “archetypal” female nudes; X-ray images which speak to mortality and the vulnerabilities of the human body; and dystopian images of human-machine hybrids.

A not-surprising mood of anxiety prevails in these latter works, which climaxed in what Morrison describes in the catalogue as Aspell’s “monumental and apocalyptic” March of the Machines, a wall-sized triptych painted in 1999. A strange scene that seems to condemn the military-industrial complex along with our growing dependence on the mechanical and the robotic, it depicts a couple of naked, hapless people captured, impaled and consumed by an assortment of vicious machines. Still, despite its grand scale and hectic imagery, this work is more weird than frightening. Sketchily executed in greys, blacks and gaseous yellow, it is simply not strong enough, formally or conceptually, to convince us of its dystopian vision. Part of the problem is that Aspell’s greatest strengths lie in his rich palette and his painterly surfaces, and March of the Machines possesses neither. More immediately affecting—and philosophically engaging—is his Narcissus from 2003. Based compositionally on Caravaggio’s c. 1597 Narcissus, it depicts a robot gazing besottedly at his unhappy human reflection trapped beneath the pond’s dark surface.

Strongly influenced by Jungian notions of archetypes and the collective unconscious, Aspell drew from a range of imagistic and stylistic sources, including ancient Egyptian art and the so-called tribal art of Africa and the Northwest Coast. While his paintings may reference European art historical precedents, including Goya and Velázquez, he also admired the spontaneous and untutored expressions of children and outsiders. Paul Klee was a special favourite, apparently because of his ability to plug into what Aspell saw as the playful and childlike. Jungian psychology and Klee-like forms and compositions are evident in a series of small, lively paintings from 1995, titled “Into Uncharted Seas.” Here, the unconscious is afloat with vivid yet disconnected symbols and motifs: fish, birds, boats, plants, celestial bodies, naked women and dark-toned female fertility figures.

One of the major influences in Aspell’s art is primitivism, a way of working associated with early Modernists who, for reasons both aesthetic and philosophical, chose to reference their art to that of non-Western or pre-industrial peoples. Judging by the quotes sprinkled through the show and the catalogue, it appears that Aspell too believed that the “primitive”—from the cave art of Lascaux to 20th-century African masks—was more direct, more instinctual, more attuned to humankind’s true and unrepressed nature than anything middle-class Western culture had to offer. This is, postmodern thinkers have pointed out, a Eurocentric and colonialist misreading of non-Western cultures. Coloured by the lingering myth of the Noble Savage, it allowed for the appropriation of forms that would have served belief systems Modernist artists did little to understand.

Although Aspell worked well into a time when primitivism was discredited, its beliefs would have been circulating when he was an art student. (He attended the Vancouver School of Art from 1937 to 1941 and the Académie de Ghent, Belgium, in 1945; Robert Goldwater’s definitive book, Primitivism in Modern Painting, was first published in 1938.) Its endurance through the latter years of his practice means that some of his images are highly problematic, especially when viewed through the lenses of feminist criticism and postcolonial theory. Even within the context of his age and education, it is difficult to discount Aspell’s occasional trade in cultural stereotypes and the objectification of women, especially women of colour.

Conversations with a friend and colleague reveal that Aspell was very concerned about issues of gender and culture, social justice and the abuses of power. It seems, however, that he continued to couch his art in discredited Modernist and primitivist terms, unconsciously conveying their biases. For instance, his Warrior Queen, painted in 1988, depicts a naked, dark-skinned woman with a mask-like face and big, bobbing breasts riding in a chariot pulled by an awkwardly galloping creature. Although this image was probably intended to be celebratory, the woman’s African attributes subscribe a little too heartily to Modernism’s sexualization of “the primitive.” This work is especially troubling when viewed in conjunction with The Virgin Queen, Aspell’s satirical portrait of Queen Elizabeth I as flat-chested, sexless and conspicuously white of skin.

The curators point out that Aspell’s “conflicted” attitude towards the Catholic Church, in which he was raised, is evident in his satirical series of generic popes. With their keys, crosses, protruding tongues and Fauvist skin tones of cadmium red or cerulean blue, these figures represent the corruption and abuses perpetuated by high-ranking members of the Church. Also conflicted, apparently, was Aspell’s relationship to his German ethnic heritage. Family pride is evident in his inserting the name “Winterhalter” into his signature in the 1990s, alluding to a great-great-uncle who was a court painter in 19th-century Germany. But what to make of his series of military types, collectively titled “Von”? Dressed in archaic uniforms bearing epaulettes, medals and name tags inscribed with the word “VON,” they seem to allude to the period prior to WWI when von in a surname indicated noble patrilineage in German society. A causal relationship between a history of hierarchical militarism and the slaughters of the Second World War is established by the odd weapons—maces, perhaps—hanging from the belts of these figures. Each weapon is marked “S6501,” an apparent allusion to the numbers tattooed on concentration camp prisoners and a register of Aspell’s horror at the Holocaust.

What is most confusing here, however, is that at least two of the Von figures are painted in the same dark skin tones as those of The African General, another putative “type” that falls into the trap of negative cultural stereotyping. Then again, Aspell’s Knight from Montoussé (Montoussé is a hamlet in south-western France) is also depicted with dark skin and an African mask-like face. One could argue, if one felt inclined, that the same Fauvist or expressionistic impulses apply to the skin colour of Aspell’s French and Prussian military types as to his blue and red popes, that the darkness of their uniforms has seeped into their physical beings. Still, the question of whether we’re looking at realistic or metaphoric pigmentation is disturbing—and shouldn’t have to come up at all.

The least troubling and in some ways most successful of Aspell’s paintings are his self-portraits, which include The Mad Alchemist of Colour and The Mad Perfumer. With their obsessive, big-nosed central characters, these playful works depict the creative act of painting through intricate networks of tubes, vessels and potions, executed in gorgeous colours. If there is a snag here, it is in the titles, with their persistent Romantic suggestion that the artist is a crazy outsider and art-making is a form of divine madness. By all accounts, Aspell was a sane, sociable and articulate being who revelled in the sensuous qualities of his paint medium. At its best, his art attests not to the artist as alienated outsider but to the humanity he shares with his viewers, irrespective of colour, creed or culture. ❚

“Peter Aspell: The Mad Alchemist” was exhibited at the Richmond Art Gallery from January 23 to April 3, 2016. “Peter Aspell: Saints and Sinners, Mystics and Madness” was exhibited at the West Vancouver Museum from January 13 to March 26, 2016.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver-based writer, curator and contributing editor to Border Crossings.