“Uprooted: The Life and Art of Ernest Lindner” by Terrence Heath
One of the pleasures of living in Western Canada is that it is possible there to observe a society in the process of forming. The country has been in existence for so little time that there is not the accretion of events that makes the older societies difficult to grasp. And there are so few people, relatively speaking, that the actions of those responsible for shaping the society stand out in clear relief. In a bare landscape, the landmarks are obvious.
The publication of Terrence Heath’s biography of Ernest Lindner is a case in point. Before this book, no serious biography of a Saskatchewan artist has ever appeared in which the author not only relates the artist’s life, but places him against his time, and assesses his achievement. What makes it particularly significant is the fact that the life Heath has chosen to record has been of central importance in the development of an artistic consciousness in Saskatchewan.
Lindner arrived in the province in 1926, and in the ‘thirties he set about organizing the Society of Saskatchewan Artists. He was rebuffed in this scheme by the established art interests because of his plan to educate the public by means of locally produced art instead of using the approved European models. He was successful, however, in reviving the moribund Saskatoon Art Association, which soon turned Saskatoon into the most active art community in Canada and which has been the basis for Saskatoon’s present extraordinarily vital art community. Later, Lindner turned his attention to the national scene, and joined with Jackson, Lemieux, Harris, and Lismer, among others, to begin the Federation of Canadian Artists. Possibly Lindner’s most influential role, however, was as a teacher. An estimated six thousand people received the benefit of his encouraging and enlightening attention, and his students included artists as diverse as Ivan Eyre, Claude Breeze, Robert Murray, and Wynona Mulcaster. Very late in his life, Lindner achieved fame for his own pictures.
All this Heath relates with clarity and economy, and in addition he gives us the character of Lindner vividly and convincingly. He shows us Lindner as a lonely child, something of a misfit in the solidly bourgeois Vienna of the early twentieth century. He allows Lindner to describe for himself his odd adventures as an airman in the Great War and takes up the narrative again as Lindner flees debt in Austria to become a farmhand in Saskatchewan, sometimes desperate with loneliness, singing German folk songs behind a six horse team with tears streaming down his face. Then come the years of organization, teaching, and painting, already mentioned.
Biography is one of the most exacting of the arts, and its difficulties might be summed up in one word: balance. The biographer must achieve balance, for instance, between the subject’s life and the times in which he lived—that is, the element of history must not obtrude. Then, the biographer must take the subject’s works into account, but must not allow the book to become merely a volume of art criticism. Finally, the biographer must strike a delicate balance between faults and virtues, and in the intimate details of his subject’s life must decide what is essential to be recorded for a full understanding of the subject and what constitutes an intrusion into his privacy and the privacy of others—a problem that is particularly acute when the subject and his circle are still living.
Heath has struck the balance with admirable skill. We have enough history to make the book an important document in the cultural development of Saskatchewan (and to a lesser extent of Canada), yet Lindner’s character is not submerged by it; instead we see clearly just what it was in Lindner that caused him to involve himself in the important events now recorded. His assessment of Lindner’s work is spare, but telling; some intimate details of Lindner’s sexual life and his marriage are frankly related, but only when they are essential in the portrayal of Lindner’s personality; finally, the direct treatment of Lindner’s obvious faults (his arrogance, chiefly) lends credibility to the picture of Lindner as basically a generous man of vision, somewhat naive, but fearless in his pursuit of truth and excellence.
There is one more area in which the biographer must strive for balance, and it is the most difficult of all. There must be a blending of fact and imagination, or, as Virginia Woolf put it, the granite and the rainbow must unite. Such an unlikely combination must take place if the biography is to rise above competence and become a work of art. Although Heath does have a clear impression of Lindner as a personality, and although he seems to perceive a certain movement from childhood to late fame, the biography does not really have the sort of controlling metaphor that André Maurois describes as an essential element in the great biographies, which gives them shape and imparts a resonance beyond the literal. The book is entitled Uprooted, but as a metaphor for Lindner’s life such an image is misleading rather than illuminating. The word suggests a disturbance of traumatic proportions leading, usually, to interruption of growth if not a termination of it. In fact, Lindner’s transference from Europe to Canada allowed him to find his true purpose in life. He moved from the business world of a decaying Vienna to what Heath describes as a cultural vacuum which, almost without thinking, he proceeded to fill. Finally, in the forests of Northern Saskatchewan, he rediscovered the profound love, hidden since youth and stifled in Vienna, for organic nature. In the dynamic rhythm of decay and rebirth of the forest vegetation, Lindner found both a source of spiritual belief and a metaphor for it, so that he (literally!) discovered his roots in Canada. But while this radically simplified account might suggest a sure progression towards a personal destiny, in fact Lindner seems to have proceeded more or less by accident. Lindner took over organization of the art community, but one gathers that he might have organized almost anything. Heath suggests that he became an artist almost in spite of himself; certainly he was a very late developer.
Heath had at his disposal an astounding wealth of material, which constitutes probably the most complete record of an artist that Canada affords. He was wise to pare the material down ruthlessly and to give us a fairly lean biography. It is now up to others to explore, by means of articles and essays, some of the directions indicated by Heath. Further research, for instance, might show in greater detail Lindner’s interaction with fellow-artists in the early days of Saskatoon’s artistic history. There are some interesting questions, such as Lindner’s attitude to the older, established painters Kinderdine and Henderson, or why the work of artist/photographer L.G. Saunders was so similar to Lindner’s early landscape painting.
But Heath has produced a solid, workmanlike biography that immediately assumes importance in the history of art in our region. It is also enjoyable reading, and its plentiful illustrations in black and white and colour make it a handsome production (a pity, though, that it has no index). It is one of two books that have launched Fifth House, a new publishing concern in Saskatoon specializing in cultural subjects. An auspicious beginning. ♦
Peter Millard is Arts Manitoba’s contributing editor in Saskatoon. An authority on biography, the U. of T. press will publish his Roger North in the fall of this year.