Carr v. Thomson: A Case of Sexism, Settler Nationalism, and Indigenous Erasure in Canadian Art History
Written by Anthony Portulese
Edited by Paige Suhl & Sophia Kogan
Anglo-Canadian art intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century cemented Tom Thomson’s landscapes of the “northern wilderness”—seemingly uncharted terrains of mighty rivers, lakes, trees and mountains—as quintessential icons of Canadian art.1 It has moreover aligned his oeuvre with that of the Group of Seven (the “Group”), a cohort of early twentieth-century painters whose own landscapes evoked a vision of an “authentic, original” Canada: a land untamed and untainted by the industries of urban life and modernity.2 Obverse to this motif, Emily Carr, a contemporary of Thomson and the Group of Seven, produced hundreds of paintings recording various Indigenous communities and their artforms.3 When examined in dialogue with Thomson’s artwork, we can begin to contemplate his images of the vast “Canadian wilderness” not as transcripts of reality, but rather as a visuo-cultural construct used to promote the illusion of a new country born from uninhabited lands.4
In offering a comparative historiographical analysis, I argue that Thomson’s artworks were revered for their reinforcement of Canadian nationalism by pictorially erasing both Indigenous identity and the violent history of European colonial conquest. In contrast, Carr’s images were overlooked or ignored by the Canadian nationalist narrative, likely due to her identity as a female artist, but also conceivably for offering Indigenous peoples a central position in her art, and by extension, validating their cultures within the grim history of post-colonial Canada.
More striking than the ostensible nostalgia for a pre-modern era read into Thomson’s subject matter—or his images’ rejection of the physical signs of modern technology—is an “emptiness,” a lack of any material or biological signifiers of humankind.5 This figurative absence of humanity provided Canadian nationalists a prime opportunity to co-opt his work into the ideological narrative for their newborn, distinctly “Canadian” nation.6 At the time of Thomson’s death in 1917, the Dominion of Canada was only fifty years old. Through their descriptions of Thomson’s paintings, writers were able to manufacture a false history of Canada, one which purports these lands to have never been “originally” inhabited by humanity prior to European arrival and hence ripe for colonization by white settlers.7 Art critics would adopt and validate colonialist language in their descriptions of his life and work. For instance, art critic Paul George Konody in 1925 styled Thomson as the “artistic discoverer of Canadian landscapes” (emphasis added).8 In 1930, Canadian journalist Blowden Davies also praised Thomson as a man who “lived like one of the voyageurs who first knew […] this land” (emphasis added).9
Figure 1. Tom Thomson, The Jack Pine, 1916-17, oil on canvas, 127.9 x 139.8 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
This charged, settler-colonizer vernacular further permeates into the literature penned about many of Thomson’s most renowned landscape paintings. It made the artist’s style of painting synonymous with the nationalist agenda by rendering his technique of thick impasto, vigorous brushwork, and bold, blotchy colour schemes synonymous with the rugged, harsh landscape of the Canadian topography.10 In describing Thomson’s painting The Jack Pine (fig. 1) shortly after his death, Group-member Alexander Young Jackson states for posterity: “Without [Thomson], the north country seems a desolation of bush and rock. He was the guide, the interpreter, and we the guests, partaking of his hospitality so generously given.”11 This assumption that the lands which Thomson painted would be entirely “desolate” had it not been for his guiding, interpreting hand completely ignores the history of Indigenous peoples as the original curators and caretakers of Canada’s domains, many of whom shared these lands’ traits and secrets with the first settler societies. Jackson’s term “hospitality” could be critiqued as a covert justification and perpetuation of colonial conquest. It carries in effect an implication of ownership, as though these lands are in Thomson’s possession, access to which is permissible only by his painterly invitation.
Figure 2. Tom Thomson, The West Wind, 1917, oil on canvas, 120.7 x 137.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
What proves remarkable is that literature on Thomson only vaguely alludes to the land’s emptiness as a deliberate cultural construct towards the end of the twentieth century. In his 1984 book on the cultural history of Quebec landscape painting—mentioning art critic Paul Dumas’ adulation of Thomson’s The West Wind (fig. 2)—Guy Boulizon exposits:
After specifying that Thomson’s oeuvre only consists of landscapes from which man is always absent [...] Dumas writes: “His favorite subject is nature and the elements [...] These favorite patterns he paints as he sees them with their rugged shapes, vibrant colors; and arrangements that one believes to discover in his paintings, he will have always found them in nature.” Thus, nature is omnipresent. But what about culture?12
Dumas suggests an awareness of Thomson’s deliberate choice to void his works of any figurative trace of human life, but promptly downplays and dismisses it through his lengthy recount of the artwork as if it is merely, to quote Jonathan Bordo, “a piece of scenic plein air naturalism.”13 Boulizon then interjects with a subtle albeit crucial question: if Thomson’s Jack Pine and West Wind have been examined as naturalistic representations of these lands, why should they not also be analyzed as cultural, settler-centric representations of these lands? Boulizon herein reminds us that while Thomson’s artworks have been exalted as vivid experiential recordings of the Canadian wilderness, it must not be forgotten that art literature has weaponized the absence of humanity in Thomson’s paintings to suit the colonialist ends of Canadian nationalists.
Perhaps no one’s work does a better job at highlighting the deliberate removal of signs of human life from landscape painting than Emily Carr. Many of her compositions are devoted to Indigenous peoples, their artforms, and their cohabitation within and alongside the lands of Western Canada.14 In recent decades, feminist historians have revived scholarly interest in Carr’s art, with resonate literary material with which to work from Carr’s own writings. Yet remarkably, or perhaps unsurprisingly, there exists little to no contemporary commentary on how her images of Indigenous peoples and cultural objects were received, nor for her oeuvre more broadly. For example, the Concordia Women Artists History Initiative (“CWAHI”)—an online, open-access database by students and staff of the namesake university, designed to compile news releases and exhibition reviews in which female artists working in Canada are mentioned or discussed—holds no documents on how Carr’s paintings were received by critics.15
The potential reasons for the substantive absence of Carr in contemporary art discourse are twofold. Firstly, the fact that Carr was a woman would not have been lost upon the male-dominated, oftentimes misogynistic artistic establishment of the time. As feminist art historian Griselda Pollock explains, in the early twentieth century, the doctrine of separate spheres—a sociocultural ideology which gendered the public, community space as masculine and the private, domestic space as feminine—translated to the artistic forum, in which depictions of home life, mothers and children, and still lifes were the subject matters considered appropriate for female artists.16 Carr defied this doctrine by travelling unaccompanied through rural British Columbia, exploring isolated Indigenous communities and visually recording their cultures, an ethnographic vocation hitherto reserved primarily for men.17 Secondly, and for further analysis below, Carr’s representations of Indigenous identities bestowed an undeniable presence and reverence to communities whose very existence was incompatible with a Canadian nationalist narrative that sought to belittle or outright ignore their presence and vitality.
Figure 3. Emily Carr, Indian Village, Alert Bay, 1909, watercolour, 37.5 x 55.9 cm. Private collection.
After her tutelage within the Primitivist school of Paris in 1910, Carr returned to the Northwest Coast of British Columbia with a regard for the artistic merits and formal traits of non-European art.18 While in 1907 she began to visually record Indigenous villages with a documentary exactness, her painterly style three years later would begin to incorporate heavier brushstrokes, brighter colours, and a more unified outline.19 Take a comparison between her 1909 watercolour Indian Village, Alert Bay (fig. 3) and her 1911 oil painting Totem Pole, Alert Bay (fig. 4). While the former image is constructed in the naturalist style that reflects an ethnographic interest in the appearance, clothing, and activities of the Indigenous people in the scene, the latter painting adopts certain strategies of the French primitivists. Her employment of oil paint, use of bold, bright colours, and the placement of the totem pole and household façade parallel to the shallow picture plane, almost to evoke the flatness of the canvas, are in line with the aesthetic ambitions of French modernists of the period.20 However, what remains consistent before and after Carr’s sojourn in France is her careful portrayal of the Alert Bay community as living and peopled, erasing neither their existence nor their inextricable connection to the lands they inhabit.
Figure 4. Emily Carr, Totem Pole, Alert Bay, 1911, oil on canvas, 68.6 x 35.9 cm. McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, ON.
Figure 5. Emily Carr, Skidegate, 1912, oil on canvas, 63.3 x 31.6 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC.
Unlike the images of other primitivists like Gauguin and Rousseau—who exoticized non-Western cultures as a projection of anti-modernist escapism and colonialist exploitation21—Carr’s work began to employ the aesthetic strategies of the primitivist school to accredit Indigenous artists’ abstract and geometric decorative forms as the manifestation of a purer, more authentic creativity.22 In fact, Carr achieves this validation of Indigenous art within a primitivist, settler context in her images of totem poles carved by Kwakwaka’wakw artists, such as her 1912 painting Skidegate (fig. 5).23 Here, the totem pole dominates the foreground and picture plane. Its anthropomorphic forms and bright colours are applied to the wood, rendered by Carr onto canvas with the primitivist painting style—complementary, saturated colours and geometric form—that works to best glorify the formalist features of the Indigenous artform itself. The inclusion of the forested mountains in the background of her image does not strip this Indigenous artwork from its context as built within and a part of the landscape in which it dwells, further anchoring Indigenous presence within her work as well as within the lands now under Canadian jurisdiction.
Carr strives in her artwork to properly contextualize her subjects within their proper Indigenous cultures. This effort on her part created friction with exhibition and museum curators who sought to detach Indigenous cultural objects from their original meanings and appropriate them as merely decorative tokens of “primitiveness” within a Canadian national artistic heritage. Their objective was made clear with the inauguration of the 1927 “Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern” in Toronto, in which several of Carr’s artworks were hung alongside Indigenous cultural artefacts and paintings by other Group artists.24 An editorial published in tandem with the exhibition’s unveiling reveals the urban, elitist response to the exhibition and its collection:
In looking at the West Coast Indian art, […] no knowledge of its ethnology is needed to enjoy the largeness of pattern and ingenuity of the carved and painted boxes, bowls and rattles […] These are children pretending, but what clever children. This work must undoubtedly go into the fabric of our Canadian art, but not too directly.25
The patronizing arrogance of this editorialist in characterizing the Indigenous artists as “children” and their diminished part in “our Canadian art” (emphasis added) echoes the racist and dismissive attitude white-settler European Canadians harboured towards Indigenous artforms and their place within the history of Canadian art. It may therefore not come as a surprise that Carr’s nuanced pictures were met with apathy and disinterest by the greater public. As art historian Fred R. Myers concludes, her scenes of local Indigenous villages as historically present within British Columbia were not appreciated by the scions of settler society, as they signified the continuing survival and adaptability of Indigenous communities and traditions in the wake of violent colonialist and modernist developments across the westernmost province.26
Contemplating the rejection of her art, Carr herself wrote in 1930: “If the work […] is too modern for the Canadian National Gallery, it seems it cannot be a very progressive institution.”27 We can speculate that critics were perhaps reluctant to recognize Carr’s ambitions of recognizing the rightful history, past and present, of Indigenous peoples and their fraught coexistence with the settler populations. Yet as I have argued, the wide disparity in scholarship between Thomson and Carr is symptomatic of, alongside sexism, the multi-decade establishment indifference to her work, as her art bolsters Indigenous identity in a manner inconsistent with the narrative of Canadian nationhood. Hopefully future scholarship will install Carr’s contributions within a revised, more holistic comprehension of what has been previously considered the history of “Canadian” art.
Endnotes
Katerina Atanassova, “Defining the North: Searching for a Visual Language,” in Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, ed. Amy Concannon (London: Philip Wilson, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2011), 37; Ian A.C. Dejardin, “Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven,” in Painting Canada, 18.
Members of the Group conceived themselves as “authentic, original artists,” which later historians expounded stemmed from an antimodernist aversion to and protest against the societal changes brought forth by capitalistic progress and early feminist thought. See T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), xiii.
Greta Moray, “Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native Images,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 73.
Eva Mackey, “Becoming Indigenous: Land, Belonging, and the Appropriation of Aboriginality in Canadian Nationalist Narratives,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology 42, no. 2 (July 1998): 161; and Lynda Jessup, “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change…,” Journal of Canadian Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 147.
Jonathan Bordo, “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 229.
See Ian McKay, “Handicrafts and the Logic of ‘Commercial Antimodernism’: The Nova Scotia Case,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience, 117, cited in Jessup, “The Group of Seven,” 145; and Fred. R. Myers, “Introduction to Part One: Around and About Modernity: Some Comments on Themes of Primitivism and Modernism,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience, 21.
Jonathan Bordo, “Jack Pine: Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 101-02; and Bordo, “Picture and Witness,” 245-46.
P.G. Konody, “The Palace of Arts at Wembley,” The Observer, May 24, 1925, quoted in Press Comments on the Canadian Section of Fine Arts, 9, cited in Robert Stacey, “The Myth – and Truth – of the True North,” in The True North: Canadian Landscape Painting, 1896–1939, ed. Michael Tooby (London: Lund Humphries, Barbican Art Gallery, 1991), 43.
Blowden Davies, “Tom Thomson and the Canadian Mood,” The New Outlook, August 27, 1930, 826, cited in Ross D. Cameron, “Tom Thomson, Antimodernism, and the Ideal of Manhood,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 10, no. 1 (1999): 201.
Their repudiation of traditional training fit their messaging of painting in a style that was “pure” and “honest,” unbiased by the constraints of academic painting, nor by the rebellion therefrom characteristic of modernism. See Cameron, “Tom Thomson,” 200.
Anne Newlands, Canadian Art: From its Beginnings to 2000 (Willowdale, ON: Firefly Books, 2000), 305.
Guy Boulizon, Le Paysage dans la Peinture au Québec (La Praire, QC: Éditions Marcel Broquet, 1984), 25, cited in Bordo, “Jack Pine,” 111.
Bordo, “Jack Pine,” 111. For an examination of figurative emptiness as a cultural signifier of an ahistorical time and space, see Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Blankness as a Signifier,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 159-75.
The fact that Carr hailed from the same region she painted and was a woman also genders the primitivism infused within her art, as she strived through her work to find her own place in the artistic world through the place of Indigenous life within the history of Canada. See Myers, “Around and About Modernity,” 22.
“Concordia Woman Artists History Initiative,” Concordia University, last accessed November 20, 2020, concordia.ca/finearts/art-history/research/cwahi.html.
Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2010; originally published 1988), 94.
Moray, “Emily Carr,” 79.
Moray, 74.
Maria Tippett, “Art as Act: Emily Carr’s Vision of the Landscape,” in The True North, 85.
Moray, “Emily Carr,” 74.
For a discussion of how Gauguin’s paintings of French Polynesia (that is, Tahiti) erases all signs of colonialism and colonial violence, yet solidifies the colonialist gaze as one of conquest, control, and possession, see Abigail Solomon Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Bourd and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 312-29.
Moray, “Emily Carr,” 74-75.
Moray, 75.
Ira Dilworth, “Emily Carr, Biographical Sketch,” in Emily Carr: Her Paintings and Sketches (Toronto: Oxford University Press, National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario, 1945), 14-15; and Moray, 80-81.
Canadian Forum 8 (February 1928), 525, cited in Moray, “Emily Carr,” 81-82.
Myers, “Around and About Modernity,” 21.
Lawrence Harris to Emily Carr, March, 1930, correspondence in private collection, Victoria, BC, cited in Mary Jo Hughes and Kerry Mason, Emily Carr: On the Edge of Nowhere (Victoria, BC: The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2010) at 13.
Bibliography
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Bordo, Jonathan. “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 224-47.
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Davies, Blowden. “Tom Thomson and the Canadian Mood.” The New Outlook, August 27, 1930.
Dejardin, Ian A.C. “Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven.” In Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Edited by Amy Concannon. London: Philip Wilson, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2011, 11-28.
Dilworth, Ira. “Emily Carr, Biographical Sketch.” In Emily Carr: Her Paintings and Sketches. Toronto: Oxford University Press, National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario, 1945, 9-19.
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. “Blankness as a Signifier.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 159- 75.
Hughes, Mary Jo and Kerry Mason. Emily Carr: On the Edge of Nowhere. Victoria, BC: The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2010.
Jessup, Lynda. “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change….” Journal of Canadian Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 144-79.
Konody, P.G. “The Palace of Arts at Wembley.” The Observer, May 24, 1925.
Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
Mackey, Eva. “Becoming Indigenous: Land, Belonging, and the Appropriation of Aboriginality in Canadian Nationalist Narratives.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology 42, no. 2 (July 1998): 150-78.
McKay, Ian. “Handicrafts and the Logic of ‘Commercial Antimodernism’: The Nova Scotia Case.” In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Edited by Lynda Jessup. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, 117-29.
Moray, Greta. “Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native Images.” In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Edited by Lynda Jessup. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, 71-93.
Myers, Fred. R. “Introduction to Part One: Around and About Modernity: Some Comments on Themes of Primitivism and Modernism.” In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Edited by Lynda Jessup. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, 13-25.
Newlands, Anne. Canadian Art: From its Beginnings to 2000. Willowdale, ON: Firefly Books, 2000.
Pollock, Griselda. “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” In Vision and Difference: Femininity and the Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge, 2010; originally published 1988, 70-127.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism.” In The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, Edited by Norma Bourd and Mary D. Garrard. New York: Icon Editions, 1992, 312-29.
Stacey, Robert. “The Myth – and Truth – of the True North.” In The True North: Canadian Landscape Painting, 1896–1939. Edited by Michael Tooby. London: Lund Humphries, Barbican Art Gallery, 1991, 36-63.
Tippett, Maria. “Art as Act: Emily Carr’s Vision of the Landscape.” In The True North: Canadian Landscape Painting, 1896–1939. Edited by Michael Tooby. London: Lund Humphries, Barbican Art Gallery, 1991, 84-97.