Book review: Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto, published by Penguin Canada (2009–185pp).
by Michael Cox
The Vancouver Art Gallery has more than 200 works by the west coast artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) in their permanent collection, and it is a rare day when they don’t have at least one room displaying her paintings or drawings. She is, arguably, the best known of early twentieth century British Columbia artists. During this summer’s show of Rembrandt, Vermeer and other Dutch Masters, you can also see an exhibit upstairs, Two Visions: Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt (running to September 13), where the two local artist’s images of the natural world and of First Nations totemic art are compared.
Emily Carr is best known for her iconic paintings of dark forests inhabited by the totem poles and long houses of the first peoples of the Pacific northwest: the Salishan, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Nisga’a, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlinglit nations whose artistry was once dismissed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as vestiges of a “savage” culture. It was not only the famous totem poles these people created, but carvings, bentwood boxes, masks and jewellery: now highly collectible, expensive, and revered world-wide as “Canadian” aboriginal art.
Emily Carr. Indian Church, 1929
Carr’s interest grew organically from her passionate connection to British Columbia. Even after studying art in San Francisco and Paris, after living in London, she defined herself as a west coast artist, and returned again and again to Vancouver Island (and her hometown, Victoria, the provincial capital at the southern tip of the island), where she found creative sustenance not in the approval of others, but in the isolated villages along the B.C. coast. From small sketches and paintings made during these physically arduous visits to native settlements, Carr created her most mature, affecting work. Her paintings have become as much a part of the Canadian artistic identity as those of the Group of Seven, if not as well known.
Carr was only recognized by the artistic community later in her life; as a woman, as a west coast artist, and as an unmarried eccentric, Carr was at a disadvantage in the male-dominated academy. Nevertheless, she persisted in both her painting and writing about her life and life’s work in such well-known books as Klee-Wyck and The Book of Small.
Penguin Canada’s new series Extraordinary Canadians features Lewis DeSoto, himself an artist (and author of A Blade of Grass), writing a new, accessible, biography of Emily Carr. Like DeSoto, I was, at one time, less interested in Carr’s shadowy paintings of the temperate rain forest I knew so well.
For me, it was not a visit to a native village that shook me from my complacency about her art; rather, it was the very institution which had, earlier, bored me with its seemingly endless Carr retrospectives. In 2002 the VAG put her alongside Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo; and in 2006 they curated a show which toured Canada (and is available as a book, published by the National Gallery): Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon.
Like DeSoto, I experienced a familiar artist with new insight, and began to appreciate her exceptional talent. She was every bit deserving of the accolades later given the Group of Seven. Had she been painting in Paris, her works would today be hung alongside Cézanne and van Gogh, DeSoto claims.
photo by Harold Mortimer-Lamb, 1936
It was only in 1927, when she was fifty-six, that Emily Carr’s reputation was justly recognized, when the National Gallery of Canada (in Ottawa) had an exhibit of west coast art, both native and modern. Here, Carr not only had some of her work shown (more than any other artist), but was introduced to her contemporaries A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris among others. Director Eric Brown invited her to design the cover of the exhibition brochure:
It was only then, so late in her artistic life, DeSoto writes, when Emily saw the works of the Group of Seven, “she was struck by how much their intentions echoed hers. She, too, had been striving to define her experience in relation to a unique, sparsely populated landscape, and to find an original style in which to paint it.” No one liked the modernist approach of these artists to begin with, but the artists were determined to forge their own styles, and Carr, although outside the group socially and geographically, found some solace in the knowledge she was not alone.
DeSoto’s biography is highly engaging if at times simplistic in style; it reads as if written for a high-school level reader (which, perhaps, is the intent of series editor John Ralston Saul—to bring these important figures in our past to the greatest number of readers): “Victoria was growing into a small city. Automobiles were appearing among the horse-drawn carriages.” That said (a minor annoyance), his unadorned style, and the conciseness of this book, makes for a fast read. If all of the biographies in this Penguin series are as intelligent and digestible as DeSoto’s Emily Carr, we have no excuse for not learning about many of the extraordinary Canadians whose lives have, until now, remained obscure to the average reader, turned off by fusty history teachers or overly-thorough, six-hundred page biographies.
[Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series includes biographies of: Lester B. Pearson; Stephen Leacock; Nellie McClung; René Lévesque; Norman Behtune, Pierre Elliott Trudeau; Marshall McLuhan, L.M.Montgomery and others, twenty subjects in all.]
Additional resources:
Vancouver Art Gallery: Emily Carr
Online biography of Emily Carr
Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (National Art Gallery, 2006)
