This is an article from the Spring 2015 issue of Canadian Art.
One of the many surprises in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s bold and engaging Emily Carr retrospective was a set of tiny watercolour sketches of Victoria Harbour, dated around 1895. Borrowed from the collection of the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, they reveal that Carr was a deft practitioner of the English watercolour tradition—four years before she set off for England to study art. What is more striking about these gemlike little works, however, is that many of them feature First Nations canoes, whose cultural significance and elegant forms attracted the young artist in some then-unarticulated way. As the show’s curators, Canadian writer and critic Sarah Milroy and Dulwich Gallery director Ian Dejardin, guided me through room after venerable room, they lighted on images and themes that particularly compelled them—and compelled Carr, too.
For Milroy, the canoe initially symbolized Carr’s interest in First Nations people and culture, viewed from across the divide of her strict, conventional and thoroughly anglicized upbringing in 19th-century Victoria. “What is that life?” Milroy imagined Carr asking about the Aboriginal people she observed on the city’s beaches and margins, then added, “That’s what we’re hoping to convey here, her sense of looking beyond the parameters of what was permitted.” Although drawn from a different territory and cultural tradition—Kwakwaka’wakw rather than Songhees—the dugout canoe appears again in Carr’s Edwardian-style watercolour, War Canoes, Alert Bay, dated about 1908, and again, and more famously, in her oil-on-canvas of the same subject and title. Produced in 1912, after Carr had returned from a second stay in Europe, studying in France, the oil painting exemplifies her dramatic shift into Fauvist-flavoured post-Impressionism—intense colours, dappled shadows, curvilinear forms and dark outlines. Carr has also added a few small, brightly dressed First Nations people to the middle ground of the oil painting, figures who were not present in the original watercolour. “I’m fascinated by the fact that this is a moment where Carr is looking at the watercolour and it’s not doing it for her—it’s not what she wants to express,” Dejardin said. “The oil painting is what she went to France for.”
As for the canoe motif, Milroy found metaphoric echoes of it in Carr’s late, rapturous images of sea and sky, which were installed in the same room with her depictions of the Kwakwaka’wakw vessels. In Carr’s series of 1935–36 oil-on-paper paintings of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Olympic Peninsula, overarched by ecstatic swirls of bright light and pale colour, the lines of mountains and water tilt noticeably upward at either edge of the picture. “There’s an embracing quality to the formal shape that does something to you physically when you stand in front of it,” Milroy said. We discussed the various meanings of the word vessel: a craft for travelling on water and therefore an image of freedom; a container, concave on the inside, convex on the outside and thus a symbol of the female body. Both readings work within Carr’s personal cosmology.
Only 14 years old when her beloved mother died, Carr read maternal forms into both her Aboriginal and landscape subjects. And freedom from social constraints was a condition that, early on and incorrectly, she ascribed to the First Nations people whose seemingly unfettered comings and goings by canoe she deeply envied. Somehow, both freedom and maternal embrace come together in her late oil-on-paper paintings. In Sky (1935–36), Milroy noted, the voluminous clouds form a kind of figure, an embryo, “something clustering together to be born.” Dejardin indicated Clover Point (ca. 1936). “The way she bends the horizon, and that water flowing uphill—if you interpret that literally, you’re about to be swamped by a tsunami,” he remarked. “But in fact,” he continued, “it’s all about the whole world being in a kind of dance.”
“From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia” was our most iconic artist’s first solo show in Europe since 1979. Yes, seven major paintings by Carr were exhibited in a group show at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, giving her reputation an unexpected international boost. But the 100-plus thoughtfully chosen works in the Dulwich exhibition, a collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario, have truly catapulted Carr into a larger arena of critical and popular regard. Opened to the public on November 7, after a succession of media previews and private receptions, “From the Forest to the Sea” garnered immediate and positive coverage in the London papers. Laura Cumming of the Guardian and Karen Wright of the Independent were downright adulatory in their assessments, responding not only to Carr’s art but also to the story of her lonely and difficult journey to creative realization. Writing in the Telegraph, Richard Dorment was more measured in his praise, but still respectful of Carr’s accomplishments, and laudatory of the Dulwich for mounting a “risky” exhibition of a locally unknown artist. All encouraged their readers to see the show, and on the three separate occasions I was there, the place thronged with visitors. A day-long Carr symposium at the gallery, featuring a roster of leading Canadian curators and scholars, was sold-out well in advance. The intellectual and visual heft of the 300-page catalogue, with its dozen wide-ranging essays, further extended the show’s reach. And, oh yes, there was the visit to the show by Prince Charles, happily reported in Hello! Canada. (What would Carr, who portrayed herself in her book Growing Pains as scorned and snubbed by the English during her studies in London, Bushey and St. Ives, have made of all that?)
Because the exhibition will also travel to the AGO, Milroy and Dejardin were faced with the task of introducing Carr to an English audience and simultaneously finding new ways of representing her work to Canadian viewers. Their decision to frame the show poetically rather than chronologically—the different aspects of Carr’s character as expressed by the sombre and enclosed forest interiors of the central British Columbia coast and then by the wide-open and light-filled seascapes she sketched near her Victoria home—was in some ways determined by the architectural layout of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Dating from 1817, the Dulwich was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane and is the first purpose-built public art gallery in England. Running the length of the building, its temporary exhibition space is composed of a series of narrow, corridor-like rooms bracketed at either end by a large, square, high-ceilinged gallery. In each of these two “cubes,” Milroy and Dejardin installed Carr’s paintings around a central vitrine filled with historic Northwest Coast First Nations art and artifacts.
On first viewing, I was startled by the juxtaposition. Given the academic controversies concerning cultural appropriation and the “salvage paradigm,” I wondered if the First Nations art in this show might not correspond too literally, too reductively, to the Aboriginal subjects in Carr’s paintings. Happily, however, the relationship between colonial and Indigenous cultural expressions took quite a different form here. The ceremonial, shamanic and utilitarian objects, borrowed from British collections, were mostly old and rare, some of them dating from the 18th century. Carr, whose focus was on the monumental art, especially the memorial poles, welcome figures and house frontal posts of the Northwest Coast, would neither have seen nor depicted any of the Indigenous works in the show. (They ranged from feast dishes, masks and soul catchers to woven hats, fishhooks and a seal club.) Instead, their presence effectively established the power and sophistication of an art and culture that long predated European contact.
As well, they helped shape one of the show’s underlying premises—that Carr was continuously struggling to acquire ways of expressing a condition of belonging, to locate herself in the British Columbia landscape. “We wanted to create a strong sense of place in the exhibition,” Milroy explained, “to make people think about one of the things that is really changing about human experience—that we don’t belong to place in the same way we once did.” Carr, the daughter of English immigrants, “possessed a fledgling Canadian imagination, striving to find a way to connect with what was, for her, a new world,” Milroy continued. “Of course, it’s not a new world for the Indigenous peoples of BC, but what we wanted to suggest was a synchrony between the two—but also a distinction.” She looked about her, from Carr’s Wood Interior (1929–30) to a 19th-century Haida grease bowl in the shape of a Raven, then added, “We actually had concerns about what would happen to Emily Carr’s paintings in the same room with these [First Nations] objects. Could the paintings push back? And they do, partly because they carry in them the same deep connection to the landscape of BC and its amazing fecundity.”
Carr’s lifelong drive to acquire the tools she needed to express her vision was another important theme in the exhibition. In addition to oil paintings on canvas and paper, the show also included drawings in graphite, charcoal and watercolour, sketchbooks, notebooks, short, illustrated diaries and a “funny book” in which Carr humorously recorded her 1907 journey to Alaska with her sister. Clearly demonstrated here was what Milroy described as Carr’s “really intrepid efforts to educate herself,” whether in England, France or Haida Gwaii. The European tools she acquired to serve her Canadian paintings are equally linked with her determination to understand and honour the cultures she recognized as original to the place she called home. There’s evidence that she worked not only from her own field sketches of First Nations art and architecture, but also from First Nations objects in museum collections and photographs of them in books and magazines.
What has made Carr a cultural icon in Canada is also what seems to appeal to foreign audiences. There are, of course, the compelling biographical facts and fictions that frame her art: her contrariness and her courage, her solitary struggle, her hard-won technical and formal achievements and her eventual release into a late-life condition verging on the transcendent, blissfully plugged-in to the rhythms of the universe. But there’s also what visitors witness in the art itself: Carr’s ability to express a profound connection to place, to articulate her admiration for the first peoples of the land she also called home, and to lift her voice in praise of the glory and godliness of the natural world. The towering trees, the windswept foliage, the beauty redeemed from the desolation of a logged-over landscape, the throbbing energy of the sea and the sky—all the extravagant beauty of the West Coast of Canada finds expression in her paintings. As in the best art anywhere, the particular becomes universal—and our Emily becomes the world’s Emily.
