As we told you about a few weeks ago, about the excellent exhibition Disraeli revisited at the McCord Stewart Museum, cultural modernity in Quebec is not only due to the intellectual and pictorial heritage of Global denialBorduas and his students…
The chance of the research and/or the synchronicity of the ideas want another exhibition to raise a very similar question. This masterfully crafted presentation by seasoned art historian Esther Trépanier highlights somewhat forgotten artists, such as Marian Dale Scott, Fritz Brandtner, Henry Eveleigh and Gordon Webber, eclipsed by the heroic tale of the adventure of the abstract art of the Automatists.
Esther Trépanier agreed to answer a few questions.
Has art history erased an important part of the emergence of abstraction in Canada and Quebec?
For the most part, I would say yes. As much for the history of abstraction as for that of modernity. In English Canada, the Group of Seven was elevated to the rank of marker, trademark of national art, which led to a certain neglect of artists like Bertram Brooker who, in Toronto, at the end of the 1920s, exhibited abstract works inspired by music. It must be said that these colleagues from the Group of Seven did not appreciate the direction in which his work was going. And there have also been women who have been on this path, think of Kathleen Munn or Edna Taçon. There is therefore already an abstraction in English Canada which is expressed in the 1920s.
In Montreal, Fritz Brandtner exhibited abstractions as early as the 1930s. But, as I tell my students, no one will tell you that he was the first. For the exhibition, I chose works from among his paintings from 1930 and 1938 that the conservative critics of the time had not appreciated. But this abstract art did not belong to a clearly constituted current. We therefore forgot artists like him. When I had my art history lessons, they cavalierly summed up the situation by saying that John Lyman was the first modern art critic and that Paul-Émile Borduas was the first abstract painter. And what came before them was often referred to as boring regionalism. It is far from true. I have spent my life demonstrating that there was an artistic modernity in the interwar period and an art critic who defended modern art. Many others besides Borduas—before and parallel to him—developed abstraction.
Some have been forgotten more than others. Brandtner, Eveleigh and Webber were more so than Dale Scott…
And there are many other artists at the time who were commented on by critics and who are nowadays forgotten… In the case of Eveleigh and Webber, there is incredible work to be done. In fact, almost everything is to be done. Gordon Webber studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago with László Moholy-Nagy and he comes back with a desire for experimentation. When he left Toronto, he had worked with Arthur Lismer, among others, and was doing landscapes in the spirit of the Group of Seven. But he soon turned to pure abstraction, with an exploration of shapes and materials.
The short abstract film Untitled, which Webber made in 1948, shows that he was an innovative artist…
He had an abundant interdisciplinary output. At McGill University, there is the Webber Archive which has many boxes with an impressive amount of material to explore. It was a young colleague, Sébastien Houdon, who found this film in these archives and who drew the attention of the Cinémathèque to have it restored.
In Quebec, is this exfoliation linked to a desire of Francophones to celebrate their artists above all?
It’s more complex. Global denial is a founding text of a revolt against what some have called the Great Darkness. And around its signatories, new exhibition venues are formed, new collectors who buy them, new art critics who will defend them, a French-speaking milieu different from that of the more traditional Anglophones. There is a separation that then begins to be established in the art world between Francophones and Anglophones. And as I told you, the Anglophones are not formed as a collective like the Automatists, who have the strength of the group. Moreover, awareness of the need to establish a history of art in Quebec, made by artists from Quebec, was developed in the post-Quiet Revolution years. And therefore, we were first interested in French-speaking artists.
Note that this exhibition is accompanied by the publication of a work that will certainly mark our history of art, a work published by Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Musée d’art de Joliette.
Nicolas Mavrikakis was the guest of the Musée d’art de Joliette.