Quebec: A Painting by Adam Miller 9780773552708

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Quebec: A Painting by Adam Miller

Quebec A Painting by Adam Miller

Published for Editions Salvatore Guerrera by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 isbn 978-0-7735-5164-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5270-8 (epdf) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Quebec (Montréal, Québec) Quebec : a painting by Adam Miller. Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5164-0 (hardcover).–isbn 978-0-7735-5270-8 (epdf) 1. Miller, Adam, 1979–. Quebec. I. Title. nd237.m55a68 2017

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I dedicate this publication and artwork To my entire family My mother Anna Mancini My late father Giovanni Guerrera My mother-in-law Yvette Leclair My late father-in-law Charles Proulx My daughter Vanessa My son Jonathan and daughter-in-law Fojan My two granddaughters Stella and Audrina My sister Gina and family My brother-in-law Richard and family And to the love of my life my dear wife Diane A gift, a story Salvatore Guerrera

Contents

ix Preface Salvatore Guerrera 3 Note on Adam Miller and the Painting of History François-Marc Gagnon 13 A History of Quebec in the Shadow of the Quiet Revolution Alexandre Turgeon 25 The New Objectivism Donald Kuspit 40 Interview with Adam Miller Clarence Epstein 59 Contributors

Preface Salvatore Guerrera

The year 2017 marks many important milestones in the history of Canada. Our country is 150 years old. We are marking 225 years of parliamentary institutions in Quebec. Montreal is celebrating its 375th anniversary. Fifty years ago, the whole world was converging in Montreal for Expo 67. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was adopted thirty-five years ago. All of these events have helped to build Canada as we know it. My intention through commissioning this painting from Adam Miller is for all Canadians to better appreciate Quebec’s immense contribution to the core identity of our country. My father arrived by ship in Halifax in 1952, my mother the following year, and they settled in Montreal. This was the common route for many Italian immigrants making their way to Canada. I was born in 1955, the first of two children. Growing up in postwar Quebec, we maintained the core values of a

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European home – culture, customs, bonding, and of course food. It was a simple yet meaningful upbringing: maintain a welcoming home; share and be generous; and everything else will follow. Integrating into Montreal, Quebec, and Canada, my parents never imagined this was going to be such a diverse country, with new customs, cultures, and faiths. Language and communication were the ultimate challenge as we were raised in a community made up of recent immigrants like us, as well as more established French- and English-speaking Canadians. When I started elementary school, I could not speak English, but that changed quickly. When I look back, I do not know how this was ever possible. In my teen years my personal interests grew in all sorts of directions, though the arts were my greatest passion. The artistic scene in Montreal was so important. Quebec contemporary artists of the day were interpreting the landscape, nature, portraits, and still life in ever-changing ways. Many of the modern movements started here in Montreal and eventually spread through Canada. Art was integrated into architecture, in both public and corporate buildings. Art was everywhere: from the pleasure of riding in the subway to the experience of the 1967 world’s fair, with its theme of “Man and His World.” The “story of life” – of all of us – was to be gleaned from the art in our surroundings. By the early 1970s, both politics and economics were changing locally and nationally. With the October Crisis and Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act, the province was heading for a new relationship with Canada. During

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those years, my sister and I each got married – she into an Anglophone family, and I into a Francophone family. We all got along well, learning about our new relations and their traditions. By the end of the decade I started my own family, raising my children in a different language and an array of cultural differences. This mélange became an advantage in understanding the visions of Quebec and of Canada, but the fear of change and partisan politics instilled uncertainty for the future. Being viewed as “ethnic” by burgeoning Quebec movements only provided us with more strength as a family. Our son, and first-born, arrived on 20 May 1980, the day of Quebec’s first referendum – yet another historical moment for the province and the country. How could I not take note of this coincidence? Was his symbolic birthdate an omen that we had a role to play in making sure that we left a better country than the one he entered into? One day I would try to make sense of it all – which is how the idea came about of creating this painted story of Quebec’s history and impact on Canada. Who else but an artist could capture such distinct moments and share the experience of diverse cultures, languages, and faiths in a way that could advance humanity? I was fortunate to meet Adam Miller and share the idea of creating a monumental painting to tell part of the story of a great (yet young) nation with a bright future. Figurative painting has always made reference to the real world or to mythologies; in either case, it offers a universal message, since life is a story, and stories are our connection to the past, to today, and

to the future. These stories help us to better understand our complex lives and are part of that energy force that makes us all human. This painting is built on many stories, ones that everyone will remember or should remember – as per our province’s motto, Je me souviens. Much of what you read will be forgotten, in time, but the many messages in this painting will always stay in your mind. Our family has been given immense opportunities in life, and in turn we are committed to finding ways to continue contributing to advancing the city, province, and country that are our home. xi

Preface

Quebec: A Painting by Adam Miller

Note on Adam Miller and the Painting of History François-Marc Gagnon

Translated by Ersy Contogouris

I am tempted to situate Adam Miller’s painting Quebec in the context of the different notions of history and the ways in which these have manifested themselves in history painting.

h istory, s y m b o l , a nd rea l it y In his famous work The Art of Painting, produced ca. 1666–68 (fig. 1.1), the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer depicts Clio, the Muse of History, crowned with laurels. She holds the Trumpet of Fame in her right hand and, in her left, a thick volume – possibly Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War, if Vermeer had in mind Cesare Ripa’s writing on iconography relating to this kind of allegorical figure.1 The artist represents himself at his easel, seen from the back. His only reference to his country’s recent history is a big map of the Low Countries hanging on the wall in front of him. It must be said that

Figure 1.1. Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting, ca. 1666–68. Oil on canvas, 130 × 110 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: khm-Museumsverband.

history painting as such was not particularly valued in the Netherlands, where patrons were more interested in still lifes, genre scenes, and landscapes. Vermeer sings the praises not only of the muse Clio here, but also of painting, which he sets off against the mediums of drawing (or perhaps printmaking?) and sculpture that are represented by an open notebook and a plaster head on the table to the left of the painter. This is why this work is sometimes entitled The Painter in His Studio. History painting cannot rely on words to recount the past. It can only use symbols or images, which can be more or less realistic, or which can at least create the illusion of reality. In this painting, Vermeer attaches a great deal of importance to reality: he shows himself in his studio and dispels any possible doubt that his model for the figure of Clio is a young woman. The events that lie outside the closed space of the canvas, on the other hand, are evoked only symbolically, through the large map of the Netherlands that hangs on the wall. In the Adam Miller painting that I analyze here, the artist has also placed himself in his painting (fig. 1.2). We see him wearing a scarf around his neck, looking up and toward the right. But instead of showing himself immersed in the making of his painting, he has included himself in the crowd of people he has depicted. Unlike Miller, Vermeer created a “figure for absorption,” to borrow a category term used by Michael Fried:2 seen from the back, paying attention only to the creation of his painting, Vermeer pushes the spectators out of the pictorial space and forces them to adopt, as it were, the position of indiscreet voyeur.

In Miller’s painting, the artist faces the viewer. Here he is an insider, even though he was necessarily an outsider when he painted his characters.3 He is part of the scene he depicts and, unlike Vermeer, he invites us, if not to partake in what he is showing us, at least to understand the meaning of the events, to take stock of the issues, to recognize the responsibility of the people – be they politicians or others – that are represented. What about symbols in Miller’s painting? As its etymology indicates, the purpose of the symbol (σύμβολον, from συμβάλλω, to throw together, join, gather, place in contact) is to connect an image to an abstract idea, just as Vermeer in The Art of Painting brings together the muse Clio and the idea of history. Clio and her eight muse sisters are the daughters of Mnemosyne (Μνημοσύνη, whose name means memory or recollection). Clio sings about the past, about men, and citystates. Do we find such symbols in Adam Miller’s painting? The answer, it seems to me, is yes. The two birds flying across the sky – the snowy owl on the right and the Canada goose in the middle – symbolize the two universes of Quebec and of Canada, which face each other in the painting. One detail at the very bottom of the canvas, in the middle, might escape the viewer’s attention: a vase with blue irises, the colour of the Quebec flag, and on the ground, some Canadian coins that represent the “economic fallout of near separation from Canada.”4 The fact that these details are placed between the representation of the flq on the one hand and the War Measures Act on the other is highly significant. We are in the realm of symbolic language par excellence.

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Figure 1.2. Adam Miller as he appears in his painting (detail).

And what can we say about the people, for example the feminine figure in the lower left who holds a Quebec flag? Miller wrote to me that during his conversations with Professor Peter Gossage of Concordia University’s history department, Miller came to believe that French Canadians, who had felt abandoned by France during the Guerre de la Conquête (War of Conquest), saw themselves as orphans. The figure that fills the lower left corner of the composition might be read as the very symbol of this situation: an orphan holding the Quebec flag. If we look at her more closely, we might find that her face reminds us a bit of the child armed with two guns on the right of the figure of Liberty in Eugène Delacroix’s great painting, Liberty Leading the People, 1830, which hangs in the Louvre. Abandoned, maybe, but free … And the figure of the child wearing a sweater decorated with red maple leaves of the Canadian flag, behind the orphan, is there to show that the French Canadians were the first European inhabitants of the land. Their French ancestors were already there, at the very beginning of the seventeenth century – or even before, if we take into account the attempts at colonization by Jacques Cartier and Jean-François de la Rocque de Roberval. France gave Canada, which it saw as a poisoned gift, to Britain in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Another figure who certainly has symbolic significance is the feminine figure dressed in white who points toward the scene representing the enforcement of the War Measures Act at the bottom centre of the painting. Adam Miller told me that he was inspired by the figure of Justice in Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s

famous painting, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, 1808, which is in the Louvre. It is therefore once again a symbolic figure. In Prud’hon’s painting, the figure of Justice holds her characteristic scale, folded up to indicate that the cause has been addressed. On the right side of Miller’s painting, the nurse who comes to the aid of a soldier alludes to the 1990 Oka Crisis, but without reference to a specific event. The Mohawk Warrior with his face covered and fist raised is more realistic. This depiction recalls the iconic photograph from the crisis of a stare-down between a young Canadian soldier and a Mohawk man whose face was covered in a similar way. It seems to me that symbolism plays another major role in the painting, one much more important than that reflected by these individual details. The great challenge for Miller was to represent time, to suggest events that belonged to different pasts and were situated at various depths of time. Unlike music or cinema, painting does not have specific means to suggest movement, such as occur in the measure of time. In order to suggest time, painting must rely on symbolic means, which it borrows from representations in space. For example, in a perspectival view, a larger figure in the foreground combined with a smaller figure in the background can suggest the recent past and the more distant past. This technique is a symbolic expedient that Miller often uses in this painting. The smaller size of some of the figures – Champlain, Cartier, Donnacona (top centre-right) – signifies their belonging to a distant past. Elsewhere, at the centre of painting, the figures of Pierre-Marc Johnson (sovereignist, elected premier of Quebec in 1985),

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Kim Campbell, and Paul Martin (who became prime ministers of Canada in 1993 and 2003 respectively) suggest a more recent history, but one still not of the present, and one beginning to fade from collective memory.

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Since its origins with Herodotus (ca. 484–ca. 425 bce), history has been presented as the result of an investigation (ἱστορία, historia), based on events either witnessed by the investigator (ocular witness) or heard from witnesses the investigator believed were trustworthy. Narrating his (perhaps imaginary) voyage to the source of the Nile, Herodotus wrote, “I was unable to get any information from anyone else. However, I myself travelled as far as Elephantine5 and saw things with my very own eyes, and subsequently made enquiries of others.”6 The investigator sees himself as an αὐτόπτης, an ocular witness, who is forced to undertake an oral investigation (ἀκούει ἱστορέων, listens to stories), when he writes about a site he has not visited or an era he has not lived through. There is something slightly comical in these declarations given the legends that Herodotus recounted completely uncritically, as though they were facts. The investigator inquires about past events that he has not witnessed. These remote facts belonging to a bygone era are represented at the top of Adam Miller’s painting. He has placed them in the sky, which is apt since most of them are linked to religion, such as the depiction of the Jesuit missions at the right, the “filles du roi” – girls sent from France to become

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wives of settlers – falling from the sky, and the Battle of Long Sault, represented at the top left, that saved the colony from Iroquois threat. This last event was appropriated by the cleric Lionel Groulx, that great admirer of Dollard des Ormeaux (it is said Groulx had a bust of him sculpted by Alfred Laliberté on his desk), for the right-wing nationalist cause, in which salvaging of the language (not to say francophone unilingualism) was presented as a way to “guard faith.” It is obviously an area of historical discourse in which imagination might dominate over facts. The history painter can give the impression that he has inquired as best he could about the costumes, the features of the figures – if there are portraits that remain – the plausibility of the gestures they adopt, and maybe even create the illusion that he has “seen” what he shows us. In this same spirit, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté painted a subject that Adam Miller also depicted: the meeting between Jacques Cartier and the chief of the Iroquoian village at Stadacona (fig. 1.3). To represent Cartier, Suzor-Coté drew on the most oftenreproduced depiction of the explorer. Of course, we know that this representation was in fact a complete fabrication by François Nicholas Riss, a Franco-Russian painter born in Moscow in 1804, who had received the commission in 1838 from the city of Saint-Malo, Cartier’s birthplace. Riss’s painting was destroyed in 1944 in a fire at the old town hall, but not before it had been copied and reproduced by many painters and lithographers, among them the Canadian artist ThéophileAbraham Hamel in the 1860s. The outfit Cartier wears is the one in which he was traditionally depicted in the prints of the time. And the Iroquoians, emerging from the woods, are

Figure 1.3. Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Jacques Cartier Meeting the Indians at Stadacona, 1535, 1907. Oil on canvas, 266 × 401 cm. Collection Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (1934.12) Photo: mnbaq, Jean-Guy Kérouac.

heavily stereotyped, with their braided hair and feathers on their heads. The only thing the artist invented was the gestures of the figures on both sides: these indicate the surprise of some and the welcome of others, which seems a little incongruous, considering all the men armed with halberds, spears, and muskets behind Cartier and his ship in the background, not to mention the enormous flag that will soon mark the possession of the territory by the French.

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Soon after Herodotus, a different conception of history emerged, that of Thucydides (460–395 bce), who mistrusted oral testimonies, preferred to rely on written documents, and believed that only a history relating to the present could contain a definite truth. The new aim of history was no longer to glorify the figures of the past through more or less mythical stories, as Herodotus had done, but to relate what the historian had personally seen. The historian was now expected to be a witness to what he recounted and to transmit to future generations the lessons of the present by giving them a point of comparison, or of reference, “forevermore.” In this conception, we are closer to the idea of history expressed in Adam Miller’s painting, through the representation of the October Crisis at the bottom of the composition and through the gallery of political figures at the centre. At the bottom, toward the left, we see Paul Rose, from behind, holding the British diplomat James R. Cross with his left

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hand, and, with his right, the minister Pierre Laporte, both of whose heads are covered in dark hoods. Above them, a feminine figure with her arm outstretched represents Justice condemning the violence of the flq and endorsing the War Measures Act adopted by the federal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The Oka Crisis is evoked on a smaller scale, on the right, behind the soldier and nurse, by a group of Mohawks shown blocking the traffic on Montreal’s Mercier Bridge, as if it were an echo of the October Crisis, twenty years later, comprising another identity crisis, but this time of the Indigenous populations, specifically of the Mohawks at Kanesatake. Above the scenes of identity crisis, forming a new layer of reference to the present, are the politicians implicated either directly or indirectly in the October and Oka crises. They are not always easy to recognize. This is because they adopt poses that are different from their media images. They are not shown facing us but are instead often seen in profile, looking in different directions, making gestures that call for analysis or interpretation. In spite of this, we recognize, from left to right, Stephen Harper, Brian Mulroney, Daniel Johnson Sr, Robert Bourassa, Jacques Parizeau, and at a slightly different level, Jean Lesage, Jean Charest, Bernard Landry, and Justin Trudeau; immediately below, we see Jean Chrétien, Lucien Bouchard, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and further below, Philippe Couillard trying to raise himself above Pauline Marois, whom he seems to be pulling down. Lastly, René Lévesque, wearing a long trench coat, stands at the edge of a promontory, at the very centre of the painting, representing the idea that the

Figure 1.4. Napoléon Bourassa, Apotheosis of Christopher Columbus, 1905–12. Oil on canvas in grisaille, 484 × 734 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, gift of Augustine Bourassa (1965.174). Photo: mnbaq, Patrick Altman.

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sovereignist option he championed is at the heart of the major conflict with Canada, which is represented in the lower part of the composition. We might also be tempted to compare Adam Miller’s painting to the Apotheosis of Christopher Columbus (fig. 1.4), the ambitious project on which Napoléon Bourassa worked for seven years, from 1905 to 1912, but that he never completed. All that remains of this project is a huge canvas painted in grisaille, a sort of preparatory sketch. Bourassa, like Miller, organized his figures in different layers, with the vignette of Columbus being crowned by Glory, who occupies the top and centre of the composition. Below him, to the right, are depictions of the familiar historical figures of Cartier, Champlain, Monseigneur Laval, and then at the bottom, political figures closer to our own time: Louis-Joseph Papineau, Georges-Étienne Cartier, and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine. But despite these similarities in the structure and ambition of the two paintings, the intentions of the two artists are completely different. Bourassa sought to express his admiration for the man who “discovered” America, whereas Miller situates himself in the present by referring to the October Crisis and the tensions created by a province that is tempted to separate from a united Canada. What is more significant is that Miller’s layered structure differs from the pyramidal composition adopted by Bourassa, who placed Columbus at the apex of a pyramid in order to pay him tribute. Miller does not paint the apotheosis of anyone. On the contrary, he plunges us with the foreground of his painting into the whirlwind of recent history.

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Adam Miller’s painting Quebec adheres to a long tradition of history painting, but brings to it a dimension that has not been seen previously with such clarity or inventiveness. It is the history of the present, to which I referred in citing Thucydides, and, as this great historian of antiquity advocated, Miller expresses the lesson of the recent past for the present moment. After all, the October Crisis is still present in Quebec’s and Canada’s memory, and Oka reminds us that every nationalist and territorial demand brings with it the risk of division and disharmony.

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notes Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia was first published in 1593. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). The opposition between insider and outsider was suggested to me by the artist himself in an email dated 9 September 2016. From an email exchange between the author and Adam Miller, 9 September 2016. Today, this would place us at the height of the Aswam Dam. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 (reissued 2008), vol. II, p. 105, https://books.google.ca/books?id=vk4lEVdmswMC &pg=PR4&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false.

A History of Quebec in the Shadow of the Quiet Revolution Alexandre Turgeon Translated by Ersy Contogouris

In Quebec, painted in 2016–17, Adam Miller has tackled the ambitious project of representing, on a canvas measuring nine by ten feet, an overview of the history of Quebec, following a commission by Montreal businessman Salvatore Guerrera. Close to five hundred years of Quebec history are depicted here, from the 1534 meeting between the explorer Jacques Cartier and the Indigenous chief Donnacona, to the present day, in the figure of Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada as of 4 November 2015, whose presence seems rather discreet and low-key. In order to achieve this goal, Miller has brought together around forty figures and important moments from Quebec history. Some are easier to recognize than others: the viewer will effortlessly identify Jean Charest and Jacques Parizeau, thanks to their distinctive features, but may have more trouble with Jean Lesage and Pierre Elliott Trudeau without the key to the figures.

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It is a rich painting, densely inhabited by a host of figures, with numerous interlocking vignettes running through it, hence the difficulty of teasing out a meaning beyond the narrative framework that can be captured at first glance. At the outset, the attentive viewer will notice a number of associations between various figures who are closely linked to one another. While these associations seem obvious in some instances – for example, between Pauline Marois and Philippe Couillard, who are carrying on, in this painting, the political battle that led to the victory of the latter over the former on 7 April 2014; or Stephen Harper in the shadow of Brian Mulroney; or the iconic meeting between Jacques Cartier and Donnacona – they are less so in others: the link between Daniel Johnson Sr and Robert Bourassa is somewhat perplexing, since they did not face off against each other much in the political arena; and the connection between Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Lucien Bouchard, standing shoulder to shoulder, seems surprising since it is René Lévesque who is considered Trudeau’s alter ego – or nemesis – in the collective imaginary of Quebecers. Faced with such unexpected associations alongside the more usual ones, it is no easy task for a historian to approach Quebec. This painting gives an overview of Quebec history that is far from linear, structured outside a chronological framework. Figures from different times and contexts are brought together in what seems to be a chaotic fashion; this is, however, only an illusory disorder. Closely following his sponsor’s vision, Miller decided to represent the Quebec historical experience in a certain way, and it is the choices he deliberately made that will be analyzed in this article. Which moments, which figures

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from Quebec history did he choose to include in this work? And which were purposefully omitted? What do they represent? To which periods do they belong? And finally, what emerges from this distinctive, if not complex, visualization of the history of Quebec? In answering these questions, we will arrive at a clearer appreciation of Miller’s – and Guerrera’s – understanding of the Quebec historical experience, gaining insight into which myths, which interpretations of the history of Quebec, he subscribes to and stages in his painting.

th e hero es of t he qu e b e cois nat i on Among the myriad individuals that inhabit the painting, thirty-two historical figures have been identified (fig. 2.1). They share the stage with allegorical figures, such as the young girl holding the fleur-de-lys flag and looking out at the viewer confidently,1 and with groups such as the filles du roi and the first Jesuit missionaries. In order to better understand Miller’s conception of Quebec history, we must begin by taking a closer look at the cast of figures that he has represented. The political dimension dominates the painting. It is omnipresent. Of the thirty-two historical figures, thirty are closely linked to politics as understood in its wider sense, and only three of them are women. Among the politicians are Canadian prime ministers (John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau) as well as Quebec premiers (Jean Lesage, Daniel Johnson Sr, Robert Bourassa,

René Lévesque, Pierre-Marc Johnson, Daniel Johnson Jr, Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard, Bernard Landry, Jean Charest, Pauline Marois, Philippe Couillard); ministers (Pierre Laporte); diplomats (James Cross); First Nations chiefs (Donnacona, Joe Norton) and Métis leaders (Louis Riel); explorers sent by the French Crown (Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain); spokespeople (Ellen Gabriel) and militants (Paul Rose). There is a predominance of state leaders, twelve of Quebec and nine of Canada. Some of them play leading roles in the painting, while others are simply shown in the background. Apart from John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, all the prime ministers depicted served in office after 1960. Of the thirteen premiers of Quebec since 1960, only Jean-Jacques Bertrand has not been included. He was interim premier for two years after the death of Daniel Johnson Sr in 1968, and while it is true he did not leave a significant or long-lasting contribution to the province, did either Pierre-Marc Johnson or Daniel Johnson Jr, who were the premiers for only three months and nine months respectively? Of the nine prime ministers of Canada since 1968 – which marks the beginning of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s first mandate – only Joe Clark and John Turner have been sidelined. The reasons are not clear: Joe Clark’s mandate was indeed brief, but longer than Paul Martin’s, while John Turner’s interim prime ministership was shorter than Kim Campbell’s. As for Macdonald and Laurier, their presence in this painting is not surprising. Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada, holding office from 1867 to 1873 and then again from 1878 to 1891. He has been at the centre of a number of

controversies these last few years, particularly regarding his treatment of First Nations, as recently brought to light by James Daschuk in Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life,2 which does not take anything away – on the contrary – from Miller’s undertaking. As for Laurier, he was the first French-Canadian prime minister of Canada and is among the most respected political figures in the country. His name was on everyone’s lips in October 2015 after the federal elections, when Justin Trudeau, having decisively beaten incumbent prime minister Stephen Harper, spoke of a return to the “sunny ways,” a clear reference to a phrase coined by Laurier in the 1890s after the resolution of the Manitoba school question. This systematic privileging of state leaders from the last sixty years means that others have been relegated to the margins of Quebec and Canadian history. At the federal level, noteworthy is the absence of William Lyon Mackenzie King, for instance, who holds the record for longest-serving prime minister, and John Diefenbaker, who broke electoral records, in Quebec in particular, during the 1958 elections, when his party received 208 of 265 seats. At the provincial level, it is surprising not to see Honoré Mercier, who was the first premier to put Quebec autonomy at the centre of his politics, also mobilizing French-Canadian opposition to the execution of Louis Riel. Even more surprising is the absence of Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1959, who holds the record for longest time in office and who has carved out an important position in the collective memory of Quebecers. His era, known as the Great Darkness, remains a

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The Battle of Long Sault Lionel Groulx The death of James Wolfe The death of Louis-Joseph de Montcalm Pox-infected blankets Filles du roi Jacques Cartier Chief Donnacona Samuel de Champlain Wilfrid Laurier John A. Macdonald Louis Riel Early Jesuit missionaries Red River Rebellion Stephen Harper Brian Mulroney Jean Lesage Jean Charest Bernard Landry Justin Trudeau Jean Chrétien Lucien Bouchard Pierre Trudeau Daniel Johnson Sr Pauline Marois René Lévesque Robert Bourassa Jacques Parizeau

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Philipe Couillard Paul Desmarais Pierre Marc Johnson Paul Martin Joe Norton Ellen Gabriel Daniel Johnson Jr Kim Campbell James Cross Paul Rose The October Crisis Oka Crisis Pierre Laporte

myth that is both persistent and relevant for us in this analysis. The Great Darkness is an interlude in the history of Quebec, a moment when progress was stalled, as it was in the so-called Dark Ages. Duplessis’s exclusion, as I will argue below, is therefore significant. In addition to the premiers and prime ministers, other political figures appear prominently in Adam Miller’s painting, for instance the trio, in the foreground, of James Cross, Paul Rose, and Pierre Laporte. They are three icons of the 1970 October Crisis that rocked Quebec society. In the wake of the various postwar protest movements, specifically those calling for decolonization, demands for the “liberation” of Quebec from the yoke of Canadian rule became louder. It is in this context that the Front de libération du Québec (Quebec Liberation Front) was formed, a terrorist organization whose most infamous deed was the kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and of Pierre Laporte, minister of labour in Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government. Cross was freed after two months, but Laporte was assassinated in circumstances that remain unclear to this day. In Miller’s painting, Paul Rose, member of the Chénier cell of the Front de libération du Québec that kidnapped Laporte, is depicted dragging his two victims, with their hands bound and heads covered, toward him.3 They are visible only from the back, so that their faces are hidden; a preparatory sketch shows that Miller had initially thought about showing more of the kidnapper’s face (fig. 2.2), which might have given an insight into his feelings. It is equally significant that Miller decided to include Joe Norton, Grand Chief of Kahnawake, and Ellen Gabriel,

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spokesperson for Kanesatake, two major players in what has come to be known as the Oka Crisis. In the summer of 1990, the plan to construct a golf course and real estate project on Mohawk territory in Oka, over burial grounds in particular, triggered major social unrest. Mohawk demonstrators faced off against the police and army over a period of seventy-eight days along a roadblock that became infamous after one confrontation led to the death of Corporal Marcel Lemay. The Oka Crisis nevertheless helped bring the issue of Indigenous rights to the forefront of political concerns, both in Quebec and in Canada. The inclusion of Louis Riel, who, during the Red River Rebellion in 1869–70, led the Métis in defending their land against the federal government’s attempt to give it to newly arrived immigrants, is also quite telling. Riel is a controversial figure in Canada if there ever was one: a hero to some – he is now widely considered the founder of the province of Manitoba – and a miscreant to others. The polemic rages on. As recently as February 2017, former Alberta Conservative mp Peter Goldring called Louis Riel a terrorist who does not deserve to be honoured,4 particularly for his role in the execution of Thomas Scott, which has long been considered an assassination. Today, Riel has become a symbol of the ongoing struggle of the First Nations and Métis in Canada. He even became the subject of an opera that played across Canada in 2017.5 Of the thirty-two figures identified in Miller’s painting, two are not linked to politics, at least not directly. One is Canon Lionel Groulx, who was a leading French-Canadian intellectual during the first half of the twentieth century and an inspiration for a whole generation of intellectuals.6 The other is the

businessman Paul Desmarais, who built a media conglomerate, Gesca, with operations in different fields. This opened many doors for him, and he was able to gain access to the halls of power in Quebec City and Ottawa. In the piece, considering where they stand, Groulx seems to represent a more traditional French Canada, one that is somewhat detached from public affairs, whereas Desmarais embodies a resolutely modern Francophone Canada, at the heart of political and economic life. These are the historical figures depicted in Adam Miller’s painting. I will now turn to an analysis of the different epochs they belong to in order to better understand which history of Quebec Miller has chosen to represent. 19

a re five cen tur ies l o o kin g u p on u s? From Jacques Cartier and Donnacona to Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, the figures who inhabit this painting appear to cover the entire spectrum of the Quebec historical experience. But the scope of this historical panorama is in fact rather misleading. While figures and events from each century are depicted in the painting, their representation is uneven. The sixteenth century is only designated by the meeting between Jacques Cartier and Donnacona. The representation of the seventeenth century is much more generous in comparison: Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec City, stands alongside the first Jesuit missionaries and the filles du roi in a tableau that culminates in the Battle of Long Sault of May 1660. This battle has played

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an important role in the Quebec collective imaginary: Adam Dollard des Ormeaux in particular is remembered from a mythical account later put forward by Lionel Groulx in his historian works7 (although it has since been deconstructed)8 of brave French settlers pushing back Iroquois aggressors to preserve the safety of the colony. This effervescence, which marks the starting point of the French colony in America, does not continue into the next century. Miller has chosen to represent the eighteenth century with the pox-infected blankets gifted to Chief Pontiac and his troops, and the deaths of the generals James Wolfe and LouisJoseph de Montcalm during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Quebec on 14 September 1759. This battle is widely understood to have sealed the fate of North America, in a conflict known in Canada as the War of the Conquest, in the United States as the French and Indian War, and in the rest of the world as the Seven Years’ War. The nineteenth century is hardly more present in the painting. Neither the Patriotes Rebellion of 1837–38, the Act of Union, the issue of responsible government, nor Confederation – the political event of the century, the 150th anniversary of which prompted the piece’s commission – found their way into Adam Miller’s painting. The artist decided instead to show a trio of historical figures side by side, chronology notwithstanding: Wilfrid Laurier, with his distinctive white hair, John A. Macdonald, and Louis Riel, who stands above them, while the Red River Rebellion is in full swing on the right side of the painting. It is the representation of the rebellion that dominates this part of the piece, while the two prime ministers,

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more effaced, standing back, seem subordinated to Riel, especially Macdonald, whose body is turned toward Riel as if distressed or fearful before him. As for the twentieth century, it is represented by close to twenty historical figures, from Wilfrid Laurier, who was prime minister between 1896 and 1911, to Lucien Bouchard. The twenty-first century, although it is still quite new, is nevertheless well represented with ten historical figures – if we count those whose public activity took place on either side of the year 2000, such as Paul Desmarais, Lucien Bouchard (who was the premier of Quebec from 1996 to 2001), and Jean Chrétien, prime minister of Canada between 1993 and 2003 – prime ministers and premiers all, with the exception of Desmarais. It is thus in large part the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that Miller has chosen to portray in this painting. Out of the thirty-two historical figures, twenty-six are post-1900, twenty-seven if we include Wilfrid Laurier. Only he and Lionel Groulx relate to the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, twenty-five figures are from the past sixty years, while only seven are from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. How can we explain this imbalance? It seems the artist’s representation stands fully in line with what we might call the dominant paradigm in Quebec historiography: the rupture known as the Quiet Revolution.

t he imp orta n ce of the quiet revolu t i on The two mythical narratives of Duplessis’s Great Darkness and the Quiet Revolution articulate a dichotomous conception of the Quebec past wherein the year 1960 represents a significant break. After fifteen years of Union Nationale government, three major events in quick succession – the death of premier Maurice Duplessis on 7 September 1959; the death of his successor, Paul Sauvé, on 2 January 1960; and the election of the Liberal Jean Lesage and his “équipe du tonnerre”9 on 22 June 1960 – sealed in the collective imaginary the idea of a clean break between two epochs and two worlds: between old and new regimes, as the political scientist Léon Dion formulated it,10 between the Great Darkness and the Quiet Revolution. The famous “Désormais …”11 that Sauvé is said to have uttered when he came to power on 11 September 1959, a catchphrase that indicated his desire to distance himself from his predecessor, reinforces the idea of a past that is being rejected from both sides of the political spectrum.12 According to this same narrative, the Great Darkness is presented as a moment of stagnation, an aberration in the Quebec historical experience, during which everything was suspended: the march toward progress was halted while the forces of reaction had the upper hand. The Quiet Revolution, on the other hand, is seen as a moment of affirmation and emancipation: the beginning of a modern Quebec in which everything became possible. Whether it is in the historiography, literature, cinema, political discourse, or media (print or social), the spectre of the Quiet Revolution is omnipresent in Quebec society. It casts a

shadow on Quebec history – present and past, but also future, as it seems clear this myth is here to stay. It organizes and structures Quebec history around the year 1960, between a before and after into which everything divides, on the face of it at least. It appears that Adam Miller also buys into this myth. It is no coincidence that the first premier of Quebec to be represented in his painting is Jean Lesage, thus completely sidelining Maurice Duplessis and the Great Darkness. Nor is it a coincidence that the vast majority of historical figures and events depicted date from the 1960s and after. It is as if all the figures, moments, and events prior to 1960 are mere backdrops to give the impression, if not the illusion, of a long-term continuity in the history of Quebec that persists nowadays. In Adam Miller’s imaginary, the real narrative, the real subject of the painting, the flesh-and-blood history of Quebec seems to have existed only since 1960, and not before. Such a vision will certainly appeal to the viewers of this painting and to the internal and external observers of Quebec society, in that it corresponds in all aspects to the collective imaginary wherein the myths of Duplessis’s Great Darkness and of the Quiet Revolution structure the Quebec past. With this in mind, it becomes possible to look at the painting from a different angle. René Lévesque’s positioning, in the centre of the scene, now takes on a new significance. Premier of Quebec from 1976 to 1984, and founding leader of the Parti Québécois, which remains today the spearhead of the sovereigntist movement in Quebec, Lévesque was also one of the main protagonists of the Quiet Revolution. While minister

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of natural resources in Lesage’s Liberal government, he led the ambitious project, in 1962, of nationalizing hydroelectricity in Quebec with the memorable slogan Maîtres chez nous.13 In many ways, the collective memory considers not Lesage but Lévesque to be the true leader of the Quiet Revolution. The depiction of René Lévesque in Miller’s painting tends to confirm this role. At the very least, it shows his place as the most important historical figure in Quebec in Miller’s vision. He stands at the centre of the painting, his arms open wide, his gaze cast far ahead – or far behind, toward the distant past, for his attention seems fixed on the first Jesuit missionaries. Lévesque’s isolation and his noble posture set him apart from the other figures. In comparison, Lesage is much more innocuous, while Jean Charest, not far behind, his face partly in the shade, seems much more severe, if not outright Machiavellian. The events known as the printemps érable14 that shook Quebec in the spring and summer of 2012, when students descended into the streets to protest en masse against the hikes in tuition fees proposed by Charest’s Liberal government, may very well not be unrelated to this.

conclus i on It is therefore to a kind of presentist history of Quebec that the viewers of this painting are invited. This perspective allows us to better understand some of the artist’s – and his sponsor’s – editorial choices when it came to selecting, among the infinitude of Quebec history, the key figures and moments to repre-

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sent. Miller and Guerrera seem particularly sensitive to the issue of First Nations and Métis in Quebec and Canada, a concern that is now more topical than ever, particularly with the recent publication of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding the way Indigenous people were treated in residential schools during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the current context, when the demands and rights of Indigenous people are on the agenda as never before, it is rather significant that Miller decided to depict a number of elements concerning these issues throughout his painting. Certain events seem to punctuate their history – within Quebec history, which is no easy task to say the least – in a narrative that is repeatedly marked by confrontation and reprisals: the Battle of Long Sault, the contaminated blankets, the Red River Rebellion, and the Oka Crisis are the key threads of this narrative. While the presence of the first Jesuit missionaries and of Louis Riel in this painting can be easily justified, this is not the case with Joe Norton and Ellen Gabriel. Their inclusion allows the artist to insist even more on the events of the Oka Crisis and the issues that underpinned them, which are represented in the background. More generally, the vision of Quebec history that emanates from this painting is, to say the least, one of conflict. In an interview given after the public unveiling of the piece, Adam Miller talked about a character he called “Confusion” – the bearded man at the front of the painting wearing a striped scarf – which he acknowledged is a self-portrait. Confusion is an outsider “who walks into

this gigantic story, this epic story that is told over centuries about a lot of different cultures and people, and is just confounded and confused by the whole thing. I felt that was an honest way to approach this story. I can have theories about it and I have listened to other people’s stories and put them together but in the end, I think Confusion’s interpretation is central to the story.”15 Confusion, if not chaos, might be the final key required to fully understand this painting, and grasp what it’s all about. Being “confounded and confused by the whole thing,” as he puts it himself, it seems Miller opted to represent elements in this fashion. The historical figures jostle and crash into each other, while at their feet, the October Crisis and the Oka Crisis, the first at the front of the scene, the second slightly back, confirm this impression, this feeling of chaos, or at least of perpetual conflict. In the land of Quebec where the revolutions are neither disruptive nor loud, but rather peaceful and quiet, this is quite uncanny. Indeed, this feeling of chaos is repeated and reinforced in the violent confrontations taking place high in the sky: the first Jesuit missionaries – one in quite a threatening pose, the Battle of Long Sault, the deaths of generals Wolfe and Montcalm, contaminated bedding, the Red River Rebellion … Adam Miller’s – and Salvatore Guerrera’s – history of Quebec, in the shadow of the Quiet Revolution, marked not by agreement and conciliation but by disagreement and division, is undoubtedly a product of its time. It remains to be seen what time will have to say about it.

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notes One cannot help but wonder if the similarities between this young girl and well-known Quebec actress Karine Vanasse, who first appeared in Léa Pool’s Emporte-moi, are fortuitous. James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013). James Cross was kidnapped not by the Chénier cell but by the Libération cell during the 1970 October Crisis. See Dylan C. Robertson (@withfilesfrom), “Former mp Peter Goldring emails the press gallery to tell us ‘half breed’ Louis Riel ‘was rightly hanged’ for terrorism. #cdnpoli,” Twitter post, 21 February 2017, 14:40, http:// twitter.com/withfilesfrom/status/834125568132120576. For a critical review of the opera, see Adam Gaudry, “A Métis Night at the Opera: Louis Riel, Cultural Ownership, and Making Canada Métis,” Adam Gaudry, Ph.D., 18 May 2017, https://adamgaudry.wordpress.com/2017/05/18/ametis-night-at-the-opera-louis-riel-cultural-ownershipand-making-canada-metis/. Lionel Groulx was also a historian who played a fundamental part in the professionalization of the discipline. Among other things, he founded the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, which continues to group historians from Quebec and French Canada to this day, and the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, the top history journal in Quebec.

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7 Lionel Groulx, Dollard est-il un mythe? (Montreal: Fides, 1960). 8 Patrice Groulx, Pièges de la mémoire: Dollard des Ormeaux, les Amérindiens et nous (Hull: Vents d’Ouest, 1998). He is not related to Lionel Groulx. 9 The “terrific team” was the name given to his team, which then became his cabinet. 10 Léon Dion, “De l’ancien… au nouveau régime,” Cité Libre 12, no. 39 (June–July 1961): 3–14. 11 “From now on …” 12 Sauvé never actually used that catchphrase in any speech. See Alexandre Turgeon, “Et si Paul Sauvé n’avait jamais prononcé le ‘Désormais…’?,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 67, no. 1 (summer 2013): 33–56. 13 “Masters of our own house.” 14 “Maple Spring,” in reference to the Arab Spring, which had happened the previous year, in 2011. 15 Michelle Lalonde, “New York Artist’s Masterpiece Depicts Quebec’s Shaping of Canada,” Montreal Gazette, 12 June 2017, http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/newyork-artists-masterpiece-depicts-quebecs-shaping-ofcanada.

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The New Objectivism Donald Kuspit

The first effect of the depreciation of our fine old objective criteria is to abolish all the difficulties – at least the conventional ones – in art. No one any longer enjoys the laborious study … of a piece of cloth thrown over a chair, of a leaf, or a hand … nor takes any pleasure in a slow, disinterested, close-up communion with any object, drawing therefrom a degree of selfknowledge and a sense of collaboration between his intellect, his motive, his vision, and his hand, in relation to a given thing … – Paul Valéry, “Degas, Manet, Morisot”1 Civilized beings are those who survey the world with some larger generality of understanding … One characteristic of the primary mode of conscious experience is the fusion of a large generality with an insistent particularity. – Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought 2

A revolution – to use that overused word – is brewing in art. This serious change of sensibility and attitude involves a return to seemingly old and outdated verities, to the craft techniques and mythopoetic imagination broadly characteristic of Old Master, or dead museum, art. This turn away from living modern art, that is, art that spoke to and for materialistic and secular modernity, that addressed and celebrated what Charles Baudelaire called “the heroism of modern life,” draws instead from an art that embodied traditional spiritual attitudes and religious ideas about the world, which often involved veneration of nature and humanity, however fallen and unsightly. In modernity, life was no longer sacred, and art no longer served its sacredness: life had become profane, and art with it. Aristocracy was on the way out, democracy – and mass society – on the way in. Baudelaire’s modern artist dandy was an aristocratic observer of a democratic world, superior to its vulgarity

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yet immersed in it.3 This world was inescapable, a point strongly made by Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans, 1849– 50, which had been attacked because it showed the democratic crowd in all its vulgar ugliness, the officiating priest no more than another member of the throng. And yet art seemed to afford, or at least to search for, an aesthetic way of escaping from, not to say rising above, it. But the modern democratizing, materialistic world demanded a new aesthetic. The modernist art critic Clement Greenberg thought Courbet’s deliberate emphasis on the materiality of the medium led the way toward it, but he regarded it as too heavy-handed and unrefined, if not crude and vulgar, altogether antithetical to the polished, “aristocratic” surface of Italian Renaissance painting. It became increasingly clear, decisively so with Futurism and Wassily Kandinsky, that the new aesthetic had to be as dynamic, exciting, and continuously changing as the dynamic and exciting modern world, in contrast to the old static world. “All that is solid melts in air,” as Karl Marx famously said, and what was melting in art was the object, slowly but surely losing its solidity, its material givenness. Kandinsky located a marked shift with Impressionism, when art, he argued, had become distinctly “modern.” He recounted that when he saw The Haystack by Claude Monet he “didn’t recognize” the subject of the painting. Before that unexpected experience, he “had known only realist art,” but now he realized, in a sort of eureka moment of insight, that “objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture.”4 Thus was born non-objective, abstract art, grounded in what he called “internal” rather than “external necessity.”

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It seems no accident that art’s “de-realization” of the object followed the lead from science and its de-realization of matter: astutely aware of the need to justify his revolutionary move, Kandinsky noted that “science itself, in its most positive branches – physics and chemistry – is reaching a threshold whereon is inscribed the Great Question: Is there such a thing as matter?”5 It was as though objective science had permitted the subjective turn inward, the romantic emphasis on feeling for the sake of feeling, on art in the service of the subject rather than the object, on introspection rather than observation. This can be traced back to Baudelaire, who declared, in “The Salon of 1846,” that “It is by feeling alone that art is to be understood,”6 a view seconded and elaborated by Kandinsky in On the Spiritual in Art, where he wrote that “the only judge, guide, and arbiter should be one’s feelings.”7 From this followed the doctrine of radical subjectivism, which became absolute in Abstract Expressionism, as articulated for instance by Jackson Pollock’s insistence that he worked entirely out of the unconscious, that he was driven by instinct or by what Sigmund Freud called the dynamic unconscious, and that his paintings were an expression of his unconscious feelings. Art was no longer in the service of consciousness and reason; it had become oddly unreasonable and unapologetically introverted. What began with Francisco de Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1797–98, climaxed – dead-ended? – in Pollock’s nightmarish Portrait and a Dream, 1953, a monstrous selfportrait, in which the face is grotesquely split in half, signalling a self divided in unresolvable conflict, accompanied by a turbulent, incoherent, self-annihilating dream. All sense of objective

reality has been lost, leaving Pollock with the dregs of subjectivity and a crudely painted, oddly artless, work of art. It is as though the all-out, not to say manic, expression of feeling – the descent into the terrifying depths of the self – demanded the abandonment of thoughtful craft. Thus what began as an attempt to “emulate” and celebrate modern life, to convey its spirit, energy, and changeableness, became a defensive retreat from it, a defiant rejection of objectivity for the sake of increasingly raw subjectivity. It was already in the works in Baudelaire’s elevation of “imagination” over “positivism,” his word for matter-of-fact (if not naïve) realism. He had appropriated this notion from Auguste Comte’s positivism, with its scientific emphasis on hard (material) facts and dismissal of “soft” religion and metaphysics as intellectually backward and unrealistic. Kandinsky’s call for a modern “soulful” art echoes Baudelaire’s appeal for a modern art conceived in the “depths of the soul.” While Kandinsky’s nonobjective spiritual art may have begun as a response to the crass materialism epitomized for him by Rudolf Virchow’s famous statement “I have opened up thousands of corpses, but I never managed to see a soul,”8 it became an aesthetic end in itself. He eschewed representational art, grounded in the perception of an externally given reality, in favour of abstract art, grounded in the intuition of an internally given reality. The subjectivity it sponsored, the feelings it presumably expressed, eventually became extraneous to what Kandinsky called the “dynamic equilibrium” of colours and lines that composed a work. Feeling was sacrificed on the altar of pure form. Colour and line were no longer charged with feeling or “soulfulness,” but

became material facts to be manipulated. This point was made emphatically by Josef Albers in his Homage to the Square series, begun in 1949 at the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, which he resisted and deplored. A total and convinced formalist interested in the interactions among colours – to refer to his famous book published in 1963 – rather than in their emotional import and expressive power, Albers declared that what the critic-historian Harold Rosenberg famously called the “anxiety” of modern art was passé. Colour had no emotional appeal, resonance, or significance for Albers, certainly none of the emotional profundity Kandinsky discussed in the long chapter devoted to its “psychology” in On the Spiritual in Art. Thus the revolutionary subjective turn that art had taken with Romanticism dead-ended in total formalism – even the authoritarian formalism of Ellsworth Kelly’s emotionally empty Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII, begun in 1958: feelingless art for the sake of clever art rather than for the sake of feeling, let alone for what Valéry called the “given thing,” and “communion with any object.” “Make it new,” the poet Ezra Pound advised artists in the early twentieth century. Pursue the “sensation of the new,” as Baudelaire famously wrote in 1859,9 or what Robert Hughes sensationally called “the shock of the new” a century later. Certainly F.T. Marinetti hoped to shock us with the new in his “Futurist Manifesto” when he declared, notoriously, “a raceautomobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the [Winged] Victory of Samothrace.”10 The racing car and the Winged Victory of Samothrace – a new modern machine and an ancient sculpture of the Greek

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goddess Nike – have something in common despite their obvious differences. Nike is a symbol of strength, speed, and victory, attributes the race-automobile aspires to possess. It is as though the race-automobile is a reincarnation, a modern version, of the old goddess, and thus as sacred as she is. But there is also a crucial difference. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the beauty of her idealized body outlined by the thin garment that covers it, represents “Mythology and the Mystic Ideal,” which are “finally overcome” by “automobiles roaring voraciously.” Marinetti’s automobile is revving up not just to race, but to kill. It is an instrument of war that brings violence and death – violent death – with it. It symbolizes (masculine) Mars, not (feminine) Nike. It is endless war, not victory and the peace that it brings. Nike is benign, as her beauty – her idealized, spiritualized body – suggests, while the automobile is malevolent and vicious: it is spiritually and materially ugly. “I stretched out on my machine like a corpse on a bier,” Marinetti wrote, “the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that menaced my stomach.” Again and again the “Futurist Manifesto” celebrates death, including the death of art, and “aggressiveness”: We will glorify war – the only true hygiene of the world – militarism … the destructive gesture of the anarchist … We will destroy museums, libraries … [W]e will free Italy from her numberless museums which cover her with cemeteries … To admire an old picture [in a museum] is to pour our sentiment into a funeral urn instead of hurling it forth in violent gushes of action and productiveness. Will you thus

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consume your best strength in this useless admiration of the past from which you will forcibly come out exhausted, lessened, and trampled? War dehumanizes and destroys. Marinetti’s manifesto epitomizes the dehumanization and destructiveness of art in modernity – not only its sadistic attack on museum art, with its old masterpieces, but its general outlook on life – its ruthless will to power, whatever the cost. The cultural historian José Ortega y Gasset brilliantly summed this up in his famous essay on “The Dehumanization of Art.” Modern art, he wrote, is “inhuman not only because it contains no things human, but also because it is an explicit act of dehumanization. In his escape from the human world, the young artist cares less for the ‘terminus ad quem,’ the startling fauna at which he arrives, than for the ‘terminus a quo,’ the human aspect which he destroys … For the modern artist, aesthetic pleasure derives from such a triumph over human matter. That is why he has to drive home the victory by presenting in each case the strangled victim.”11 It was inevitable that there would be a reaction to art’s dehumanization, a rejection and rebuttal of modern art, more particularly of non-objective or abstract art. That this reaction was delayed for a century was perhaps unavoidable considering modern art’s institutionalization and idolization. The recoil occurred not only because abstract art was almost as old as Methuselah, suggesting that it was no longer fertile with possibilities, but because a new generation of young artists – not the young twentieth-century artists who gave birth to modern art, as Ortega y Gasset noted, but the young twenty-first-century

artists witness to its decadence and end – realized that art should be made for and by human beings, not for its own selfcongratulatory sake. Abstract art seemed to have been made by and for abstract human beings, even self-made, as if in hermetic glory. But human beings are not abstract; they are made by the society in which they live as much as by nature. For the young twenty-first-century “post-modernists,” art should address the human condition. It should insightfully articulate what it means to be human in a world not of one’s own making, a world that was given before one was born into it, a world that began in the past, and continues to be informed by it, however unwittingly or unconsciously. Even non-objective art engages the human condition. The new objective or realist artists, or New Old Masters, as I call them,12 look to museum art for inspiration. They return to the idealizing art of the Old Masters, recognizing and appreciating their use of classical myths and religious metanarratives to mediate their experience of life, which thus seems fated while its ironies and absurdities are made palatable and digestible. The New Old Masters reject non-objective art, realizing that it was dubiously Solomonic in its aesthetic wisdom: it split off art that attended to the object or “external necessity” – it was supposedly beside the aesthetic point – from art that attended to feeling or “internal necessity.” This left art peculiarly crippled or incomplete, half-baked, as it were, and thus peculiarly unsatisfying. One might say that non-objective art was unable to accept the ambiguity of experience, the inseparability of external and internal reality, object and subject, perception and introspection, leaving one uncertain how much of each was involved in

human experience. The twentieth-century non-objective artist wanted certainty (just like Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century positivist artist did): why could Kandinsky not see the haystack as well as the colours in Monet’s “impression” of it? Why could he not accept the doubleness (“duplicity”) of the image, or at least remain in a state of undecidability and appreciate both? Both the colours and the haystack are real: Monet was responsive to both, attentive to both. Dispense with one or the other and you are left with a trivial “impression,” no memorable humanizing experience, a work of art that is peculiarly disappointing and perhaps ultimately insignificant. Purity sells life and humanness short, leaving art in an existential crisis, all the more so because abstract art is no longer shockingly new, but has become a shopworn convention, indeed, a narrow-minded, dogmatic ideology, inhibiting creative exploration; it is no longer the avenue to lived sensuousness and transcendence it once claimed to be. Any work of art that sells the internal or the external short, that elevates one at the expense of the other, fails to convey their interdependence, indeed, their co-determination, as the Old Masters did. As such, it is seriously flawed, a clever failure. Rejecting the humanistic realism of the past – the traditional “realism, naturalism, illusion” that has contributed so much to “Western art,” as even Greenberg acknowledged13 – leaves one stuck in the specious present, making speciously original art. For if there is no originality without tradition, as the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued, then seemingly original non-objective art, more broadly the endless reiterations of the originality, not to say newness, of modern art (Cubism,

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Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop Art, Earth Art, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, each claiming to be more new and original, and with that more “advanced,” than the other), is peculiarly specious, for they all reject or are indifferent to tradition. When Salvador Dalí returned to realism in The Basket of Bread, 1926, and began to make hyperrealistic, exquisitely crafted myth-inspired and religious paintings informed by a modern understanding of reality, most famously Leda Atomica, 1949, and The Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955, he was dismissed as a reactionary. There is some truth to this, for he was reacting – rebelling – against the subjectivism of his earlier Surrealism by grounding his art in the existential myths and mystical idealism of the museum art that Marinetti despised and rejected. It was a revolutionary regression to fine-tuned, insightful realism, profoundly radical in its implications. By returning to the perceptual and mythical roots of art, and perhaps above all by focusing on the figure, making the human body once again central to art, Dalí re-humanized and re-originated it, all the more so because his figures are not surreally distorted, cubistically mangled, or abstracted into pure form. Roberto Ferri and Adam Miller are two of the most important New Old Master realist painters working today. Like with the Old Masters, technique and imagination seamlessly converge in their works, and the human figure is the subject of their art. They are masters at conveying bodiliness, a lived experience of the living body. Ferri is particularly adept at representing the sexualized body – Eros embodied in the male and female body. His tenebrism is deeply indebted to the Baroque

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realist Caravaggio, but it is more intense and extreme, and his handling more painterly and “wet.” Ferri is appreciative of classical myth as an insightful mediator of profound human experience; he paints mythical figures, both pagan and Christian, with exquisite craft. His three paintings treating the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 2010, from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, are flawless masterpieces in the Grand Tradition, and his less lush, more subdued – dry and linear – Stations of the Cross, 2011, are more than a match for Quattrocento renderings of that Christian narrative.14 Ferri’s The Horseman of the Apocalypse, 2011, is the most original, ingenious, complex, grandiose, bizarre, unusual – oddly surreal as well as incisively realistic (surreal because it carries hyper-realism to an extreme and overloads it with symbolic objects, making it more evocative and deepening its meaning, so that it instantly engages the unconscious) – rendering of the subject since Albrecht Dürer’s more conventional representation of the horsemen as familiar earthly figures in the sky (rather than an unfamiliar weird angel at home in it) in 1498. For both Ferri and Miller, the myth supplies the “larger generality of understanding,” as Whitehead calls it, and the human figure – often the active, self-dramatizing body – provides the “insistent particularity” necessary for a grand humanistic art. But whereas Ferri lives entirely in the world of myth, Miller finds the mythical in the mundane. Ferri’s figures, however acutely observed, are strangely unfamiliar, oddly absurd fantasies, while Miller’s are everyday, familiar people, sometimes in period costume, sometimes displaced into a mythical world, for instance in Twilight in Arcadia (2013; fig. 3.1). Miller’s men

Figure 3.1. Adam Miller, Twilight in Arcadia, 2013. Oil on canvas, 243.84 × 182.88 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3.2. Adam Miller, Apparition, 2013. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 101.6 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3.3. Adam Miller, The Roses Never Bloomed So Red, 2013. Oil on canvas, 228.6 × 152.4 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

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are clothed and carry guns: they are clearly aggressive, dangerous, menacing, rugged, crude, vulgar, emotionally and physically ugly. His women are naked, vulnerable, helpless, passive, and beautiful, their bodies idealized into perfection, sights to behold that jump out of the picture, suggesting their goddesslike autonomy and their superiority to the men, even if they seem inferior, laid out on the ground, looking like they are unable to move or lift themselves up, like they are strangely incapacitated. Miller’s men and women are clearly at odds, as Apparition (fig. 3.2) and The Roses Never Bloomed So Red (fig. 3.3), both 2013, make clear. It is the battle of the sexes, with man triumphantly standing over woman, but then her body promises paradise. If he accepts her peace offering – the promise of pleasure and plenty of the flowers she holds in her left hand in Apparition and the roses she holds in her right hand in The Roses Never Bloomed So Red – then she is the victor. An ingenious take on the myth of Mars and Venus, more deeply on the difference between Eros and Thanatos, or libido and the death drive, as Freud called them – Eros uniting, Thanatos dividing – these works are allegorical masterpieces bespeaking profound human truths. Both Ferri and Miller address the conflict innate to human beings, the inner and outer conflict. Ferri’s works are sublime, sometimes ironically so, as when he gives his female angel devil’s wings in Liberaci Male, 2013, suggesting that she is a fallen angel, not to say a devilish temptress, as women tend to be in Ferri’s paintings (Salmacis is another one). Miller’s works are down to earth. His figures literally stand on it (they do not have wings that would allow them to fly into Ferri’s sublime

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sky). Sometimes conflict is overcome, as when Hermaphoditus and Salmacis fuse, become physically and emotionally one, suggesting the implicit bisexuality of human beings, or, more broadly, their need of and identification with each other. And sometimes, as in Miller’s paintings, it is not overcome, and it is the incompatibility, even irreconcilability, of man and woman that is emphasized. Both Ferri and Miller have mastered the dialectic of opposites, sometimes resolved, as it tends to be in Ferri’s works, sometimes unresolved, as it tends to be in Miller’s. The latter’s The Night Watch, 2017, whose title ironically repeats Rembrandt’s famous work of 1642, makes the point clearly: the male and female nudes form a V – their bodies are diverging diagonals. Their upper bodies are far apart, suggesting they are at odds, but their legs are intimately intertwined, implying they are unconsciously connected, dreaming of each other while peacefully asleep, as though after coitus. They are clearly double, self-contradictory figures, simultaneously related and unrelated to each other, at odds yet oddly and inseparably together. Ferri and Miller have understood their own doubleness and projected it onto their paintings. If ripeness is all, then there is no ripeness without doubleness, the healthy synthesis of opposites whose incompatibility in the unconscious is made uncannily compatible through conscious creativity. This is what such masterful art as Ferri’s and Miller’s achieves, following the lead of the Old Masters, who understood that the basic purpose of art is to show that the conflicts inherent to being human, our all-too-human doubleness, can be imaginatively resolved. The resolution is mythical and make-believe, but myth made

believable through art becomes a model for life. “An artist is only an artist on condition that he is a double man,” Baudelaire wrote, “and that there is not one single phenomenon of his double nature of which he is ignorant.”15 This knowledge permits him to overcome his double nature by making unnatural art, by masterful artifice and rich imagination. However strangely, this makes him – or rather his art – what Baudelaire called a beacon in the darkness of life. Ferri’s and Miller’s paintings are beacons of New Old Master art; they are milestones in the history of art. Theirs is a new civilized, “fine” art, an art for the twentyfirst century. It contrasts sharply with the so-called primitivism of much twentieth-century art, which is no longer novel or exciting. Modern technological societies are as barbaric as preindustrial primitive societies whose art many so-called avantgarde artists idolized and appropriated, naively thinking that it was personal rather than tribal, an expression of individuality rather than a collective cult art. To Paul Gauguin, their “barbarism,” as he called it, was a “rejuvenation,” while August Strindberg, refusing in a letter to write about Gauguin’s “savage” paintings, thought they were merely “bizarre.”16 Pablo Picasso’s 1935 remark that his art was a “sum of destructions”17 makes it clear that it was the quintessential, emblematic art of the twentieth century: as the historian Niall Ferguson stated, “the hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era.”18 More particularly, the historian Eric Hobsbawm noted, “a recent estimate of the century’s ‘megadeaths’ is 187 million … more

human beings [who] have been killed or allowed to die by human decision than ever before.”19 The killing of traditional artists by modern artists is one of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in the twentieth century. While Ferri and Miller integrate the “larger generality of understanding” signified by myth and the “insistent particularity” of the human body, other Old Master artists tend to treat the human body as an end in itself, whatever its mythological and narrative context. Carefully studying its details, they emphasize its objective character – its sheer physical givenness, its indisputable material reality – whatever feelings they accord the human beings pictured in various situations. Steven Assael and F. Scott Hess are masters at this “hyper-objectification” of the body. This is strikingly evident in their female figures, which are decidedly earthbound rather than beautiful goddesses, as Hess’s Riverbed, 2009, and Assael’s Fallen Groom, 2015, make clear. They tend to be seductively fleshy and warmbodied, luridly naked like the women in Assael’s Bridal Preparation, 2015, and Hess’s His Donkey’s Voice, 2003, rather than nude goddesses to be worshipped but not touched. They are peculiarly uninviting, even though, like the statuesque goddesses of antiquity, their bodies are idealized and their skin polished to perfection. There are many other New Objectivist painters, but their style lacks the Old Master quality and character – the insight and wisdom embedded in classical and Christian myth – of Ferri and Miller. However objective, these other painters tend toward the subjective, the objective becoming a platform for the subjective. They do not present the seamless integration

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of subjective and objective, interiority and exteriority, that we find in Ferri’s and Miller’s mythic paintings, the former poetic, the latter prose masterpieces. The realism of the other Objectivists, however attentive to given facts – especially the persistent givenness of the human body – is openly informed by “daring” modernist practice. This can be seen for instance in some artists’ emphasis on the material surface for its own expressive sake, their tendency to make the medium more meaningful than the scene, in order to render it subjectively, even surreally exciting – see for example Jerome Witkin’s extraordinary Nazi concentration camp series, a remarkable fusion of expressionism and realism, and Eric Fischl’s suburban scenes that represent the naked body, with its pop glamour, as a prop in an erotic fantasy. Similarly, Jenny Saville is a modernist realist; she is quasi-objective and uncertainly subjective; she is as interested in the material medium as in her human subject matter, or perhaps even more, and therefore stays on its surface rather than plumb its depths. Her female figures seem more painterly flesh – raw body – than suffering soul. Vincent Desiderio is the grand master of the New Objectivism, imbuing his bodies with mind. He is a master of the expressive body, clothed, as in I’Liberati, 2011, or naked, as in Sleep, 2008. Soma and psyche fuse seamlessly in his figures. The psychosomatic figure is the triumphant achievement of New Old Master art. Some of Desiderio’s figures derive from classical myth, like those in Theseus, 2016; others are ruthlessly objective, as in The Bride, 2015. These qualities can also be found in the art of Odd Nerdrum, who unites the objective

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and subjective, body and soul. However different their settings, Nerdrum’s figures are as subjectively resonant and skilfully rendered as Desiderio’s. He is a kind of mentor to the younger New Old Masters. Both Nerdrum and Desiderio support this younger generation and teach them in their workshops. Baudelaire thought that the antithesis of modern art was philosophical art, a literary art produced by learned artists rather than a purely visual art for the unlearned eye:20 on the one hand, an art for the mind’s eye as well as the body’s eyes, a reflective, stable art, an art that invited intellectual reflection even as it afforded ingratiating sensations; on the other hand, an art only for the body’s eyes, which neglected the mind for the sake of ephemeral sensations, which afforded inconstant, unstable sensations rather than focused, steady thoughtfulness, which cultivated and educated the mind with no loss of sensuous appeal. Baudelaire thought that modern art should address the ephemeral modern world rather than permanent human concerns, those enduring issues that the Old Masters of the Grand Tradition had engaged through myth and religion, with no loss of objectivity. Observation of the object was the path to insight into the subject, and subjective insight intensified and refined objective observation. It made it enlightening, it offered a kind of revelation of perception and understanding, rather than a routine, mindless, and feelingless recognition of the obvious. The Grand Tradition was dying, Baudelaire wrote in 1846, and the new tradition was in the process of being born. He

celebrated the child as its inspiration – the child who saw everything with new eyes, as though for the first time. Picasso would later remark that it took him a lifetime to learn to make art like a child. The tradition of the new (or avant-garde), as Harold Rosenberg called it, now more than a century and a half old, has lost its freshness and novelty, its revolutionary fervour and daring. It seems only furtively alive, walking in place, with nowhere to go, and thus strangely dead – more dead than Old Master art, which is creatively being revived by the New Old Masters. The New Old Master Objectivists make it clear that the Grand Tradition has risen from the grave to which the Avant-Gardists or Newists, to coin a word, had relegated it. They meet the adult’s frustrated need for a mature, reflective art. Avant-Gardist or Newist art is inspired by, modelled on, and meant for children – the forgotten child in the adult, as it were – because “every object is new” for a child, being “encounter[ed] for the first time,” so that it has an immediate effect. For Kandinsky, it had a “spiritual effect.”21 He wrote, “There is an unconscious, enormous power in children that expresses itself here and places the work of children on the same level as (and often much higher than!) the work of adults.”22 This somewhat hyperbolic remark seems a distant echo of Baudelaire’s assertion half a century earlier that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.”23 But children are emotionally immature, existentially inexperienced, and intellectually undeveloped, not to say ignorant, naïve, unreflective, and limited. Their art is not memorable as Old Master art is. Its immediate effect wears off rather quickly, but we

linger over Old Master art. We are drawn to its insightfulness and ingenious beauty. Uninformed and unmediated by the long experience of life, children’s art is at best a passing fancy. The adult knows that the world is old, that it is fraught with eternal returns of inescapable human issues, which precludes fleeing into the immediate or momentary. Strange as it may seem, taking children’s primitive art as a model led to the undermining of art that occurred when it purged the object. Abstract art became a shell of itself, a perversely limited edition of art, a sort of reductio ad absurdum. When the “laborious study” of the “given thing” was no longer necessary, to recall Valéry’s remarks, art became self-expression; but just like Samson, whose destruction of the temple was his only means of expression, the self had blinded itself.

notes 1 Paul Valéry, “Degas, Manet, Morisot,” in Degas, Manet, Morisot (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 59 (emphasis in the original). 2 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Cambridge, uk, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 5. 3 “Dandyism,” Baudelaire wrote, “appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fail.” It is during such uncertain times that the regressive “cult of … emotions” arises. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other

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5 6

7 38

8 9

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Essays, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Mayne (London and New York: Phaidon, 1995), 28, 27. Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences/Three Pictures” (1913), in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 363. Wassily Kandinsky, “Wither the ‘New’ Art?” (1911), in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky, 101 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in The Mirror of Art, Critical Studies, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1956), 39. Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art” (1912), in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky, 169. Rudolf Virchow, quoted by Kandinsky in “On the Spiritual in Art,” 98. “… la sensation du neuf …,” Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1859,” in Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 265. F.T. Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” 1908, reprinted in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1968), 284–9, 286. All subsequent quotations from Marinetti are from his manifesto. José Ortega y Gasset, “The Dehumanization of Art,” in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1956), 21. For a discussion of New Old Master art see the “Postscript: Abandoning and Rebuilding the Studio” of my book The End of Art (Cambridge, uk, and New York: Cambridge

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University Press, 2004), particularly pages 182–92, and chapter 10, “The Decadence of Advanced Art and the Return of Tradition and Beauty: The New as Tower of Conceptual Babel; the Tenth Decade,” of my ebook A Critical History of 20th-Century Art, first published by artnet magazine, beginning in 2005, and subsequently published in Art Criticism 23, no. 1/2 (2008). Clement Greenberg, “Byzantine Parallels” (1958), in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989 [1961]), 167. For an extensive treatment of Ferri’s art that emphasizes his importance as a “breakthrough” New Old Master, see my article “Refinding the Great Tradition: Roberto Ferri’s Paintings,” American Arts Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Summer 2014). Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” in The Mirror of Art, 143. For the exchange between Gauguin and Strindberg, see Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1968), 80–2. Pablo Picasso, “Conversation,” in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1968), 267. Niall Ferguson, The War of the Worlds: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin, 2006), xxxiv. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 12. Baudelaire’s “Philosophic Art” is a literate, even erudite

“plastic art” that deals with “history, morals and philosophy.” Ironically, “philosophic art presupposes an absurdity – I mean the public intelligence in matters of the fine arts.” (And, one might add, in matters of history, morals and philosophy.) Charles Baudelaire, “Philosophic Art,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 204. 21 Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art,” 157. 22 Kandinsky, “The Blaue Reiter Almanac” (1912), in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky, 251. 23 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 8.

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The New Objectivism

Interview with Adam Miller Clarence Epstein clarence epstein: Let’s begin with your early career and formation as an artist. Can you tell us about the various influences – be they comic books, Old Master paintings, or classical sculptures – and how these melded in your mind to make you the artist you are today? adam miller: I was raised in the United States, without much exposure to classical art. My first real contact with anything resembling representational drawing was through comic books. One of their main subjects was the figure, and they presented an interesting stylistic expressive treatment of the figure. This is an important aspect that is shared by the different traditions you mentioned. I was going down the road to working in illustration and comics full-speed ahead. Gradually I began to take up and get more interested in paint, which led me toward the Renaissance. And I think that Renaissance art really resonated with me because it carried those same themes. The way of treating the human form isn’t naturalistic, it isn’t trying

to reproduce reality, but it’s telling big mythical stories. Today’s version of these stories – this world of almost polytheistic mythology – is what you find in comics and illustration. During the Renaissance, this great tradition came out of Rome and Greece and was consistently kept alive with Italian Catholicism. I believe there is a similar quality that resonated in a lot of the art that I saw in Italy and what I had already been exposed to in the United States. The main differences were just the scale and complexity. In the Renaissance, the narrative was oftentimes represented on a large scale and focused into a single image – on this one image, an artist could spend a year, or two or three years. It was a very involved and labour-intensive way to give shape to these mythical ideas, and this is a way of painting [that] isn’t really practised anymore. We’re in such a rush these days that it doesn’t make sense to spend that kind of human labour on one product that doesn’t serve an industrial purpose, that doesn’t have a mass distribution system behind it to make the person rich. ce: A thread that runs continuously through your practice is that of mythology and humanism. Can you talk about how mythology and humanism are woven into your work? am: I came to humanism in a roundabout way. Mythology was what initially caught my interest, and humanism later grew from that. I was exposed to mythology very early on. When I was around six years old, my mother was studying English literature in college. She would read her books to me: Norse mythology, stories from the Middle Ages, the troubadours, Lord of the Rings, all those texts. I enjoyed these a lot as I was

growing up, and they came to feel natural. As a teenager, like a lot of people in that stage of life, I felt a bit lost. But there is something in the journeys described in those mythological stories that gave me direction, a way to think about things, a way forward, rather than being content hanging out, smoking joints. I felt like it offered me something with some real potential: the idea of doing something bigger than yourself, something outside of yourself. I was seduced by that. This led to me to want to find out more about Renaissance art and literature. I read Dante, philosophers such as Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, some of the Neoplatonists. What attracted me to these humanist philosophers was that they argued that beauty is a reflection of the divine. This resonated with my own experience of art. There is something vast and cosmic and magical in the universe. By coordinating forms and sounds, you can find a reflection of that and tie it into something much bigger than what you’re doing. That made a lot of sense to me. Perceptually that’s what I experienced when I listened to Beethoven or looked at Michelangelo … That was something very different from anything I had seen in pop culture. More and more, this began to shape my desire to spend much longer on a painting, polishing all the angles, and working with the colours and the lines and the forms, harmonizing it to try to find this total experience where all the pieces fit together to express a wider idea. ce: I would like to move the conversation from that backdrop of your work and how it’s expressed to the development of this project. What attracted the patron Salvatore Guerrera to your body

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of work was the painterly qualities that you demonstrated, which were so accomplished and vivid in their expression, meaning, and depth as far as issues of humanism, mythology, and mastery were concerned. What were the steps that led to the commission? Can you reflect on the discussions that took place between you and Mr Guerrera? am: I believe it all started randomly. Sal was on the Internet; he was actually looking for another artist, and that’s when he came across my work. I find this relevant to the international nature of this project: it’s interesting that you can now go on the Internet and see what painters are doing in China or Mexico. So it happened by chance that he came across my work and found what he was looking for. He came to New York to my studio and we sat together for a long time, chatting and getting to know each other. We were on the same wavelength on many issues. He was interested in another painting of mine at the time. He told me that he wanted to buy that work, but with the agreement that I would paint another one for him within a year or so. I agreed, thinking it was no big deal, that I could do a commission, it sounded like fun. His second visit, or maybe it was the third – Clarence, you were also there – was the key visit for me. You two came to New York with a lot of information about this project. We went over it and that’s when I understood what a very intense project it was, to depict the history of an entire province – which at one time had been a nation. That was really the moment when I got a true picture of what Sal wanted and that I grasped the scope of the project. I had to do a lot of learning and reading and studying. Sal really wanted to do the kind of painting that isn’t done that often anymore. You have to go

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back at least a hundred years to Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic (1910–28; fig. 4.1), and not much since then. ce: The conversations about earlier artworks were pivotal to the discussions that took place in New York and sparked your imagination regarding the nature of this kind of composition. If I remember correctly, we looked at Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson’s Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes (1800; fig. 4.2). What linked the three of us was this connection and passion that you had for representing mythology and realism coming together in one painting. While talking about this painting, I also saw the connection between empire and colony, not unlike the history of Canada and the history of Quebec in their own right, and Girodet-Trioson’s painterly style that brings these messages together. This was not unlike what you and Mr Guerrera envisioned would happen with this project. What did you draw from the Ossian painting, and did you see other paintings connecting to the idea that you would eventually present? am: There were two levels. The Girodet-Trioson was key; it gave a strong direction to the painting I would create. The ghosts were going to be central. We were going to give this otherworldly feeling to the painting, with the light entering in a certain way. There is something so beautiful about paintings in which people look at the totality of the state, like in the Ossian, which had been commissioned by Napoleon. It brings a feeling of unity to the work – I feel that this abstract sense can be considered beauty. But the Ossian painting and the Mucha series were produced during the early days of solidifying a nation-state. This

Figure 4.1. Alphonse Mucha, The Coronation of Tsar Stepan Dusan, from the Slav Epic, 1926. Oil and tempera on canvas, 405 × 480 cm. Prague, Mucha Museum. Photo: Mucha Trust / Bridgeman Images.

Figure 4.2. Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes (Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for Their Country during the War of Freedom; homage presented to Napoleon I), 1800. Oil on canvas, 192.5 × 184 cm. Rueil-Malmaison, Châteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Préau (mm.40.47.6955). Photo: Franck Raux. © rmn-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.

means that their point of view is one of strengthening the empire, strengthening the state. I wanted the Quebec painting to have a little more of the chaos of the moment – we’re at a very different historical moment: we’re at a moment when the nation is threatening to dissolve. So it was a matter of taking a very strong, unifying effect of light and design, and creating polarizing tensions throughout it to keep the viewer from getting too much of a restful feeling from it. So historically, we needed a different structure than the one that was presented in the early nineteenth century. That came through exploring some Baroque and even Rococo imagery, something with a little more chaos, for instance after the Thirty Years’ War. These came out of a more chaotic moment, like ours, and they presented a different narrative structure: there was something more playful, mischievous, and exploratory about them. This sense of chaos can be found to have had an influence on the structure of paintings throughout time, and by turning to works such as Rubens’s Marie de Medici cycle (1622–24; fig. 4.3), I was able to bring in some of that energy into the painting. ce: We also discussed Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (1771; fig. 4.4). It was an important part of your formation as a non-Canadian and non-Quebecer in learning about a history that was not familiar to you, but it also seems to me that it provides a very important comparandum with your work in the present. It represents a pivotal moment in the history of Quebec and Canada, a moment of dissolution; and the painter was not a Canadian, but a British American portraying this moment of

transition in the history of Canada. How did you take and interpret that story of the death of Wolfe and this artist’s impression of it when it came to learning about the visual history, as well as the social and political history, of Quebec and Canada? am: I decided to accept and build upon my advantages as an outsider in this project. Similar situations have often happened. Two of the most iconic artworks in [the] history of the United States, for example, were made by foreigners: the Statue of Liberty by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel, who were French, and Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutze, who was part German. What is key here is that as an outsider, you do have an interesting way of viewing things: you weren’t born into a tradition that divides itself into opposing traditions. I tried to keep that in mind. As I learned more about the story of Quebec, I was very consciously trying not to identify with any one point of view, whether it be the French or English or First Nations or separatists or people who want to stay in Canada. I tried to keep myself thoroughly neutral so that I could look at the history as a narrative. And I think that this is one of the positive contributions that a foreigner can make to a project like this one. It is much easier for us to do that. If a Canadian were painting the story of the history of the United States, they would probably do a more convincing job of it in a lot of ways than an American would. It’s like if you grow up in a certain climate, you assume that’s how the weather is. If you grow up with hippies in San Francisco, you have a very different life than if you grow up on a farm in Idaho. And you probably don’t appreciate the particularity of your own existence.

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Figure 4.3. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Apotheosis of Henry IV and the Proclamation of the Regency of Marie de Medici, May 14, 1610. Oil on canvas, 393 × 727 cm. Paris, Louvre (inv 1779). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda / Thierry Le Mage. © rmn-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.

Opposite Figure 4.4. Benjamin West (1738–1820), The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. Oil on canvas, 152.6 × 214.5 cm. Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada (Gift of the 2nd Duke of Westminster to the Canadian War Memorials, 1918; Transfer from the Canadian War Memorials, 1921). Photo: ngc.

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ce: I’m going to assume that your understanding of Quebec and Canada before you got involved in the project was limited, and this wouldn’t be any surprise to Canadians, knowing Americans and their knowledge of our country. What did it take for you to begin to get a grasp of this Quebec and Canada dialogue and history that gave you the kind of impetus to begin interpreting what ultimately was this painting and its composition? am: There were a few moments when things really came to life, and I believe, Clarence, you were there for both of them. One was talking to Sacha Trudeau, and the other to Lucien Bouchard. I was coming in as an outsider and I was getting to talk to people who have actually experienced a lot of the big transitions that happened in last twenty or thirty years. When I spoke to them, the events seemed to come to life. When you see an event through the eyes of a person who experienced it first-hand, the story becomes something that has real drama behind it, real energy, it isn’t just a series of facts. One of the big challenges for me in the project was how to go beyond seeing an entire people and their stories as just a series of facts. Thanks to those two encounters, my eyes opened up more and I thought, Ah, ok, I understand this now, I understand the motivations of the people involved and how they felt about doing what they were doing. That became so much more important than the dates and the technical history. ce: So seeing the history of Quebec and Canada through the eyes of individuals who had strong opinions – and dissimilar opinions – was also for you an eye opener about the variations of interpre-

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tations of the story of Quebec and Canada. Would you agree to that? am: Yes, and it brought to life and validated all these perspectives that I could identify with. If you first walk in and all you have is the information from Wikipedia and perhaps a couple of documentaries you’ve watched and books you’ve read, it’s dry. And you can make easy moral judgments about things. But once you’ve heard from the people involved and their different points of view, you get it – especially if they’re good speakers – you can’t help but get carried along [on] their journey, and then you feel like you’ve experienced it in your own mind. You’re experiencing the story from different points of view, so that it gets rich and complicated. At this point, it gets even harder to compress into a painting. There is so much going on that you have to find the common dramas that unified people. ce: That brings us back to composition. When you were creating your shortlist for the historical and contemporary figures that were going to be represented, how did you order them, how did you devise the rationale for the way we see them ordered in the painting, from the time you had a list to work with to its transfer onto the canvas? am: Some of it came about through discussions and reflections – reflections about how society works. All these characters had played pivotal roles: some were members of the political class involved in some of the important events and decisions, and some were people on the street, average people

who had also been part of important events. They might not have the same power individually as the politicians do, but they’re part of those very large movements, and as such, they’re arguably more important than the politicians themselves. This energy that comes from what people are doing, from what entrepreneurs are doing, from what people are feeling is what guides the directions that the politicians take. At the same time, there is also history. We live in the present, which almost doesn’t exist: at every instant, it’s either the past or the future. This means that all we can really look to in terms of our experience of ourselves or our country is history. History then exists as a myth, a story, and an influence that shapes reality. Those were the three elements that were at play here: politicians, ordinary people, and history. Compositionally, I felt it made sense to place history in the upper part of the painting and in the distance, seen as if through mist, in order to communicate the impression of it influencing present events from afar. I placed the politicians right in the middle, acting as a bridge between the traditions of history and the people. This creates a movement from the back to the front, with the ghosts in the back, the people in the front, and the politicians in the middle, stuck between all these events in a certain sense. It’s a way to visualize the modern state.

in a painting: you want the subject to be powerful but you don’t want it to overwhelm the artist. You want that fifty-fifty balance where the artist doesn’t crush the subject and the subject doesn’t crush the artist. I went through a period of doing a lot of initial sketches that I thought were pretty awful, and then gradually I started to find a way to hold this whole depiction together. In this particular painting, because there was so much information, it was really a question of sketching and sketching until I could find the composition and look that would tie all these different elements together (figs. 4.5–4.12). Once that started to happen, it all became much easier. I started to identify people around me who looked a little like some of the politicians and did a number of sketches of them to try to get the heads and costumes right. Working through these early stages took probably three, four, five months. Once that was done, I had a general idea of the composition that I wanted, I had some studies of the heads, I had costumes … and I could start working on the painting itself: I did a complete drawing on the canvas, then I applied the underpainting. At that point, I thought I had everything figured out, that I would follow the traditional steps and methods – underpainting, glazing – passed on since Titian, and that everything was going to go smoothly. This of course didn’t happen. As I went along, I made many changes.

ce: As the idea translated onto the canvas, what was the process of painting from the textual to the visual? am: There was a lot of sketching, reading, and talking. The subject was a little overwhelming at first. You have to hit a balance

ce: There is a somewhat comical side to the poses of some of the figures that seems to come back to our earlier discussion about comic books and the idea of exaggeration. How did you see that playing into the overall impact of the composition?

Interview with Adam Miller

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Figures 4.5–4.12. Adam Miller, preparatory sketches for Quebec. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

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am: That’s just inescapable in this case. I was very conscious of this – we are painting and painting about politics. Politics are a bit comical, and politicians are a bit comical. I think it’s a mistake to take them too seriously. I didn’t want to elevate the politicians to the realm of the gods in the way that some of the older paintings do. I didn’t want to paint the apotheosis of Lévesque or Trudeau or anyone like that. I wanted to keep a little bit of irony in there to remind people that politics isn’t clean, it is not the realm of the heroic. The heroic lies somewhere else. I think you have to be really clear about that. Politicians’ intentions when making decisions are sometimes honourable, sometimes questionable, and sometimes a combination of both. ce: Another element that underpins much of your oeuvre and that stands out here is the mythological dimension. How did you see mythology playing out in this composition? am: I think in this particular case, the obvious level is the visions of the past coming through. In telling this story, I wanted to paint the myths of these historical characters. I didn’t want to paint the actual characters, because I don’t think they are by and large the ones that are influencing people today: the myths of these characters are what influence people’s ideas. What wove through the different levels, down to the politicians and people, is that they are inhabiting the stories that these characters represent. I see this notion as central to the painting and to the way that any work of art connects to the viewer. It connects through the universal aspects of our psyches or characters that

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the Greeks and Romans personified as gods. If we can’t do those things, then the viewer is lost and we have a bad piece of art that needs a big write-up about it to make any sense of it. I thought it was really important that these characters be portrayed beyond who they are and that they be shown to inhabit the archetypal roles that would connect to the people. You can’t expect the viewers to recognize each individual historical figure, especially with our current education system. It’s just impossible, but viewers still have to get something out of it. And if I’ve done my job as an artist, they will be able to grasp the bigger story, to project themselves into it, whether or not they are familiar with or recognize the technical details of the story. I think that’s where the mythology comes in. More generally, I think that this is what art is about, what storytelling is about, what painting is about. Mythology allowed me to find the meat behind these big stories that people tell themselves in a country or a province, and these stories happen to be the same ones as the ones the Romans told themselves, or people in India told themselves. I wanted to find those stories. ce: I would like to discuss the way that you included yourself in the painting. This is a device that has existed for centuries, with artists representing themselves in some capacity, either as observers or actors or witnesses. Tell us a little bit about your position in the painting and what you are trying to say by putting yourself in the painting. am: It’s an old trope that has been used in many paintings in the past. When I put that figure of myself in the painting, I did

it as a little bit of an inside joke: those who know me will know it’s me, and for everybody else in the world, it doesn’t mean anything, they have no idea who I am. But I like the fact that with so much going on in the painting, with all these people involved in playing their roles in the political arena, here’s this guy who’s just completely dumbfounded by the theatre around him. I think that this is universal: everyone has days when they wake up and look around them and think, wow, what madness is this, with everyone pursuing power, chasing what they want. If you’re not involved in that, if you’re on the outside of it, it’s funny looking. So this character is part of that tradition of the observer who reminds you of the action, in a way. He reminds you of the bigger societal drama because he’s the part of you that’s not participating. So he also plays an important and serious role, especially in the lower part of the painting, with all the different ideas being played out: What is Quebec? Is it part of Canada? Is it a separate culture? Is it an imposition on First Nations? This figure is a separate individual in the sense that he does not belong to any of the groups. Beyond the sense of the joke, I put myself in as that character because I was definitely as much of an outsider as you could get going into this project. ce: So in a way you surrounded yourself with these larger-thanlife historical and political figures, as well as allegorical figures. How about some of the other, everyday types – women, First Nations, minorities – who were not as towering as these political characters were? How did they fit into the composition, given that they were not necessarily listed as famous people or as disruptors?

am: Individual people have power, they have power as a group, which is why there are so many big debates about what and who we are – are we Quebecers, are we French, are we First Nations – because it’s really through the group that people get political power. This is central, so it was important to me to show that there were forces shaping the world other than the individual politicians. Many of them are groups of people who have particular interests or who have chosen to represent themselves in a certain way and who drive the politicians’ decisions a lot of the time. The individuals depicted stand in for larger groups. ce: Many of these individuals are represented in a situation of conflict. How did you understand the term conflict when it came to the Canada/Quebec model historically? How did you represent it in the painting at various metaphorical and real levels? am: Over the centuries, various stages were set and various conflicts were played out on them. I wanted to find the central moments that expressed these basic archetypal conflicts that keep reoccurring. From the very beginning there is the initial conflict when Jacques Cartier meets Donnacona (1534), resulting in an immediate clash of civilizations between the First Nations and the French. Some of them seemed particularly interesting because of the combination of historical and visual qualities they presented: Dollard des Ormeaux at the Battle of Long Sault (1660), for instance, was compelling because of the way it had been elevated to legendary status over the years. I thought that was very telling of the way in which a society

Interview with Adam Miller

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builds the myths that hold its self-image together. Later on, the Battle of [the] Plains of Abraham (1759) was another important conflict, after which power was transferred to the British Empire. It is a key one, and it provided me with a fun opportunity to put in the death of Montcalm as well as the death of Wolfe to even out the balance. The crisis with the flq (Front de libération du Québec) in 1970 was another key conflict. I felt that it represented a turning point in modern history, with many of the same tensions that had been simmering under the surface now coming to a head and switching the direction that Quebec was to take in the future. It was a great visual moment in which I could use the actions of the figures to tell a story about the seething resentment that many French Canadians had been feeling and that was now coming to the surface. Those were a few of the main episodes of conflict that I chose to depict. ce: I’m going to take this question of conflict and flip it over. One of Mr Guerrera’s overarching goals in commissioning this painting was to underline the pivotal role that Quebec and Quebecers have played in shaping the story of Canada. In that regard, do you believe it is because of conflict or in spite of it that your painting reflects that? am: I would say both. One thing that is in the painting is politics. Politics in a way is formalized, ritualized violence. We no longer handle power struggles by handing arms to the king’s sons and having them fight to see who ends up with the kingdom. Now, we transfer power through votes. Politics is a way of containing violence between different people who have

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different agendas. For me, conflict was central in that way. It was central to the story, to both stories. It’s central to life and it’s what society is about: maintaining civilization in the face of conflict and trying to keep conflict at bay. Regarding Quebec, I felt that there are all these people who have come from very different backgrounds – French, English, First Nations – and ended up in the same area, in Quebec. They’re probably more impacted by the fact that they were born in Quebec than by the fact their ancestors lived in Paris. And they’re all struggling to figure out what this means, what takes priority. Should my loyalty lie with the fact [that] I speak French and my ancestors came from France, or that I’m Canadian, or that I live in Quebec? Should my loyalty lie with the fact that my people were here first and your people came and massacred us? There are so many different points of view, and in a sense it’s not just a matter of conflict between groups, but also of inner conflict, of identity, and of what your identity says about you. This aspect is also central. Identity was one of the more interesting things to explore. Quebec is such a microcosm of the different issues, the way different identities comes up against each other – it was such a timely thing for what’s happening in the whole world right now. ce: I would like to consider a word related to conflict, and that is tension. In almost all of your works, there seems to be some tension between the characters, or it is a tension of the moment that is either unresolved or that is about to move to the next level. Would you say this is true in this work and in relation to your other works?

am: Yes, and in this case it was even more explicit. Part of the discussions I had with Sal regarding this painting was to determine whether it was going to address only the past of Quebec, or also the present and the future, and if so, in what form. In the end, it does deal with the future, but only very slightly, and in a way that leaves the future very unresolved. And to me that’s probably wise. We really don’t know what the future is going to be, so we felt it was better to leave it unresolved in the painting.

am: It is such a unique place. When I was in Canada doing initial research for the painting, I met with several politicians and intellectuals including Senator Serge Joyal. Suddenly it struck me how amazing it was that I was up there talking about francophone culture with a senator. And that is something so unique. There is nothing else like it in North America.

ce: 2017 is an anniversary year for Canada, and the whole impetus for Mr Guerrera to commission the painting this year was to encourage Canadians to ask questions about who they are and to show an image to outsiders looking at Canada. In the 1990s, I was living in London, and on the occasion of a royal visit to Canada, a British journalist wrote – and this is engraved in my brain – “if Canada didn’t already exist as a country, there would be no need to invent it.” It was the ultimate insult that one could receive from a foreigner. And it was also the ultimate call for action: if people are thinking about us that way, then we’re not doing a good job at explaining what our identity is and how critical it is to our being. am: Maybe he didn’t have to think about you because your identity was never as toxic as some of the other identities that force themselves upon others.

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ce: Whether that’s what it is to be Canadian or not, what your painting brings out is more of those statements of identity, conflict, and compromise that are critical to the understanding of Canada and the role of Quebec in Canada.

Interview with Adam Miller

Contributors

clarence epstein is executive director of the Max and Iris Stern Foundation. He specializes in the management of international and Canadian cultural property. For close to twenty years at Concordia University, he was instrumental in the development of public art, museum, heritage, and urban planning projects. He has written extensively on Montreal architecture and art collections. françois-marc gagnon is founding director and distinguished research fellow of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, a member of the Ordre national du Québec, and a member of the Order of Canada. donald kuspit is an art critic and distinguished professor emeritus of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. alexandre turgeon is the Killam Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Bridgewater State University. From January 2018, he will be the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Quebec Studies at suny Plattsburgh.