Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 9780773539662, 0773539662

Citation preview

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History m a r t h a l a n g f o r d a n d s a n d r a p a i k o w s k y, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips

Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy

Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay

Rethinking Professionalism Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, translation by Nancy Senior, modernization by Réal Ouellet

Rethinking Professionalism Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970

Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

MCG I L L /Q UE E N ’S U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

i sbn 978-0-7735-3966-2 Legal deposit first quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in China on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia’s arre Program, administered by the Office of the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies, and the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Every effort has been made to identify, credit appropriately, and obtain publication rights from copyright holders of illustrations in this book. Notice of any errors or omissions in this regard will be gratefully received and correction made in any subsequent editions.

Rethinking professionalism : women and art in Canada, 1850–1970 / edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson. (McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history ; 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. i s bn 978-0-7735-3966-2 (bound) 1. Women artists–Canada–History. 2. Feminism and art–Canada–History. 3. Art, Canadian– 20th century. 4. Art, Canadian–19th century. I. Huneault, Kristina II. Anderson, Janice, 1951– III. Series: McGill-Queen’s/ Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history ; 9 n8354.r48 2012 700.82'0971 c2011-907833-3

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Sabon 10.2 /13.4

Contents

List of Illustrations • vii Acknowledgments • xvii Preface • xix

1

Part One Introduction Professionalism as Critical Concept and Historical Process for Women and Art in Canada • 3 kristina huneault

2

Part Two Professionalizing Art “What Would He Have Us Do?”: Gender and the “Profession” of Artist in New Brunswick in the 1930s and 1940s • 55 kirk niergarth

3

The Rewards of Professionalization: Alice Lusk Webster and the New Brunswick Museum, 1933–53 • 83 lianne m c tavish

4

“A Story of Struggle and Splendid Courage”: Anne Savage’s cbc Broadcasts of The Development of Art in Canada • 106 alena buis

5

Part Three Careers for Women Hannah Maynard: Crafting Professional Identity

•

135

jennifer salahub

6

From Amateur to Professional: The Advertising Photography of Margaret Watkins, 1924–28 • 168 mary o’connor

7

“I Weep for Us Women”: Modernism, Feminism, and Suburbia in the Canadian Home Journal’s Home ’53 Design Competition • 194 cynthia imogen hammond

8

Kathleen Daly’s Images of Inuit People: Professional Art and the Practice of Ethnography • 225 loren lerner

9

The Girls and the Grid: Montreal Women Abstract Painters in the 1950s and Early 1960s • 259 sandra paikowsky

10

Part Four The Limits of Professionalism “I Want to Call Their Names in Resistance”: Writing Aboriginal Women into Canadian Art History, 1880–1970 • 285 sherry farrell racette

11

From “Naturalized Invention” to the Invention of a Tradition: The Victorian Reception of Onkwehonwe Beadwork • 327 ruth b. phillips

12

Professional/Volunteer: Women at the Edmonton Art Gallery, 1923–70 • 357 anne whitelaw

13

“Marjorie’s Web”: Canada’s First Woman Architect and Her Clients • 380 annmarie adams

Contributors Bibliography Index • 433

vi

• •

401 405

co nt e nt s

List of Illustrations

1.1 Charlotte Schreiber, The Happiest Land, n.d., oil on canvas, 71.1 ⫻ 91.4 cm. Collection of the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, ab, purchased, 1961, 61.17. 1.2 Ida Braubach, The Canadian Kitchen Interior, 1871, oil on canvas, 45.4 ⫻ 60.8 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of the Birks Family Foundation. Photograph: mmfa, Christine Guest. 1.3 Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, School Is Out, 1889, oil on canvas, 106.4 ⫻ 145 cm. © Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, Cornwall, uk/ Bridgeman Art Library. 1.4 Lucy J. Goslee, Folio from Flowers from the Woods, Fields and Swamps of Canada, 1890–97, oil on stiffened linen, 51.5 ⫻ 28.0 cm. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, ms 9254. 1.5 Alice Nolin, Modèle au repos, c. 1927, plaster, 18.5 ⫻ 17 ⫻ 18.3 cm. Collection Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (1978.334). Photograph: mnbaq, Jean-Guy Kérouac. 1.6 Anonymous Huron-Wendat artist, Case, c. 1850–1900, birchbark, silk, moosehair, cotton thread, dyes, 5.5 ⫻ 13 ⫻ 26 cm. McCord Museum me938.10. 1.7 Alice Egan Hagen, A Copenhagen Inspiration [Vase], 1907, mineral paint on Bavarian china, 16 ⫻ 7.5 cm. This reproduction is from the DesBrisay Museum, Bridgewater, ns. Photograph: Mike Ross. 1.8 The obverse of one of Mrs Maynard’s photographs, n.d. Image hp092016, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 1.9 Eugénie Gagné, Mrs. Wing Sing and Son, Montreal, QC, 1890–1895, silver salts on paper mounted on card-albumen process, 17 ⫻ 12 cm. McCord Museum, mp–1984.44.1.2. 1.10 Mary G. Hall, The City of St. John, New Brunswick, 1835, hand-coloured lithograph on wove paper, 14.4 ⫻ 22.7 cm (image). Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, w1519. 1.11 Frances Richards, Portrait, c. 1884–87, oil on canvas, 40.7 ⫻ 30.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photograph © ngc.

1.12 Artists’ advertisements, Toronto Saturday Night, 14 November 1896. 1.13 Alice Egan’s studio in Halifax’s Roy Building, 1898–99. History Collection, Nova Scotia Museum. 1.14 Mary Kate Graham, Looking across the Parade, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 30.8 ⫻ 23.0 cm. Collection of nscad University. Photograph courtesy of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. 1.15 Mary Ella Dignam, Landscape, 1900, oil on academy board, 25.5 ⫻ 32.6 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, gift of Sydney K. Herman, Toronto, 1997, © 2011 ago. 1.16 Hannah Rusk Kelly, Untitled [Mother and Child], n.d., watercolour on ivory, 9.0 ⫻ 7.2 cm. Art Gallery of Hamilton, gift of Mrs E.B. Carter, 59.5.9. 1.17 “The Charcoal Class – Sketches by the Pupils of the Ontario School of Art,” Canadian Illustrated News, 15 May 1880. 1.18 Liliane Tucker (active 1893–1901), Academy Nude, 1893–94, charcoal on paper, 61.8 ⫻ 46.6 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photograph: mmfa, JeanFrançois Brière. 1.19 Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Munitions Worker, 17 March 1944, plaster painted green over silver, 84.4 ⫻ 55.5 ⫻ 40 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photograph © ngc. 2.1 Photograph of an anonymous student, in Barbara Fisher, “Summer Art Center Uncorks Talents at the University of New Brunswick,” Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 1946. Courtesy of Christian Science Monitor (www.CSMonitor.com). 2.2 Pegi Nicol MacLeod’s rug design, Pony, 1941, watercolour over graphite on board, 56 ⫻ 71 cm. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, 1995.27.145.14. 2.3 Pegi Nicol MacLeod at work on a mural for Woodstock Vocational School, 1941. Photograph: Madge Smith. Courtesy of the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Madge Smith Photographs, p120–23–58. 2.4 Elizabeth Sutherland, panel depicting domestic work, Saint John Vocational School mural, 1940, in situ, Harbour View High School, Saint John, nb. Photograph: Kirk Niergarth. 2.5 Elizabeth Sutherland, Winter Afternoon, c. 1939, pastel on brown kraft paper, 40.2 ⫻ 49.3 cm. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, a45.748. 2.6 Violet Gillett, Freedom from Want, 1943, painted plaster, 38 ⫻ 39.7 ⫻ 27.5 cm. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, 2008.10.1. 2.7 Julia Crawford, Boy, 1946, oil on canvas, 57.5 ⫻ 42.7 cm. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, a68.98. 2.8 Lucy Jarvis, Kathleen, 1939, charcoal on laid paper, 47.7 ⫻ 36.3 cm. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, a54.744.

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3.1 Unidentified members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Natural History Society at the New Brunswick Museum’s Oriental Exhibition, January 1924, gelatin silver print on mounted card. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, x16534. 3.2 Case featuring Chinese art from the Art Department of the New Brunswick Museum, c. 1935, arranged by Alice Lusk Webster. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, nbm–f41–6. 3.3 Overall view of display cases in the Art Department of the New Brunswick Museum, 1930s–1940s. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb , nbm–f41–14. 3.4 Display cases in the Art Department of the New Brunswick Museum, 1930s– 1940s. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, nmb–f41–22. 3.5 Case that includes Chinese Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) ceramics. Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, nbm–f41–22. 3.6 Case that includes tomb figures dating from the T’ang period (618–906 ce). Courtesy of the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, nb, nbm–f41–1. 4.1 Anne Savage at Baron Byng High School, c. 1939. Courtesy of the Anne Savage fonds, Concordia University Records Management and Archives. 4.2 Anne Savage Untitled (Trees against Mountains, Skeena River Region, B.C.), 1927, oil on wood, 23 ⫻ 30.5 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photograph © ngc. 4.3 Anne Savage teaching students at Baron Byng High School, c. 1940s. Courtesy of the Anne Savage fonds, Concordia University Records Management and Archives. 4.4 Anne Savage painting outdoors, c. 1920s. Courtesy of the Anne Savage fonds, Concordia University Records Management and Archives. 4.5 Anne Savage, Saint-Sauveur, c. 1935, oil on canvas, 78.8 ⫻ 102 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photograph © ngc. 5.1 Hannah Maynard, [The At Home] (multiple exposure), c. 1893. Image hp092057, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.2 Lady Clementina Hawarden, Portrait with Embroidery and Camera, c. 1862–63. Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 5.3 [Portrait of Hannah Maynard with Appliqué and Embroidered Pillow and CrazyQuilt footstool], c. 1880s. Image hp068253, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.4 Hannah Maynard, Hannah and Richard Maynard outside of Mrs. R Maynard’s Studio, c. 1880s. Image hp056736, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.5 Hannah Maynard, [On Display: Maynard and Her Souvenirs], c. 1893. Image hp093205, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives.

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5.6 Hannah Maynard, Mrs Carlo [Petronilla] Bossi, c. 1890. Image hp002674, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.7 Unknown, Crazy Quilt (detail), Canadian, c. 1885, 110 ⫻ 155 cm (full quilt). Collection of the author. 5.8 Hannah Maynard, [Quilted Landscape] 80 Views on the Frazer River, c. 1885. Image hp087660, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.9 Hannah Maynard, Gems of British Columbia 1891. Image hp093169, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.10 Maynard Studio, Maynard’s Float on Pandora St., c. 1890. Image hp093257, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.11 Hannah Maynard, [Remembering with Photo Sculpture] (multiple exposure), c. 1895. Image hp093164, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 5.12 Hannah Maynard, [The Thread of Life – Multi-Tasking] (multiple exposure), c. 1893–97. Image hp093162, courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 6.1 Margaret Watkins, Still Life – Circles, 1919, platinum print, 16.3 ⫻ 20.2 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.2 Margaret Watkins, Self-Portrait, 1919–23, gelatin silver print, 21.4 ⫻ 16.0 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.3 Margaret Watkins, Woodbury’s Soap, 1924, platinum print, 20.8 ⫻ 25.6 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.4 Margaret Watkins, Study for ad for Cutex nail polish, c. 1924, platinum print, 21.5 ⫻ 16.5 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.5 Margaret Watkins, bra, torso, and hand, Cutex ad study, c. 1924, gelatin silver print, 10.7 ⫻ 16.7 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.6 Margaret Watkins, The Tea Cup, 1924, platinum print, 10.3 ⫻ 15.3 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.7 Margaret Watkins, Myers Gloves, c. 1924, gelatin silver print, 25.4 ⫻ 20.3 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.8 Margaret Watkins, Johnson and Johnson Modess ad, 1924–28, gelatin silver print, 12.2 ⫻ 9.4 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.9 Margaret Watkins, Demonstration kitchen for the Delineator magazine, c. 1924– 28, gelatin silver print, 25.4 ⫻ 20.3 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 6.10 Margaret Watkins, Design for Carpet, “Blythswood,” Front Steps, Centered, c. 1937, four gelatin silver contact prints, 20.5 ⫻ 15.6 cm. Courtesy of the Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow. 7.1 Cover, Canadian Home Journal, August 1953. 7.2 Maria Prus with her collaborators and their second-place designs for Home ’53 in Canadian Home Journal, August 1953, 45. 7.3 Agnes Macphail, Canadian Home Journal, April 1954, 3.

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7.4 Guy Desbarats and Fred Lebensold, first-place design, Home ’53 housing competition, Canadian Home Journal, August 1953, 20. 7.5 Elizabeth Kent, interior design for the winning entry for Home ’53, Canadian Home Journal, August 1953, 22. 7.6 Guy Desbarats and Fred Lebensold, Home ’53, plan, Canadian Home Journal, August 1953, 21. 7.7 Advertisement for Crane Ltd, Canadian Home Journal, August 1953, 62. 7.8 Home ’53, Canadian Home Journal, January 1954, 40. 7.9 Exterior of Home ’53, 1979. Photograph: Bev Thompson. 7.10 Bev Thompson’s garden, photographed in July 2009. Photograph: Cynthia Hammond. 8.1 Kathleen Daly, Katoo, 1960, oil portrait sketch, reproduced in “People of the North: An Album of Distinguished Paintings,” North Magazine, 9, no. 2 (1962): 7. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 8.2 Cover, North Magazine, 9, no. 2 (1962). 8.3 Kathleen Daly, Eskimo Mother and Child, 1960, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper, reproduced in “People of the North: An Album of Distinguished Paintings,” North Magazine, 9, no. 2 (1962): 8. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 8.4 Photograph of mothers and children in Daly and Pepper’s cabin, Povungnituk, 1961. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 8.5 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 8.6 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 8.7 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 8.8 Anonymous, Kneeling Mother with Child, c. 1950. Crown Collection, Official Residences of Canada, National Capital Commission. 8.9 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Eskimo with Carving], 1968, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper, 36.8 ⫻ 29.2 cm. Courtesy of the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, bequest of Kathleen Daly Pepper, 1995.5.15. 8.10 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 8.11 A.Y. Jackson, Pangnirtung, 1930, graphite on paper, 19.2 ⫻ 28 cm. Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, gift of the artist. 8.12 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Iceberg], oil on canvas, 40.6 ⫻ 50.7 cm. Courtesy of the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, bequest of Kathleen Daly Pepper, 1995.5.69.

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8.13 Kathleen Daly, Povungnituk, 1968, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper, 29.3 ⫻ 36.8 cm. Courtesy of the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, bequest of Kathleen Daly Pepper, 1995.5.85. 8.14 Photograph of Inuit children watching Daly draw, 1961. Photograph, Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. 9.1 Marcelle Ferron, Composition #17, 1955, oil on canvas, 91.6 ⫻ 73.0 cm. Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, a 71 83 p1. © Estate of Marcelle Ferron / sodrac (2011). Photograph: Richard-Max Tremblay. 9.2 Rita Letendre, Jazz à Amsterdam, 1953, oil on board, 60.5 ⫻ 79.8 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2004.313). Photograph: mnbaq, Patrick Altman. 9.3 Rita Letendre, Engin poetique, 1961, oil on canvas, 152 ⫻ 165.5 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Guy Fournier. Photograph: mmfa, Jean-François Brière. 9.4 Marcelle Maltais, Iconoclast, 1957, oil on canvas, 125.8 ⫻ 101.3 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photograph © ngc. 9.5 Lise Gervais, Le bayous, 1961, oil on canvas, 160.5 ⫻ 87.5 cm. Collection of the Musée d’art de Joliette, gift of Claude Laberge. 9.6 Laure Major, Oriflammes d’orage, 1958, oil on canvas, 106.8 ⫻ 127.0 cm. Collection of the Musée d’art de Joliette, Maurice Forget donation. 9.7 Henriette Fauteux-Massé, Plein-chant, 1964, gouache and oil on board, 76.6 ⫻ 53.7 cm. Collection of the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University purchase, 1983. 9.8 Suzanne Meloche, La Pont Mirabeau, 1962, oil on canvas, 92.5 ⫻ 105.7 cm. Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, a 76 7 p1. Photograph: macm. 9.9 Marian Scott, Sans titre, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 165.6 ⫻ 155.7 cm. Collection of the Musée d’art de Joliette, Maurice Forget donation. 9.10 The first page of Michelle Lasnier’s article, “Les Femmes peintres du Québec,” Châtelaine, October 1962, 32. 10.1 Marguerite Vincent La8inonke, embroidered birchbark trays dedicated to Lord and Lady Elgin, c. 1850, birchbark, porcupine quill, moose hair, sweetgrass, 30.7 ⫻ 9.2 and 8.6 ⫻ 5.3 cm. Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2008.118.9 and 10. 10.2 Isabella Edenshaw, spruce root hat, before 1911, 43 cm. diameter. Canadian Museum of Civilization, VII–b–899. 10.3 Photograph of Cree goods displayed at a Hudson’s Bay Company post, c. 1911. © Trustees of the British Museum. 10.4 Edith Smith, Micmac Indian Woman Selling Baskets, 1924, watercolour on paper, 25 ⫻ 32.5 cm. History collection, Nova Scotia Museum. 10.5 Cornelius Krieghoff, Iroquois Woman from Kahnawake, 1847–52, oil on canvas, 28 ⫻ 23.1 cm. McCord Museum, m967.100.10.

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10.6 Tuscarora Women Selling Curiosities, Niagara Falls, Photograph: William Notman, c. 1860. McCord Museum, n–0000.193.237. 10.7 Mi’kmaq woman artist, quillwork chair seat, 1845–55, birchbark, porcupine quills, spruce root, ash splint, dyes, 34.6 ⫻ 30.8 cm. McCord Museum, m2206. 10.8 Mi’kmaq Woman with Quillwork (possibly Christianne Paul Morris or Bella Marble of Shubenacadie). Photograph: Joseph S. Rogers, c. 1863–73. Nova Scotia Archives and Record Management, neg. no. 6154. 10.9 Princess White Deer (Esther Deer), postcard from a photogravure by Emil Otto Hoppé, 1921. © Trustees of the British Museum. 10.10 Christina Eneutseak. Photograph: O.D. Goetze, 1909. Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, Wash., 5502.14. 10.11 Teresa Baptiste, Untitled, n.d., gouache on paper, 27.5 ⫻ 35 cm. Inkameep Day School Collection, Osoyoos Museum Society, 1963113006. Courtesy of the Osoyoos Museum Society and the Osoyoos Indian Band. 10.12 Ellen Neel and ballerina Maria Tallchief with sculpture. Photograph: William Cunningham, c. 1950. Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections, vpl 62660. 10.13 Mildred Hunt working on a totem pole at the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, c. 1949. Image pn 18469 courtesy of the Royal bc Museum, bc Archives. 10.14 Mary Adams, baskets, c. 1986, sweetgrass and ash splint. Akwesasne Cultural Center. Photograph: Drew Harty. 10.15 Intergenerational group of Akwesasne basket artists, c. 1928. Photograph courtesy of the Akwesasne Cultural Center. 11.1 Onkwehonwe artist (probably Tuscarora), pincushion for long hatpins, late nineteenth century. Wool cloth, glass beads, 9 ⫻ 28 cm. Gift of Mrs Agnes Fogg, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 21/4004. Photograph by Photo Services. 11.2 Drawing of a “small Indian moccasin” from Florence Hartley’s The Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work (1859), 27. Courtesy of the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at the Strong Museum, Rochester, ny (2011). 11.3 Moccasins for a small child, commercially tanned cowhide, velveteen, glass beads, wool twill tape, 13.7 ⫻ 6.2 ⫻ 6.5 cm. Collected by Captain D.F. Tozier, a US revenue officer, probably between 1870 and 1890. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 07/3227. Photograph by Photo Services. 11.4 The cast of The Spinster’s Convention, a popular play performed in Westminster, vt, in 1902. Westminster Historical Society. Photograph: Courtesy of Gerry Biron – www.gerrygiron.com.

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11.5 Pincushion for hatpins made by Lady Dawson, wife of the principal of McGill University, velvet, glass and metal beads, fringed silk tape, 26 ⫻ 26 cm. McCord Museum, m18065. 11.6 Gä ya ah or satchel purchased by Louis Henry Morgan for the New York State cabinet. Photograph courtesy Tozzer Library, Harvard University, and Tiffanie Ting. 11.7 Portrait of three women, one holding an Onkwehonwe beaded chatelaine bag, daguerreotype, early 1860s. Gerry Biron Collection – www.gerrybiron.com. 11.8 Portrait of two young girls with Onkwehonwe beaded chatelaine bags hanging from their wrists, daguerreotype, 1850s. Gerry Biron Collection – www.gerrybiron.com. 11.9 Portrait of Caroline Parker (Ga-ha-no), 1850. Photograph of a lost hand-tinted daguerreotype, c. 1849. From the Arthur C. Parker collection of negatives, New York State Museum / Rochester Museum and Science Center, rm2086a. 11.10 Pattern for making an Onkwehonwe beaded bag published in The Lady’s Magazine, 1857. 11.11 Onkwehonwe beadwork artist (probably Tuscarora or Mohawk), late nineteenth century, velvet, cotton canvas, cotton cloth, silk ribbon, glass beads, paper, cotton thread, 20.5 ⫻ 21.5 cm. McCord Museum, m 2001.51.1. 11.12 Unknown needlewoman, Berlin work slippers for a man, c. 1860, canvas, wool, 6 ⫻ 8.5 ⫻ 27.5 cm. McCord Museum, m 17976 1–2. 11.13 Beadwork pattern samples: Oh-gwah-daz-ganh (“Dead Meadow” – e28,364) and Joack-oh or oh-see-deh (“Raccoon Tracks” – e29,028). “Dead meadow” was made by Mrs Walter Jimerson. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. Photograph: Jessica Horton. 11.14 Beadwork pattern samples: Oh-ee-wah-gah-yonk (“Old Fashioned” – e28,369) and Je-nay-ga-anh-Ho-ah-donk (“Drunkard’s Path” – e28,366). Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. Photograph: Jessica Horton. 11.15 Beadwork pattern samples: da gah gwet gant (“Sun Rise” – e29,374) and gus sto-nah (“War Bonnet” – e29,359). Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. Photograph: Jessica Horton. 11.16 George Barker stereo card showing Victorian tourists and Tuscarora Beadwork artists selling their work on Luna Island, Niagara Falls, c. 1870. Gerry Biron Collection – www.gerrybiron.com. 11.17 William Morris (designer) and Ada Phoebe Godman (embroiderer), wall hanging, 1877, crewel wools on linen, 207.5 ⫻ 153 cm. Photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 11.18 Samuel Thomas, Onkwehonwe woman’s outfit made by the Ska-Ni-Kwat project, c. 2001. © Royal Ontario Museum, rom2005_1465_7. Photograph: Brian Boyle. 11.19 Shelley Niro, Thinking Caps, mixed-media installation, 1999. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photograph © ngc.

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11.20 Hannah Claus, he didn’t know her name, pinpricked kozo paper, dried flowers, thread, hanger, hook, screws, 2001. Collection of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 500052. Photograph: Lawrence Cook. 11.21 Hannah Claus, still from Repeat along the Border, video, 2006. Collection of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 500052. Photograph: David Barbour. 12.1 Women’s Society tea party, Edmonton Museum of Arts, Edmonton Bulletin, 9 February 1949. Photograph: City of Edmonton Archives, ea 600–2031b. 12.2 Members of the Women’s Society spruce up the Edmonton Museum of Arts, Edmonton Journal, 11 July 1959, Section 2, p. 1. 13.1 Marjorie Hill’s graduation from University of Toronto, 1920. Esther Marjorie Hill, b1986–0106/005p, University of Toronto Archives. 13.2 Marjorie Hill at home, Victoria, bc. Esther Marjorie Hill, b1986–0106/006p, University of Toronto Archives. 13.3 Hanson House, 1946. Photograph: Annmarie Adams. 13.4 Marjorie Hill. Generic house plan, 1956. Esther Marjorie Hill, b1986– 0106(010a), University of Toronto Archives. 13.5 Marjorie Hill. Generic house plan with more detail, 1956. Esther Marjorie Hill, b1986–0106(010a), University of Toronto Archives. 13.6 Elevations of the Frank Moore house of 1948–49 signed by Marjorie Hill. Esther Marjorie Hill, b1986–0106/008(01), Sketches for Moore House, University of Toronto Archives. 13.7 Fold-out drawing by Marjorie Hill. Esther Marjorie Hill, b1986–0106/008(01a), University of Toronto Archives. 13.8 Apartment building by Marjorie Hill. Photograph: Annmarie Adams. 13.9 Photograph of Marjorie Hill. Esther Marjorie Hill, b1986–0106/005p(20), University of Toronto Archives.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the scholars and participants who made the inaugural conference of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative such a success, and particularly Melinda Reinhart, our cwahi collaborator. Our gratitude goes out to Brian Foss for editorial assistance, to Danielle Lewis for her painstaking labours with the Chicago Manual of Style, and to the Department of Art History, Concordia University, for providing such a genuinely congenial environment for work and study. We are also extremely grateful for financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Office of the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies, Concordia University. Most of all, we would like to thank the authors: you have taught us much and worked with us so good-naturedly. This book is dedicated to your scholarship in the field of women and art in Canada.

Preface

Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

This book is the first published collection of scholarly essays on women, art, and history in Canada, and the task of introducing it is shaped by the particular circumstances that have made it possible to be writing these words as late as 2012. Books and exhibition catalogues that insist on the importance of writing women into the history of art are now almost four decades old, and feminism’s intensive examination of the relationship between culture and identity has had a profound effect, both on the discipline of art history and, indeed, across the humanities more generally. The breadth of this impact, however, has also been accompanied by a change in the focus of disciplinary attention, and the urgency that once accompanied investigations of women artists has now shifted to other arenas in which questions of cultural identity intersect with considerations of power and self-determination. In Canada, for example, the energy currently fuelling the surge of interest in First Nations art and history shares much with the considerations that have motivated the history of women’s art. If feminist art history’s moment of historical intensity has passed, however, the need for its historical work has not. This is particularly so in the Canadian context. From its earliest days, Canadian scholars have been active contributors to feminist art history. Indeed, Dorothy Farr and Natalie Luckyj’s exhibition From Women’s Eyes: Women Painters in Canada opened at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston a full year before Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris’s paradigm-shifting exhibition Women Artists: 1550–1950 was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.1 But, whereas further study of the European and American women that the Los Angeles exhibition engendered could build on well-developed national legacies of art-historical exploration, the investigation of women artists in Canada proceeded in the context of a comparatively new field of study. The amount of basic research to be undertaken, not only on women

The first page of Michelle Lasnier’s article, “Les Femmes peintres du Québec,” Châtelaine, October 1962.

artists but on the whole social context in which they worked, combined with the reality of fewer art history graduate programs and professional Canadian art historians both to limit the amount and to influence the nature of the scholarship produced. Emphasis was placed on the essential tasks of factual investigation and historical recuperation, with museum and gallery exhibitions driving the work of unearthing women’s art, establishing the historical facts of its production, and reconstructing a broad social context for it.2 While such research was, and indeed continues to be, foundational for the study of women and art in Canada, it failed to keep pace with the momentum of women’s art history as a whole. As feminist scholars elsewhere enthusiastically embraced the insights of Marxist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and post-colonial theory that invigorated art history in the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading authors on Canadian women artists, from Natalie Luckyj to Maria Tippet, found themselves criticized for failing to account for this new methodological sophistication.3 In recent years, concern for theorized analysis, methodological reflection, and deep historical engagement has emerged to enrich writing on women and art in Canada. The intersections between women artists and the social formations of colonialism and of modernity have been particularly productive of historically nuanced analysis,4 while interest in craft has contributed to a broadening of the very objects considered suitable for art-historical study.5 Such writings have brought a welcome depth to the field, but the gain has been won at the cost of a profoundly compartmentalized, even atomized, vision of women’s engagement in the national cultural terrain. The tight focus of the monographic framework, so common to gallery exhibitions and catalogues, continues to exert a significant influence, and in recent years individual women artists have also been the subject of sustained biographical writing.6 Within this landscape of individuation and specificity, the broad patterns that span the larger context of women’s art history remain to be brought into view and assessed. Whereas broad-based scholarly histories exist for women’s production in Britain, the United States, France, Australia, and elsewhere, in Canada the need for a critically engaged synthetic look at the significance of women’s cultural production remains unmet. If recent interest in imperialism, transculturation, and global art histories has created opportunities for Canadian case studies to be included in analyses of the broader international phenomena that structured women’s art production, such inclusions, too, have remained largely episodic, lacking the support of a welldeveloped critical history that would outline the specific national contexts that enhance the significance of individual artists’ contributions.7 This, then, is the scholarly context for Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970, a publication organized by the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. As a collection of essays, the book by no means fills the need for a broad-based history, but in its focus on the widely operative par-

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adigm of art-world professionalism it does seek to offer a critical investigation of one of the synthetic trajectories that such a history might ultimately engage. Two factors have particularly shaped the volume: a recognition of the importance of collaboration, and a conviction in the merit of bringing historical and methodological analysis together. The Canadian Women Artists History Initiative is an open network of scholars who come together to discuss the intersections of our research interests at the point of women’s cultural activity.8 As collaborators, we recognize that the history of women and art in Canada encompasses a diversity of time, place, language, ethnicity, and visual media that is simply too vast to be grasped from a single vantage point. This book, which is the outcome of the Initiative’s inaugural conference in 2008, bears testament to the critical insights that can emerge from shared discussions of such historical richness. If the study of women and art is to continue to be a vital undertaking, it must continually ask the question: What new understandings and perspectives does the examination of women bring to the field of art history? As we assembled and assessed the essays stemming from the conference, the issue of professionalism emerged as our most compelling way to frame a shared response to this question, providing not only a nodal point to unify a variety of disparate papers but a vector for critical analysis of the difference that the study of women can make to our understanding of art history. The social formation of professionalism has been particularly influential in the cultural field, dividing amateurs from ‘serious’ artists and underpinning claims for increased status and support for the arts. It is also a formation of special relevance to women. At professionalism’s doors may be heaped both the most outrageous discriminatory practices of the past and many of women’s most impressive cultural achievements. The chapters collected here address aspects of those struggles and achievements as they affected women working between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, from Victoria to Saint John, in the fields of painting, photography, craft, architecture, art education, and museum work. Taken together however, the essays also cast into relief both the utility and the limitations of professionalism as a conceptual framework. In this way the book as a whole works to facilitate methodological reflection on the ideas and assumptions that underpin the history of women and art in Canada.

The volume begins with an introductory essay by Kristina Huneault defining artistic professionalism, sketching the broad outlines of its historical development in Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and assessing its historiographical and methodological implications. In exploring women artists’ relation to professionalism, the essay interrogates the historical reasons for its ascendancy and its consequences for scholarship. Thereafter, the body of the

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book is divided into three parts: “Professionalizing Art,” “Careers for Women,” and “The Limits of Professionalism.” Part One follows different manifestations of the professionalizing project within Canadian art history. Kirk Niergarth focuses on politicized debates about what it meant to be an artist during the 1930s and 1940s. Contrasting the postwar dominance of a socially stratified and specialized artistic identity with the wide variety of community-based arts activities pursued by women artists in New Brunswick, Niergarth’s essay highlights the gendered ramifications of a professionalizing project that would eventually move the Canadian art world away from the democratizing impetus that characterized discussion of art during the Great Depression and the Second World War. If some of New Brunswick’s most active women artists were wholeheartedly committed to that impetus, however, Lianne McTavish’s chapter reveals that its female museum professionals were not. At the New Brunswick Museum, Alice Lusk Webster sought rather to enlighten what she considered to be the culturally backward citizenry of the province. Situating her analysis against competing visions of professionalization in North American museums, McTavish traces the genesis of Lusk Webster’s specialist persona, drawing out the ways in which it was fashioned in explicit opposition to the cultural practices of the museum’s other female supporters. The currents of elitism and populism cast into relief by Niergarth and McTavish are also central to Alena Buis’s reading of Anne Savage’s cbc broadcasts on The Development of Art in Canada. Through the new mass-communication potential of the national broadcasting network, Savage made the recently established narrative of professional art practice in Canada available to a wide public. However, Buis argues that, in popularizing the canon of Canadian art, Savage unwittingly reinforced a set of art historical constructs that would eventually result in women’s elision from the national art-historical narrative. Taken together, the essays in this part of the book foreground the relation of professionalization to currents of social and artistic stratification, centring on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that constitute the professional terrain. The chapters in Part Two, “Careers for Women,” address artists’ experiences as working professionals and the techniques they adopted to facilitate their participation in what continued to be a relatively masculine domain. Examining the potential contradictions between a commercial career and feminine propriety during the nineteenth century, Jennifer Salahub identifies the pictorial language of domestic handcraft as a crucial aspect of Hannah Maynard’s carefully fashioned public persona. Salahub’s argument that female professionals strategically embraced the domestic as an acceptable avenue to professional success is strengthened by the pronounced presence of domesticity in the three subsequent chapters. In her essay on the commercial photographer Margaret Watkins, Mary O’Connor demonstrates that Watkins’s avowedly professional ambitions were furthered by the potential of her iconography to circulate within a visual econxxii

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omy that increasingly commodified domesticity and female sexuality alike. Domestic spaces and familial relations are equally pronounced in chapters by Cynthia Hammond, on the career of architect and landscape designer Maria Prus, and by Loren Lerner, on the Arctic drawings of painter Kathleen Daly Pepper. Yet these essays also call our awareness to the fractures that attended the increasingly unstable conjuncture of professionalism, femininity, and the domestic. Thus, Cynthia Hammond considers the social unease manifested in the Canadian Home Journal’s coverage of Prus’s winning co-design for an ideal home. Here, in a women’s magazine from the 1950s dedicated to domestic adornment, texts by feminist Agnes Macphail worked in tandem with the example of Prus’s own career to open a window on – in Hammond’s words – “a future in which women choose their lives as well as their furnishings.” The lines of force between domesticity and professionalism also flowed in the opposite direction, and Loren Lerner argues that the personalized nature of Daly’s drawings of Inuit mothers and children acted as a counterpoint to other available paradigms for the representation of the Arctic and its inhabitants – notably the dehumanized landscape vocabulary of the Group of Seven and the potentially objectifying idiom of professional ethnography. The chapters by O’Connor, Hammond, and Lerner also address the relation between women’s experiences as professional artists and modernism, and this strand is picked up in the final chapter of the section as Sandra Paikowsky explores the distinctive visual idiom developed by francophone women painters working in the male-dominated avant-garde milieu of Montreal in the 1960s. Looking closely at the paintings of Rita Letendre, Marcelle Maltais, Henriette FauteuxMassé, and others, Paikowsky proposes the novel figure of the “armature” as an alternative to the pictorial language of the grid dominant in the work of male plasticiens. Ranging in scope from Victoria in the 1860s to Montreal in the 1960s, these essays thus explore the various strategies employed by professional women artists to negotiate the sometimes-conflicting forces of gender, work, and art. The essays of the concluding part of the book, “The Limits of Professionalism,” alert us most acutely to the shortcomings of professionalism as an art-historical framework. Just as professional regulating bodies have historically established barriers to membership, the adoption of a discourse of professionalism by art historians effectively marginalizes certain women, certain kinds of contributions, and certain spheres of practice. Essays by Sherry Farrell Racette and Ruth Phillips draw our attention to the limitations of professionalism for the analysis of art by First Nations and Métis women. Farrell Racette’s chapter explicitly points out the rootedness of the concept in the socio-economic structures of Euro-Canadian society, while in Phillips’s essay the very absence of the term speaks volumes. At the same time, the crucial connections between commercial and amateur art practices that Phillips draws out would be lost to an art-historical vision too narrowly focused on the professional achievement of named individuals. Here, p re face

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then, where the address to professionalism might be considered most oblique, the blind spots of the paradigm emerge most clearly. If it is fair to say that, for Phillips and Farrell Racette, the notion of professionalism is simply not germane, for Anne Whitelaw, by contrast, it is only too relevant. Whitelaw’s chapter on the history of women’s involvement with the Edmonton Art Gallery highlights the exclusions and elisions effected by the professionalizing project. Demonstrating the significant role played by non-professional female volunteers in the development of Canadian museums, Whitelaw argues for “a frame of analysis that moves beyond [the] narratives of personal achievement and innovative cultural leadership” that are so characteristic of the discourse of professionalism. Finally, Annmarie Adams’s chapter on that consummate professional Marjorie Hill explores the way in which Hill’s non-professional female networks were far more significant to her architectural career than the official associations conventionally considered to be a sine qua non of professional activity. Thus, while all of the essays included in this section discuss women whose cultural practices might be considered professional, they also call into question key aspects of both the designation and its consequences. Together, the chapters in the volume work to explore the nature and ramifications of professionalism in order to build a better understanding of women and art in Canada. As photographic historian Colleen Skidmore underlined in her paper at the conference from which this volume stems, such an understanding must be founded on secure methodological premises. That security will come from attentively and openly considering the criteria according to which we undertake our analyses. Collectively, the essays in this book are an attempt to do just that.

notes 1 Dorothy Farr and Natalie Luckyj, From Women’s Eyes: Women Painters in Canada (Kingston, on: Agnes Etherington Art Centre 1975); Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550– 1950 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1976). 2 Some examples of exhibition catalogues from the 1980s include: Mary Sparling, “Nova Scotia Women and the Ornamental Branches,” in Great Expectations: The European Vision in Nova Scotia: 1749–

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1848 (Halifax: Mount Saint Vincent University 1980), 53–72; Natalie Luckyj, Expressions of Will: The Art of Prudence Heward (Kingston, on: Agnes Etherington Art Centre 1986); Christine Boyanoski, Loring and Wyle: Sculptors’ Legacy (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario 1987); and Joyce Zemans, Elizabeth Burrell, and Elizabeth Hunter, Kathleen Munn, Edna Taçon: New Perspectives on Modernism in Canada = nouveau regard sur le modernisme au Canada (North York, on: York University Art Gallery 1988). Please note that the citations included in this and

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subsequent notes are intended to provide examples of representative scholarship, but not to offer a full overview of the field. Melinda Reinhart, visual arts librarian at Concordia University, is currently undertaking such bibliographic research. 3 Janice Helland, Review of Maria Tippett’s By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Art by Canadian Women, in Journal of Canadian Art History, 15, no. 1 (1992): 125–33; and Reesa Greenberg, “Further Comments on Natalie Luckyj’s Publication,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 9, no. 2 (1986), 208–9. 4 Some recent examples of writing on Canadian women artists and the colonial encounter include: Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: ubc Press 2006); Marcia Crosby, “A Chronology of Love’s Contingencies,” in Ian M. Thom and Charles Hill, eds., Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (Vancouver and Ottawa: Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, and Douglas and McIntyre, 2006); and Kristina Huneault, “Always There: First Peoples and the Consolation of Miniature Portraits in British North America,” in Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Doug Fordham, eds., Art and the British Empire (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press 2007), 288–308. On women artists and modernity, see Patricia Smart, Les Femmes du Refus global (Montreal: Éditions du Boréal 1998); Lora Senechal Carney, “Modernism and Folk on the Lower St. Lawrence: ‘The Problem of Folk Art,’” in Lynda Jessup, ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001), 104–16; and Marielle Aylen, “Modern Vision and National Memory: Jori Smith, the Montreal Avant-Garde, and Charlevoix Painters” (phd thesis, York University, 2009). 5 Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts

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Guild (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press for Carleton University Press 1999); Sandra Alfoldy, Crafting Identity: Professional Fine Craft in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005); and Paula Laverty, Silk Stocking Mats: Hooked Mats of the Grenfell Mission (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005). 6 Examples of writing since 2000 that focus on individual artists include: Brian Foss and Janice Anderson, Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario 2000); Esther Trépanier, Marian Dale Scott: pionnière de l’art moderne (Québec City: Musée du Québec 2000); Tobi Bruce and Jennifer C. Watson, Harriet Ford (Hamilton, on: Art Gallery of Hamilton 2001); Joan Murray, An Extraordinary Life: Isabel McLaughlin (Oshawa, on: Robert McLaughlin Gallery 2003); Joan Murray, Florence Carlyle, 1864–1923: Against All Odds (London, on: Museum London 2004); Mora Dianne O’Neill and Caroline Stone, Two Artists Time Forgot = Deux artistes oubliées par l’histoire / Frances Jones (Bannerman) & Margaret Campbell Macpherson (Halifax: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia 2006); Linda Jansma, Rody Kenny Courtice: The Pattern of Her Times (Oshawa, on: Robert McLaughlin Gallery 2006); and Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007). Biographies include: Elspeth Cameron, And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle (Toronto: Cormorant Books 2007); Laura Brandon, Pegi by Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005). For an exploration of the biographical framework see Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, This Woman in Particular: Contexts for the Biographical Image of Emily

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Carr (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1996). 7 Susan Close, “The Camera and the Contact Zone: Re-envisioning the Representation of Aboriginal Women in the Canadian North,” in J. Codell, ed., The Art of Transculturation (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, forthcoming); Kristina Huneault, “Placing Frances Anne Hopkins,” in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, eds., Studio, Space and Sociality: New Narratives of Nineteenth Century Women Artists (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate 2006), 179–98; and Lisa MacFarlane, “Mary Schaffer’s ‘Comprehending Equal Eyes,’” in Susan Bernardin et al., eds., Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880–1940 (Piscataway, nj: Rutgers University Press 2003), 109–50. Interest in politicized art has also been productive internationally,

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for example: Natalie Luckyj, “Come Out from behind the Pre-Cambrian Shield: The Politics of Memory and Identity in the Art of Paraskeva Clark,” in Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds., The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2006), 223–40. 8 In addition to producing new scholarship, the Initiative maintains a documentation centre and develops digital resources relevant to historical Canadian women artists. These currently include its biobibliographical artist database as well as Canadian Exhibition Reviews Online, a database of published reviews of annual exhibitions from major Canadian exhibiting societies. Visit http://cwahi. concordia.ca.

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RETHINKING PROFESSIONALISM

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PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

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1

CHAPTER 1

Professionalism as Critical Concept and Historical Process for Women and Art in Canada1 Kristina Huneault

Although the arts have long taken high rank among the professions and possess many of the fundamental professional attributes … the demands upon their practitioners are so exceptional, so individual, in many ways so immeasurable, that it is impossible to discuss professional women in the arts as in the other professions. – Elizabeth Kemper Adams2

Writing in 1920, the American feminist Elizabeth Kemper Adams noted the anomalous situation of women working as artists in relation to the structures and expectations of the professional sphere. To be a woman and an artist at the beginning of the twentieth century was, it would seem, something of a slippery business; exceptional, individual, and immeasurable, the nature of her professionalism was difficult to define. Almost a century later, the essays assembled in this volume both bear Kemper Adams’s observations out and add to them. That art remains uneasily positioned as a profession among others is witnessed by its virtual absence from the now voluminous sociological literature on that field.3 But, if art itself has been in some ways immeasurable by conventional professional standards, four decades of feminist art-historical critique have alerted us to the possibility that women, too, might in some ways be immeasurable by the standards of professional art. To explore this issue of the fit between women, art, and professionalism is both the historical and the methodological work of this volume.

An exact definition of what constitutes professionalism in art is, as Kemper Adams asserts, somewhat difficult to provide. But, while this difficulty does stem partly from the particular exigencies of artistry, it is even more intimately tied to the historically specific and variable nature of the construct itself. The meaning of artistic professionalism that emerges across the chapters of this book is dependent on time, place, and the different kinds of visual production that have structured the cultural field. What it meant to be a professional beadworker in mid-nineteenth-century Halifax, for example, was starkly different from what it meant to be a professional oil painter in mid-twentieth-century Montreal. Awareness of these differences prompts consideration not only of the historical meaning of professionalism but also of the nature and consequences of its function as a category of analysis for women and art in Canada. From an historical standpoint, this book tells a series of detailed narratives about women’s careers as artists, educators, curators, and gallery directors, and in so doing it positions women in relation to a dominant paradigm of art-world professionalism – one that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and that had become fully entrenched by the second half of the twentieth. But, while many of the women discussed in these pages can easily be recognized and situated as professionals according to this model, for others the fit was less comfortable. Some women, indeed, actively resisted the growing dominance of the new paradigm, while others did not meet one or more of its customary criteria – whether because they were self-taught or unpaid, because their class, race, or ethnicity effectively debarred them from the professional cadre, or because their very production was not recognized as art by the standards of the day. How best, then, to consider such women, and what might that consideration contribute to art history? As a discipline emerging in the late nineteenth century, the history of art has been profoundly shaped by the developing discourse of art world professionalism with which it has been contemporaneous; it is, by and large, professional artists whose works have been preserved, whose stories have been rehearsed, and who have been judged to merit a place in the exhibitions and publications that chart the artistic field. For those wishing to expand the history of that field to be more inclusive of women’s production, the question of what to make of the criterion of professionalism is a significant one. Does the inclusion of women who do not conform to the dominant professional paradigm necessitate a realignment of professionalism, a conceptual recalibration that would enable it to encompass a greater range of practices?4 Or does it, more radically, require a reduction in importance, if not an outright rejection, of this particular disciplinary construct? To ask these questions is to pose a methodological problem that draws attention to the notion of professionalism itself and interrogates its role as a critical concept that has structured our tellings of the past.

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Rethinking Professionalism

In keeping with the dual historical and methodological priorities that mark this volume as a whole, the goal of this introductory essay is to provide both a factual and a critical background against which the book’s subsequent case studies of artists and professionalism may be situated. The chapter is organized around three structuring questions: What role has the professional framework played in writing on Canadian women artists? What is the broad history of women, art, and professionalism in Canada? And what are the consequences of telling that history through this particular lens?

Writing Professionalism into the History of Canadian Art When, in 1900, the landmark publication Women of Canada: Their Life and Work included a section devoted to “Distinguished Professional Women Artists,” it effectively ushered in a long tradition of writing that has adopted professionalism as a framework through which to consider women and art in Canada.5 The publication as a whole, which was authored by the National Council of Women of Canada, celebrated a wide range of women’s activities, and its pages vividly illustrate that the emergence of the professional woman artist during the last decades of the nineteenth century was part of a much broader incursion of women into areas of public life.6 In Canada, this social change and its feminist eulogizing coincided with the onset of professionalization in the art world, as artists’ societies and academies were founded to validate artistic pursuits, to advance the interests of their members, and to set aesthetic standards. Owing in part to this confluence of historical circumstances, professionalism has emerged as a particularly influential framework for the discussion and analysis of women and the visual arts in Canada. From 1900 until now, the theme has appeared in a range of literature, from handbooks and exhibition catalogues to coffee-table books, graduate theses, and scholarly monographs. Among the earliest of these publications were guidebooks and articles intended to acquaint Canadian women with the range of their newly expanded social options.7 As the number of women embarking on careers of all kinds steadily increased during the first decades of the twentieth century, painting, sculpture, architecture, illustration, and commercial and interior design were presented to the public as professions suitable for highly trained women who combined a native ability with dedicated application and a willingness to forego wealth in favour of “the depth of the artist’s inner satisfactions.”8 Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, newspapers and magazines published pieces highlighting the achievements of women as artists, often as part of series dedicated to female professionals.9

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This celebration of women’s success in the professional sphere was, however, soon followed by an increased awareness of the obstacles thrown up in its path. Of these, the discriminatory practices of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (rca) presented the clearest target. When, in 1930, writer and journalist Blodwen Davies levelled her guns at the rca for its failure to admit women to full membership in the society, her passionate defence of female equality was strengthened by having such an obvious focal point for critique: Now that the Canadian Senate has been besieged and has capitulated, the next stronghold of masculine exclusiveness to feel faintly uneasy over its traditions is the Royal Canadian Academy. In fifty years of its history it has quietly excluded women from the ranks of full membership, not on standards of art, but on a basis of sex. It must be irritating to skilled and successful women artists to realize that they are forever debarred from the sanctum of full membership and to have to sit in the outer chamber, while from their numbers men are chosen not because they happen to be more highly skilled and creative but because they have the accident of sex to their advantage … It took the Lord Chancellor of England to decide whether or not Canadian women were persons. There is no high court of appeal for Canadian women which can say with authority whether or not women are artists. Art, in the eyes of the Royal Canadian Academy, is a masculine prerogative.10 Since then, women artists’ encounters with the machinery of their profession have provided plentiful opportunity for the kind of withering indignation that Davies mobilized to such rhetorical effect, and subsequent writing on their experiences has displayed a certain degree of relish in its relation of professional injustices.11 There is as much relief as ressentiment in this focus on professional discrimination, for the naked prejudice exercised by professional schools and societies has at least had the merit of bringing systemic biases out into the light. Sociologists have alerted us to the extent to which professional organizations exist to erect walls around their fields, employing a battery of exclusionary techniques to preserve the prestige and authority accruing to their specialist knowledge and experience.12 The professions, in short, have been bastions of social power, and by virtue of their intrinsically hegemonic functions they have crystallized and made transparent forces of social oppression that were often much more subtle and insidious. In her chapter in this volume, for instance, Annmarie Adams charts architect Marjorie Hill’s uphill struggle for admission to the Alberta Association of Architects. Hill was, ultimately, recognized by her Alberta peers as a professional practitioner, but she could not escape the more nebulous and pervasive devaluation of women’s creative powers that led some of her own clients to remember her as a draftsperson rather than an architect. 6

Rethinking Professionalism

These and other social forces – such as the pressures to conform to a normative domesticity or to prioritize the needs of family members – have typically had a greater impact on women artists’ careers than the prejudicial policies of professional associations.13 Yet social pressures are harder to recognize and far more difficult to counter than naked professional protectionism, and so instances of professional discrimination against women have gained great emotional power by standing in for a larger experience of oppression. From its beginnings, then, art-historical writing on women in Canada has been indelibly shaped by the patterns of exclusion it has sought to redress. Its engagement with the concept of professionalism should be understood as part of that dialectical process. In their catalogue for the influential 1975 exhibition From Women’s Eyes: Women Painters in Canada, curators Dorothy Farr and Natalie Luckyj first clearly delineated the terms of a developmental narrative of Canadian women’s art that progressed from amateur domestic gentility to professional public achievement.14 The subsequent published surveys of historical painting by Canadian women – Maria Tippett’s By a Lady and A.K. Prakash’s Independent Spirit – have followed Farr and Luckyj’s lead, drawing heavily on the amateur/professional divide as they chart the course that enabled women “to be recognized as more than dabblers in the fine arts.”15 Recently, Susan Butlin’s monograph on the painter Florence Carlyle, aptly entitled The Practice of Her Profession, vigorously embraces this narrative as its primary conceptual armature, arguing that Carlyle’s “novel solutions to the challenges of women’s entry into the commercial and professional world contributed to a new model of the art professional in Canada.”16 In keeping with its progressivism, this narrative has an overtly celebratory thrust; nevertheless, there is something unsettling about the role that professionalism has played in attempts to reinscribe women into Canadian art history. Looking back at the text of From Women’s Eyes, one of the things that emerges clearly is the extent to which Farr and Luckyj’s embrace of the professional model (and its concomitant devaluation of amateur practice) led them to find women artists lacking. The academic genre painter Charlotte Schreiber, for example (Fig. 1.1), they dismissed as “no more than a prominent amateur,” despite her varied professional activities throughout the 1880s, and this vein of critique appeared again in their reproof of women “who too frequently have accepted family circumstances and have been lulled into comfortable amateurism.”17 While Luckyj would become one of the nation’s most significant voices for feminist art history, her perspective at the early date of 1975 was necessarily indebted to dominant art world concepts and criteria, and these included a professionalism that was then on the upswing in the Canadian milieu, having been strengthened in 1968 by the founding of carfac, the “voice of professional artists in Canada.”18 In retrospect, however, it seems fair to ask whether the professionalism that Farr and Luckyj so valued had, to some extent, helped h une ault

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Fig. 1.1 Charlotte Schreiber, The Happiest Land, n.d. Capitalizing on the prestige of credentials established in her native England as well as a keen public sensibility, Schreiber quickly built an impressive reputation and career in Canada.

to produce the very exclusions that their exhibition sought to redress; for, while the catalogue seeks to recognize a wide range of women artists, it simultaneously devalues at least half a century of female practitioners, passing them over as “not quite professionals.”19 “Dabblers” and “not quite professionals.” The repercussions of this language and the methodological framework that engenders it are far-reaching. As Janice Helland has pointed out, uncritical acceptance of conventional strategies of artistic valuation precludes serious exploration of the social and historical functions performed by women’s art.20 From the implication of art in the colonial project to its role in the construction of gender or its place in the changing nature of household and national economies, the untheorized acceptance of an evaluative division between amateur and professional forecloses opportunities to understand some of the most significant aspects of women’s art production. To participate in the methodological privileging of professionalism is thus – and to an extent that has not been widely discussed – to play with intellectual fire. It is a fire that has burned most brightly in the sphere of painting. Since the mid-eighteenth century, when the newly founded Royal Academy explicitly 8

Rethinking Professionalism

debarred craftspeople in a bid to raise the status of artists and art in England, painting and professionalism have been tightly linked, and this connection has been no less true in Canada, where the nation’s leading arts organization, the rca, closely modelled itself on the British example. The legacy of this history has been to naturalize assumptions about the value of professional status within the history of painting so as to make them effectively invisible. While much recent writing on women painters has been historically sophisticated, taking care to situate women’s canvases in a web of social and aesthetic considerations, the evaluative and progress-driven narrative of professionalization itself has not typically been a focus of attention. It is otherwise in the spheres of craft and architectural history. In Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada, Sandra Alfoldy denaturalizes the shift from amateur to professional status, revealing it to be more than just the logical outcome of expanding social opportunities pursued by talented and determined women.21 Rather, professionalism comes into view as a complex and historically contingent construct, inseparable from debates about the definition of fine art under modernism, the creation and mobilization of cultural capital in a classed society, competition for state resources, the organization of urban industrial culture, competing power bids over training and governance, and – underneath it all – a hegemonic dialectic between centre and margins. In thus recognizing professionalism as a site of struggle, the topic is also positioned as a subject for methodological reflection. As Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred stress in ‘Designing Women’: Gender and the Architectural Profession, “some thought should clearly be given to the heuristic value of the term ‘professions’” in light of its strongly gendered history.22 Questioning the relevance of professionalism as a lens for the scholarly analysis of women’s creative production, Adams and Tancred seriously consider the possibility that “the very conception of the professions [is] so profoundly masculinist that we enter into male priorities by using this term.”23 Though the authors eventually decide to preserve professionalism as a necessary framework, they conclude that “part of what we have learned from this study of women architects is that no existing categories of analysis concerning the professions should be taken for granted.”24 This is a crucial lesson for the investigation of women and art in Canada. The history of women’s art history has vividly demonstrated the importance of attending to the repercussions of the criteria that we bring to women’s art, and it has long been a tenet of feminist scholarly practice that the incorporation of women into art history necessitates a structural revision of the discipline itself. Feminist art historians have offered trenchant critiques of art history’s emphasis on originality and greatness, its privileging of stylistic genealogy, its hierarchization of genres, and the predominance it has accorded to painting and sculpture. As early as 1987, Pamela Gerrish Nunn recognized the privileging of professional practice as part of this art-historical nexus, and in her book Victorian h une ault

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Women Artists she argued that in reassessing nineteenth-century art “the amateur – or, rather, the non-professional artist must also be considered.”25 Nunn’s hesitation over terminology (“amateur” or “non-professional”?) signals more than a need to integrate previously marginalized practitioners into the discipline; rather, it is symptomatic of both the possibilities and the potential drawbacks that professionalism itself poses when adopted as a structural model for an art history that seeks to recognize the full scope and import of women’s cultural participation. To assess fully this mix of possibility and limitation, it will be necessary to look more closely at the specific historical outlines of the process of professionalization as it interacted with women and art in Canada.

Professionalism as Historical Process Professions and professionalism alike have been tremendously important to Canadian women. While the most prestigious of the traditional careers, such as law and medicine, were, of course, long closed to women, the perception of the professional sphere as a masculine stronghold is altered if we follow the lead of the Canadian census and take a more inclusive view of the field. According to census records, women constituted over half of the professional workforce in Canada between 1921 and 1941.26 Indeed, it is even possible to make the case that professions have been more important to Canada’s working women than they have been to its men. In 1921, for example, 19 per cent of all working women were professionals, as compared with only 3 per cent of all working men.27 Artists were officially classed within this professional workforce from Confederation onward, and, with the significant exception of craftspeople, all of the arts practitioners considered in this volume – painters, sculptors, art teachers, photographers, architects, and designers – were so designated.28 Professionalism and Its Exclusions The designation of “professional artist” came to be increasingly specialized over the course of the nineteenth century. Artists were affected by a broad restructuring of the cultural terrain that had set in during the nineteenth century, as academies regulated training, revised standards, built up markets, and controlled membership. In Canada, this process was clearly discernible by 1872 when the Ontario Society of Artists (osa) was established by and for professional practitioners, ushering in an era of artistic self-regulation that is characteristic of professions as a whole. In this the osa differed from earlier groups, such as the Society of Artists and Amateurs of Toronto (1834) or the Art Association of Montreal (aam) (1860), where the cultural agenda was set by lovers of art as much as, or more than, by artists themselves. 10

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Fig. 1.2 Ida Braubach, The Canadian Kitchen Interior, 1871. With her 1870 inclusion in Montreal’s Society of Canadian Artists, Braubach became the earliest female member of a professional artists’ society in Canada.

It is a further hallmark of professional societies that they manage admission to their ranks through the control of specialized knowledge, and in short order the osa opened three branches of the Ontario School of Art, in Toronto (1876), London (1878), and Ottawa (1879). Soon afterwards, the professionalizing project was invigorated by the intense encouragement for cultural institutions offered by the Marquis of Lorne and Princess Louise when they took up residence in Canada as governor general and vicereine. This, the first wave of cultural professionalization in Canada, reached an early highpoint in 1880 with the establishment of the rca, the National Gallery of Canada, and the School of Fine Art of the Art Association of Montreal. This development of professional artists’ societies, academies, and schools overlaps exactly with the first trickle of Canadian women into the professions as a whole, a process that historian Mary Kinnear dates to the 1870s.29 Thus, it is unsurprising that women were active in Canada’s new professional artistic structures from the beginning. In 1870 the German-born and trained Ida Braubach (Fig. 1.2) became the only female member of Montreal’s short-lived professional Society of Canadian Artists (1867–73), in 1874 the craftswoman and designer Esther K. Westmacott was the first woman elected to membership in the still new Ontario Society of Artists, and in 1880 Charlotte Schreiber (see Fig. 1.1) was a founding member of the rca.3 The chequered history of women’s participation in such organizations is a standard feature of writing on Canadian women artists. After its initial inclusion of Charlotte Schreiber, the rca famously did not elect a woman to full membership for over half a century. Couching its discriminatory policy in the h une ault

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language of gallantry, the academy’s constitution stipulated that women “shall not be required to attend business meetings” (my emphasis) and then went on explicitly to exclude them from participating in its executive.31 Similarly, the osa, though admitting women to full membership, also initially denied them “the privilege of voting or attending meetings except [when] specifically invited to do so,” and it would be a quarter of a century before a woman, Laura Muntz, joined the society’s executive council in 1900.32 Typically, women remained marginalized from the governing bodies of artists’ societies until the 1920s and 1930s, or later.33 These restrictions notwithstanding, the male members of such societies did recognize women as fellow professionals, and seven women were elected to membership in the osa during the 1870s.34 Their career paths are worth briefly rehearsing, for they largely conform to a range of traits and options characteristic of professional artists at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to membership in artists’ societies, these included specialized training and travel abroad, the routine exhibition and public sale of work executed in the popular or avant-garde styles of the day, participation in cultural institutions, and teaching.35 Charlotte Schreiber, for example, built on credentials established in her native England and assumed a prominent place in the nation’s arts community; in addition to her role in the rca, she was on the board of the Ontario School of Art and a key teacher there.36 Esther Westmacott, who exhibited in the osa primarily as a painter, pursued an even more active career as a designer, founding the Associated Artists’ School of Art and Design in 1884 and serving on the executive of Toronto’s Society of Arts and Crafts.37 Like Westmacott, the commercial portrait painter Anne Blackwell seems to have supported herself through her art; although Blackwell was married, she lived alone and advertised her services in the Ontario Gazeteer and Business Directory.38 Soon after her election to the osa at the precocious age of seventeen, the talented genre painter Elizabeth Adela Armstrong left Canada to pursue advanced training in England, where marriage to a fellow artist facilitated continuation of her work after matrimony (Fig. 1.3).39 Mrs S. Hamilton, an oil painter, also lived abroad, making her home in a Paris that was fast becoming the destination for Canadian artists with serious ambition. Little is remembered about the Toronto-based painter and photographer Jane Hamilton, but, as the daughter of a prominent minister, she exemplifies the middle-class status that was also common to these women, at least insofar as this is possible to determine.40 The caveat is necessary here, for of the society’s final member – Mrs Sinclair – nothing is known at all. The dearth of archival information on historical Canadian women artists is a notorious stumbling block to research, but the thorough canvassing of sources that it necessitates is also occasionally productive of new vantage points. With respect to professionalism, one such vantage point is provided by the Canadian census, which casts a strikingly different light on the identity of professional 12

Rethinking Professionalism

Fig. 1.3 Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, School Is Out, 1889. Forbes is one of Canada’s first expatriate professional women artists, a pattern that would later be followed by Helen McNicoll and Henrietta Shore, among others.

women artists than does the preceding list of women voted to membership in osa; of the eighty-three women who declared their occupation as artists in the 1881 census (and so were automatically classed as professionals), there is only one point of overlap – Jane Hamilton – with the women on the osa membership rolls.41 Charlotte Schreiber, for example, following the bourgeois conventions of her day, was described as being without occupation on the census enumerator’s handlist.42 Conversely, not one of the names of the eighty-three women artists enumerated now appears in the extensive Artists in Canada database of the Canadian Heritage Information Network.43 Who, then, were the women artists of 1881? And what should we make of their ostensible professionalism? The progressive narrative of women’s transition from accomplished amateurs to working professionals at the end of the nineteenth century is suggestive of a profile of gentility and possibly – at the relatively early date of 1881 – of public aspirations that were still in excess of their h une ault

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attainment: Farr and Luckyj’s “not quite professionals.” Were these women simply “dabblers” with an exaggerated sense of their own importance? There is little art remaining to judge by. While Lucy J. Goslee has left behind an extensive botanical album that demonstrates training and seriousness of purpose, neither quality necessarily bears witness to professional status (Fig. 1.4). The census does offer some limited contextual information about the women, however, including their places of residence and, frequently, the occupations of their family members. From this a surprising professional profile emerges, for the women were overwhelmingly from working-class families. They were the daughters of machinists, millers, and masons, the sisters of seamstresses and servants, and the neighbours of workers and small tradesmen. Frequently, they were in their twenties and thirties and unmarried; others were widowed, some supporting children. The general impression is of women who would, of necessity, have expected to make their art pay, and there is some corroborating evidence that they did so. We know, for example, that C.H.A. Miller was a twenty-eight-year-old living on a farm near Chatham, Ontario, and from her listing as a portrait painter in the Ontario Gazeteer and Business Directory we may conclude that she was actively working to establish a paying clientele.44 This one example aside, however, speculation about the women’s careers remains almost entirely conjectural, for, with the exception of Colleen Skidmore’s research on the employees of the Notman studios, the contributions of working women to the history of Canadian art are unexplored.45 It is a fair guess that the rapidly proliferating visual culture of the late nineteenth century would have created employment opportunities, and it is likely that some of the women in the census found work hand-tinting photographs, while others may have helped to fill the demand for engravings and lithographs in the expanding print market. Possibly they designed advertisements or painted business signs. But was art a “profession” for such women? Or was it merely an “occupation”? The split between the census returns and the female membership of the osa prompts attention to social stratifications within the Canadian cultural field, and suggests that there were at least two kinds of professional artists working in at least two separate but overlapping art economies: a commercial art professionalism, and a fine art one.46 Artists might expect to earn money from both avenues – and, indeed, might even pursue them simultaneously – but the avenues themselves were distinct in their patterns of training and financial remuneration. Nor were the required outlays and anticipated intakes of money the only points at stake in the distinction, for the division between commercial and fine art professionalism was (and is) at least as much a question of cultural as of financial capital. In each manifestation of the commercial/fine art split (which would be reconfigured in the emerging art/craft hierarchy and, later, in the art versus kitsch debate), the issue of who and what has been accorded professional status in the art world has typically been decided by those with the highest social standing. 14

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Fig. 1.4 Of the eighty-three women who listed themselves as artists on the 1881 census, only Lucy J. Goslee has work known to be preserved in a public collection. This is a folio from her album of Flowers from the Woods, Fields and Swamps of Canada, 1890–97.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, to be an artist was to be a professional, and to be a professional was to be middle class. In this context, it is fair to ask the question: What becomes of the working-class artists of the 1881 census? An art history structured by the narrative of professionalism is unlikely ever to tell us much about them. In other respects, however, the professionalism indicated by the census does coincide with that signalled by the osa rolls, for both groups of women were white, Protestant anglophones from Ontario. While the women artists named on census returns lived in all provinces, they were concentrated in the urban h une ault

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centres of Ontario and, to a lesser extent, Quebec. The women were of English, Scottish, Irish, or occasionally German descent. Only three claimed French heritage and no Aboriginal women at all were listed. What, then, of the relevance of professionalism to those unrepresented women? In Quebec, where women did not obtain the vote until 1940, recognition of their right to and aptitude for public life was slow in coming. The tight social control exerted by the Roman Catholic Church, together with the province’s predominantly rural demographic, limited the career opportunities for Frenchspeaking women prior to the Quiet Revolution. Nevertheless, the strong value historically placed on arts and culture in Quebec mitigated these factors, and a number of francophone women did forge professional art careers, if not in the late nineteenth century then certainly by the 1910s and 1920s, when Jeanne de Crèvecoeur, Sylvia Daoust, Simone Dénéchaud, Claire Fauteux, Agnès Lefort, Berthe Lemoine, E. Louise de Montigny-Giguère, and Alice Nolin were all active (Fig. 1.5).47 Two important exhibitions at the Musée du Québec have drawn attention to these and other francophone women artists working prior to the better-known women of the Refus global, but there is still much work to be done before we shall fully understand their relation to the currents of urban professionalism that have been mapped out for the province by Esther Trépanier.48 Outside Montreal, the work of Charlevoix artists such as Simone Mary Bouchard and Louise Gadbois raises further questions about the specific configuration of professionalism that applies to women whose folk paintings and hooked rugs were, quite unusually, valued both in a local commercial economy and by the Contemporary Arts Society, the province’s leading modernist art association.49

Fig. 1.5 Alice Nolin, Modèle au repos, c. 1927. Nolin is one of a number of little-studied professional francophone women artists working in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Yet, despite its points of contact with a variety of French-speaking women, professionalism remains an issue of limited utility for much of the history of women and art in francophone Quebec. The examples of Bouchard and Gadbois notwithstanding, the concept is ill-suited to an analysis of the economic and familial functions of women’s domestic textile production, such as the quilts, rugs, and catalognes produced by members of the cercle des fermières. Nor is the important role of art in the convents of the ancien régime and afterwards well served by the professional model. While nuns may have been classed as “professionals” in the Canadian census, and while their creative practice, from embroidery to painting, may have been subject to a strict imposition of standards passed on through a training system that was reminiscent of professional and academic apprenticeship structures, the sisters’ devotional orientation coupled with the particularities of their institutional framework keep them firmly outside the sphere conventionally inhabited by the professional artist.50 In the context of Aboriginal art history, the concept of professionalism is even more suspect. In the late nineteenth century, the sale of beadwork, quillwork, moosehair embroidery, and basketry for the tourist market was all that stood between many Aboriginal families and starvation (Fig. 1.6), but the highly skilled women who produced these beautiful objects appear neither in the membership rolls of the osa nor in the census itself, where most Aboriginal women were listed as being without occupation.51 Nor, to be fair, would these women themselves likely have considered their labour as a “professional” undertaking. As Sherry Farrell Racette argues later in this volume, while “art” and “artist” are meaningful concepts within First Nations societies, the designation of “professional … remains tightly bound to European economic and social structures.” Recent recognitions of the economic, aesthetic, and social value of First Nations artwork have led to more broadly inclusive art-historical accounts, but such inclusions cannot simply be effected along established evaluative lines without perpetuating the imposition of a Eurocentric framework. The culturally specific and highly racialized nature of the discourse of artistic professionalism is a crucial part of its past, and one that clearly limits its usefulness for Canadian art historians. Here as elsewhere, professionalism remains a discourse of centre and periphery, not easily suited to discussion of those on the margins, whether economically, geographically, or ethnically. Nor is it particularly well suited to marginalized forms of artistic production, such as craft. As Jennifer Salahub describes later in this volume, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought new opportunities for women to earn money through the production of a tremendous variety of sculpted, painted, beaded, stitched, lacquered, and enamelled objects (Fig. 1.7). Typically, producers of these objects were considered to be artisans, or even (for the purpose of the census) manufacturers. So when, in 1881, Frances Letheby – the widowed

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Fig. 1.6 Anonoymous Huron-Wendat artist, Case, c. 1850–1900. Though many Aboriginal women supported their families through their artistry, none were listed in the Canadian censuses as artists, and very few were recognized as having any occupation at all.

mother of a thirteen-year-old daughter in Halifax – described herself to enumerators as an “Artist, Fancy W[ork],” she was raising the stakes considerably. So were Hester Sammons in Hamilton and Marilla Snively in St Catharines: both self-described as “Artists in wax.” Salahub points out that, as the popularity of the Arts and Crafts movement grew across North America, “art with a capital ‘A’ served as a prefix for embroidery, furniture, photographs and all manner of home decoration.” Were the producers of these objects professional artists? The ramifications of this question are still being felt today as craft historians actively debate the relation of their field to that of art history. Given the importance of craft within women’s creative production, feminist scholars have long insisted that the writing of women back into the art-historical narrative necessitates a re-evaluation of its medium-based hierarchies. In Canada, craft production was of central importance to the careers of professional artists such as May Phillips, co-founder, in 1905, of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, and Mabel Cawthra, who studied with Charles Ashbee, opened a franchise of a furniture shop based on the English firm of Morris and Company and became the first president of the Society of Arts and Crafts of Canada.52 Indeed, as Susan Butlin has demonstrated, Arts and Crafts production played a significant role in the careers of most of the women artists working in Toronto between 18

Rethinking Professionalism

Fig. 1.7 Alice Egan Hagen, A Copenhagen Inspiration [Vase], 1907. China painting, with its strong domestic associations, was a popular choice among women seeking to make a living from their artistic practice.

1880 and 1920, including some, like Mary Hiester Reid, who are usually remembered only as painters.53 Yet the practices of these women sit uneasily within the discourse and history of professionalism in Canadian craft. Sandra Alfoldy has persuasively argued that craft in Canada did not professionalize until the 1960s, when the Canadian Craftsmen’s Association emerged to challenge the dominance of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in English Canada.54 While the guild had emphasized the provision of employment for makers of traditional crafts, its roots were grounded more firmly in maternalist traditions of philanthropy than in the project of professionalization, and many Canadian artists – even those with allegiances to the applied arts – kept their distance from it. As Frances Loring wrote to National Gallery of Canada director H.O. McCurry in 1943: “We feel that the Can. Handicraft Guild has not yet proven its interest in anything but exploitation of the craft worker. Certainly in Can. handicraft production there is very little that puts it in the creative or art class.”55 Craft production is central to the history of women and art in Canada, but Loring’s comments are in line with Alfoldy’s general argument; given its late onset, the adoption of professionalism as a lens for Canadian women’s craft production will miss the greater part of its history – the isolated voices of the women of 1881 notwithstanding. h une ault

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Similar questions about artistic and professional status are raised by the history of photography where – in marked contrast to the field of craft – professionalism did emerge as an important issue early on, as the medium struggled to establish its artistic credentials. In 1881 the census recorded thirty-five women working as photographers, including one – Alice Bowness from Prince Edward Island – who was listed as a “photographic artist.” The professional photographer’s bid to be considered as an artist was long-standing. As early as 1841, only two years after the daguerreotype process had been introduced in Paris, Montreal’s Mrs Fletcher was advertising her services as a “professor and teacher of the photogenic art.”56 Similar language, with an added French fillip, was employed by British Columbia’s Hannah Maynard in her dealings with the public (though not in her encounter with enumerators) (Fig. 1.8). Maynard’s self-description as a “photographic artiste” is particularly evocative, denotatively calling attention to the status of photography as an art form at the same time as it connotatively endeavoured to secure for Maynard a position as a truly cultured woman in an outpost of the British Empire. The intertwined questions of artistic status and cultural capital became increasingly important during the 1880s, as the new dry-plate process enabled photographers to minimize the appearance of visual detail, thus cultivating a more painterly visual appearance and concomitantly intensifying the existing division between photography’s documentary functions and its artistic ones. In the absence of a developed economic infrastructure for art photography, this divide was, initially, mapped onto the professional/amateur split. As Martha Langford has observed, different standards were applied to “professional” and “artistic” productions,57 and, even in cases where the same practitioners pursued the two trajectories, the instrumentalization typical of commercial photography was contrasted with the amateur’s purity of aesthetic interests. In this way – and in distinct contrast to the field of painting – status came to accrue to the amateur practice in preference to the professional one. This binary, however, was further complicated by the advent of a third type of photography, with the introduction of the first Kodak camera in 1888. As the proliferation of snapshot photography created a new type of amateurism (one that the Kodak company would particularly market to women), the designation of professional photographer was rehabilitated as a marker of status. The rapprochement of the documentary and artistic traditions that was, as Langford points out, spurred on by modernism thus also makes sense as a realignment of cultural capital in reaction to the development of snapshot photography. Thus, the art photography of Margaret Watkins (see Fig. 6.3) could find a niche in the commercial world of the 1920s, just as the documentary photojournalism of a photographer like Edith Watson could function as the central facet of her identity as an artist; for both practices were distinguished by the professionalism that set them apart

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Rethinking Professionalism

Fig. 1.8: A stamp used by Hannah Maynard, emphasizing both photography’s status as an art form and Maynard’s professional self-presentation as a cultured woman in a colonial outpost of the British Empire.

from the snapshots taken by amateurs such as Mattie Gunterman, a camp cook working in the west Kootenay region of the British Columbia interior.58 If the structuring of the professional/amateur divide along the lines of artistry diminished during the twentieth century, however, it did not disappear entirely, and in the case of female photographers it overlapped in predictable ways with considerations about gender and class, as the gentility of “artistry” was deployed to insulate middle-class women from the commercial concerns of the workaday world. An article on pictorialist photographer Minna Keene, published in Maclean’s in 1926, is indicative. After praising the only Canadian woman to have attained membership in the Royal Photographic Society as a “charming hostess” and “home lover,” the article closed with this assessment of her achievements: “Artistically, she is a success. Commercially? There is too much of the artist in this woman, who is first of all a successful wife and mother, to worry about commercial recognition.”59 In photography, as in craft and painting, classed and gendered expectations about appropriate feminine behaviour clearly structured the field of women’s professionalism.

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The biases of Maclean’s notwithstanding, commercial recognition was crucial for most professional female artists, and in establishing their careers women often had to negotiate places for themselves within predominantly masculine business communities. Photographic history provides a range of examples of the strategies they employed to do so, from sheer stubbornness in the face of outsider status to creative partnership and the formation of a feminized professional identity. For Edmonton’s Gladys Reeves, the pressures of her anomalous position were acute. “I started my own studio in 1920. I had the unfortunate position of being a woman. And in those days a woman in business was not recognized. I think I was the first woman west of Portage La Prairie to start a photographic studio of my own. And there were many, many times when I’d think I’d come to the end of my tether and just couldn’t go on and then I’d be afraid they’d say ‘I told you so.’”60 For some women, such as Mary Dukelow of Iroquois, Ontario, the answer was to capitalize on her unusual position, and as late as 1880 she was (inaccurately) advertising herself as the “only Lady Photographer in Canada.”61 Other women, like Montreal’s Eugénie Gagné, ran studios with their husbands but carved out professional identities for themselves by using their own imprints (Fig. 1.9).62 At the same time, female photographers sought to reassure their clientele as to their conventionality; as Jennifer Salahub discusses in her essay on Hannah Maynard, Maynard built her career around very traditional markers of a genteel, domestic femininity that counteracted the unconventionality of her position as a woman in business. In this, Maynard’s strategy was, in fact, characteristic of a whole first wave of women’s artistic professionalization, and raises the question of a distinctly feminine path to artistic professionalism. A Distinctly Feminine Professionalism? In assessing the place of feminine gentility and domesticity within the profile of the professional woman artist, there is perhaps no better place to begin than with the last type of paid work to structure the field of women’s artistic employment in 1881: that of art teacher. The case of the Toronto teacher Annie H. Heaslip is typical. In 1881 Heaslip was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of a teenaged son, married but living apart from her husband, and earning a respectable living by teaching the art of painted porcelain, bolstering her reputation and income by exhibiting samples in the professional category at Ontario agricultural fairs. This profile of the woman artist as an income-earning instructor/practitioner of an art of gentility conforms to a female career pattern so long-standing that it challenges the conventional dating of women’s artistic professionalism to the end of the nineteenth century. Beginning as early as 1798, and becoming commonplace from the 1820s to the 1840s, women such as Charlotte Allamand Berczy, Louise-Amélie Panet, Mary G. Hall, Eliza Thresher, and Maria Morris Miller had turned their creative 22

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Fig. 1.9 Eugénie Gagné, Mrs. Wing Sing and son, Montreal, QC, 1890–1895. Gagné’s studio on Saint-Laurent Boulevard was located in the city’s Chinatown, not far from the old port of Montreal, a point of entry for many immigrants.

abilities to financial account by giving art lessons. In Montreal, Saint John, Charlottetown, and Halifax, these women opened private academies where they earned much-needed money by teaching drawing and a range of genteel art forms to local residents.63 Some, like Hall and Miller, also published their work (Fig. 1.10). Should these women be considered “professional” artists, and were they so in their day? Donald Soucy and Harold Pearse are categorical: “The only artists in Nova Scotia who were looked upon as professionals were male. Many women painted, and many women taught painting, but they were all viewed as amateurs.”64 Yet another answer is possible, suggested not only by the remunerative status of the women’s work but also – and somewhat paradoxically – by the very domestic and eminently feminine nature of their labour. In her analysis of the experiences of American women artists, Laura Prieto has argued that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, women’s professionalism followed a distinct developmental path that set it off from male practices and norms: “Women artists hearkened back to the former model of family workshops producing art. h une ault

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They framed their lives and work in terms of their relationship to home and family, and sought legitimacy through an extension of their feminine roles.”65 In Canada, the private academies opened by women artists paralleled this course. Maria Morris Miller, for example, first taught art together with her mother, Sybella, and then in a separate drawing school run from the family home.66 Like Berczy, Panet, Thresher, and Hall, Morris capitalized on traditions of feminine “accomplishments” – those amateur cultural pursuits such as drawing, music, and the study of foreign languages so key to middle-class women’s education during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Accomplishments filled a variety of social functions – establishing class status through their demonstration of the leisure necessary to cultivate a cultured identity, while simultaneously forming a crucial component of the marriage market through their provision of socially sanctioned opportunities for young women to display their talents for the benefit of young men. The visual arts of accomplishment, which included painting and drawing on silk, velvet, and china, also blurred the boundaries between fine art and domestic craft, further enhancing their ties to the feminine realm. Yet the domestic connotations of genteel feminine propriety that accompanied accomplishments were also productive of professional opportunities for the women who taught them, and Anne Bermingham has observed that the women who ran private art schools and studios were able to mobilize associations that rendered their careers eminently palatable.67 As Prieto puts it, the woman artist’s profession in the earlier part of the nineteenth century was thus configured as “a natural expression of her womanhood.”68 By providing

serious female artists with an acceptable avenue through which to turn their art into a career, accomplishments paradoxically offered a way to surpass the domestic amateurism that they exemplified. The historically specific culture of feminine accomplishments declined in relative importance over the course of the nineteenth century, but women’s training in them left them well placed to meet newly developing demands for art education. As art education in primary and secondary schools expanded during the late nineteenth century, new job opportunities were created, and women were soon establishing, running, or teaching at art schools and women’s colleges across the country.69 Women’s fortunes in these careers varied. Private art schools were financially precarious and often short-lived. In Quebec, women could not teach in the prestigious network run by the Conseil des arts et manufactures de la province du Québec. By contrast, in Ontario they constituted 35 per cent of postsecondary art instructors in the provincially administered network of Ontario School of Art branches, obtaining over three-quarters of the teaching certificates issued for the advanced course in art between 1885 and 1898.70 Occasionally, women occupied senior administrative posts. Frances Richards, a Parisian-trained portraitist, was headmistress of the Ottawa School of Art in the 1880s (Fig. 1.11) and Jessie Semple was supervisor of art for the Toronto School Board from 1900 to 1925.71 Other women, such as Amelia Anne Paget, a Métis teacher at Manitoba’s Qu’Appel Industrial School, were tenuously employed and poorly paid, but, as Sherry Farrell Racette discusses in this volume, Paget’s labour was critical to the survival of traditional Indigenous arts at a time when the federal government actively sought to destroy Aboriginal culture. In these teaching careers, women artists often specialized in domestic handcrafts and the applied arts. In addition to Esther Westmacott’s Associated Artists’ School of Art and Design (established in Toronto in 1884), Marion A. Living founded the First Technical School of Ottawa in 1898, and Rosina J. Barrett opened the city’s School of Art Needlework, having previously been on staff at the Ottawa School of Art.72 In Toronto, the art pages of Saturday Night regularly ran advertisements by women offering studio instruction in china painting, miniature painting, and art needlework (Fig. 1.12). Again, the distinct path to

Fig. 1.10 Opposite Mary G. Hall’s The City of St. John, New Brunswick, 1835, was part of a collection of six Views of British North America, Drawn from Nature and on Stone, by Mrs. Hall, published in Boston by Pendleton’s Lithography.

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Fig. 1.11 Frances Richards, Portrait, c. 1884–87. Oscar Wilde’s experience of sitting for a portrait by Richards inspired the author to write The Picture of Dorian Gray.

professionalism proposed by Prieto is germane. Charting the social “conventions and ideologies of gender [that] prevented them from simply following men’s route to professional status,” Prieto argues that women looked to those same gendered conventions as the basis for their careers: “Needlework and other domestic arts provided women with a feminine context, a cultural tradition, that helped legitimate their own work.”73 The importance of this context is apparent in the professional workspaces that women created for themselves. Alice Egan Hagen, for example, established her first studio in the 1890s in a rented space in Halifax’s commercial Roy Building. While she equipped the studio with a kiln purchased from her first professional profits and used the space as a location in which both to paint and to teach, photographs show how carefully Egan worked to blend the room’s commercial purpose with the furnishings and atmosphere of a cultured and feminized domestic environment (Fig. 1.13). Historian Marie Elwood has observed the similarities between Egan’s studio decor and that of her New York teacher, Adelaide Alsop Robineau,74 and the mentoring relationship that existed between the two women positions them within a shared women’s culture that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, binding female artists together in a discernible group identity.75 In Canada, participation in a distinct women’s culture is further apparent in figures such as Anna Leonowens, a suffragist and founder of a number of 26

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women’s organizations. When Leonowens and other Halifax women established the Victoria School of Art and Design (now the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) in 1887, the school was mandated “to open up new and remunerative employment for women,” and it pursued its goals in its own hiring practices, bringing Katharine N. Evans from Philadelphia to serve as principal in 1895.76 Subsequently the school would hire its graduates, including Alice Egan, Kate Foss Hill, Edith Smith, and Kate Graham (Fig. 1.14). Montreal’s similarly named Victoria School of Art would also hire women in senior positions during the 1890s; in 1892 May Phillips and Harriette J. MacDonnell were made co-principals of the newly revamped school, which later became the School of Art and Applied Design.77 Women also formed the majority of the teaching staff at the School of Handicraft and Design in Victoria.78

Fig. 1.12 Left Advertisements from Toronto Saturday Night, 14 November 1896. The magazine regularly published notices by women artists seeking commissions or offering to teach.

Fig. 1.13 Above The idea of a separate female path to professionalism is supported by this photograph of Alice Egan Hagen’s studio in Halifax’s Roy Building (1898–99). The studio’s professional purpose was combined with the trappings of a domestic environment.

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The associations with domesticity and gentility that attended women’s distinct path to professionalism followed them on their entrance into the artistic mainstream. Among artists’ associations, the innovative Toronto Art Students League was unique in including women on its executive as early as the 1890s, but published comments by the league’s president, Robert Holmes, are indicative of their role within the group. According to Holmes, the “gentler sex” kept the league’s bohemian excesses in check “while ministering most effectively to the material comforts of its abiding place, and supplying a valuable element of refinement and delicacy to its art atmosphere.”79 The moral and material “delicacy” esteemed by Holmes has been discussed in the American context by Kirsten Swinth, who argues that during the 1870s and 1880s women’s socially sanctioned acts of cultural guardianship “created positive associations between art, refinement and women’s activity that helped validate women’s careers.”80 Laura Prieto charts a similar phenomenon but points out that, increasingly, propriety marked the edges of a growing divide between “the serious woman artist who was willing to risk her reputation for her career and the dilettantish amateur artistic woman who considered her purity more important than her training.”81 In Canada, Blodwen Davies’s account of a kerfuffle over Charlotte Schreiber’s proposed attendance at Royal Canadian Academy meetings attests to the value that women artists placed on being beyond moral reproach: “Mrs. Schreiber wanted to attend but, of course, could not contemplate being present with thirty-nine men, so she wanted to take her husband along with her for escort. However, the Academy could not see why it should allow Mr. Schreiber to attend their meetings just because he happened to be Mrs. Schreiber’s husband, and, according to the gossip of the time, there was friction.”82 Davies’s story is undocumented, but, if it is true, it suggests that the exclusion of women from the rca executive had as much to do with Schreiber’s concern for her reputation as it did with discrimination strictly on the basis of her sex. Be this as it may, in the larger picture the sharp divide between artistic professionalism and sexual respectability that Prieto invokes for the United States does not seem to have been as pronounced in Canada. As Janice Anderson has pointed out, press coverage of the pre-eminently professional Toronto painter Mary Hiester Reid was unswerving in its adulation of her gracious and ladylike character, and Marilyn Baker’s work on the members of the Winnipeg branch of the Women’s Art Association of Canada (waac) demonstrates that activity as a woman artist – even a professional one – was in many ways consonant with a highly respectable social conservatism.83 One factor that may have contributed to this Canadian difference was the complex overlap between amateurs and professionals north of the border, where a less developed art world infrastructure led to the continuing prominence of

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Fig. 1.14 Mary Kate Graham, Looking across the Parade, c. 1910. Graham was one of a number of female instructors to be hired at the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax.

amateurs within the cultural field.84 Nowhere was this intricate relation between amateurs and professionals more actively played out than in the waac. Founded in 1886 with two classes of membership – “Professional” and “Honorary” – the association existed to foster “the mutual help and cooperation of women who are either artists or lovers of art.”85 The interests of the two constituencies were not always coextensive, and the gap led to an early split in the association’s membership, with those who wished to use its rooms as working studios splitting away from the main group, which maintained a broader aim of “promoting the more general interest in Original Art in this country.”86

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In assessing the contribution of women-only societies to American women’s art careers, Prieto emphasizes their contributory role in forging a distinctly feminine path to professionalization. Her conclusions fit well within the broader history of women and work, where gender-based separatism has long been recognized as one of women’s principal methods for negotiating entry into the professional sphere.87 Yet Kirsten Swinth complicates this picture, arguing that professionalization in art created “a series of shifting alliances that often pitted generations and groups of women against one another as much as it divided women from men.”88 The Canadian context appears to bear out both perspectives. The waac was established by painter Mary Ella Dignam (Fig. 1.15) as a clear response to gender-based discrimination in the Canadian art world. As Dignam recalled in the pages of the Christian Science Monitor, “I had to do something to open the door for women and the only way seemed to be the organization of the Women’s Art Association.”89 But female artists seeking to counteract gender biases needed to balance the appeal of sisterhood against the divisions between amateur and professional status, which, though they were by no means complete, had begun to intensify. For later advocates of professionalization in the Canadian art world, such as Graham McInnes writing in 1939, “the curse of the amateur” was an explicitly gendered affliction: “The Opdike Women’s Art Guild and societies like the O.S.A. should each have a distinct standard.”90 Already by the 1890s, membership in women-only societies could have a negative impact on women artists’ perceived professionalism. While Dignam used the waac as a platform on which to build her professional profile, others, such as Margaret Sutherland, a professional china painter in Winnipeg, apparently considered that participation in the association would be more of an obstacle than a boon to her career. As Virginia Berry has documented, Sutherland chose to maintain only an honorary membership in the Winnipeg waac while “carrying on her professional responsibilities.”91 Likewise, Susan Butlin’s research indicates that some of the prominent women painters active in Toronto during the 1890s, including Harriet Ford and Sydney Strickland Tully, avoided the waac entirely, while others, such as Mary Hiester Reid, Laura Muntz, Florence Carlyle, Sarah Holden, and Mary Riter Hamilton, made use of its exhibiting and networking opportunities early on in their careers but dropped the connection as soon as their reputations were established. Among the following generation of painters, participation rates by prominent women were even lower.92 This pattern seems to have changed in the interwar period, however. Although sculptor Frances Loring may well have joined the waac with an eye on its opportunities for “contacts with the wealthy wives of Toronto businessmen,” her connection with the association deepened and by 1938 she had become its president, while her partner, Florence Wyle, took on the job of exhibition coordinator.93 Throughout the interwar years, the association was actively engaged 30

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Fig. 1.15 Mary Ella Dignam, Landscape, 1900. Dignam’s husband was unusually supportive of her career, and she is a rare example of a turn-of-the-century woman artist who combined motherhood with an active professional practice that included significant foreign travel.

with modernism and Alison Thompson argues that it played a significant role in the careers of the Montreal painters Emily Coonan, Lilias Torrance Newton, Mabel May, Sarah Robertson, and Anne Savage (all waac members who exhibited with the association repeatedly between 1924 and 1940); likewise, Emily Carr reported herself to be “thrilled” about her first Toronto exhibition “at the ‘Women’s Art’” in 1935.94 Even such staunch supporters as Loring and Wyle were amply aware of the tensions that underpinned association membership, however, and they irreverently poked fun at members of “women’s art committees” in the press, characterizing them as “busy running around exhibition rooms” and “wanting to spread lace tablecloths on our dining-room table.”95 As such barbs indicate, the female professionals of the mid-twentieth century resolutely distanced themselves from h une ault

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the gentility that had eased women’s early entry into the art world in the 1880s and 1890s. “By culture,” proclaimed the sculptor Elizabeth Wyn Wood, “I do not mean literacy and gentility. I mean active, progressive, and creative achievement.”96 While there is no doubt that the tablecloths of the waac functioned as markers of the gentility that Wood’s generation disdained, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which even the tablecloths were tied to the association’s professional function, for from its earliest days the waac’s interest in and support for women seeking to earn their livings through artisanal craft and design had made it of special utility to those building careers outside the dominant field of painting. May Phillips and Margaret Houghton, two of Montreal’s leading professional craftswomen in the 1890s, were founding members of that city’s branch of the waac.97 Geography, too, is a factor to consider in assessing the place of women-only art societies in the development of female professionalism in Canada. With twenty branches across the county, involvement in the waac may have also been important for women seeking to build professional careers outside the country’s main art centres. In Hamilton, for example, a number of clearly professional artists were actively involved with the waac’s local executive, including Clara Galbreaith, who taught at the Hamilton Art School and ran a private studio from the ymca building, Ottilie Palm-Jost, also on the teaching staff of the Hamilton Art School, and Hannah Rusk Kelly, a student of Whistler and professional miniaturist (Fig. 1.16). As late as the 1940s, cutting-edge abstractionists like Hortense Mattice Gordon and Edna Taçon continued to be actively involved with the running of the Hamilton branch of the association, suggesting that the waac served an important function for professional artists not based in Toronto or Montreal. More research is necessary to untangle the specific temporal, regional, and media-based dimensions that factored into professional women’s involvement with the waac, but less ambivalence seems to have attended their membership in women-only clubs, which combined sociability with networking opportunities. Foremost among these was Toronto’s Heliconian Club, founded in 1909, which counted among its executive the professional artists Estelle Kerr, Dorothy Stevens, Mabel Cawthra, Marion Long, Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles, Rody Kenny Courtice, Isabel McLaughlin, and – as Loren Lerner discusses in her chapter here – Kathleen Daly Pepper.98 The Zonta Club and the Canadian Business and Professional Women’s Club of New York City were crucially important to the developing career of Margaret Watkins, while another New York club of female cultural professionals, known as “The Gamut,” welcomed Canadian artists such as Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles and Eva Brook.99 All of these clubs gave women artists the opportunity to exhibit their work, but, unlike the exhibitions of women-only art associations, which invited direct and sometimes

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Fig. 1.16 Hannah Rusk Kelly, Untitled [Mother and Child], n.d. Portraits, and especially miniature portraits, were common areas of specialization for women artists seeking to make a living at the turn of the century.

unfavourable comparison with the professional standards of mixed-gender exhibiting societies, the women’s clubs provided a network of fellow professionals rather than a network of fellow artists. Professional Ethos: Academic and Modern If the paths to professionalism that women adopted were influenced by their negotiation of gendered considerations, they were also structured by other more generalized transformations within the artistic domain, notably the nineteenthcentury dominance of academicism and the subsequent shift to modernism. Across Europe and North America, women artists at the end of the nineteenth century vigorously embraced the emergent professional ethos of academicism. Paradoxically, academic professionalism, which developed formalized, systematic training and imposed a set of rigorous standards, was seen to offer fewer rather than more barriers to female participation than had preceding models of artistic achievement. “At the most basic level,” writes Kirsten Swinth, “professionalism represented the best available expression of middle-class women’s

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ambitions and the best available marker of the seriousness of women’s intentions.”100 This pattern holds true for Canada as well, and, to appreciate the factors that underpinned it, it is necessary to look to the changes in art education that were an integral part of this shift. When in 1883 the Art Association of Montreal fired its school’s first instructors, including the landscape painter Allan Edson, in favour of the younger genre painter Robert Harris, it was making more than a change in personnel; it was also embracing a new vision of professionalized education based on a Parisian atelier model that emphasized figure study and the progressive attainment of skills according to a formalized set of steps.101 Both of these aspects were crucial for women. Because of the importance of the figure within academic art, much has been made of the obstacle posed to nineteenth-century women artists by their restricted access to the nude model, but the extent of such discrimination in Canada is surprisingly difficult to assess. Overall, the less fully developed infrastructure of the Canadian art world seems to have mitigated the disparity somewhat – men and women being disadvantaged alike in the lack of opportunity for study from the nude model. An engraving in the Canadian Illustrated News from 1880 shows women and men drawing together from the clothed model at the Ontario School of Art (Fig. 1.17), but six years later (once its management had been transferred to the Ontario government) a prospectus for the school lists separate classes for women and men in the two areas of “Modelling

Fig. 1.17 This illustration from the Canadian Illustrated News, 15 May 1880, shows women and men drawing together from the live model as early as 1880.

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from life” and “Painting from life.”102 Study from the nude was emphasized at the Toronto Art Students League beginning in 1886, but in the early years of the society there were separate classes for women and men, and the lower membership fee for women (typically women paid higher tuition than men) raises the possibility that they may have been excluded from some drawing sessions.103 In Montreal, a prize-winning académie drawing by Liliane Tucker in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts indicates that by 1893 women were certainly studying the partially nude male figure with William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal (Fig. 1.18). By contrast, however, press notices for the life classes sponsored by the Royal Canadian Academy and held at the aam in 1904–05 specified that the classes were exclusively open “to men.”10 Whatever the status of women’s access to the nude or mostly nude model, women’s success as figure painters suggests that their careers were not dramatically hindered by this consideration. In fact, Kirsten Swinth makes the point that, despite the vagaries of their training, figure-based genre painting was far more accessible to women than the sublime landscapes that had preceded it.105 Such landscapes – embodied in Canada by the work of Otto Jacobi, Lucius O’Brien, and Allan Edson – had necessitated wilderness travel and been grounded in an aesthetic of the romantic sublime – factors that, while they did not entirely preclude female participation, did mitigate against it.106 Even more important than the shift from landscape to genre, however, was the move to a formalized process of performance-based achievement and the reorganization of art training away from an earlier environment of easy homosociality. Whether based on the Parisian model (as at the aam school) or the South Kensington System (as at the Ontario School of Art), the new professional art schools provided a rigorous and progressively structured program of training that was marked by defined stages, expectations, and examinations.107 The criteria for evaluation were standardized and – in theory at least – objectively measurable and impartially applied. This professionalized promise of meritbased achievement determined exclusively by talent and effort spoke powerfully to generations of women looking to shed gender-based restrictions.108 “Art is one-fifth talent and four-fifths hard work,” affirmed painter Marion Long.109 Like Long, many women were willing to put in the work; they dominated enrolment at the new professionalized art schools and walked away with the majority of prizes.110 “Nowhere else,” rejoiced Elizabeth Kemper Adams, “has their professional achievement been judged more wholly on its merits.”111 Slowly, however, as women gained increasing professional experience, the ideology of meritocracy began to show its cracks. As Cynthia Hammond recounts in chapter 7, some of the nation’s most avid supporters of professionalism for women ceased to believe in its discourse of objective and neutral standards; by the 1950s, pioneer feminist Agnes Macphail was championing careers for women in spite of her conviction that they “would have to work twice as hard as men h une ault

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Fig. 1.18 Liliane Tucker’s award-winning Academy Nude, 1893–94, is one of the earliest semi-nude figure studies known with certainty to have been drawn from life by a woman in a Canadian art school.

and be twice as good to get half as far.”112 So, too, did feminists begin to have concerns about the price that professionalism exacted. Virginia Woolf, for example, “worried that women would either be appropriated by the establishment … or that they would abandon their larger quest for social equity in an increasingly individualistic and competitive professional sphere.”113 Woolf’s concerns about professionalism were made in the context of her practice as a consummately modernist writer and as a social observer keenly interested in the structures and effects of modernity. This link is not accidental, for the aesthetic and social reorganizations effected under modernism are an integral part of the history of artistic professionalization. As modernism emerged 36

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to challenge academicism in Canada during the 1910s and 1920s, professionalism’s outlines were discernibly altered. In the early phases of this transition, the positive value conventionally placed on professionalism was compromised by its extensive imbrication with academicism. Thus, for example, Fred Housser’s influential championing of the (quintessentially professional) Group of Seven as an “amateur” movement is fully comprehensible only as an extension of his celebration of the Group’s rebellion against the academy.114 As modernism’s hegemony was secured, however, professionalism came to lose its academic tarnish. What was disreputable about academicism was no longer its professionalism as such so much as its pandering to popular taste. The widespread popularity of the realist academic idiom now came to be contrasted with advanced cultural opinion, and the divide between an art that was saleable and one that was truly meritorious began to intensify. In the interests of paying the bills, of course, many artists continued to combine both commercial and fine art activities, but their claim to the identity of artist was increasingly based on the distance of the latter from the former. To be a professional artist was, more and more, to be associated with avant-garde practice and its insistent detachment from the marketplace.115 Thus, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s dictum that in the cultural field “the real winners are the losers” generally holds true for the modernist Canadian context.116 This insistence on aesthetic autonomy from the popular taste of the marketplace was a double-edged sword for women working in the first half of the twentieth century. As Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace have insightfully discussed, paradigmatic modernists such Virginia Woolf maintained a divided allegiance to both the commercial and the fine art (now avant-garde) forms of professionalism. On the one hand, Woolf’s feminist consciousness left her acutely aware of the debilitating consequences of women’s financial dependence on men, and in texts such as The Three Guineas she warmly espoused the kind of professionalism that paid the bills. On the other hand, however, Woolf had the modernist’s skepticism about popular success, and the artist-protagonist of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, is never known even to exhibit her paintings, much less to sell one.117 For women artists who struggled to counteract the baggage of their assumed amateurism, the sale of work was more than economically empowering: it had also been tangible proof of their aesthetic seriousness. Under modernism, however, as a 1915 obituary for the painter Helen McNicoll attests, the reconfiguration of professionalism away from sales rendered women vulnerable to charges of dilettantish amateurism once again. Speculating that McNicoll “may have been helped in her career by the fact that she was not obliged either to potboil or to make extravagant bids for attention in order to secure a living,” McNicoll’s eulogist firmly positioned her in the field of the fine art professional, as opposed to the commercial one. No sooner had the artist been established in this position, however, than her claim to occupy it required shoring up. “But Miss McNicoll h une ault

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was no amateur,” readers were immediately assured. “There are indeed few painters in the Dominion who take their art as seriously as she did.”118 With its explicit refusal and implicit acknowledgment of the sale of artwork as a marker of seriousness in a female artist, the passage is indicative of women’s ambiguous position within the modernist professional field. Still more worrisome for women was the glorification of the autonomous individual integral to the figure of the modernist professional. Feminist historian Nancy Cott has been particularly damning in her analysis of the function of individualism within the ethos of a female professionalism. For Cott, not only did professionalism fail to live up to its promise for women, but it also ricocheted against them, actively undercutting efforts to achieve equality by entrenching women so deeply in the professional credo of individual merit that they were unable to see the need for collective action.119 The credo of individual merit was not entirely a modernist phenomenon, of course, and the emphasis on professional autonomy fit well with academicism’s doctrine of merit-based success. But where academicism had typically identified merit with skill grounded in hard work, modernism privileged the vision and genius of a mythologized and unrelentingly individualized artist hero. The negative consequences for women of the discourse of the individual artist-genius have been thoroughly explored by Christine Battersby, and Alena Buis’s contribution to this volume suggests that the “richochet effect” described by Cott was felt in the Canadian context as well.120 As Buis describes, the artist-educator Anne Savage’s commitment to popularizing the hegemonic modern narrative of professional art in Canada had unintended negative structural implications for women; Savage’s best intentions to the contrary, the story of art that she disseminated to the nation in a series of cbc broadcasts was inherently marginalizing to female artists, both in its trope of the individual artist genius, disconnected from society, and in its embrace of a wilderness aesthetic couched in modern terms of artistic virility. Likewise, Anne Whitelaw’s essay on the divisions between professional and volunteer women at the Edmonton Art Gallery from the 1920s to the early 1970s underlines an art-historiographic bias “toward narratives of individual accomplishments,” arguing that it has prevented scholarly recognition of the contributions of women’s societies to the history of museum building in Canada. In these ways, consideration of the history of professionalism serves to deepen the caution that feminist art historians have brought to modernism’s celebratory narrative of the liberation of creativity from the thralldom of restraint.121 The impetus towards emancipation has, indeed, been strong within modernity, but just as its cultural and aesthetic forms have not always been conducive to women, so too does women’s embrace of the restraints of academicism highlight the complexities and ironies that have attended the history of their struggle. Clearly, the professionalism that structured the twentieth-century art world partook of modernism’s individualist orientation. At the same time, however, it 38

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was also implicated in the more collectivist currents of modernity, particularly those that underscored the importance of the professional practitioner’s service to society. Beginning with Emile Durkheim in the 1890s, theorists of the professions had emphasized the essential social services provided by a professional corps that “contributed to society’s collective health.”122 Here, just as much as with individualism, the professional paradigm offered an entry point for women, for such a vision bore much in common with the social mission of the feminist organizations with which it was contemporaneous. Thus, the members of the National Council of Women of Canada (ncwc) defended their advocacy of increased public responsibility for women on the grounds that it was a logical extension of their work as mothers in the homes of the nation.123 Maternal feminism, as this logic has come to be known, emphasized women’s capacity to serve, and, as a member organization of the ncwc, the Women’s Art Association of Canada enthusiastically adopted this mentality. “Service is the keynote to happiness,” it proclaimed to readers of Woman’s Century magazine in 1917. “Every part of the Art Association’s activities is based upon service to the individual, to the community, and to the nation.”124 If professionalism’s ideal of accomplishment may have assisted women to develop careers, its ethos of public service was equally well suited to their aims, for it enabled them to reconcile their bid for educational, social, and economic advancement with existing understandings of women’s roles in society.125 The First and Second World Wars were key factors in extending this emphasis on service during the first half of the twentieth century. In art, as in all areas of society, global conflict opened career opportunities for women artists. Some, including Frances Loring, Florence Wyle, Mabel May, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod, received official commissions to document war efforts on the home front, and during the Second World War Molly Lamb Bobak became the first female war artist to hold military rank. The career opportunities opened up by war-art commissions were not typically long-lived, but women did have a lasting impact on the professional field through their broader contribution to a wartime reimagining of the place of the arts in Canadian society. During and after the Second World War, women’s involvement in public-arts administration increased. Through their membership in and stewardship of the lobbying organizations founded in the wake of the 1941 Kingston Conference of Canadian Artists – notably the Federation of Canadian Artists and, subsequently, the Canadian Arts Council – artists such as Yvonne McKague Housser, Rody Kenny Courtice, and Elizabeth Wyn Wood (Fig. 1.19) worked together with their male colleagues to strengthen public support for the arts community and to shape the next major development in the professionalization of art in Canada: the shift to state sponsorship.126 In furtherance of the second goal, and with generations of practice behind them, women turned the rhetoric of community service to powerful effect. Thus, when Wood outlined her ambitious “National Program for the h une ault

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Arts in Canada” in 1944, she couched her proposal for the development of a state-supported arts infrastructure in terms of art’s “conspicuous social applications” and artists’ service to society: “Canadian artists, individually and collectively … have shouldered [social] responsibility far beyond their recognized authority and their economic status. In the years most marked by a growing sense of nationhood … I do not think there was any greater single influence, political, economic or cultural, than the steady drive of the artists who, day in and day out, were saying ‘This is Canada,’ ‘We are proud of Canada,’ ‘We are Canadians.’ But there are things which artists cannot do alone. They need a partner in the whole nation.”127 Wood’s claim that the country’s artists were the single greatest influence for a unified national identity explicitly cemented art’s prestige as a social calling. In this, her rhetoric aligned the position of artist with the contemporaneous thinking on professionalism developed by sociologist Talcott Parsons who, in 1939, had influentially cast professionals as agents of social cohesiveness.128 Like Wood’s views on artists, Parsons’s functionalist vision of professionals as catalysts for a common set of beliefs and spokesmen for a “collective orientation” meshed beautifully with the concern for national identity that was deeply imbedded in Canadian art and that had been revitalized in the context of wartime patriotism. It can readily be argued that many of the anglophone intelligentsia

Fig. 1.19 Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Munitions Worker, 17 March 1944. Wood was active in reconstruction efforts to shape a federal infrastructure to support professional artists. Like this wartime image, her writing stressed art’s social function.

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identified by historian Mary Vipond as key players in the Canadian nationalist network were cultural professionals in the functionalist sense.129 In Canada, patriotism and professionalism came to march side by side, and Canadian women artists’ embrace of an ethos of social service became tied, whether intentionally or not, to a strengthening of their own professional status as privileged agents of a national agenda. Wood’s championing of public sponsorship for arts professionals did not, of course, take place in a vacuum. As Jeffery Brison has detailed, the way for this shift had been prepared by American philanthropic support of the arts in Canada beginning in the 1920s. An elite class of professional administrators who, together with a small group of artists, critics, and curators, “sought to organize and lead a Canadian artistic constituency” managed the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, which distributed crucial financial support to Canadian cultural institutions.130 While all of the key players in this network were male, the increasing bureaucratization of Canadian culture did encompass women in a variety of ways. Women artists sat on the Carnegie-sponsored juries that travelled from central Canada to assess and encourage regional cultural production, and, as Lianne McTavish relates in chapter 3 of this book, they were also an integral part of the emerging class of specialized, university-educated museum professionals so vigorously promoted by the Canadian Museums Committee of the Carnegie Corporation. Of course, not all women embraced the nationalist ethos or the functionalist vision of artistic professionalism that came to accompany it. When Paraskeva Clark famously challenged Wood to “come out from behind the Pre-Cambrian shield,” it is significant that she did so from an international socialist perspective that emphasized class friction over social cohesion.131 Following the socialist activism of the Great Depression and in the broader national context of the rise of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the identity of the artist was, once more, reimagined. In his contribution to this volume, Kirk Niergarth highlights the debates over professional identity that fractured the art world of the 1930s and 1940s. While some, like Wood, supported a vision of the artist as cultural arbiter, trendsetter, and authority, others, like Clark, Pegi Nicol (see Fig. 2.2), and Lucy Jarvis (see Fig. 2.8), considered that the artist’s social function was not to guide from the front but to support from within. As Niergarth describes, Jarvis’s populist understanding of artists as participants in culture rather than leaders of it was concomitant with an ambivalence about professionalism. Ultimately, however, the paradigm of the artist that was supported by the Massey Commission and enshrined in the founding of the Canada Council represented the more conservative of these two social visions. Increasingly, professional artists came to be positioned as self-governing members of a cultural elite, funded by the public in recognition of the value of their contributions to society.

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The women artists discussed in this volume stand in varying and sometimes ambivalent relation to this position of professional power. In 1960, for example, when Kathleen Daly Pepper (see Fig. 8.1) was invited by the Department of National Health and the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources to join the crew of the vessel C.D. Howe on its eastern Arctic patrol, it was in recognition of the authority of her position as a professional artist working in the equally professionalized idiom of ethnography. Daly’s drive for professional opportunity and recognition led her eagerly to accept government patronage and her images were reproduced in the pages of its publication, North magazine, at a time of increased colonialist intervention in the Arctic. And yet Loren Lerner argues that Daly’s ethical approach to the Inuit she represented was subtly undermining of the objectifying framework of professional authority that simultaneously structured and enabled her representations of Inuit mothers and children. In a related vein, Sandra Paikowsky highlights women’s divergences from the visual syntax of non-figurative painting developed by the men of Montreal’s rigorously professionalized arts community during the 1960s. Yet, however mediated or contested women’s relation to professional norms may be, with their accession to professional status women artists have been interpellated from the centres of social and cultural power. When, for example, Yvonne McKague Housser and Rita Letendre were inducted into the Order of Canada for their pioneering contributions to the development of landscape and abstract art, they were unquestionably welcomed into a society that exists to mark out the nation’s professional elite. Though the forms of recognition vary, the positions of privilege enjoyed by artists such as Daly, Housser, Letendre – and, indeed, by the authors and editors of this book – are strong inducements to the continuing professionalization of women and art in Canada today.

Professionalism in Perspective Professionalism has been an appealing outcome, both for women artists who built rewarding careers for themselves and for feminist art historians who seek to counteract a modern intellectual legacy of dismissal and devaluation. To consider art as a profession and the artist as a professional is to insist on the value of art and artists in society. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century understandings of professions emphasized their contributions to a functional social order. Professionals were positioned as serving modern industrial society through their orientation towards collective service and their unique role in generating a common set of beliefs and values. In the nineteenth century, Canadian women artists capitalized on professionalism’s ties to service to render their claims to public status more palatable; in the twentieth century, women artists active in the nation-building project embraced professionalism’s aspiration to generate 42

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common values. More recently, art historians have insisted on the important role that professionalism serves in drawing attention to women’s cultural labour as work, tying historical recognition of the scope and importance of that labour to contemporary battles for workplace equity. In her book Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, Janice Helland articulates these priorities clearly: My contention is that until feminist historians and art historians write about the nineteenth-century artist as a working woman, that is until her place within an economy of production and consumption is insisted upon, women will continue to inhabit an insecure space within society. Our place is still underwritten by the historical ideology of the separate spheres which functioned to stabilize patriarchal capitalism; as long as the historical ideology remains intact, struggles for day care, equal pay for equal work, and equity in hiring will founder. A displacement of the dichotomy of public and private requires more than a writing of unpaid labour – it requires also a recognition of self-employment and/or partial employment as it is found in cultural work.132 From the nineteenth century onward, women’s professional careers, even in the comparatively non-lucrative field of art, have opened doors to the financial independence so essential to their autonomy, the cultural recognition so critical to their social standing, and the personal fulfillment so decisive for their happiness. Yet, as a model for art-historical analysis of the creative production of women in Canada, professionalism also has its perils and limitations. By the mid-twentieth century, Canadian women’s decades of experience within the professions had rubbed the shine off professionalism’s ideology. For scholars of women’s art eager to redress historical practices of exclusion, the category of professionalism is problematically tied to histories of marginalization. More worrying still is the possibility that it may also serve to reinforce current patterns of exclusion within Canadian art history, reinforcing the dominance of painting and continuing to overlook those, like Aboriginal women, whose stories are just not effectively framed by the professional paradigm. To tell a story of professionalism is to reinforce a narrative of margins and peripheries. In calling attention to this fact, this volume aims not to advocate for a refusal of the term professionalism, but rather to sensitize readers to the ways in which preexisting conceptual categories shape our ways of thinking in order to ensure that the injustices of the past are not perpetuated in our retellings of history.

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notes 1 I am very grateful to Brian Foss, Anne Whitelaw, Anna Hudson, Georgiana Uhlyarik, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their generous comments and advice, to Marie Peron, Jessa Alston-O’Connor, and Jessica Mace for research assistance, and to Kate Marley and Rosika Desnoyers for help with photos and permissions. 2 Elizabeth Kemper Adams, Women Professional Workers (New York and Toronto: Macmillan 1921), 308. 3 One exception is Eliot Freidson, “Les professions artistiques comme défi à l’analyse sociologique,” Revue française de sociologie, 27 (1986): 431–43. On art’s anomalous status as a profession, see Julie Codell, “Artists’ Professional Societies: Production, Consumption, and Aesthetics,” in Brian Allen, ed., Towards a Modern Art World (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press 1995), 171. As Codell describes, artists were, in fact, comparative latecomers to the professional field, gaining a toehold only at the end of the eighteenth century and remaining somewhat unusual among their colleagues: “Artists did not necessarily require institutional training, and the final arbiter of their success was the non-professional public, unlike arbiters for law or medicine. These conditions kept artists from participating in the professional ideal of economic autonomy from the market based on esoteric knowledge or skills.” 4 This has, in effect, been the path followed, perhaps unintentionally, by both the earliest and the most recent overviews of Canadian women artists, where the painter Elizabeth Simcoe – whose aristocratic status and accomplished education made her the very model of an eighteenthcentury amateur – is included among the roll call of the nation’s “professional” women artists, presumably by virtue of her ability and seriousness of purpose. See

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National Council of Women of Canada (ncwc), “Distinguished Professional Women Artists,” in Women of Canada: Their Life and Work (1900), 224, and A.K. Prakash, Independent Spirit: Early Canadian Women Artists (Toronto: Firefly 2008), 20, 352. ncwc, “Distinguished Professional Women Artists,” 222–6. On the history of women and professions in Canada, see Mary Kinnear, In Subordination: Professional Women, 1870–1970 (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGillQueen’s University Press 1995), and Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice, eds., Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999). See, for example, Alice Vincent Massey, Occupations for Trained Women in Canada (Toronto: J.M. Dent 1920); Gabrielle Carrière, Comment gagner sa vie: Carrières féminines (Montreal: Beauchemin 1942); Gabrielle Carrière, Careers for Women in Canada: A Practical Guide (Toronto: J.M. Dent 1946); and Lillian D. Millar, Careers for Women (Toronto: Ryerson 1946). Kemper Adams, Women Professional Workers, 308. See, for example, Margaret Pennell, “Interesting Canadian Women – Art for Art’s Sake – Pets for Profit – Manitoba’s First Lady Lawyer,” Canadian Magazine, 67–8 (1927): 25; and Madge MacBeth, “Canadian Women in the Arts: The Third Article of a Series,” Maclean’s, 27, no. 12 (1914): 23–5, 105–8. Throughout the 1920s, Saturday Night ran a series of articles on “Canadian Women in the Public Eye,” which included pieces on artists Margaret Frame (29 January 1927) and Lilias Torrance Newton (12 November 1927), and in 1924 Toronto’s Sunday World ran an extended series of “Closeups of Toronto’s Women Artists.”

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10 Blodwen Davies, “Canadian Women of Chisel and Brush,” Chatelaine, June 1930, 9. 11 A prominent example: in By a Lady (the title itself rife with irony), Maria Tippett commences her account of the interwar period by describing the range of new professional opportunities that were opening for women. While Tippett’s chapter charts the process by which women “became part of the male art environment as promoters and organizers of galleries, exhibitions, art organizations, art schools and art publications,” it nevertheless ends by emphasizing an instance of institutionalized discrimination: “When Jori Smith failed to earn a scholarship at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the authorities there told her, ‘You know, you should get it but we cannot afford to give it to you, because you are a woman, and you will go over and get married and you’ll stop painting.’” Maria Tippett, By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Art by Canadian Women (Toronto: Viking 1992), 90. 12 Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge 1991); Keith MacDonald, The Sociology of the Professions (London: Sage Publications 1995); and Magali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press 1977). 13 With the exception of architects, exclusion from professional associations could not prevent women from fully practising their art, but family demands often did. Canadian women artists whose careers were forestalled or curtailed by family obligations include Madeleine Desrosiers, Laura Muntz Lyall, Sophie Pemberton, and Margaret Watkins. Among those who did balance both activities, the stress was apparent: “It’s a hell of a thing to be a painter,” said Paraskeva Clark. “I would like to stop every woman from painting, for only men can truly succeed. The

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majority of women who have really succeeded have not married or had children, but I don’t envy them. I believe that women, by their very nature, by their mental and emotional makeup are so absorbed by their natural duties and responsibilities that they cannot truly gather that great volume of creative effort needed for truly great works of art. But I cannot complain, I have had a very good career, considering a great deal of my time has been spent on being a wife and a mother.” Clark cited in Janice Cameron et al., eds., Eclectic Eve (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press 1974), 7–9. Dorothy Farr and Natalie Luckyj, From Women’s Eyes: Women Painters in Canada (Kingston, on: Agnes Etherington Art Centre 1975). Tippett, By a Lady, 27. Susan Butlin, The Practice of Her Profession (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGillQueen’s University Press 2008), xx. Farr and Luckyj, From Women’s Eyes, 1, 3. http://www.carfac.ca/about/ (accessed 13 July 2010). Best know by its acronym, carfac stands for Canadian Artists Representation / Front des artistes Canadiens. Formed by and for artists, carfac demanded the recognition of artists’ copyright. In 1975, the year of Luckyj and Farr’s exhibition, carfac had successfully lobbied the Canada Council to require that public galleries in receipt of support from the council pay exhibition fees to living Canadian artists. The issues relating to professionalization that carfac’s success raised were much on the minds of curators across the country. Farr and Luckyj, From Women’s Eyes, 3. Janice Helland, review of Tippett’s By a Lady in Journal of Canadian Art History, 15, no. 1 (1992): 125–33. Sandra Alfoldy, Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, on:

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27 28

29 30

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McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005), 3–16. As Alfoldy describes, the designation “Fine Craft” was part of a professional strategy to raise the status of craft by claiming it as a “fine” rather than an “applied” art. Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred, ‘Designing Women’: Gender and the Architectural Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000), 122. Ibid. For analysis of the place of gender in the professional project, see Witz, Professions and Patriarchy, passim. Ibid., 123. Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists (London: Women’s Press 1987), 126. See “Numerical and percentage distribution of the labour force, 14 years of age and over, by occupation group and sex, for Canada and the provinces, 1901– 1951,” Ninth Census of Canada, 1951, vol. 4 (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics 1951), Table 2–1. Teachers, nurses, and nuns were among those classed as professionals. After the Second World War, the proportion of female professionals declined. Ibid. The census does not explicitly define “professional” as a term but situates it in relation to other classes of occupations. In the first Canadian census, of 1871, these were: agricultural, commercial, domestic, industrial, professional, and “not classified.” Kinnear, In Subordination, 6. Art Association of Montreal and the Society of Canadian Artists, Society of Canadian Artists [exhibition catalogue] (Montreal: 1870). For a list of early female members of the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy, see Virginia G. Berry, Taming the Frontier: Art and Women in the Canadian West 1880–1920 (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery and Bayeux Arts 2005), 145–7. Constitution and Laws of the Royal

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Canadian Academy of Arts (Toronto: Globe 1881), cited in Farr and Luckyj, From Women’s Eyes, 3. Ontario Society of Artists Minutes, 2 July 1872, cited in Farr and Luckyj, From Women’s Eyes, 3. In commenting that no woman was on the osa executive until the election of Mary Wrinch Reid in 1924, Farr and Luckyj had overlooked Laura Muntz’s participation, which is documented in the President’s Annual Report, Ontario Society of Artists, 1900, http://www.ccca.ca/resources/searches/eve nt_detail.html?languagePref=en&vk=102 1 (accessed 1 March 2010). There were no women on the executives of the British Columbia Society of Artists (1909) until 1922; the Alberta Society of Fine Arts (1931) until 1950; the Manitoba Society of Artists (1902/1925) until 1942; and the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour (1925) until 1935. By contrast, women were executive members of the Sculptors Society of Canada (1928), the Nova Scotia Society of Artists (1922), and the Maritime Art Association (1935) from their beginnings. The osa constitution proclaimed itself open to “all persons, male or female, who follow Art as a profession.” Charles Hill, “To Found a National Gallery: The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts 1880–1913,” National Gallery of Canada Journal, 35, no. 6 (1980): 2. These factors are roughly in line with those discussed by Susan Butlin, who particularly emphasizes sale of work and recognition by other professionals. Butlin’s doctoral thesis provides detailed information about the specific careers of a key group of women working in Toronto between 1880 and 1920. Susan Butlin, “A New Matrix of the Arts: A History of the Professionalization of Women Artists in Canada 1880–1914” (phd thesis, Carleton University 2008). Margaret Fallis, Charlotte Schreiber R.C.A., 1834–1922 (ma thesis, Carleton

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University 1985). Though she did not list an occupation in the census, Schreiber did not shy away from selling her work. At the 1876 osa exhibition, her price of $300 for Two’s Company, Three’s None, was the highest set by any artist. See http://www.ccca.ca/OSA/artist_work. html?artist=4th+Annual+Exhibition+1876 &languagePref=en& (accessed 1 March 2010). Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press for Carleton University Press 1999), 37, 74. Ontario Gazeteer and Business Directory (Polk 1884); and Census of Canada, 1891, http://www.collectionscanada. gc.ca/databases/census-1891/001081100.01-e.php (accessed 1 March 2010). See Janice Helland, “Forbes, Elizabeth,” in Delia Gaze, ed., Dictionary of Women Artists (London, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997), 539–41. “The Late Rev. Dr. Hamilton,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Jane Hamilton Artist File, Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, Concordia University. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ databases/census-1881/index-e.html (accessed 20 February 2010) The same is true of other Canadian women artists, such as Halifax’s Frances Jones Bannerman, who was one of the country’s best-trained and most serious female painters in the early 1880s. More famously, the American painter Mary Cassatt was described by her family as being “without occupation” on her death certificate. Female leisure was a key signifier of affluence, and class considerations were likely as important a factor as gender bias in failures to recognize women artists’ professional activity. For more on Bannerman, see Mora Dianne O’Neill and Caroline Stone, Two Artists Time Forgot = Deux artistes oubliées par l’histoire / Frances Jones (Bannerman) & Margaret

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Campbell Macpherson (Halifax: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia 2006). http://www.pro.rcip-chin.gc.ca/bd-dl/aacaic-eng.jsp (accessed 20 February 2010). Ontario Gazeteer and Business Directory (Polk 1884). Miller’s consistent use of gender-neutral initials in the place of her first name was an established practice among women artists seeking professional recognition; in 1860 Laura Herford had become the first woman to secure admission into England’s Royal Academy Schools by subterfuge, submitting an entrance drawing with her first initials only. See Nunn, Victorian Women Artists, 47. Colleen Skidmore, “Women in Photography at the Notman Studio, Montreal 1856–1881” (phd thesis, University of Alberta 1999). I am very grateful to Kirk Niergarth for this observation. Most of the ideas and some of the phrasing in this paragraph originate with him. To these names should be added those of a slightly later generation, including Suzanne Duquet, Thérèse Lecomte, and Jeanne Rhéaume, and also those of craftswomen and designers such as Jeanne Dansereau, Yvonne Rouleau, Georgette Boyer, and Gabrielle Limoges Boyer, active at the École du meuble. See Magdeleine Bertrand, “Les femmes artistes du Québec de 1875 à 1925” (ma thesis, Université de Montréal 1990); Esther Trépanier, “Les femmes, l’art et la presse francophone Montréalaise de 1915 à 1930,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 18, no. 1 (1997): 68–83; Gloria Lesser, Ecole du Meuble 1930–1950: La décoration intérieure et les arts décoratifs à Montréal (Montreal: Château Dufresne, Musée des arts décoratifs de Montréal, 1989), 69–73; and Rosalind Pepall, “Jeannette Meunier Biéler: Modern Interior Decorator,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 25, no. 1 (2004): 126–49. Musée du Québec, Au féminin: choix d’oeuvres de la collection du Musée du

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52 53 54 55

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Québec, 1920–1930 (Quebec City: Musée du Québec 1997); and Esther Trépanier et Pierre Landry, Femmes Artistes: La conquete d’une espace (Quebec City: Musée du Québec 2010). See Monique Brunet-Weinmann, Simone Mary Bouchard et Louise Gadbois: l’art naïf dans la modernité (Saint-Sauveur, QC.: M. Broquet 2009); and Lora Senechal Carney, “Modernists and Folk on the Lower St Lawrence: The Problem of Folk Art,” in Lynda Jessup, ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000), 104–15. See Christine Turgeon, “Jeanne Leber Recluse and Embroideress (1622–1714),” Journal of Canadian Art History, 25, no. 1 (2004): 6–47; and Christine Turgeon, Art, Faith and Culture: le Musée des Ursulines de Québec (Quebec City: Musée des Ursulines de Québec 2004). The 1881 census recognizes “basket and bead work” (or variations thereon) as an occupation for only five Aboriginal women: Mauney Arkin, Annie James, Jane Jomie, and Louisa and Mary Vascau. Not infrequently the occupation for both Aboriginal men and women was listed as “Indian.” Butlin, “A New Matrix of the Arts,” 340. Ibid., 228–58. Alfoldy, Crafting Identity, 6. Frances Loring to H.O. McCurry, 3 March 1943, Loring, Frances N., Correspondence with/re, Artists, National Gallery of Canada fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives. Laura Jones, Rediscovery: Canadian Women Photographers, 1841–1941 (London: London Regional Art Gallery 1983), 5. Martha Langford, “A Short History of Photography, 1900–2000,” in Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss and Sandra Paikowsky, eds., The Visual Arts in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2010), 280. On Watson, see Frances Rooney, Working

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60 61 62

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Light: The Wandering Life of Photographer Edith S. Watson (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1996); on Gunterman, see Susan Close, Framing Identity: Social Practices of Photography in Canada (1880–1920) (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring 2007). Cited in Diana Pedersen and Martha Phemister, “Women and Photography in Ontario, 1839–1929: A Case Study of the Interaction of Gender and Technology,” Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, 9, no. 1 (1985), 27–52. Gladys Reeves quoted in Jones, Rediscovery, 20. Ibid., 5. Gagné eventually assumed the running of the couple’s joint studio, but, while Lovell’s directory provides the explanation that she was a widow, the census records her husband as alive at the time. See Michelle Macleod, “Mme. Gagné: In Her Shoes, through Her Lens” (undergraduate essay, Concordia University 2009), available for consultation in the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative documentation centre, Department of Art History, Concordia University. On the complex cultural history of feminine “accomplishments,” see Anne Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, ct, and London: Yale University Press 2000), 183–227. On accomplished women artists in the Maritimes, see Mary Sparling, “‘The Lighter Auxiliaries’: Women Artists in Nova Scotia in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal, 5, no. 1 (1979): 83–106. Donald Soucy and Harold Pearse, The First Hundred Years: A History of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Fredericton: University of New Brunswick Faculty of Education and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1993), 24. Laura Prieto, At Home in the Studio:

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67 68 69

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The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 2001), 2. Janet Guildford, “Maria Morris Miller: The Many Functions of Her Art,” Atlantis, 20, no. 1 (1985): 116. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 224. Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 70. See Harold Pearse, ed., From Drawing to Visual Culture: A History of Art Education in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2006). For an extensive list of schools where women taught, see ncwc, “Distinguished Professional Women Artists,” 218–22. Ibid., 101–2, and 264. Among prominent artists to teach at ladies’ colleges, Tippett, By a Lady, 38, cites the examples of Florence McGillivray, Laura Muntz Lyall, and Edith Smith. Women’s teaching careers are also discussed by Butlin in “A New Matrix of the Arts.” I am grateful to Steven McNeil for bringing Frances Richards to my attention. For Semple, see Harold Pearse, “The Dawn of the Twentieth Century: Art Education in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and British Columbia,” in From Drawing to Visual Culture, 113. McLeod, In Good Hands, 75. Mentions of Barrett can be found in coverage of the Ottawa School of Art in the Ottawa Evening Journal, 2 November 1896, 24 November 1896, 4 December 1896. See also http://www.artottawa.ca/125th/ index.html (accessed 28 April 2011). Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 39. Marie Elwood, “Alice Hagen” (slide-tape presentation prepared for the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery exhibition Alice Hagen, 1872–1972), 1976, cited on the Virtual Museum Canada’s Community Memories website, “Alice Egan Hagen (1872–1972) Nova Scotia Woman Ceramicist,” http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/ pm_v2.php?id=exhibit_home&fl=0&lg+E nglish&ex=00000637 (accessed 18 February 2011).

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75 Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 70. 76 Victoria School of Art and Design, Annual Report of the Year 1887–8 (Halifax: Nova Scotia Printing Company 1888), 22, cited in Donald Soucy, “More Than a Polite Pursuit: Art College Education for Women in Nova Scotia, 1887–1930s,” Art Education, 42, no. 2 (1989): 24. 77 McLeod, In Good Hands, 31. 78 K.A. Finlay, ed. “A Woman’s Place”: Art and the Role of Women in the Cultural Formation of Victoria BC 1850s–1920s (Victoria: Maltwood Museum and Art Gallery 2004), 99. 79 Robert Holmes, “The Toronto Art Students’ League,” Canadian Magazine, 4, no. 2 (1894): 187. Gertrude Spurr Cutts was secretary for the league in 1896. 80 Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2001), 4. 81 Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 107. 82 Davies, “Chisel and Brush,” 42. 83 Janice Anderson, “Negotiating Gendered Spaces: The Artistic Practice of Mary Hiester Reid,” in Brian Foss and Janice Anderson, Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario 2000), 31, 38; Marilyn Baker, “In Perspective: Women’s Participation in and on Behalf of the Arts in Manitoba,” unpublished paper presented to the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Open Session, Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, University of Edmonton, Alberta, 23 October 2009. 84 On the connections between amateur and professional culture, see Maria Tippett, Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990), 17. 85 Alison Thompson, “A Worthy Place in the Art of Our Country: The Women’s Art Association of Canada” (ma thesis, Carleton University 1989), 203. 86 F. Deeks, “Historical Sketch of the

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Women’s Art Association of Canada” (1912), cited in Thompson, “A Worthy Place,” 65. In Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press 1987), Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater identify four main strategies: superperformance, innovation, segregation, and subordination. Swinth, Painting Professionals, 33. Violet Dickens, “Half-Century of Leadership in Canadian Arts,” Christian Science Monitor, 18 March 1936, cited in Thompson, “A Worthy Place,” 50. Saturday Night, 17 June 1939, 25. Berry, Taming the Frontier, 21. Butlin, “A New Matrix,” 126–44. Elspeth Cameron, And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle (Toronto: Cormorant 2007), 147. Thompson, “A Worthy Place,” 148–59. “In a former church, sculptors Wyle and Loring create ageless art,” unidentified clipping, Florence Wyle artist file, Art Gallery of Ontario Library and Archives. Elizabeth Wyn Wood, “A National Program for the Arts in Canada,” Canadian Art, 1, no. 3 (1943–44): 94. H.V. Haskins, “Bending the Rules: The Montreal Branch of the Woman’s Art Association of Canada, 1894–1900” (ma thesis, Concordia University 1995). Butlin, “A New Matrix,” 127; and Alicia Boutilier, Four Women Who Painted in the 1930s and 1940s (Ottawa: Carleton University Art Gallery 1998), 24–6. Irene B. Hare, “Close-ups of Toronto’s Women Artists – No. 14 Mrs. MacGillivray [sic] Knowles,” Sunday World, 7 September 1924, identifies “The Gamut” as a club for Canadian business and professional women in New York. From the article it is clear that McGillivray Knowles used both womenonly and mixed-gender artist societies to build contacts while living outside her established circles in Canada. Swinth, Painting Professionals, 35.

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101 The instructors were fired for incompetent teaching methods in the wake of the school’s first public exhibition of student work. See J. Craig Stirling, “Postsecondary Art Education in Quebec from the 1870s to the 1920s,” in Pearse, From Drawing to Visual Culture, 71. 102 Department of Education, Select Subject Files, rg 2–42–0–361, Archives of Ontario. 103 Holmes, “Toronto Art Students’ League,” 174; Thompson, “A Worthy Place.” 104 “Royal Canadian Academy Life Class,” Montreal Witness, 11 November 1904. 105 Swinth, Painting Professionals, 19. 106 On the gendering of the sublime and its relation to Canadian women artists, see Susannah Wesley, “Finding the Sublime: Assessing Elizabeth Simcoe’s Fires as an Art Practice” (ma thesis, Concordia University 2008); and Andrea Korda, “Femininity, the Picturesque and the Canadian Landscape,” Atlantis, 30, no. 2 (2006): 8–21. For women artists and wilderness travel, see Kristina Huneault, “Placing Frances Anne Hopkins,” in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, eds., Studio, Space and Sociality: New Narratives of Nineteenth Century Women Artists (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate 2006), 179–98. 107 Stirling, “Art Education in Quebec,” 70–82, and “Art Education in Ontario,” in Pearse, From Drawing to Visual Culture, 101. 108 Swinth, Painting Professionals, passim. 109 “An Interview with Miss Marion Long,” The Magnet 6, no. 1 (March 1924): 54. 110 Stirling, “Art Education in Ontario,” 101–2. 111 Kemper Adams, Women Professional Workers, 308. 112 Agnes Macphail, “I Weep for Us Women,” Canadian Home Journal, August 1953, 35. 113 Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, “Professionalism, Genre, and the Sister(s’) Arts,” in Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)positionings (London: Routledge 1994), 68.

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114 Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1995), 166. 115 The general Canadian public was apparently a bit slow on the uptake of this point. As late as 1950, Graham McInnes, a vehement advocate of professionalization in the Canadian art world, still felt it necessary to explain to readers that in the necessary task of distinguishing amateur from professional “the standard is aesthetic, not monetary.” Graham McInnes, Canadian Art (Toronto: Macmillan 1950), 107. 116 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (London: Polity Press 1993), 154. My thanks to Kirk Niergarth for the quote from Bourdieu, and to the anonymous reader who suggested a more explicit development of the transition from academicism to modernism. 117 Elliott and Wallace, “Professionalism,” 75; and Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press 1938). 118 “A Loss to Canadian Art,” Saturday Night, 10 July 1915, 3. 119 Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press 1987), 234. 120 Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press 1989). 121 For example: Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin, “Feminism and Modernism: Paradoxes,” in Benjamin Buchloh, Serge Guilbault, and David Solkin, eds., Modernism and Modernity (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1983), 195–212; Janet Wolff, “Feminism and Modernism,” in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990), 51– 66; and Griselda Pollock, “Feminism and Modernism,” in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, eds., Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970– 1985 (London: Pandora 1987), 79–121. 122 Timothy P. McCauley, “Theoretical Foundations for the Study of Work and the Professions,” in Merle Jacobs and Stephen

h une ault

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124 125

126

127

128

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E. Basanac, eds., The Professionalization of Work (Whitby, on: de Sitter 2006), 68. Veronica Strong-Boag, “‘Setting the Stage’: National Organization and the Women’s Movement in the Late 19th Century,” in Susan Mann Trofimenkoff and Alice Prentice, eds., The Neglected Majority (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1977), 97. “Women’s Art Association of Canada,” Woman’s Century, March 1917, 10. In this connection it is worth noting that Josephine Dandurand, author of one of the earliest reports advocating government sponsorship of an arts infrastructure in Canada, was a member of the National Council of Women of Canada. Elizabeth Wyn Wood was organizing secretary at the Canadian Arts Council from 1944 to 1945, chair of its international-relations committee from 1944 to 1948, and vice-president from 1948 to 1949. Rody Kenny Courtice was president of the Ontario branch of the Federation of Canadian Artists from 1945 to 1946. Yvonne McKague Housser became chair of exhibitions of the Canadian Arts Council in 1947. For more on these women, see Boutilier, Four Women; Linda Jansma, Rody Kenny Courtice: The Pattern of Her Times (Oshawa, on: Robert McLaughlin Gallery 2006); and Victoria Baker, Emanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wyn Wood: Tradition and Innovation in Canadian Sculpture (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1997). Elizabeth Wyn Wood, “A National Program for the Arts in Canada,” Canadian Art, 1, no. 3 (1944): 93–5, 127–8. Talcott Parsons, “The Professions and Social Structure,” Social Forces, 17, no. 4 (1939): 457–67. Mary Vipond, “The Nationalist Network: English Canada’s Intellectuals and Artists in the 1920s,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 7, no. 1 (1980): 32–52. Jeffrey D. Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and

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the Arts and Letters in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005), 69. 131 Paraskeva Clark, “Come Out from Behind the Pre-Cambrian Shield,” New Frontier, 1, no. 12 (1937): 16–17.

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132 Janice Helland, Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Commitment, Friendship, Pleasure (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate 2000), 4.

Rethinking Professionalism

PART TWO

PROFESSIONALIZING ART

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CHAPTER 2

“What Would He Have Us Do?”

Gender and the “Profession” of Artist in New Brunswick in the 1930s and 1940s Kirk Niergarth

In the autumn of 1953, Canadian Art published Toronto-based critic George Elliott’s “What Have Amateurs Done to Canadian Art?” According to Elliott, “hundreds of dozens” of amateur painters had “brought turmoil into Canadian art since their post-war preeminence began.” One of the most difficult problems for the contemporary gallery-goer, Elliott wrote, was “to distinguish between the work of the anxious amateur and the embryo artist.” Worse still, not only were amateurs confusing audiences by exhibiting their work, they were selling it! “The economics of art are precarious at best,” Elliott mourned, “but the sale by an amateur tends to encourage more amateurs to offer their work for sale and in the ensuing sentimental exuberance the work of the serious artist, young, old or middle-aged is submerged.” These serious artists were increasingly being driven to produce non-representational works because they did not want to “run the risk of being seen or associated with energetic amateurs.”1 Responding to Elliott in the magazine’s next issue, Evelyn Wright of Fredericton combined outrage and bewilderment in her letter to the editor. Did Elliott, Wright wondered, believe that “professionals are born, not made?” Moreover, “for several years past the so-called professionals have been preaching that every child is an artist” and that art should be a “part of everyday life.” Could it be that Canadians who enjoyed “having fun and trying to be creative” were “spoiling the prospects for professionals?” And, if so, Wright wondered, “Where do we go from here? What would he have us do?”2

The exchange between Elliott and Wright is indicative of shifting terrain within the field of Canadian art. Four years earlier, in 1949, Canadian Art had posthumously published Harold King’s “Some Notes for Amateur Artists.” According to King, who had reviewed art for the left-wing magazine New Frontier in the 1930s and been vice-president of the Ontario branch of the Federation of Canadian Artists (fca), “in the visual arts our generation suffers from cultural malnutrition caused by ‘spectatoritis.’ We perpetuate this malnutrition if we believe that the ordinary person cannot appreciate or create art, if we regard art as the creation of ideal beauty and measure all in terms of fixed standards. In times of cultural vigour, art has always been productive and active, not passive; it has been marked by the joy of discovery; it has been warmly expressive of feelings about people and the things they live among and work with; it has communicated freely.”3 King’s ideas, evidently, would have resonated with Wright. Five years later, by contrast, Lawren Harris published an article in the same magazine that shared much with Elliot’s position. Contemporary creative art, Harris explained in 1954, can be understood only by a tiny “minority of intuitive and imaginative individuals”: “The creative artist like the creative scientist … is always ahead of his public in his particular field … While at work the creative artist no more thinks of a public than a surgeon does while performing an operation or a scientist when engaged in the process of research.”4 The “artist as scientist” had not been part of Evelyn Wright’s lived experience as a member of the Fredericton Art Club and an active participant in the activities of the University of New Brunswick’s Observatory Art Centre (oac) during the 1940s. Lucy Jarvis and Pegi Nicol MacLeod, the two painters who founded and ran the oac, believed, as Jarvis put it, that the centre “should be open freely to all and never for a clique of people who call themselves artists.”5 Nicol MacLeod shared this perspective, once writing that “art should be freedom; its essence is freedom; Rules, laws, controls, standards – these words smell of the academy (power, lust to dictate). The very word ‘taste’ is bandied about by people as if it were the exclusive possession of the elect.”6 Jarvis and Nicol MacLeod would have been among the “professionals” who had convinced Wright that “every child is an artist” and that “art should be a part of everyday life.” For Wright, the obvious antonym of “amateur” was “professional,” but this had been a term that Elliott had avoided – juxtaposing instead “serious artists” against “anxious amateurs,” “teacher-artists,” or “Sunday painters.” Similarly, Harris contrasted the “creative” with the “academic,” “derivative,” or “commercial” artists. For these writers, the term “professional,” in the field of art, was too inclusive, signalling only remuneration: that is, it might include portrait painters, illustrators, or those amateurs who, as Elliott noted, had the audacity to sell their work. Nevertheless, Wright correctly sensed “professionalization” as the impetus behind Elliott’s column. Elliott advised his readers how they could 56

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tell a serious artist from an amateur: “One good way to distinguish between them is to compare their bodies of work. The serious young painter … will have tried a number of media and his individuality will be evident in all media. He will have advanced through several stages of ‘borrowing’ from earlier artists. His emergence from a Picasso period will have been celebrated long since.”7 In other words, the serious artist produced a large body of original art in a modernist idiom, one more “advanced” than Picasso. Elliott was, then, describing a particular kind of professional “fine” artist – a kind characteristic of modern art. Picasso himself called it the “Van Gogh” archetype.8 Modernist culture, Laura Prieto writes, “changed the basic function of the artist from a teacher to a hero.”9 The discursive struggle between Wright and Elliott transpired at a moment when the modernist conception of “artist” had been challenged (in Wright’s lived experience) and was being reasserted (by cultural figures like Elliott and Harris). Challenging the “clique of people who call themselves artists” or the notion that taste was the “exclusive possession of the elect” was not a struggle that was articulated in the name of gender equality during the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War – class was more frequently the explicit or implicit barrier being attacked – but the ramifications were certainly gendered.10 Both women who were, by Elliott’s definition, “anxious amateurs” such as Wright and “serious artists” such as Jarvis and Nicol McLeod were significant participants in this challenge. That it ultimately failed to reconstitute the meaning of “artist” in Canadian society is reflected by the marginalization of women such as these in critical and historical writing on Canadian art in the decades after the Second World War.11 These were years when powerful, conservative voices in Canada called for a return to “normalcy.” Women were pressured to relinquish wartime gains in and out of the workforce.12 Anti-communism tarred even moderate leftists with its red-baiting brush.13 This pattern of reaction and repression is often only obliquely addressed in histories of Canadian art. Focusing on the stylistic experimentation of Canadian painters associated with the Automatistes, Prisme D’Yeux, or Painters Eleven, accounts of the period are stories of adventurous artists achieving international success in spite of a conservative cultural climate that lacked the sophistication of New York or Paris.14 In this telling, the artist is praised for being “ahead of his public” (an achievement quite different from the Depression-era ideal of being an artist of the people). Most historians have assessed Canadian art of this period using criteria similar to those Elliott articulated in 1953. Wright reminds us that these are not the only possible standards of evaluation. As the “idea of modern art” waxed in post-war Canada, waning were ideas about the democratization of culture that had attracted wide support during the war and earlier.15 Elliott refers to the “post-war pre-eminence” of amateur artists, but what had really changed between the war years and the years that followed, as Wright ni e rgart h

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protested, were the terms used to value works of art and the work of artists. Canadian cultural historians have documented the lobbying campaigns of cultural organizations to obtain state sponsorship of the arts in Canada in the decade preceding the formation of the Royal Commission on the Development of the Arts, Letters and Sciences, better known as the Massey Commission. Several scholars have noted the relationship between this campaign and a professionalization movement among cultural producers. As Andrew Nurse observes, the idea of the “health of the arts in Canada” was often equated with the “health of Canadian artists.”16 Professionalization was clearly on the agenda at gatherings such as the Conference of Canadian Artists held in Kingston in 1941. It is less clear that there was consensus about the ends of professionalization. That is, what kind of profession would “artist” be in Canada? The social function of an artist is and was subject to debate. “Artist” could fall on either side of the division sociologist Paul Halmos makes between “personal” and “impersonal” service professions.17 As examples of the personalservice professions, Halmos includes the clergy, doctors, nurses, teachers, and social workers; among impersonal-service professions, he includes lawyers, accountants, engineers, and architects.18 These categories seem relevant to the Elliott/Wright exchange. Did artists have more in common with teachers or with engineers? There is no question where Elliott stood on this question: he explicitly separated the categories of “teacher artist” and “serious artist.” This article will take seriously Wright’s contradictory perspective, spurred by her encounter with “personal service” professional artists in New Brunswick. Wright was not alone. Marilyn Baker has recently described the experience of female artists who taught at the Winnipeg School of Art (wsa).19 Between 1940 and 1947, the majority of teachers at the wsa were women, including talented artists such as Byllee Lang, Edith Carter, and Julia Barnard. In 1947 the wsa hired as director twenty-seven-year-old Joseph Plaskett, who had been studying with the Abstract-Expressionist painter Hans Hoffmann in New York. Plaskett recommended that the wsa be shut down and reopened as the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. When this transpired in 1950, all of the women on staff were out of a job. Julia Barnard stayed in Winnipeg and continued to exhibit her work. One 1950s critic, Baker writes, described Barnard as “one of those housewife artists who could be found on every street.” Barnard saw her work differently. “I am interested in the Canadian scene as it presents itself to me,” she wrote in 1966, “and not as seen through the eyes of Famous Artists.”20 Barnard’s capital letters, one might imagine, served to direct her critique not at particular artists who were famous but at the category “Famous Artist.” In the latter 1930s and during the Second World War, Canadian artists debated the nature and aims of their profession. Elliott and Harris echo the winning arguments in this debate, at least from the perspective of the 1950s; from

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the perspective of Fredericton in 1941, however, this victory would have seemed entirely unlikely. The debate was ideological. It was also gendered. The conception of “artist” as a personal-service professional – or, more precisely, a communityservice worker – offered opportunities for women artists less limited than those offered by “Famous Artist.”

‘Who Have Set Themselves up as Judges?’ Artists in Canada “professionalized” for the first time in the late nineteenth century with the founding of a number of organizations and institutions, most notably the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (rca) in 1880. The sociological traits of a profession – “prolonged training in a definable body of knowledge, a credential system, a code of ethics, self-government, and legislated access to a particular labour market”21 – are only somewhat applicable to the production of “fine” art, but, with its membership restrictions, hierarchical credential system, control of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada (until 1910), and privileging of particular forms of artistic production and training, the rca clearly positioned itself as the professional association of artists in Canada.22 It was also, as a number of scholars have noted, almost totally exclusive of women.23 The rca, like other academies in the Western world, could not sustain its dominance in the field of art in the twentieth century. In Canada, the stylistic challenge to the academy – modern art – was accompanied by an institutional challenge, as the National Gallery emerged as an autonomous, and in many ways antagonistic, authority in the field. Between 1910 and 1930, a new hierarchy emerged – privileging those artists who combined modern style with nationalist sympathies. The characteristic production of these artists was a wilderness landscape painted in post-Impressionist style. The new “fine artist” archetype – the woodsman artist – was, too, gendered male. Fred Housser, the Group of Seven’s first historian, described members as a “new type of artist; one who divests himself of the velvet coat and flowing tie of his caste, puts on the outfit of the bushwhacker … sleeps in the out of doors under the stars … [and] climbs mountains with his sketch box on his back.”24 This characterization, minus its local particularities, was, like modern art, an international phenomenon. As Laura Prieto writes, many modernist critics “emphasized the importance of virility, or the masculine aspect of creativity to making great art.”25 Ostensibly an anti-academic movement – though a number of its members were academicians – the Group of Seven, like its successor, the Canadian Group of Painters (1933), was less obviously a “professional” association than the rca. Nevertheless, there were certain parallels: membership was controlled by

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election; exhibitions were restricted to members and invited contributors; members were privileged by significant public and private patrons; and a particular artistic ethics – modernism combined with nationalism – was enshrined in its charter.26 Its success as a professional movement was of short duration. The 1930s witnessed a decline in the art market (cash-strapped public patrons, such as the National Gallery of Canada, purchased very few works) and a rise in the number of artists challenging the ideological underpinnings of the “Canadian Group.” These challenges were both artistic (the “art for art’s sake” versus “art for nation’s sake” divide) and political (questioning the relevance of “wilderness nationalism” in Depression-era Canada). Participants at the 1941 Conference of Canadian Artists in Kingston voiced a range of competing ideological and aesthetic positions. The Kingston Conference is usually written about as a milestone on the road to the Massey Commission and the enlarged role of the Canadian state in the production of Canadian cultural products.27As Jeffrey Brison puts it, the conference put “the Canadian art scene on the path to centralization and bureaucratization on a scale that exceeded the wildest fantasies of American New Dealers.”28 A close reading of the proceedings, however, reveals tensions and disagreements among the 145 artist-participants. The organization that eventually was formed as a result of the conference, the Federation of Canadian Artists, reflected these tensions. If members generally agreed that the fca’s function was to foster links between artists and the broader society, there was no unanimity on what kind of links, or on how they might be forged. In this regard, Andrew Nurse draws a subtle but significant distinction between the outlook of the fca’s top executives in 1944: President Lawren Harris and Vice-President Fred Taylor, a committed leftist.29 “For Taylor,” Nurse writes, “art had to change. It had to become active and meaningful in the lives of working people. And, through this process, it could in turn support, and help to change, society. For Harris, the process was almost reversed. He did not feel that art had to change. What was necessary, Harris argued, was that society find a means to expand the audience for art as it existed.”30 The distinction, to put Nurse’s observation in other words, is between the populist and the popular, between an art of the people and an art for the people. Early initiatives of the fca could be supported from either Taylor’s or Harris’s position. The organization’s lobbying campaign to encourage the government to construct community cultural centres in seventy-five Canadian cities and towns could be seen, from Taylor’s perspective (or from Evelyn Wright’s), as a step towards socializing the means of cultural production. On the other hand, from Harris’s perspective, these community centres would provide new exhibition venues and create studio space and employment opportunities for professional artists. Since the campaign was unsuccessful and the centres remained hypothetical, it is impossible to know whether they would have enlisted artists in the

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service of society or vice versa. We do know that the subsumed tensions within the fca became open breaks in the post-war years. In 1946 Harris spearheaded and financed a silk-screen reproduction project in the name of the fca over the strenuous objections of Fred Taylor.31 This project aimed to distribute broadly the works of Canadian artists, principally works by members of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, across the country. The “distinguishing feature” of the works, art historian Joyce Zemans writes, was their “decorative, Christmascard prettiness.”32 For Taylor, the mass marketing of Canada’s most celebrated artists was not the kind of socially engaged art practice he thought the fca had been formed to promote, and he resigned in protest.33 During the war years, many women artists were active in the fca, including Byllee Lang and Julia Barnard in Winnipeg, Pegi Nicol MacLeod in Fredericton, and Julia Crawford in Saint John.34 What did they see as the appropriate function of the organization? In 1942 Lang obtained fca endorsement for a collaborative mural project in Winnipeg’s United Services Centre. Nicol MacLeod, who also executed a mural in this period, was, with Jarvis, instrumental in creating a cultural community centre in Fredericton. Perhaps these artists would have endorsed Walter Abell’s speech at the Kingston Conference, entitled “Art and Democracy.” Abell, a left-leaning professor of Fine Arts at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, was a proponent of Taylor’s vision for the fca. Canada, Abell told the Kingston delegates, was not a cultural democracy but a “cultural plutocracy” which was “determined by a small group possessing great wealth.” The “democratic usage of art,” he continued, “would serve the life of the people as a whole.”35 Abell described some “experiments” that promised new cultural health for democracy, including children’s art, folk art, amateur creative workshops, and murals. These were, as Abell put it, the “movements of modern art that have broken old forms and prepared the way for new ones, with increasing emphasis upon the creative possibilities in the common man.”36 A point to emphasize here is Abell’s characterization of these cultural activities as movements of “modern art.” For Abell, an artist’s function was to express the “thoughts and feelings dominant in the artist’s community.” The artist did not need to choose between “form” and “content,” because both would inevitably communicate a work’s social meaning. Beginning in the late 1930s, Abell and other left-leaning critics began to champion what Abell called a “new generation” of Canadian modernists. Women artists were, in Abell’s view, at the forefront of this generation. After a trip to Toronto in 1936, he wrote to Saint John-based painter Jack Humphrey about his conviction that there had emerged a “very important group of young Canadian painters … more important than the Group of Seven … Of all I have seen I feel that you and Pegi Nicol, and possibly Paraskeva Clark, are the top rank of this generation in Canadian art.”37

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Abell’s aesthetic ideals were not universally shared. By contrast, consider Graham McInnes’s 1937 review of Marian Scott’s work in the pages of Canadian Forum: I have no wish to arouse the ire of those readers of the forum who are not numbered among my own sex; but the fact remains that women, when they tackle the creative arts, have an exceedingly hard time of it. Due to various reasons … biological, social and environmental, they cannot … wrestle successfully with the greatest creative problems and emerge – as men occasionally do – triumphant … If the “greatest” artists of the world number among them no women, nevertheless the artistic creations of women have a unique flavor and have enriched greatly art as a whole.38 In order for women to produce truly “fine” modern art, McInnes suggested, they needed to suppress their femininity, which he associated with “decorative” painting. McInnes praised Scott for doing exactly this. In spite of his wish, McInnes did arouse the ire of Forum readers. The next month, a letter to the editor by Harriet Forsey was published in rebuttal: “I am baffled by the attempt to understand why ‘femininity’ should necessarily be discernible in [Scott’s work] … On Mr. McInnes’s statement that the great masterpieces of art number among them the work of no woman … my only comment is this question, ‘who have set themselves up as judges?’”39 We might celebrate Abell’s open-mindedness and condemn McInnes’s sexism as individuals, but it is more significant to observe that their diverging critical positions are related to differing conceptions of the ideal modern artist. McInnes’s artist – wrestling with the “greatest creative problems” – is the gendered, “serious” artist of Elliott and Harris in the 1950s. For Abell, the greatest creative problems were not formal but social. The prominent position occupied by women in Abell’s “new generation” suggests that gender did not limit an artist’s ability to express the thoughts and feelings of a community or to encourage those activities that revealed “the creative possibilities in the common” person.

Reconsidering the Teapot School of Art The Observatory Art Centre came into existence as the result of a chance meeting of Lucy Jarvis and Pegi Nicol MacLeod on a Fredericton street in the summer of 1940.40 A few years earlier, the two women had met at a party in Toronto but neither knew that the other had recently moved to Fredericton. For Jarvis, this move was a return to her family’s home after five years of working as a commercial artist and portrait painter in Toronto. Nicol MacLeod, who had been living in New York, had never been to Fredericton before coming to stay with 62

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her husband’s parents while he looked for Canadian employment. Jarvis took Nicol MacLeod to visit another pair of acquaintances recently arrived from Toronto, the new president of the University of New Brunswick and his wife, Larry and Margaret MacKenzie.41 At tea, the three women developed a plan to convert a small, unused building on the campus, a one-time observatory, into an art centre for both students and the broader community. By December 1940, renovations were complete.42 In the intervening months, Nicol MacLeod had become very active in the local cultural scene and aspired to provide it with leadership. She explained this desire in a letter to National Gallery of Canada director H.O. McCurry: “I am in a very interesting situation here, I’d like to tell you about. This is a very good hen without a head and in a way, I could be head for a time perhaps … There are odd folk interested in – weaving, pottery, photography – also they do same, and good things, they are.”43 Most of the best-known artists in New Brunswick lived in the province’s largest city, Saint John. Nicol MacLeod made frequent visits there from Fredericton and was influential in developing connections between the artistic communities in the two cities. She described the itinerary of one early trip in another letter to McCurry. “It is all awfully exciting,” she wrote. “I’ve spent a week at the Deichmanns’ pottery, a day with [painters Jack] Humphrey and Miller Brittain and saw the good things at the Vocational School … where there are some remarkable student murals.”44 Potters Kjeld and Erica Deichmann, Brittain, Humphrey, and other Saint John artists would become actively involved in the early operation of the Observatory Art Centre, loaning works for exhibition, teaching classes, and delivering lectures. With the centre open in January 1941, Nicol MacLeod left for New York where her husband had returned to work. She would return to Fredericton each summer to teach a summer school in painting at the oac until her death in February 1949. Jarvis operated the centre for the remainder of the year, when it served as classroom for children’s art classes, exhibition space for local and invited artists, meeting room for campus and Fredericton clubs, performance centre for small concerts and lectures, and informal drop-in centre for university students to create or appreciate art and music.45 Jarvis dubbed the centre a “tea-pot school of art,” reclaiming a term that could be negatively used to suggest parochial, old-fashioned, and female.46 She bristled at any suggestion that the oac was a vehicle to enlighten the culturally deprived. She was, she wrote, suspicious of cultural hierarchies: “This led me (and other nb artists were in accord), to try as far as possible to keep the art centre organization always ‘at the service of’ and never as ‘a dictator to’ those who enjoyed its equipment.”47 Many years after the event, Jarvis was still outraged over a 1941 national broadcast by Graham McInnes on “Art Centres in Canada” in which he “cited the unb effort as laudatory because that university had wanted an art centre and sent for Pegi Nicol MacLeod to come and start one.” Jarvis was incensed ni e rgart h

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and wrote to McInnes explaining that the centre “did not grow at all in this spirit” but rather “had roots in the whole history of Fredericton.” To this McInnes replied, unforgivably in Jarvis’s opinion, “Would it not have been better if it had been as I said?”48 It is possible to see McInnes’s point. If cultural centres emerged organically from local contexts, it would greatly weaken the fca’s effort to encourage government sponsorship of community centres. From this perspective, it would have been far better if the institution had launched the centre and it had subsequently attracted local support. Pegi Nicol MacLeod explicitly made the connection between an fca-led campaign to pursue government funding for community centres and the Observatory Art Centre in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor early in 1946. Paraphrasing Nicol MacLeod, the interviewer notes that “in many parts of Canada there are still no art centers of any kind … that help people discover themselves and find a way of self-expression they never dreamed of before. But Canadian artists are making valiant efforts to correct this. They have recently put before Parliament a plan suggesting community art centers in some 25 different sections of Canada.” The centre in Fredericton, Nicol MacLeod is quoted as saying, “serves as a nucleus from which we hope larger ones can grow.”49 The article is illustrated with a photograph of one of Nicol MacLeod’s pupils using an overturned chair as an easel, a photograph that showed both local enthusiasm and material deprivation (Fig. 2.1). The imbalance between these factors made the Observatory Art Centre a perfect example for fca lobbying efforts. Jarvis’s desire to correct McInnes’s misrepresentation, though, is significant. The distinction between a centre that had grown from a community and one that had been brought to a community essentially reflects the division between Taylor and Harris within the fca. Women artists were also at the forefront of community art organization in Saint John. In the late 1920s, after training and professional work outside the region, Violet Gillett and Julia Crawford returned to New Brunswick to teach art at the Saint John Vocational School (sjvs). Both were involved in the development of Maritime Art – Canada’s first magazine devoted exclusively to the visual arts. The idea for the magazine was hatched at a gathering of artists, including Gillett and Crawford, held during one of Walter Abell’s many visits to Saint John. With the organizational support of the Maritime Art Association (maa) and a small seed grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the magazine’s first issue was published in October 1940. Abell edited the magazine, but the production of its first issues was carried out by Gillett and student volunteers at the Vocational School.50 Gillett was responsible for reproducing the magazine’s early “original print” supplements and produced some of the designs on which they were based. Crawford was the magazine’s Saint John correspondent. In its early years, the magazine principally published material contributed by members of the maa, but these contributions discussed national and interna64

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Fig. 2.1 A student at the Observatory Art Centre in Saint John, nb, as pictured in the Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 1946.

tional issues, events, and artists. Though Maritime Art offered to publish all points of view, many of the articles aligned with Abell’s ideas about cultural democracy. Contributors praised and called for more socially relevant art;51 promoted art-education initiatives and were enthusiastic about children’s art;52 and were particularly interested in cultural aspects of the American New Deal, Mexican muralists, and the status of art in the Soviet Union.53 The underlying political ideology of the magazine – most evident in Abell’s editorials – critiqued laissezfaire capitalism and endorsed social planning, especially slum clearance. These ideas appealed to Gillett. She succeeded Abell as president of the maa and was the first and only editor of the Maritime Arts Bulletin, which the maa briefly produced after Maritime Art became Canadian Art. Her contributions to this publication continued the editorial line of Maritime Art. Gillett hoped that the destruction of war would lead to the construction of a more humane society. “Property has been a difficult cause to attack,” she wrote, “and while a little was accomplished in what is known as slum clearance there has been little or no opportunity to demonstrate upon a total scale the desirability of the community built upon scientific and aesthetic concepts and the needs of ni e rgart h

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modern living.” The war “with all its horror will give the opportunity for such demonstration … [This] will naturally produce new forms and with them an unprecedented demand for the work of the artist.”54 It is important to note that Gillett writes “the work of the artist” and not “works of art.” Gillett’s leadership of the maa directed the organization away from art appreciation and towards community service. Though the member clubs of the maa may have been formed to increase “personal knowledge of art,” she wrote in December 1943, the efforts of the association should be directed to “actively see that Art is used by, is produced by and sponsored by the community.” The war should not result in a curtailment of these efforts. “If our club has been and is a true and felt service in our community,” she suggested, “then our members would have no reason for withdrawing from such work at any time.”55 Outside her contributions to Maritime Art, Julia Crawford’s local influence was most noticeable in the transformation of the program of the Saint John Art Club. Throughout its history, the majority of the members of this club were women by a large margin.56 In the early 1930s, the club’s program was geared almost wholly to art appreciation. Each meeting included a lecture on “Pictures you should know,” and the year’s major social event, the annual “Conversazione,” featured performances of “tableaux” where club members would costume themselves and pose in imitation of famous paintings. After Crawford’s election as president in 1937, the program of the club became more focused on art creation and education than appreciation. As part of the 1937 program, local artists and craftspersons delivered instructional lectures describing their techniques. Walter Abell visited and spoke on “New Directions in Canadian Painting.”57 The club sponsored children’s art classes and, beginning in 1940, junior memberships in the club were made available at reduced rates. Children’s art classes were also being organized in Fredericton at the oac and in the art and crafts store of photographer Madge Smith. Jarvis’s Saturday morning children’s classes at the centre filled the little building to capacity and the Fredericton Art Club sponsored yearly art contests for school-age children. Jarvis recalled judging the first of these contests with Saint John painter Ted Campbell: “[Art Club] members subdued their wonder when we preferred the honest, even if untidy, efforts by the children at giving their own impressions of such things as the breaking up of river ice, the making of maple sugar or a town parade, to the previously admired and highly finished imitations or copies of adult work.”58 Jarvis’s standards of judgment were reflected in her art classes. Fredericton artist Brigid Toole Grant started attending Jarvis’s classes at the age of nine in the late 1940s and recalled that Jarvis was passionately opposed to copying and favoured unique, creative expression.59 Jarvis also made efforts to extend her encouragement of children’s art into the New Brunswick countryside through her job as a rural film projectionist for the National Film Board (nfb). Jarvis was one of two travelling New Brunswick 66

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projectionists presenting nfb films in the winters between 1943 and 1945. On her own initiative, she combined her nfb duties with children’s art classes and mounted a travelling exhibition of these classes’ finest products. On one occasion in 1944, Jarvis recalled later, she was too tired to mount the children’s art show at one of her stops. A local resident wrote to nfb director John Grierson to complain that Jarvis “hadn’t shown the pictures.” Grierson assumed that the writer meant the nfb films and contacted Jarvis to reprimand her. When he was informed of her children’s art initiative, he invited her to bring her exhibition to an nfb conference at Magog, Quebec. Jarvis recalled her speech at the conference: “They wanted me to talk about [the children’s art exhibit], and I was so shy, in front of all these people, oh there were two or three people whose names are up in the sky today, John Grierson amongst them, and Grierson was so impressed that he took some of the pictures and put them in his office and I couldn’t get them back from him! And the kids wanted their pictures! And I made quite a fight and I got those pictures back.”60 Jarvis’s nervousness speaking in front of nfb luminaries did not prevent her from challenging them: “I asked why they made all their films about Canada in Ontario. Why didn’t they do them down here [in the Maritimes]?” Her question got its desired result and nfb filmmaker Ernie Reed was dispatched to Fredericton to make a film. Reed, Jarvis recalled, was “terribly impressed” with art activities in New Brunswick but his film “met with terrible misfortune.” It seems to have been somehow destroyed in processing or transit.61 To make up for this misfortune, Grierson agreed to speak in Fredericton under the auspices of the Observatory Art Centre. Grierson, who had recently described himself standing “one inch to the left of the Liberal party in power and would stand one inch to the left of a ccf party in power,” told his audience that a socially engaged art could help in the recovery from the “awful failure of our generation.”62 Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner reported that Grierson took “issue with those who maintain that art should be concerned only with idealistic values and not with the compelling realities of a modern civilization.” In conclusion, he “declared his earnest hope that art would not again withdraw within its ‘ivory tower’ and expressed confidence in a successful union of the two forces in art – idealism and realism.”63 Essentially, Grierson delivered a similar message in Fredericton in 1944 to that of Walter Abell’s “Art and Democracy” in Kingston in 1941. Recollecting years later, Jarvis mentioned Grierson’s speech when explaining her reasons for leaving the nfb in the summer of 1945, shortly before Grierson himself resigned. “I left the Film Board because they were working things up, [causing] people to get excited, and then nothing [was] happening as a result. And I thought, if we do this too much when the time [comes] when they are really going to do something, no one will come.”64 At war’s end, Jarvis realized earlier than many others that talking about cultural democracy was far easier than realizing it. ni e rgart h

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Where action could be taken, Jarvis acted. She pushed Fredericton’s art club, for instance, in progressive directions. “Fredericton has become so active that they want to undertake anything,” she wrote to Jack Humphrey in 1942. “Our art club is going to study Russian art next year! We do have fun.” The exclamation point brings the joke home to Humphrey: just look at how daring the “teapot school of art” has become! The club was considering developing a magazine, Jarvis wrote, to replace Maritime Art after that magazine had changed its title to become the national publication Canadian Art. “I know we could produce just as good if not a better magazine,” Jarvis wrote. “I can’t help thinking what fun it would be to fight it out and develop a homespun sort of a thing, unacademic in character – that would be vital and real enough to withstand competition and that would have all the arts in mind.”65 Jarvis’s choice of the word “homespun” was undoubtedly deliberate, referring to the resurgence of local interest in traditional crafts such as weaving. Jarvis, a former student remembers, did not rank “arts above crafts in terms of what sort of thing was made, but in what spirit it was made.”66 Long-time Fredericton residents remember that “there was no conflict between art and craft” in Madge Smith’s shop.67 In fact, Smith enabled interactions that blurred conventional distinctions between fine artists and craftspersons. Inspired by rugs hooked by local rural women in Smith’s shop, Nicol MacLeod took up rug hooking in the summer of 1941.68 Smith was impressed and asked for copies of her designs to distribute to local craftspeople (Fig. 2.2). Nicol MacLeod also attempted to teach herself to design for weaving, though there is no indication that these designs were ever executed.69 The rug designs, however, were definitely a success, as Smith continued to request new ones through the early 1940s. One called The Thistle, hooked by a Mrs J. Pye Weed White, was sent by Smith for exhibition in Saint John in 1942 and a number of Nicol MacLeod-designed rugs appeared in the Canadian section of the 1942 annual Women’s International Exposition of Arts and Industries at Madison Square Gardens in New York.70 Mrs White’s version of one of Nicol MacLeod’s horse designs hung in a 1943 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and, in the same show, a rug hooked by Nicol MacLeod herself won a cash prize.71 It may have also been in Smith’s store that Nicol MacLeod came in contact with the homespun material produced by students at the Carleton County Vocational School in Woodstock, New Brunswick. Under the leadership of principal Grace Coughlin, female students at this school created fabrics and clothing – their graduation outfits in 1939 became newsworthy as “the first occasion in 163 years a class dressed in homespun was graduated within the British Empire.”72 Nicol MacLeod met Coughlin in the summer of 1941 when, during a visit with Violet Gillett at her summer residence in Andover, the two painters stopped at Coughlin’s school for tea. As they toured the school, Coughlin complained about its bare walls. “Feed me and feed my daughter and I will do 68

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Fig 2.2 Pegi Nicol MacLeod’s rug design, Pony, 1941.

your walls,” Nicol MacLeod replied.73 Upon her return to Fredericton, Nicol MacLeod wrote to H.O. McCurry: “The most exciting thing I know is that I went to a tea … [and] met a Miss Grace Coglan, Principal. She wants a mural.”74 The mural was the sine qua non of socially engaged art for painters in this period. The summer before meeting Grace Coughlin, Nicol MacLeod had promoted mural painting during an interview published in the Ottawa Citizen. What better way could there be, Nicol MacLeod wondered, to memorialize Canada’s war effort?75 After she had completed her mural in Woodstock, she was still enthusiastic: “Every artist should get off a few murals in a life time. They clarify the mind. They use up all the ideas that straight painting does not need. I recommend them to painters who feel hampered. The material spaces in murals are as wide open as the mental.”76 Nicol MacLeod offered to do the mural in exchange for room and board, but Coughlin objected that this might ni e rgart h

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anger other artists.77 Ultimately, it was decided that Nicol MacLeod would accept payment in kind – in the form of homespun and tweed materials produced by the school’s students (Fig. 2.3). In her article “Adventure in Murals,” Nicol MacLeod invited other artists to follow her lead: “With such good painters in the Maritimes, not to say elsewhere in Canada, more schools might have murals. Work for the credit and let the cash go. The labor will be repaid.”78 Schools were the most enthusiastic patrons of murals in New Brunswick in this period. Nowhere was this more the case than in the Saint John Vocational School where Gillett and Crawford occupied positions of power. Art students at sjvs would all plan murals and, on occasion, the strongest designs would be executed on the walls of the school. In the pages of Maritime Art, Gillett explained that the aesthetic achievement of the Vocational School’s murals was less important than the example they provided in demonstrating that mural projects could be achieved in Canada. “The only form of Canadian painting now widely known to the public is landscape and this is not a subject which lends itself to mural treatment,” she wrote. “Before the layman or the government official is going to know what Canadian artists can do for him, haven’t they got to show their wares? It’s no good saying ‘Look what Mexico or the usa has done.’ If we want direct action we have to show what Canada can do.”79 The first Vocational School student murals to attract significant attention were the panels executed for the doors to the school’s auditorium by Elizabeth Sutherland in 1939. Her depictions of four sites of work were reproduced in Saturday Night in November 1940 (Fig. 2.4).80 The social-realist style of Sutherland’s door-panel murals was consistent with her easel work. The view from the cold sidewalk of the travel poster in the illuminated store window of Winter Afternoon (1939), for example, suggested the distance between consumer desire and lived reality in a city still reeling from the economic devastation of the Depression (Fig. 2.5). In the fall of 1940, sjvs students executed a six-panel mural for the Services Club in Saint John. The next major mural project was a fifteen-panel mural for the school’s cafeteria to illustrate “the history of Saint John from early times to present.” Production commenced in the spring of 1942 and by the fall of that year the stretched-cotton panels had been installed. Continuity, it was reported, was achieved through a common colour scheme and through Gillett’s guidance.81 None of these panels, unfortunately, has survived. Murals, children’s art, folk art, and amateur creative workshops – the “movements of modern art that have broken old forms and prepared the way for new ones,” according to Abell – were all part of the professional art practice of women artists in Saint John and Fredericton. These women, it should be emphasized, were “serious artists,” even by Elliott’s standards. They had extensive training in urban centres outside the region. They produced art in a variety of media

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using modernist idioms. Pegi Nicol MacLeod and Julia Crawford exhibited nationally and internationally, attracting critical attention. Abell’s praise for Nicol MacLeod has already been noted.82 Of Crawford’s Still Life, showing in Toronto in 1937, Graham McInnes wrote: “The strength and spirited bravura of this group of flowers is a convincing testimony to the awareness of a group of New Brunswick painters and craftsmen which include Jack Humphrey, Miller Brittain and Mr. and Mrs. Kjeld Deichmann.”83 In the spring of 1945, critic Geraldo Ferraz reviewed a Canadian exhibit touring Brazil and wrote: “I should like to pay homage to Julia Crawford whose ‘Flowers’ is a product of discreet observation of great delicacy in this exacting genre.”84 The examples of Crawford’s watercolours in the collection of the New Brunswick Museum make no pretence of illusionism: they are highly stylized, with blank canvas and obvious brush strokes. Nicol MacLeod’s work, too, was decidedly and idiosyncratically

Fig. 2.3 Pegi Nicol MacLeod at work on a mural for the Woodstock Vocational School in 1941. The photograph was taken by Madge Smith.

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Fig. 2.4 Left Elizabeth Sutherland’s panel depicting domestic work in the Saint John Vocational School mural, 1940.

Fig. 2.5 Above Elizabeth Sutherland, Winter Afternoon, c. 1939.

modern in style. Though they exhibited less widely, Jarvis and Gillett were accomplished painters. Gillett also sculpted. Her desire to connect her art to contemporary society is illustrated by her decision to sculpt an allegorical representation of one of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, freedom from want, a subject with obvious social implications in a region tenuously recovering from two decades of economic hardship (Fig. 2.6). Crawford, Jarvis, and Nicol Macleod also produced works with explicitly social themes, specifically portraits of impoverished children (Figs. 2.7 and 2.8). The purpose of art for Nicol Macleod was communication: “I sometimes think nothing matters but the communication from a certain kind of person thro his

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Fig. 2.6 Violet Gillett, Freedom from Want, 1944.

hand and his brush.”85 Jarvis, likewise, maintained that art should be “like participating in a dance – a communication of what all the dancers know already.”86 Both were less than enthusiastic about marketing their art works as commodities. Lucy Jarvis, a friend recalled, “was resistant in some ways to professionalism – she disliked galleries.”87 As Jarvis herself explained, “if so many people had not lost their basic will to make life a work of art … individual artists might not even be noticed so specially as they are today. It would not be a prestigious calling. The word culture seems to signify an artificial manipulation of something good. It is here that value finally comes in. Art is valuable to people in arid soil. Perhaps this is why the materially successful are such art collectors.”88 In 1943 Pegi Nicol MacLeod wrote of her distaste for art dealers in a letter to Marian Scott: “They think they do artists a favour by their existence, whereas art comes first and they are just mongers … They cannot judge art as living stuff that has to be made, only as a thing marketable. That point of view clouds their view.”89 Julia Crawford, too, was dubious about the art market. “People should buy paintings and not

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Fig. 2.7 Julia Crawford, Boy, 1946.

have them sold to them,” she wrote. If an artist spent too much time pursuing sales, “his art would degenerate and he would become a better salesman than an artist.”90

The Interests of Artists Writing in Canadian Art in 1952, George Robertson reported that all artists who had made presentations to the Massey Commission had agreed that “the most crucial problem facing the Canadian artist today [is] the lack of any art market sufficiently large to support our serious practising painters, sculptors and graphic artists.” Artists were forced to do types of work “irrelevant to their interests as artists”: “teaching, illustrating, commercial art and design, jobs that have little or no actual connection with serious art.” Why, Robertson wondered, “should a country of Canada’s population and size be incapable of supporting at least a few of its better artists on a full-time basis?”91 Ultimately, the Canadian government would endorse Robertson’s position when the Canada Council was created in 1957. 74

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Fig. 2.8 Lucy Jarvis, Kathleen, 1938.

None of the New Brunswick women artists discussed above would have objected to government support of artists. Indeed, Lucy Jarvis received a “Senior Artist Award” from the Canada Council in 1961 that allowed her to spend a year travelling and studying in Europe. For a time, however, they defined the kinds of work relevant “to their interests as artists” much more broadly than Robertson did. Their efforts to be of service to their communities were intrinsic to their artistic careers. For Jarvis, this conception of the role of the artist was directly connected to the war against fascism. “We thought we were doing war work, believe it or no!” she recalled. “We thought, here are all these totalitarian countries trying to clamp down on creativity, and we were doing the opposite thing, and we really did think it was war work! Lots of people in town didn’t. There were things in the paper ‘Why should people waste their time over pictures’ (when they should be doing something for the war and so on). It’s not the way we felt. And we had many discussions on that.”92 Jarvis’s “war work,” like Gillett’s “work of artists” in her imagined post-war world, defined the profession of “artist” differently than Elliott and Harris would in the 1950s. This alternative definition did not hold sway in the postwar era, nor, for many years, in the writing of Canadian art history, which has ni e rgart h

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long been far more interested in the lives and works of Famous Artists than in the activities of the “anxious amateurs” who so perturbed Elliott. Jarvis’s war work, though, was not forgotten by people such as Evelyn Wright, who demanded to know what Elliott would have her do. Elliott offered no response and, indeed, the question itself was a refusal.

notes 1 George Elliott, “What Have Amateurs Done to Canadian Art?” Canadian Art, 11, no. 1 (1953): 23–4. 2 Evelyn R. Wright, letter in “The Art Forum,” Canadian Art, 11, no. 2 (1954): 81. Evelyn Wright had been president of the Fredericton Art Club in 1943 and remained active in it thereafter, becoming president again in 1964. Born in England, Wright arrived in Fredericton in 1919; she and her husband raised four daughters. She began taking art classes at the Observatory Art Centre at the University of New Brunswick when it opened in 1941, exhibiting paintings locally and with the Maritime Art Association. See Mary Hashey, Maritime Artists, vol. 1 (Fredericton: Maritime Art Association 1967), 75. 3 Harold King, “Some Notes for Amateur Artists,” Canadian Art, 7, no. 1 (1949): 10. 4 Lawren Harris, “What the Public Wants,” Canadian Art, 12, no. 1 (1954): 9, 13. It seems fitting that Harris would echo Elliott’s position. When explaining the “great advances” of non-amateur Canadian painting, Elliott began with the landscapes of the Group of Seven: “A characteristic of Canadian painting is a strong sense of design … This dates back to the twenties, to the Group of Seven and later, to the followers of the Group who have carried its theses of design into new, delicate, vigorous, subtle and meaningful areas. Canadian abstract paintings have an enduringly decorative quality.” Elliott, “What Have Amateurs Done to Canadian Art?” 24. 5 Jarvis to Brigid and Richard Grant, n.d.,

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“unb Art Centre,” ua case 75, box 1, University of New Brunswick Archives (unba). Nicol MacLeod to Jack Humphrey, November 1947, reproduced in Joan Murray, Daffodils in Winter: The Life and Letters of Pegi Nicol MacLeod (Moonbeam, on: Penumbra Press 1984), 270. Elliott, “What Have Amateurs Done to Canadian Art?” 24. Elliott’s use of gendered pronouns was typical of his period – this typicality, though, is worth noting. “As soon as we saw that the collective adventure was a lost cause,” Picasso reflected, “each one of us had to find an individual adventure. And the individual adventure always goes back to the one which is the archetype of our times: that is, Van Gogh’s – an essentially solitary and tragic adventure.” Quoted in T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press 1999), 222. Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 2001), 180. See Candida Rifkind’s recent study of the intersection of socialism and modernism in the Canadian literary field, which focuses on the contributions and experiences of women writers. Rifkind, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009). In the last few decades, a number of important Canadian women artists have been rescued from historiographic obscurity or have had their work re-evaluated from a feminist perspective. Much of this

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scholarship is justifiably skeptical of the value of the concept of a “canon” and aware of the risks of merely adding a few women “hero” artists to a male pantheon – an “add women and stir” art history that would fail to acknowledge the structural factors that had created the existing male-dominated canon. See, in particular, Joyce Zemans, “A Tale of Three Women: The Visual Arts in Canada / A Current Account/ing,” Revue d’art canadienne/ Canadian Art Review, 25, nos. 1–2 (1998): 103–22; Maria Tippett, By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Art by Canadian Women (Toronto: Penguin 1992); and Susan Butlin, “A New Matrix of the Arts: A History of the Professionalization of Canadian Women Artists, 1880–1914” (phd thesis, Carleton University 2008). Ruth Roach Pierson, They’re Still Women after All: Canadian Women and the Second World War (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1986). Mark Kristmanson, Plateaus of Freedom: Nationality, Culture, and State Security in Canada, 1940–1960 (Don Mills, on: Oxford University Press 2003). See, for example, Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1973), 218–63. Judith Ince, who does pay close attention to the relationship between art and ideology in post-war Montreal, should be exempted from this judgment. See Ince, “The Vocabulary of Freedom in 1948: The Politics of the Montréal Avant-Garde,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 6, no. 1 (1982): 36–63. For a consideration of how Canadian art fits into the transatlantic cultural and political context of the early Cold War, see Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945–1964 (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1990). Guilbaut’s earlier monograph remains essential reading: Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,

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Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983). Andrew Nurse, “A Confusion of Values: Artists and Artistic Ideologies in Modern Canada, 1927–1952” (ma thesis, Queen’s University 1991). See also Jeffrey D. Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005); and Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992). According to Halmos, “professions whose principal function is to bring about changes in the body or personality of the client are the personal service professions, whilst all other professions which are not charged with responsibilities of this sort or, at any rate, which do not set themselves such tasks as these, are the impersonal service professions.” Paul Halmos, “Introduction,” in Halmos, ed., Professionalisation and Social Change (Keele, uk: University of Keele 1973), 6. Halmos’s emphasis. It is worth noting that all professions that, by the twentieth century, were dominated by women – teaching, nursing, and social work – are on the “personal service” side of Halmos’s division. Marilyn Baker, “The Later Years: Women Instructors at the Winnipeg School of Art in the 1940s,” Atlantis, 30, no. 2 (2006): 50–62. Ibid., 57–8. Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005), 4. See Ellen Ramsay, “The Promotion of the Fine Arts in Canada, 1880–1924” (phd thesis, University College London 1987), 24–186. Butlin, “A New Matrix of the Arts.” F.B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan 1926), 15. Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 3.

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26 Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1975). 27 On the organization, proceedings, and significance of the Kingston Conference, see: Helene Sicotte, “A Kingston, il y a 50 ans, la conference des artistes Canadiens: Débat sur la place de l’artiste dans la société,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 14, no. 2 (1990): 28–47; Michael Bell, “The Welfare of Art in Canada,” in The Kingston Conference Proceedings (1941; repr., with an introduction by Michael Bell and biographical notes by Frances K. Smith, Kingston, on: Agnes Etherington Art Centre 1991), iii–xxxiv; and Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada, 138–47. 28 Jeffrey D. Brison, “The Kingston Conference, the Carnegie Corporation and a New Deal for the Arts in Canada,” American Review of Canadian Studies, 23 (winter 1993): 503–22. 29 Taylor joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1936. John Virtue, Fred Taylor: Brother in the Shadows (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008), 77. 30 Nurse, “A Confusion of Values,” 150. 31 “Federation of Canadian Artists,” fca Bulletin, February 1946, Wartime Information Board Records, vol. 15, file 8–23, Library and Archives Canada (lac). 32 Joyce Zemans, “Sampson-Matthews and the ngc: The Post-War Years,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 21, nos. 1/2 (2000): 106. 33 I discuss the schism within the leadership of the fca in more detail in “‘Missionary for Culture’: Walter Abell, Maritime Art and Cultural Democracy, 1928–1944,” Acadiensis, 36, no. 1 (2006): 23–5. 34 Baker, “The Later Years,” 54, 56. 35 Walter Abell, “Art and Democracy,” in The Kingston Conference Proceedings, 23. 36 “Abell, Walter,” “Lectures by Walter Abell, 1938–1939,” Outside Activities/Organizations, 7.4 a, file 1, National Gallery

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of Canada Archives (ngca). For more on Abell, see Niergarth, “‘Missionary for Culture.’” A different reading of Abell’s career is presented in Sandra Paikowsky, “‘From Away’: The Carnegie Corporation, Walter Abell, and American Strategies for Art in the Maritimes from the 1920s to the 1940s,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 23 (2006): 37–72. Abell to Humphrey, 15 July 1936, Jack Humphrey Papers, box 1, file 2, ngca. See also Abell to H.O. McCurry, 1 August 1936: “There is a group of people about whom I am very enthusiastic – Paraskeva Clark, Pegi Nicol, Kathleen Munn, Marina Goodier, and others.” Outside Activities/Organizations, 7.4 a, file 1, ngca. G. Campbell McInnes, “Contemporary Canadian Artists, No. 10 – Marian Scott,” Canadian Forum, 17 (November 1937): 274–5. Harriet R. Forsey, “Womankind,” Canadian Forum, 17 (January 1938): 366. Jarvis was born in 1896 and her family moved from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to Andover, New Brunswick, in her youth before relocating to Fredericton. Between 1925 and 1929 she studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Art before returning to Fredericton where she had a studio until 1931. She taught art at a school in Compton, Quebec, between 1931 and 1933 and then moved to Markland, Nova Scotia, for a year, after which she went to Toronto where she found work as a draughtsperson and cataloguer at the Royal Ontario Museum. In 1936 she opened a portrait studio in Toronto and also lived briefly in Brantford before returning to Fredericton upon the outbreak of the Second World War. Lucy Jarvis Fonds, ua rg 357, box 3, file 1, unba; and Lucy Jarvis interviewed by Janet Toole, Oral History Programme, 26 February 1974, rg 153, unba. Larry and Margaret MacKenzie were both involved in progressive and left-wing Christian and political organizations in

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42

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44

45

46

47

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the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the Student Christian Movement and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf). Margaret had wanted to run for election in Toronto as a ccf candidate. Both were contributors to the Canadian Forum. P.B. Waite, Lord of Point Grey: Larry MacKenzie of UBC (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1987), 31, 70. Nicol MacLeod to Humphrey, n.d. [1940]; Nicol MacLeod to H.O. McCurry, 5 December 1940, reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 149. Nicol MacLeod to H.O. McCurry, n.d. [1940], reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 145. Nicol MacLeod to H.O. McCurry, 23 November 1940, reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 148. Nicol MacLeod was also close to Saint John art educator and painter Ted Campbell, who mounted an exhibition of her work in his studio in October 1947. Saint John Art Club Papers, “Minutes,” s85–1, file 6, New Brunswick Museum Archives (nbma). Rhonda J. Bradley, “Making a Place: The Life and Work of Lucy Jarvis as Cultural Educator and Community Catalyst in Atlantic Canada” (ma thesis, Carleton University 1997), 111. Bradley understands Jarvis’s use of this title quite literally and suggests that Jarvis liked it because “she believed that having social time after programs and classes was very important. It made for ‘warmth and discussion’ where ‘big things happen.’” Bradley, “Making a Place,” 105. Jarvis to Brigid and Richard Grant, n.d., “unb Art Centre,” ua case 75, box 1, unba. This anecdote is retold in Jarvis to Brigid and Richard Grant, n.d., “unb Art Centre,” ua case 75, box 1, unba. Barbara E. Scott Fisher, “Summer Art Center Uncorks Talents at the University of New Brunswick,” Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 1946, a7.

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50 “An Unlikely Time, an Unlikely Place,” cbc Radio program, transcribed in The Cormorant 9, no. 2 (1992): 46. 51 Pegi Nicol, “Miller Brittain,” Maritime Art, 1, no. 4 (1941): 14–18; Walter Abell, “Editorial Comment: The Artist in Society,” Maritime Art, 1, no. 5 (1941): 3–5; John Alford, “The Artist and Society,” Maritime Art, 2, no. 1 (1941): 13–14; Pegi Nicol MacLeod, “Adventure in Murals,” Maritime Art, 2, no. 2 (1941–42): 37–8; Kathleen Shackleton, “Art in Action,” Maritime Art, 2, no. 5 (1942): 158–9; Walter Abell, “Prints and Democracy,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 1 (1942): 3–4; Frederick B. Taylor, “Painting Canada’s War Industry,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 5 (1943): 143. 52 Children’s art initiatives were frequently discussed and praised in the “Coast to Coast in Art” section of the magazine, but there were also articles devoted principally to the subject, including: D.J. MacGillivray, “British Children as Artists,” Maritime Art, 2, no. 3 (1942): 93–4; D. Edwin Campbell, “Child Art and the School,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 1 (1942): 16–17, 32; E.R. Hunter, “Arthur Lismer,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 5 (1943): 137–41. 53 Arthur Lismer discusses each of these international inspirations in his article “Federation Means Service,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 3 (1943): 93–5. But on American New Deal cultural initiatives, see: Walter Abell, “South of the Border – Canada Takes Notice,” Maritime Art, 1, no. 2 (1940): 3–5; Edward Rowan, “American Rennaissance,” Maritime Art, 2, no. 1 (1941): 15–18. On Soviet art, see Stanley Hart, “Nationalism in Russian Painting,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 4 (1942): 105–9. 54 Violet Gillett, “Editorial Comment,” Maritime Arts Bulletin, 4 (April 1944): 2. 55 Violet Gillett, “Editorial Comment,” Maritime Arts Bulletin, 2 (December 1943): 2. 56 Of the Saint John Art Club’s 268 members in 1931, 193 (72 per cent) were women. 57 In 1937 lecturers included Ted Campbell,

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64 65

66 67

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Violet Gillett, and Kjeld and Erica Deichmann. s85–1, Saint John Art Club Papers, “Minutes,” January 1937 and February 1937, file 6, nbma. Lucy Jarvis, “Notes from a Benighted Maritimer,” Canadian Art, 4, no. 4 (1947): 163. On one occasion, after a snowfall, Grant recalled her class going outside to make snow sculptures and remembered feeling that it was an injustice that Jarvis praised her “bizarre, humanoid creature” over her friend’s very naturalistic likeness of a dog. In retrospect, Grant realized that this was part of Jarvis’s larger effort to encourage creativity and imagination. Author’s interview with Brigid Toole-Grant, 19 May 2004. Lucy Jarvis interviewed by Janet Toole, 18. Ibid. Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984), 210. Lucy Jarvis Papers, “John Grierson Spoke to Many Last Night at the University,” Fredericton Daily Gleaner, n.d., rg 357, series 3, file 3, unba. Lucy Jarvis interviewed by Janet Toole, 18. Jarvis to Humphrey, 10 June 1942, Jack Humphrey papers, ngca, Jarvis’s emphasis. Author’s interview with Brigid TooleGrant, 19 May 2004. Author’s interview with Brigid TooleGrant, Dick Grant, Mark Connell, and Lucy Dyer, 19 May 2004. This particular comment was made by Connell, but it was affirmed by the others in attendance. Nicol MacLeod to Smith, 20 September 1941, reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 167. Nicol MacLeod to Marius Barbeau, December 1941, reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 173. Nicol MacLeod to Smith, n.d. [1942], reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter,

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185; the information on the Women’s International Exposition comes from Laura Brandon, Pegi by Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Canadian Artist (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005), 165. Brandon suggests that Nicol MacLeod took up rug hooking because “she was questioning her abilities as a painter, had difficulties exhibiting, and wanted money” (164). All this may have been true, but I have seen no evidence that Nicol MacLeod gave up painting for rug hooking, nor that she considered the latter a form of art to explore in lieu of painting. Moreover, Nicol MacLeod’s want of money and difficulties pursuing her painting career were neither unique to her nor unique to this moment in her life; it is hardly plausible that she regarded rug hooking as a pragmatic or lucrative solution to these problems. On 13 February 1943 Nicol MacLeod wrote to Smith concerned that the notice she had sent announcing her prize in the exhibition may have caused Smith and White to believe that it was the rug hooked by White that won. If such was the case, Nicol MacLeod advised Smith not to disabuse White of this belief, though the issue of sharing the prize money could be awkward since Nicol MacLeod had already spent most of it. (Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 196). The moma show was called Arts in Therapy and it was conceived around the theme of activities that could help rehabilitating veterans. Brandon, Pegi by Herself, 165. Aida B. McAnn, “New Brunswick Renaissance,” Maritime Art, 1, no. 3 (1941): 12. Pegi Nicol MacLeod, “Adventure in Murals,” Maritime Art, 2, no. 2 (1942): 37. MacLeod to McCurry, 1 August 1941, reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 162. Emphasis in original. “Murals Offer Opportunity to Record Canada at War: The Former Pegi Nicol,

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Visiting Here, Is Collecting Her Paintings for Toronto Exhibition Next January,” Ottawa Citizen, 12 August 1940. In her biography of Nicol Macleod, Laura Brandon correctly points to the inspiration of American and Mexican muralists on Nicol MacLeod’s thinking before commenting: “She does not appear to have realized [mural painting’s] dangers in the hands of totalitarian governments.” This is an odd observation, for it seems to expect a political judgment that Nicol MacLeod would have been unlikely to make while promoting murals in Canada. Brandon, Pegi by Herself, 114–15. 76 Nicol MacLeod, “Adventure in Murals,” 38. In her history of Canadian muralism, Marylin McKay claims that MacLeod’s Woodstock mural continues the nineteenth-century tradition of Canadian murals by celebrating “the material progress of Western culture’s modern age.” What makes the mural historically interesting is how and where the material progress of the modern age was envisioned. A key scene features portraits of the school’s benefactor, L.P. Fisher, and its first principal, R.W. Maxwell. In Nicol MacLeod’s written description of the mural, she imagines that these two historic figures are “discussing the advantages of vocational training.” Two young men, wearing shirts and ties, are listening to this conversation. Nicol MacLeod writes that these figures are looking forward to the future and turning their backs on the past depicted in the scene unfolding behind them. There, a young man in a suit with a briefcase walks towards a cityscape and away from a small farm where an older man and woman, his parents in Nicol MacLeod’s description, “dig and delve in the old way.” With the new agricultural techniques taught at the Vocational School, Nicol MacLeod’s mural argues, the urban migration of rural youth need not continue. A large section of Nicol MacLeod’s mural

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is entitled “The Crafts of Rural Womanhood.” The depicted crafts include not only weaving, sewing, and baking but also typing and filing. Rural women would, then, also combine the traditional with the modern in Nicol MacLeod’s utopian vision of a future agricultural society. McKay, A National Soul: Canadian Mural Painting 1860s–1930s (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002), 199. Nicol MacLeod to H.O. McCurry, 1 August 1941, reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 162–3. Nicol MacLeod, “Adventure in Murals,” 38. Violet Gillett, “Art Forum,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 1 (1942): 20. It was only after her retirement from teaching that Gillett herself executed a mural: a series of panels in Trinity Church in Andover, New Brunswick. In her description of the murals in an unpublished typescript, she explained that the panels on the southeast wall illustrate children’s hymns, those on the northeast wall illustrate “All things bright and Beautiful” with depictions of the small “beauties of nature,” and the remaining two walls contain New Testament scenes set in recognizably local, New Brunswick landscapes. There is no indication when Gillett executed these murals, but she does refer to her father’s retirement in 1954. Violet Gillett, “Four Murals,” ra 759.11 gil, Reference Archives, Fredericton Public Library. Saturday Night, 16 November 1940, 26. Julia Crawford, “Saint John,” Maritime Art, 3, no. 2 (1942–43): 61. The reception of Nicol MacLeod’s work by critics in this period is comprehensively surveyed in Brandon, Pegi by Herself. Graham McInnes, “World of Art,” Saturday Night, 8 December 1937, 2. Donald W. Buchanan, “Brazil Sees Canadian Art,” Canadian Art, 2, no. 3 (1945): 105–6.

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85 Quoted in Brandon, Pegi by Herself, 130. 86 Lucy Jarvis Fonds, “Miscellaneous,” Speaking notes, n.d., rg 357, unba. 87 Author’s interview with Brigid TooleGrant, 19 May 2004. 88 Lucy Jarvis Fonds, “Miscellaneous,” Speaking Notes, n.d., rg 357, unba. 89 Nicol MacLeod to Scott, 18 January 1943, reproduced in Murray, Daffodils in Winter, 195.

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90 Julia Crawford, Saint John Art Club Papers, “1942 Art Club Report to maa,” s85–1, file 37, nbma. 91 George Robertson, “A Broader Base of Patronage,” Canadian Art, 9, no. 3 (1952): 105. 92 Lucy Jarvis interviewed by Janet Toole, 15.

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3

CHAPTER 1

The Rewards of Professionalization

Alice Lusk Webster and the New Brunswick Museum, 1933–531

Lianne McTavish

An image from 1924 shows three unidentified members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Natural History Society (nhs) of New Brunswick standing inside their society’s museum in Saint John (Fig. 3.1). Normally devoted to the display of local birds, insects, and geological specimens, the museum had been temporarily transformed into an “Oriental bazaar,” a fund-raising event at which the ladies served tea and cake while dressed in Japanese, Chinese, and Indian costume. The next two photographs (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3) were taken eleven years later, in the new museum building that replaced the nhs Museum when it became a provincially funded institution. They show cases filled with the Asian objects collected by Alice Lusk Webster, a wealthy patron who founded the Art Department of the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John during the 1930s. Her interest in Asian culture implies a continuity of women’s work within the old and new museums. Nevertheless, Lusk Webster distinguished herself from the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, arguing that they and their “pink teas” should be “la[id] away in lavender on an upper shelf.”2 In this chapter I consider Lusk Webster’s efforts to professionalize the New Brunswick Museum, increase her own authority, and raise the status of the decorative arts within the institution. Although she strategically denounced the small-scale entrepreneurship of her predecessors, Lusk Webster had much in common with them. As the wives, sisters, and daughters of male members of the nhs, participants in the Ladies’ Auxiliary had donated objects to the museum,

Fig. 3.1 Unidentified members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Natural History Society at the New Brunswick Museum’s Oriental Exhibition, January 1924.

raised money to furnish its rooms, and funded the female staff member who kept the doors open to the public.3 Like these women, Lusk Webster was involved in the museum largely because of her familial relationship with one of its male administrators; her husband, Dr J. Clarence Webster, was vice-president of the board and honorary curator of Canadian history from 1934 until his death in 1950.4 Also like the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, Lusk Webster worked in a largely volunteer capacity, struggling to increase the material possessions and fixtures of the New Brunswick Museum. The founder of the Art Department had a particular interest in Asian art; with her husband, she had amassed an impressive personal collection, fraternizing with experts and travelling widely.5 All the same, Lusk Webster differed significantly from her predecessors. From a prominent New York family, she was a well-travelled woman who had been educated in France, specializing in both art making and its history.6 As the educated wife of a wealthy doctor, Lusk Webster had greater social and cultural capital than most members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and she was involved in the administration of the New Brunswick Museum, serving as the first vicepresident of its executive board after her husband’s death. Lusk Webster aligned herself with male curators and connoisseurs, especially C.T. Currelly, director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology in Toronto. After studying the installation methods used at the Royal Ontario Museum and other major institutions, she based her Art Department on the principles of coverage and classification, and rejected the costumed social events that had been hosted by the Ladies’ Auxiliary. By 1941, Lusk Webster had hired Edith Hudson – a young woman equipped with both a master’s degree in art history and a certificate in museum work – to run her Art Department. Lusk Webster hoped that Hudson 84

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Fig. 3.2 Left Case featuring Chinese art from the Art Department of the New Brunswick Museum, c. 1935, arranged by Alice Lusk Webster.

Fig. 3.3 Below Overall view of display cases in the Art Department of the New Brunswick Museum, 1930s–1940s.

would receive a title and salary equal to that of the male curators charged with managing the Canadian History and Natural Science departments at the New Brunswick Museum.7 Comparing the museum work performed by members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary with that of Alice Lusk Webster both confirms and challenges previous accounts of women’s status in North American museums. According to historian Kathleen D. McCarthy, women finally began to be hired as official curatorial m c tavi s h

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staff in major American museums by 1930, but “they remained at lower occupational rungs and in areas such as textiles, which ... had [been] claimed as particularly ‘feminine’ terrain.”8 Edith Hudson’s employment as curator of the Art Department at the New Brunswick Museum followed this pattern, and she resigned in 1945 citing sexist treatment.9 Lusk Webster had a greater impact on the museum than her protégé, however, acquiring and installing valuable objects. The members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary were also a major force within the nhs Museum, ultimately financing the building that housed it. Studying these women reveals their important roles as museum builders, moving beyond stories of marginalization to consider how lower-middle- and upper-middle-class white women asserted their presence within early museums. With particular attention to the collection and display of Asian material culture, I argue that both groups of women insisted on their right to work in the museum and, by extension, participate in the colonial project of museums, deploying the culture of others to improve their own status. At the same time, comparing their diverse strategies undermines assumptions that women’s experiences in early museums were uniform. There were in fact differences, as we shall see. This emphasis on different articulations of gender sheds new light on the professionalization of Canadian museums. During the early twentieth century, North American museums were developing training programs that would lead to credentials, distinctive hierarchies that would delegate power to those at the upper levels, and organizations that would control who was allowed to work through the evaluation of training and the assessment of individual performance.10 For example, the American Association of Museums and the Canadian Museums Association were founded in 1906 and 1947 respectively.11 Professionalizing the museum world was nevertheless a lengthy process, one scarcely begun during the 1930s and 1940s, especially in Canada. These decades were characterized by disagreement about what constituted a professional, how museum workers should be trained, and what kind of work they should perform. Studying the role of women in the New Brunswick Museum and its precursor reveals multiple definitions of professional museum work, including the unpaid variety. Whereas upper-middle-class women such as Lusk Webster strove to acquire prestige rather than material remuneration, Hudson pursued various kinds of museum training to build a career.12 In addition to receiving educational funding from the Canadian Museums Committee of the Carnegie Corporation – an American philanthropic association – Hudson participated in the apprenticeship program pioneered by John Cotton Dana, director of the Newark Museum. Though Dana’s innovative exhibitions in Newark are well known, the gendered nature of the apprenticeship program, which was explicitly designed to produce female museum staff, has received little attention. Considering the training offered in Newark alongside that promoted by the Canadian Museums Committee contributes to a more precise understanding of museum professionalization, while 86

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acknowledging the range of rewards offered to women for museum work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The New Brunswick Museum is the oldest continuing public museum in Canada, according to its current website.13 Though established in 1929 and officially opened in 1934, it was constructed from an amalgamation of earlier collections in Saint John, including Abraham Gesner’s Museum (1842–46), the Mechanics’ Institute Museum (1846–90), and, most important, the Museum of the nhs (1862–1932).14 Both the nhs Museum and, subsequently, the New Brunswick Museum were international in scope; moreover, in addition to their global acquisitions and connections, they were recognized by museum experts as innovative, particularly for their development of educational programming. During the late nineteenth century, members of the nhs created an outreach program, loaning objects, posters, and educational notes to New Brunswick schools long before other North American museums undertook such initiatives.15 The two museums also included women to an extent that surpassed some institutions, such as the Museum of the Natural History Society of Montreal, and equalled others, including the Vancouver Museum.16 The New Brunswick Museum is also distinctive because it retained and continues to house more archival records than many other Canadian natural-history museums, documenting its precursors and attesting to its rich history. Studying this institution therefore offers ample opportunity to explore both the contested understandings of professionalization and the shifting identities of museum workers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Canada.

The Women of the Natural History Society, 1881–1932 In 1862 forty-three men – including business owners, customs officials, and teachers – founded the Natural History Society of New Brunswick. One of their primary goals was to create a museum to “illustrate the Natural History of this Province, and so far as possible, of other countries.”17 They pursued this mandate immediately, and by 1864 the museum in Saint John contained 10,000 minerals and fossils, 2,000 marine invertebrates, 750 insects, 500 plants, and 30 stuffed birds.18 According to early members, the collection and display of these objects contributed both generally to the dissemination of useful knowledge and specifically to the industrialization of New Brunswick’s natural resources, especially minerals.19 At the same time, early members of the nhs claimed that nature study was an appropriate social pastime, both spiritually uplifting and physically beneficial to participants.20 In 1881 the male founders invited women to form a Ladies’ Auxiliary, whereupon they might join the nhs as associate members upon payment of a onedollar fee to their parent group. This formal admission of women occurred m c tavi s h

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during attempts to revive the society, which had become dormant in 1874, by increasing both its numbers and its public profile.20 For the most part, the first women to gain entry were the wives and daughters of long-standing male members, but a number of other women eventually joined, including local teachers.22 The associate members were nevertheless a rather homogenous group of white, middle-class, adult women of varying ages from the Saint John region. In the 1880s the number of women involved in the Ladies’ Auxiliary was modest, but during the early twentieth century the female membership grew to over two hundred, consistently outnumbering the male members.23 From its inception, the Ladies’ Auxiliary was ancillary to the main group, with women excluded from the annual meetings and paying a lower entry fee than men. The female members continually demanded more autonomy but were denied full membership.24 All the same, archival records indicate that the women made great contributions to the society and its museum, primarily by purchasing display cases and equipment with the monies they raised by means of teas, suppers, public lectures, and special exhibitions. In 1906 the Ladies’ Auxiliary ambitiously decided to engage in fund-raising activities for the purchase of a new building to house the expanding Museum of the nhs. Among other events, the members held a successful loan exhibition and high tea in Saint John’s York Theatre, charging an entry fee of twenty-five cents for the opportunity to see such items as Mrs A.L. Holman’s Peruvian mummy sheet. The women served veal, meat pies, hams, and cakes at the theatre, garnering $323.62.25 The bulk of the mortgage on the large building ultimately purchased to house the museum in 1907 was paid off by a long-serving member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, Catherine Murdock. In 1909 she left over $4,000 to the nhs in her will, freeing the society from debt.26 Members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary also gave gifts to the museum’s collections. In 1894 Mary Lawrence, a teacher in Saint John, donated a stuffed caribou worth about forty dollars; in 1898 Agnes Warner, a local botanist, donated a collection of New Brunswick plants; and in 1906 various women proffered Aboriginal items, including baskets, clothing, and souvenirs from their personal collections.27 Such items were accessible to the public largely because members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary provided a modest salary for a young woman to guide visitors through the museum. In the minutes of 4 January 1898, the president of the nhs stated that the female members had in view the “appointment of a lady curator and librarian who [sic] services should be at the disposal of the Society on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoon of each week, when the rooms would be thrown open to the Public.”28 In light of this insistence on hiring a female staff member – she would be subordinate to the honorary male curator, William MacIntosh – the women of the auxiliary appear as both demure middle-class ladies who baked cakes to raise money for noble purposes and assertive businesswomen dedicated to extending women’s presence within the public sphere. Gift giving is not a selfless act. In a 88

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well-known study, anthropologist Marcel Mauss argues that in several nonWestern societies gift giving is a complex ritual that helps to constitute social relationships rather than merely signifying them. In these cultures, participation in such exchanges is obligatory, with the initial recipient of a gift required to offer a “return gift” in keeping with kinship, legal, economic, religious, and other social structures.29 According to historian Simon Knell, the long-standing practice of donating specimens to museums is a similar kind of ritual motivated by the quest for esteem and recognition.30 Members of the nhs’s Ladies’ Auxiliary participated in this economy. By giving gifts to the society and its museum, they had their names inscribed in the minutes and accession registers. The women sometimes demanded, however, a fuller recognition of their contributions. They purchased “a beautiful quartered oak desk” for the rooms of the nhs, fitting it with a brass plaque inscribed with the words: “In living memory of Catherine Murdock, St. John, nb 1910, presented by the ladies of the N.H.S.”31 This additional gift ensured that a reminder of Mrs Murdock’s contribution would be both visibly and materially present in the society’s lecture room, augmenting the other furnishings and donations the women had given to the organization. With their participation in the nhs, the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary strove to acquire symbolic capital, a non-material stake. In Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, symbolic capital exists primarily in intersubjective relationships that produce forms of recognition other than strictly material ones, such as money or university degrees.32 The members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary used the nhs and its museum to enhance and extend their existing social networks, raising money and material goods that they then exchanged for the respect and gratitude of the male members as well as the museum-visiting public. At first glance, the women garnered symbolic capital in a way that conformed to social expectations and did not overtly challenge dominant gendered norms. Their emphasis on domestic skills and management was in keeping with the expected female role of caretaker, and had also long been an aspect of nineteenth-century women’s contributions to churches and other charities.33 The Museum of the nhs was therefore a site enabling the extension of traditional women’s work. Yet the women also intervened in the museum, with the Oriental Exhibition of 1924 providing a prime example. In keeping with earlier activities, the exhibition featured female gift giving and food preparation, enabling the associate members to play the roles of welcoming hostesses. In this case the sale of food and provision of entertainment took place directly inside the museum, positioning them as legitimate activities crucial to the continuing existence of the institution. The women reshaped the collections of the museum, temporarily replacing geological specimens with the Chinese porcelain and Japanese art recently donated by Dr Catherine Travis and Loretta Shaw, local women then working as missionaries in China and Japan respectively.34 m c tavi s h

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The photograph from 1924 shows how members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary claimed space in the museum, “feminizing” it with luxurious textiles and decorations. The women’s Asian clothing reinforced the validity of their presence, signifying both tradition and the height of fashion. According to curator Juliet Kinchin, Victorian women used the same fabric for their clothes and the upholstery in their drawing rooms to express a unified character, while aristocratic bohemian hostesses of the 1920s greeted guests wearing Asian clothing, including Chinese sleeveless dragon coats, to convey their creativity.35 The women in the photograph nevertheless appear to be objects on display, akin to the wall banners and vases surrounding them. A local newspaper report emphasized the costumed ladies as an essential part of the exhibition, noting that they would wait on patrons: “The upper floor of the museum will be converted into an Oriental bazaar, and tea will be served by ladies in Oriental costumes.”36 The costumed women in the transformed Museum of the nhs embodied a contradiction; their theatrical identities are potentially assertive even as they passively offer up their appearances for consumption. This display contrasts with the pageants produced by suffragist women in North America during the 1910s. According to Kimberly A. Hamlin, these pageants featured female supporters of suffrage dressed as important women in history, or as embodiments of such virtues as courage and justice, and thereby helped “to normalize the presence of women in the public sphere and gave the participants confidence in their abilities and role models to emulate.”37 While the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary insisted on and perhaps even normalized their presence within the museum, they served tea and cake instead of noisily demanding rights and risking arrest like the earlier suffragists. This sense of servility may have been reinforced by the stereotypes about Asian women then dominant in the Western world. Yet scholars such as Sarah Cheang and Beverly Lemire have argued that, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European women donned Asian costume in order to adopt masculine postures. Cheang in particular discusses how British women wore the oversized robes formerly owned by Chinese men during the 1920s, replacing the absent male body with a modern female body that remained feminine even as its boundaries were extended.38 The central woman wearing Chinese clothing in the New Brunswick photograph from 1924 is, however, sporting a coat and skirt resembling those worn by affluent women during the Qing Dynasty (1644– 1911). The tapestry on the left of this image depicts a royal lady wearing a rather similar coat and skirt, again linking the women with the material objects on display. The elaborate headdress of this member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary is easier to identify, for it resembles the phoenix crown worn only by the empress during the Qing dynasty.39 Although the white, middle-class members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary were masquerading as Asian women rather than men, their theatrical display could have 90

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challenged Western conceptions of femininity. The women mimicked “exotic” Asian women in order to move beyond the limits of their given roles without appearing to do so. The women thus claimed the right to appropriate the culture of others, participating in the imperial nature of museum collecting to enhance their position as privileged white women. In this case, challenging gendered roles went hand in hand with assertions of racial and imperial superiority. Despite supplying substantial funds and objects to the museum, members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary never acquired the freedom to arrange the permanent collections or even to become full-fledged members of the group while it was active. The women found ways, however, in which to gain symbolic capital, representing themselves in the society’s museum, meeting rooms, and official records, as well as in the public eye.

Alice Lusk Webster and the Currency of Asian Art During the 1930s Alice Lusk Webster claimed that the supposedly old-fashioned ladies of the auxiliary should step aside so that modern women such as her could participate in creating the New Brunswick Museum. Despite the significant similarities with the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary noted above, Lusk Webster was in some ways more comparable with Isabella Stewart Gardner, the wealthy American art collector who transformed her palatial Boston home into a museum before her death in 1924. According to Kathleen D. McCarthy, Stewart Gardner “presaged the activities of both an emerging group of highly individualistic women patrons and a coterie of aesthetically competitive male connoisseurs.”40 Stewart Gardner’s stereotypically masculine efforts to collect a range of Italian Renaissance material culture were aided by connoisseur and art historian Bernard Berenson, though she refused to follow his advice to assemble a systematic collection of paintings and instead acquired a diverse array of objects that she found pleasing.41 With considerably less funds than Stewart Gardner, Lusk Webster contributed to the New Brunswick Museum during a later period, from the 1930s until her death in 1953, but she too was able to acquire important objects because of her relationship with a male connoisseur. C.T. Currelly assisted Lusk Webster’s Art Department by means of strategic gift exchanges rather than outright purchases. In 1934, for example, Lusk Webster offered Currelly seventeen fine Japanese paintings owned by her and her husband in exchange for a substantial amount of duplicate material from the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, to be given as a gift in kind to the New Brunswick Museum.42 The Japanese paintings had been on loan to Currelly’s museum since 1914, and their high value meant that Lusk Webster received in return some 450 objects, mostly Asian ceramics but also objects of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Palestinian origin.43 m c tavi s h

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Unlike Stewart Gardner, Lusk Webster strove to represent systematically the major historical periods, styles, and nations with at least one visual example of each, creating logical connections between the objects that she placed on display in her Art Department.44 She clearly wanted the objects to tell a story of change and development through their careful selection and juxtaposition. In that sense, she adhered to what historian Steven Conn has called the “epistemology of objects,” namely, the belief that objects could speak for themselves and thus convey important information, a concept that informed the organization of many nineteenth-century American museums.45 All the same, Lusk Webster discussed specific objects during her tours, indicating that their materiality required supplementation. According to contemporary reports as well as Lusk Webster’s own lecture notes, the honorary curator regularly spoke about herself while giving tours of the Art Department, narrating to audiences the ingenious methods she had used to acquire objects for the department’s collection.46 Her speeches rivalled those of Currelly, who finally published accounts of his extensive collecting activities in a 1956 book called I Brought the Ages Home.47 This autobiography featured stories of Currelly’s travels through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and how he outwitted unscrupulous dealers and avaricious locals in order to obtain authentic international objects for Western museums. Lusk Webster similarly portrayed herself as an intrepid collector who found opportunities in foreign lands, though she mentioned the relatively tame England and France rather than the distant locales frequented by Currelly (Fig. 3.4). She claimed, however, to have acquired her most valuable objects by raiding the “rag-bags and dust-bins of my friends.”48 Lusk Webster wrote letters to her relatives in New York and Washington, requesting that they send her various cast-off items, including old lace and chipped teacups, if they were otherwise of high quality. In an undated letter written before 1935 she asserted that “broken crockery is my specialty,” noting how she had painstakingly glued back together “12 specimens of Hang Hsi and Chien Lung porcelain destroyed by the careless maid” of her friend, Mrs Beeknan Hoppins.49 Lusk Webster’s letters and public speeches were filled with other similarly heroic tales that portray her simultaneously as a thrifty, hard-working housewife and an adventurous archaeologist who, like Currelly, rescued objects from those who did not truly appreciate them. Like the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, Lusk Webster drew on her social networks to reshape the New Brunswick Museum. In this case, however, she avoided local contacts, calling instead on her wealthy American friends and relatives. When combined with Lusk Webster’s donation of her personal collections, including art and furniture, these efforts validated the kinship ties and upper-middle-class taste of the honorary curator of the Art Department. Lusk Webster argued that her goal was to replace the “second-rate” items donated

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Fig. 3.4 Display cases in the Art Department of the New Brunswick Museum, 1930s–1940s, filled with early British-Roman objects on the lower level (a gift to Lusk Webster from the Guildhall in London).

by members of the nhs to the museum, but she also portrayed herself as a kind of beggar, grateful for the garbage of her wealthier social network.50 In this self-portrayal, she was a marginal figure, displaced by her relocation to New Brunswick and in desperate need of benefactors to help her to improve the cultural standing of benighted New Brunswickers. Lusk Webster claimed to labour not for herself but for the people of New Brunswick. Her goal was to improve New Brunswickers by importing good taste, so that those “men and women, boys and girls, who [were] groping blindly for the finer things in life” in the “backwoods” of New Brunswick could find cultivation.51 She pictured herself as a cultural missionary, bringing civilization to the well-meaning but uneducated populace of New Brunswick. Her method was colonialist in nature, and she built her own empire in the Art Department, hoping that her mostly Asian and some European objects would establish her value within the province. She identified strongly with the collections of the Art

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Department, treating them as extensions of herself.52 In that sense, Lusk Webster was like the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, creating her identity by invoking the allure of the Orient even if she did not literally wear Chinese robes inside the museum. Unlike her female predecessors, Lusk Webster strove to present herself as a knowledgeable and worldly collector, identifying with male experts such as Currelly. In 1935 she asked Currelly for advice, sending him photographs and descriptions of thirteen of her completed cases, nine of which were devoted to Asian art, including one filled with ceramics from the Han dynasty (206 bce– 220 ce) and two with pottery and tomb figures dating from the T’ang period (618–906 ce) (Figs. 3.5 and 3.6).53 Only part of one case was devoted to ceramics from the popular Qing period. Lusk Webster parted ways with the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary by focusing her collecting activities on the earlier, more exclusive periods of Chinese art. According to art historian Stacey Pierson, during the early twentieth century Qing ceramics continued to be associated with wealth and good taste, but more historical objects began appealing to an elite and specialized kind of collector.54 Lusk Webster mimicked this kind of connoisseur in her efforts to improve the reputation of New Brunswick and increase her own symbolic and cultural capital.

Alice Lusk Webster and the Female Professional The honorary curator regretted, however, that her department was not on an equal footing with the Canadian History and Natural Science departments of the New Brunswick Museum. Unlike those departments, the Art Department received very little funding, with all of its objects, furnishing, and supplies provided by Lusk Webster herself; she also installed and labelled all of the displays, working herself into a state of exhaustion.55 In January 1940 she asked the chair of the New Brunswick Museum’s management committee for permission to hire a qualified young man or woman to take over her position, promising to provide a salary of $1,200 per year, at least initially. In her letter, Lusk Webster modestly claimed that she had “gone as far as an amateur can go,” suggesting that an officially trained curator would both professionalize and raise the profile of the Art Department.56 Assuming that members of the management committee would be unfamiliar with the duties of an art curator, she furnished them with a list. It included caring for the collections by cleaning, repairing, dating, labelling, and installing objects, preparing exhibitions of recent accessions and loan collections, providing docent services within the museum as well as educational talks at local high schools, and contributing to the educational loan program by producing visual aids and notes for teachers.57 Using her

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Fig. 3.5 Above Case that includes Chinese Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) ceramics. Fig. 3.6 Right Case that includes tomb figures dating from the T’ang period (618–906 ce).

economic capital rather directly, Lusk Webster attempted to construct and legitimate the role of a curator of fine art and decorative objects. In this, she was partially successful. Edith Hudson was hired to work at the New Brunswick Museum on a trial basis during the summer of 1940. Lusk Webster’s selection of Hudson strengthened the female presence in the museum, recalling the employment by the Ladies’ Auxiliary of young women to work in the Museum of the nhs during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, unlike the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, Lusk Webster did not hire a worker meant to be subordinate to a male curator, simply guiding the public through the exhibitions instead of creating the displays themselves. Rather, she insisted that her candidate be qualified and equipped with university degrees. Edith Hudson was an ideal applicant, for, in holding a ba and ma, she had successfully applied for funding from the Canadian Museums Committee of the Carnegie Corporation, undertaking research for ten weeks at the National Gallery of Canada in 1936 and surveying museums and historic sites in France, Germany, and England in 1939.58 Still, Lusk Webster felt that Hudson lacked the crucial element of hands-on museum experience, and so she decided to enroll her protégé in the apprenticeship program at the Newark Museum.59 Begun in 1925 by the museum’s founder, John Cotton Dana, the apprenticeship program strove to equip an intelligent workforce with an array of practical skills that could transform “gloomy

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museums” into useful institutions providing concrete benefits to society.60 Dana and his associates strove to avoid specialization by having the apprentices work in each department, receiving a salary of fifty dollars per week in return. The apprentices followed an eight-month program, beginning their training in the public library connected with the Newark Museum before undertaking between two and five weeks of practical work in the education, registration, exhibitions, and science departments.61 Instead of dividing museum staff into expert curators and those who performed unskilled labour such as guards, Dana’s program was meant to create a new kind of practical worker situated somewhere in between. The founder of the Newark Museum and his followers argued that the most useful and important kind of museum worker would perform “active service, no longer isolated from the everyday life, no longer existing chiefly for the pleasure and enlightenment of the student and the initiated.”62 When Lusk Webster informed Currelly of her decision to enrol Hudson in the apprenticeship program, he responded with dismay, insisting that Hudson receive her museum training from him in Toronto. He dismissed the program in Newark, arguing that it was “no better than that given to our school children here.”63 He reported having visited the Newark Museum in the past and being “bitterly disappointed” because there was “very little in the way of a museum.”64 The director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology defined museums in terms of the original and valuable objects in their collections. Dana, on the other hand, openly ridiculed the expense spent on European oil paintings and ancient artifacts, arguing that useful objects, such as bathtubs, would be of greater interest to the populace of Newark, an industrialized American city. Currelly’s disgust with the populist nature of the Newark Museum did not, however, sway Lusk Webster. In 1941 she provided a weak defence of Dana’s program, explaining that she had set aside her “own objections to Newark, for I know no place where contact with the public is so intimate, or where instruction is given to children in such an elementary form, and believe that doing odd jobs in a one horse museum, is just what she [i.e., Hudson] needs to counteract her academic tendencies and fit her to meet our requirements.”65 Lusk Webster seems to have associated the Newark Museum with the kind of menial labour liable to take Hudson down a peg, preparing her for work at the relatively small and underfunded New Brunswick Museum. This exchange between Currelly and Lusk Webster reveals contested visions of museum professionals. One vision, supported by Dana and his followers, affirmed that museum workers should possess the practical skills required to produce diverse exhibitions that served the public instead of showcasing elitist knowledge. The other, supported by Currelly, involved training students with master’s or doctoral degrees so as to equip them to undertake specialized museum research, classification, and curatorship. When he recommended that Hudson

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receive training at his museum in Toronto, Currelly endorsed the pedagogical practices of the Canadian Museums Committee of the Carnegie Corporation. Responding to the 1932 survey of Canadian museums commissioned from Sir Henry Miers and S.F. Markham – it ranked Canadian museums among the worst in North America because of inadequate financial support and poorly trained personnel – Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel formed the Canadian Museums Committee to provide advice about the disbursement of funds for gallery development and museum training.66 In 1936 the members of this committee – white, anglophone businessmen who elected J. Clarence Webster to chair the committee from its inauguration in 1933 until its demise in 1938 – declared that “the urgent need in Canada is for the creation of an adequately trained Art Gallery and Museum personnel to replace, as opportunity permits, the casual, amateur and volunteer assistance with which most museum work in the Dominion is carried out.”67 Members of the Canadian Museums Committee strove to produce professional staff while driving supposedly unskilled workers out of museums. The committee pursued this goal by giving both travel grants and fellowships to aspiring museum workers already equipped with university degrees, such as Hudson. Like other award winners, Hudson had undertaken research at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, reading a wide range of art-history textbooks in addition to quizzing staff members about how to make slides and restore pictures.68 Other candidates for Carnegie grants, including twentyfour-year-old Donald A. Taylor, with a master’s degree in geology, pursued museum work in geology and palaeontology by working with the directors and staff of different museums at the Royal Ontario Museum for ten months in 1934. He also used a separate travel grant to visit such American museums as the Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Arts and the Field Museum of Natural History before taking charge of the Museum of the University of Alberta in 1935.69 Although the training promoted by the Canadian Museums Committee overlapped with that of Dana’s apprenticeship program to a certain degree – both provided hands-on experience and the opportunity to visit important museums and art galleries – it was designed to create specialists who would direct museums or work as professional curators, rather than flexible staff able to serve a broad public. The Canadian Museums Committee had a substantial impact on the New Brunswick Museum, in part because of its chair, Dr J. Clarence Webster. In 1935 he obtained Carnegie funding to hire Alfred Bailey, a recent phd in history from the University of Toronto, to replace the director of the New Brunswick Museum, William MacIntosh, a self-trained entomologist who had learned museum work while serving unofficially as the curator of the Museum of the nhs from 1898 until 1906, and officially from 1907 until 1932. Although the campaign to hire

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a degreed director initially failed – Bailey’s appointment was as curator only and he retained this title throughout his time at the museum – Hudson was appointed curator of the Art Department in 1942, replacing her “amateur” benefactor, Alice Lusk Webster.70 Hudson provides an especially interesting example of efforts to professionalize the New Brunswick Museum, however, because she was trained by both the Canadian Museums Committee and the Newark Museum, combining the two models. She exemplifies the extended process of defining professionalization, before the triumph of the more academic and specialized approach to museum training supported by the Canadian Museums Committee. One reason Hudson was able to combine the two visions of museum workers into a single person was her sex. The Newark Museum training program primarily attracted female candidates. Records housed at the Newark Museum indicate that, between 1925 and 1941, the apprenticeship program enrolled 217 students: 204 of them were women and only 13 were men.71 This statistic is partly explained by the gendered divisions of work and identity during the first half of the twentieth century. Dana’s program envisioned the ideal museum worker as flexible and practical, dedicated to serving the public and educating children, roles then coded as feminine. Official publications released by the Newark Museum explicitly recognized that the apprenticeship program would appeal more to women than men, arguing that a man would want to specialize and make a name for himself whereas a woman was “like Lord Bacon,” taking “all knowledge for her province.”72 Women were thus naturally suited to work in museums, a point reinforced when apprentices received advice from representatives of large department stores in Newark, who informed the young women about what an employer would demand in terms of personal appearance, personality, and conduct.73 The ideal museum worker favoured by Dana and his followers was an accommodating, pleasant, and attractive young woman, who would be “[f]leet of foot, supple of wrist, accurate of eye, deft of hand, in good health, and merry. She is in practice a learner of a number of subjects. She has, probably, one or more foreign languages, some use of accurate, even elegant, English, the habit of doing more-or-less what she is told.”74 This obedient woman would also be “a bargain,” willing [or obliged] to work for half the wages a man would demand, an added bonus for underfunded institutions.75 In contrast to the highly gendered image of the desired museum worker presented by the Newark Museum, the specialized museum curator or director pursued by the Canadian Museums Committee was not exclusively identified with either men or women. Between 1933 and 1938 the committee funded some twenty-six students, including twelve women and fourteen men.76 It might therefore seem that the Canadian Museums Committee was devoted to the principle of gender equality, given that its members supported the education of female curators. Evaluating this possibility remains difficult because the surviving doc98

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umentation related to the candidates who received Carnegie funding contains few details, simply listing the persons selected and their course of study. Yet, unlike Currelly, key members of the Canadian Museums Committee did not entirely dismiss the apprenticeship program, and even enrolled three of their protégés in it, all of them women. In 1934 H.O. McCurry, assistant director of the National Gallery of Canada and de facto leader of the Canadian Museums Committee, argued that the Newark Museum provided “the best general training in museum work possible.”77 He thereby emphasized generalized training for some women in contrast to the specialization officially endorsed by the committee. It is striking that only male recipients of Carnegie funding, including Bailey and Taylor, were described in official reports as future directors of museums. Overall, then, the members of the Canadian Museums Committee seem to have pursued the production of specialized and credentialed “masculine” museum personnel able to manage the collections, not subservient female staff members devoted to pleasing the public. Unlike her male colleagues at the New Brunswick Museum, Hudson was trained to be both a specialist and a generalist, both a leader and a follower, both a professional and an underpaid servant of the public. She did not embrace all of these roles equally, a point that annoyed even Lusk Webster, her strongest supporter. Despite completing her apprenticeship in Newark, Hudson resented the servile work she performed for the school-service program at the New Brunswick Museum. In 1942 she wrote to Ruth Home, a lecturer who organized educational programs at the Royal Ontario Museum, complaining that she was spending too much of her time “spoon-feeding” notes to rural school teachers in New Brunswick.78 Hudson also openly rebelled against the gender distinctions enforced by her institution. In 1942 she remarked that, although a new director was desperately needed, the management committee would wait until the war was over to begin its search because “women aren’t considered very able in these parts.”79 By 1945, Hudson had announced her intention to find a new position, claiming that the “Board refuses to grant equal status to male and female workers, regardless of training, qualifications, or anything else,” and noting that her annual salary was $1,800 though it “should be $2,400, if I were paid the same as the male curator on the staff.”80 Hudson was clearly not a submissive employee willing to be paid less than a man. Nor was she willing to accrue symbolic rather than economic capital. In the end, Hudson returned to the Newark Museum, working in the Registrar’s Office for a starting salary of $2,000 per year, a fact that suggests that the obedient female museum worker described in the museum’s apprenticeship pamphlet of 1928 did not necessarily work out in practice.81 Although Lusk Webster consistently defended Hudson, she argued that her protégé had been too assertive at the New Brunswick Museum. This point was made by Lusk Webster in 1947, when she informed the curator hired to replace m c tavi s h

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Hudson that his predecessor had angered male administrators by “over-stepping the mark,” whereas Lusk Webster strove to maintain good relationships with them by displaying friendly and accommodating behaviour.82 She stressed the importance of performing traditional “feminine” qualities within the museum, implying that acting like the ideally servile and self-effacing museum worker described in the apprenticeship pamphlet could function as a survival mechanism for ambitious women, as well as for men engaged in the “feminine” role of managing an art department. Although such gendered expectations about appropriate behaviour were and remain commonplace in the Western workplace, references to the confident personality of Hudson suggest that gender was central to debates about the shifting status of museum workers, affecting the professionalization of museums. In the end, Lusk Webster differed significantly from both Hudson and her predecessors in the Ladies’ Auxiliary. Even though she occasionally referred to herself as an amateur, Lusk Webster associated with professionals and sought to hire one to manage her Art Department. She took on a leadership role at the New Brunswick Museum, transforming her social, cultural, and economic capital into symbolic capital, but she remained self-effacing during interactions with the museum’s male-dominated board. Like the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, Lusk Webster challenged some gendered roles in the museum even as she reinforced others, primarily by deploying Asian material culture to represent her accomplishments and insist on her presence. But have these accomplishments been remembered? Despite efforts by the Ladies’ Auxiliary to insist on the material contributions of women, including benefactor Catherine Murdock, they have been largely erased from both the historical accounts and collective memory of the New Brunswick Museum. Lusk Webster was more successful in accruing long-standing symbolic capital or recognition, but her legacy pales in comparison with the attention paid to her husband. Largely absent from specialized histories of the museum as well as scholarly publications, Lusk Webster is nevertheless credited on the museum’s website with amassing the decorative arts collections.83 A 1953 obituary in Saint John’s Evening Times-Globe also claimed that Lusk Webster’s death was a “distinct loss to the cultural life of New Brunswick” because she had made a “significant contribution to this province’s historical heritage.”84 Such public statements were among the rewards sought and received by Lusk Webster as she worked to promote herself, her uppermiddle-class values, her Art Department, and the professionalization of women at the New Brunswick Museum. Lusk Webster’s protégé, Edith Hudson, was caught between competing visions of museum professionals, ultimately finding her position at the New Brunswick Museum untenable. Hudson’s brief career as a curator of fine and decorative arts was ultimately informed by equally contrasting conceptions of the

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function of the museum. For Dana and his followers, museums were to be open and accessible, serving a diverse public. According to Lusk Webster, her associates, and the members of the Canadian Museums Committee, however, museums were rightly bastions of elite culture, able to enlighten as well as cultivate the lower classes. This more authoritative and hierarchical version of the museum ostensibly won the battle, but it has been consistently challenged, particularly within the last decade. Current debates about the appropriate function of curators – should they research collections or should they serve the public? – continue to be informed by the early museum history outlined above.85 Perhaps those opposed to reshaping traditional museums into the public resource envisaged by Dana are now anxious about curators losing the status and masculine aura that many of them finally managed to achieve.

notes 1 Research for this chapter was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2 Lusk Webster to C.T. Currelly, 1934, Records of the Registration Department, Royal Ontario Museum (rom). All material from the Records of the Registration Department of the rom in this and following endnotes is located in one large, unmarked file, uncategorized and unnumbered. 3 For a lengthy discussion of these women, see Lianne McTavish, “Strategic Donations: Women and Museums in New Brunswick, 1862–1930,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 42, no. 2 (2008): 1–24. 4 For J.C. Webster, see Gerald Thomas, “John C. Webster: Applying Material History: Developing the New Brunswick Museum,” in Peter E. Rider, ed., Studies in History and Museums (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization 1994), 33–55. 5 For the Websters’ Asian art collection, see the John Clarence Webster (jcw) fonds, s200, f39–42, Archives of the New Brunswick Museum (anbm). 6 Alice Lusk Webster’s Working Files,

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undated lecture notes, Art Department Records, New Brunswick Museum (nbm) fonds, f544–5, anbm. See also www.unbf.ca/womenandmuseum (26 July 2011). Memo sent by Alice Lusk Webster to the Board of the New Brunswick Museum and subsequently to C.T. Currelly, undated but likely 1941, Records of the Registration Department, rom. Edith Hudson was officially “Curator of the Art Department” but never received a salary equal to that of her male colleagues, as discussed below. Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830– 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991), 144. Hudson to Beatrice Winser, director of the Newark Museum, 21 May 1945, Apprenticeship Program, 1909–1950s, “Bishop, Mrs. Edith H.,” Archives of the Newark Museum (anm). Rudi Volti, “Professions and Professionalization,” in An Introduction to the Sociology of Work and Occupations (Thousand Oaks, ca: Pine Forge Press 2008), 97– 116; and Gregg Scott, “The Complex History of Credentialism,” in Merle Jacobs and Stephen E. Bosanac, eds.,

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The Professionalization of Work (Whitby, on: de Sitter Publications 2006), 252–81. For the history of the Canadian Museums Association, see: http://www.museums. ca/en/about_cma/history/1950 and the “1960” section for the claim that “it was in the 1960s that working in museums became a career” (accessed 10 August 2009). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1994). http://www.nbmmnb.ca/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id= 59&Itemid=251(accessed 10 August 2009). Lianne McTavish and Joshua Dickison, “William MacIntosh, Natural History and the Professionalization of the New Brunswick Museum, 1898–1940,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 36, no. 2 (2007): 72–90. Lianne McTavish, “Learning to See in New Brunswick, 1862–1929,” Canadian Historical Review, 87, no. 4 (2006): 553–81. My comparative assessment of these institutions will appear in Lianne McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study in the Challenges of Exchange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). General Minutes of the nhs, 1862–90, 29 January 1862, nhs fonds, s127, f40, anbm. Le Baron Botsford, “Annual Address,” Bulletin of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick, 7 (1888): 5. General Minutes of the nhs, 1862–90, 29 January 1862. Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983), xiii, 10, 31–2, 45. Minutes of the Council of the nhs, 1862– 1901, 5 July 1880, nhs fonds, s127, f37, anbm. Ibid., 1 June 1886.

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23 For the statistics, see McTavish, “Strategic Donations,” 1–24. 24 Harriet B. Holman fonds, cb doc, anbm. 25 Minutes of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, 1906– 1910, 28 February 1906, nhs fonds, s128a, f115, anbm. 26 General Minutes of the nhs, 1890–1911, 3 January 1910, nhs fonds, s127, f41, anbm. 27 For the history of donations by women to the New Brunswick Museum, see www.unbf.ca/womenandmuseum (26 July 2011). 28 General Minutes of the nhs, 1862–90, 4 January 1898, nhs fonds, s127, f40, anbm. 29 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Routledge 2002), 11–23. 30 Simon J. Knell, The Culture of English Geology, 1815–1851: A Science Revealed through Its Collecting (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate 2000), 116–18. 31 Minutes of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, 1906– 1910, 17 October 1910, nhs fonds, s128a, f115, anbm. 32 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press 1986), 249. 33 See, for example, Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996); and Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996). 34 For more about these women see www.unbf.ca/womenandmuseum. 35 Juliet Kinchin, “Interiors: NineteenthCentury Essays on the ‘Masculine’ and the ‘Feminine’ Room,” in Pat Kirkham, ed., The Gendered Object (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press 1996), 18.

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36 Scrapbook of the nhs, Newspaper Clippings, 1921–1934, nhs fonds, s128a, f124, p.3, anbm. 37 Kimberly A. Hamlin, “Bathing Suits and Backlash: The First Miss America Pageants, 1921–1927,” in Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin, eds., “There She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 28. 38 Beverly Lemire, conversation with the author, 2 May 2008; and Sarah Cheang, “Turning Chinese: Fashion, Chinoiserie and Cross-Cultural Masquerade in 1920s Britain” (paper presented at the Fashion, Community and Culture: Explorations of the Material World Symposium, Material Culture Institute, University of Alberta, 2 May 2008). 39 This information was provided by my colleague, Dr Walter Davis, a specialist in East Asian art. 40 McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 160. 41 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2008), 89. 42 For the Websters’ Asian art collection, see the jcw fonds, s200, f639-642, anbm. 43 Alice Lusk Webster’s Working Files, Art Department Records, undated lecture notes, nbm fonds, f545, anbm. Rough notes indicating dimensions and weight of boxes sent from Toronto to Saint John, undated, Records of the Registration Department, rom. 44 Lusk Webster to C.T. Currelly, marked “Received,” 20 October 1937, Records of the Registration Department, rom. 45 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998), 262. 46 Some of Lusk Webster’s rough lecture notes (undated) are stored in the Art Department Records, nbm fonds, f545, anbm. See also a witness’s description

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47

48

49 50

51 52

53

54

55

56

57 58

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of one of her tours in Maritime Art, 1, no. 5 (1941): 30. Thanks to Kirk Niergarth for providing this source. Charles Trick Currelly, I Brought the Ages Home (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum 1956). Alice Lusk Webster’s Working Files, undated lecture notes, Art Department Records, nbm fonds, f544, anbm. Ibid. Lusk Webster to C.T. Currelly, 23 June 1941, Records of the Registration Department, rom. Ibid. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., The Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1994), 7–24. Lusk Webster to C.T. Currelly, c. 1935, Records of the Registration Department, rom. Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain, 1560–1960 (Bern, Germany: Peter Lang 2007), 140–1. Lusk Webster to C.T. Currelly, marked “Answered,” 16 July 1934, Records of the Registration Department, rom. Lusk Webster to the Management Committee of the New Brunswick Museum, 10 January 1940, nbm fonds, anbm. Ibid. Edith Hudson to H.O. McCurry, 1 October 1936, rg 7.4c, Carnegie Corporation – Individuals – Hudson, Edith A. (Outside Activities/Organizations), National Gallery of Canada (ngc) fonds, National Gallery of Canada Archives (ngca). Lusk Webster to C.T. Currelly, 23 June 1941, Records of the Registration Department, rom. John Cotton Dana, “The New Museum,” and “The Gloom of the Museum,” in William A. Peniston, ed., The New Museum: Selected Writings by John Cotton Dana (Newark, nj: The Museum 1999), 42, 55.

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61 Records of the Apprenticeship School, 1925–81, boxes 1–3 (unprocessed collection), anm; and E.T. Booth and John Cotton Dana, Apprenticeship in the Museum (Newark, nj: The Museum 1928), 27. 62 Katherine Coffey, “Apprenticeship Study for Museum Work” (paper presented at a conference in Detroit, May 1940), Records of the Director’s Office, 1909– 1994, box 3, Departments – Education, anm. 63 Currelly to Lusk Webster, 30 June 1941, Records of the Registration Department, rom. 64 Currelly to Lusk Webster, 9 May 1941, ibid. 65 Lusk Webster to Currelly, 23 June 1941, ibid. 66 Henry Alexander Miers and S.F. Markham, A Report on the Museums of Canada (Edinburgh: Constable 1932). See also Jeffrey D. Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGillQueen’s University Press 2005). 67 Canadian Committee on Canadian Museums Progress Report, 26 August 1936, 15, 7.4c Carnegie Corporation General (file 5), Outside Activities/Organizations, ngc fonds, ngca. 68 Hudson to McCurry, 1 November 1938, rg 7.4c, Carnegie Corporation – Individuals – Hudson, Edith A., Outside Activities/Organizations, ngc fonds, ngca. 69 “Carnegie Corporation Scholarships,” Report of 30 April 1935, 1, rg 7.4c Carnegie Corporation – General (file 4), Outside Activities/Organizations, ngc fonds, ngca, Royal Ontario Museum Minute Book, Education Committee, 1934, 22 October 1934, rg 26, Archives of the Royal Ontario Museum (arom). 70 McTavish and Dickison, “William MacIntosh,” 72–90. 71 Records of the Apprenticeship School, 1925–81, box 1 (unprocessed collection), anm.

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72 Booth and Dana, Apprenticeship in the Museum, 17. 73 Ibid., 43–7. 74 Ibid., 17. 75 Ibid., 16. 76 “Carnegie Corporation Funds Administered by Canadian Committee for Museum Development, Training Plan in Effect 1933–1939,” ngc fonds, rg 7.4c Carnegie Corporation – General (file 5), Outside Activities/Organizations, ngca. The commission also funded individual museums and such organizations as the Maritime Art Association. 77 McCurry to Lusk Webster, 2 October 1934, jcw fonds, s193, f97, anbm. 78 Hudson to Home, 25 September 1942, Art Department fonds, f4, anbm. 79 Hudson to Beatrice Winser, Director of the Newark Museum, 21 May 1945, Apprenticeship Program, 1909–1950s, “Bishop, Mrs. Edith H.,” anm. 80 Ibid. 81 See Edward P. Alexander, The Museum in America: Innovators and Pioneers (Walnut Creek, ca: Altamira 1997), 162, for an account of Beatrice Winser, the woman appointed director of the Newark Museum after Dana’s death in 1929. 82 Lusk Webster to Avery Shaw, curator of the Art Department, 1947, Art Department fonds, f10, p.39, anbm. 83 http://www.nbm-mnb.ca/index.php? option=com_wrapper&view= wrapper&Itemid=462 (accessed 21 April 2009). 84 Alice Lusk Webster’s obituary, Saint John Evening Times-Globe, 15 December 1953. 85 James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1997), 188–219. Clifford suggests that contemporary curators should no longer function as authoritative interpreters of objects but instead be willing to collaborate with various audiences, facilitating their use of collections. Other scholars are

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less enthusiastic about an apparent demotion of curatorial expertise, arguing that the intellectual contributions of curators are marginalized when museums aspire to please the public. See, for example, Brian

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Young, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921– 1996 (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000), 138–47.

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4

CHAPTER 1

“A Story of Struggle and Splendid Courage”

Anne Savage’s CBC Broadcasts of The Development

of Art in Canada1 Alena Buis

The story of Canadian landscape painting is a story of struggle and splendid courage. You can imagine in a country like ours with its rigorous climate and vast distances just how little thought or interest could be afforded to anything as impractical as Art … but when Time puts the value on a country’s activities, [the artist’s] work shall take its place in the record of our struggle on the road to a finer understanding of the World surrounding us … For it is born of our snow and rocks, plains and forests, their air and winds, their silence and distance.2 – Anne Savage

In January and February 1939 Montreal artist and educator Anne Douglas Savage (1896–1971) (Fig. 4.1) gave an eight-part series of radio lectures entitled The Development of Art in Canada. Broadcasted nationally by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc) on Sunday evenings, her twenty-five-minute talks traced a chronological progression through Canadian art, with each lecture focusing on one or two key individuals and a final segment commenting on contemporary artists and cultural trends. Recordings of the talks are not known to be extant and little information on why Savage was chosen to give them exists, but from the typescripts preserved in her archive it is apparent just how well the

Fig. 4.1 Anne Savage at Baron Byng High School, c. 1939.

artist’s personal, professional, and pedagogical beliefs aligned her with the mandates of two of the most influential early-twentieth-century Canadian cultural institutions: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Gallery of Canada (ngc). With extensive archival records leaving traces of her personal and professional life, Savage may be one of the best-documented and most written about Canadian women artists.3 While her radio talks are mentioned by most of her biographers, however, their cultural significance has yet to be critically examined.4 In this chapter I explore the way that Savage’s broadcasts voiced a nationalistic narrative previously constructed by Canadian cultural elites, embraced by the National Gallery of Canada, and strategically disseminated by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. Anne Savage’s chosen position as spokesperson for this narrative is consonant with the options open to women seeking to develop professional careers at the beginning of the twentieth century, and reveals her own simultaneous agency and constraint within the developing narrative of Canadian art.

The NGC , the CBC , and the Project of Canadian Identity In 1912 the National Gallery of Canada’s first director, the English art critic Eric Brown, described the purpose of the gallery as “mainly educative, as a knowledge and understanding of art is only to be gained by the comparison of one work of bui s

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art with another … We must have, in addition to our own Canadian pictures, the best examples we can afford of the world’s artistic achievements by which we may judge the merit and progress of our own efforts.”5 Since its inception, the ngc’s duties included the organization of travelling exhibitions within Canada but starting in the 1920s and 1930 the nationalistic mandate expanded to include also the showcasing of Canadian art abroad.6 The ngc’s central role in establishing a definition of Canadian art echoed other federally funded initiatives to unite, politically and culturally, the ideologically diverse and geographically vast young country. Pre-eminent among these was the government’s embrace of the new technology of radio. After announcing the formation of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (crbc) in 1932, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett stated: “Properly employed, the radio can be made a most effective instrument to nation building with an educational value difficult to estimate.”7 Four years later, the crbc would become the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and by 1937 almost three-quarters of the Canadian population had access to cbc radio. Anne Whitelaw has elucidated the different ways Canadian federal institutions – such as the ngc, the cbc, the National Film Board, and the two national railways – and the policies governing them created a coherence among “a diverse set of practices and traditions that may be characterized as ‘Canadian,’ advancing a single unified national culture that would effect a (unified) national identity.”8 In furtherance of this endeavour, the cbc and the National Gallery of Canada worked together throughout the 1930s and 1940s “to give wider publicity to [cultural] activities and bring the work of the gallery to the attention of the people.”9 In 1945, for example, the two institutions officially joined forces for Young Canada Listens, a series of radio broadcasts accompanied by the circulation of gallery-issued reproductions of paintings by Canadian artists. Discussing the role of this program in the establishment of a Canadian artistic identity, Joyce Zemans has concluded that both visual art and radio were united by a conviction in their “capacity to mold public taste, to create proper moral values and identify the basic truths required to establish a sense of nationhood.”10 Nationalistic considerations were, indeed, never far removed from the lectures on art that the cbc broadcast throughout the 1930s, though the emphases and approaches of individual speakers differed. Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery from 1910 to his death in 1939, gave a number of talks in which he tied the gallery closely to federal needs and priorities, explaining that “the National Gallery may be said to be somewhat in the position of being the Federal Government’s department of the arts.” Elizabeth Styring Nutt, the Britishborn head mistress of the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax, devoted her 1934 lecture to the “pioneers” of cultural systems in Canada, while emphasizing the great distance that the nation had yet to travel towards cultural maturity: “Even yet, Canada is in respect of its leisured population a new country. It has 108

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no artistic traditions save those of the native crafts and totem poles. It has few great galleries, or museums of art treasures, where paintings, sculptures and treasures of time-tested worth may be seen and studied by the artists.”11 Walter Abell, Acadia University’s influential art educator, theorist, and administrator, would go on with more enthusiasm than Nutt to discuss contemporary art criticism and the production of artists in the Maritimes.12 Prominent art historians and critics A.F.B. Clarke, Graham McInnes, and George Robertson would continue the trend towards contemporary content, crafting broadcasts with the aim of developing a national “standard of criticism” that would be “superior to its average counterpart in the daily and periodic press.”13 The frequent emphasis on contemporary art and artists also created an opening for a more historical perspective. In January 1938 Arthur Lismer wrote a letter to the National Gallery’s assistant director, H.O. McCurry, which may have been the impetus for Savage’s talks: “But seeing you are doing a lot of things over [at] the cbc I wonder if you are continuing with the series. I notice that Graham [McInnes], [John] Alford, Alex Y. [Jackson] and others are doing things for you for the cbc [sic] which are maybe their own arranging. We have been doing an Art Gallery programme over the air, mostly advertising and small talk. I think there is room for a series on the social and national growth and development of art in Canada – architecture, painting, crafts and including education etc. I haven’t put the idea up to [Donald W.] Buchanan. What do you think?”14 Buchanan was undoubtedly the link that made the lectures happen. After having received a fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation to study museum administration, Buchanan was specifically selected by McCurry to serve as an attaché at the ngc. Even after becoming director of talks and public affairs for the crbc, Buchanan continued to be intimately involved in the administration of the ngc, as director of the Industrial Design Division from 1947 to 1953 and ultimately the assistant director of the gallery between 1956 and 1960 and acting director for a brief stint in late 1959 and early 1960. According to the correspondence between Buchanan and McCurry in the late 1930s, the cbc had gone to great lengths performing “exhaustive tests” to find suitable lecturers to provide an accessible, informative overview of the country’s artistic production.15 Anne Savage would prove to be the ideal candidate, and for reasons far in excess of the suitability of her voice.

Who Best to Represent Canada? Born in 1896 to a prominent Montreal family, Savage belonged to the city’s Protestant cultural elite. Her brother-in-law, Brooke Claxton, a First World War veteran and cabinet minister, was instrumental in the development of the cbc. Such connections may have helped to cement the relationships with influential bui s

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Fig. 4.2 Anne Savage Untitled (Trees against Mountains, Skeena River Region, B.C.). From her trip to the Skeena River with Marius Barbeau, Pegi Nicol, and Florence Wyle.

federal institutions that Savage had already established through her professional achievements. From 1914 to 1918, Savage had attended the Art Association of Montreal, one of the country’s leading art schools, where she had studied under two of its leading painters, Maurice Cullen and William Brymner. Returning to Canada in 1920 after further training at the Minneapolis School of Art, she was a founding member of the Beaver Hall Group, a short-lived but important association of Montreal artists.16 Savage was much influenced by the work of her friend and the Beaver Hall Group’s first president, A.Y. Jackson, and she exhibited with the Group of Seven in 1926 and 1931.17 Then, in 1932, both artists were instrumental in establishing the Canadian Group of Painters. Throughout her career, Savage maintained a close working relationship with the ngc. In 1927, at the request of the gallery, Savage, along with painter Pegi Nicol and sculptor Florence Wyle, had accompanied the ethnologist Marius Barbeau to British Columbia to document Aboriginal culture along the Skeena River (Fig. 4.2).18 Her works were exhibited in the gallery’s influential annual 110

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exhibitions of Canadian art, with her canvases Laurentian Hills and The Hills in Spring first being shown in 1927 and others such as The Wood (1936) and Corn, Quebec (1940) appearing subsequently. Other paintings were included in the ngc’s selections of Canadian art for international shows, including the First Pan American Exhibition of Contemporary Painting in Baltimore (1931), the Empire Exhibition of Contemporary Canadian Painting in Johannesburg (1936), and A Century of Canadian Art held at the Tate Gallery in London (1938). Savage was more than just politically and aesthetically well connected, however; she was also an art educator, and her experience in enabling art to capture the imaginations of the public made her a natural choice for the cbc broadcasts. From 1922 to 1948, Savage taught at Montreal’s Baron Byng High School, where she developed progressive arts programming (Fig. 4.3). In 1930, two years prior to the broadcasts, she had initiated Saturday morning art classes at the Art Association of Montreal, and she would later go on to become the supervisor of art for the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal and a lecturer in art education at McGill University. As a teacher, Savage’s goal was to inspire and stimulate the imagination, introducing as broad a public as possible to art’s potential to enrich life. Like her friend and pedagogical mentor, Arthur Lismer, Savage “felt strongly that [a] larger vision [of art] should not be reserved for the select few, but that it should be spread throughout the land.”19

Fig. 4.3 A popular teacher at Montreal’s Baron Byng High School, Anne Savage introduced progressive art programs.

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In Savage’s concern with the accessibility of culture for all Canadians, her shared priorities with the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation become apparent. Prior to employing the cbc to reach a wider audience, the ngc had demonstrated its commitment to making its permanent collection accessible to the entire Canadian population with programs of travelling exhibitions and the distribution of educational materials. Such concerns were, if anything, even more pressing at the cbc. When, in 1932, Prime Minister Bennett first tabled legislation to create a publicly owned and controlled communication system, it was in order to ensure “the people of this country without regard to class or place, equal enjoyment of the benefits and pleasures of radio broadcasting.”20 And, just as a major cbc objective was to “make it possible for every Canadian to hear cbc’s programs,”21 Savage tailored her broadcasts to appeal to a wide audience. “We may not all be artists,” she declared in her introductory lecture, “but we are really all potential artists and we can all be actively interested and derive great pleasure and enjoyment from art.”22 Savage used radio as a tool to reach a socio-economically and geographically diverse audience. Although entrance to Canadian museums was not restricted to any particular class and was often free to the public, the general culture of art was, to a large extent, still the province of those with the leisure, financial means, and educational background to support their interests. Moreover, museums were predominantly located in urban centres, limiting the access of people living in rural communities. As historian Mary Vipond notes in her discussion of mass media in Canada, the geographic size and wide dispersal of the population often made national communication difficult. Radio allowed for “broadcasting” to large numbers of people across a vast area. Indeed, R.B. Bennett viewed a government-controlled broadcasting system as the twentieth-century equivalent of the Canadian Pacific Railway in its ability to unite the nation.23 As issues of accessibility shade back here into considerations of national unity, the aptness of the cbc’s choice of Anne Savage to develop and deliver its lectures on this history of Canadian art is compounded, for Savage was profoundly committed to the nationalist project. Her formative professional years coincided with the political and sentimental consecration of Canadian national independence in the decade following the First World War, as the establishment of a distinct national identity became the major preoccupation of Canadian political and cultural life. With the wartime deaths of over sixty thousand Canadian soldiers, a discernible focus was placed on the positive outcomes of Canada’s first participation in a major world event, and the glorification of a national identity emerging from the devastation allowed Canadians to believe their losses were not in vain.24 Discussing the role of adult educational broadcasting in Canada, Ron Faris recognizes that many of the soldiers “who had left Canada as proud British subjects returned with a sense of Canadian iden112

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tity and a desire to develop a Canadian nation.”25 Artists were among them. Several of Savage’s colleagues, including A.Y. Jackson, had served as war artists or fought overseas, and in The Development of Art in Canada Savage described how they returned with a new inspiration for the project of a truly national artistic production. And Savage, too, had been personally affected by the war. In 1916 her twin brother, Donaldson, was killed in action. She later reflected about this time in her life, suggesting that her brother’s death was a motivating factor in her artistic drive: “I was left with this feeling of trying to do something to make up for that loss and I think that was the basis of why I worked the way I did. That came at a very critical time and fired me to go on with what I was doing.”26 A few years later Savage worked as an artist in hospitals in Montreal and Toronto, making visual records of the operations performed on veterans who had been “patched together” in England and France.27 Though Savage made no reference to this or any of her own artistic practices in her cbc broadcasts, her career throughout the 1920s had been intimately involved with the cultural aspects of nation building that were so prevalent after the war. Looking back on her activity at this time, Savage later observed that she and her fellow artists were engaged in a friendly and informal challenge to “find the best motif to represent Canada.”28 Though Savage cannot, by any estimation, be regarded as the winner of that particular aesthetic contest, her nationalism – taken together with her pedagogical experience, her professional achievements, and her ties with leading figures in the cultural and political establishment – did position her as an excellent voice to represent the development of Canadian art on the airwaves of the nation.

“An Art That Can Be Called Canadian” From her first broadcast to her last, Anne Savage drove home her preoccupation with nation building, articulating to listeners her goal to bring them “into a closer contact with the people who made it possible for us to have an Art that can be called Canadian, as it reveals to us the characteristics of our own land.”29 In the texts of her lectures, Savage advances the cause of a truly Canadian art in two main ways: through her public encouragement of the patronage necessary to cultural achievement, and, more intensely still, in the teleological thrust of the very chronology that she recounts. Recognizing that Canadian art could not “really come into its own” until “the public in general appreciated their own painters by decorating their walls with [their] canvases,”30 Savage used her lectures to promote the purchase of Canadian art as a means to assert a cultural freedom from European suzerainty. Like the poet Duncan Campbell Scott, who derided early Canadian collectors bui s

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for preferring to “spend $5000 on an inferior Dutch painter than $700 on a Canadian masterpiece,”31 Savage lamented the preferences of those railway barons, shipping magnates, and financiers for whom “everything had to be imported. Nothing was of any value unless it had the stamp of either England or France upon it … you were not considered as having become socially established unless you had at least two good grey Dutch pictures hanging on your walls.”32 By contrast, Savage’s contemporaries, such as lawyer and diplomat Charles Vincent Massey33 and publisher Harry Southam, were singled out as men of vision “who through their systematic purchase of good canvases have built up fine collections of Canadian painting and made it possible for the artists to continue to produce.”34 Such support was, more than ever, a necessity in the 1930s, for, while campaigns such as the Group of Seven’s to promote Canadian art had caught the attention of the public, actual sales remained low. Public galleries had been among the important consumers of Canadian paintings but when acquisition budgets were slashed during the Depression years artists suffered greatly. The overall operating budget of the National Gallery, for example, dropped from $135,000 in 1928–29 to just $25,000 in 1934–35.35 In this context, Savage’s radio broadcasts made a clear request to fellow citizens to support Canadian artists. And, because Canadian art could still be bought relatively inexpensively,36 it was not only to the Masseys and the Southams of the country that she spoke. Rather, Savage addressed her comments primarily towards middle-class consumers purchasing a painting or two for their homes. Such a broad-based market would, however, need to be educated into existence. Speaking of her fellow artist Ethel Seath, Savage once described her friend’s work as an art teacher at an exclusive Montreal girl’s school to be the task of creating “an informed audience for art and a nucleus of art patrons.”37 Savage’s own task in her cbc lectures was not unrelated, though her comments were aimed at a broader middle-class audience. Discussing his own cbc broadcasts on art in the late 1940s, writer and critic George Robertson explained that “unlike the readers of most art periodicals, newspaper and magazine reviews and critical essays, a large percentage of listeners were probably unable to name half a dozen Canadian painters.” Therefore it was “necessary to approach each broadcast from a strict ‘review’ angle and [to] attempt to provoke some measure of curiosity on the part of the general listener.”38 Ten years earlier, Savage had anticipated Robertson’s views and had even begun her first talk by asking her viewers to try to name six Canadian artists. In a letter to A.Y. Jackson regarding her lectures, she wrote: “I have the feeling the people who would take the trouble to listen in are just interested laymen, and so I have simplified as one would for a child.”39 The simple story that Savage told was one of Canadian progress exemplified through the achievements of heroic individuals – a strategy that was, moreover, 114

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well suited to the time constraints of radio. Like many accounts that have sought to emphasize the triumphant emergence of a distinctly Canadian culture during the twentieth century, she began her story of art in Canada by eliding its Indigenous peoples in favour of its colonizing newcomers. For Savage, Canadian art started in 1818 during the childhood of the artist-pioneer Paul Kane. In these early stages, art’s Canadianness was to be distinguished not so much by its form and style as by its themes: Kane’s treatment of First Nations subjects and, in the subsequent broadcast, Cornelius Krieghoff’s “lovely intimate pictures” of “simple habitant folk in their snowy landscapes.”40 The years following Krieghoff Savage characterized as a period of “doubt and uncertainty” in the journey towards national identity, noting that while several societies had been formed to “encourage and foster” art in Canada, the country remained in the “grip of European influence.”41 In her fourth broadcast Savage recognized the achievements of Homer Watson, Horatio Walker, and William Brymner but devoted most of her time to the “courageous and vigorous” work of James Wilson Morrice, who “shattered the dead hand of the European School.”42 The next three lectures were devoted to Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven and their struggle to create not only a formally distinct artistic vision but a geographically and institutionally unified Canadian art practice. Her broadcast on A.Y. Jackson, for example, emphasized his determination to study every aspect of the country: “East, West, North, his sketching trips have made an intricate network trail from the Maritimes to the Pacific.”43 In order to appeal to the majority of the population, Savage further employed familiar archetypes to frame the individuals she had selected. Paul Kane was presented in the guise of the fearless adventurer, risking his life to document Indigenous peoples. Savage imagined him as a witness to “the good of those early days, which otherwise would have disappeared, with the Redman, into the ‘Happy Hunting Ground of the West.’”44 A similar combination of romantic idealism and exoticism characterized her presentation of Krieghoff as “a charming young German, who at the age of twenty-two, set out to seek his fortune in a new land, with a violin under one arm and a paint box under the other” and “fell under the spell of [the] simple and wholesome [French Canadian] people.”45 Above all, Savage presented the figure of the artist as a forward-thinking genius, misunderstood by society. Her descriptions of Tom Thomson and A.Y. Jackson are characteristic. Thomson she lauded as having initiated the “modern movement for spiritual freedom in Canada,”46 while Jackson was a man “ahead of his time … able to see with vision, a far-sightedness that common folk like ourselves do not.”47 With rhetoric like this, Savage’s broadcasts stand as an excellent instance of the cbc’s own long-standing appreciation of the ways in which “the arts create mythologies and shape everyone’s imagination.”48 It was an approach well suited to the mediation of radio technology, for, as Marshall McLuhan would later bui s

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observe, “when man is overwhelmed by information, he resorts to myth; myth is inclusive, timesaving and fast.”49 Particularly in a nation such as Canada, with both geographic and ethnic diversity, myth’s provision of a common signifier for its citizens has been critical to attempts to develop a national identity.50 In her discussion of the “myth of the artist,” Catherine M. Soussloff notes the importance of interesting biographical anecdotes to the process of mythicizing.51 Such anecdotes are indeed central to Savage’s approach, and may be divided into two types. The first, a popular one in art- historical texts, is the illustration of the moment when man embraced the struggle of becoming an artist. In this vein, for example, Savage described Paul Kane’s battle to emerge from his struggles in the Canadian wilderness to train as a painter in Europe, and rejoiced in the story of how, with the help of the prominent Montreal art dealer William Scott and the encouragement of eminent collector Sir William Van Horne, James Wilson Morrice was able to “forsake” a law career for the “heresy” of becoming an artist.52 The second type of reoccurring anecdote identified by Soussloff – and in the Canadian context perhaps the more important one – centres on the individual’s intimate relationship to the landscape.53 In a tale that serves as the epitome of a Canadian artist’s devotion to the wilderness, Savage tells of Lawren Harris “renting a box car on the Algoma Central Railway, filling it full of artists,” and creating the ultimate outdoor studio.54 Savage extricates the anecdote from its original biographical context and introduces it into the larger narrative of a national art history, and she is particularly eloquent about the heroic and selfsacrificial nation-building efforts of Thomson and the members of the Group of Seven. They had “given their lives to revealing it [the Canadian landscape]. They saw it years ago, and were impelled by the strange forces of Art to search it out. What if they starved or wandered about in a society that did not understand them – they did not mind because they had the beauty of the land itself. Ever changing, never ending, the great reservoir of Nature was open to them as she always has been to those who seek her.”55 Indeed, for Savage as for many commentators who preceded and followed her, the narrative of Canadian art was the story of landscape painting and its heroic practitioners. Although in her last lecture she did refer to recent developments in figure painting, it is clear that the story that mattered most to her was that of man’s encounter with his natural environment.56 Throughout her discussion the Canadian landscape emerges as not just a backdrop for actors and events but as a dominant mythical figure itself (Fig. 4.4). “Here in the North Country,” she muses, “I wonder if we realize how peculiarly clear the air is and as a result of the brilliant light how much more intense the shadows are?”57 Savage’s description of the land and the outdoors reinforces the idea that a nationalistic mythology is embodied in the landscape itself.58 On 7 December 1938 Buchanan was quoted in the Kingston WhigStandard as saying, “Are we not, as a nation, obsessed with the magnitude of 116

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Fig. 4.4 Anne Savage enjoyed depicting the landscape of rural Quebec.

geography; as a people, are our minds not constantly involved in the problems of space and distance? Nothing more natural then than that we should be attracted firstly and most strongly to the visual arts and in particular to landscape painting.” Savage’s talks echoed this sentiment.

At Home in a Professionalizing Art World By 1939, such an account of Canadian art as “story of struggle and splendid courage” set within the land would have offered little that was new to listeners who did happen to be familiar with the nation’s artistic contours. Beginning in 1913, and picking up pace throughout the 1920s, a series of key English-language texts had established the chronological and thematic outlines of the story that Savage told her listeners – a story that was, indeed, to become the standard narrative of Canadian art history. Savage referred her listeners to a number of these works during her final broadcast. Three texts in particular appear to have been crucial to her. In 1925 Newton MacTavish’s overview of The Fine Arts in Canada had cemented the basic chronology and cast of characters from which Savage selected the protagonists of The Development of Art in Canada, and the following year F.B. Housser’s A Canadian Art Movement established the basic heroizing outlines of the Group of Seven’s mythic encounter with the land. bui s

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Housser’s description of the painter of the Canadian landscape as putting on “the outfit of the bushwhacker and prospector” and becoming one “with his environment [as he] paddles, portages and makes camp; sleeps in the outof-doors under the stars; climbs mountains with his sketch box on his back” was accepted and largely reiterated by Savage.59 Finally, in 1932, Albert Robson’s Canadian Landscape Painters reiterated themes already present in MacTavish and Housser as it characterized the artist’s plight as a “struggle” in much the same way that early Canadian settlers were “actively engrossed in the struggle for material existence.”60 What are we to make of Anne Savage’s close adherence to these models in assessing The Development of Art in Canada? It is simple enough to draw the conclusion that Savage was, as an art historian, much what she arguably was as a painter: an epigone, an imitator, as in thrall to the narrative myth of the Group of Seven as she was to its visual aesthetic. It is also possible, however, to cast Savage less as an imitator than as a popularizer, innovatively using the new technology of radio to make art accessible to the broad sweep of Canadians. Through the airwaves, Savage brought art into the listeners’ homes, using words expertly and creatively to convey to her listeners what the paintings looked like. One particularly evocative passage described Tom Thomson’s revolutionary technique: “[It was] as if the seal of a locked treasure-box had been broken and the explorer started hurling out the contents in reckless enthusiasm. Pink and white birch trees on a carpet of scarlet, fringing a blue lake, silver twisted cedars reflected in still pools, wind-swept, purple-blue clouds scudding over dark hills, and masses of varied coloured rocks overgrown with litchen [sic].”61 In this way, Savage was able to create an image for many members of the audience who otherwise would never have been able to see exhibitions. She brought art into their homes, regardless of their location or their social status, endeavoring to make it live where they did. This is one of the chief contributions of her broadcasts. In her lectures Savage stressed the value of art in the personal and social growth of all individuals. Art, for her, was the means to “an intensification of life,” and her talks aimed to help others “to perceive not merely to see … and to find delight in just looking.”62 In this, Savage invoked the presence of art in everyday life: “Many of us feel that Art is outside our world, and yet, to-day, we are surrounded by so much that is the direct product of the Artist’s and Designer’s mind that every strand of our lives is interwoven with it.”63 This emphasis on the quotidian presence of art and beauty had long been a core tenet of Savage’s approach to art, and her success as a popularizer is most readily apparent in her extremely successful teaching career. In her classroom as in her radio lectures, she encouraged a broad public to engage their innate creativity: to look “out upon the world to see objects and people and incidents as forms and grasp their significance, both outward and inward, to create a work

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of art.”64 One of her students recalled Savage having them paint the snowcovered trashcans of their working-class urban neighbourhood to find beauty in ordinary things.65 This approach to viewing art in everyday events and ordinary objects countered established and more elitist understandings in which art was denoted as such by its location in a museum or other ritualized space. Savage’s disciples, most notably Leah Sherman and Arthur Calvin, have lauded her unique approach to art education.66 It is arguable, however, that many of the pedagogical strategies that she employed had already been introduced to Canadian educational channels by others, notably Arthur Lismer, beginning as early as 1917 in the children’s art classes he established while principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax.67 Encouraged by Lismer, many Canadian galleries established their own art classes for children, and when in 1937 Charles F. Martin, director of the Art Association of Montreal, invited Savage to organize a children’s program, she adopted and adapted Lismer’s model. As with her cbc broadcasts, then, Savage’s work as art educator was less that of innovator than of implementer. To cast Anne Savage as a popularizer is not only to nuance an understanding of the derivative aspects of her achievements in the cbc lectures and elsewhere, it is also to position her within the history of female professionalism. As Ann Shteir has so ably demonstrated in the field of natural history, women have historically built careers for themselves as popularizers of knowledge originally intended for an intellectual elite.68 At the time of the broadcasts and the height of her career, Savage was, indeed, the very picture of what it meant to be a professional woman artist in Canada: she made a living through art, exhibited widely, joined professional associations, cultivated friendships and connections with artists and leading cultural figures, and worked in a style that typified the most broadly accepted aesthetic trend in Canada. Above all else, she was recognized and accepted as a fellow professional by her peers, and served twice as president of the Canadian Group of Painters. What such acceptance meant was changing, however, and the professionalization of women artists like Savage coincided with a significant professional restructuring of the Canadian artistic milieu, of which the incorporation of the National Gallery of Canada in 1913 was one notable instance. As publicly funded art institutions gained ground, a discourse of democratization flourished. The goal and benefits of an increased integration of art within a fully democratic society were widely discussed, and in her cbc lectures Savage advocated for art’s ties to a precious and, by 1939, increasingly endangered democracy, speaking of “the special kind of liberation for mind and spirit with which Art endows us all.”69 In this she was very much part of a feeling of the day, and two years later, when she attended the influential Conference of Canadian Artists (or Kingston Conference), she must have recognized many of her own convictions in Walter

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Abell’s keynote lecture on “Art and Democracy,” which called for “a recognition of creative resources which should be set free” by being made available to all Canadians.70 Yet, in examining the shifts in cultural authority that characterized the earlytwentieth-century Canadian art world, Lynda Jessup has argued that the increasing importance of public art institutions like the National Gallery – and the growing dominance of the cultural narratives they circulated – exemplified not so much “the democratization of aesthetic opinion, but rather the professionalization of the cultural field and the shift evidenced elsewhere during this period to bureaucratically oriented, hierarchical cultural institutions modeled on the modern business corporation.”71 In his contribution to this volume, Kirk Niergarth further explores the ways in which such professionalization worked in opposition to the democratizing impetus that so clearly motivated a number of Canadian artists, Savage among them. Democratization and nationalism were, moreover, uneasy bedfellows, and Mary Vipond’s work on Canadian nationalism has demonstrated the extent to which the political, diplomatic, and cultural manifestation of the nationalist sentiments so dear to Savage was controlled by a “small, close-knit, articulate and concerned” professional class of Englishspeaking politicians, writers, cultural figures, and intellectuals located primarily in central Canada.72 It was through such elite networks that the narrative of Canadian art, buoyed by the success of the Group of Seven and promoted so effectively by the National Gallery of Canada, became consecrated. Anne Savage’s position in relation to this professional culture was not straightforward. As sister-in-law to a government minister, close friend of A.Y. Jackson, and educated member of Montreal’s anglophone Protestant elite, Savage was, to some extent, a natural member of this world, and we have seen the extent to which the evident sincerity of her democratic populism was, at times, compromised by the condescension that she assumed as an arts professional, apparently at ease with the idea of addressing her public “rather as one would a child.” But Savage was also a woman, and this too was a determining factor in her professional position. As feminist scholars Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Nancy Tomes have noted, women followed a distinctly feminine social trajectory towards professionalization: “For middle-class women, as distinct from their male counterparts, careers were usually prompted by the downward mobility of families.”73 In this respect, Anne Savage, whose full-time career as an art teacher began when the death of her father created financial hardship, clearly conforms to a pattern of female professionalism. The outlines of that pattern have been further delineated by American historians Penina Glazer and Miriam Slater, who observe that, at the height of the female professional projects of the early twentieth century, women entering professions “employed four main strategies: superperformance, innovation, segregation, and subordination” to legitimate their participation in otherwise male-dominated sectors. In the Canadian 120

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context, Mary Kinnear suggests that accepting subordinate roles has been the dominant method employed by women pioneering entry into the professions.74 The history of Savage’s cbc broadcasts appears to bear this out, notably in correspondence between her and A.Y. Jackson that reveals the extent to which Jackson guided the content of her lectures, suggesting topics for her to discuss and also heavily editing her drafts. It is not surprising that Jackson assisted Savage. The two were romantically linked, and despite her refusal of his marriage proposal, letters between them reveal Savage’s deep respect for, and compliance with, his guidance. Jackson took his position as an arbitrator in the development of Canadian art seriously, and he was careful to correct any misinterpretations that he thought Savage had made in her retelling of the story, or that did not reinforce the carefully crafted public image of him and his Group of Seven colleagues that he had honed over the years. His tone in their correspondence was often condescending – he remarked in a letter to her, for example, that it was “quite a little job”75 she had undertaken. In other correspondence he commented on how he had to make some major changes to her draft; her chronology was wrong but it was “not to be wondered at as it all happened when [she] was a mere child.”76 Through his involvement in Savage’s broadcasts, Jackson directly controlled the construction of himself and his fellow artists as prominent, indeed mythical, figures in Canadian art. If Savage’s acceptance of Jackson’s authoritative editing of her cbc talks is the most obvious signs of her professional subordination, it is not the only one. As an influential art educator, Savage’s most significant cultural contribution was made within the gender-appropriate field of teaching, one of the “service professions” to which women had been directed for decades, effectively confining them to the lowest end of the professional hierarchy. In keeping with the “caring script” that was socially acceptable for the female professional, Savage encouraged her listeners to experience art within a comfortably domestic framework. While the revolutionary potential of art’s full incursion into everyday life would be ardently articulated by American socialist and artist Thomas Hart Benton at the Kingston Conference, Savage’s challenge to the belief that “art is outside our world” was framed in the familiar language of the feminine sphere: “Everything we touch or use in our homes, that ministers to our physical comfort and to our aesthetic tastes … the height of our hats and the length of our skirts, the tone of our walls and the texture of our curtains, the ply of our rugs and the construction of our furniture, are all controlled by the artist.”77 Above all, in Savage’s broadcasts she did not claim for herself the authority of an artist, passing over in silence her own participation in the events she was describing (Fig. 4.5). As Savage’s biographer points out, her strategy for the cbc broadcasts was to align herself with her listeners, speaking “to her audience as if she too knew little about art and was, like them, looking for something to hang on her walls.”78 bui s

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Fig. 4.5 Anne Savage, Saint-Sauveur, c. 1935. One of Savage’s many landscapes purchased by the National Gallery of Canada.

As with her radio broadcasts, in other venues Savage was careful in her own professional positioning, particularly when discussing the achievements of Canadian women artists. In a lecture to the Canadian Women’s Club in Montreal, she declared women’s work to “be judged strictly on merit and any handicap they have comes from having to devote time to such things as housekeeping.”79 Writing about this statement in her monograph on the female relationships of the Beaver Hall Group, Barbara Meadowcroft comments that “like many successful women, Savage did not recognize any bias against women in her profession.”80 From her relatively prominent position within the Canadian art community, it would have been difficult for her to challenge the very structures that supported success. Placing Savage within the context of the strategies adopted – or realities accepted – by female professionals in the early and middle twentieth century thus repositions the derivative aspects of her cbc lectures once more. In this reading, Savage accepted a certain degree of professional subordination and was rewarded by membership in the old boy’s club of the central Canadian art milieu, exem122

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plified by the Group of Seven’s much romanticized camping trips. Such acceptance was not easily won, and having attained it she did nothing to jeopardize it. It is notable, for example, that in her concluding lecture on trends in the contemporary art world, Savage made no mention of the move to abstraction and internationalism that was then challenging the hegemonic landscape-based narrative of Canadian art established by the Group of Seven and embraced by the National Gallery. By continuing to promote the nationalist agenda of the ngc, which exhibited her works both at home and abroad, Savage positioned herself as the ideal, dutiful employee within the new “business” of Canadian art. The one potentially subversive aspect of her broadcasts – the populist power of bringing art into life – she tempered through discourses of democracy and the domestic. Assessing her message in the context of the subsequent Kingston Conference, it appears as if she maintained just enough political dynamism in her professional persona to keep her relevant, but not enough to jeopardize her tentative placement among the earliest generation of women artists to be recognized as full participants in the Canadian art scene.

Women, Art, and the Canadian Canon The impression of Anne Savage that emerges from her broadcasts, then, is one of a popularizer and of a woman deeply invested in the emerging canonical myths of Canadian art that were embraced by the cultural establishment and its institutions. At the beginning of her broadcasts on The Development of Canadian Art, Savage was, indeed, at pains to frame that development in canonical terms, referencing acknowledged masters such as Giotto, Perugino, Constable, and Van Gogh. The story that she subsequently conveyed to listeners was, in effect, the story that would be enshrined within the newly developing field of professional writing on Canadian art history. If, as art historian Griselda Pollock suggests, “the canon is held in place by the power of the stories it tells about artists,”81 then Savage’s widely disseminated tale of dashing artists and dramatic settings has helped to cement the Canadian artistic canon, yet her role in contributing to nationalistic mythologies is seldom discussed. There are obvious reasons for this: the historiography of Canadian art is not generally well documented; Savage’s broadcasts were ephemeral and never published; and the story she told was not new. In the context of a book on women’s professional art practices in Canada, however, two additional and diametrically opposed historiographical factors should also be considered. The first relates to the way in which women were written out of the canon of Canadian art, the second to the way in which they have been written back in. The narrative of early-twentieth-century Canadian art popularized by Savage’s broadcasts was influentially rearticulated during the mid-twentieth century at a bui s

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cultural moment characterized by the highly gendered pursuit of an assertively masculine artistic identity. Key texts on Canadian art such as Dennis Reid’s A Concise History of Canadian Painting – so often the target of feminist ire for its near exclusion of women – appeared at a time when women were being excluded from a whole range of art-historical narratives.82 Savage does, in fact, appear in Reid’s text, but his discussion of her is predictably short. When, in response to such marginalization, women artists began to be rediscovered by feminist scholars, emphasis was frequently placed on individual hardships and women’s struggles to overcome exclusion from art institutions. Such discussions have tended to focus on women’s omission from art-historical discourse and their oppositional challenges to the gendered norms of their day, rather than on their participation in larger national networks and projects of the kind that were so central to Savage’s activity. Indeed, recent writing on Savage’s involvement in the Beaver Hall Group offers a prime example of the ways in which authorial attention to women’s oppositional position in the art world has curtailed recognition of their broad-based cultural participation; though the Beaver Hall Hill exhibitions included works by men and women in roughly equal numbers, a string of recent accounts of the group have focused only on the women, thus resulting in the erroneous impression that it was a separate female society.83 With a feminist art history thus primed to see instances of women artists’ differentiation from hegemonic discourse, The Development of Art in Canada has not been an obvious candidate for rediscovery, for Anne Savage’s lectures reinforced the dominant cultural narrative far more than they worked against it. Yet her broadcasts do offer interesting scope for feminist analysis, particularly in light of scholarship on women’s relation to hegemony, both within and outside the art-historical canon. As an active participant in the “Canadianizing” movement, Savage exemplifies Jill Vickers’s suggestion that women were not only symbols of nationalism but also its agents. “Women of the dominant culture in Canada,” Vickers observes, “benefited from their relationships to nationalism.”84 Furthermore, as scholars Jo-Anne Lee and Linda Cardinal point out, in the highly contested relationship between nationalism and feminism, women’s agency was often constrained within hegemonic practices.85 Savage’s broadcasts sit comfortably within their analysis of the ways in which “hegemony is not imposed from above but is constantly being produced, challenged and reproduced in our everyday struggles.”86 The nationalistic imperatives and perceptions of the time required the delivery of a patriarchal canon of Canadian art. Anne Savage delivered. There are parallels here to women’s contradictory relation with the arthistorical canon. Largely excluded from the canon, women artists have nevertheless occupied a contested relation to canonicity itself, operating both inside and outside its strictures.87 Recognition and acceptance by the arbiters of greatness has been a powerful motivating factor for many women, particularly 124

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those working as professional painters. Anne Savage herself promoted this recognition, lecturing on the contributions of women artists on several occasions in her career. In talks on Rosa Bonheur, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and others, given at the Art Association of Montreal, Savage looked “into the record of the past [to] salute the spirit of our sisters who have triumphed in the field of painting.”88 Such recognition was slow in coming in The Development of Art in Canada, however, and in her eighth and final instalment Savage acknowledged her complete omission of women up to that point. Thereupon she hastened to assure listeners that “Canada has produced a remarkable group of women painters as well,”89 an assertion that she developed through a substantial discussion of the works of Emily Carr, supported by brief analyses of the art of Prudence Heward and Lilias Torrance Newton, and rounded off with a quick list of other significant women: Sarah Robertson, Isabel McLaughlin, Kay (Kathleen) Daly, Paraskeva Clark, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Ethel Seath, Nora Collyer, Yvonne McKague Housser, Marion Scott, and Rody Kenny Courtice.90 Savage’s discussion of Carr, Heward, and Newton drew on well-established conventions within canonical art history. Her account presented Carr in the same mythicizing vein as her male contemporaries and predecessors – an exceptional and inadequately appreciated heroine who ventured by herself to paint the “jungle-like foliage of [the] mist-ridden … Indian country” of the west coast but whose “interesting canvases received little or no encouragement.”91 Turning to the topic of her Beaver Hall colleagues, Savage adopted the language of evaluative but non-contextualized formal analysis, praising Heward’s “fine, strong directness, finely modeled, rich in colour and beautifully and powerfully designed” and contrasting it to the “delicate feeling for colour harmonies” of Lilias Torrance Newton.92 Without the benefit of the methodological critique that would only much later reveal the structural implications of the mechanisms of genius and formalism in the exclusion of women artists from history, Savage’s effort to include women artists in the canon of Canadian art was undermined by its own rhetoric. Literally and figuratively, Savage had a voice in telling the story of Canadian art; however her account conforms to patriarchal conventions. As Christine Battersby has powerfully demonstrated, the mythical heroicizing of the solitary artist genius – a topos so dear to Savage – is intrinsically gendered masculine.93 So too, in early-twentieth-century Canada, was Savage’s beloved narrative of the heroic quest for a national artistic identity; when Lawren Harris commented that “no virile people could remain subservient to, and dependent upon the creations in art of other peoples,” he unambiguously linked the new nationalist spirit in Canadian landscape painting to an assertive masculinity.94 Nor was the position of “exceptional woman” that Savage effectively built for Carr any more conducive to an art-historical discourse attuned to women’s presence; from bui s

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Artemisia Gentileschi to Rosa Bonheur, masculinist histories of art have frequently made room for a few such women, exceptions whose presence effectively proved the rule of women’s general insignificance within hegemonic cultural narratives. Throughout the twentieth century, moreover, the power of such narratives was characteristically reinforced by short but authoritatively passed verdicts on the formal aptitudes of painters. Savage’s praise for Heward’s “fine modeling” or Newton’s “delicate feeling for colour harmonies” may be well merited, but it also conformed to a wider use of formalist rhetoric to limit the scope of art writing, keeping it well away from consideration of the social issues that have been so central to the subsequent development of women’s art history. Indeed, it was not until the deposition of formalism from its position of art-historical dominance in the 1970s that the discipline was truly able to make room for women. Thus, despite Savage’s desire to include women in her story of Canadian art, her ambitions could not fully be realized, for the very terms and modes of analysis available to and embraced by her were prejudicial to women. In the end, and as with the accounts written by Newton MacTavish and M.O. Hammond,95 Savage’s inclusion of women was confined to a section of its own, tacked on almost as an afterthought – an example of courage, perhaps, but outside her account’s main narrative of nationalist struggle.

Conclusion Anne Savage’s radio lectures represent just one of the voices of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that have contributed to the mythologies that have formed a Canadian national identity. Savage shared with the cbc and the ngc a democratic commitment to making Canadian art accessible to the Canadian public. Her first-hand knowledge of the art world and her skill as an educator enabled her to contribute, alongside others, to the foundations of a larger arthistorical narrative that has continued to inform scholarship. Decades later, echoes of this narrative could be found, for example, in Charles C. Hill’s account of Canadian painting in the 1930s as “the story of the struggle to develop an art inspired by the Canadian landscape, of a brotherhood, united by the mystical number seven, working to open up the creative channels of Canadian art.”96 At the time of her broadcasts, Savage’s goal was to educate and excite; she wanted to stimulate interest in Canadian artists. Today, after nearly a century of repetition, the anecdotes, imagery, and techniques that she used to form the story of the broadcasts seem clichéd and problematic. As a woman, Savage was pioneering in her participation in the canonization of Canadian art history. However, in contrast to the “bushwacking” hero of the north, she assumed the maternal role of teacher, educating Canada on the young country’s artistic achievements. Not once during the broadcasts does Savage mention her own painting. Despite her 126

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own active participation in the development of Canadian art, she fails to note her status as an artist – perhaps the ultimate act of professional subordination. In this way, Anne Savage’s story of The Development of Art in Canada offers mute but nevertheless eloquent testimony to the ways women utilized their subordinate position to gain entry into previously masculine professions.

notes 1 My deepest gratitude goes to Kristina Huneault for her considerable assistance with this essay. I am also indebted to Janice Anderson, Brian Foss, Martha Langford, Sandra Paikowsky, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier drafts. 2 Anne Savage, The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, “Introduction,” file 2.2, p.7, Concordia University Archives (cua). Savage’s typescripts for the broadcasts were meant for her personal use, not for publication, and therefore contain many spelling and grammatical errors. 3 Publications on Savage include: Anne Savage Archives, 1896–1971 (Montreal: Concordia University 1989); Annie D. Savage: Drawings and Watercolours [organized by the Sir George Williams Art Galleries] (Montreal: Sir George Williams University 1974); Janet Braide, Anne Savage: Sa Vision de la Beauté / Her Expression of Beauty (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 1979); H.A. Calvin, “Ann[e] Savage, Teacher” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 1967); Anne McDougall, Anne Savage: The Story of a Canadian Painter (Ottawa: Borealis Press 2000); Leah Sherman, “Anne Savage: A Study of Her Development as an Artist/ Teacher in the Canadian Art World, 1925–1950,” in David Thistlewood, ed., Histories of Art and Design Education (England: Longman Group 1993); Leah Sherman, “Anne Savage,” Canadian Review of Art Education (CRAE), 29, no. 1 (2002): 45–60; Leah Sherman, Anne

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Savage: August 15–September 21, 2002 (Montreal: Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2002); and Leah Sherman and Angela Grigor, A Comparison of the Influences of Anne Savage and Arthur Lismer, sound recording (Montreal: Concordia University Libraries, Oral History Montreal Studies, 1985). Savage also features prominently in works on the Beaver Hall Group such as Susan Avon, “The Beaver Hall Group and Its Place in the Montreal Art Milieu and the Nationalist Network” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 1994); Pepita Ferrari and Erna Buffie, By Woman’s Hand (dvd) (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada 1994); Barbara Meadowcroft, Painting Friends: The Beaver Hall Woman Painters (Montreal: Véhicule Press 1999); Joyce Millar, “The Beaver Hall Group,” Woman’s Art Journal, 13 (spring/summer 1992): 3–5; and Evelyn Walters, The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters (Toronto: Dundurn Press 2005). 4 Savage’s radio broadcasts are mentioned in Braide, Anne Savage; Meadowcroft, Painting Friends; McDougall, Anne Savage; and even Maria Tippett’s By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Art by Canadian Women Artists. (Toronto: Viking Press 1992). 5 Eric Brown, “Untitled,” Toronto Globe, 4 May 1912. 6 In 1880 Governor General John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, the Marquis of Lorne, encouraged the foundation of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and along with it the National Gallery of

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Canada. Initially, the gallery was a collection of diploma works of academicians and some donated works, and it was not formally incorporated until 1913, by an act of Parliament. R.B. Bennett, House of Commons Debates, 16 February 1932, 236. Anne Whitelaw, “‘Whiffs of Balsam, Pine, and Spruce’: Art Museums and the Production of a Canadian Aesthetic,” in John O’Brian and Peter White, eds., Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007), 175. Harry McCurry to W. Percy Over (chairman, Exhibition Committee of the Winnipeg Art Gallery), 8 January 1935, “Outside Activities/Organizations Radio Broadcasts 1933–39,” box 324, file 2, National Gallery Archives (nga). Joyce Zemans, “Establishing the Canon: Nationhood, Identity and the National Gallery’s First Reproduction Programme of Canadian Art,” Journal of Canadian Art History, 16, no. 2 (1995): 9. See also Paula Romanow, “‘The Picture of Democracy We Are Seeking’: cbc Radio Forums and the Search for a Canadian Identity, 1930–1950,” Journal of Radio Studies, 12, no. 1 (2005): 108. “Outside Activities/Organizations Radio Broadcasts 1933–39,” box 324, file 2, nga. I would like to thank Sandra Paikowsky for pointing out Abell’s involvement and for providing me with further information on his radio broadcasts. George Robertson, “Art and the Radio Audience,” Canadian Art, 9, no. 1 (1951): 3. “Outside Activities/Organizations Radio Broadcasts 1933–39,” box 324, file 2, nga. Buchanan to McCurry, 9 September 1938, ibid. Sources cite different dates for Savage’s return to Montreal. While some suggest

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18

19

20

21

22 23 24

she was in Minneapolis until 1921, Janet Braide asserts she was in fact in Montreal in the fall of 1920 when the Beaver Hall Group began to assemble. Despite these discrepancies in the timeline, all texts agree upon her role as a founding member, since she participated in the group’s first exhibition in January 1921. Braide, Anne Savage, 11–13. The 1926 Group of Seven exhibition included Savage and seven other emerging artists, John Alfsen, George Pepper, Tom Stone, Lowrie Warrener, Doris Huestis Mills, Marion Huestis Miller, and Bess Housser. For more on this show, see Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1995), 196. The exhibition that resulted from the expedition is described in National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s, where Leslie Dawn gives a critical account of this show as one of the “most radical and problematic exhibitions ever assembled at the National Gallery of Canada up to that time” (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2006), 238. Savage, The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, “A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer,” file 2.15, p.5, cua. The words, used by Savage to describe Lismer’s pedagogical convictions, apply equally to her own. House of Commons Debates, 18 May 1932, quoted in David Ellis, Evolution of the Canadian Broadcasting System: Objectives and Realities, 1928–1968 (Ottawa: Government of Canada, Department of Communications, 1979), 6. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: A Brief History (Ottawa: cbc 1976), 7. Savage, “Introduction,” 1. Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer 2000), 41. Jonathan F. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World

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26 27 28 29

30

31

32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1997), 11. Ron Faris, The Passionate Educators: Voluntary Associations and the Struggle for Control of Adult Educational Broadcasting in Canada, 1919–52 (Toronto: P. Martin 1975), 1. Quoted in McDougall, Anne Savage, 23. Braide, Anne Savage, 21. Sherman, Anne Savage: A Retrospective, 9. Savage, “Introduction,” 1. Like much of her rhetoric, these remarks faithfully echo views long since expressed by A.Y. Jackson. “Plea for Support of Canadian Art: Buying and Hanging Paintings by Home Talent Most Effective Way,” Montreal Gazette, 21 February 1922, quoted in Avon, “The Beaver Hall Group,” 26. Scott to Gagnon, Duncan Campbell Scott Papers, 9 June 1926, mg 30, d 100, Library and Archives Canada (lac). Savage, The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, “J.W. Morrice,” file 2.9, p.1, cua. At the time of the broadcasts, Massey was an influential collector; however, he would go on as governor general of Canada to have a tremendous impact on Canadian arts and culture. In the early 1950s he headed a royal commission on arts that resulted in the establishment of the National Library of Canada, the Canada Council of the Arts, and various federally funded programs. Savage, The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, “Conclusion,” 5. Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, 14. Ibid., 13. Meadowcroft, Painting Friends, 146. Robertson, “Art and the Radio Audience,” 3. Savage to Jackson, quoted in MacDougall, Anne Savage, 153. Savage, The Development of Art in

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49

50 51

52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59

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Canada, 1939, “Cornelius Kreighoff,” file 2.6, p.7, cua. Savage, “J.W. Morrice,” 1. Ibid., 1–2. Savage, “A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer,” 2. Savage, The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, “Paul Kane,” file 2.4, p.7, cua. Savage, “Cornelius Krieghoff,” 1. Savage, “Tom Thomson,” 7. Savage, “A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer,” 2. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio Study Group, Report of the CBC Radio Study Group on Programming of and about Arts, Music and Drama (Toronto: cbc 1976), 156. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1962), 25. Romanow, “‘The Picture of Democracy We Are Seeking,’” 108. Catherine M. Soussloff, “The Artist in the Text: Rhetorics in the Myth of the Artist,” in The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), 140–2. Savage, “Paul Kane,” 3; “J.W. Morrice,” 4. Soussloff, “The Artist in the Text,” 149. Savage, The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, “J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren Harris,” file 2.13, p.5, cua. Savage, “Introduction,” 3. For more on highly gendered concepts of landscape, see Eva Mackey, “Death by Landscape: Race, Nature, and Gender in Canadian Nationalist Mythology,” Canadian Woman Studies, 20, no. 2 (2000): 126. Savage, “Introduction,” 3. Mackey, “Death by Landscape,” 126. F.B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan 1926), 15. Albert H. Robson, Canadian Landscape

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Painters (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1932), 17. 61 Savage, The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, “Tom Thomson,” file 2.11, p.5, cua. 62 Savage, “Introduction,” 1. 63 Ibid. 64 Savage, “Conclusion,” 5. 65 Sherman, Anne Savage, 15. 66 Calvin, “Ann[e] Savage,” includes twentyeight pages of bibliography, illustrations, and four cassettes of six hours of interviews with Anne Savage, Alfie Pinsky, and Leah Sherman. A former student of Savage’s, Sherman was inspired by Savage to pursue a career in art education and devoted much of her academic career to writing about Savage and her “childcentred” approach to art education. See n.3 for a list of her publications. 67 Nearly forty years earlier, Austrian painter Franz Cižek had encouraged children to draw and paint from their imaginations in his Vienna Juvenile Art Classes. Several years later, Arthur Lismer introduced Cižek’s innovative methods to Canada when, as the principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax, he began Saturday morning art classes in 1917. 68 Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore, md, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996), especially chapters 3 and 4. 69 Savage, “A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer,” 7. 70 Walter Abell, “Art and Democracy,” in The Kingston Conference Proceedings (1941; repr., with an introduction by Michael Bell and biographical notes by Frances K. Smith, Kingston, on: Agnes Etherington Art Centre 1991), 30. 71 Lynda Jessup, “Bushwhackers in the Gallery: Antimodernism and the Group of Seven,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of

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75 76 77 78 79 80 81

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Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001), 131. Mary Vipond, “The Nationalist Network: English Canada’s Intellectuals and Artists in the 1920s,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 7, no. 1 (1980): 32. Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Nancy Tomes, “Women in the Professions: A Research Agenda for American Historians,” Reviews in American History, 10, no. 2 (1982): 281. Penina Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press 1986). McDougall, Anne Savage, 152. Ibid., 154. Savage, “Introduction,” 1. McDougall, Anne Savage, 152. Anne Savage, “Canadian Women Artists,” 1941–42, file 2.18, cua. Meadowcroft, Painting Friends, 149. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge 1999), 40. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistress: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon Books 1982), 3. See Avon, “The Beaver Hall Group,” 67. Avon’s thesis has very much shifted the way the Beaver Hall Group is discussed today. However, Meadowcroft’s Painting Friends, Evelyn Walters’s The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters (Toronto: Dundurn Press 2005), and the reprinting of Anne McDougall’s Anne Savage: The Story of a Canadian Painter in 2000 continue to reinforce the commonly held belief that the Beaver Hall Group consisted of primarily women painters. In the glossary of art terms and movements in Canadian Paintings, Prints and Drawings (Richmond Hill: Firefly Books 2007), 349–50, Anne Newlands defines the group as “a short-lived (1920– 1921) predominantly female group of

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artists who shared studio space on Beaver Square in Montreal.” Jill Vickers, “Feminisms and Nationalisms in English Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 35, no. 2 (2000): 131. Jo-Anne Lee and Linda Cardinal, “Hegemonic Nationalism and the Politics of Feminism and Multiculturalism in Canada,” in Veronica Strong-Boag et al., eds., Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender and the Construction of Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1998), 214–16. Ibid., 217. Nanette Salomon, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission,” in Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 345–6. Anne Savage, Talks Given at the Art Association of Montreal, 1939, “Women Artists,” file 2.18, unpaginated, cua.

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Savage, “Conclusion,” 2. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3. Christine Battersby, “Feminism and Genius,” in Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 292–7. 94 Quoted in Carl Berger, “The True North Strong and Free,” in Peter Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw Hill 1996), 21. 95 M.O. Hammond’s Painting and Sculpture in Canada appended women artists as exceptional, claiming it “more convenient than discreet to segregate the women painters of Canada” in his short survey text (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1930), 53. 96 Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, 20.

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PART THREE

CAREERS FOR WOMEN

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5

CHAPTER 1

Hannah Maynard

Crafting Professional Identity Jennifer Salahub

It is now more than fifteen years ago that specimens of a new and mysterious art were first exhibited to our wondering gaze … Since then photography has become a household word and a household want; is used alike by art and science, by love, business, and justice; is found in the most sumptuous saloon, and in the dingiest attic – in the solitude of the Highland cottage, and in the glare of the London gin-palace. – Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1857)1

Hannah Hatherly Maynard (1834–1918) was a British-born, middle-class Victorian woman who was seduced by “the mysterious art” of photography in the 1850s and by the turn of the last century was a celebrated, self-employed professional photographer working in Victoria, British Columbia. The obstacles she overcame were daunting, although perhaps not unfamiliar in the history of art. She was a woman artist, an artist with little, if any, formal training, a woman running her own business, and an outspoken advocate of a new art form, all the while working in an outpost of an outpost of the British Empire. A self-proclaimed “Photographic Artiste,” Hannah Maynard challenged gendered conventions regarding identity, and the path she negotiated is worthy of note. If, as the art historian Pamela Gerrish Nunn has suggested, “it was [Victorian] women’s move into professional art practice which produced the greatest potential for change … [and] ultimately that potential was only partially realized,” then Maynard is the exception that proves the rule.2 She was a

respected wife and mother of five who became a professional photographer with a reputation in Canada and the United States. She ran a successful studio and hired male apprentices (one was in her employ for over three decades). Maynard taught her family photography; Richard, her husband, would become a noted photographer of Vancouver Island and northern landscapes, her daughter and son worked in the studio, and her granddaughter would use her camera forensically to document an early traffic accident. Hannah Maynard was celebrated as a photographer of families and children, yet she would also become the official photographer of the Victoria Police Department,3 and she was commissioned by the anthropologists of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take photographs of the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia’s Northwest Coast.4 Further, she was a savvy entrepreneur, well aware of the importance of advertising and selfpromotion. The latter she honed to a fine art, even as she kept abreast of innovations in her chosen field. Maynard was accepted, socially and professionally, within the greater community, and if her priorities, which included self-promotion, do not necessarily coincide with our ideas of Victorian middle-class feminine propriety, they were certainly celebrated by her peers. In 1878 she was identified by the Seattle Weekly Pacific Tribune as “the leading photographer of Victoria” and was held up as an exemplar of “what women can do when there is necessity or ambition or the incentive.”5 A year later, the St. Louis Practical Photographer enthused that “Mrs Maynard is one of the most industrious and persevering ladies we have in our business. She stops at no impediment, in our Art, but is a regular go-ahead, even beating our Yankee girls two to one in photography.”6 Upon her retirement in 1912, Maynard summarized her experiences by stating, “I think I can say with every confidence that we photographed everyone in the town at one time or another.”7 Despite Maynard’s successes, and the enthusiasm of those who have been introduced to her photography, critical engagement has remained limited, with scholarly interest (including my own) focusing on a small selection of her latenineteenth-century experimental work. While the bc Archives houses a large collection of her more conventional work, including studio portraits, commemorative images, and landscapes,8 it is her experimental photos (see Figs. 5.1, 5.10, and 5.11) that most captivate. Many of these works are autobiographical – of Maynard herself and her immediate family – some within a studio setting, some within the family home, and others posed in nature. Still other photographs defy description, presenting fastidiously manipulated images that utilize innovative techniques and unexpected imagery judiciously balanced by familiar decorative language and the accoutrements of domesticity.9 When these works came under the scrutiny of photographic historians in the late 1970s and 1980s, they received spirited, if mixed, reviews. Maynard’s 136

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Fig. 5.1 Hannah Maynard, [The At Home] (multiple exposure), c. 1893. It is worth noting that the Maynard photographs have been printed from the original plates and have not been cropped. This is both helpful and problematic when considering her professional practice and aesthetics. What we do see is that Hannah Maynard did some “alterations” on the plate – removing double chins and nipping in waistlines (at least her own).

photographs were both lauded as the “vision of a Canadian genius” and described as “quite conventional, catering to the demands of a conservative clientele.”10 Some have admired her experimental works as uniquely charged with the “undeniable presence of the unconscious”; others have dismissed them as mere “photographic amusements.”11 A number of authors have tenuously pointed to links with major art movements, highlighting the photographs’ “air of the bizarre and of technical experiment” and reiterating that they “can in a real way be said to anticipate the Dadaist and Surrealist movements of the twentieth century.”12 Underpinning all of these readings have been the designations “eccentric,” even “freakish,” used to characterize both the artist and her works. As early as 1894, Maynard was described as creating photographs “on the freak order … showing Mrs Maynard in different positions on the same plate.”13 This description has continued to be cited – in 2001 Robert Belton wrote that “Maynard produced a series of strange composite photographs that even her professional peers saw as freakish”14 – but current scholars have lost the historical nuances of the nineteenth-century word “freak,” which, according to contemporary sal ah ub

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dictionaries, meant simply whimsical or curious. Today terms such as “freak” and “eccentric” suggest that Hannah Maynard deviated from conventional practices or patterns. As a craft historian, I disagree. There is a pattern here and it is time we reconsidered her practice and successes as a professional artist. In this chapter I will argue that Hannah Maynard was very much aware of the problems facing a woman desirous of entering the public sphere and that she worked hard to develop a strategy that would allow her to participate in both the professional activities of an artist and the commercial activities of establishing, running, and promoting a photographic studio. It is my intention to show that Maynard’s photographs, with their repeated images and lavish embellishments, were closely linked to fashionable handcrafts and the ongoing domestic discourse present in contemporary advice literature. I shall suggest that it was this intimate familiarity with the decorative and the domestic (in particular, fashionable domestic textiles) that allowed her so successfully to move between the private and public spheres. Such an argument takes its distance from the conventional view regarding nineteenth-century craft; in fact, the majority of popular references to Victorian needlework, painted china, ceramics, bookbinding, jewellery, and so on reinforce the image of the Victorian woman as house-proud and housebound, and contemporary readers are, more often than not, left to conclude that domestic craft was poorly conceived, badly designed, and self-indulgent, a visual manifestation of a lifestyle identified with the cult of domesticity and the ideology of separate spheres – at the very least the work of dilettantes (amateurs) rather than professionals. This common generalization regarding Victorian domestic craft is based not on the objects themselves, however, nor even on a familiarity with nineteenth-century literature, which reveals that fairs, bazaars, international exhibitions, and widely available journals brought domestic craft into the public realm. Rather, it is a product of the modernist value system that systematically separates art from craft, with craft generally suffering a loss of respect. Thus, when I first began to research Canadian needlework in the 1980s, the Library of Congress Catalogue directed me not to needlework, sewing, or even embroidery but to the letter “W” – women’s work. But what exactly is the work that craft performs with respect to women? A British photograph at the Victoria and Albert Museum first suggested to me the answer that I will develop in this chapter. Figure 5.2 is identified as a selfportrait, dated 1862–63, of the noted amateur photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden. Lady Hawarden gazes confidently at the viewer, standing in a domestic interior in front and slightly to the right of a cheval glass. Her camera and tripod (not the artist herself) are reflected in the mirror, while to the left, on a small table, is a large unfinished embroidered canvas of fashionable Berlin wool work. The attributes the artist has selected to define her personality and place

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Fig. 5.2 Lady Clementina Hawarden, Portrait with Embroidery and Camera, c. 1862–63.

Fig. 5.3 [Portrait of Hannah Maynard with Appliqué and Embroidered Pillow and Crazy-Quilt footstool], c. 1880s.

in society are noteworthy – the one connoting domesticity, femininity, and tradition (needlework) and the other the public world of science, technology, and non-conformity (photography). Studying this photograph I wondered whether Hawarden had judiciously included her needlework to mitigate the unconventionality of the camera. Thus, I was intrigued when, several years ago, I came across a late-nineteenth-century self-portrait of a Canadian woman photographer – Hannah Maynard – with her needlework (Fig. 5.3). Was Hawarden’s strategy in fact a pattern? Certainly, it would not be the only time that women used needlework to render their public aspirations more socially palatable; the strategy of subversion using textiles also served the women of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and suffrage movements, who used handmade banners rather than the more common manufactured ones, to stake their claims for public reform. Drawing on the religious and domestic associations of embroidery and appliqué, these women couched their radical claims to public influence in a visual language replete with traditionalist associations.15 Further examination of Maynard’s photographs and career offers strong support to the suggestion that she, too, understood and successfully employed domestic craft as a means to bring her very public professional identity into line with Victorian social expectations.

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The Early Years Hannah Hatherly Maynard (1834–1918) was born in Bude, Cornwall, to John and Elizabeth Hatherly on 17 January 1834, the second of at least four children. The 1851 census identifies her father, John Hatherly, as a master mariner and her younger sister Elizabeth as a dressmaker’s apprentice. There is no occupation listed for the seventeen-year-old Hannah. In the same census, Richard Maynard (1832–1907) was living with his family in nearby Stratton and was described as a shoemaker, the son of a cordwainer. Hannah Hatherly and Richard Maynard were married on 24 March 1852 and almost immediately emigrated to Canada West (now Ontario). The young couple settled in Bowmanville, a small but growing community on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Richard established a boot and shoe business at the corner of King and Silver streets and the family grew with the births of four children. Another child was born in Victoria. While Bowmanville appeared to have much to offer a young family, the adventurous Richard Maynard was determined to seek another path – one that was indeed paved with gold – and he set off for the British Columbia gold rush of 1859. How Hannah Maynard managed the young family of three and one on the way is uncertain, but when her husband triumphantly returned to move the family west he found his wife “studying photography.”16 If such study was not necessarily the norm for women, it was by no means unheard of. As Naomi Rosenblum explains in A History of Women Photographers, “photography was unimpeded by many of the conventions that restricted the traditional arts. Who could become a photographer had not yet been defined, and there was more inclusiveness in terms of the age, class, and genders of its practitioners.”17 We do not know if Maynard had any formal training. In these early years there were few professional societies and no academic institutions offering instruction; nonetheless, the mid-century appears to have been a moment of opportunity for women.18 One of Maynard’s family albums also includes two photographs from Bowmanville with the imprint of “R & H O’Hara: Photographers, Booksellers, Insurance Agents Etc.” Several researchers have speculated that Maynard may have studied or apprenticed with this firm.19 Bowmanville was also home to at least one professional woman photographer in the 1860s: Polly Ann (Pauline) Henry.20 The fact that another woman who would also become a photographer was living in Bowmanville at around the same time as Maynard suggests that there was indeed the opportunity to study photography, or, at the very least, indicates support for women interested in the new medium in this small community. Such support notwithstanding, the Maynards left Bowmanville for the distant colony of Vancouver Island, arriving in Esquimault on the vessel the Sierra Nevada on 6 March 1862.21 They took with them his boot-making equipment, 140

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her photographic supplies (including a complete stock of cameras with photographic plates and materials), and their four children.22 Maynard would later describe her new home as made up of “tents, gullies and swamps and the inhabitants mostly miners. Even then there were a great many people here and the town gave every promise of growth and development.”23 Certainly, there was a large transient population, since Fort Victoria was the only ocean port and therefore the place where miners and adventurers landed to stock up on supplies before heading off to the goldfields. There were, in fact, thirty-seven brick buildings, and that same year Victoria was incorporated as a city. As well, the library was completed and gas streetlights soon appeared. The first mayor was elected and Maynard would later photograph his grandchildren. The predominantly male population of the new city was augmented by the arrival of the Tynemouth (known as the Bride Ship) on 19 September 1862, transporting what the Colonist lasciviously described as “60 select bundles of crinolines.”24 Unfortunately, there are neither journals nor letters in Maynard’s hand from which to gauge her reaction to her new environment. Richard Maynard left immediately for the goldfields of the Stikine River where he once again found success, and Hannah Maynard and the four children settled into a frame house on Johnston Street. When he returned the following year, his wife was installed as a professional photographer of portraits, working from “Mrs R. Maynard’s Photographic Gallery.” The works she created in those early years were conventional portraits and there was a steady market for cartes de visite, sought by those setting off to make their fortunes “up country” and by those who returned successful from the goldfields. In an interview written upon her retirement, Maynard recalled, “There was always plenty of money in the town and business was excellent … Sailors were always coming to us. You see Esquimalt was then in use as a naval base or something of the kind and sailors were always in the town. They were great on photographs.”25 In this setting, cartes de visite – small photographs – were extremely popular. Modelled on society calling cards, they were enthusiastically exchanged and collected; albums were manufactured to hold the numerous cards one collected. The reverse of the card held the address of the photographic studio in elaborate lettering. During this period, Maynard’s imprint was placed within a cartouche surmounted by two cupids; one stands beside a camera mounted on a tripod while the other kneels and presents a portrait of a woman, in mid-century dress, to the viewer. The text reads “Mrs R. Maynard Photographic Artiste, Johnson Street Near Douglas, Victoria, V.I. B.C.” (See Fig. 1.8.) Comparatively few examples of Maynard’s work represent the early years in Victoria, but by the mid-1870s we have a clearer view of her career since this period marked the beginning of a very productive time in the studio. The increase in production could have been the result of the expanded market for photographs; the popularity of new types of images meant a greater demand sal ah ub

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for novelty photographs – including images of royalty, the clergy, politicians, First Nation peoples, Chinese workers, and unusual occupations and sights. Alternately, it may have been due to the fact that Maynard had an established clientele and market. It is even more likely, however, that the reasons for this growth were closer to home. We know that Richard Maynard had travelled to England and on his return voyage purchased new equipment and “photographic supplies at Anthony’s, a major wholesaler” in New York City.26 Then, in 1874, Hannah Maynard moved to a new and larger studio, and by the end of the decade she was able to hire an apprentice. Her increased commitment was likely a result of family demographics. Judging from various city directories and group photographs, the Maynards appear to have been a close-knit family, often sharing the same address; nonetheless, 1874 would have found the four older children quite independent, and Maynard with more time to devote to her work.27 During these years, Maynard’s self-confidence and business acumen were much in evidence. Various newspapers and trade journals bear witness to her continued and open engagement with new techniques, while also recording for public approbation her various memberships and activities. For instance, in March 1877 she shared with the public a lengthy response to an inquiry she had made about printing in carbon. The St. Louis Practical Photographer printed the information and noted: “The above very interesting account was furnished [to Mrs Maynard] … We hope others engaged in the carbon and Labertype processes will also give us some of their experience in such notices, for that is the way to learn, from others’ failures, as well as successes.”28 Maynard was, in effect, a master of self-promotion. Aware of the importance of advertising, she ran a “Notice of Removal” for at least eighteen months in the local newspaper announcing that “Mrs Maynard’s New Photographic Gallery corner of Douglas & Johnson Streets Victoria BC is now prepared to take all kinds of Photographs in all the latest improvements. On hand and for sale views of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. Also all kinds of Photographic Material. As the New Gallery is well lighted I will guarantee satisfaction to all who will favour me with their patronage”29 (Fig. 5.4). Her new studio was half a block west on Johnston and warranted a new imprint; in fact, she used several, including “Mrs R. Maynard, Photographic Artiste, Douglass [sic] St., Victoria, V.I.B.C.” and “From Mrs R. Maynard’s Photographic Studio, cor. Douglas & Johnson Sts., Victoria, B.C.”

Women and Photography: A Model What were the challenges that Maynard faced as a professional woman photographer in colonial Victoria? Photographic historian Naomi Rosenblum suggests that, because the new medium was an “easily achieved skill adaptable to a wide 142

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Fig. 5.4 Hannah Maynard, Hannah and Richard Maynard outside of Mrs. R Maynard’s Studio, c. 1880s.

variety of uses, photography offered women a more congenial discipline than the traditional visual arts of painting and sculpture.”30 While photography may not have been subject to the same biases and academic restrictions, however, it was not an inexpensive process and the majority of women involved were working with male partners or were from the privileged classes. Doubtless, the women who took up photography were not those who readily conformed to the mores that governed Victorian society, and, while women were indeed active participants, there was certainly no expectation that they would use their skills and talents to become professionals. In general, public opinion about female photographers was negative, or patronizing at best, with women considered illequipped to negotiate the cumbersome apparatus. As well, chemical odours and the potential staining power of silver nitrate (a clear liquid that left black stains sal ah ub

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on the clothing and hands) reinforced the perceived unseemliness of the process. Editorials were written and lampoons inked; one of the earliest ridiculing women photographers appeared in Punch in 1853.31 It might be thought that women in the colonies had an advantage over their sisters in the homeland in that they were subject to fewer societal conventions, but it should be remembered that Victoria, of all Canadian cities, sought solace in the comfort of traditions and prided itself on its Englishness. Its citizens were adept at keeping up appearances. Upon arriving in Victoria in 1891, Lady Ishbel Maria Aberdeen, wife of the governor general and author of Through Canada with a Kodak, wrote in her journal: Is it indeed Victoria and Vancouver Island where we have arrived? Has not the “Islander” lost her way, and brought us by a short route back to England, and landed at Torquay? The resemblance has almost a touch of the comical in it – the same scents, the same sort of greenness all round, the same sort of ferns and foliage and surroundings, and on that day, at any rate, the same moist feeling in the air, developing later on into a steady downpour. Then English voices and faces abound, and English customs predominate so largely that the illusion would be complete if we were not recalled to our whereabouts by the presence of the Chinese pigtail everywhere.32 In such an environment, nineteenth-century English attitudes towards women’s capacities and feminine propriety would doubtless have influenced Maynard. Reminiscing about Victoria’s “pioneer days” on the occasion of her retirement, Maynard spoke of the hardships endured by early settlers and alluded to the biases facing a woman in business. In assessing the challenges she faced and gauging the strategies by which she responded to them, however, it is important not to overstate the effect of these societal biases on her practice and reputation. Much of the writing that followed Maynard’s rediscovery by scholars in the 1970s was framed by Linda Nochlin’s provocative question “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971). As the focus of attention turned towards locating and celebrating the contributions women had made to history and the history of art, accounts such as Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race (1979) emphasized the disadvantages and discrimination they faced. Thus, in Women of British Columbia (1975), Jan Gould would write, “Many of these photographs were credited to Mr Maynard as it didn’t occur to people that his wife was just as skilled a photographer as him”; and in Eight Women Photographers in British Columbia (1978), Myrna Cobb and Sher Morgan represented Maynard as opening the city’s first portrait studio (it was, in fact, the first studio opened by a woman) and continued, “But in 1862 a woman in business was considered

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unconventional. A newspaper article written many years later [in 1950] claimed that Hannah’s bold entry into the business world so astonished the prim Victorians that ‘she was for a long time boycotted by the public.’” Not only do Cobb and Morgan repeat the 1950 account verbatim, they maintain that, “until Victoria would accept Hannah as a professional, Richard often claimed recognition for her photographs.”33 In fact, it appears that the opposite was true, with Hannah taking ownership of works by her husband. While they had separate imprints and mounts, numerous examples exist where Hannah is identified with a photograph known to be by Richard Maynard. In at least one case, she was credited with winning a prize that he was awarded for a landscape, The [Victoria] Arm, in 1890.34 Indeed, the history of Hannah and Richard’s working relationship confounds a variety of gender-based expectations and signals to us the complex position Hannah Maynard occupied with regard to Victorian conventions. Upon his return to Victoria from the gold rush, Richard Maynard once again established a boot and shoe business and began to learn photography from his wife. The earliest reference to a photograph by him is a panorama he made of Victoria Harbour in May 1864. Within a decade, Richard Maynard had become a successful photographer in his own right, documenting landscapes for general interest as well as fulfilling commissions from museums, governments, and popular journals. In 1873 and again in 1874 he accompanied the Indian Affairs commissioner, Dr I.W. Powell, on tours of the east coast of Vancouver Island and the Northwest Coast of the British Columbia mainland. He made several trips to the Queen Charlotte Islands and in 1892 travelled to the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea to photograph the seal rookeries. Yet contemporary directories and censuses make no record of Richard Maynard’s considerable photographic employment during much of this period. While Hannah Maynard is identified as a “photographer” in these sources, for the most part Richard Maynard is not. In the census of 1871, for example, his occupation is “boot maker and cabinetmaker”; and in 1881, “leather dealer.” Only in 1891 is it “photographer.” This is in direct contrast to the recorded history of other professional women photographers who were in business with their husbands, such as Montreal’s Eugenie Gagné. Gagné was listed in the Lovell’s city directory as a photographer from 1886 to 1899 and produced photographs under her own imprint. In the 1891 census, however, only her husband, Edouard, was recorded as a photographer; Eugenie was given no occupation.35 Today, the decision as to whether Hannah or Richard Maynard took a particular photograph is often based on the subject matter, with the accepted view being that Hannah Maynard was a studio and portrait photographer working indoors, while Richard Maynard was solely a landscape photographer who seldom included people in his compositions. In fact, throughout their professional lives,

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“both Hannah and Richard Maynard accepted commissions to produce documentary photographs for a diverse assortment of clients including provincial and federal Indian agents, U.S. explorers, museum collectors, and civil servants.”36 Certainly, we know that the Maynards made several working trips together – Vancouver Island (1879), the Queen Charlotte Islands (1888), and Banff (1887 and/or 1889) – on which both practised landscape photography. One such trip was a ten-day journey around Vancouver Island in August 1879 aboard the side-wheeler steamboat, the Princess Louise, with a “party of 40 ladies and gentlemen.” Among the Maynards’ more eminent fellow passengers were the former premier and a Supreme Court judge.37 A photograph of some of these travellers and one of the Princess Louise at Comox Wharf with the mountains in the distance bear Hannah Maynard’s imprint; more unusually, we have a personal account of the journey written in her hand. Although the entries are abbreviated and punctuation erratic, the few handwritten pages tell us something of Maynard’s personality and self-deprecating humour as well as her determination – despite the rain and fog – to see the sights, take photographs, and purchase souvenirs. Several entries are noteworthy: Thursday 14th.: Nice morning but too foggy to take photographs … We had tea, then left the ship in company with several ladies and gentlemen & paid a visit to the Indians that plundered the Bark “Mustang” a few years ago – We bought some baskets from them also gave them a few presents… Friday 15th.: Up at 5 o’clock to try to take some photos … but found it very foggy … a great lot of Indians came off to the steamer this morning, offering things for sale … Sat 16th.: Lovely morning so we were called early to get up. So we are now on top of a high rock taking a view of the Indian Camp whilst there Maynard down to his tent me on the top with the Cameras 3 Indians came up with nothing on but a piece of old blanket – however they did not kill me we took two negatives when the whistle blew for the starting. So it was pack up and off for the steamer – Met with an accident broke our bath bottle & spilled part of the bath. Monday 18th.: Nearly all the Indians are gone off to a potlatch. Could get nothing to buy.38 Maynard was not merely looking for souvenirs of her travels; she was buying a certain kind of object – one whose significance could not be overlooked by visitors to her home. In the eighteenth century, aesthetic taste had been viewed 146

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as a largely innate quality reserved for the well born; however, by Maynard’s time it had become a trait to be cultivated – the draping of a table or arrangement of bric-a-brac on a mantelpiece with a certain panache established one’s artistic and aesthetic credentials. And particular kinds of object, the more exotic the better, had heightened significance in communicating an artistic flair. As Ruth Phillips’s chapter in this book explores, there was extensive crossover between Aboriginal and anglo-North American handcrafts during the nineteenth century. And, though by 1879 a genuine mid-century admiration for Aboriginal craft had begun to be replaced by the scientific racism of anthropological investigation, Aboriginal handcrafts continued to find their place in the homes of cultured Europeans and North American settlers. Photographs of the interior of Maynard’s home (Fig. 5.5) reveal just such stylishness and a studied awareness of contemporary aesthetics. Despite her disappointment in “having nothing to buy”

Fig. 5.5 Hannah Maynard, [On Display: Maynard and Her Souvenirs], c. 1893.

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on the 1879 trip, she had at some point been successful in her pursuit of souvenirs – for photographs of the Maynard home reveal numerous objets d’art drawn from a variety of cultures: Japanese fans, Haida argillite carvings from the Queen Charlotte Islands, and a beaded whimsy photograph frame (likely collected when the family was living in Ontario).

“House Beautiful”: Contemporary Aesthetics As an active collector of such objects, Maynard participated in a nineteenthcentury culture of art and design that was very much in flux, altered not so much through the teachings of art and design reform as through socio-cultural political changes. In particular, the Industrial Revolution had extended patronage of the arts to the middle classes, and this art, to be successful, had to be one that was democratized and commercially viable, a commodity available and desirable to the middle-class consumer. For the first time, middle-class women had a role to play – as consumers, as producers, and as arbiters of taste. Typically, the women who were successful in the commercial home arts were not only talented and strong-willed but well positioned in society. In a business proposal written in the late 1870s by the American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany to Candace Wheeler (an American textile and interior designer), the existing assumptions regarding women, and women in business, are elucidated: “It is the real thing, you know; a business, not a philanthropy or an amateur educational scheme. We are going after the money there is in art, but the art is there, all the same. If your husband will let you, you had better join us and take up embroidery and decorative needlework. There are great possibilities in it.”39 Hannah Maynard may not have begun with the social connections that Candace Wheeler possessed, but she had the support of her husband (whose profits from the gold rush had financed the businesses), access to a wide variety of exemplary models (literature, exhibitions, and individuals), and, most important, the determination to succeed. For there was indeed money to be made as the boundaries between art, home, and commercialism crumbled. The 1880s had ushered in a period of economic prosperity in Canada and the urban elite adopted art and culture as their leitmotif. This was manifested in a desire for the promotion of good taste within the domestic interior. Yet there was anxiety around the best way to accomplish this. The fluidity that had granted a measure of social mobility to Victorians also brought with it a sense of insecurity – how could one be sure of one’s place in a shifting society? It became not a question of who you were, but what you had and how you displayed it. Prescriptive literature on these subjects abounded and the domestic advice offered by late-Victorian authorities was of one voice: an attractive, tastefully appointed parlour was a sign of respectability. Taste was not personal; instead, 148

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it was something sanctioned by society. Taste had moral values and ignoring the taste of the period was a sign of something very wrong. It fell to the lot of Canadian women to acquire and proselytize this taste within their homes – specifically the parlour, for it was there that family and friends and carefully screened strangers were permitted to enter. In that part of the home, the “angel of the household” and her domestic and decorative skills were on display – photographs and embroideries alike becoming what Pierre Bourdieu termed an accumulation of cultural capital.40 Art was a common currency of the young Dominion, and handcrafted objects played a vital role. Art with a capital “A” served as a prefix for embroidery, furniture, photographs, and all manner of home decoration. Indeed, the display of ceramics, glass, embroidery, crazy quilts, and photographs was considered essential. With cultural capital taking such a variety of forms, the task of recognizing and displaying it became the recurrent theme in advice literature, lectures, and exhibitions during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Advicegivers lined up to help the newly prosperous spend their money “morally” and “artistically.” The American publication Treasures of Use and Beauty: An Epitome of the Choicest Gems of Wisdom, History, Reference and Recreation (1883) was typical in that it followed a familiar format wherein readers were invited into the home, their voyage (and education) beginning with the hall (the index to the whole house) and culminating with that most important of spaces – the parlour – where one could find the physical manifestation of the public definition of good taste. On display, one would discover objets d’art such as crazy quilts, china painting, and photographs. Readers were instructed in the art of parlour decoration: Care should be taken in arranging that the room is not overcrowded. There should be a few good pictures, or painted plaques mounted in plush, hung on the wall; a portrait may be placed on a common easel, and draped with a scarf in old gold or peacock blue, and tiny lambrequins, painted or embroidered may hang beneath a bracket supporting a bust or flower vase … A sash made of small pieces of bright colored plush or silk in crazy work may be flung across the table, the ends drooping very low. The mantle-piece may be covered with a corresponding sash, over which place a small clock as center piece, and arrange ornaments on each side – statuettes, bannerettes, flower holders, small Japanese fans, pieces of odd china, painted candles in small sconces, may all find a place on the mantel.41 The majority of authors were enthusiastic in including photography within the decorative scheme, with many going so far as to combine photography and embroidery – embroidered frames serving as a means to embellish a cherished sal ah ub

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image. In the 1888 publication From Kitchen to Garret: Hints for Young Householders, the author, Mrs Jane Ellen Panton (daughter of Victorian artist William Powell Frith, and author of Homes of Taste: Economical Hints and The Gentlewoman’s Home), argued that people who cared for their houses were much better “mentally and morally” than those who did not, and provided explicit directions on how to incorporate photographs into a tasteful parlour: Put straight across the corner of the wall a small black table … covered at the top with a Turkish antimacassar; this holds a plant in the daytime and the lamp at night, and is large enough to hold all the month’s magazines … above this a black corner bracket for china, crowned by a big pot to hold grasses or bulrushes, can be hung on the wall; and in front of the table would stand a square stool, holding a large plant and pot, heavy enough to hold its own should any one come near enough to knock it over, were it too light … next the fire place, put your own particular chair, leaving room for a stool of some kind, that is broad and low, and can hold your work-basket … your favourite book, or your newspaper stand with the paper knife attached; and on the desk above and at the side of your chair hang a sabot for flowers, your favourite photographs, and any pet piece of china or ornaments you may fancy. One of mine consists of a mandarin’s fan and case; the case is embroidered in silk, and gives a very pretty bit of colour.42 Photographs and the display of photographs were increasingly an integral element of decor – if deemed to be artistic. Directions abounded for the manufacture of photographs and photograph-related items: albums, photograph frames, and even “photograph envelopes.” The latter were considered necessary for the “accumulation of photographs beyond the capacity of the family album.”43 That the photographs would always be available and would be subject to continual scrutiny is specified in the directions – for the flaps were to remain loose “as the envelope is to be placed upon a table, and this method allows the photos to be examined without fear of tearing their edges in removing from and returning to the envelope.”44 A Canadian needlework guide included a special offer for pre-stamped pieces of linen to make an embroidered picture frame that was advertised as “a patriotic design … a very effective and pretty reminder of our absent ones.”45 Yet handcrafted domestic objects, in particular embroidery and china painting, were more than a signifier of taste, for they served as a generic symbol of industry of a female sort. These crafts underlined other womanly accomplishments as well, since, according to arbiters of female decorum, one could take up “fancy work only when all other duties had been discharged.”46 As the editors of The American Women’s Home, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 150

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stated, none had “a right to put a stitch of ornament on any article of dress or furniture … until she is sure she can secure time for all her social, intellectual, benevolent, and religious duties.”47 The working of fashionable domestic crafts had taken on a moral and ethical dimension; exemplars had to be well considered. Women were assured (from all sides) that their production had significance beyond the work itself. Thus, the authors of Treasures of Use and Beauty emphasized that interior decoration reflected women’s inherent feminine – therefore domestic – nature: “It is almost impossible for the average female mind to confront unmoved the delightful possibilities now afforded by the many new and beautiful, yet inexpensive, articles of home adornment. The housekeeper has full scope to develop her taste in both purchasing and making household elegancies.”48 Residents of Victoria could find worthy models of both good taste and feminine rectitude right on their doorsteps, for the city was a celebrated outpost of the Empire and entertained numerous illustrious visitors. Various vice-regal delegations spent time in the city and the Maynards documented the parades and the resplendent arches that marked each visit. Lady Dufferin’s arrival in Victoria in 1876 featured social events including “at homes,” a “drawing room,” a garden party, and a huge ball for five hundred people.49 Like many of her class, Lady Dufferin was an amateur artist involved with philanthropic work. Here was a role model who understood how to put domestic space to good use while demonstrating the initiative that a woman might display in the cultural sphere. Perhaps none were more influential than the Marquis of Lorne and his wife, Princess Louise (1878–83). As the daughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Louise came under considerable scrutiny. She was an artist and follower of the Aesthetic Movement – patroness of the British Lady’s Needlework Society and the Montreal Decorative Art Society. She wrote, sculpted, painted in oils and watercolours, and, in the Aesthetic manner, worked on panels, designed appliqué, and embroidered portières and wallpapers. She painted a door panel in her official residence, Rideau Hall, Ottawa, with trompe l’oeil apple blossoms, and sketched her way across Canada, spending ten weeks in Victoria. The pairing of a royal personage with the Aesthetic Movement was equated with good taste and the role of her Royal Highness was described as “the artistic promulgation of taste.”50 The Daily Colonist recorded that Princess Louise made sketches “for transmission to Her Majesty” and that in her honour the ladies of Victoria had arranged for Ellen Phillips, an orphan at St Ann’s Convent School, to make “an artistically embroidered blue satin handkerchief which received general admiration and was graciously accepted.”51 As well, the principal spokesman of the Aesthetic Movement, Oscar Wilde, who held that art should serve as the outward manifestation of an inner sensibility, toured and lectured in eastern Canada in the autumn of 1882. Excerpts from his two presentations, “The Decorative sal ah ub

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Fig. 5.6 Hannah Maynard, Mrs Carlo [Petronilla] Bossi, c. 1890.

Arts” and “House Beautiful,” were printed and reprinted in various forms, and Canadians responded to Wilde’s “greenery-yallery” palette by incorporating sunflowers, peacock feathers, bulrushes, water lilies, and Japanese fans into their decors.52 Victoria boasted a burgeoning art community – with the ornamentals taught to young ladies at institutions such as St Ann’s Convent School, and the applied arts taught at the Mechanical Institute. A studio portrait of Mrs Carlo (Petronilla) Bossi (Fig. 5.6), a graduate of St Ann’s, provides some insight into the continued importance placed on these accomplishments within the social sphere that Hannah Maynard was documenting. Petronilla Bossi was the Canadianborn daughter of an Italian immigrant who, at the age of fourteen, married a forty-one-year-old stonemason from Italy.53 Like many of the Victoria establishment, Carlo Bossi had made his money in the goldfields, and he invested in an Italian grocery store, hotels, and real estate. His wife was admired for her skills as an amateur painter and needlewoman and her accomplishments were celebrated in the local newspapers and in several portraits by Maynard. In 1882 the Daily Colonist recorded that her “pretty pair of window curtains in crochet” had received notice at the Agricultural Association Fair.54 Four years later, the 152

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Victoria Daily Times enthused over an exhibition of Mrs Bossi’s handwork, describing it as evidence of good taste: “As two of her pieces lay in cases under a glass cover many doubted whether so beautiful specimens of needle and hand craft could be executed in Victoria. The opera cloak, table scarfs and fancy aprons were perfect gems, as were also her crochet work, the coral basket, while the seed and leather wreath that commanded so much admiration were exquisite specimens of her well known taste. Mrs Bossi may well feel proud of her work as it evinces a talent of a very high order for the artistic and the beautiful.”55 In Maynard’s studio photograph of 1891, Mrs Bossi is portrayed as well corseted and self-confident and is surrounded by evidence of her accomplishments. She stands before her easel and holds a palette, brushes, and mahlstick. On the easel there is an unfinished flower painting and on the floor an unframed landscape. Besides the paintings there are numerous examples of fashionable domestic needlework, including an embroidered footstool, a patterned chair, and a striped runner. Here we have an image of a woman defined by fashionable domestic activities; the inclusion of needlework in Maynard’s portrait of Petronilla Bossi is in acknowledgment of the sitter’s elevated social position as well as her accomplishments.56 Similarly, the insertion of well-considered textiles and domestic crafts in Maynard’s self-portraits (Figs. 5.3 and 5.5) served to remind the contemporary viewer of the familiar background of respectability that framed her qualifications as a professional photographer and aesthete. Here was someone worthy of the patronage of the carriage trade. But, in addition to this incorporation of textiles as signifiers of respectable femininity, Maynard also used the language of domestic textiles in a second, and more remarkable, way – as a means to selfpromotion. The former tactic modulated the latter, making it more acceptable. In this second instance, Maynard directly drew upon domestic craft in her promotional materials – for instance, the patching together of photographs in a crazy-quilt composition, or the superimposition of photographic images on plates and vases in a tribute to another Victorian passion, china painting. She referenced quilting, and in particular crazy quilts, in an advertising campaign that lasted at least fifteen years. Unlike bed quilts, which had a history of utility, crazy quilts were the ultimate decorative object in the last quarter of the century (Fig. 5.7).57 They were influenced by the colours and subjects made popular by the Aesthetic Movement and were composed of assorted small pieces of delicate and heavyweight dress silks that were joined and embellished by a variety of embroidery stitches. As the advice literature suggested, they were to be draped across sofas, pianos, or shelves in the parlour. These intricate mosaics served as a very public encyclopedia of a lady’s taste – her fashion sense judged not only by her sewing skills but also by her selection of fabrics and stitches as well as her choice of images appropriated from contemporary art movements. Among the cognoscenti, it was agreed that “to be endurable, [crazy patchwork] must sal ah ub

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Fig. 5.7 Unknown, Crazy Quilt (detail), Canadian, c. 1885.

after all, have ‘method in its madness.’”58 Distinct artistic skill in grouping and harmonizing of colours was indispensable to the beauty of the final result. Hannah Maynard took note, and cut, pieced, and “appliquéd” existing photographs to create her own crazy quilts, which she then photographed. An unusual example (Fig. 5.8) is a photomontage that she created using landscapes attributed to her husband. That the BC Archives hold several copies suggests that it was a form of promotion, and a popular one at that. On one copy, a handwritten inscription reads: “80 views of the Frazer [sic] River, Photographed by R. Maynard.” Each photograph was cut into an irregular shape and then “pieced” together with others cut in the same way. The edges were defined by a thick piping of putty not unlike the contrasting silk threads that framed the patches that made up crazy quilts. In a portrait of Maynard, she is seated at a lady’s writing desk, wearing white lace lappet and cuffs; at her feet is a small footstool covered in a crazy-quilt fabric (Fig. 5.3). Maynard’s awareness of, and debt to, popular textile techniques becomes obvious when we consider the promotional cabinet cards, which she referred to as “gems,” that she created and distributed annually between 1880 and 1895 (Fig. 5.9). Before this time the term gem had been used by photographers to refer 154

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Fig. 5.8 Hannah Maynard, [Quilted Landscape] 80 Views on the Frazer River, c. 1885.

to tiny photographic images (usually tintypes) that were suitable for mounting in jewellery.59 In constructing her Gems of British Columbia, Maynard exhibited the patience and persistence that Rozsika Parker identifies as the defining characteristics uniting femininity and embroidery in the public imagination for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.60 Maynard’s “gems” were intended as local marketing tools to be sent out to those who had visited the studio and in particular those who were documenting their family’s growth that year. As the Practical Photographer explained to its readers, “each annual card consists of a reduced photograph of all the children taken during the past year. One of these sal ah ub

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Fig. 5.9 Hannah Maynard, Gems of British Columbia 1891.

cards is sent to each mother whose child is represented therein.”61 In a period of high child mortality, photographs of infants had an even greater significance to the family. Like the quilts and embroideries they referenced, these cabinet cards were constructed to fit comfortably within Victorian parlours – on mantels, on tables, in albums – and always served as a visual manifestation of contemporary sensibilities and sentimentality. By combining diverse photographic images of babies and children, Maynard would produce new works, reconstructing, repositioning, and rephotographing the various elements. Numerous examples remain, and their formal complexity mirrors the visual history of quilts. Simple geometrical shapes (patchwork) following a grid-like pattern gave way to popular pictorial silhouettes (appliqué) – horseshoe, crown, turtle shell, artist’s palette, wreath, and even a fountain. Photographs where tiny patchworks of babies appeared on pitchers, in abalone shells and covering the leaves of a dieffenbachia were common. Images of the same children were reused in different compositions and these “crazy quilts” were in turn reduced further to reappear in later editions. Each year the number of faces multiplied – from hundreds to thousands – by far outstripping population growth and making a mockery of the idea that these were the children she had photographed that year. By framing the 1891 collection with a border of earlier gems, Maynard incorporated approximately 22,000 faces! As a publicity campaign, Maynard’s quilt-inspired gems were a brilliant success. She circulated her compositions far and wide for public scrutiny and approbation and she could not have been disappointed in the results. When the editors of the St. Louis Photographer published the 1885 version, they wrote: “Again we present our readers with British Columbia Gems, from the art gallery of Mrs R. Maynard, in the great North West. This is the fifth year of the gathering, and they increase in number and variety year by year. Mrs Maynard is deserving of much praise for her skill and patience in the arrangement of these precious gems. Indeed, where can be found gems more precious.”62 So enthusiastic were the editors that prose would not suffice to capture their fervour; an eleven-verse poetic encomium followed, in which the artist’s contributions were admired, her worth was noted, and (in a concluding burst of gusto) readers were exhorted to “bless the artist Maynard’s name.” A full decade later, both the photographer and her gems were still much admired. The May 1894 issue of the Practical Photographer reproduced a photograph of Maynard taken on her sixtieth birthday, noting that her Gems of British Columbia “are very clever productions, and bear evidence of much ability and perseverance.”63 Maynard obviously welcomed public scrutiny, sending not only the “gems” but also a variety of her photographs into the public domain. Her efforts at selfpublicity were actively assisted by the photographic press; indeed an American journal of 1887 proposed that “photographers would not lose anything were they to send to this lady artist and secure a set of these views, and frame and sal ah ub

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hang them in their reception rooms. They will prove immensely entertaining to patrons while waiting.”64 This was Hannah Maynard’s community and she knew her market and her audience; photographs were her social network. Seattle’s Weekly Pacific Tribune recognized her talents and her commitment to promotion, writing, “Some weeks ago while in Victoria, the writer passed by the photograph gallery of Mrs R. Maynard, and, noticing the excellent character of the work, and learning then that she was on the upper Fraser and Cariboo road taking views, gave her and her gallery on our return home a truthful and complimentary mention. Judging from the handsome collection of stereoscopic views received from her by mail yesterday, we fancy that she appreciates the use of printer’s ink, and believes in paying for it when she gets it.” The author goes on to describe the images sent and concludes that “her work will compare favorably with that of artists anywhere on the coast.”65 Flush with this success, Hannah and Richard Maynard made a final move to a purpose-built brick building in 1892 (Fig. 5.10). The new “Maynard Building” on Pandora Avenue housed both “Maynard’s Photographic Gallery” and “Maynard’s Boot and Shoe Store.” A contemporary photograph shows a flatfronted, two-storey building with triangular pediment inscribed with the family name.66 Maynard’s studio with its large windows occupied the second floor. A small, flat-roofed structure to the left was a separate photographic gallery where views and photographs could be seen and purchased. Numerous photographs and promotional materials can be seen covering the windows of the gallery. It was in this new studio that Hannah Maynard created her more experimental works, including multiple images and “Living Sculptures.”67 The multiple-exposure images are considered by photographic historian David Mattison to be her most accomplished works, “reflecting a technical maturity that few, if any, other contemporaries in Canada could equal.”68 These works are autobiographical and have overt domestic narratives. They are also often amusing. In what is perhaps Maynard’s best-known experimental photograph (Fig. 5.1), domestic references abound. Besides the painted backdrop, Maynard has included a tea set, fringed tablecloth, gilded picture frame, embroidered stool, and carpet, with the intention of recreating a tasteful parlour, where “most respectable people [could] feel at home.”69 The composition is a simple triangle. On the left, a proper Victorian lady, Maynard, is seated at the table and tips the teapot to pour tea; on the right, another Maynard, with saucer in hand, looks towards us expectantly. Both are oblivious of the third Maynard, who is about to cause havoc, for she projects from the picture frame on the wall and is in the process of emptying her cup onto the head of the Maynard on the right. There is no attempt to confuse, merely perplex, as each Maynard is dressed in the same garb. She has pieced together a new narrative, and the viewer is to make of it what they will. 158

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Fig. 5.10 Maynard Studio, Maynard’s Float on Pandora St., c. 1890.

In other multiple portraits Maynard incorporated what she called “Living Statuary” or “Statuary from Life,” with people draped in black velvet, their faces, hair, and shoulders whitened and made to look like statues and then photographed. Maynard created a “bust” of herself, but most of these works featured young children. In one complex work (Fig. 5.11), a double exposure of Maynard is coupled with a living statue of her grandson. Maynard appears on the left and gazes quizzically through her lorgnette towards the centre of the composition at her doppelgänger, who stares directly at the viewer. The two are identical, clothed in the same dress with fashionable leg-o-mutton sleeves, dark hat, and dark gloves. Meanwhile, Maynard’s grandson (also named Maynard) seems mesmerized by the “bust” of himself. On the wall is a large, framed photograph of Lillie, the Maynards’ youngest daughter. On the floor, propped against the easel, is a photograph of daughter Emma, and in the centre, resting sal ah ub

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Fig. 5.11 Hannah Maynard, [Remembering with Photo Sculpture] (multiple exposure), c. 1895.

on the easel, is a likeness of her daughter-in-law Adelaide, the mother of the young boy. The work is an example of the photograph’s privileged position as a conduit of memory – a means of linking past and present – for Lillie, Emma, and Adelaide were all dead when it was made, Lillie from typhus in 1883, Adelaide from a drowning accident in 1892, and Emma only a year later from unknown causes. The remaining family members in this photo wanted to be remembered as remembering. The photograph also underlines Maynard’s involvement with the Spiritualist movement, a creed founded on personal communication with the supernatural and the afterlife. In a period defined by mourning and consolation literature, the new faith offered much to a bereaved mother. It has been argued elsewhere that Spiritualism provided a forum for women by encouraging them to play an active role.70 That Maynard was indeed an active member is mentioned in an interview with her son Albert in 1931.71 Several group photographs of members attending the Spiritualist picnic at Cordova Bay in 1886 are attributed to her. The respectability of Spiritualism at this time is indicated by the fact that Victoria’s mayor, James Fell, was the president of the local Spiritualist society. Neverthe160

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Fig. 5.12 Hannah Maynard, [The Thread of Life – Multi-Tasking] (multiple exposure), c. 1893–97.

less, given Maynard’s need to safeguard her professional reputation, it is not surprising that she did not flirt with the controversial forms of “spirit photography” that had taken hold of the public imagination. Rather, in images such as this one, she tended to include visual references to, and photographs of, the deceased in family portraits.72 Variously inspired by the spaces, personages, and accoutrements of the domestic, Hannah Maynard’s experimental photographs play with that reality in a variety of ways. In at least one self-portrait, for example, there is evidence of “early Photoshopping” – white paint creating a tidy nipped-in waist and making wrinkles and double chins disappear. Strangely enough, “to embroider” means to embellish and in literature this may infer the telling of lies. Maynard enjoyed embellishing her life experiences, and her works, and she used the language of domestic craft to this end. Her narratives are intriguing, the details beguiling, the meaning ambiguous. In a final photograph (Fig. 5.12), we have an inventory of domestic textiles – and four Hannah Maynards. Connecting the figures is a taut thread (of life?) formed as Hannah (on the right) rolls a ball of yarn drawn from the skein held sal ah ub

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by the Hannah on the left. The fashionable domestic textiles in the photo are both machine- and handmade and include crochet lace, lace panels, tablecloths, bobbin lace, an unfinished embroidered runner, and a cut-work teacloth. Most fascinating is a diamond-shaped piece of fabric in the foreground on which there is a portrait of Lillie (seen also in Fig. 5.5). This is a cyanotype – an early photographic process that was taken up, at the turn of the century, by embroiderers and quilters seeking ways to personalize their works. When considered as a whole, this group of photographs resonates with the values of objects of association. Whether involving references to the deceased and the importance of identifying familial ties or the use of needlework as a signifier of femininity, respectability, or aesthetic taste, the narratives are multilayered.

Conclusion Like the photographs themselves, interpretations of Hannah Maynard’s contributions are multiple, but, without an understanding of contemporary attitudes towards domestic textile production, a significant and well-considered aspect of her art is missed. Through their decorative vocabulary and domestic accoutrements, Maynard’s photographs function as an encoded interface between the public and the private. She conscientiously marketed and represented a respectable lifestyle, with clothing that was deemed suitable by the standards of the time and studio props – from painted backdrops to upholstered chairs and aspidistras – that were accurate reflections of middle-class aspirations. In what may be understood as overt references to propriety, she was always “Mrs Richard Maynard – Photographic Artiste,” and her own family gazed out from cartes de visite and portraits. Even her studio – despite its separate street entrance – was physically part of the family home, the parlour (and respectability) only a portière away. Through this skilful combination of the professional and the domestic, Hannah Maynard created a space in which her peers could acknowledge her as a “lady artist.”73 By referencing domestic crafts in her photographs, Maynard emphasized her status as a lady even as she sanctioned her role as a professional businesswoman. This was a slippery slope in Victorian times, but Hannah Maynard made few false steps. Her professional confidence and avid self-promotion might have proven detrimental (vainglory in a woman was abhorred by the Victorians) had she not tempered it with a dry wit and the familiar rhetoric of Victorian domesticity. Hers was a carefully orchestrated performance as she set about creating objects for an emerging market of female consumers desiring to create tasteful interiors. From the perspective of craft history, Maynard is intriguing – adding a rare voice to an ongoing narrative regarding craft in Canada. While at times slyly 162

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mocking the rituals of middle-class domesticity, Hannah Maynard consistently employed the handcrafted material markers of good taste and respectability to reinforce her own position as a businesswoman. When she retired in 1912, Maynard was quoted in the Victoria Daily Colonist as saying that “she was not tired of work or study … but [that] she fancies that having worked for so long it is about time she made way for the younger generation.”74 Hannah Maynard died six years later, in 1918, at the age of eighty-four. It is perhaps fitting that at her funeral the hymn Just As I Am was sung.

notes 1 Lady Elizabeth Eastlake [Elizabeth Rigby], “Photography,” Quarterly Review, 101, no. 202 (1857): 442. 2 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists (London: Women’s Press 1987), 2. 3 She held this position from approximately 1897 to 1902, documenting both officers and prisoners who were taken to her studio to be photographed. The photographs are in the archives of the Victoria Police Museum. 4 Charles Willoughby to Hannah Maynard, add. Mss. 1077, vol. 20, file 7, bc Archives (bca). 5 “A Woman Photographer,” Seattle Weekly Pacific Tribune, 29 May 1878, 4. 6 “Editorial Chit-Chat,” St. Louis Practical Photographer, 3, no. 9 (1879). 7 “Worked Here for Fifty Years,” Victoria Daily Colonist, 29 September 1912, 10. 8 See its excellent online image collection of Maynard’s photographs: www.bcarchives.bc.ca. 9 Most of the conventional images were made using the standard collodion wetplate process. Maynard also made daguerreotypes, tintypes, and albumen prints. For more information on these processes, see George Gilbert, Photography: The Early Years: A Historical Guide for Collectors (New York: Harper and Row 1980), 40. For technical information on Maynard’s experimental photographs, see David Mattison, “The Multiple Self of

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10

11

12

13

14 15

Hannah Maynard,” Vanguard, 9, no. 8 (1980): 14–19; and Petra Rigby Watson, The Photographs of Hannah Maynard: 19th Century Portraits (Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr College of Art and Design, 1992). Claire Weissman Wilks, The Magic Box: The Eccentric Genius of Hannah Maynard (Toronto: Exile Editions 1980); and Robert J. Belton, Sights of Resistance: Approaches to Canadian Visual Culture (Calgary: University of Calgary Press 2001), 198. Peter Wollheim, “Hannah Maynard: Participant and Portent,” Canadian Forum, 61 (March 1981): 35–6; and Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press 1994), 46. Belton, Sights of Resistance, 198; and catalogue entries for Adriane Munro [identified as ‘AM’] in K.A. Findlay, ed., “A Woman’s Place”: Art and the Role of Women in the Cultural Formation of Victoria, BC, 1850s–1920s (Victoria: Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery 2004), 63, 64. “Our Photo Album,” St. Louis and Canadian Photographer, 3, no. 7 (July 1894): 341. Belton, Sights of Resistance, 198. For further discussion, see Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch (London: Women’s Press 1984); Max Allen and Wendy Harker, Gather beneath the Banner: Political and Religious Banners of the Women’s

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17 18

19

20

Christian Temperance Union, 1877–1932 (Toronto: Museum of Textiles 1999); and Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988). Joyce Wieland (1931–98) employed a similar strategy in the late 1960s to challenge mid-century hierarchies (i.e., modernism). True Patriot Love (1971) was the first major National Gallery of Canada exhibition devoted to the work of a living Canadian woman artist. J.B. Kerr, Biographical Dictionary of Well-Known British Columbians, with a Historical Sketch (Vancouver: Kerr and Begg 1980), 230. Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, 39. The popularity of photography among women in Canada at that time is seen in the burgeoning number of advertisements for photographic equipment and detailed advice on the ladies pages of local newspapers. See, for example, “How to Make Photographs by the Gelatin Dry-Plate Process,” Ladies Manual of Art (Philadelphia: American Mutual Library Association 1887); and Lucy Maud Montgomery, “Photography as a Hobby: Cynthia’s Advice to Beginners,” in “Around the Table,” Halifax Daily Echo, 12 May 1902. David Mattison, “Richard Maynard, Photographer of Victoria, B.C.,” History of Photography, 9, no. 2 (1985): 128; and Wilks, The Magic Box, 5. Polly Ann Henry (1825–1913) was an American who married a local farmer, George Henry, at Bowmanville in 1848. She had a photographic studio in Oshawa (which was purchased by portrait photographer James E. Hoyt in 1865) but prior to this had run a studio for a year in Bowmanville. The William C. Darrah Collection of cartes de visite at the Pennsylvania State Special Collection Library has two portraits by Polly Ann Henry and one by Hannah Maynard: cdv 60718 and cdv 60718.

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21 The passenger list of the Sierra Nevada indicates that the photographer FrançoisGeorge Claudet (1837–1906), the youngest son of the acclaimed photographer Antoine-François Jean Claudet (mentioned by Lady Eastlake in the article cited at the beginning of this chapter), was also on board. F.-G. Claudet was not only a photographer but also managed the assay office and mint at New Westminster. He had been sent to San Francisco by Governor James Douglas and was returning to Victoria with various equipment including photographic supplies. It is likely he would have been known to the Maynards. 22 Myrna Cobb and Sher Morgan, Eight Women Photographers of British Columbia, 1860–1978 (Victoria: S. Morgan and M. Cobb 1978), 4. 23 “Worked Here for Fifty Years,” 10. 24 “The Tynemouth at San Francisco,” Victoria Colonist, 17 September 1862, 3. 25 “Worked Here for Fifty Years,” 10. 26 Richard Maynard, “Richard Maynard’s Diary,” Mss. 1077, vol. 47, file 2a, bca. 27 George, aged twenty-two, was already married; Zela was twenty (married in 1879); Albert was seventeen (married in 1878); and Emma Jane was fifteen (married 1879). 28 “How to Print in Carbon: Extract of Letter to Mrs. Maynard, Victoria, British Columbia,” St. Louis Practical Photographer, 1, no. 3 (1877): 74. 29 The advertisement ran from 23 October 1874 to at least 3 May 1876 in the Victoria Daily Colonist. 30 Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, 7. 31 “A Photographic Positive” was drawn by Cuthbert Bede (the Reverend Edward Bradley, 1827–89). It depicted a mother and a daughter in fashionable crinoline dresses, requesting help from a chemist to remove the dark smudges from the daughter’s face. Unless the stains, caused by splashes of silver nitrate, are removed, the daughter “will not be fit to be seen at Lady Mayfair’s tonight.” Punch, 25 (30

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32

33

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July 1853): 48. Potassium cyanide was typically used to remove such stains. Ishbel Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, The Canadian Journal of Lady Aberdeen: 1893–1898, ed. John Saywell (Montreal: Champlain Society 1960), 146–7. Given Lady Aberdeen’s comment, it is refreshing to know that Maynard’s probate, executed by her son Albert, states that she disposed of her equipment in about 1910 to a Chinese photographer named Peter on Government Street. See Mattison, “Richard Maynard,” 129. Cobb and Morgan, Eight Women Photographers, 4; the article to which they refer, but do not cite, is J.K. Nesbitt, “Old Homes and Families,” a nostalgic compilation of historic anecdotes published in the Victoria Daily Colonist, 30 July 1950, Magazine Section. In a recent turn of events, photography historian David Mattison suggests that the “eccentric” works attributed to Maynard were perhaps the creation of her male apprentice, Arthur S. Rappertie (1854–1923). See David Mattison, “What about Rappertie?” Victoria Times Colonist, Sunday Monitor, 12 January 2003, 11. The St. Louis and Canadian Photographer, 8, no. 2 (1890): 461, reported that “Mrs R Maynard of Victoria B.C. has been awarded first prize in a photographic contest instituted by the West Shore Publishing Co.” In fact, first prize had been awarded to Richard, and the photograph had been reproduced in West Shore, 4 October 1890, 115. Michelle Macleod, “Mme. Gagné: In Her Shoes, through Her Lens,” undergraduate essay, Concordia University, April 2009. A copy of the essay is held in the files of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, Concordia University. Carol J. Williams, Framing the West: Race, Gender and Photographic Frontiers in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003), 77. Victoria Daily Standard, 13 August 1879, 3.

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38 Hannah Maynard, “Around Vancouver Island on Princess Louise, August 13–22, 1879,” handwritten account, box 3/3, file 6, bca. 39 Amelia Peck and Carol Irish, Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875–1900 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press 2001), 38. Wheeler was the acknowledged national expert on decorative textiles and interiors. She founded the Society of Decorative Art in 1877. 40 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1990), 31. 41 Mrs G.W. Mack et al., Treasures of Use and Beauty: An Epitome of the Choicest Gems of Wisdom, History, Reference and Recreation (Chicago: F.B. Dickerson 1883), 359, 362. 42 Mrs [Jane Ellen] Panton, From Kitchen to Garret: Hints for Young Householders, 4th ed. (London: Ward and Downey 1888), 78; emphasis added. 43 Addie E. Heron, Fancy Work for Pleasure and Profit (Chicago: Danks and Company 1894), 203. 44 Ibid. This same compendium also provides instructions for photograph frames decorated with embroidery and pyrography. 45 Corticelli Home Needlework Magazine, January 1900, insert. 46 Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home or Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful and Christian Homes (New York: J.B. Ford and Company 1869), 175. 47 Ibid. 48 Mack, Treasures of Use and Beauty, 358. 49 Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Hariot Georgina [Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava], My Canadian Journal, 1872–1878 (London: John Murray 1891), 282–4. 50 “Current Topics,” London Free Press, 9 March 1882, 2.

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51 Finlay, “A Woman’s Place,” 82. 52 This is seen in the numerous embroideries featuring these colours and patterns found in the holdings of public and private Canadian collections, including: McCord Museum (Montreal); Museum of Civilization (Gatineau); Billings Estate (Ottawa); Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), Glenbow Museum (Calgary); and Royal British Columbia Museum (Vancouver). As well as Aesthetic embroideries, items such as Japanese fans are seen in photographs of contemporary interiors – including those of Hannah Maynard (e.g., Fig. 5.5). 53 Finlay, “A Woman’s Place,” 91, 57–8. 54 Victoria Daily Colonist, 28 September 1882. 55 Victoria Daily Times, 12 October 1886. 56 Shortly after having her photograph taken by Mrs Maynard, Mrs Bossi would go on to win recognition at the Chicago World’s Fair (1893) for a Frame of Wool Flowers. The embroidery would have been displayed in the Women’s Pavilion, the interior of which had been designed by Candace Wheeler. 57 The craze was so popular and so widespread during the 1880s and 1890s that it became the subject of ridicule, with male contributors to The Carpet Trade and Review submitting “true accounts” about being accosted by young women anxious to snip the silk from the men’s hat linings and neckties for use in their crazy quilts. In fact, women (young and old) regularly traded scraps with family and friends or sent away for packages of mixed silks, which were widely available by mail order. 58 [Mrs] John A. Logan, The Home Manual (Philadelphia: A.M. Thayer 1889), 288. 59 These tintypes were usually from 3/4” to 1” wide and were one of the most-produced forms of photograph in the 1860s. 60 Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 1–16. 61 “Photographer among the Seals,” Practical Photographer, 1 (May 1894): 109–10.

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62 “Essential Gleanings: Our Photo Album,” St. Louis Photographer 1, no. 9 (1885): 297. 63 “Photographer among the Seals,” 109–10. 64 “Our Photo Album,” St. Louis and Canadian Photographer, 1, no. 12 (1887): 410. 65 “Photographs Received,” Seattle Weekly Pacific Tribune, 26 June 1878, 3. 66 Maynard Building on Pandora, hp057186, bca. 67 Instructions for achieving the effect were widely available in publications such as the American Annual of Photography and Scientific American, which could always be found at the library of the Mechanic’s Institute. See Val Starnes, “‘Doubles’ Simplified,” in American Annual of Photography, and Photographic Times Almanac (New York: Scovill and Adams Company 1895), 109–12. 68 Mattison, “The Multiple Self of Hannah Maynard,” 19. 69 André Rouille, “The Rise of Photography,” in Jean-Claude Lemagny and André Rouille, eds., History of Photography: Social & Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 40. 70 Numerous references to spirit photography appear in issues of the British Journal of Photography from the 1870s. Further, many monographs were written on the subject, including at least one by a woman: [Georgina] Houghton, Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (London: E.W. Allen 1882). 71 Albert H. Maynard in conversation with Isabel Bescoby, Victoria, bc, 16 June 1931, Maynard Files, box 2/3, file 11, bca. 72 The only photograph by Maynard that could conceivably be considered a “spirit photograph” is a portrait of Albert that might best described as whimsical rather than spiritual. A small oval cameo of Adelaide (d. 1883) – much like a lapel pin or brooch – appears to hover on Albert’s jacket. I, 51981, bca.

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73 “From that renowned lady artist, Mrs R. Maynard, of Victoria, BC, we receive a set of pictures.” “Our Photo Album,” St. Louis and Canadian Photographer, 1, no. 6 (1887): 187. 74 Victoria Daily Colonist, 29 September 1912, 12. Richard had died in 1907 and Hannah produced very few photographs

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in the years just prior to her retirement. One cannot help but feel that she strategically chose 1912 as an auspicious date to retire; fifty years of being in business was indeed newsworthy.

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CHAPTER 1

From Amateur to Professional

The Advertising Photography of Margaret Watkins, 1924–28

Mary O’Connor

In her early fifties, the Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins (1884–1969) confirmed in a letter to her cousin that she had given up “my home and profession” to look after her spinster aunts who lived in Glasgow.1 That Watkins saw herself as a professional was not surprising. She had trained in the Clarence H. White School of Photography, a school that emphasized “use in art” and future employment as well as fine technique and design in photography.2 She exhibited her photographs in solo shows in New York City and in juried shows around the world, winning prizes in the United States, England, Japan, and Java. And, from 1924 to 1928, she made money producing photographs for advertising companies. She also taught photography and gave welcome critical advice to such photographers as Margaret Bourke-White, Paul Outerbridge, and Ralph Steiner.3 And she had been an important part of the photographic institutions of her time: she was on the executive of both the Pictorial Photographers of America (ppa) and the Art Center in New York City and was a member of the Royal Photographic Society in London. Watkins’s photographs were chosen for the covers of such publications as the Art Center’s Art Bulletin and the Newark Camera Club’s Ground Glass. The Brooklyn Museum invited her to lecture on “The Modern Trend in Photography,” and she edited the 1926 Annual for the ppa with an introduction on “Advertising and Photography.”

Fig. 6.1 Margaret Watkins, Still Life – Circles, 1919.

By most standards, then, Margaret Watkins was a professional artist. Nevertheless, Watkins had not always been considered or considered herself a professional and, as her letter to her cousin indicates, at some point she gave up that status once she had earned it, so much so that late in life she avoided all mention of photography.4 In this chapter I will explore the very complicated relation of the gendered life of Margaret Watkins to the significant art that she practised. That Watkins coupled the loss of her home with that of her profession is symptomatic. On a literal level, what she considered her real home was her studio. Her apartment on Jane Street in Greenwich Village provided her with a room of her own, indeed a few rooms, which served as living space, portrait studio, and set-up laboratory for photographing advertising objects and her own domestic still-life studies, such as Design – Circles (Fig. 6.1). It is not that she had a separate room for her photographic work. All her spaces literally and metaphorically functioned in both worlds: that of her work and that of her “life” – what she called on one occasion, “just liv’n.”5

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This chapter looks at Watkins’s professionalization, the institutions through which she found her way to making and selling her art, and the art itself – constituted as it was out of Watkins’s own relation to the domestic (as a woman and as a girl who had been “brought up on books and music”6 in a bourgeois home in Hamilton, Ontario, but who also experienced the failure of her father’s department store and his bankruptcy when she was fifteen). The focus is on Watkins’s advertising art, for here is a test case not only for professional art, with its characteristic link with the commercial world, but also for its own negotiation of the public and the private, the female body and sexuality, domestic space and women’s labour.

An Artist, a Worker, and a Modern Margaret Watkins saw herself primarily as an artist, a worker, and a modern. By 1923, she could distance herself from other Canadians who, she thought, had not seen the light of modern art. After spending an evening with Annie and Farquhar McGillivray Knowles in New York, Watkins wrote, they “are both awfully orthodox in their work and made a great to-do about the modern movement in art … My prints are a darned sight more up and coming than his silly little paintings of boats and pink apple trees. They are beginning to realize that their attitude is a bit behind the times and instead of catching up with the procession they wax sarcastic and grouch on the side.”7 When her photograph The Kitchen Sink won second prize at the Emporium Second Annual Photographic Exhibition in San Francisco and enraged one critic with its depiction of dirty dishes, she noted: “Evidently the poor duffer knows nothing of Modern art – abstractions, pattern rhythm etc. The ‘objects’ are not supposed to have any interest in themselves – merely contributing to the design.”8 She was not the only one to see her photography as modern. In 1921 Vanity Fair did a one-page display of her work comparing it to that of Picasso and Brancusi, and on another occasion her work was compared to that of Gertrude Stein.9 As a worker, Watkins never denied that art (and modernity) took a great deal of effort. She had always worked hard. When her merchant father went bankrupt, she made crafts to sell at the department store he had just lost. At twenty-four, she took a job as a chambermaid at the Arts and Crafts community of Roycroft in East Aurora, New York, “to get a start.”10 She soon was illuminating their publications and learning a good deal about book design. In 1923, when asked to define herself, besides indicating that she was “brought up on books and music,” she noted, “I … do my own carpentry.”11 In a speech she gave to the Newark Camera Club on “How Art Enriches My Life,” she did not neglect to include the labour involved in making art: “the mean, messy, technical side calling for patience, perseverance and a very nice precision. Long before 170

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Fig. 6.2 Margaret Watkins, Self-Portrait, 1919–23.

signing a masterpiece you roll up your sleeves, play about in poison – keeping the cyanide out of the soup – and work in icy water till the hand hangs dead on the wrist.”12 While an assistant in Alice Boughton’s portrait studio in New York, she was often frustrated with Boughton for not taking care of the technical details before sending out photographs for exhibitions. And, when students remembered her, they remembered her technical expertise: she was “a tough dame … a real person to whom you said ‘is this negative over-developed or under-developed’ and ‘my gum prints didn’t come out well, what’s wrong?’”13 She would often work through the night on her own photography at Boughton’s studio, sometimes pushing herself to the point of illness. Therefore, when she sent out her own self-portrait (Fig. 6.2) for publicity, she was horrified to find that the New York Sun and Globe had placed the image in an oval and retouched it to give the effect of her wearing heavy makeup. On the back of the print she wrote: “To ye engraver / Don’t clip prune / or place this in an oval / Neither retouch & paint / To the semblance of a snake-eyed vamp.”14 Of the many constructions of female identity available to women in New York City in the 1920s, one with which Watkins refused to identify was the vamp. o ’co nno r

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Institutions Watkins also worked at being a professional. Eventually, a small inheritance from a cousin allowed her to have a room of her own, but she spent a good amount of time hustling for photograph commissions. We get an idea of what it was like trying to be a female professional in New York City from 1915 to 1928 through her archive, and her case may well be representative. She participated in women’s organizations and in other institutional networks to further her career. She joined two important associations in New York City that helped female businesswomen: the Canadian Business and Professional Women’s Club and the Zonta Club, part of an international confederation of business and professional women’s clubs.15 Besides offering Watkins the opportunity of connecting with other Canadian women working in New York, the Canadian Business and Professional Women’s Club mounted a solo exhibition of hers in April 1924. Its Bulletin also gave her publicity, announcing that she would be giving a public lecture on “The Modern Trend in Photography.”16 Watkins was even more involved with the Zonta Club, becoming an active member of its publicity committee and its official photographer. Reading through the clippings and draft typescripts from the publicity committee’s binder that remained in Watkins’s archive at her death, one is struck by how definitive these women were about their struggle to compete in a man’s world and to find a place in the public sphere, at times explicitly situating their work in the “women’s movement.”17 It was “a get-together organization” meeting monthly: “sister strugglers who are carving out nice niches for themselves in the Hall of the New Freedom.”18 We get a picture of a city that was in the process of finding the space and mechanisms for women who were working for a living and often on their own. The official publication of the Confederation of Zonta Clubs announced that “their motto is ‘a square deal’ and they are taking active, keen interest in civic and national life.”19 Articles on these businesswomen that were prepared for publication make the ethos behind the group clear. They emphasize the women’s hard work, their competence, their success, and above all their unique innovations. They are good-news stories about how women can be fulfilled in remunerative work, how they can succeed in a man’s world, and how they can fend for themselves. Even if a woman has had no formal training, she is praised for reviewing her life and identifying what skills she does have. So a Mrs Lois Pierce Hughes became a widow and “was faced with the problem of making her way for herself and a daughter.” With no business background, she put her experience of domestic life to use and devised the idea of providing a special floor for women travellers in a New York hotel, offering a kind of “home” with services such as daycare, shopping guides, hair-dressing, and even counselling (for female staff as well as guests). The floor had a library and a “reception-room where men callers may be 172

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received or business appointments kept.”20 Another exemplary Zonta member, Anna McLean, trained as an artist but became a stenographer to make a living. She channelled her “great longing for [an artist’s] career,” into moving from secretary to the company’s top advertising agent soliciting photogravure advertisements.21 The well-known actor and director, Jessie Bonstelle, was also a Zonta member and promoted as “one of the foremost women producers of America.” She is noted for being “the first theatrical manager to make good the dream of the last few years of a ‘Dollar Top’ theatre in New York where plays of Broadway quality can be seen at popular prices.”22 If we read Watkins along the axis of these women’s struggles and acclaimed achievements, we see a female artist, always negotiating possible venues and connections, someone who made art out of her pots and pans (her kitchen still life studies circa 1919) or became a chambermaid just to get into the Roycroft Arts and Crafts community (in 1909). The Zonta connections brought Watkins a number of commissions, notably portraits of Zonta members, including Katherine Dreier (Cubist painter, collector, and founder of the Société Anonyme with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray), but it is clear that they also reinforced Watkins’s identity as a professional woman. The New York associations did, in fact, offer material gains as well as psychological support for women. Nevertheless, a female photographer did not only have to negotiate the business world dominated by men. She also had to negotiate the multiple meanings of the terms “photographer,” “artist,” and “professional” circulating at this time, often as a series of oppositions: amateurs versus professionals; “serious” artists versus mass-market Kodak-users; and pictorialists versus scientists. If Watkins saw herself as “professional” by 1924, she had not always done so. In 1921 Vanity Fair introduced her as “strictly speaking an amateur” when it devoted a full page to her photography.23 To understand the meaning of being a professional or amateur photographer in both 1921 and 1924, we must be clear about what was at stake. Besides the danger of being read as a “lady amateur,” with its connotations of wives or spinsters who were seen to be dabbling in artistic realms during their leisure time,24 Watkins would also have had to establish herself as both an artist and someone who made her living from her photography, tying her work to the world of commerce. Since photography was invented as a technical, that is, scientific, discovery, there has been a complicated relationship between its technology of graphic recording and its potential as an artistic medium. As Margaret Watkins noted in her essay on “Advertising and Photography”: “To fix the image projected in the camera obscura, that was a scientific problem. When it was solved we had the foundation of a new art medium.”25 This period saw a fierce struggle to award photography the status of an art (in relation to the established arts of painting, sculpture, and prints or drawings) and to isolate the serious artists from and above the hobbyists, dilettantes, and users of the new Kodak cameras, the o ’co nno r

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simplicity of which allowed anyone the possibility of taking a snapshot. This fight had been taking place in camera clubs across North America and in the little galleries of New York City, notably in Alfred Stieglitz’s 291, where modern art and photography had been finding their privileged spaces.26 There were conflicting opinions about being an amateur and linking art to commerce, even among the members of the Photo-Secession such as Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White. A good deal has been written about Stieglitz’s relation to the amateur, but essentially that subject is tied to his understanding of himself and those who showed in his gallery, or whose work he reproduced in his Camera Work, as “real” artists.27 Stieglitz held on to the term “amateur” for his own work to distinguish it from and in resistance to work done for commercial purposes. Bonnie Yochelson points out how Clarence White, a member of Stieglitz’s Photo Secession, also understood his work in terms of the pull between the amateur (read artistic) and the professional (in his case, read useful), but ultimately his life and work was informed primarily by an Arts and Crafts ideology, which held that art can be, and should be, useful in the world.28 She quotes White: “I took up photography, as nine out of ten of the photographers do, as a hobby, and pursued it with all the enthusiasm of the amateur; so much so that a change of occupation became necessary. Photography then became my real work, but [I] still was anxious to keep the attitude of the amateur, doing the best in me, believing in photography as an expression for the artist. This persistence led me into another field of photography, that of teaching.”29 Stieglitz has been quoted as denigrating the work that Clarence White did as a teacher of mostly women because it took him away from the real work he should have been doing: his art photography.30 Yet White made it his life’s work to build institutions, such as his photography school and the Art Center, which would build links between artists and the working world.31 In 1914 Margaret Watkins borrowed money to take Clarence White’s summer school program in Maine. She benefited from this and the New York City school, first as a student and then as a teacher, a manager of the summer sessions, and a personal assistant to White. The school prided itself in taking photography beyond the little galleries. It emphasized “Photography as a Vocation” and “Professional Opportunities” for its graduates.32 Indeed, White published an essay entitled “Photography as a Profession for Women.”33 One course was exemplary. White hired Frederic Goudy to teach material “associating more definitely photography to the printed page” and promising to incorporate both art and utility, commercial use and “a means toward ideals.” The course would explicitly attend to design in advertisements.34 And this, as Stieglitz intimated, was a school that was comprised predominantly of female students. Another institution besides the White School that framed Watkins’s linking art to commerce was the Art Center of New York, founded in the same year – 1921 – that Watkins was celebrated as an artist of avant-garde status in Vanity 174

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Fair. The Center was comprised of seven constituent art societies: the Art Alliance of America, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Pictorial Photographers of America, the Society of Illustrators, the Art Directors Club, the New York Society of Craftsmen, and The Stowaways. It was the Art Center that particularly facilitated Watkins’s move into the advertising world and for the first time allowed her to make a living through her art. Both Bonnie Yochelson and Michelle Bogart have reviewed the importance of the Art Center in the shift of pictorialist photography to advertising images. According to its promotional pamphlet, the Center’s core function was “to Develope [sic] Art in Use.” It offered the only free placement bureau to help students and artists secure employment and to give them vocational advice. Its interest in integrating industry and art and in educational reform was present in its founding vision and practices.35 Bogart points out that the Art Center was founded by “social welfare and art worker” Helen Sargent Hitchcock (1870–1958).36 It grew out of the Art Alliance (1914) and the Art Workers Club for Women (1898), both founded by Hitchcock. Bogart argues that the Art Alliance and the Art Workers Club for Women, “dedicated to helping craftswomen and models find jobs, were outgrowths of a distinctly female political culture organized around social welfare work and voluntarism to alleviate women’s problems. The Art Center represented a transmutation of this older woman-oriented reform enterprise into a corporate, male-dominated operation in which women artists now competed with male practitioners.” However, for the most part, women lost control of the Center, since company art directors such as Heyworth Campbell (Condé Nast) held the most power and “dispensed patronage.”37 Although Bogart transmits an image of the Art Center as a boys’ club, Watkins negotiated her way through it by being both “female art worker” and a competitive artist in the new commercial system. The Art Center in many ways was a compatible “home” for her work. It satisfied her commitment to art in its various manifestations, from crafts to fine arts, and her interest in the relations between the arts – between the book and its illustrations, for instance. It provided a venue for strong interdisciplinary debates among the artists about the relation between art and advertising.38 Watkins had her first solo show at the Art Center in 1923, and she contributed a great deal to the running of the Center, sitting on its board of directors, acting as corresponding secretary, and, later, as vice-president of the ppa, hanging many photographic shows.39 Retrospectively, she commented on her artistic (if not remunerative) success there: “When it came to hanging an exhibition they said I was next best to Clarence White, but you don’t get paid for that.”40 The Art Directors Club, made up of magazine and advertising agency art directors, and with Heyworth Campbell (art director of Condé Nast’s magazine business) as its president, played a crucial role in the Art Center’s links with industry. The Art Directors Club’s stated function was “to advise commerce o ’co nno r

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in the use of art and to interpret for art the requirements of commerce.”41 One of its purposes was “to raise the standards of aesthetic and commercial values in art as applied to industry.”42 Campbell’s knowledge of Watkins’s work through the ppa and the Art Center led to specific advertising commissions that began in 1924 and probably to the Vanity Fair publication of her kitchen still lifes in 1921.43 In 1926 Watkins added to this institutional structure that was moving art photography into the commercial world. As the editor of the ppa annual that year, she chose to include advertising studies along with other pictorialist photographs and she made advertising the topic of her introductory essay. This essay shows no anxiety about being an artist who was tied to commerce; rather, she gave a long genealogy of advertising’s links not only to the earliest photographers but to major avant-garde artists. The photography that had learned from modern art would appeal not only to an elite audience; in the world of advertising, it would also appeal to both those who wanted to sell and those who wanted to buy. The “stark mechanical objects” and “commonplace articles show[ing] curves and angles” proved to be a foundation for effective marketing: “Even the plain business man, suspicious of ‘art stuff,’ perceives that his product is enhanced by fine tone-spacing and the beauty of contrasted textures.”44 Watkins’s inclusion of advertising images in her edition of the ppa annual as well as her essay “Advertising and Photography” revealed her belief that this modern commercial photography was equal to other fine art photography. The formal abstraction of the object ironically allowed the object to circulate in a field of fantasy open to the needs of commodification. As Patricia Johnston and Bonnie Yochelson have pointed out, “commercial photography may be seen as an alternative pathway to modernism in American visual culture.”45

Advertising and Photography By 1924, Watkins was advertising her business in journals, pointing to her specialty of “still life studies for advertising.”46 She was one of the earliest to develop a photographic language for advertising – indeed, she was working on it at the same time as the now canonical figure Edward Steichen, whose advertising photography also began in the early 1920s. Patricia Johnston, in her book on Steichen’s advertising photography, points out that “in the early 1920s fewer than 15 percent of illustrated advertisements employed photographs … by 1930 almost 80 percent did.”47 In this climate, Watkins’s strong reputation spread among art directors, advertising companies, and businesses, both in New York and beyond. Agents turned to her for “developing a unique photographic treatment” on the basis of her domestic still lifes. Her work appeared on the cover of the Art Center 176

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Bulletin – a prime example of the Center’s usefulness in linking the art world and industry.48 Ethel Power of House Beautiful magazine wrote to Watkins looking for her still-life studies: “I have an article, ‘Pots and Pans as Beauty Spots,’ and it has occurred to me that one of your attractive still life studies of kitchen objects might well illustrate this. If you would be willing to send me a selection of two or three, I should be very glad to have them with the idea of choosing one for the article.”49 The letter suggests just how easy the slippage was between art and fashion, art and advertising. If “pots and pans” can slip to “beauty spots,” Watkins’s kitchen still lifes were fair game for circulation. They circulated not as representations of her specific home space or treasured objects, but as allusions to the domestic in an “attractive” form.50 It was Watkins’s original work in creating domestic still-life studies that led directly to her career as an advertising photographer. Her ability in 1919 to isolate a household object and show it in a new light was her most marketable skill from 1924 to 1928. Her reputation elicited direct commissions as well as steady contract work with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and with Macy’s.51 In a complex way, Watkins’s particular interest in the home and its objects led to a reformulation of the modernist photographic image ready to be caught by the new advertising of her time. Her 1919–21 images of her knives, cups, and pots on the sink and of soap on her bathtub rack were reformulated and reframed for beautiful advertising images of domestic commodities. Her discovery of how the home might be newly documented, shaped, and cropped was easily translatable into a representation of desire for domestic objects. If her images captured sensuousness, aesthetic beauty, and a sense of being “at home,” they could be the perfect medium for the creation of a desire for commodities that might promise such fulfillment. If everyday life could be aestheticized, it could also be sold. The transformation of still-life studies into advertising images is apparent in Watkins’s 1924 photographs for Woodbury’s Soap advertisements done for J. Walter Thompson (Fig. 6.3). What might have been a mark of everydayness is transformed into a cleansed image of a “readable” bar of Woodbury’s Soap and its promotional pamphlet. Watkins’s Woodbury’s Soap images manage to maintain a notion of “at-homeness,” but their formal elements – the running water, the cropped circles and curves, the rectangles within rectangles – signify modernity in the new context of advertising. An art editor at J. Walter Thompson wrote to her on another occasion requesting photographs for a toothpaste campaign and asking for “the inner line of the wash bowl … or … the fat, round lines of the porcelain base of a faucet … a smart touch of modern bathroom.” He added, “Please take your time on this and bring us the kind of work of yours we all like so well.”52 Modernity and sexuality were integral elements in the Woodbury’s advertisement, which was accompanied by a slogan and a pamphlet. The slogan, “A o ’co nno r

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Fig. 6.3 Margaret Watkins, Woodbury’s Soap, 1924.

Skin You Love to Touch,” developed by Helen Resor, addressed both a hypothetical male reader, whose presence was pictorially asserted by the pamphlet’s opening illustration of a heterosexual couple, and women themselves. The slogan created space for women to imagine themselves as sexual beings.53 The sexuality of the slogan is picked up in the sensuous curves and tones and the suggestion of a private, isolated space in the cropped fragment of the still life. On the other hand, the bar of soap came with a pamphlet “giving special cleansing treatments for different types of skin.”54 The instructions in it mapped out the body in terms of its remediable parts: “Do you want to free your complexion from blackheads, blemishes, large pores, excessive oiliness?” The soap was seen as a “treatment” and had been developed by science: “A special formula, the result of years of scientific study of the skin and its needs.”55 Watkins argued that she was “selling” or providing significant form, a beauty of line for the world to enjoy – sharing her artist’s vision, as it were. She was offering pure image, the sign of the modern. The consumers of these images would be taking in with this “beauty” the sense that their lives and bodies also could be beautiful, hygienic, scientifically managed – in short, modern. Thus, from the advertiser’s point of view, modernity was sold with this soap, and it must have been felt that Watkins’s images reinforced this value. In a series of images Watkins created for a Cutex nail-polish campaign, she employed paradigmatic techniques of advertising – cropping the body, fetishizing the hands or legs, and suggesting through synecdochal detail a possibly sexualized space and figure. The advertising copy suggested the domain of healthful self-care, but it also suggested a class-based eroticization of a woman at home who prepared her body for both her man and her class peers. The Ladies’ 178

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Fig. 6.4 Margaret Watkins, Study for ad for Cutex nail polish, c. 1924.

Home Journal’s use of Watkins’s images addressed working women as well as housewives: “no matter how crowded your day, no matter how exacting your household, social or business duties may be.” The ads appealed to modernity, being “scientifically worked out,” and to the new management of the body: “All the little edges of superfluous skin are wiped away and the rim of the cuticle shrinks back, curved, thin and smooth as it ought to be.” In one such photograph, Watkins played with modernist repetitive forms (Fig. 6.4): a v-shaped curved line formed by fingers holding a set of pearls that swing down, presumably from the woman’s neck.56 Yet beyond pure form is the hint of the boudoir in the cuff and the sensuous hand. The truncated body or body part became a standard trope for commercialism and modernist advertising – the suggestion through synecdoche, the fetish of the object – the hidden evoked through the detail. The fragment becomes a trace, a hint, a tease. Certainly, in the context of advertising, class and gender are crucial to the photograph’s effect. The trace here is not just of a sexual woman’s body but also of money; the ring, the pearls, and the cuff are all unnecessary objects – desired and enjoyed because they are not necessary. They clothe the figure in wealth and worth. o ’co nno r

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Fig. 6.5 Margaret Watkins, bra, torso, and hand, Cutex ad study, c. 1924.

Reading Watkins as a gendered artist, we can argue that she was critiquing an older construction of womanhood, which demanded that a woman should be pious, chaste, domestic, and obedient (the sort of womanhood from which Watkins was trying to escape). The woman in the Cutex photograph is free to construct herself as sexual and playful in movement (if not in flight) as the necklace is flung off its stationary place on her bodice and her finger slips through the twisted pearls. What we can see in Watkins’s work is how that system at one level served women’s interests. Her ironic play with fingers has to be seen in juxtaposition to the Victorian lace and morality of her mother’s generation. Other images isolated legs and feet in both erotic and formalist ways: arched feet and legs beneath the rim of a peacock-feathered fan, or a hand (presumably with Cutex-painted nails) hanging over what looks like a lamé brassiere (Fig. 6.5). In none of these images is the labelled product itself present. What is represented is the body part that was to be treated by the product – the part that would be made over by the nail polish – but in fact the image stands as a sign for sensuality, pleasure, and class. One may well ask what is being represented in The Tea Cup (Fig. 6.6). If the former images suggested sexuality, this Cutex photograph could suggest class.57 The Tea Cup presents a woman’s torso in a dress with intricately designed sleeves and trim. The exaggerated position of hands parodies the upper-class tea ritual. Without the surrounding advertising copy, one would not know what was being advertised. Besides carrying formal repetitions of triangles and lace, the image is filled with potential allusions to Renaissance art. Cutex was interested in establishing its product’s users as “well-groomed” and “well-kept” women. Even if women did not have the time and money of the upper class, their nails – once treated by the product – could partake of that realm. The promise held out would be that, if one used the product, one could be both free and part of a higher class. 180

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Fig. 6.6 Margaret Watkins, The Tea Cup, 1924.

Products were offering a new world in which a woman could, hypothetically, be sexual and also respectable. Class was also being rewritten through the advertisements as decency and culture, and all was understood as performance. If you could behave as upper class, you could belong. In Watkins’s hands, the image played with its allusions to high art and to high class. The photograph’s model was performing both. A similar play occurred in Watkins’s image for a Meyers Gloves advertisement in which the hand performed the new world order that was possible for women in the 1920s (Fig. 6.7). In fact, the gloves did not even need to be shown.58 Debates continue about the position of women as subjects and objects in the consumer culture of advertising. The predominant argument has been that women were targeted and exploited as consumers: constructed as irrational and made into sex objects for the gaze of men and the profit of capitalists.59 There has been of late a counter-argument showing that women have “consumed” this culture in their own way, often exploiting it for their own interests. Celia Lury, building on Judith Butler, summarizes the argument: “It has also been o ’co nno r

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suggested that the construction of the female consumer as irrational has provided the basis from which women could willfully challenge their subordination in relation to men. From this point of view, women do not simply passively adopt the versions of femininity which they are encouraged to emulate, but actively seek to redefine the meaning of these femininities … [They] have developed ways of seeing femininity as a masquerade, a performance, in ways which enable them to play with their personal identity, and take pleasure in the adoption of roles and masks.”60 Lury goes on to argue, with reference to Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking, that department stores “provided a space within which (first middle-class and then working-class) women could participate in public life, in which they could experience some of the shocks, speed and spectacle of modernity, in which they could have brief encounters and make ‘unwise’ purchases for themselves.”61 One could taste this new world and it was freedom compared to the options of the century before. Others have claimed that “consumption … has offered women new areas of authority and expertise, new sources of income, a new sense of consumer rights; and one of the consequences of these developments has been a heightened awareness of entitlement outside the sphere of consumption.”62

Fig. 6.7 Margaret Watkins, Myers Gloves, c. 1924.

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Fig. 6.8 Margaret Watkins, Johnson and Johnson Modess ad, 1924–28.

It is interesting to watch Watkins as a professional photographer reproduce this new freedom in her photographs. They play with femininity as much as formal design, and when necessary they rewrite what is seen as all-too-materially feminine in the new language of stark, abstracted modernity, as, for example, in her brilliant image for Johnson and Johnson’s Modess sanitary pads (Fig. 6.8). By constructing her modernist set with black-and-white paper backgrounds and judicious lighting to accentuate the geometry, Watkins displays the rectangular Modess boxes in a contemporary form for the contemporary woman. Modess disposable pads were launched by Johnson and Johnson in 1926, making Watkins’s image one of the first in a long line of advertising campaigns. Although Watkins’s most characteristic advertising work isolated single objects, fragmented them, and removed them from context, she was occasionally presented with a more complex challenge, as with her photographs of a demonstration kitchen for The Delineator magazine. Instead of fragments of a sink or drying rack with strategically positioned utensils, she was faced with framing (and selling) an entire modern kitchen, with stove, sink, hutch, cabinets, and appliances. It was as if the modern world of scientific management and invention were laid out for her comprehension and representation. The givens were multiple. Watkins’s usual goal of “essential form” in a cropped detail seemed elusive. The demonstration kitchen would theoretically organize and rationalize women’s o ’co nno r

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labour into distinct operations, aided by the latest technological inventions and Taylorized efficiency. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) laid out a program for dividing production activities into unique, rationalized parts, based on the efficiency with which they could be completed. Thus, at the same time as presenting the site of domestic labour, the advertisement ideologically was to remove that labour by offering the magical implements that would save time and effort. Despite its gendered space, this kitchen was to represent modern masculine rationality. Electricity and modern plumbing are visible in the light fixture, wires, and metal pipes. An electric clock reigns over the realm, an iconic reminder of the efficiency of the new order. The kitchen’s “essential order” has been designed by the engineers and advertisers. The work of representation here would entail further rational work in presenting this modern kitchen and at the same time appearing to gloss over the necessary material labour of that space. Watkins opted to play with allusions to her own still lifes (Fig. 6.9), with water running from the tap, a brush handle emerging from the washing basin, or a set of glasses posed on the sink. These echoes of her own kitchen still-life studies embedded in her paid assignment to reproduce and promote a Taylorized and commodified kitchen can stand as an emblem of her relationship with advertising. At the centre of this photograph is a small cabinet. Hanging on the wall, it creates the centre of two axes: one a line of modern technology (the electric light, the electric clock, the taps and pipes of running hot and cold water); the other a set of squares (the two windows on either side) softened by almost identical flower pots silhouetted against the incoming light. In this photograph Watkins has opened up the cabinet to reveal its contents: Fairbank’s Gold Dust Scouring Powder, a bottlebrush, a whisk. It is as if she has given us a still life inside a still-life painting. The box is also reminiscent of cabinets of curiosities. Positioned between the two windows, it suggests a third window onto an outside or inside world (a new world of housekeeping under the clock-organized regime). However, because of the nature of its contents, Watkins highlights the labour that cannot be made unnecessary through modern engineering. Fairbanks Gold Dust may be offered by the advertisers as a wonder product; nevertheless, the dishes in the drying rack, the glasses on the sink, let alone the tiled wall and enamel sink, provide surfaces that the scouring powder will have to keep clean. At the centre of this photograph are the labour of the kitchen and the labour of photography. In a project that is fundamentally part of modernity’s system – “the official art of capitalism”63 – Watkins reminds us of what is generally repressed in that system. Her use of modernist art – the objective of which is to make order through design out of the givens of everyday life – reintroduces, even reinforces, rather than denies materiality and labour.

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Fig. 6.9 Margaret Watkins, Demonstration kitchen for the Delineator magazine, c. 1924–28.

The Work of Art Just how real this labour was and how photographs do, in changing hands, mean many things besides “art” will be made clear in the following account of the events that led to Watkins leaving New York, her home, and her profession. At the height of her commercial and professional success, with commissions from J. Walter Thompson and work for the Art Center, the ppa, and the Clarence H. White School Alumni, Watkins became embroiled with Clarence White’s widow, the Library of Congress, New York City sheriffs, and the courts. The story is complicated. The short version is that she called the sheriff to remove ten photographs at the end of the White Memorial Exhibition; the longer was that she was demanding recognition of her labour, knowledge, generosity, and a particular kind of intimacy with Clarence White. o ’co nno r

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In the summer of 1925, Clarence White and a few photography students went to Mexico. A week into the trip, he suffered an aneurysm of the heart and died.64 Although Watkins did not go on the Mexico trip, she had acted as White’s personal assistant for a number of years.65 Part of their work together was an archival project that Watkins had planned in order to preserve White’s vintage photographic prints for history. White trusted her knowledge of photography and its technical aspects in general and her knowledge of his work in particular. The two of them reviewed all his work and spent hours making a selection of his best photographs, particularly the early ones, on fine photographic papers. They hoped that the collection would be placed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – once that museum recognized photography as an art rather than mere documentation.66 Because White was not wealthy, he had offered some of his photographs for sale to the school alumni and had set a price at ten dollars. Based on this price, Watkins agreed to forgo part of her salary, which he had not been able to pay, in exchange for the group of prints they had chosen together. She promised that these would eventually go to the museum, and, in the meantime, she left the prints with White so that he could use them in exhibitions or for teaching. She and White made a list of twenty-five to thirty prints and kept it with the photographs in White’s studio at the school.67 When White died suddenly in Mexico, the widowed Jane White refused to return these photographs to Watkins and organized the sale of forty-three Clarence White photographs to the Library of Congress, including some from Watkins’s collection. At the close of the White Memorial Exhibition at the Art Center in May 1926, Watkins had the sheriff take back her photographs. Alon Bennett, the president of the Art Center, explained to Herbert Putnam at the Library of Congress: Miss Margaret Watkins, who was Mr. White’s assistant to his school in the Berkshires, owing to lack of funds, was not paid for her last year of service. Mr. White, the soul of honesty, acknowledged this many times, and in the presence of several witnesses including Dr. and Mrs. Hervey, promised Miss Watkins the prints seized by the sheriff at this exhibition. The action was precipitated, I am given to understand, by the repudiation of Mrs. White of any obligation of the estate to Miss Watkins. Miss Watkins’ counsel contends that the estate had no legal right to sell the photographs to the Library of Congress before all its liabilities had been liquidated.68 A court case ensued during which it was insinuated that Watkins had had an affair with White. The sexual innuendo suggested in the testimony successfully discredited her as a woman and thus as a truth-sayer, which in turn resulted in “her” photographs being taken away from her. Just what the photographs 186

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meant to her and just what was lost with them were bound up in a complex knot of meaning, which included years of work, not just the unpaid work that she had done as White’s assistant but all the artistic and institutional work she had accomplished with White himself: building up the school, the ppa, and the Art Center. Also at stake was her extensive knowledge and its authority in the photographic world. She was portrayed as a conniving, adulterous woman – a role much more easily digestible by the “system” (of both law and society) than the role of a professional woman whose expertise had been cherished and whose authority on what is worthy of being called art (and preserved for history) had been accepted. In short, Watkins was reduced to the snake-eyed vamp she had always repudiated. She did indeed lose the case. By 24 June, the photographs were returned to the Library of Congress. She did not refer to the events again, though her departure from New York two years later was linked to the exhaustion of these times. The rest of 1926 remained busy with commissions for advertisements and portraits. Her work at the school was obviously over, but she was still the vicepresident of the ppa and she brought out the annual by the end of the year, with its introduction, “Advertising and Photography.” Although she was still receiving requests for advertising photographs right up to her departure for Europe in August 1928, her production had decreased in the last eighteen months. In short, what the Memorial Exhibition fiasco indicates is that Watkins had played the traditional role of both handmaiden to the great male artist and idealist, with reverence for the art object. She had thought she had “made” the perfect collection of White’s vintage prints – any substitutions or breaking up of the collection would make it less than a masterpiece. And all of this was done with hours of labour and emotional investment without legal record or financial remuneration. She may have known what made a great advertising photograph, but in the end she was not making a profit. Watkins always intended to return to New York. The trip to Europe was supposedly a rest and a holiday. Nevertheless, she did not return and did not find a firm footing in professional institutions or networks in Europe. She joined both the Royal Photographic Society, where she was noted as “a Canadian, and a professional still photographer,”69 and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Amateur Photography Association, where she was its first female member. She exhibited and won prizes with the latter organization, but it was clearly not an avant-garde milieu. Nor was London particularly at the forefront of new photography at the time. But Watkins did continue to photograph for the next ten years: in Germany, the Soviet Union, England, and Scotland. She adapted and developed a new practice of urban photography influenced by the avantgarde work she was witnessing in Europe, notably the photography of Germany and ussr that she saw at the Pressa Fair in 1928 and on her trip to the ussr in 1933. Some of her most striking images are of industrial sites such as the o ’co nno r

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Fig. 6.10 Margaret Watkins, Design for Carpet, “Blythswood,” Front Steps, Centered, c. 1937.

Finnieston crane in Glasgow. She wove her art photography with business projects (she was desperate to make a living), inventing designs for carpets, fabric, and marble floors, although she was not able, as far as we know, to find buyers for her ideas. Still, the results are some innovative images made out of assemblages of identical photographs to create abstract designs. Her Design for Carpet, “Blythswood,” Front Steps, Centered (Fig. 6.10) is a good example of her post-1928 avant-garde work in which she imagined the worlds of art and commerce coexisting, a place in which she might again know herself as a professional photographer. But running against the grain of this modern, creative artist, who continued to work hard, was a very gendered counter-pressure to care for sick relatives. Being the only single female in the extended family, she

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moved in with her aging spinster aunts in Glasgow and helped nurse them over ten years until their deaths. After they died and after the war that followed, she took in displaced people, often those whom others would not accept: musicians because of the noise they might make, or families of non-white races. There is thus a sense in which the conjunction of femininity and domesticity that Watkins manipulated to such tremendous visual effect in her professional practice also brought that practice to its close. She left behind an extensive archive of photographs, and a legacy of one women’s struggle to negotiate the – always-gendered – world of art and work in New York in the 1920s.

notes 1 Margaret Watkins, draft of letter to Eirene Drummond Anderson, c. 1937, box 4, file 90, Margaret Watkins Fonds, McMaster University (mwf). For a longer study of the work of Margaret Watkins, see Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007). Part of this essay revises excerpts from chapters three and five of that book. The author thanks Katherine Tweedie for all her work on those chapters and assistance with this essay. 2 For a detailed account of the school and its artists, see Bonnie Yochelson, “Clarence H. White, Peaceful Warrior,” and Kathleen A. Erwin, “‘Photography of the Better Type’: The Teaching of Clarence H. White,” in Marianne Fulton, ed., Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography (New York: Rizzoli 1996), 10–119, 120–91. 3 See, for instance, the signed letter from Margaret Bourke-White to Margaret Watkins, 29 March 1928: “I should love having a chance to show you my beautiful Tower, and have you give me the old-time, much-appreciated onceover of my work,” box 3, file 51, mwf. 4 See Joseph Mulholland’s account of meeting Watkins late in life, foreword to

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O’Connor and Tweedie, Seduced by Modernity, xvii–xx. Notation in Watkins’ 1917 Agenda, box 5, file 8, mwf. Watkins to New York publicist [Emily P.] Street, 15 June 1923, box 3, file 16, mwf. Watkins to her aunt, Louisa Anderson, 18 February 1923, box 3, file 14, mwf. Farquhar McGillivray Knowles, rca (1859– 1932), landscape painter and art educator, and Elizabeth Annie McGillivray Knowles (1866–1928), an elected member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, New York, were living in New York City at this time. Watkins, notation on a printed review attached to the back of her photograph The Kitchen Sink (National Gallery of Canada, accession number 20629), quoted in Lori Pauli, “A Few Hellers: Women at the Clarence H. White School of Photography,” in Martha McCulloch, ed., Margaret Watkins 1884–1969 Photographs (Glasgow: Street Level Photography Gallery and Workshop 1994), n.p. “Photography Comes into the Kitchen: A Group of Photographs by Margaret Watkins Showing Modernist, or Cubist, Patterns in Composition,” Vanity Fair, October 1921, 60; and Karl Davis Robinson, “The New York Salon,” American Photography, 19, no. 8 (1925): 435. A review of a Clarence H. White School female alumni exhibition noted that Watkins’s

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“Studios [sic] in Angles and Curves … remind us that the Cubists – like a certain amount of the measles – are always with us.” “Photographic Exhibition Here Is an Artistic Triumph,” Flushing [New York] Evening Journal, 3 May 1921, newspaper clipping, box 6, file 12, mwf. Notation in Watkins’s 1915 Agenda, box 5, file 4, mwf. Watkins to [Emily P.] Street, 15 June 1923, box 3, file 16, mwf. Margaret Watkins, “How My Art Enriches Life,” The Ground Glass: Bulletin of the Newark Camera Club, 8, no. 5 (1926): 5. Watkins’s photograph The Wharf appeared on the cover of this issue of The Ground Glass, and inside was a notice of a solo exhibition of Watkins’s work that would take place at the Newark Camera Club in September 1926 (3). Ralph Steiner, quoted in Lucinda Barnes, ed., A Collective Vision: Clarence H. White and His Students (Long Beach, Calif.: University Art Museum, California State University, 1985), 28; and in Pauli, “A Few Hellers,” n.p. Watkins, note on verso of print Portrait of Herself, box 18, opus P.s.1, Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow (jmc). In other words, she followed what Laura R. Prieto refers to as the separatist route of finding strength through parallel institutions that put in place structures to help women survive and compete. Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 2001), 2–3. Bulletin of the Canadian Business and Professional Women’s Club (New York City), 1 (April 1924): 3–4. “New York City” [report from the New York City club summarizing remarks by its president, Rosalie S. Morton], The Zontian, 4, no. 2 (1923): 20. Jane Dixon, “Are You a Zonta?” Evening Telegram, 9 December 1923. “The Confederation of Zonta Clubs,” The Zontian, 4, no. 2 (1923): 3.

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20 “Cashing in on an Idea: The Story of a Woman Who Made Hospitality Her Profession,” typescript for Zonta Club publicity committee, box 3, file 168, mwf. The published version appeared in The Delineator (February 1923): 20, a copy of which is in box 4, file 5, mwf. 21 Rosalie Armistead Higgins, “Women Can Succeed as ‘Specials’ Says Anna McLean – And Proves It,” typescript of an article for Editor and Publisher (New York), April 1922, for Zonta Club publicity committee, box 3, file 168, mwf. 22 “From the Press Department of the Harlem Opera House,” typescript for Zonta Club publicity committee, box 3, file 168, mwf. 23 “Photography Comes into the Kitchen,” 60. 24 Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 3, 4, 195–7. 25 Margaret Watkins, “Advertising and Photography,” Pictorial Photography of America, 4 (1926): n.p. 26 Alfred Stieglitz ran The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, or “291,” from 1905 to 1917, often exhibiting European avantgarde art. The December 1922 issue of his journal Manuscripts was dedicated to the subject “Can a Photograph Have the Significance of Art,” with contributions by Marcel Duchamp, Sherwood Anderson, Marius De Zayas, Waldo Frank, and many others. 27 Paul Spencer Sternberger, Between Amateur and Aesthete: The Legitimization of Photography as Art in America, 1880– 1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2001); and Joanne Lukitsh, “Alone on the Sidewalks of New York: Alfred Stieglitz’s Photography, 1892– 1913,” in Patricia Johnston, ed., Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press 2006), 178–91. 28 Yochelson, “Peaceful Warrior,” 16. 29 Clarence H. White in John W. Gillies, ed., Principles of Pictorial Photography (New

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34

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York: Falk Publishing 1923), 21; reprinted in Peter C. Bunnell, ed., A Photographic Vision, Pictorial Photography, 1889–1923 (Salt Lake City, ut: Peregrine Smith 1980), 206, and in Yochelson, “Peaceful Warrior,” 11. Alfred Stieglitz in a letter to Heinrich Kühn, 25 August 1925, called White’s students “women – half-baked dilettantes, not a single real talent – a few hellers.” Heinrich Kuhn Letter File, Stieglitz Archive in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; quoted in Maynard Pressley White, Jr, “Clarence H. White: A Personal Portrait” (phd thesis, University of Delaware, 1975), 189, and in Pauli, “A Few Hellers,” n.p. See Yochelson, “Peaceful Warrior,” for a convincing explanation of the Arts and Crafts roots of White’s school. Bulletin of the Alumni, Clarence H. White School of Photography. House Warming Number, December 1920, n.p., jmc. Clarence H. White, “Photography as a Profession for Women,” American Photography, 18, no. 7 (1924): 428. Clarence H. White School of Photography school prospectus for January to May 1919, jmc. Art Center pamphlet, c. 1921, box 3, file 165, mwf. The Art Center sought an endowment “to keep its galleries open Sundays for industrial workers who are engaged during business hours.” It planned to reach out to schools and colleges to show them how to relate art to industry, and to establish a lectureship on art and industry. Two photographs of Mrs Ripley Hitchcock by Watkins exist in the jmc (P.w.23 and P.w.57). Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), 133–4. Often the “commercial people” were used as examples of what not to do. The discourse of the Center included what “real”

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artists could add to the commercial world: “The commercial people always employ retouchers to darken up backgrounds and shadows with the airbrush. They want ‘snappy’ pictures. But these snappy things bear the brand of commercialism … An artistic photograph has mystery in it. Commercialism aims to avoid this.” Dean Cornwell, president of the Society of Illustrators, at a talk on pictorial composition for the members of the ppa on 5 May 1924; quoted in Henry Hoyt Moore, “Pictorial Photographers of America,” Bulletin of the Art Center (New York) 2 (June 1924): 315–16. Sculptors often commissioned Watkins’s services: one impressive series documents the sculptures of Ivan Mestrovic in 1924, wao 9–11, 18, 37–45, 109–11, 150, 153, 175, 178, jmc. Watkins to Norman Walker, 8 November 1929, box 3, file 17, mwf. Catalogue: First Exhibit at the Art Center, November 1921, n.p., jmc. Ibid. At the founding of the Art Center in 1921, Heyworth Campbell was its treasurer while Watkins sat on its board. As an example of Campbell’s influence on Watkins’s career, Gardner Osborn, of the Reimers and Osborn advertising company, wrote to Watkins, 8 January 1926: “Mr. Heyworth Campbell, Art Director of the Condé Nast Publications, has suggested that I ask you to call with a representative collection of your Still Life photographs. I am interested in developing a unique treatment for advertising a new line of toilet preparations.” Box 3, file 30, mwf. Watkins, “Advertising and Photography,” n.p. Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press 2000), 106; and Yochelson, “Peaceful Warrior,” 11–114. See also Mary O’Connor, “The Objects of Modernism: Everyday Life in Women’s Magazines, Gertrude

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Stein, and Margaret Watkins,” in Jay Bochner and Justin D. Edwards, eds., American Modernism across the Arts (New York: Peter Lang 1999), 101. Bulletin of the Art Center (New York) 2 (June 1924): 324, jmc. Johnston, Real Fantasies, 1. S.H. Ankeney (J. Horace Lytle Co., Dayton, Ohio) to Watkins, 12 November 1926, box 3, file 26, mwf. Ethel B. Power to Watkins, 4 December 1926, box 3, file 34, mwf. Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mécanique, conveying the functional as beautiful, was also created in 1924. The Mulholland archive includes over two hundred advertising images as well as page proofs or original pages from magazines and newspapers in the 1920s. The following is a list of known advertising campaigns for which Watkins provided images: Phenix Cheese, 1923[?]–27; Cutex, 1924; Colgate, 1924; Woodbury’s Soap, 1924; Fioret, 1924; Macy’s 1925, 1928; Dromedary Dates, 1925; Johnson and Johnson, 1925; Louis Sherry, 1926; and Delineator: Demonstration Kitchen, Meyers Gloves, Keytainer, Gabilla, and Pond’s Cream, 1924–28. Raymond [Donne?] (J. Walter Thompson Co., 244 Madison Avenue, New York) to Watkins, 3 June 1926, box 3, file 27, mwf. See Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 1998). New York Times, 13 April 1924, newspaper clipping, jmc. In fact, although the advertising campaign was very successful, the roughness of Woodbury’s soap prevented the company from keeping consumers (Kathy Peiss, “Worldly Ways in a World of Goods: Women Embracing Modernity,” lecture, McMaster University, 2000). The photograph has Watkins’s advertising stamp on its verso: “Photograph by

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Margaret Watkins. / New York City / Please give credit.” On the back she has also written, “best.” S.a.2, jmc. Signed and dated 1924. S.a.9, jmc. Published in a cropped form in the Ladies’ Home Journal, 13 April 1924, jmc. Myers vintage-leather gloves can be found at Internet auctions today. Although we cannot exactly call Watkins a flapper, she was a smoker. See, for example, Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton 1963); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972; repr. Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin 1990); Kathy Myers, Understains: The Sense and Seduction of Advertising (London: Pandora 1986); and Catharine Mackinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An ‘Agenda’ for Theory,” in Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel, eds., The Signs Reader: Women Gender and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago 1983), 139–68. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press 1996), 144. Ibid. Mica Niva, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth, and Consumerism (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage 1992), 162; quoted in ibid. Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso 1980), 170–95. Pressley White, “Clarence H. White,” 239–43. The “School Budget for 1922–23” lists Watkins as receiving $900 for “30 weeks @ $30/wk” as an assistant. Laura Gilpin Papers, Amon Carter Museum Archives. Others confirmed her claim that White had not paid her for the last year of her work with him. See letters from Jerry D. Drew (5 May 1926) and Alon Bement (6 May 1926) to Herbert Putnam, Putnam Correspondence, Collections of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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66 Draft letter, Margaret Watkins to Herbert Putnam, 13 June 1926, box 3, file 38, mwf. 67 Draft letter, Watkins to Jane White, n.d., box 3, file 25, mwf. 68 Alon Bement to Herbert Putnam, 6 May 1926, Putnam Correspondence, Collections of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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69 Peter Le Neve Foster, “A Movie Maker in Moscow,” Photographic Journal, 74 (June 1934): 315.

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CHAPTER 1

“I Weep for Us Women”

Modernism, Feminism, and Suburbia in the Canadian Home Journal’s Home ’53 Design Competition1 Cynthia Imogen Hammond

An elegant, spare page in the February 1953 issue of the Canadian Home Journal (CHJ) announced to its mostly female readership that they would be participants in a nationwide design event of historic proportions. The significance of this participation was clear: “You, the Public, you, a parent, will be vitally concerned in this unique project. Here, for the first time in Canada’s publishing history, a great national magazine seeks to meet your housing needs and your neighbors’ by inaugurating a series of annual competitions for all members of the architectural profession in Canada … This will be for the express purpose of finding interesting, ingenious, livable house designs suitable for Canadian conditions of climate, geography and family requirements … and at a cost acceptable to the average building budget.”2 These words launched the Home ’53 housing design competition, inviting Canadian architects to submit modern designs for the single-family home. Canadian Home Journal was in print from 1910 to 1958 and at the time of the competition claimed “a million readers every month.” It sponsored the design program with the approval and professional support of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (raic). raic members Douglas G.W. McRae, Kent Barker, and John C. Parkin along with CHJ editor Mary-Etta Macpherson comprised the jury. The cash prizes offered were one reason for young architects to enter, but perhaps more enticing was the ultimate goal of the program: to design an architecturally relevant, widely accessible home for a middle-class family. In the

post-war decade, this meant participating in the exponential growth of the suburbs, which urban historian Richard Harris describes as “a fundamental part of [Canadian] national experience” in the 1950s. According to Harris, in this period Canadians “began to view the suburbs … as a national phenomenon [and] mirror of the nation.”3 Knowing that the construction drawings of the winning design would be made available to millions of readers across Canada at the nominal fee of $10, emerging and established architects from every province submitted designs, hoping to see their vision of an architectural future reflected in that mirror. In August of the same year, CHJ announced the winners in a special issue devoted to the competition. Plans, elevations, and axonometric drawings accompanied extensive notes on the jury’s decisions. Readers could compare in detail the work of Montreal architects Guy Desbarats (1925–2003) and Fred Lebensold (1917–85), who took first place; Maria Fisz Prus (1919–) and Victor Marius Prus (1917–) in collaboration with Ray Affleck (1922–89) and Jeffrey Lindsay (dates unknown), winners of second place; and Eb Zeidler (1926–), who came in third. Stan H. Butcherd with Clifford Wilson, John W. Graham, and Roy B. Turner received honourable mentions. The top-ranked designs all met the mandate of the competition: to create a single-level, multi-functional bungalow with clearly defined zones for adults, children, and public and private activities. The judges chose designs that offered “fresh, happy, practical solution[s] for the living needs of the ‘middle majority’ of Canadian families,” with a maximum building budget of $16,000 and a maximum square footage of 1,400.4 Many of the architects featured in the well-illustrated issue would go on to become central figures in Canadian architecture; for most, it was their first national exposure. Over the next four decades, Desbarats, Lebensold, Affleck, Prus, and Zeidler would build extensively in Canada and abroad, garnering international fame.5 The Home ’53 competition thus holds a significant place in the history of Canadian modernism. For the history of the profession of architecture in Canada, the competition was also a watershed moment: a woman architect, who would herself become a distinguished, if still relatively unknown, architect, participated on one of the top two teams. My goal in this chapter is to read the special CHJ issue simultaneously as catalytic event and as dialectical image. Catalytically, the Home ’53 housing competition brought cutting-edge modernist architectural design strategies to its readers in a way that underscored their ability to participate in the production of a new, national architectural culture. With the presence of a woman in second place, the image of this participation may have opened itself up in multiple ways to the wide readership of the magazine. Just as the Home ’53 competition is a powerful marker of the rise of post-war modernism, so too does the special issue reflect an historical moment when Canadian women entered the profession of architecture in greater numbers than ever before. I argue that the journal was h ammo nd

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also dialectic in the sense that its content produced a compelling text of ambivalence. Readers encountered articles about innovative modernism alongside “Top-o’-the-crop” salad recipes and romantic fiction steeped in gender clichés. But there could be no clearer indication that the world in which the Home ’53 was to take its place was a fraught and unstable one than the issue’s cover. There, a pert model of the winning Home ’53 design, receiving its finishing touches courtesy of an elegant, female hand, occupied the same visual space as the title of that month’s lead article, “I Weep for Us Women” (Fig. 7.1). Situated directly beneath the model house, these words jar the image of the home and the woman who lavishes attention and care upon its spaces and surfaces, troubling the cohesion between femininity and domesticity that remained the journal’s primary focus. The article, by author and politician Agnes Macphail (1890–1954), was an unequivocally feminist text and its critique of suburban life cut like a knife through the affirmative content of the rest of the magazine. The presence of such an essay within the pages of the CHJ special issue of August 1953 points to something beyond the cultural ironies and social contradictions of 1950s Canada. In bringing together undeniably conservative content with a feminist lead article and cutting-edge modernism, the journal resonated with the arguments, explicit and implicit, that would transform Canada in the decade to come, both architecturally and socially. These include the rightful place of women in society, the role of the family and the home in the creation of a stable, powerful nation, and the question of what, precisely, constituted the “modern,” meaning progressive, versions of all of the above. If, following Jane Rendell’s reading of Walter Benjamin, a dialectical image is “a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired,”6 then the CHJ special issue is such an image: while the journal continually marshalled heteronormative gender roles, conventional social expectations of women, and nuclear family-oriented consumerist practices, it also demonstrated an irrefutable sedition. The call to leave the unsatisfying confines of feminized domesticity spins out a few pages away from architectural designs that reify, in elegant, spare lines, a stylistically modern version of the very same ideal. As such, the August 1953 special edition of CHJ is, as Benjamin writes, “that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”7 The effect of such an image, for Rendell, is “to create a moment when the usual patterns of thinking and everyday living stop and new ones are given the chance to emerge.”8 As the only female architect included within a group of ten male architects, Maria Prus (Fig. 7.2) is the cipher and the sphinx of the dialectical image I seek to analyze here. She is an example of what Macphail calls for, a woman with a life and career beyond the home, and thus is representative of the genderinclusive future that Macphail implores her readers to create. Prus is also the co-producer of a design for a home that reproduces, as do all top six designs, the

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Fig. 7.1 Cover of the Canadian Home Journal, August 1953.

implicitly patriarchal social relations contained within the magazine’s design brief. When her career as a whole is taken into account, Prus is an enigmatic figure, whose professional contributions to architecture are distinct yet subsumed within the rubric of the firm she would work for until her retirement: Victor Prus Architects. My intention is to explore the CHJ special issue as a constellation of newness and possibility as produced in the effect of the clash between existing ideals and emerging change. In my reading, the journal becomes a site where powerfully opposed, yet historically parallel, phenomena encounter one another, and where the stunning absence of any framing editorial commentary left readers

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Fig. 7.2 Maria Prus pictured (top right) with her collaborators and their second-place designs for Home ’53 in the Canadian Home Journal, August 1953. Left to right: Victor Prus, Maria Prus, Ray Affleck, Jeffrey Lindsay.

free to choose which aspects of the radically modern visions – feminist and architectural – they preferred, and which of the more familiar images of femininity they wished to retain. Faced with such contradictory possibilities, perhaps some readers also found themselves reflecting upon the gaps between the two in their own lived experience. 198

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“A Woman Should Be a Person” Perfectly illustrating the ways in which women were perceived both as necessary to the functioning of the home and as still childlike in their interests and dependency, the woman’s hand on the cover of the August 1953 issue delicately dabs paint on the apex of a dollhouse version of the Desbarats/Lebensold design. The left hand supports the right wrist, perhaps to indicate the exacting work being undertaken, but perhaps also to allow the woman’s wedding ring and exquisite grooming to be seen. Tiny pink and blue lawn chairs remind us that this model is, like a doll house, a site of fantasy and projection, while the faintly peaked roof and suggestion of a chimney confirm that, modern or not, this house still resonates within familiar codes of house, home, and suburb.9 Just as the cover infantilizes the magazine’s readers by suggesting that women are only playing at homemaking, the image also suggests, tantalizingly, that women are the creators of their homes, the architects of their families’ spaces. Literally underscoring this image and its inherent problems, however, is a profoundly destabilizing phrase, “I Weep for Us Women,” enunciating that all is not as perfect as it may seem. Agnes Macphail’s blistering lead article for the Home ’53 special issue is a surprisingly feminist critique of the ways that women continued to be confined, ideologically, to the home in the year 1953, throwing into question the otherwise monolithic vision that the magazine would appear to present of women as simultaneously, and unquestioningly, house-bound and house-proud.10 A prison reformer and peace activist, Macphail was also the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons, in 1921 (Fig. 7.3). She was a fierce defender of women’s rights and sought what she called a “politics of equality” for all people.11 Aware of how a male-dominated society reduces the full capacities of men, women, and children, Macphail used her CHJ article to draw readers’ attention to the absence of Canadian women in politics, medicine, business, and the creative professions. Of the latter, she wrote, “Creative work is the highest form of independent thinking, and a woman is often only half a person or less. When she and her husband become one, he is that one. That doesn’t make for great art.”12 Macphail’s emphasis upon professions was keyed to her dual theme: that women become full individuals once they develop a public life, and that society as a whole will benefit once this representation has become truly equal. “A woman,” Macphail explained, should be a person. She should have ideas on what’s going on in her community and in the world. If she doesn’t like things she should step out and remedy them … women must establish themselves as people in every walk of life before they can wield the influence to which they are entitled … I weep for us women, then, because the cards are stacked against us. We want not only to love and be loved. We want decent homes, in which h ammo nd

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Fig. 7.3 Agnes Macphail as pictured in the Canadian Home Journal, April 1954.

we can raise healthy, happy children … we want peace in the world. We want these things for our own families, and, because any of us who have faced the facts at all realize our interdependence, we must want them for everybody. Yet to get to them we must move out into fields which men have pre-empted.13 This was not the first or last time that Macphail’s tough but wryly humorous personality would find a voice in CHJ’s pages. She would also provide a posthumous guest editorial, eight months later, in which she asked, “Are Politics Too Dirty for Women?” (Her answer: “Women have never been afraid of dirt.”14) In its broad address to women’s potential and to society’s structure, Macphail’s contribution to the Home ’53 issue is a possible marker for the rise of second wave feminism in Canada. Like later, book-length publications such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique of 1963, Macphail’s essay is a withering

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critique of the limited options available to women and a direct rebuttal of the idea that women’s place was (still) in the home. Although she never expressly mentions architecture as one of the professions that women need to infiltrate, architecture certainly resonates in terms of her discussion of the “half person” that women become when they work with their spouses, and the requirement that they “must work twice as hard as men and be twice as good to get half as far.”15 While it is unknown if, before penning her own text, Macphail had read Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking book The Second Sex, published in English for the first time in 1953, it is clear that her essay directly confronted the gendered inequities that saturated the remaining content of the August 1953 special issue. In this way, the essay provided readers with a tool for reading against the grain of the Home ’53 winning designs. Valerie J. Korinek decodes similar expressions of women’s power and powerlessness in 1950s and 1960s popular media in her book, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. Chatelaine purchased CHJ in 1958, and thus their histories and readers are entwined. Writing against the widely accepted view of suburban existence as only detrimental to women, and of reading popular magazines as simply an exercise in passive acceptance, Korinek argues that “reading a magazine, watching television, or consuming other types of popular culture involve the reader in making a series of choices.”16 Through a close reading of magazine content, as well as Chatelaine’s readers’ letters to the editor, Korinek suggests that “Chatelaine articles, editorials, fiction [and] advertising produced a variety of possible interpretations beyond the most basic premise or preferred meaning.”17 Following John Fiske and Roland Barthes, Korinek explores how Chatelaine contained, “while attempting to repress them, voices that contradict the ones it prefers; it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them.”18 Chatelaine’s articles about birth control (before it was legally available), common-law marriage, homosexuality, women’s health, racism, and social justice created, with readers’ responses, a rhetorical space that Korinek believes to have contributed to the rise of feminism in the late 1960s in Canada. Korinek’s book therefore makes an argument that is important for this chapter. She writes, “Instead of providing an environment that supported and encouraged readers to consume the advertisers’ products or to re-create themselves as the embodiment of the perfect Canadian housewife and mother, Chatelaine often, in a quietly subversive manner, encouraged Canadian women to think about other options for their lives.”19 This idea then begs the question: Did the lush visual range of options, opinions, and ideals presented via the Home ’53 special issue prompt Canadian women to think about other options for their lives within the built environment? In other words, did Home ’53 ask women to think spatially for themselves?

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The Competition The mid-1950s were the only time in its history when CHJ outsold its national competitor, Chatelaine.20 This was also the period in which CHJ ran its annual housing competitions. It is possible that the magazine’s success in these years is directly related to the popularity of the competitions, and the interest that they raised within CHJ readership. This interest, however, was rooted in a bigger national picture. Veronica Strong-Boag discusses similar competitions, some of which predate Home ’53, mounted by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (cmhc) in the same decade.21 Private companies also mounted competitions in this period, such as the International Calvert House Competition for the Canadian Home of Tomorrow (1954)22 and the Douglas Fir Plywood Architectural Competition (1953). These competitions, like Home ’53, emerged in the period of post-war affluence and within the context of a nationwide housing crisis. Changes to legislation, mortgage structure, and suburbandevelopment policy in the early 1950s meant that gradually the cmhc’s goal of seeing one million new houses built after the Second World War could come to fruition. Yet, as Deryck W. Holdsworth and Joan Simon note, “popular ‘house and garden’ magazines and the technical architectural press envisioned modern houses built with new materials and industrialized technologies – scientifically lit, heated, and air and sound conditioned – but the houses actually built were traditional bungalow designs constructed in traditional ways.”23 Home ’53 in contrast, aimed to create architecturally modern houses, in materials and design, for traditional, nuclear families. The challenge of the Home ’53 competition, in the judges’ view, was “to design an efficient, livable, original house, one thoroughly of our time in concept and plan.” “Good house design,” the special issue continued, “must start with a knowledge of the people who will live in the structure.”24 Who was to live in Home ’53? According to the magazine, it was to be “a young married couple having a reasonably assured income and whose way of life might be described as conforming to that led by the ‘middle majority’ of Canadians.”25 The competitors took this rather vague instruction to heart, creating designs for families of four whose possessions included a car, appliances, toys, garden tools, and clothes. Their spatial needs, as dictated by the directors of the competition, were to include parking, storage, laundry facilities, and designated eating, cooking, and leisure spaces, as well as a “multi-purpose” area intended for “father’s tools” and “mother’s sewing machine.” In addition to attributing an impressive list of possessions to the hypothetical occupants of Home ’53, the jurors assumed that “all the household duties [would be] carried out on the co-operative plan by the husband and wife with the part-time assistance of a domestic.”26 As was the tendency of magazines like Chatelaine and CHJ, “average” Canadian incomes and dwellers were inflated and idealized in terms of the competition’s mandates.27 202

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Fig. 7.4 Guy Desbarats and Fred Lebensold’s first-place design for the Home ’53 housing competition, as pictured in the Canadian Home Journal, August 1953.

Guy Desbarats and Fred Lebensold’s first-prize design (Fig. 7.4) was a onestory bungalow of three closed bedrooms ranged around a central, open plan. Interior designer Elizabeth Kent, who was also the official interiors expert for CHJ, imagined colour palettes for a built version of the design that included rosy pinks, verdant greens, and minimal furniture (Fig. 7.5). Photographs showing a range of stunning modern furnishings accompanied the more technical drawings of Home ’53, illustrating the high level of design and the marriage of functionalism and aesthetics for which exemplary modernism is known. In their handdrawn plan, Desbarats and Lebensold show the carport to be integrated into the h ammo nd

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Fig. 7.5 Elizabeth Kent’s interior design for the winning entry in the Home ’53 housing competition, as pictured in the Canadian Home Journal, August 1953.

Fig. 7.6 Guy Desbarats and Fred Lebensold’s winning plan for Home ’53, as pictured in the Canadian Home Journal, August 1953.

overall conception of the house (Fig. 7.6). After driving up to the front door, one proceeds through a brief passageway that immediately breaks open into four different areas: the parents’ or guest bathroom to the right; the dining/living room, straight ahead; the multi-purpose or playroom, to the left; and the kitchen, accessible through either of the two previous spaces. Standing in the centre of the house, one would have a clear view as well to the children’s bedrooms to the left, while the access to the powder room acts as a spatial screen between the entrance area and the parents’ bedroom. In addition to its skilful expression of the “modern idiom,” the jurors admired this design’s capacity to allow the mother to watch over her children easily while cementing firm boundaries between adult and child sleeping areas. Bev Thompson, who has lived in a built version of Home ’53 from 1963 to the present, confirms that “there was no place in the house where I couldn’t keep an eye on [the children].”28 Desbarats and Lebensold organized their design around the experiences of a woman who worked in the house as a wife and mother. The kitchen and living and dining rooms were set up so that cleaning, cooking, and other household duties might be undertaken simultaneously with the work of motherhood. This adaptation of modernist architectural ideals to the Canadian home came, perhaps, with a price: the visibility of the children could mean a lack of privacy for the woman in question.29 Agnes Macphail dwells upon the possible consequences of such a spatial condition a few pages after the floor plan for the Desbarats/Lebensold design is shown. She writes, “If Mum is going to be the servant of all in the home, it is going to be a little hard for her to express her own ideas as distinct from her husband’s and children’s.”30 Macphail never explicitly mentions Virginia Woolf, but the insights of A Room of One’s Own haunt all the designs presented. Like Woolf, Macphail insists that women need mental space of their own, a break from the duties that come with their identities. This mental space has a direct spatial equivalent for Woolf; in having a room of one’s own, one has a place where one can close the door on all the requirements and demands of family life, of one’s gender role, and of one’s prescribed place in society, even if just for a time. Where for Woolf the room of one’s own is necessary for the cultivation of creativity, for Macphail the purpose of an escape from domesticity is that it cultivates a sense of self, which in turn creates the conditions for entry into public life. Macphail’s impassioned plea for women to live up to their potential and to leave the home at least partly behind could not have been completely ignored as readers surveyed their spatial and gendered options in the illustrated designs and the many accompanying advertisements. A counter-thesis begins to emerge, then, among the images and texts of consumerism and domesticity. The juxtaposition of the winning designs with Macphail’s article suggests that women both require and produce space. The space that Macphail’s text calls into representation is a space of subject formation, of h ammo nd

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public action, of independent identity. With the possible exception of the secondplace design, none of the top designs of the Home ’53 competition provided such a space, or at least not literally. But they did propose, in conjunction with the advertisements and focus articles, a rhetorical space where women’s informed choices about home design, furnishings, and decorations could begin to represent their inner lives, even in spaces where their primary function was to act for the benefit of the family. Folded within the paradox of the August 1953 issue thus lies evidence of how women, in the words of feminist scholar Judy Giles, “negotiated ambiguous and ambivalent ways of seeing themselves, sometimes pulled forward as agents of change, but at others pushed back as symbolizations of continuity and tradition.”31 The modern house, as presented in the winning designs, is certainly an architectural expression of the gendering of the post-war, built landscape. But it is also a site for a range of choices, however much such choices would have been apprehended within the conventions of gendered labour and homemaking. Readers of the Home ’53 special issue were invited to examine the different plans and elevations, read expert opinions, consider a variety of decorative treatments, and decide within a range of options upon the best spatial approach for their own families. While there are clearly aspects of coercion in this scenario, there are also possibilities for the expression of personal difference and choice within conformity. Such expression and choice can be linked to the discussions of mimesis proposed by architectural theorist Hilde Heynen and philosopher Luce Irigaray. For Heynen, mimesis is “an act of imitation resulting in a similarity without exact likeness,”32 perhaps in the same way that readers of CHJ would have imitated, but not directly reproduced, some of Elizabeth Kent’s lush colour schemes for their own homes. What separates mimesis from repetition, in Irigaray’s writing, is that mimesis contains within it the potential to disturb, distort, and even disengage, perhaps only slightly, from convention, and, in so doing, to enter into the possibility of a questioning or critical distance. As Heynen writes, “mimesis, as an inscription of the feminine, can be seen as operating on different levels in the practices and discourses related to modernity and domesticity.” Even homemaking, Heynen continues, “the act of appropriating a house by decorating it, furnishing it, investing it with the mementoes of personal and family histories,”33 holds within its prescribed patterns and actions the potential for subversion and divergence from norms. The idea of mimesis leaves open an imaginative space, available, in Irigaray’s words, to “convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus begin to thwart it.”34 Although not all home decorating could be said to operate critically, mimesis, with its critical possibilities, does describe the ordinary actions taken towards the design, decoration, and maintenance of post-Second World War, middle- and upper-middle-class domestic architecture.

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Being Modern Beyond the winning designs, the special issue supplements the Home ’53 plans, elevations, and decorative schemes with in-depth, factual articles about modern building materials and methods, about how to decode construction costs, and about how to obtain mortgages and financing.35 From the varieties of heating ducts to the merits of asbestos panels, experts provided reasoned arguments for modern ways and means of building. The magazine was likewise full of articles and advertisements that aimed to enhance readers’ appreciation of modern architecture, furnishings, cuisine, and fashion. Modernity, ease of use, and the promise of extended youth and newness mingled in the images and copy of this content. “Is there a fur in your future?” asks one article about new styles of mink coats, while an advertisement for Marchand’s hair rinse promises an end to the evidence of aging: “Romance is just a rinse away!”36 Ads for menstrual pads, hairnets, corn-removal creams, baby powder, and high-powered vacuum cleaners are fully in evidence, but so are endorsements for refrigerators whose “modern designs compliment any kitchen” and furnishings whose “bold clean lines … promise lasting good taste in the modern home.”37 Two full-page advertisements illustrated the ways in which the home was a woman’s domain but not fully under her control. “Be sure to show this advertisement to your husband!” exclaims the young, attractive woman pictured in a promotion for the Coleman Blend-Air Home Heating System, promising “health as well as comfort.”38 The reader’s power to make an informed selection – but with the guidance of her “Architect or Plumbing and Heating Contractor” – is also at the heart of an advertisement for Crane that closed the August 1953 issue of CHJ (Fig. 7.7). Notions of want and need, as well as an appreciation of quality and innovation, shape the text of the ad: “The styles you need – and the colours you desire – they’re yours to choose in the complete Crane line of modern bathroom fixtures.” Crane’s ad makes its case in a stunning palette, whose shades of peach, ochre, and turquoise could obscure the fact that the bathroom represented is modern not just in its fixtures and colours but also in its layout, elevation, and technical aspects. Pot lights illuminate the room from dropped ceiling elements, which would also contain the indoor plumbing. The advertisement shows a built-in closet equipped with aeration holes for fresh towels, and up-to-date baseboard electrical heating. Ribbon windows, a central modernist design element, suggest a view of greenery and trees beyond. The implication is of a verdant exterior but one that does not necessarily exclude other buildings nearby. The strategically high placement of the window suggests the proximity of other houses. From within one of the modern house’s most modern rooms, the bathroom, the vision is implicitly one of a suburban development. After an issue full of suggestions and standards for modern design and living, all assuming that the reader of CHJ was thinking about either purchasing h ammo nd

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a new home or was seeking ways to modernize the home they had,39 the Crane bathroom advertisement would have made a great deal of sense to its newly educated readers. The magazine, in other words, would have instructed its readers on how to analyze this advertisement not just for the desirability of its consumables but also for the expression of modern, hygienic, and improved space. While the emphasis on consumption-related happiness and health is clear, the continual invocation of the “modern” points to another reading in the context of the housing competition. The issue as a whole clearly delineates the important role that women could play in the development of an (architecturally) modern nation, as educated taste makers within the gendered hierarchies of their own family units and within what Veronica Strong-Boag calls the “gendered landscape” of post-war, suburban Canada.40

Women, Modern Architecture, and Landscape Through a series of twentieth-century case studies, Alice T. Friedman has shown how women, particularly clients, have been “effective catalysts for creativity in modern domestic architecture” by virtue of the fact that both women and architects believed that “the essence of modernity was the complete alteration of the home – its construction, materials, and interior spaces.”41 The potential to

Fig. 7.7 Advertisement for Crane Ltd in the Canadian Home Journal, August 1953.

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be part of a new vision for both architecture and one’s country was not limited, however, to the prerogatives of individual, wealthy women clients. Curators, authors, editors, and consumers also made an important impact in terms of bringing architectural modernity, and its presumed social counterpart, social modernity, into the minds and hearts of their fellow citizens. Writer, curator, and educator Elizabeth Bauer Mock (1912–98) curated seven exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art from 1938 to 1946, during which time she wrote two widely circulated books, Built in USA, 1932–1944 (1944) and If You Want to Build a House (1946). In both, Mock strove to persuade a new generation of homebuyers of how modernism might improve their lives and the quality of North American architectural culture overall. Women with public roles such as House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon (active 1941–65) were also important arbiters in terms of espousing one type of modernism over another. Gordon famously rejected International Style modernism in her April 1953 editorial, “The Threat to the Next America,” in which she objected to the work of well-known architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe on the grounds that the “much-touted all-glass cube of International Style architecture is perhaps the most unlivable type of home.”42 That architects took note of what Gordon had to say is evident in the fact that Architectural Forum issued a full-page rebuttal in the form of an editorial in May 1953.43 Given the scope of this debate, which spawned a series of articles in each journal on what constituted “the modern,” it is very likely that Canadian architects also would have paid attention.44 Perhaps it is an indication of House Beautiful’s import that the Desbarats/Lebensold design has very little in the way of glass-cube solutions, and more in the way of asbestos panels (a material that would ultimately prove just as antithetical to livable homes). The examples of Mock and Gordon are meant to show that it was not just women readers who participated in the development of modernism in domestic architecture but also some very powerful writers, editors and taste makers, many of whom had long careers. Elizabeth Mock’s positive and pedagogical prose shifts over the course of her career from buildings to the larger landscapes that surround them. Even in her early work, landscape continually attends architecture and makes it more beautiful; many of the illustrations in her books depict not the interiors of rooms but the views from those interiors of a leafy exterior world. With the publication of her 1964 book, Modern Gardens and the Landscape, Mock began to raise questions about architecture’s legacy as humanity’s greatest impact upon the natural environment. Here, as she continued to explore the design possibilities of modernism, her writerly gaze left the house behind altogether. “It becomes apparent,” she wrote, “that the architecture of the landscape, perhaps even more than the architecture of buildings, can be wholly ours, yet wholly free … We demand a close relationship between indoors and outdoors,

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but wish the landscape to be itself, not an architectural appendage.”45 This description of landscape architecture, by a woman who made an enormous contribution to the post-war appreciation of modern architecture, could easily be describing the landscape designs of Maria Prus. Her collaboration with Victor Prus, Ray Affleck, and Jeffrey Lindsay for Home ’53 may have been the starting point for a career in which landscape design is the place where architecture ends and a certain kind of freedom begins.

Liminal Space, Landscape Design “No other design,” wrote the Home ’53 jury, “compared with this [one]”46 (See Fig. 7.2). Maria Prus, in collaboration with three other young architects, produced a design that nearly won first place, according to the jury, who hesitated only over the smaller living room and what they felt were awkwardly placed toilet facilities. What impressed the jury most was a service core, gathering together kitchen, laundry, bathroom, and storage and utility functions in one centrally placed island, naturally lit by a raised roof and clerestory windows. The grouping of functions in a central service core was not new in modern design, but, in the context of an appeal to a Canadian “middle majority,” it was daring. What is more striking, however, is that this was the only house design published that used the space thus saved to create areas, both indoors and out, that defy a clear use or designation, that complicate the modernist ideal of visibility and consequent character of surveillance. The service core featured in the second-place design serves to block views from the living area through to its “all purpose room” to the south. While the main access to the house, via the front door, does provide a clear view through to the rear of the home and into the back garden, it does not allow someone working in any of the service areas to be seen. Perhaps more significantly, there is no one vantage point in the house that allows for the kind of panoptic spatial experience that can be found in the first-place design. The house provides an outdoor “patio” that is not for gardening or for children’s play. Spaces for hanging out laundry or storage have been provided elsewhere. This patio has been reserved as the site of a potential “future bedroom,” following the design brief, but for now – in the moment of the plan – it is a site where no work need take place, for it is all taken care of, spatially, elsewhere. Is this space, then, the kind of partial escape from domesticity espoused by Macphail as necessary to the inner life of a woman, and therefore to the larger, public life of all women? Existing somewhere between purposes, between present and future functions, the “patio/future bedroom” is a liminal space set apart from the house while clearly integral to its design.

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This kind of space is a feature that has many echoes in what would be the future designs of Victor Prus Architects, the firm for which Maria Prus worked for the rest of her professional career. It is clear from surveying the firm’s design history that Maria Prus was responsible, consistently, for the landscape design of many of the firm’s most successful and significant commissions, including numerous private houses, the award-winning Rockland Shopping Centre (Montreal, 1959), Station Bonaventure (Montreal, 1967), Le Grand Théâtre de Québec (1971), the Montreal Congress Centre (1979), the Barbados International Airport (1980), and the spectacular Brudenell River Recreational Park (Prince Edward Island, 1973). For these projects as well as for many others, Maria Prus has credit for all aspects of the design where interior meets exterior; her signature style appears to be the creation of spaces where one may remove oneself – visually, physically, and perhaps also mentally – from the official program or purpose of the architecture. In this way, the design practice of Maria Prus could be said to be linked by the consistent provision of egress from the architecture she helped to design. She worked consistently on the edge of the profession just as she designed edges for buildings: interstitial spaces and subtle, organic frames for bold modern buildings. Maria Prus’s landscape designs, now mostly vanished, were a place where the discourse of masculinity in architecture (and its designers) was interrupted; her authorship requires this pause, but her designs do as well. Hilde Heynen argues that “mimesis is also at work in the critical moments where modern architecture questions, subverts, undermines, or thwarts conventional gender patterns.”47 The lack of an uninterrupted scopic field and the presence of a liminal, unscripted space in the second-place Home ’53 design suggest such a critical moment. While it would be essentialist to claim that the presence of a woman on the design team guaranteed this subtle thwarting of both mainstream modernism (which emphasized open plans and multi-purpose rooms) and traditional homes and gardens (which emphasized a vertical organization of power and labour), her presence on this and other projects is nevertheless important. Recent research has demonstrated that women have played a substantial part in the history of North American landscape architecture of the twentieth century, shaping the profession as well as being the conduit through which cutting-edge architectural ideas came into landscape practice.48 But the strong drive within architecture to distinguish itself from related fields has meant that landscape architecture has had the double burden of being both marginal and gendered feminine, constituting a professional and symbolic other to the masculinist vision of architecture as the opposite of nature.49 Prus may have experienced the effect of this double burden, compounded perhaps even further by working collaboratively, as a woman, during a period when women architects fought for professional recognition.

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Professional Status and Women Architects in Canada in the 1950s Because educational and provincial organizations strictly regulate access to formal registration, the issue of professional status with regard to architecture, which emerged as a profession for Canadian women in the 1920s,50 may seem to be a relatively straightforward matter. However, as Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred demonstrate in their book, Designing Women, female architects in Canada have tended to maintain a more “fragmented and tenuous connection to the labour force” than their male counterparts, and there has been a “greater tendency of qualified women graduates [of schools of architecture] to be ‘neverregistered professionals.’”51 The authors assess how, prior to the 1970s, women architects in Canada were “pioneers” in terms of entering this male-dominated field, constituting just 5 to 9 per cent of the registered architects in the country between 1920 and 1970.52 The 1950s saw the highest number of women registrants in architecture to date in Canada, although this number still constituted only 9 per cent of the total. Adams and Tancred pay special attention, however, to the unique case of Quebec where significantly higher numbers of women, 16 per cent, became registered members of its professional organization, L’Ordre des Architects du Québec (oaq). Of this proportion, a substantial number included women who had trained abroad before settling in Canada. Adams and Tancred note as well that over half of the Quebec-based women architects they interviewed had married architects or men with careers in related fields such as engineering or contracting.53 With these tendencies in mind, Maria Fisz Prus can be seen as highly representative of this pioneering generation of Canadian women architects. Born in Poland, Prus studied architecture in Warsaw before the Second World War, then worked as a stage designer during the war. She continued with her architecture training in Belgium after marrying Victor Prus in 1946. On completion of her education, Prus took up a position in the office of the chief architect of the London County Council. After moving to Quebec in 1952, she became a senior associate of Victor Prus Architects in 1954, one year after participating in Home ’53. Prus describes her ninety years as “a very rich life”54 and, reflecting on her career, says that it seems “like a beautiful dream.” Having been both the life partner and collaborator of Victor Prus for sixty-three years, Prus sees this relationship as a “major accomplishment.” When, in an interview with Prus, I made the suggestion that there was something special about her landscape designs, and that they make a unique contribution to the firm’s œuvre, Prus laughed and replied, “How can you tell? Landscape changes so much over time.” I explained that Victor Prus’s self-published memoirs contain many images which document her work, and that her role in the firm is certainly implied in the text. She replied, “I didn’t write that book. But yes, I talked with him about everything.”

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Prus was the first woman architect to be named an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1977, the same year that Victor Prus received the honour. For her, the Home ’53 competition is a distant memory, obscured by over three decades of a varied, successful career, including public and private commissions, memorial projects, and designs for museums and other cultural institutions. But Prus’s thoughts about landscape are irrefutable; it does change. Her interventions at Rockland Shopping Centre and the Montreal Convention Centre are not to be found today. The ephemeral nature of much landscape design and the ever-expanding nature of the built environment make the creative traces of landscape architects difficult to evaluate. Prus’s comments about her life point, however, to another reality, one that is much more personal. As feminist historians of architecture delve more deeply into the modern period, when so many women architects came to the fore, methodological questions impinge upon individual histories. How does a study of a woman architect approach its object when she produced her work collaboratively within the context of a firm? When an individual woman feels that her contribution, while significant, cannot and should not be extracted from those of her colleagues or partner, how should the feminist architectural historian treat that sensibility? And when the conventions of the profession are such that one name – that of the principal architect – comes to stand for the joint work of firms which may have shifting membership over time, how are the professional identities of associates to be considered, taking into full account the loyalty, respect, and affection of those members for one another? Such questions have gained increasing currency as the work of married architects, and of women who worked for high-profile men, comes under greater historical scrutiny. Cautioning against the tendency to isolate single architects as “innate individual talents,” architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright suggests that the prevailing notions of architectural genius convey a very limited notion of the individual. If scholars presume the autonomy of their historical subjects, they risk obscuring the complex and vital ways that friendship, love, and collaboration inspire, transform, and extend individual creative action. This insight is as true of the men who have a much more visible place in architectural history as it is of the women who are at risk of being lost within that history. Author of a compelling essay about the intellectual and personal partnership of planner, activist, and educator Catherine Bauer (1905–64) with her husband, modern architect William Wurster (1895–1973), Wright argues that “to suggest some of the ways in which Wurster and Bauer affected one another is not to question either one’s creativity or independence … [but rather] to see these two lives conjointly reminds us of the ways in which significant human choices and the experiences that follow can alter our lives, expanding certain dimensions and foreclosing others.”55

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Such powerfully resonant relationships need not only encompass the romantic realm. A recent documentary, showing interviews with six of the one hundred women architects who collaborated with the famous (and famously egotistical) American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, illustrates how much his encouragement, mentoring, and abolition of gendered labour in his studio and at his school meant to the women who became his colleagues and apprentices.56 Reflecting on the implications of these under-studied relationships, Gwendolyn Wright observes that, “if we miss the complexities of an individual architect,”57 such as his or her relationships with family, spouse, or peers, “we may miss what made him or her a good architect.” Thus, creative partnerships and the family or peer relationships that support them are important considerations for an inclusive approach to architectural history. By the same token, it becomes clear that studying the role of women, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s female colleagues and apprentices, gives rise to more accurate histories of architecture. In short, considering co-authorship, particularly when a woman architect is one of the authors or collaborators, is an important strategy for feminist histories of architecture, especially given the prevalence of such practices within the profession. Nevertheless, it is also necessary to find ways to assess critically the work of women in architecture, to find methods that take into account how cultural production is so often shot through with ambivalence and paradox, for it seems to be in such contradictions that the crucial traces of women’s creativity and resistance can be found.

The “Real” Home ’53 If you are among the ‘middle majority’ of Canadian families for whom Home ’53 was planned,” voiced a half-page insert on one of the final pages of CHJ’s August 1953 issue, “and if you wish to build a house which has the benefit of the most careful architectural thought in both distinctive design and practical living appeal, the coupon herewith will represent the exciting first step towards realizing your dream. A home of your own.”58 The clip-and-mail coupon promised a contractor-ready building kit for the price of $10 (the equivalent of approximately $80 in 2010), a very low sum for architect-designed housing. Perhaps the publisher of CHJ, Jack Kent Cooke, had been reading the journal of the raic during the months between the announcement of the competition and the printing of the winning designs. In the June issue of the raic journal, author James W. Strutt commented on the recent spate of housing competitions, including the CHJ’s, and criticized the lack of truly low-cost solutions and fundamentally innovative housing alternatives. His greatest objection to the competitions, however, was the lack of built models. Without them, neither the designers nor the potential inhabitants could really learn what worked in terms 214

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of modern, domestic architecture and what did not. “It all would take time,” Strutt wrote, “but at least through certain publicity, the people would see what could be done. They cannot be expected to judge what they cannot see.”59 Whether Cooke was directly inspired by these words or simply had a similar sense of application, he decided to collaborate with Harold Shipp, a prominent Toronto-area developer, and, upon the announcement of the competition winner, a model Home ’53 was built in Applewood Acres, an emerging development in Mississauga. Visually distinct from Applewood’s other model homes, Home ’53 struggled to find a buyer, but thousands of visitors toured its unusual spaces.60 At Applewood, the middle majority could apparently be found. Holdsworth and Simon describe the Applewood Acres housing market in the following way: “Their typical buyer was a 38-year-old salesman with an annual income of $6,600, a wife, and two children, aged 10 and 6 years. This was the second house they had owned; they had made a downpayment of $55 and were carrying an $11,000 mortgage. They owned one car … and a television set. The house was designed to appeal to the wife. White, enameled-steel kitchen cupboards with a maple chopping block incorporated into the countertop, a stainless-steel sink with a pull-out attachment for rinsing dishes, vinyl tile floors and the hood for the kitchen stove made these ‘state of the art’ kitchen designs. The four-bedroom brick house had a full basement and an attached garage.”61 The “glass house” that emerged at the corner of Ribston Road and Redan Drive over the fall and winter of 1953 and 1954 differed in a number of respects from this description of the typical Applewood bungalow. There was no brick, no basement, and only three bedrooms. The couple that would eventually live in Home ’53 differed as well from the “typical buyer” in the development. Figure 7.8 shows Home ’53 as it was built. Taken from the CHJ January 1954 issue, the image depicts an elegant, spare house, although not quite as “modern” in its furnishings as Elizabeth Kent’s interior design sketches had suggested it might be. White-enamelled-steel kitchen cupboards were the choice of traditional homebuyers in the development; the Home ’53 model sports these as well, as it does vinyl tile floors. But modern art hangs on the walls and the furniture has a hint of Scandinavian modern. Where the Applewood Home ’53 really stood out from its neighbours was in its façade. The clean lines and bold form of the house design, long and horizontal, with dramatic hanging eaves, spoke clearly to the building’s modern leanings. But the ribbon and wall-to-ceiling picture windows, unlike the fenestration in Kent’s drawings and the Crane bathroom fixtures advertisement, are fully covered. In every room the modernist promise of visibility and light give way to the need for privacy and interiority. The model home was slow to sell. “People marveled at all the glass, but hesitated at the carport (no garage) and lack of a basement.”62 But this did not stop Bev and Frank Thompson, a young couple with no children, from succumbing to the unique charm of the “glass house.” They visited it one night after a stint h ammo nd

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Fig. 7.8 Home ’53 as pictured in the Canadian Home Journal, January 1954.

of house hunting and knew the moment they saw it “glowing through the trees” that it would be their home.63 They bought the house in 1963 from the original owners and remain there to this day. In contrast to the way the house was presented in the January 1954 issue of CHJ, the Thompsons live with their blinds open: “All that space made us feel as if we were in the country. We could look through our glass wall and see from the Corners’ garden to Fred Hedge’s lovely stone farmhouse, surrounded by trees.”64 In 2004 Bev Thompson wrote a short article about her Home ’53, describing how she felt about it after her three children were born, once she and her family were no longer the “middle majority”: “We could have moved, but we 216

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loved the house. So we renovated: one bedroom became a laundry/craft room; we added two bedrooms, enlarged the family room, and created inside access to the storage room. We lost the glass wall and the view, and eventually we lost [our neighbours], who had introduced us to the joy of gardening. The design of the house has proven to be very flexible over the years, and we’ve made more changes since the children have grown and gone. Frank and I continue happily in the house … and plan to keep on doing so.”65 Thompson’s story is perhaps not unlike many women’s stories about first houses that became, through expansion, their second and third houses. And certainly Home ’53 was not as socially radical as it may have been architecturally cutting-edge. But what the built version of Home ’53 did clearly allow was for its own transformation and, most important, its re-creation. Thompson has kept a meticulous photographic record of the house, cherishing the renovations, improvements, and expansions that their home has undergone, both inside and out, since 1963 (Fig. 7.9). Beloved trees have been lost, while storage and skylights have been gained. The roofline is completely new, and none of the original surfaces (floors, interior or exterior walls) can be found today. The hardest loss in the course of making changes to the house, Thompson says, was that of the expansive glazed wall, one of the most modernist features of the house that allowed light into the “multi-purpose room,” as well as beautiful views across the orchards, where a McMansion now sits, next door. But one of Thompson’s greatest achievements with the house is the garden that she has been cultivating on all sides of the building, a feature that is nowhere to be seen in either the original plans or in the early photographs of the prototype (Fig. 7.10).

Fig. 7.9 A 1979 photograph by Bev Thompson of the exterior of Home ’53, showing the carport and the Thompsons’ two sons, Steve and Rob.

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Fig. 7.10 Bev Thompson’s garden in July 2009.

Summing up the many decades lived in their home, and the multiple changes to it, Thompson concludes, “What remains is an entirely updated, insulated and beautiful house but with little resemblance to the original.”66 Yet, like a person transformed by age, the Mississauga incarnation of Home ’53 still looks like the house it once was, its modernist pedigree evident in the elegant and generous fenestration, the overall horizontality, and the open-plan interior. And still the house remains a visual anomaly, inspiring passing drivers to stop and inquire for the name of the architect who designed this unusual beauty. Bev’s husband, Frank Thompson, notes the closeness between family history and spatial context, saying, “This house has gone through all the chapters our life has gone through.”67 Bev and Frank Thompson’s family’s dramatic and sustained renovations to their version of Home ’53 speak to the question of critical mimesis, through which the practices of repetition (living in the suburbs, raising children, engaging in home renovations) become sites for significant expressions of individuality and control over one’s environment. Annmarie Adams has argued that the North American suburban home was “neither paradise nor prison” but was instead a space where women “redesigned the meanings and the uses of the spaces in 218

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[their houses], setting in motion a completely different standard of relations … than that established for [them].”68 “Far from being an antidote to modernity,” Heynen writes, for most women “the home was the place where modernity was enacted. And this home was not necessarily seen as constricting and narrow.”69 On the contrary, the home was – and is – for many women a site of encounter between self and space, a mutually constitutive relationship in which each makes the other. As with all relationships, this relationship of self and house is sometimes frustrating, sometimes triumphant, and, of course, always contingent upon having the means to engage in such a relationship. “To inhabit a house,” suggests Heynen, “means to go through a mutual process of molding in which house and inhabitant become adapted to one another.”70 Bev Thompson’s description of her family’s changes to Home ’53 over time is such a narrative of encounter, mutuality, adaptation, and transformation. What comes through most strongly is that Bev and Frank Thompson love their very transformed home. Indeed, as they say, it was “love at first sight.”71 But this love is not binding; Bev is still thinking about making one more small addition to the house: a little patio for herself on the west side, where she can be in her garden and yet with the house at the same time.

Conclusion Was Agnes Macphail right to weep? Perhaps with some inkling of the impact that her article might make in an issue devoted to the home, she used an architectural metaphor, a doorway between past and future, to close her text. She wrote, “I am glad I am a woman. I am proud of my sex and I only wish I could live another sixty years to see them step across the threshold into the fulfillment which I am sure the future holds for us.”72 Macphail’s trenchant analysis of women’s social conditions in 1953 acts to rupture the idea of home, as it is presented in the majority of the selected architectural designs, advertisements, and articles of the August 1953 special issue of Canadian Home Journal. Her words pierce the wash of normativity that otherwise floods the magazine, subverting the near-constant exhortations to women to whiten whites, try new recipes, and purchase linoleum. Yet the co-mingling of exciting new architectural ideas, glossy advertisements, a feminist essay, and an award-winning house design by a mixedgender architectural team creates a rhetorical gap, where readers of CHJ may have been inspired both to borrow design ideas from Canada’s new generation of modern architects and to think about the public life that Macphail evoked so powerfully as waiting for women, beyond the home. While some of the magazine’s content props up the idea, expressed so compellingly through the cover image, that for women making home is the simple fulfillment of innate, girlish dreams, the dialectical image of the special issue also h ammo nd

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tantalizingly suggests that women are also the creators of their homes, the architects of their families’ spaces and, possibly, of the buildings, spaces, and societies of the future. The housing designs invoke family values, suburban security, gendered labour, and domestic bliss. But, in conjunction with Macphail’s essay, readers could see the ruin of that ideal, its insularity, its consumer-driven practices and content, its turning away from larger social and even global issues. A future in which women choose their lives as well as their furnishings begins to emerge from the pages of the journal. Thus, the images of idealized, modern yet still feminized domesticity in Home ’53 contain the seeds of their own undoing, their own remaking. Macphail’s essay charts a possible path for this undoing and remaking in stringent, expository prose. But the second-place design for Home ’53, while clearly operating within dominant codes of domesticity, gender, knowledge, and space, also provides a means of escape from being observed, and a place of escape from work, even as it appears to conform. These subtle but crucial design details contribute as well not just to the dialectical quality of the Canadian Home Journal special issue but to understandings of this period in suburban architectural design, a telling example of the negotiations of domestic space that continue into our own time.

notes 1 I would like to thank Kristina Huneault, Janice Anderson, and Thomas Strickland for their encouragement and guidance with multiple versions of this essay. I am indebted to Annmarie Adams for helping me to make contact with the family of Guy Desbarats; my sincere thanks go also to Kate and Aileen Desbarats for a generous day of driving, visiting, and talking. I am greatly obliged to Maria Prus for making the time to speak with me by phone. My thanks to Danielle Lewis for her interest in this project as well as her diligent searching and photocopying. Bev Thompson’s many generous replies to my questions about living in Home ’53 were, along with my visit to her house, wonderful developments in the preparation of this essay. Anne-Marie Sigouin at the Canadian Centre for Architecture was exceptionally helpful in providing assistance with the Guy Desbarats archive, while Maria Cook

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of the Ottawa Citizen kindly reported on my search for built versions of the winning Home ’53 design. I would like to thank as well the students in Annmarie Adams’s graduate seminar for their questions and feedback on an earlier stage of this project. This research was generously funded by the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture Emerging Scholar programme. 2 “The Publisher and Editors of Canadian Home Journal announce an annual program of Architectural Competitions to Find and Stimulate Designs for Better Housing for Canadian Living,” Canadian Home Journal (CHJ), February 1953, 59. 3 Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900– 1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004), 11. 4 “Home ’53,” CHJ, August 1953, 19. The building budget of $16,000 is the equivalent of roughly $130,000 in 2010. Advertisements for the competition in the raic

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5

6

7

8 9

10

Journal described the “purpose of the competition” as being to “assist more Canadians to select better medium-cost housing.” Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, 30, no. 2 (1953): 58. The August 1953 issue of the CHJ, however, quoted Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation statistics showing that the average cost for houses in 1952 had been $11,300. Since 10 per cent of this figure included land costs (a cost not reflected in the Home ’53 budget), Home ’53 would have been viable only for above-average income families. J. Caulfield Smith, “For Your First Venture into Home Building: The A, B, C’s of Construction Costs and Mortgage Financing,” CHJ, August 1953, 51, 55–8. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Desbarats, Lebensold, and Affleck worked together in the major Canadian firm arcop (Architects in Co-Partnership), while Eb Zeidler created Zeidler Partnerships in 1970. Both firms have international profiles and are still in operation today. I discuss the accomplishments of Victor Prus Architects below. Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London and New York: I.B Tauris and Company 2006), 77. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1927–39, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1999), 462; quoted in Rendell, Art and Architecture, 77. Rendell, Art and Architecture, 77–8. Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred make a similar analysis of an advertisement for Crane bathroom fixtures (1969), showing a woman’s lower arm and hand installing a bathroom in a construction model, which has the appearance of a doll house, emphasizing how women’s relationships to architecture are playful, not serious. Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000), 45. The technique of printing polemical articles in conjunction with more convention-

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12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

21

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al fare was not unknown, but CHJ tended to be less provocative than Chatelaine. The explicitly feminist charge of Macphail’s text was unusual. For example, the cover of the August 1954 special issue of CHJ, devoted to Home ’54, has no lead article mentioned on its cover, and its most potentially controversial feature, a short story by Jean MacKeagan, deals with the way in which society can push women to be antisocial. “Not Nice People,” CHJ, August 1954, 14–15, 37–9. Overall, CHJ tended to conform and reify normative ideas about femininity. Terrance Allan Crowley, Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality (Toronto: J. Lorimer 1990), 208. Agnes Macphail, “I Weep for Us Women,” CHJ, August 1953, 33. Ibid., 34, 35. Agnes Macphail, “Are Politics Too Dirty for Women?” CHJ, April 1954, 2. Macphail, “I Weep for Us Women,” 35. Valerie J. Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000), 11–12. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 268. Veronica Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945–1960,” Canadian Historical Review, 72 (December 1991): 492; See also Graham Livesy, Michael McMordie, and Geoffrey Simmins, Twelve Modern Houses, 1945–1985 (Calgary: Aris Press and University of Calgary Press 1995), for a discussion, through case studies, of modern, domestic architectural developments in Canada. Victor Prus received an honourable mention in this competition. “International Calvert House Competition,” Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, 31, no. 8 (1954): 263–77. Deryck W. Holdsworth and Joan Simon, “Housing Form and Use of Domestic

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24 25 26 27

28 29

Space,” in John R. Miron, ed., with L.S. Bourne, House, Home, and Community: Progress in Housing Canadians, 1945– 1986 (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1993), 191. “Home ’53,” 53; emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid. This assumption was not unique to the jury of Home ’53. Korinek finds that many Chatelaine readers objected to the suggestion that “middle-class” was the norm among their number, finding the magazine’s conjectures about “average” incomes very inflated. Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs, 290. Likewise, Harris contests the notion that suburbs themselves were middle-class enclaves in the post-war era, noting that just a generation before, during the Depression, suburbs were “home to powerful and militant associations of workers that fought for welfare relief and organized resistance against evictions.” Harris observes as well that suburbs were where more radical politicians – such as Agnes Macphail – tended to be elected in the 1940s. Harris, Creeping Conformity, 42. Author’s interview with Bev Thompson, 24 July 2009. Aileen Desbarats, widow of Guy Desbarats, explains that housing remained a pleasure and preoccupation for Desbarats for the rest of his professional life, even after retirement. His last design projects, for children, neighbours, and friends of reduced mobility, indicate that his approach became one of user-driven design, in which the client and the architect are equal participants. His own home in Georgeville, Quebec, is in many ways the opposite of Home ’53. Sightlines are confounded by the twists and turns of a house that has developed from a small lakeside cottage, purchased in the 1970s, and expanded multiple times. Rooms have more than one way in and out; nooks and cran-

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30 31

32

33 34

35

36 37

38 39

40 41

nies provide many private and play spaces for adults and children alike. Aileen Desbarats feels that the house was the result of a collaboration between herself, Desbarats, and their children. Aileen Desbarats, conversation with the author, 14 March 2009. Macphail, “I Weep for Us Women,” 34. Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (London: Berg 2004), 22. Heynen is here drawing from Walter Benjamin. Hilde Heynen, “Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions,” in Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, eds., Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London and New York: Routledge 2005), 22. Ibid., 24. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press 1985), 76; quoted in Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge 1991), 71. Caulfield Smith, “For Your First Venture,” 43, 52, 58. See also David J. Hulchanski, “New Forms of Owning and Renting,” in Miron, ed., House, Home, and Community, 64–75. CHJ, August 1953, 12, 38. Advertisement for Wood’s Freezers, ibid., 42; advertisement for Ruspan Furniture, ibid., 51. Ibid., 47. A lively advertisement for Paneltyne surfaces, featuring a smiling, wasp-waisted woman, enthused, “Paneltyne is perfect for kitchen, bathroom, bar, playroom – for any busy surface. For your new home – or for easy modernization – see the wide range of Paneltyne colours and patterns before you decide.” Ibid., 53. Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams,” 471. Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and

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42

43

44

45

46 47 48

49

50

Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams 1998), 16. Elizabeth Gordon, “The Threat to the Next America,” House Beautiful, April 1953, 250; quoted in ibid, 141. I am indebted to Monica Penick for this information; Penick’s forthcoming doctoral thesis focuses on Gordon’s influence during this time period. Certainly, Guy Desbarats was profoundly interested in another vivid debate in American architecture of the same period, which also played out in popular sources like the New Yorker – namely, the battle between regionalism and the International Style. Desbarats’s personal memoirs describe his attempt, from the mid-1950s onward, to relate his modernism to the specific qualities of a place, region, and culture. Guy Desbarats, “Three Views of Architecture: A Troubled Profession,” typescript, n.d., Guy Desbarats Papers, folio b12–2109–13td, 38, Canadian Centre for Architecture Archives. Elizabeth B. Kassler [Elizabeth Bauer Mock], Modern Gardens and the Landscape (New York: Museum of Modern Art 1964), 15. CHJ, August 1953, 45. Heynen, “Modernity and Domesticity,” 24. Thaïsa Way, Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2009). Gwendolyn Wright observes that, during the past fifty years, there has been a decisive separation of architecture from “landscapes, housing, historic preservation [and] interior design.” Gwendolyn Wright, “Women in Modernism,” keynote address, “Women in Modernism: Making Places in Architecture,” 25 October 2007, Museum of Modern Art, New York, http://www.bwaf.org/downloads/WRIGH T-WomenInModernism.pdf (accessed 21 June 2009), 5. See chapter 13, Annmarie Adams’s essay on Esther Marjorie Hill, Canada’s first

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55

56

57

58 59

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61 62 63 64

registered woman architect, in this volume. See also Adams and Tancred, Designing Women, 16–17. Adams and Tancred, Designing Women, 22, 25. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 67. All direct quotes: Maria Prus, telephone conversation with the author, 23 June 2009. Gwendolyn Wright, “A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and William Wurster,” in Mark Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press 1995), 199. Beverly Willis, director, A Girl Is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, 15 mins. Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, 2009. The architects featured are Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts, Jane Duncombe, Lois Davidson Gottlieb, Eleanore Pettersen, and Read Weber. Gwendolyn Wright, with Suzanne Lessard and Carol Gilligan, “The Architecture of Writing: Wright, Women and Narrative,” public round table, held in conjunction with the exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Outward Within,” 10 June 2009, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. “Home ’53,” 60. James W. Strutt. “Ontario,” Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, 30, no. 6 (1953): 179. Bev Thompson, “People Who Live in Glass Houses Just Love It,” in “Applewood Originals” (column), The Apple Press (community newsletter), 13, no. 2 (2004): 5. Holdsworth and Simon, “Housing Form and Use,” 192. Thompson, “People Who Live in Glass Houses,” 5. Author’s interview with Bev and Frank Thompson, 24 July 2009. Thompson, “People Who Live in Glass Houses,” 5.

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65 Ibid., 5. 66 Bev Thompson, e-mail message to the author, 9 June 2009. 67 Author’s interview with Frank Thompson, 24 July 2009. 68 Annmarie Adams, “The Eichler Home: Intention and Experience in Postwar Suburbia,” in Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins, eds., Gender, Class,

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and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture V (Knoxville: University of Tenessee Press 1995), 164, 175. Heynen, “Modernity and Domesticity,” 12–13. Ibid., 21. Thompson, “People Who Live in Glass Houses,” 5. Macphail, “I Weep for Us Women,” 35.

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CHAPTER 1

Kathleen Daly’s Images of Inuit People

Professional Art and the Practice of Ethnography Loren Lerner

Kathleen Daly Pepper (1898–1994) possessed all the credentials typical of a professional artist of her era. Born in Toronto into an affluent family, she studied at the Ontario College of Art and graduated in 1924 with a particular interest in drawing and painting. A short time later she left for Paris for two years of post-graduate studies. Upon her homecoming she returned to the Ontario College of Art for another year of schooling, this time with the goal of developing proficiency in etching. As an artist, Daly was an active member of several professional societies, including the Ontario Society of Artists, the Canadian Group of Painters, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, as well as Torontobased clubs for professional women, such as the Heliconian Club and the Zonta Club. Dedicated to the full spectrum of activities expected of someone of her status, she exhibited regularly, participated in the public sale of her work, and received art critics and potential buyers at the Severn Street studio that she shared with her husband and fellow artist George Pepper (1903–62). In 1975 Daly was asked to update the biographical information she had sent periodically to the documentation centre of the National Gallery of Canada. Attached to her papers was an eleven-page appendix that listed artworks in public collections, all her exhibitions and commissions, books and articles she wrote, published reviews on her oeuvre, reproductions of her works in books, journals, and catalogues, and a chronology of her painting trips.1 For Daly, the paintings and drawings of Indigenous and French Canadian subjects produced during these trips – “to most parts of Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific and in the Arctic as far north as Ellesmere Island” – were

the basis of her art practice. She began exploring this interest in the early 1930s, when she and George Pepper travelled to Nova Scotia, the Gaspé peninsula, the north shore of Lake Superior, and Quebec City.2 In 1933 the couple built a log cabin in Quebec’s Charlevoix region, where over the years Daly sketched numerous portraits of Innu (Montagnais) and Quebec habitants. In the 1950s, Daly and Pepper went on summer sketching excursions to Newfoundland and northern Labrador aboard various ships, including a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) minesweeper, a supply ship, a trawler, and a whaling vessel. It was during these outings that they first sketched the Inuit. In 1960 and 1961 they visited the Arctic, and Daly went again in 1968, six years after her husband’s death. There is another aspect of Daly’s professionalism that sheds light on the subject matter that captured her attention during her travels: that of the ethical responsibility that accompanied her status as an expert. As is true of many professionals, Daly’s expert knowledge and her possession of skills developed while acquiring that knowledge placed her in a particular position, at once autonomous and altruistic, from which she sought to contribute to the betterment of society.3 Indeed, Daly viewed herself as a professional whose aim was to educate Canadians about Inuit people. This she accomplished through the drawings she produced in 1961 and 1968 during her stays in the eastern Arctic village of Povungnituk (now Puvirnituq), which show that her “extensive studies of the Eskimo,” as she put it, were grounded in pictorial strategies derived from two sources: the modern way of drawing that originated in her art education and her strong interest in ethnographic practice. When analyzing Kathleen Daly’s work, it is critical to take into account the relentless social and cultural changes the Inuit of this Arctic region experienced during the 1960s.4 In effect, they were forced by the Canadian government, working together with private industry, to leave behind their nomadic life, which was based on hunting, fishing, and trapping, and to piece together a new existence as a settled, wage-based society. Indeed, no other Indigenous group of record in North America endured such swift and profound changes to their way of life, as businesses eager to exploit northern natural resources found a sympathetic partner in a Canadian government increasingly intent on exerting sovereignty over the Arctic during this period of Cold War anxiety.5 Daly was witness to the resultant process of forced social transformation and the imposition of external control – a process that may best be understood as an instance of what sociologist Robert Blauner has termed “internal colonialism.”6 But, while many outsiders from southern Canada were carrying out policies whose goal was to constrain and destroy Indigenous values, Daly focused on finding a method of depicting the Inuit that would allow her to express a sensitive interpretation of their culture. Her solution was to concentrate mainly on drawings of mothers and their children, a coupling that caught her attention in 1960 while travelling for three months aboard the C.D. Howe, a patrol ship. 226

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Given the paternalism of the Canadian government’s northern policies, Daly’s choice to focus on the subject of Inuit maternity was particularly potent. In contrast to the colonial treatment of the Inuit, who were being administered, managed, and manipulated,7 Daly’s drawings constitute a subtle form of social and cultural resistance. Essentially, they can be regarded as an ethical mode of ethnographic intervention, a way of representation defined by the cultural historian James Clifford in The Predicament of Culture as a process wherein the ethnographer, artist, writer, or intervener “caught between cultures, implicated in others” creates “cultural descriptions” that are “properly experimental and ethical.”8 As such, Daly’s drawings of the Inuit, shaped by contemporary events and her own modern art practice, embody her attempts to respond compassionately to a unique culture and history. This argument is, of course, not without its difficulties, for as an individual artist Daly was unable to circumvent fully the institutional power structures she was a part of. Daly was not exempt from imagining the mother with her child as the “Madonna” of the north; nor was she was immune to the romantic idea that childrearing was a common bond for women, a notion that was part and parcel of the larger domestic ideology that fuelled post-war nation building. Most significantly, as Gayatri Spivak has argued, it is inherently problematic for those in privileged positions to represent those who have been disempowered under colonialism. This is because the very power to represent another is an extension of colonial oppression. By virtue of her position as a privileged white professional from the south, Daly was implicated in these power relations, and doubly so given that the first of her Arctic excursions was taken on the governmentowned C.D. Howe. Nevertheless, there is a self-reflexivity in Daly’s drawings, a sympathetic awareness that conveys her endeavour “to work hard,” as Spivak suggests, “at gaining some knowledge of the other.”9 Like Emily Carr before her, as recently explored in Gerta Moray’s Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr,10 Daly tried to create images that conveyed a sincere and honest interest in Native people, despite her entanglement in colonialism. This approach differentiated her work from the picturesque and commercial pictures of the Inuit that were commonly produced during this period. The notion that Daly was engaged in a type of ethnographic intervention contributes to recent art-historical debates about practices of representation within colonialism.11 Three decades of scholarship on European and EuroCanadian ways of depicting Indigenous peoples have taught us to be alert to how these depictions supported the injustices of colonialism. The most recent scholarship, however, has been attentive to aspects of non-exploitative currents within some of these representations that acknowledge the complexity of interpersonal relationships as they played out against historical realities.12

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On Board the C.D. Howe In the summer of 1960, the C.D. Howe, temporary home to Daly and her husband, journeyed 17,600 kilometres along the eastern Arctic coastline. This was an annual voyage organized by the Department of National Health and Welfare, whose mandate was the promotion and preservation of the health, social security, and social welfare of the people of Canada.13 The Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources was also involved in the voyage in its role as administrator of matters relating to Inuit affairs, including the use of lands, the management of resources, and the fostering of education and related projects.14 The couple’s invitation to join the expedition came from R.A.J. Phillips, assistant director of the Northern Administration Branch of the latter department, but Daly, through her work, was instrumental in securing the invitation. Phillips’s enthusiastic reply to a letter sent by Pepper in which he asks how the couple could visit the Arctic ends with this note: “I am returning the reproductions of Mrs. Pepper’s sympathetic Eskimo studies.”15 In choosing to document the landscape and people of the Arctic, Daly and Pepper were following in the footsteps of several artists and photographers who had participated in similar summer excursions for over forty years. A.Y. Jackson travelled to the Arctic in 1927 with the physician and amateur artist Frederick Banting, and again in 1930 with the artist Lawren Harris. In 1938 Frederick Varley followed this same route. Between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, photographers Richard Sterling Finnie, Donald Benjamin Marsh, Charles Gimpel, Kryn Taconis, and Arthur H. Tweedle made sojourns to the north to record various medical subjects as well as the day-to-day activities that made up life on board the ships on which they journeyed and in the region’s communities.16 During her time on the C.D. Howe, Daly witnessed thousands of Inuit who came by barge to the ship to be examined by its health-care team, whose duties included conducting dental and medical surveys, implementing immunization programs, and trying to slow the tuberculosis epidemic that had been ravaging the population since the early 1950s. Sketched in oil and lithograph crayon, Daly’s subjects were the men, women, and children who agreed to model for her either on board or ashore. Some of the models were fellow passengers, in particular two children who were being reunited with their families after having spent time receiving medical treatment hundreds of kilometres to the south. In 1962 seven works by Daly completed during this voyage and five by Pepper, along with captions written by Daly, appeared in North, a magazine published by the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources.17 Of Daly’s seven, six were portrait sketches done in oil (see Fig. 8.1), and one was a figure drawing in lithograph crayon (see Fig. 8.3). Even in North’s black-and-white reproductions of the oil sketches, it is evident that Daly paid close attention to 228

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Fig. 8.1 Kathleen Daly, Katoo, 1960, oil portrait sketch, reproduced in “People of the North: An Album of Distinguished Paintings,” North Magazine, March–April 1962.

her models’ faces and the varying textures of their hair and skin in an effort to communicate their age, sex, and personality. Recognizing that head portraits imposed certain limitations that made it hard to express character, she succeeded in capturing her subjects’ individual qualities by representing each of them in a different gaze and position. Further, the captions she wrote – a precise description of the person portrayed and the event – confirm that her aim was to create a direct and spontaneous portrait. Katoo, a girl of six who, according to Daly’s caption, was travelling alone, stares straight ahead at the viewer (Fig. 8.1). She is bundled in a parka with a furtrimmed hood, an outfit that contrasts starkly with her sad, piercing expression, which seems too old for her years. Pudlalik, a five-year-old returning home from the Hamilton Sanatorium, was “an engaging little fellow with slanting enquiring eyes. Until the novelty of posing wore off, he made a willing model. In a winsome way he jabbered stories of his father’s hunt for polar bears as he sat for us.” Pawoolsie, who boarded the ship at Coral Harbour for a medical examination, was “weathered and handsome and strong. His close set eyes accentuated the broadness of his cheeks … As he reflected upon the strange position he found himself placed in, a kind responsive smile broke through his serious posing.” Ada, who posed among cases of Eskimo carvings in a Hudson’s Bay Company l e rne r

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warehouse at Port Harrison while Daly was on a one-hour shore leave, “enjoyed being the centre of interest as her amused friends peered through the windows.” Although Daly’s captions contain racially explicit references and may, in some respects, seem patronizing, her drawings reveal an artist at pains to avoid the racial stereotyping (“ethnic heads” and “the exotic”) typically found in paintings, sculptures, and photographs of people living under colonial rule.18 Instead, she devoted thought and care to her subjects, attending specifically to their emotions. In the captions cited she also demonstrated sensitivity to the fact of the encounter itself. Her alertness to her sitters’ reactions to being drawn asserts her own involvement in the moment, suggesting an unusual self-awareness. By expressing her sense that her Inuit sitters, while fascinating, were people “just like you or me,” her drawings delivered to her Canadian audience individuals who were deserving of respect. In this they were a refreshing departure from other depictions of Inuit people such as those that could regularly be found in North magazine. While the periodical ostensibly welcomed the expression of various Inuit voices and appeared to respect Indigenous history and anthropological inquiry, its primary objective was to endorse the government-sponsored initiatives whose purpose was the transformation of “primitive” Inuit culture. Its stated editorial aim was “to present in readable form information and viewpoints for members of the Northern Administration Branch and others who share their interest and confidence in the future of Canada’s north.”19 Printed in the same issue as Daly’s article were photographs of Inuit men enthusiastically learning to operate new machinery, silhouettes of children cheerfully running to school, and drawings that envisioned “Eskimos” from a prehistoric past performing traditional tasks (Fig. 8.2). The department, along with its private-sector partners, used such images to garner public support for its policies and to show that the Inuit themselves agreed with these policies. The images conveyed the supposed enthusiasm of the Inuit for what were, in reality, profoundly disruptive and disturbing changes. North’s typical narratives reduced the Inuit to a set of simple characteristics, resulting in an “othering” that made them seem instantly knowable.20 Similar stereotypes could be found in other media produced by the federal government. Northern Campus (1961), a production of the National Film Board of Canada sponsored by the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, was made as a training film for northern educators and managers of northern resource projects.21 The film starts with the statement: “The face of the north country is changing fast. Minerals and oil are demanded by the world. Training of young people to manage this is necessary.” The narrator then describes the traditional way of living as “bad diet, disease and dirt.” Only through schools, he insists, will Inuit youth learn such skills as “tidying up and keeping things in apple pie order,” which will give them “a chance for a life in the new north.” 230

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Fig. 8.2 Cover, North Magazine, March–April 1962.

“Big machines excite Charlie,” the narrator reports in an effort to emphasize the Inuit’s supposed naive enthusiasm for new jobs in industry. Many agencies active in the north were complicit in promoting this image. As Joan Sangster explains in her analysis of The Beaver, A Magazine of the North, published by the Hudson’s Bay Company, such publications offered a “visual and textual rendering of the Native, crafted for a predominantly white middlebrow audience in the south.”22 While The Beaver was purportedly committed to truthful images of northern people, it also encouraged cooperation with development, which it believed would free the Inuit from environmental uncertainty and integrate them into a thriving, progressive Canadian society. Doug Wilkinson, a writer and filmmaker with the National Film Board, who wrote an article in The Beaver in 1959, shared this view: “One young boy, a lad of 12, attracted my attention. He was a carefree youngster, quick to laugh, l e rne r

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quick to pout … I am fairly sure where that boy is going. He is part of a great mass of people in the Canadian Arctic who will live and die watching their old way of life slip away from them … Eskimos as we know them today will have vanished from the Canadian scene. In their place will have arisen a new race of northern Canadians.”23 While various publications were showing pictures of the Inuit embracing a new and better way of life – proof that a successful modern relationship with Canada’s Indigenous population had been forged – Daly was practising a type of ethnographic research that demanded observation of a particular culture, society, or community followed by reportage. This is not to suggest that ethnographic research and government exploitation of the north were completely unrelated. During the 1960s, a whole series of Arctic and subarctic studies by ethnographers, many funded by the Canadian government, focused on acculturation models as their main theme.24 While Daly was aware of the impact that social and economic changes were having on the Inuit, her orientation was different in part because of her relationship with Marius Barbeau, which had begun in the 1930s. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Barbeau was the most prominent figure in Canadian anthropology owing to his pioneering work in the study of First Nations and French Canadian cultures, which formed the basis of what is now the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.25 In articles and books on a wide range of subjects related to these cultures, from folk songs and legends to shipbuilding, woodcarving, and the fur and silver trades, he emphasized the value of Indigenous and Québécois history. Furthermore, he linked his extensive studies of early arts and crafts with a modern aesthetic vision. According to Barbeau, “folksongs and traditions (as collected today) are materials for the future arts of Canada; either musical, literary or plastic. They are the basic materials. The modern arts cannot develop in a way that reveals originality unless these are consulted and absorbed by the creators, the composers.”26 In concert with this definition of the modern arts, Barbeau invited Daly, along with André Biéler, Yvonne McKague Housser, Peter Haworth, B. Cogill Haworth, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, and George Pepper, to depict scenes for his book The Kingdom of Saguenay (1936).27 The focus of the book was the region’s pioneering settlers, local characters, artisans, and songsters. While the other artists depicted mainly landscapes and village scenes, Daly portrayed home life in illustrations such as Young Mother, At Home, The Cradle, and A Folk Singer. Thus began Daly’s connection with Barbeau and her own interpretation of the relationship between figurative art and ethnographic practice, which complemented her interest in French Canadian, First Nations, and Inuit subjects. Daly’s participation in Barbeau’s book is consistent with her conflicted position as a professional working within colonialism’s social structures but in opposition to its norms. What propelled Barbeau’s vision was the misguided 232

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conviction that it was the fast-disappearing Aboriginal past that was authentic, while the present, which assumed the assimilation of Indigenous peoples, was corrupt.28 Daly, like Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frederick Varley, and other Canadian artists of this period who depicted First Nations and Inuit people, was influenced by this commonly held colonial perception; at the same time, however, her connection with Barbeau reinforced her ability to find genuine value in cultures other than her own.

Drawing in Povungnituk In 1961, when Daly and Pepper returned to the Arctic to spend the summer in Povungnituk, her main interest was figure drawing. Eskimo Mother and Child (Fig. 8.3), the only drawing she included in her portfolio of paintings for North magazine, is indicative of this change. The image shows a mother in a full-length parka carrying a baby in a pouch on her back. Outlined in lithograph crayon, the parka’s flowing fabric extends in waves downward from the heads of the mother and child. The child’s body, nestled securely in the pouch, is drawn in miniature, complementing the volume of the mother’s slender, upright form. The movement of walking – one foot forward, head slightly bowed and hands extended for balance – is captured in a concentration of formal elements that nonetheless attentively considers the subjects’ facial expressions.

Fig. 8.3 Kathleen Daly, Eskimo Mother and Child, 1960, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper, reproduced in “People of the North: An Album of Distinguished Paintings,” North Magazine, March–April 1962.

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In the caption, Daly describes the drawing: “Fleeting glimpses of the Eskimo mother and her child provided exciting material for lightning line-drawings. Movement and balance were made graceful by the flowing flaps of the mother’s parka as she moved among the boulders or clambered from her tossing boat up the ship’s ladder. With ease and pride she slid her child into the warm depth of her great parka or tossed it out again over her head with sureness. From squeezed-in corners of narrow windswept decks or medical waiting rooms, such action sketches of Eskimo families together were fascinating to make.”29 In deciding to draw rather than paint this Inuit mother and child, Daly had selected a medium and method firmly connected to her education as an artist, which began at Havergal College in Toronto, where she took lessons in drawing.30 A surviving certificate states: “Kathleen Frances Daly, aged 14, a pupil at Havergal College, Toronto, obtained Honours in Division Preparatory at the Drawing Examination held May 1916.” Issued by the Royal Drawing Society, the certificate was signed “T.R. Ablett, Art Director.” Ablett was an influential art educator in London, England, who had founded the Royal Drawing Society in 1888 with the purpose of teaching drawing as a means of developing the innate creativity of young people.31 In this he was following the precepts of art critic and educator John Ruskin, author of The Elements of Drawing (1857), who believed that learning to draw from nature trained the eye to see the world more distinctly.32 Ruskin was convinced that accurate, penetrative perception affected other forms of understanding, and that, by comprehending reality directly as visual experience, children learned not to separate the visual from the emotional or the aesthetically pleasing from compassion for humankind. In short, according to Ruskin, the act of drawing was crucial in fostering moral vision and spiritual health. This understanding of drawing was reinforced in Daly during her years at the Ontario College of Art, where she studied under J.W. Beatty, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Robert Holmes. From her studies with Beatty, she learned to simplify her observations in order to capture the landscape’s essential characteristics. MacDonald encouraged her to locate an aesthetic understanding of nature that was in harmony with her own spirit. From Holmes, she discovered how to capture small details and to be sensitive to various colours and textures.33 Then, during her post-graduate years, she studied croquis sketching and life drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière34 and wood engraving from René Pottier.35 At the Paris branch of the Parsons School of Design of New York she explored costume design and the principles of “snap-shot drawing” – how to use pencil, crayon, or brush to render surface descriptions, perspectives, and shading to visualize different effects.36 Returning from Paris, she continued to study drawing to improve her skill in etching. Her teacher was Frederick Stanley Haines, well known for his extensive use of patterning and tonal effects.37 While Daly was expected to paint all types of subjects, drawing from nature and 234

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the mastery of the human form through life drawing was always a major focus of her work. Coinciding with this formal education and equally meaningful to her development was Daly’s growing familiarity with historical art and her encounters with people from different places. In letters to her mother from Paris, she commented on learning design from the objects on display in museums. She wrote, “I went to the museum (Louvre) to get some patterns from the Greek pottery there. I stood on my head most of the time trying to draw some animals on a bowl placed upside down in a glass case.”38 She shared descriptive details of her travels through France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, as well as her interest in the daily life, customs, and dress of women living in the country. She also wrote about genre scenes that were excellent for sketching: “A village wedding procession marching through the streets … The bride wore a black costume with white veil”; girls from Brittany “dressed in white caps or high bonnets and sometimes with wide stiff collars”; and women at an outdoor market who “carried away huge baskets of green vegetables on their heads and numbers of chickens etc.”39 While in Paris, Daly confirmed her adherence to a modern art that was based on direct observation. Commenting on the scenery of Lausanne, Switzerland, she wrote: “Most of all I liked the view from an old bridge built over the valley of the Flon and the ancient part of the town … I would like to have tried something modern with them.”40 Daly’s embrace of modernism and modernity went only so far, however. For her, the elements of modern drawing were located in outdoor sketching, in the discovery of new sights and settings, and in drawing from the figure; she was deeply skeptical of abstraction. An episode at the Grand Salon’s autumn exhibition in 1924 where the Madonna and Child by the Canadian artist Lorna Reid was on display gave strong evidence of the artist’s convictions. “It was all modern work exhibited and oh dear! … You’d never complain of modern work in Canada, Mother, if you could see some of these. Miss L. Reid’s was the same type of thing so I can’t criticize. The Madonna looked half-witted and the child deformed.”41 Daly was not alone in criticizing what she considered to be the abstracting tendencies of a new, expressive form of modern art that was detached from reality and competed with the reaffirmation of figurative art, sculptural contours, and constructive design. Like other artists who had taken up an anti-modernist stance, Daly felt sadness at losing traditional culture, ambivalence about material progress and modernization, and a longing for imagined authentic experiences that were embodied in so-called primitive communities and pre-industrial cultures.42 When, thirty-seven years later, on 16 July 1961, a sixty-three-yearold Daly arrived by plane in Povungnituk, she was still faithful to a modern pictorial realism grounded in the art of drawing and to observing and recording what she perceived to be a pre-modern society. l e rne r

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After the long voyage of the summer before, which had offered very little time in port, she and her husband wanted to stay in one place so they could get to know a single Inuit community. Located about halfway up the western coast of the Ungava peninsula on land that had been an outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Povungnituk was surrounded on three sides by an expansive plateau of lakes and rivers where herds of caribou migrated in the fall. When the Hudson’s Bay Company opened a general store there in 1951, Inuit who had been scattered throughout the region, some at outposts that had recently closed, relocated to Povungnituk, where opportunities in arts and crafts began to replace the declining trade in fox furs.43 Migration to the village increased during the tuberculosis epidemic of the 1950s, when nearly every family in the larger area sent at least one member, usually the breadwinner, to a hospital in the south, forcing the remaining family members to move to a larger settlement to survive. The presence in the village of a school and nursing station, along with the introduction of government welfare in the early 1960s, were incentives to stay, as was the possibility of supplementing hunting and fishing with money earned from carving. In 1958 the Carvers Association of Povungnituk was established under the guidance of Father André Steinmann of the Oblate mission, with the help of Charlie Sivuarapik, an artist.44 Thus, the village consisted of a fragile grouping together of Inuit families, government representatives, Hudson’s Bay Company personnel, teachers, missionaries, and artists like Daly and Pepper. In the midst of these persistent changes – with the community under mounting pressure to replace traditional ways with new modes of living even as the population was under attack by rampant poverty and disease – Daly began to work. The next seven weeks were spent inviting mothers, babies, and small children into her tiny cabin (Fig. 8.4), where she rendered drawings in every conceivable pose, capturing every conceivable movement. The women were shown sitting on a chair or on the floor, standing, kneeling, viewed from above or from the front or side, in full or half-figure, or sometimes head only. Typically, babies were pictured in the pouch of their mother’s parka, breastfeeding on her lap, or playing by her side. Occasionally they were alone or in the company of another child. Through this close attentiveness, Daly captured the individuality of her subjects and the nature of their interactions (see Figs. 8.5–8.7). As a student Daly had become well acquainted with depicting costume and dress, particularly the draped figure inspired by classical sculpture, which had been a routine drawing exercise.45 She had learned how to focus on the ornamental patterns and surface designs of fabric and how drapery could be worked to suggest gesture and give the illusion of body and movement. She also knew to be aware of the harmony between motion and expression and of clothing’s potential to elicit the emotion of the subject. Despite her familiarity with the principles and procedures of drawing clothing, in this new situation everything relating to dress and fabric, from the overall 236

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Fig. 8.4 Photograph of mothers and children in Daly and Pepper’s cabin, Povungnituk, 1961.

composition to the details of the costume, was strange and different. It didn’t matter that her subjects no longer only wore the seal and fox skins of days gone by; the commercially manufactured textiles with which they made their clothing still provided plenty of interest, with the patterns of the fabric giving rise to an array of different shapes and contours. Daly also had the challenge of having to work fast, given that the clothing created new shapes when the mother shifted her own or her child’s body, or when the child moved on its own. She later told the art critic Lenore Crawford that keeping the mother and baby in one position was very difficult. The mother “wears a parka that can be opened easily and quickly to allow her to feed the child. The softly-draped parka presented fine opportunity for pictures, but there were problems, also, because the wearer re-arranged it so frequently that the artist had to work at lightning speed to accomplish a sketch before the parka folds would be completely different.” There were further reasons for working quickly. Inuit mothers and children arrived “at any hour without knocking … To-day a mother burst in with her baby in a wide parka – nursed it, posed for an hour – and flew out again.”46 The modelling sessions would come to an abrupt end because, for the children, “an hour and a half was eternity.”47 Different ways of drawing suggest different ways of knowing. The draftsman who draws a figure in pen with a firm unbroken line communicates with certainty not only her ability to perform the complex task of representation but confidence in the subject she is presenting. With Daly, the graphic shaping of each young family, achieved with accumulated soft touches, revealed a more tender exploration as she attempted to reach and understand her subjects. It is as if she was tentatively engaged in experimentation that demanded the quick l e rne r

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execution of diverse types of strokes, lines of varying sizes and densities, and graphic marks such as dots, dashes, whirls, and curves. The geometry of each work is complex, and in fact she developed a new vocabulary to describe the designs and textures of her subjects’ parkas, boots, shorts, and coats, as well as the amaut pouches that sat below the hoods and held the small babies securely on their mother’s backs.48 The result of Daly’s efforts is something more than a series of figure drawings or portraits. Each work evokes a distinctive understanding of the person through the facial expression, the activity of the body, and the rendering of the clothing. In one image (Fig. 8.5), the cloth generates deep shadows and angular shapes, recalling the profile of the woman’s face. In another (Fig. 8.6), the flow of the fabric is soft and light, even buoyant, creating sweeping lines that envelop the mother and child. In a third (Fig. 8.7), the mother’s tailcoat, spread out on the floor, becomes the solid ground that supports her and her baby, who is bundled on her back. It all seems simple enough. But we cannot forget the ethnographic impetus behind Daly’s drawings and the associated concerns. James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture, questions ethnographic authority with the argument that its significant limitation is that it represents only the view of the author. He asks, “How do self and other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography, travel, modern interethnic relations?”49 While it is possible to consider Daly’s interpretation of Inuit mothers and children purely as an ethnocentric projection, the similarities between her drawings, photographs, and writings and Inuit-created sculptures of mother and child suggest the reliability of her attention. The mother-and-child theme is a recurring motif among Inuit artists (e.g., Aisa Alasua, Mother and Child, c. 1953; Luke Anautalik, Family Group, 1968).50 In many Inuit works, the posture of the woman counterbalancing the weight of the child on her back, the tension of the amaut against the mother’s throat, and the embracing form of the large hood resemble the poses Daly captured in her drawings (Fig. 8.8). A major difference is Daly’s interest in the mother’s individual features as compared with the Inuit sculptors’ emphasis on her facial

Fig. 8.5 Opposite clockwise Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper. Fig. 8.6 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper. Fig. 8.7 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961, conté (lithographic crayon) on paper.

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expressions. Daly is also unique in her fascination with the movement of her subjects’ clothing. To be sure, we can question Daly’s ability to interpret, objectively and realistically, another culture. After all, her efforts are framed by her personal history, her art education, and her cultural situation.51 These factors create the condition that Clifford insists is always, in “varying degrees, ‘inauthentic.’”52 Should we conclude, then, that these drawings exclusively articulate Daly’s voice, leaving no place for the multiple voices of the Inuit women and children she drew? The answer is no. For Daly, her work was an act of empathy, done in an art form she selected specifically to express her concern for the Inuit and respect for their way of life. She had been taught that successful figure drawing was contingent on the artist’s ability to feel the pose and character of the person she was drawing and that is what she did.53 Daly’s training thus reinforced her natural empathy and motivated her to try to experience what the other experienced and to see from the other’s viewpoint without confusing the boundaries between herself and that person. This is the inter-subjective experience that plays a fundamental part in the constitution of self, according to the philosopher Edmund Husserl, so that when we relate to a community that is different from our own we are able to translate that lifeworld,

Fig. 8.8 Anonymous, Kneeling Mother with Child, c. 1950.

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or “homeworld,” into something we understand.54 Edith Stein, whose doctoral work on empathy was supervised by Husserl, calls this “iterated empathy,” wherein one person identifies with the body of another as a human being.55 At its essence, this describes Daly’s experience of the other’s body: “my body over there,” modified so that what is encountered belongs to the other even though she experiences it herself. Further, through her commitment to evoking the interiority of the Inuit person via the individual’s face, Daly lays bare another level of the experience of other: what Emmanuel Levinas defines as a “face-to-face” encounter. This empathetic relationship guides ethical responsibility because, in recognizing the face of the other, one is forbidden from ignoring that person as a fellow human being or reducing him or her to a state of faceless sameness.56 Daly’s abiding interest in promoting an appreciation of other people through her artistic sensibility and sympathetic temperament was perhaps in part a reaction to the absence of empathy in the paternalism of Povungnituk’s government administrators, religious leaders, and commercial officials.57 In paternalism, a dominant power adopts attitudes and practices that deny the people being cared for individual responsibility and choice and leave them in a subordinate position. It often includes meddling in their lives, the imposition of gross inequalities, and the creation of devices for legitimating hierarchical and exploitative relationships. In contrast, Kathleen Daly consistently portrayed Inuit women as capable mothers who shaped their children according to particular norms and fostered in them a strong sense of belonging. She recognized that these mothers were responsible for guiding the personal growth and social development of the next generation. This is the aspect of Daly’s art that constituted an act of resistance. By identifying with and respecting the nurturing role of her female, maternal subjects, she countered the invasive forces of those who were imposing new social and economic conditions on the Inuit. Nelson Graburn and Marybelle Mitchell have emphasized that the most common form of resistance among the Inuit to cultural hegemony has been their determination to preserve their language and culture.58 Daly participated in this by envisioning the act of Inuit mothering as a form of strength, independence, and preservation of culture. To preserve means to protect from destruction. In Daly’s drawings, which contain no setting, it is as if the mother and child have been removed from the rapidly changing contingencies of space and time and are suspended in a state of preservation. Reality appears to exist not as something out there but as something within, constructed and maintained through the relationship between mother and child. There are other ways to interpret the non-existence of setting in these drawings. One could argue that Daly’s visual strategies contribute to the process of othering by conveying the impression that Indigenous people have no history

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and can be plucked from the context of their experience and positioned on sheets of paper to be scrutinized by Euro-American observers. But such an interpretation ignores the crucial context of Daly’s artistic training. This was how Daly learned to draw the figure: by focusing closely on the shapes and positions of the model and ignoring everything else. Taking this into account, what surfaces is the “overlay of traditions” as discussed by Clifford,59 specifically the interconnections between Daly’s identity as an artist and the Inuit world she was exploring. Nevertheless, by focusing on the coupling of mother and child and the spatial interactions between them, she produced drawings that suggest that the perceptions, thoughts, and memories inhabiting the intersecting bodies and enveloping fabric will be preserved from one generation to the next despite the demands of a changing world. These drawings also affirm the material contribution to their culture made by Inuit women, since dressing skins and making clothes and boots were their responsibility.60 Moreover, despite their apparent lack of contextual setting, the images also connote Inuit women’s awareness of time and history. As the work of anthropologist Murielle Nagy has demonstrated, when recalling events, the majority of Inuit men understand time in relation to hunting and trapping activities, whereas most women connect events and stories to the places where their children were born.61 We have seen that Daly’s ethnographic focus was predicated on a keen awareness of her relationship with her subjects. This reflects the ethical consciousness originally espoused by the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), who believed that the “in-group” had to expand to include all of humanity.62 For Boas, anthropologists had the obligation to speak out against virulent forms of racism and to support cultural diversity based on an in-depth knowledge of, and ethical and humanistic respect for, the complexity and integrity of cultural others. In 1888 Boas, who lived and worked closely with the Inuit on Baffin Island, wrote The Central Eskimo, a book whose antipathy to environmental determinism flowed from his ideas about the psychic unity of mankind.63 Daly’s drawings are also reminiscent of the work of Margaret Mead (1901– 78) and Gregory Bateson (1904–80), both followers of Boas who in the 1930s, while in Bali, made anthropological use of cameras.64 In their pioneering work, they believed that a culture’s psychological characteristics could be more fully captured through bodies and movements than through written accounts.65 In a similar vein, Daly concentrates on body movements and gestures to see more deeply into the characters of her Inuit sitters. Like Mead and Bateson, who besides taking numerous photographs of parent-child interactions also focused their cameras on artists at work, Daly extended her studies by drawing Inuit men in the act of carving. The carvers sit on the ground alone or in small groups, the movements of their bodies described

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Fig. 8.9 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Eskimo with Carving], 1968.

Fig. 8.10 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Povungnituk], 1961.

in the folds of their large coats (Fig. 8.9). As they bend over their stones, sculpting miniature birds, seals, walruses, and other Arctic animals, their physical and mental energy is articulated through posture and the expressive qualities of the fabric of their coats, whose shoulders are deliberately roomy to facilitate hunting, fishing, and, more recently, carving.66 Even when Daly’s subject was the village landscape, the form and movement of fabric defined her perception. For example, one drawing records a configuration of stretched pieces of fabric – canvas tents that replaced the skin tents, called tupiqs, the Inuit used to live in during their short summers – secured with guys to boulders on the ground (Fig. 8.10). The tents signify the network of Inuit relationships and a domesticity that thrives in a land of ice and rocks.

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Return to the Arctic In November 1962 an exhibition of Daly’s and Pepper’s drawings and paintings was mounted at the London Public Art Museum.67 Sadly, Pepper had died of a stroke the month before at the age of fifty-nine. Although Daly stayed in contact with her Inuit friends and with Vola Furneaux, the wife of the rcmp officer in charge at Povungnituk, it was not until the summer of 1968 that she returned to the community. During the intervening six years she spent her summers in Charlevoix and the rest of the year in Toronto. Increasingly discouraged by the writings of art historians such as Paul Duval68 and Charles Hill,69 who she felt were dismissive of many of the artists active in the first part of the twentieth century (including her and Pepper), she decided to put down on paper her version of this period of Canadian art. In 1966 Clarke, Irwin published her book on James Wilson Morrice, with a preface by A.Y. Jackson.70 Daly also planned to write a book about Pepper and herself, but, despite an expression of interest from Clarke, Irwin and a letter of support from Marius Barbeau, the Centennial Commission refused her proposal.71 She then turned to writing about the Group of Seven, but, though she came close to completing the book, it was never published.72 Two texts comprise Daly’s writings about her Arctic experiences: the captions she wrote for North magazine in 1962 and, more obliquely, the manuscript she wrote on the Group of Seven, which includes a chapter on A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris’s trip to the Arctic in 1930. With appreciation and understanding she describes the works of these two artists, but in certain passages she is almost certainly also drawing on her own experiences as documented in her drawings. When she writes about Jackson’s depiction of “a few sod huts and tents of skins pitched pell-mell among the boulders … this little community with a few tents … the bigger boulders similar in shape and colour as the weathered summer huts,” she is communicating the vision she captured in her own landscapes. In highlighting a scene about “ruddy-cheeked young women with babies swinging against their backs deep in Parkas … proud laughing people wearing high-skinned Mugluks with bright vermilion patches dyed in seal’s blood and other special toggery,” she is echoing her own keen observations of the Inuit. Her description of Jackson and Harris dashing ashore, gathering “what material they could – too rapid for more than simple pencil notes” also recollects her own practice. From the time Daly studied drawing at Havergal through her years at the Ontario College of Art and in Paris, the essence of her drawing can be described in the same terms she uses when she writes of Jackson’s and Harris’s development of “simple clean line patterns into sketches … while fresh in memory.” Most tellingly, the devotion Daly sees in Jackson’s landscape sketches of “little groups … standing about their homes” more accurately conveys her own 244

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Fig. 8.11 A.Y. Jackson, Pangnirtung, 1930.

warm feelings for the Inuit. In Jackson’s drawings the region is presented chiefly in panoramic views, and, though its inhabitants are usually somewhere visible, he depicts them primarily in the abstract at a distance: faceless figures in groups crossing ice floes, paddling kayaks, or walking along the shoreline (Fig. 8.11). They are not individuals to be encountered and experienced, rather they constitute a timeless presence whose repetitious actions have left a series of traces on the land. A diary entry from Friday, 12 August 1927, lays bare Jackson’s point of view: “Eskimos walking along the beach to get beyond the ice and visit the steamer. They all stepped up and shook hands with me very genially – the big chief, three or four other men, a lot of kids, tattooed ladies and the village belles. Smiling is their chief means of communication … not having high boots an Eskimo carried me out on his back. I assisted the ladies on board. They smell rather high – smiling at about six feet is as intimate as I would care to get.”73 From passages such as these it seems clear that the artist with the “human sympathetic interest” described by Daly is not so much Jackson as Daly herself. For Jackson, the allure of the Arctic was not really the people but the adventure of finding a distinctly Canadian landscape that could be interpreted using modern art techniques.74 This interest, shared by the Group of Seven, is explained by Roald Nasgaard as a “mystical bonding with the land, the character l e rne r

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of which provided the basis for common experience and by analogy Canadian identity.”75 For Daly, it was people who counted most, in particular the chance to meet and relate to individuals, whether on the deck of the C.D. Howe or in her temporary home in Povungnituk. One can only guess at the factors that influenced Daly’s decision to return to the Arctic in 1968.76 Perhaps she was encouraged by Jackson, who in July 1965, at the age of eighty-three, went camping in the area with a group from the Alpine Club of Canada. Since Daly’s book on the Group of Seven was to include a section on Jackson and Harris’s 1930 voyage through the Arctic, she may have wanted to reconnect with the artists’ experience of the north. Or maybe she found incentive in Vola Furneaux’s annual Christmas letters, which described the many changes taking place in Povungnituk.77 In 1962 Furneaux wrote that, despite the measles epidemic, the community was prospering thanks to the carvers and because the Inuit were being hired to construct houses and a new wing for the school.78 In 1966 she reported that the population had grown to 600, with more and more families coming to settle in the hopes of participating in the carving enterprise and sending their children to school. By now, Furneaux was concerned about “the vast amount of building,” “huge oil and gas tanks,” and “masses of electric cable poles” that were making the community “so ugly.”79 Daly’s works from her final stay in Povungnituk suggest that she was working from a different temperament than that which had characterized her earlier visit. The works are “modern,” following what she learned as a student about seeing nature clearly, but she seems reticent to get too close, drawing the houses of Povungnituk from a more distant vantage point. That, plus the aesthetic ordering of the interlocked house-shapes from afar, indicates a loss of connection (Fig. 8.12). When Daly does venture near, as in the drawing of an Inuit carver (Fig. 8.13), rendered with thinly delineated lines and limited shadows, the portrait has a ghostlike quality. The inwardly focused gaze of the old man as he cradles a seal carving in his hands evokes a strong and tender pathos. The small sculpture, typical of the carvings made in the village before large-scale works became popular, expresses the memory of a time when seal hunting was an integral part of everyday living. The awkward coupling in this portrait of an old man and a tiny seal is the antithesis of Daly’s earlier vibrant drawings of mothers and children. Here, she implies the trauma of the Inuit and a deep feeling for their grief at losing their connection to the land and experiencing the breakdown of their social, cultural, and economic systems. Susan Hiller, an artist and former anthropologist, has argued that, “by definition art is an anthropological practice and anthropology is by definition an art – the role of the artist is to unveil codes not yet articulated within a culture … to look for new forms known but as yet not understood.”80 While there are 246

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Fig. 8.12 Kathleen Daly, Untitled [Iceberg].

similarities between anthropology and art, it must be kept in mind that the discipline of anthropology, including ethnographic practice, which is the basis of anthropology, is different from the discipline of art. Each field has its unique objectives, methods, functions, critical thinking, and evaluative criteria. What is important in art – the analyzing of formal, conceptual, and aesthetic elements – is not necessarily relevant to anthropology, and vice versa. Nevertheless, Daly’s professional art practice demonstrates how these two fields can interact and learn from one another. She had the conviction that the Inuit of Povungnituk respected her drawing practice because “the Pov Eskimos are artists themselves and really understanding.”81 In describing the Inuit carvers “sitting out on the rocks carving at all times that the mosquitoes will allow,” she is referring to the camaraderie she and her husband shared with them as artists, as she does again when she writes: “We are often working close-by and visit back and forth to see each other’s progress.” l e rne r

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Fig. 8.13 Kathleen Daly, Povungnituk, 1968.

Her observations include comments on the recent introduction of printmaking at the “craft house,” an initiative of Gord Yearsley, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art. Daly is impressed to see how “expertly the Eskimos are working. I went yesterday to watch … They are doing a lot of stencil and a new process of making plates which Yearsley thinks is a new development that will take-off.” From a colonial perspective, it could be concluded that as a witness Daly cooperated with the transformation of the Inuit culture. Though admittedly she was unable to escape completely from participating in this paternalistic way of seeing and acting, certainly her attitude was more inclusive and accommodating. In Daly’s view, the people she encountered in the north were artists who were developing their abilities as a result of the same kind of art education – learning relevant methods and techniques – she had experienced all her life (Fig. 8.14). Through depicting cultural events, stories, myths, and legends in their artwork, a practice first encouraged by the ethnologist Asen Balikci in 1958, they were acting as both artists and anthropologists. 82 Further, in the same way that Barbeau helped Daly launch her professional practice, she and her husband strove to assist the Inuit in launching theirs. When Yearsley and artists Innupak and Pauloosie came to Toronto in December 1961 to show the new prints from Povungnituk, Daly and Pepper welcomed them warmly and were helpful in promoting the work.83 248

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Fig. 8.14 Photograph of Inuit children watching Daly draw, 1961.

Conclusion When Kathleen Daly passed away in 1994, a selection of her drawings was donated to the National Archives of Canada, the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, and the Centre d’art de Baie-Saint-Paul.84 From slides of her works we know that many were sold to private collectors. In fact, while people know about Daly’s Inuit paintings because she exhibited these on a regular basis, few are aware of her drawings. The time has come to change that, to recognize the intellectual tenderness and sense of discovery in Daly’s Arctic sketches and to appreciate them as modern drawings that reveal her extraordinary empathy. Over the decades there have been many instances of anthropologists who have assumed an authority predicated on colonial domination and collaborated in insensitive data and artifact collection.85 In contrast, the ethnographic practice of individuals like Daly, who saw herself as a professional artist who had the opportunity to educate her fellow Canadians about Inuit people, was based on respect and cooperation. Daly’s drawings should be shared not only with Canadians in the south but also with the Inuit who were her subjects. Project Naming,86 initiated in 2001, has embarked on the task of identifying thousands of northern people in photographs now located in Library and Archives Canada. In the same spirit, researchers should make the connections between Daly’s drawings and the people who posed for her, whose names are available thanks to Daly’s constant interest in her subjects. While working on the C.D. Howe, she insisted on knowing the names of everyone she portrayed.87 In Povungnituk, she not only tried to know the names of her subjects, she strove to connect with them, at times asking her models to write their names on the drawings, and she corresponded with Inuit friends. She also stayed in contact with Vola Furneaux, whose letters kept her up to date. l e rne r

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Clifford asserts the need for a new form of ethnographic practice that takes into account colonial history and attempts to overcome it.88 This accurately describes Daly’s experience as an artist. However, only when her drawings, as well as her paintings, photographs, and films, are recognized, described, and analyzed by the Inuit people she depicted will her work achieve its potential.

notes 1 National Gallery of Canada Documentation Centre. Daly filled in the information sheet and included updated information every few years. 2 Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives, private collection. All letters, other archival material, and newspaper articles cited in this chapter are from this source. 3 On the relevance of this position to professional status generally, see Daniel E. Wueste, Professional Ethics and Social Responsibility (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield 1994); and Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W.W. Norton 1976). 4 See, for example, Pamela Stern and Lisa Stevenson, eds., Critical Inuit Studies: An Anthology of Contemporary Arctic Ethnography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2006). 5 See Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shapers of the World (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre 2000), for this anthropologist’s informative study of the Inuit. 6 Robert Blauner, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt,” Social Problems, 16, no. 4 (1969): 393–408. The processes of internal colonialism include the forced transformation of the culture and social organization of the people to be colonized, who are seen as different and inferior. The next step is to develop a structure

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through which the colonized can be socially dominated by strangers. Norman K. Zlotkin and Donald R. Colborne, “Internal Canadian Imperialism and the Native People,” in John S. Saul and Craig Heron, eds., Imperialism, Nationalism, and Canada: Essays from the Marxist Institute of Toronto (Toronto: New Hogtown Press and Between the Lines, 1977), 161–85. James Clifford, “Introduction,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1988), 11, 2. See also James Clifford and Elizabeth Ervin, “The Ethics of Process,” in Thomas Kent, ed., Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1999), 179–97. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The PostColonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge 1990), 4–5. Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2006), 84–5. See also Gerta Moray, “Emily Carr: Modernist, Cultural Identity and Ethnocultural Art History,” in Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss, and Sandra Paikowsky, eds., The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Don Mills, on: Oxford University Press 2010), 59–78. See Lynda Jessup, “Prospectors, Bushwhackers, Painters: Antimodernism and the Group of Seven,” International

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Journal of Canadian Studies, 17 (spring 1998): 193–214; Jonathan Bordo, “The Terra Nullius of Wilderness – Colonialist Landscape Art (Canada & Australia) and the So-Called Claim to American Exception,” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 15 (spring 1997); and Scott Watson, “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of Modern Canadian Landscape Painting,” Semiotext(e), 6 (1994): 93–104. For example, Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 84–5; and Kristina Huneault, “Miniature Objects of Cultural Covenant: Portraits and First Nations Sitters in British North America,” Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review (RACAR), 30, nos. 1/2 (2005): 87–100. Mary Jane McCallum, “The Last Frontier: Isolation and Aboriginal Health,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 22, no. 1 (2005): 103–20. The Eastern Arctic Patrol was inaugurated in 1922. The patrol had representatives from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Department of National Health and Welfare, the Department of Northern Affairs and Resources, the Post Office Department, the Department of National Defence, the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, the Department of Transport, and occasionally other government departments. The Department of Northern Affairs, under different names, was responsible for coordinating all the departments’ work until 1959 when this task was assigned to National Health and Welfare. C.S. Mackinnon, “Canada’s Eastern Arctic Patrol, 1922–1968,” Polar Record, 27, no. 161 (1991): 93–101; and John Parker, Arctic Power: The Path to Responsible Government in Canada’s North (Peterborough, on: Cider Press 1996). R.A.J. Phillips, assistant director, Northern Administration Branch, Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, to George Pepper, 29 February 1960. Although Daly sent Phillips “Eski-

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mo studies,” he assumed that she and Pepper were interested in painting the scenery: “You might find the landscape somewhat more interesting in Baffin Island … The land at Resolute Bay is a mixture of rock and gravel with low hills. It is not dramatic but it is typical of a considerable part of the Arctic.” 16 Library and Archives Canada (lac), “Project Naming,” http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/inuit/index-e.html (accessed 15 June 2009). The photographs are held in the lac collections. 17 Kathleen Daly, “People of the North: An Album of Distinguished Paintings,” North, 9, no. 2 (1962): 6–13. A postcard from Daly to Kate and Arthur Daly, Coral Harbour, 1 August 1960, describes the context for one of these drawings: “180 Eskimos are to be examined here and had to come through high seas from the island. It was a wonderful sight and the children had a great time running over the ship. The doctor allowed us to have 5 in our cabin at once – a few hours … more interesting than productive.” Usually, according to Pepper, the artists did not draw in the cabin: “Our studio is the deck-space underneath one end of a huge landing-barge that is mounted over the main hatch. That is the only practical place to work … our cabin is too small for working from a model.” Pepper explains that the artists had special permission to visit the Inuit quarters: “We are the only passengers who are permitted to go. To all the others the forward deck is ‘out of bounds,’ since it is reserved for the Eskimos.” Pepper to Evelyn Pepper (his sister), 9 July 1960. 18 This interpretation agrees with Jonathan Black’s analysis of the “ethnic heads” depicting subjects from Southeast Asia that were produced by British women sculptors in the 1920s and 1930s. In his essay, Black argues that these artists, in creating convincing portraits deserving of respect, did not participate in the racial

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stereotyping endemic during this period. “‘An Unsettling Aura of Inscrutability’: Imperialism, Racial Stereotyping and the Construction of the ‘Exotic’ by British Women Sculptors during the 1920s and 1930s,” in Karen E. Brown, ed., Women’s Contributions to Visual Culture, 1918– 1939 (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate 2008), 57–78. North, statement in Table of Contents, 1962. Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (Houndsmills, uk: Palgrave 2001), xi. Brian J. Low, NFB Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Canada, 1939–1989 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2002), 103. Joan Sangster, “The Beaver as Ideology: Constructing Images of Inuit and Native Life in Post-World War II Canada,” Anthropologica, 49, no. 2 (2007): 192. Doug Wilkinson, “A Vanishing Canadian,” The Beaver, 289 (spring 1959): 25. Julie Cruikshank, “Telling about Culture: Traditions in Subarctic Anthropology,” Northern Review: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Arts and Sciences of the North, 1 (summer 1988): 28–9. Cruikshank cites these studies: Asen Balikci, “Vunta Kutchin Social Change: A Study of the People of the Old Crow, Northern Yukon Territory” (Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Northern Coordination and Research Centre, 1963); Norman Chance, “Social Organization, Acculturation and Integration among the Eskimo and the Cree: A Comparative Study,” Anthropologica, 5, no. 1 (1963): 47–56; and James Vanstone, The Changing Culture of Snowdrift Chipewyan, Anthropological Series 74, Bulletin 209 (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada 1965). Lynda Jessup, Andrew Nurse, and Gordon E, Smith, eds., Around and about Marius Barbeau: Modelling TwentiethCentury Culture (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization 2008).

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26 Laurence Nowry, Marius Barbeau: Man of Mana (Toronto: nc Press 1995), 394. See also Frances M. Slaney, “Working for a Canadian Sense of Place(s): The Role of Landscape Painters in Marius Barbeau’s Ethnology,” in Richard Handler, ed., Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2000), 81–122. 27 Marius Barbeau, The Kingdom of Saguenay (Toronto: Macmillan 1936). 28 Andrew Nurse summarizes Marius Barbeau’s point of view: “For Barbeau, the anthropologist’s proper work was to reconstruct ‘authentic’ aboriginal cultures, unaffected by interaction with white society … Barbeau’s discourse reinforced his authority as an anthropologist by constructing aboriginal authenticity as a thing of the past. In the present, confusion reigned. His task as an anthropologist was to determine what was and was not authentic even when aboriginal peoples no longer could. With distinctive aboriginal cultures rapidly disappearing, it was only a matter of time before the anthropologist became the sole authority on aboriginal cultures.” Nurse further suggests that perhaps Barbeau’s “most important legacy … lies in the way aboriginal peoples continue to work to transcend the cultural framework of which Barbeau’s anthropology constituted a part.” “‘Their Ancient Customs Are Gone’: Anthropology as Cultural Process,” in Jessup, Nurse, and Smith, eds., Around and about Marius Barbeau, 13–26. Leslie Dawn, National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2006), has also detailed strong indictments of Barbeau’s ideas and practices. 29 Kathleen Daly, “People of the North: An Album of Distinguished Paintings,” North, March–April 1962, 10. 30 See Donna Darling Kelly, Uncovering the History of Children’s Drawing and Art (Santa Barbara, ca: Praeger 2003), for an

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31

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historical analysis of the role of drawing in a young person’s education. Thomas Robert Ablett was a superintendent of drawing at the London School Board. See ibid., 58–61. John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, with notes by Bernard Dunstan (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications 1997); and Kelly, Uncovering the History of Children’s Drawing and Art, 35–42. Milena Placentile, “Canadian Painters as Educators, 1920–1950,” Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, University of Toronto, 4 September 2001, http://www.utoronto.ca/gallery/archives/ed ucation.htm (accessed 15 June 2009); and Ontario College of Art, 100 Years: Evolution of the Ontario College of Art (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario 1976). Daly to her mother (Mary Frances Bennett Daly), 26 October 1924: “The Beaux Arts is out of the question entirely. We would have to try an examination and show our ‘fort’ before being admitted to the classrooms even! And the exams require months of study. I think I told you in my last letter that we’ve decided on the Académie de la Grande Chaumière for painting, careful life drawings and quick sketches and Parson’s New York School of Applied Design for poster, wood-blocks, etc.” Daly to her mother, 16 November 1924: “M. Pottier is a coming artist who hasn’t quite ‘arrived,’ but has a splendid reputation for woodblocks.” A document from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, Paris branch, listed the “Subjects of the Examination” required for the “full school certificate” granted when the “six divisions” were completed. The divisions referred to as “snap-shot drawing” were “subject description, and the resultant silhouette,” “elementary perspective,” “perspectives of varied surfaces,” “systematic surface description of foreshortened surfaces,” “uncoloured shading,” and “painting in water colour or pastel.” The receipt from

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the school indicates that Daly paid to attend the classes from 23 October to 23 December 1924, three full days and two half-days a week. Patricia Ainslie, Images of the Land: Canadian Block Prints, 1919–1945 (Calgary: Glenbow Museum 1984), 47. Daly to her mother, 26 October 1924. Daly to her mother, 19 June 1924. Daly to her mother, 5 March 1925. Daly to her mother, 16 November 1924. Daly’s friends from the Ontario College of Art, mentioned earlier in this letter, are Helen Wells and Peg McKay. Daly’s travels with Yvonne McKague, also from the Ontario College of Art, to Italy, London, and Paris, in the summer and early fall of 1924, are described elsewhere in Daly’s correspondence with her mother. For a discussion of other Canadian artists with a similar point of view, see Sandra Paikowsky, “Modernist Representational Painting before 1950,” in Whitelaw, Foss, and Paikowsky, eds., The Visual Arts in Canada, 121–41; and Lynda Jessup, ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001). Winnipeg Art Gallery, Povungnituk: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, December 10, 1977 – February 26, 1978 (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery 1977); Puvirnituq [Povungnituk], Nunavik [Arctic Quebec], http://www.ccca.ca/ inuit/english/puvirnituq.html; Puvirnituq, http://www.inuulitsivik.ca/b_puvirnituq_e. htm (accessed 15 June 2009). Nelson Graburn, “Canadian Inuit Art and Coops: Father Steinman of Povungnituk,” Museum Anthropology, 24, no. 1 (2000): 14–25. John Elderfield, The Modern Drawing: 100 Works on Paper from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art 1983); David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies on Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002);

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and David M. Mendelowitz, Drawing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1967). Daly to Kate and Arthur Daly, c. 11 August 1961. Lenore Crawford, “Exhibit by Husband and Wife Team Depicts Life in Eskimo Land,” London Free Press, November 1962. Betty Kobayashi Issenman, Sinews of Survival: The Living Legacy of Inuit Clothing (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1997). Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 8. The Inuit Amautik: I Like My Hood to Be Full (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery 1980): Aisa Alasua, Mother and Child, 51; Luke Anautalik, Family Group, 101. Ibid, 9. Ibid, 11. Empathy is often cited as an important aspect of figure drawing. See, for example, Howard Riley, “Drawing: Towards an Intelligence of Seeing,” in Steve Garner, ed., Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Intellect Books 2008), 164: “At each level of engagement, compositional decisions make visible the empathetic experience of the drawer, and invite the viewer to share the feeling of such experience.” Edmund Husserl, “Fifth Meditation,” in Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1950), 89– 92; See also Arthur David Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London: Routledge 2003), 213–22; and “Edmund Husserl: Empathy, Intersubjectivity and Lifeworld,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 28 February 2003, substantive revision 6 July 2007, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/ #EmpIntLif (accessed 15 June 2009). Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (The Hague: Nijhoff 1970); and Judy A. Miles, “Other Bodies and Other Minds in

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Edith Stein: or, How to Talk about Empathy,” in Richard Feist and William Sweet, eds., Husserl and Stein (Washington, dc: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy 2003), 119–26. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press 1969). Bettina Bergo explains: “The other’s face is not an object, Levinas argues. It is pure expression; expression affects me before I can begin to reflect on it. And the expression of the face is dual: it is command and summons. The face, in its nudity and defenselessness, signifies: ‘Do not kill me.’” “Emmanuel Levinas,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2008/entries/levinas/ (accessed 24 July 2010). Robert Paine, “The Path to Welfare Colonialism,” in Robert Paine, ed., The White Arctic: Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity (St John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1977), 7–28. Nelson Graburn, “Culture as Narrative,” in Stern and Stevenson, Critical Inuit Studies, 139; Marybelle Mitchell, From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGillQueen’s University Press 1996), 413. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 9. Margaret Mead, “Eskimos,” The Beaver, 290 (autumn 1959): 35. Murielle Nagy, “Time, Space, and Memory,” in Stern and Stevenson, Critical Inuit Studies, 75. Franz Boas, “An Anthropologist’s Credo,” The Nation, 147 (1938): 204. Douglas Cole, “‘The Value of a Person Lies in His Herzensbildung’: Franz Boas’ Baffin Island Letter-Diary, 1883–1884,” in George W. Stocking, Jr, ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 13–52. Margaret Mead, “Visual Anthropology in

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a Discipline of Words,” in Paul Hockings, ed., Principles of Visual Anthropology (New York: Mouton de Gruyter 1995), 3– 12; Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences 1942); and Gerald Sullivan, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Highland Bali: Fieldwork Photographs of Bayung Gedé, 1936–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999). See also Peter Kulchyski, “Six Gestures,” in Stern and Stevenson, Critical Inuit Studies, 155–67. This is an analysis of gestures associated with the facial yes and no, the gift of food, the handshake, the unannounced entrance, the kiss, and the smile. Kulchyski writes: “Gestures and the language of the gestural are … a sign open to interpretation, a form of writing, but this form of writing inscribes with the face, with movements of the body” (158). 65 Andrew Lakoff, “Freezing Time: Margaret Mead’s Diagnostic Photography,” Visual Anthropology Review, 12, no. 1 (1996): 1–18. 66 Daly and Pepper were well aware of Inuit sculpture, having prepared a report for the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources in 1960 based on what they saw during their brief visits to Inuit communities along the Arctic coast. D. Snowden, chief, Industrial Division, Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, wrote to George Pepper, 9 December 1960: “We are grateful for the trouble which you and Mrs. Pepper have taken to collect the detailed information which you have assembled in this paper. It has been read by numerous officers within the Department who will be serving in the Arctic, in the future, and they have taken note of your suggestions.” In the report Daly and Pepper explained that most of the more marketable Inuit sculpture had already been shipped to the south before their arrival. They expressed the concern “that a high proportion of the carvings now being done is of low stan-

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dard. This is probably the consequence of the growing demand encouraging speedy production and also attracting to a lucrative field many of little talent.” Causes for this new emphasis on carving were also mentioned: “At Lake Harbour where as a result of an epidemic last autumn destroying eighty per cent of the huskies, the Eskimos could not pursue their normal means of livelihood which is hunting. To make up this deficiency they turned to carving.” 67 Crawford, “Exhibit by Husband and Wife”; and Ruth Bowen, “Artists Travel, Paint in Europe or Arctic,” Edmonton Journal, 30 June 1962. 68 Daly sent a letter to Paul Duval, author of Canadian Drawings and Prints (Toronto: Burns and MacEachern 1952), asking him why her painting of an Indian girl, Two Shoes with Papoose, was eliminated from the publication when “you had asked for the privilege of reproducing this in black and white.” She expresses concern that “the lumped-in paragraph about me was inaccurate. I may add that … in 1933, the first year that the Canadian Painters functioned, I was elected to membership … having occasionally been contributor to the Group of Seven exhibitions prior to the Canadian Group of Painters.” A copy of this undated letter was sent to the artist York Wilson on 10 December 1952. Daly appears to have written to a number of artists. 69 When Canadian Painting in the Thirties by Charles C. Hill was published in 1975 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada), Daly wrote to J. Hugh Faulkner, secretary of state of Canada, on 4 July 1975 to “protest the inadequately researched content” of the exhibition and publication and to criticize both for “not truly representing Canadian art and artists of the thirties.” The omissions included artists such as herself and her husband, active in the Royal Academy of Arts and the Canadian Group of Painters, and painters including her husband who were recruited

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to serve as official war artists in the Second World War. Daly ends the letter with this question: “Is it too much to ask that this publication be withdrawn from circulation and that, following intensive research, a complete and authoritative history be published?” The website, “Canadian Paintings in the Thirties in Context,” produced by the National Gallery of Canada, explains that the thirty-six artists selected for the exhibition were meant to “exemplify the main currents of ideas and innovation during the decade.” Works by Daly and Pepper and other artists from the 1930s and held by the National Gallery are included on this website “to provide additional contexts for understanding Canadian art of the 1930s.” See http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/ enthusiast/thirties/in_context_e.jsp (accessed 15 June 2009). Kathleen Daly Pepper, James Wilson Morrice, with a preface by A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1966). Barbeau to Centennial Commission, sent to Daly, 9 December 1965, to include in her application. Also included was a letter from R.W.W. Robertson of Clarke, Irwin to Daly, 8 December 1965. The Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives has several working drafts of the Group of Seven manuscript, as well as research notes and related correspondence. A.Y. Jackson, diary entry, Friday, 12 August 1927, The Arctic 1927 (Moonbeam, ON: Penumbra Press 1982). Jackson wrote in his autobiography that his interest was in the landscape and rural scenes. “At first in my paintings I was interested in the old farm houses, in the barns and the trees. Later it was snow that captured my attention” (58); “on another occasion with Marius Barbeau and the Lismers, I went to the Ile d’Orleans … I did not find the Island much of a place for landscape” (67). A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1967).

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75 Roald Nasgaard, The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America 1890–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984), 166. See also Renée Hulan, Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2003), 75; and Al Purdy, North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island, with Oil Sketches of the Arctic by A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1967). 76 Catharine Robb Whyte (1906–79), an artist and long-time friend, accompanied Daly on this one-month visit to Povungnituk. Letters from Whyte to Daly, 4, 6, and 9 June 1968. 77 While stationed in Povungnituk during the early 1960s, Vola’s husband, Patrick Furneaux, states that within a period of six years the igloos, kayaks, and dog teams were replaced with prefabricated homes, snowmobiles, and boats. Richard C. Crandall, Inuit Art: A History (Jefferson, nc: McFarland 2000), 51. George Pepper comments on this development in his letter to Kate and Arthur Daly, 7 August 1961: “There is an amazing amount of activity around this place. The Eskimos are always going off on or returning from their hunting trips, and sometimes the stretch of water in front of us is like the Grand Central Station with planes landing and taking off. There have been as many as four planes in here in one day. Quite a few of them, the smaller ones … belong to mining companies. Just now the aerial activity concerns the installation of a telephone system to link this place with the outside world.” This is not to say that Daly was adverse to some of these changes. In a letter to Kate and Arthur Daly, written c. 11 August 1961, she wrote: “We visited an old Eskimo who designs very well and is better informed of the past … I have seen many Indian tents but nothing to equal the poverty and filth of this one … There are 4 houses being built this Autumn of fair dimension.”

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78 Vola Furneaux to Daly, undated, c. January 1962. 79 Vola Furneaux to Daly, 4 January 1966: “Each year more and more families come here and settle. First because there is such a good market here for their carvings if they wish to sell, and secondly because of sending the children to school, and lastly – but not least – because they all have such fun here. No one lives in igloos anymore. They all have houses. And every night there is something for them to do, if they wish to. Films, meetings, dancing, cards, church services, and choir singing, educational, and musical evenings, welfare talks, Bingo … Girl Guides, and Sea Cadets meetings and films for the children. There also has been plenty of work for everyone this autumn too, because of the vast amount of building that is going on. The huge oil and gas tanks that have been erected and the masses of electric cable poles (Ugh! So ugly), but I guess this is the way it goes when things get civilised, and people want cheaper oil, and electricity.” 80 Susan Hiller, Thinking about Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, ed. Barbara Einzig (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press 1996), 214. 81 Daly to Kate and Arthur Daly, c. 11 August 1961. 82 “In 1958 Father Steinmann requested that Povungnituk carvers create in soapstone some of their oral traditions. These resulted in the ‘carvings,’ which were created in 1958 and 1959. Assisting Father Steinmann was Dr. Asen Balikci, an ethnologist who was in Povungnituk in 1958. When a carver completed a work he brought it into the co-operative with the legend, myth, or story, in syllabics. Dr. Balikci photographed the carvings and, whenever possible, tape-recorded the carvers’ oral versions of the legends, myths or stories.” Crandall, Inuit Art, 126. See also, Asen Balikci and Ronald Cohen, “Community Patterning in Two Northern Trading Posts,” Anthropologica, 5, no. 1 (1963): 33–46.

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83 The Kathleen Daly and George Pepper Archives contain photographs of the artists at their home. Vola Furneaux writes in January 1962 about “the boost to their morale that you gave Paulusi and Inuppu … in your promotion of their work.” See also Crandall, Inuit Art, 139; and Pete Ward, “7-Above and Eskimos Think It’s Banana Belt,” Toronto Telegram, 16 December 1961. 84 Some Arctic drawings were exhibited at the Centre d’Exposition de Baie-Saint-Paul in 1996. See François-Marc Gagnon and Suzanne Pressé, Kathleen Daly, George D. Pepper: Retrospective (Baie-Saint-Paul, qc: Centre d’Exposition de Baie-SaintPaul 1996). 85 James Clifford, “Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska,” Current Anthropology, 45, no. 1 (2004): 5–30. 86 See Project Naming: “While the archival community has long recognized that the majority of Inuit whose photographs are held in the Library and Archives Canada (lac) collections were not identified, it was Murray Angus, an instructor with Nunavut Sivuniksavut Training Program (nstp), who proposed Project Naming … As the majority of Inuit depicted in the photographs were not identified, Angus proposed Project Naming as a way to give people from Nunavut access to the photographic collections of Inuit held at lac, to foster dialogue between Nunavut youth and Elders, and to reclaim these ‘lost’ names.” See http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/inuit/index-e.html (accessed 21 June 2011). 87 George Pepper to R.A.J. Phillips, 13 November 1960: “We received this week a letter from one of our models at Resolute Bay telling us that his little brother, whom we had also painted, had been shot by his chum Phillipoosie and is now in hospital in Thule.” Barbara McGregor Cram from the Kativik School Board wrote Daly on 19 November 1991, after reaching her by phone, about the oil

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sketch of Ada that appeared in North in 1962. Cram wrote that Ida Ningiuk, who “is a certified teacher, and is now in charge of curriculum development for Inuktitut Language and Culture classes for the Inuit School Board of Arctic Quebec (Kativik),” is hoping to contact the “owners of ‘Ada’ to procure a photograph of the portrait.” The archives have letters, especially from Inuit youth, dating back to the early 1950s.

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88 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1997).

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9

CHAPTER 1

The Girls and the Grid

Montreal Women Abstract Painters in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Sandra Paikowsky

The received and simplified history of Montreal abstract painting, beginning with the early 1950s and continuing into the first years of the next decade, suggests that the period can be divided into two main categories: the Automatiste or gestural mode, and the Plasticien or geometric approach. This is certainly the easiest way to categorize the concerns of a complex and sometimes turbulent art milieu and it is also a convenient way to sidestep the important question of abstraction’s relationship to the city’s modernist representational painting. A further factor that has not been given its due consideration is the significant participation of a number of Montreal francophone women in the city’s abstract or, more correctly, non-figurative movement. The evidence of their presence in numerous group and solo exhibitions is clearly disclosed by the many newspaper reviews of Montreal abstract art. Nevertheless, paintings by these women during these years demonstrate that their pictorial expression was not a simple matter of privileging either the gesture of the Automatistes or the grid of the Plasticiens. Rather, they incorporated strategies from both practices, thereby taking their own place within Montreal’s male-dominated community of non-representational artists.1 This more open approach to non-figuration also reflected their experience of the world and in particular the politically and socially circumscribed world of women in French Quebec.

While the secondary status of women in Quebec was slowly starting to change, the path of women artists to acceptance and recognition was not without difficulties. Discussion of their work in the Montreal press suggests that, while a few critics understood their intentions, many others were somewhat bewildered. In the wider scheme of things, Quebec women had not obtained the right to vote until 1940, long after their sisters in the rest of the country. Despite some attempts to the contrary, the provincial government under Premier Maurice Duplessis worked hand-in-glove with the Roman Catholic clergy to maintain well-entrenched discriminatory policies intended to keep francophone women in their traditional place of hearth and home.2 It was not until after 1950 that “women quietly gained access to what seemed to be equality … They could become involved in socio-political issues and artistic and cultural matters, so long as they remained anges du foyer (angels of the home)” and their families were not “inconvenienced.”3 Certainly, these conditions affected the independent thinking of Quebec women artists as they moved toward redefining the processes and possibilities of non-figurative painting in their own terms. The intense emotion of Automatiste strategies, with their overt and covert allusion to the ways of intuitive surrealism and to the workings of the unconscious, would not have been swallowed whole cloth by women painters.4 Surrealist attitudes to art, as defined in Quebec, may have demanded too strong a belief in the irrational and presumed a state of being that was rooted in pseudo-science, which did not necessarily sit well with the societal experiences of most Montreal women painters. They were only too aware of the concrete realities of everyday life and its attendant implications; their experience encompassed a more realistic approximation of how the world around them really worked. As well, the privileging of the concept of absolute freedom proposed by the Automatistes, as exemplified by the Refus global manifesto, was not easily imaginable by or for women artists, even if it seemed possible to their male counterparts who had a different socially and politically determined understanding of what traditionally defined freedom in Quebec. Perhaps this helps to explain why those women who experimented with the processes of Automatiste painting did not totally accept either its ways or its means. Similarly, geometric abstraction, as defined by two generations of Plasticien painting, offered an imposed and strict system of ordering the visual world that for most women artists was just as divorced from reality as gesturalism.5 Plasticism’s concern for the utter stability of the pictorial surface, with nothing left to chance, was alien to most women’s daily experience. Geometric abstraction implied a position of control and authority that hardly spoke to the secondary position that women painters navigated and occupied both in Quebec and in the wider Canadian art milieu.

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It is important to emphasize, however, that it would be incorrect to state categorically that such less-than-orthodox attitudes toward the two dominant trajectories of Montreal non-figuration belonged exclusively to its women artists. Definitions of Quebec Automatism were changing as international (especially American) gestural abstraction became more familiar. Certainly, by the mid1950s, a number of male artists were also taking a less rigid attitude to geometric painting, producing more lyrical images than what has come to be defined as Plasticien-type painting.6 Perhaps because women’s position in the Montreal art milieu of the 1950s lay somewhere between the centre and the periphery, they could be more open to investigating the possibilities of abstraction through experimentation and were less encumbered by the ideologies and rhetoric that drove the acceptance of purist Automatiste and Plasticien painting by many of their francophone male counterparts. More to the point, women abstractionists seem to have rejected the absolutism of either aesthetic position as being too divorced from their own experiences as both women and painters in the changing world of Quebec’s grande noirceur. They considered the aesthetic merits and visual possibilities in both gesture and geometry not as compromise but as vehicles more attuned to the realities of their own experience. As the 1950s progressed, some of these women artists moved more decidedly toward geometric painting and played their (fully unacknowledged) role in what became known as the “Montreal School.” At the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, they openly embraced various international influences, and again this suggests that their attitude to the wider art world was different and less encumbered than that of their Quebec male counterparts. Some Montreal women artists readily acknowledged the importance of American painting in helping to articulate their individual sensibilities and also accommodated its strategies to their earlier experience of Parisian abstraction, without worrying how this might affect the nationalist identity of Quebec art. The enunciation of these women’s visual vocabularies and the critical reception of their ensuing images are the two principal concerns of this discussion.

The Legacy of Automatiste Painting By the early years of the 1950s, purist Automatiste painting as defined by the work of Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923–2002), Jean-Paul Mousseau (1927–91), Marcel Barbeau (b. 1925), Pierre Gauvreau (1922–2011), Fernand Leduc (b. 1916), and especially the guiding spirit of Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–60) was losing some of the stridency that had changed the face of Montreal painting in the previous decade. At this point, the Refus global, published in 1948, was well known

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among the creative community, and its author, the charismatic but beleaguered Borduas, would leave for New York in 1953. The impoverished societal condition of the majority of francophone Quebecers that been the real subject of the Automatistes’ manifesto was changing as the province slowly evolved into a more democratic state. While the restrictive socio-political and religious policies of Duplessis and his Union Nationale were still in force, opposition to and repudiation of the status quo was growing and could not be halted. Because of the symbolic political undercurrents of the Automatiste movement in its halcyon days, Montreal abstract artists continued to see themselves as a collectivity, generating a spirit of activism shared by proponents of liberal collectivism in other sectors of Quebec’s cultural community. Group exhibitions organized by non-figurative painters were considered a communal act and intended to declare the artists’ new challenge to representational painting and to insist on public acknowledgment of their own place in Montreal’s cultural firmament. But such group showings were also the eventual undoing of the hegemony of an emphatic gestural approach to painting. For example, the freewheeling La Place des artistes exhibition in 1953 organized by the Automatistes was such a mélange of figurative and non-figurative art that their own visual strategies lost any primacy. Then the 1954 exhibition La Matière chante, which is often considered the swansong of the movement, was overshadowed by the controversy engendered by Borduas’s inclusion of a “fake” Automatiste painting and his comments that New York Abstract Expressionism had something new to teach Montreal painters.7 The Automatiste approach to painting in the early 1950s was now both modulated and challenged by other non-figurative aesthetic ideologies that would change the definition of Montreal painting for decades to come. The only woman painter closely aligned to the Automatiste movement was Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001).8 A ferocious spirit, whose energy for collective action was replicated in her exuberant painting, Ferron in 1953 would abandon Montreal for Paris where she remained until 1966.9 In Paris she began working in large format – influenced by contemporary French art and, most notably, by the expatriate Jean-Paul Riopelle. Ferron’s earlier close-up and tightly painted images of an abstracted landscape or a garden had allied her work to the subdued colour and small-scale paintings of other Automatistes. As she became more experimental, her large, open canvases from the mid-1950s contained big overlaid shapes that burst from the centre or moved in a flow down or across the canvas (Fig. 9.1). While they retain the intuitive movement of the brush or knife from her previous gestural work, they also exploit the solidity of elongated geometric forms clearly constructed by the overlaid movements of the spatula. Ferron’s compositions, with their swooping bravura marks, layered brightened pigments, and thick, tactile surfaces, position her work in that space between the open gesture and the controlled grid. 262

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Fig. 9.1 Marcelle Ferron, Composition # 17, 1955.

The Potency of Geometry With the waning of Automatiste painting in Montreal, many non-figurative artists developed a new interest in geometric strategies. For some, it entailed a strong visual and theoretical commitment while others employed a softer version of its pictorial language and ideas. In the mid-1950s, the group now known as the Premiers Plasticiens formulated the first definition of Montreal geometric abstraction. The exhibitions and manifesto presented by Louis Belzile (b. 1929), pai kows ky

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Jean-Paul Jérôme (1928–2004), Fernand Toupin (1930–2009), and the movement’s principle polemicist, Jauran (Rodolphe de Repentigny, 1926–59), were redolent with the ideas of Mondrian and neo-plasticism. Their relatively smallscale canvases rejected mimesis (and by extension the allusions to nature found in Automatiste work), redefined non-figuration in terms of overlapping, aligned colour planes, and strong frontality, and juxtaposed quirky geometric shapes within a flattened pictorial space. A starker visual rigour and stricter ideology associated with European neo-plastic images quickly followed, especially in the work of the so-called Seconds Plasticiens led by Guido Molinari (1933–2004) and Claude Tousignant (b. 1923), along with Fernand Leduc (1916–2011), Denis Juneau (b. 1925), and other male painters. Their work proclaimed the rejection of the self-containment of easel painting (present in Premiers Plasticiens painting) through large, staunchly reductive hard-edged surfaces, strict planarity, clear structural colour, and an uncompromising flat space that defined the authority of the grid. Such autonomous, self-reflective, and purified non-objective images became the metaphor for new Montreal painting and even the new Quebec society of the early 1960s and the ideals of the Quiet Revolution. Nevertheless, the opposing ideologies of post-Automatism and neo-plasticism did find a common ground within the loose coalition of the Non-Figurative Artists Association of Montreal/L’Association des artistes non-figuratifs de Montréal (nfaam), active during the second half of the 1950s. Fernand Leduc, the president and premier spokesman of the nfaam, defined the association’s ambitions for the advancement of abstraction: that non-representational painting gain acceptance and authority within the city’s cultural milieu, and ideally across Canada.10 More important for the present discussion, this collective organization was essentially an exhibiting society, not unlike Montreal’s earlier Contemporary Arts Society, and, in contrast to the male exclusivity of both bands of Plasticiens, the nfaam was open to the city’s women abstract painters.11 Certainly, they constituted only a small part of the group’s official membership, approximately one-seventh in the later 1950s. Nevertheless, the group’s numerous exhibitions, along with the city’s tradition of shows featuring the work of women artists, further contributed to the unusual prominence (for Canada) of female painters within the cultural arena. The images by Montreal women non-figurative painters of the 1950s reveal a tendency to work against the rigidity of the grid as it had been proposed by Mondrian and numerous Parisian painters and then emulated by the two generations of Montreal male geometric painters. The grid, as Rosalind Krauss so famously defined it, declares the modernity of modern art through its nonreferential character and its hostility to nature. She regarded the grid as antinatural, anti-mimetic, and anti-real, while other theorists saw it as a set of objective rules and regulations, like an imposed system of grammar.12 But, in considering the structural strategies of Montreal women abstractionists, it is 264

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perhaps more accurate to speak of the armature rather than the grid. As a physical object intrinsic to the making of some types of sculpture, the term “armature” is used in this context to suggest metaphorically an orderly but intuitive support system for composing and structuring the pictorial surface. The armature, in contrast to the grid, is neither directing nor controlling but suggestive and provoking. The emotive use of the armature does not deny nature or narrative, but, at the same time, it does not project the grid’s aura of the puritanical and the self-righteous. It does not demand the universal or ideal truths that are so firmly rooted in the ideologies of geometric abstraction, and the armature does not deny the use of more organic and freer gestural form. The twentieth-century grid is defined as disclosing information – primarily about itself. In contrast, the armature allows for a mapping of visual sensation from elsewhere – from beyond itself. The armature, in opposition to the grid, is therefore neither autonomous nor static, and thus it is more symbolic of the ways and byways of everyday reality. For these reasons, the armature seems to have been a particular compositional solution for Montreal women abstractionists in the 1950s since it functioned more satisfactorily than the Plasticien grid to conjoin the exuberance of Automatiste gesturalism and the stoicism of neo-constructivist compositions. To think in terms of an armature rather than an enclosing substructure also seems to reflect more accurately the processes of painting and conceptualizing that influenced the non-figurative work of women in Quebec. The woman artist most publicly associated with the wider aims and ambitions of Montreal abstraction during much of the 1950s and opening years of the 1960s was Rita Letendre (b. 1928).13 Moving from her early post-Automatiste images with their loose anchoring of vaguely organic shapes and fluid space to the more solid and closely knit tiles of colour of mid-decade, she gave soft geometric painting a lyrical and sensuous movement (Fig. 9.2). As with other women of her generation in Montreal, her work affirms that neither the unconsciousderived strategies of the Automatistes nor the austerity and control of Plasticien painting could offer the means to achieve the emotional content matter that was the real subject matter of her production. Letendre’s tempering of a type of constructivist space through the use of a softer pictorial armature rather than the grid provided an alternative approach to spatial organization: the consolidation of geometry and gesture. Her strategies for the exploitation of heightened tonal juxtapositions and an expanded pictorial space were delivered through the clear directional movement of the spatula and the lush energetic impasto of heightened colour. The unabashed sensuality of the surface and the undisguised spontaneity of applying the paint allowed for emphatic images that both accommodated and denied the stricter strategies of Automatism and Plasticism in the production of a redolent alternative. In the years immediately preceding her move from Montreal to Toronto in 1963, Letendre increased the scale of her images’ shapes and spaces, broadened pai kows ky

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Fig. 9.2 Rita Letendre, Jazz à Amsterdam, 1953.

Fig. 9.3 Rita Letendre, Engin poétique, 1961.

the planes of colour, and allowed the forms to become more expansive and organic, although less volumetric (Fig. 9.3). The loosening up of the structural armature suggests a pulling apart of the pictorial elements and even an element of chaos that privileges sensation over stoicism. Most important, her later work of the 1950s implies a new restlessness, which was emblematic of her faith in experimentation and in her belief that emotional power was a reflection of pictorial power. The legitimacy of Letendre’s challenge to dominant non-figurative ideologies was assured by the strong presence of her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions. It also greatly affected other Montreal women abstractionists of her generation in their explorations of different possibilities and different ways of thinking about non-figurative painting. Letendre’s accommodation of the deliberate gesture of Automatiste painting with the soft grid of geometric images exemplifies a distinct path that is characteristic of the painting process of Montreal women abstract artists in the 1950s. Despite the abbreviated and not fully inclusive discussion that occurs in this overview, it appears that the concern for experimentation, for finding a voice within the dominant vocabularies of non-representationalism, was in itself an act of freedom. Some of these painters, at one point or another, may have seemed to favour the informal gesture over the controlling grid or vice versa, or even melded both strategies within one image, depending on the moment. Nevertheless, the possibilities of choice among these pictorial processes were a means to aesthetic freedom and liberty that ensured both the self-expression of individual experience and the self-sufficiency of the artwork. Traces of the spontaneity of the Automatistes are also evident in the work of Marcelle Maltais (b. 1933). In her paintings from the late 1950s, the restless play of dark shapes against an open white ground suggests both attachment and resistance to an imagined armature (Fig. 9.4). Increasingly, she relinquished covert references to nature within an implied limitless spatial arena in favour of the more flattened surface and layered bands of colour that have ties to Plasticien painting, but without its aura of control and precision. Again it is a matter of the armature versus the grid. Her proclivity for taking chances is echoed in the almost arbitrary framing of the edges of the surface. Works by Lise Gervais (1933–98) at the end of the decade show a greater open tension between figure and ground as well as a tendency for organic forms to burst from the centre toward the outer limits of the surface (Fig. 9.5). The paintings of Marcelle Ferron, particularly her images from the late 1950s with their sweeping spatula- driven shapes, may have had an influence on the more tightly organized images of Laure Major (b. 1930) (Fig. 9.6). Both of these painters, as well as others, recognized the potential of the expanded white ground to suggest metaphorically both the spiritual and the concrete, as well as presenting a visual forum for the debate between gesture and geometry, the armature and the grid.

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Fig. 9.4 Marcelle Maltais, Iconoclast, 1957.

An early affinity for a more systematic and concise assemblage of pictorial forms through the device of the armature is clearly evident in the work of Henriette Fauteux-Massé (1925–2005). Interestingly, the first painting that Rita Letendre ever sold was to her colleague, and, despite the significant differences between their approaches to painting, their names were often combined in exhibition reviews as a kind of dynamic duo. Fauteux-Massé usually favoured 268

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Fig. 9.5 Lise Gervais, Le bayous, 1961.

Fig. 9.6 Laure Major, Oriflammes d’orage, 1958.

Fig. 9.7 Henriette Fauteux-Massé, Plein-chant, 1964.

the vertical format that has traditionally been associated with portraiture, rather than using the more popular horizontal or square canvas with its oblique references to the natural world or landscape imagery. Of a smaller and thus more human intimate scale than the majority of second-generation Plasticien painting at the time, Fauteux-Massé’s canvases deploy stacked arrangements of various types of rectangular forms in contrasting scale and colour (Fig. 9.7). The composition respects the grid but simultaneously renders it incapable of containing the variety of tensions between shapes and spaces. Her relaxed arrangement of soft geometric forms exemplifies the capacity of the armature to construct a more lyrical surface movement than that usually associated with compositions tied to the grid. Fauteux-Massé’s work has a particular elegance that derives from its sense of restraint and composure, but also from an undercurrent of whimsy that discloses the sensuousness of the impastoed surface and its rhythmic brush marks. Work by Suzanne Meloche (b. 1926) shows a much closer relationship with a Plasticien approach to the surface (Fig. 9.8). Her large anonymous rectangular shapes, which seem to abut rather than overlap, are resolutely flat and make no reference to nature or the organic that is associated with Automatiste and even Premiers Plasticiens images. The reduced range of colour also adds to the sensation of austerity and immediacy. Yet parts of the shapes’ contours are 270

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Fig. 9.8 Suzanne Meloche, La Pont Mirabeau, 1962.

sometimes silhouetted by broken or curved brush lines and a few of the individual shapes within these unified images appear to teeter slightly. Such suggestions of subtle motion play against the stasis of geometric painting and read as a covert visual reference to the inconsistencies inherent in daily life. The career of Marian Scott (1906–93) is somewhat of an anomaly among the women artists cited in this text.14 First of all, Scott was a generation older than these painters, and secondly, she was an anglophone. Equally important in this context, she spent much of her career as a figurative painter. But, by the end of the 1950s, the representational elements in her paintings were increasingly replaced by a pictorial vocabulary with strong links to post-Automatism; at the same time, she also retained the lessons of the School of Paris, which did not deny allusions to nature.15 Perhaps because Scott came from the English-speaking Montreal art milieu, where painting was less entwined with issues of Quebec identity, she also had an easy openness to American Abstract Expressionism, and her work until the mid-1960s often evoked the interests of “downtown” New York painting. Line became synonymous with colour and her complex web of almost hieroglyphic organic and geometric shapes was sometimes referential, sometimes non-objective. As her commitment to non-figuration developed, recognizable imagery disappeared in her pursuit of the visceral act of the direct pai kows ky

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application of paint, unencumbered by the pictorial demands of figuration (Fig. 9.9). In her work of around 1960, she reintroduced a compositional armature of diagonals, a strategy that had served as the linchpin of her earlier representational painting. In the 1960s, Scott and Letendre became more interested in the issues inherent in American post-painterly abstraction. For both artists, the vibrant opticality of the image, the resonant luminosity of the surface, and the controlled rhythms of colour confronted the current expectations of Quebec non-objective painting. Whatever the differences between the intentions and dynamics of their paintings, the work of both artists contained a sense of gravity and of weight that perhaps alluded to the seriousness and determination of women navigating a male-dominated art world. Like the images of other Montreal abstract women artists, their painting retained an inner continuity that spoke to individual experiences and individual perceptions. But all of the women painters cited here, and even those female abstractionists and “semi-abstractionists” who are not, were directly or indirectly influenced by Borduas’s well-known belief that art is made for self-knowledge. And, in the process of confronting the dominant aesthetic ideologies as well as their disadvantaged socio-political position, the girls continued to tear down both the real and the metaphoric grid.

Fig. 9.9 Marian Scott, Sans titre, 1966.

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Critical Reception The reaction to the work of these Montreal women abstract painters can be easily determined by the unusual numerous discussions of art shows in the local press. That they did find a place in the city’s visual culture was a result of their participation in the many exhibition opportunities available in the 1950s.16 Group shows sponsored by the nfaam at various venues, along with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Annual Spring Exhibition and the smaller presentations in its Gallery XII and later in the museum’s Stable Gallery, furthered the public presence of women’s non-figurative painting in the city’s art milieu. As well, exhibitions were organized or sponsored by the city of Montreal at its Hélènede-Champlain restaurant (and on one occasion at Canada House in New York) and regularly included the work of women abstract painters. Annual exhibitions in Quebec City such as the Salon de la jeune peinture (where Letendre, Maltais, Major, and other women abstractionists were prize winners), the Concours artistique de la Province, and the Moins de trente ans, as well as others in smaller Quebec cities, provided further occasions to make their work more widely known. Various Montreal educational institutions, especially the École des Beaux-Arts, as well as the Young Women’s Christian Association, the bar L’Échourie, and the Tranquille bookstore, were among the other local venues showing abstraction by women painters. Their non-representational painting could also be seen in shows held in towns outside the city, such as Granby and Sainte-Adele. In Montreal, Galerie Agnès Lefort, Galerie Denyse Delrue, and Galerie Libre (all run by women), along with Galerie L’Actuelle and Galerie Artek, held important abstract group and solo exhibitions, further demonstrating the ascendancy and acceptance of non-figuration in the city during the decade and into the 1960s. However, as might be expected, in all of these exhibitions women participants were heavily outnumbered by men. Nevertheless, exhibitions exclusively presenting women’s art had been regular events in Montreal since at least the beginning of the twentieth century.17 Women abstractionists participated in such shows ranging from, for example, the Femina exhibition at the Musée de la Province de Québec in 1947 and the annual city-sponsored Femmes-Peintres exhibitions to the spring 1960 group showing of new work by Fauteux-Massé, Letendre, Major, Maltais, and Meloche in the foyer of the Elysée cinema, which was often used for various progressive events. The presentation of Women Painters of Quebec at the Stable Gallery in late 1964 followed directly on the heels of a larger exhibition of Women Painters of Canada from across the country, which had been presented at the National Gallery of Canada. Although the official records of such museum exhibitions are disappointingly scant, the increased recognition of abstraction by art institutions and commercial galleries indicates the growing professional autonomy of women artists that would become emblematic of avant-garde art in the next two decades. pai kows ky

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Exhibition catalogues (if they were produced at all) were usually no more than checklists of the participants, and reproductions of their work were almost non-existent. Fortunately, writings on non-objective painting were abundant in Quebec newspapers and the coverage devoted to art in Montreal was unique in Canada. Consequently, newspaper reviews of group and solo exhibitions remain the primary source for discerning the critical reception of the work of Quebec women artists.18 The reviews also function as an index of the city’s attitudes to art and, by extension, a reflection of its wider cultural context. The two anglophone dailies, the Gazette and the Star, and especially the two daily French-language papers, La Presse and Le Devoir, provided ample space for the discussion of figurative and non-figurative exhibitions. Le Devoir in particular published lengthy and often heated debates between artists and critics on the pros and cons of non-representational painting. Various weekly newspapers in and around Montreal added to the plethora of critical (or more often descriptive) writing on abstraction. The monthly magazines Vie des Arts and Canadian Art also paid attention to Montreal non-figuration, although not always as supportively as the milieu would have hoped.19 Vie des Arts, however, did give the critic Rodolphe de Repentigny (a premier plasticien who painted under the name Jauran) ample space to consider the wider issues of abstraction in his regular “think pieces,” which rarely contained direct references to specific artists. National attention also came in a September 1956 Weekend Magazine photo story, although Letendre was the only woman featured.20 However, the October 1962 article in Châtelaine magazine by Michelle Lasnier entitled “Les Femmes peintres du Québec” opened with the statement that women held an eminent position within the ranks of Quebec’s best painters and that they were also equal to men in terms of numbers (Fig. 9.10).21 The most influential and articulate writer on Montreal abstraction, as well as on the wider issues of non-figurative art, was undoubtedly de Repentigny, who died in a tragic accident in 1959.22 He had been trained in philosophy, and his determination to instruct his readers in the issues essential to art drove his columns in La Presse, his magazine articles, and his occasional pieces in the progressive newspaper L’Autorité du peuple (under the pseudonym François Bourgogne). De Repentigny’s sophisticated and well-crafted writings on both solo and group abstract exhibitions provided judicious, balanced accounts of the work. Later art writings by his widow, Françoise de Repentigny, in Le Devoir are similar in style and approach. Because de Repentigny gave almost equal attention to representational art, his texts provided a superb overview of the Montreal art milieu of the period.23 Robert Ayre, a generation older but often more cognizant of international trends and of art history, was equally empathetic and insightful although less strident in his support of abstraction in his weekly column in the Montreal Star. Ayre’s carefully composed texts usually covered

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Fig. 9.10 The first page of Michelle Lasnier’s article, “Les Femmes peintres du Québec,” Châtelaine, October 1962.

several topics and his remarks were often more condensed than those of his francophone colleague. Despite his more distanced appraisal of non-figuration, Ayre often urged readers to consider the artist’s individual sensibility even if it did not accord with their own (or his). Writers such as Paul Gladu, René Chicoine, Noel Lajoie, Pierre Saucier, Jean Sarrazin, and other contributors to local and regional dailies and weeklies, while not committed to non-objectivism early on, eventually showed more enthusiasm toward, or at least acceptance of, abstraction as a visual and cultural necessity.24 Nevertheless, they certainly regarded non-figuration as a thorny problem and their attempt to position women’s painting within this genre only added to their dilemma. Interestingly, those writers who had the most difficulty in supporting women’s non-figuration often found ways to link the painters’ abstract motifs to traditional “feminine” figurative themes such as flowers and landscapes, and to suggest that sometimes representational form and content continued to influence their work. As might be expected, the earlier commentaries on the work of Montreal’s abstract women artists had their fair share of gender-driven language. Particular favourites were such words as “courageous,” “bold,” “sincere,” “tender,”

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“poetic,” and so on, and they were often used when the writer was also attempting to find (or invent) an appropriate descriptive and critical language to discuss non-representational work. The ever-popular adjective “dynamic” was so commonplace that Rodolphe de Repentigny wrote in his 14 March 1958 La Presse column that the word had become no more than a cliché, of the sort used by publicity agents.25 Among the few comments on Montreal women abstractionists that can be found in exhibition reviews in Toronto newspapers, some were much more offensive: “barbaric,” “frenzied,” “slightly mad”; but truth be told, the Toronto press often applied the same adjectives in its comments on Quebec’s male non-figurative painters. In direct contrast, de Repentigny’s lengthy discussion in Vie des Arts of an exhibition of Toronto’s Painters Eleven at Montreal’s École des Beaux-Arts in 1958 devoted his longest paragraph on an individual artist to Hortense Gordon. After citing her earlier exhibition at the Galerie Agnès Lefort, he admiringly stated that not only was she “probably the first Canadian to produce non-figurative work,” but that several of the Painters Eleven had applauded Gordon as “one of the rare sources of encouragement for their efforts in an indifferent city.”26 As the 1950s progressed, Montreal newspaper articles citing the work of women artists generally became more democratic, praising or panning in the same critical language and attitude extended to male painters. Such discussions often knit the work of men and women in the same sentences or phrases in an attempt to find pictorial similarities rather than gender differences. This is not to suggest, however, that women had achieved a type of parity; for example, a Canadian Press wire-service article on Henriette Fauteux-Massé in early January 1960 was entitled “L’histoire d’une fille-peintre courageuse.”27 The piece was primarily biographical and her “courage” rested in the fact that she had chosen a career as a painter. As an aside, photographs of Fauteux-Massé were favourites among the few images that accompanied newspaper art reviews, perhaps because she was strikingly beautiful. A year later, in an article in Le Petit Journal of 9 April on the second Peintres-femmes exhibition, the (unknown) author was still trying to come to terms with the place of women abstract painters: “Generally speaking, the women are caught between academic and non-figurative painting. They seem to avoid the extremes of ease and audacity. They possess an excellent decorative sense … they represent equilibrium, perhaps even boldness.” A more sophisticated opinion is that voiced earlier by de Repentigny, almost as an interjection in the middle of his La Presse column of 1 November 1958 entitled “Douceur, feu et affirmation.” Although he usually avoided making general glosses on women abstractionists, here he wrote: “It seems, moreover, that there is a movement that stands out among Montreal women painters, one that is in favour of painting that is more categorical in its enunciation of itself.” This same lengthy article began with a comparison of two solo exhibitions of the very different non-figurative paintings by Eva Landori (1917–38) and Rita 276

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Letendre. De Repentigny suggested that the former employed the type of space reminiscent of bas-reliefs and shields, while the work in the latter’s presentation evoked the notion of an object in time rather than in space. He then analyzed their process of painting through his usual strategy of citing specific examples to support his argument, mentioning the various international and Quebec artists whose concerns seemed to be evoked in their work. These comments were then followed by his equally long analysis of the themes in the increasingly non-figurative work of Marian Scott, suggesting that she sometimes followed the routes taken by Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey. Generally supportive of Scott, here de Repentigny had no qualms about discussing both the strengths and weaknesses of her painting in clear and discerning language. Most important, however, is the fact that such a lengthy, detailed discussion, entirely devoted to three women artists, could not be found in any other major daily newspaper elsewhere in Canada in the late 1950s. The question (or more accurately an answer) concerning the position of Montreal women abstractionists was also considered by the few female writers writing on art at the time. In her 19 February 1959 La Presse article on Laure Major, who had recently won the top prize at the Salon de la jeune peinture, Fernande Saint-Martin stated that while francophone women writers, novelists, and poets had been solidly recognized for their important contributions to Quebec literature, women painters were only now making up for lost time. The reason for their new prominence was that “they demonstrate an ability that reflects original, feminine sensibilities, far removed from the tradition of polite watercolours by young ladies from good families.” Saint-Martin had earlier helped to advance Montreal non-figurative art through her support of Galerie L’Actuelle, run by her painter-husband Guido Molinari from 1955 to 1957. A spring 1960 review in Le Devoir of an exhibition by five Montreal women painters written by Françoise de Repentigny took the public to task for their reactionary dismissal of abstraction, despite its fifty years of history. To challenge such attitudes, she stressed the individuality and strength of the work of Maltais, Fauteux-Massé, Letendre, and Meloche as exemplary of non-figuration’s intense creativity and spirit.28 Proof of the fact that women abstractionists had finally found their place in the Quebec cultural milieu was clearly demonstrated in the substantial article by Michelle Lasnier in Châtelaine magazine in October 1962. Entitled “Les femmes peintres du Québec,” it began with a question: “Ces artistes renommés sontelles des bohèmes ou des femmes comment les autres?”29 Lasnier focused on the careers of Henriette Fauteux-Massé, Marcelle Ferron, Lise Gervais, Rita Letendre, Marcelle Maltais, and Suzanne Meloche, as well as mentioning the dancers Françoise Sullivan and Monique Voyer and the textile artists Mariette Vermette and Micheline Beauchemin. She provided a careful and detailed coverage of their accomplishments, emphasizing that the pre-eminence of women painters was a pai kows ky

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particular phenomenon of French Canada, even though it was not unusual in New York or Paris. She began her narrative with an overview of their international shows and awards, and then continued with information on their training. She paid substantial attention to their work routines, with a special interest in how those painters who were married (and those who also had children) juggled their private and professional lives. Lasnier also commented on the significant increase in the price of their works and explained (briefly) how the art world works. Her article lauded other accomplishments such as the artists’ participation in exhibitions abroad and their success in having work included in American collections, but then boasted that the most salient point was “the role that Montreal has played in their evolution.” She also discussed Agnès Lefort, “the first woman in Montreal to open an art gallery,” who was also “the first gallery director to support young painters.”30 Perhaps because the article was written for a popular “woman’s” publication, it was supported by portrait-like photographs of seven of the artists, opening with a large image of Rita Letendre and Dorothy Cameron at the installation of Letendre’s March 1962 exhibition at the Here and Now Gallery. Although the gallery itself was unnamed, the caption stated that it was “the only picture gallery in Toronto directed by a woman.” Other half- and quarter-page illustrations showed Gervais, Voyer, Maltais, Ferron, Sullivan, and Fauteux-Massé along with glimpses of their work, and most of the women were photographed in a domestic setting. However, Meloche was posed in front of a brick wall, which seems like an accidental allusion to her geometric abstractions. Several of the captions included a quote from the artist, while the others provided a sentence or two on their lives. Lasnier devoted lengthy paragraphs to each artist in order to emphasize their individuality and she also allowed the women to speak for themselves; their numerous comments seem to have been chosen to reinforce the sustaining meaning of art within their lives and their professional attitude toward their work. She found other threads linking the women, particularly their shared belief that painting “is a way to live more intensely” – an essential concern for these women who worked in the solitude of the studio after completing their art studies in the late 1940s. Fifteen years on, however, they were now part of “a vigorous artistic eruption, [creating] a spectacle of exuberance and enthusiasm for the visual artist that places Montreal at the forefront of Canadian painting.” Most impressive is Lasnier’s respectful (despite the occasional flamboyant adjective) attention to the ten artists within a wide range of topics and without the need to mention their male counterparts. She concluded her lengthy text with the comment that Montreal was the unique site in Canada for the most interesting “recherches plastiques.” As a result, “Quebec women painters are well placed. And to us, that is not at all surprising.”

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By the mid-1960s, Montreal women abstract artists had widened the path for the succeeding generations who would give a new identity and meaning to what Fernande Saint-Martin had earlier called “feminine sensibilities.” Montreal women abstractionists of the 1950s and early 1960s enunciated their own definition of the pictorial grid, but they also broke the barriers that the metaphorical grid had imposed on their lives; and they had clearly attained their due recognition as productive and accomplished Quebec painters.

notes 1 For detailed information on the women artists cited in this discussion, see the artist files at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, and elsewhere, along with various Internet sites with postings on the individual painters. For a general discussion of non-figurative art of the period, see Denise Leclerc, “Montreal,” in The Crisis of Abstraction in Canada: The 1950s (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1992); and Sandra Paikowsky, “Vivre dans la cité: Quebec Abstract Painting,” in Robert McKaskell et al., Achieving the Modern: Canadian Abstract Painting and Design in the 1950s (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery 1993). 2 Duplessis was premier from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1959. His death and the defeat of his Union Nationale by the Liberals in 1960 signified the beginning of the Revolution tranquille. See PaulAndré, “The Duplessis Era 1945–1960,” in Paul-André Linteau et al., eds., Quebec since 1930 (Toronto: James Lorimer 1991). 3 Micheline Dumont et al., Quebec Women: A History (Toronto: Women’s Press 1987), 303. For a discussion of the period considered here, see “Part V: The Impasse 1940–1969” of this classic study. 4 For discussion of the Automatistes, see François-Marc Gagnon, Chronique du

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movement automatiste québécois 1931– 1954 (Montreal: Lanctôt Éditeur 1998); Ray Ellenwood, Egregore: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement (Toronto: Exile Editions 1992); and Roald Nasgaard and Ray Ellenwood, The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal, 1941– 1960 (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre 2009). Their bibliographies provide further sources of earlier writings. A full history of Plasticien painting has not been compiled. See Alain Parent, Jauran et les Premiers Plasticiens (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal 1977); France Gascon, Dix ans de propositions géométriques le Québec 1955– 1965 (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal 1979); and Jody Patterson, “Painting on the Edge: Geometric Abstraction in Montreal, the 1950s” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 2001). Other discussions on the Plasticien approach can be found in the various publications on Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant in particular. These would include Robert Blair, Ulysse Comtois, Paterson Ewen, and Jean McEwen among others. The submission of a pseudo-Automatiste painting by Jean Paul Lemieux and Edmund Alleyn is recounted in detail in Gagnon, Chronique du movement automatiste québécois, 903–6. For discussion of other women more loosely associated with the Automatistes,

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see Patricia Smart, Les Femmes de “Refus global” (Montreal: Éditions Boréal 1998). See Réal Lussier et al., Marcelle Ferron (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal et Éditions Les 400 coups 2000). By the time of her return to Montreal, Ferron was involved with stainedglass projects, and that same year she completed an installation at the Champde-Mars Metro station. The group’s slogan, “Vivre dans la cite,” epitomized their determination to forefront non-representational art within urban visual culture. See Sandra Paikowsky, The Non-Figurative Artists Association of Montreal/L’Association des artistes non-figuratifs de Montréal (Montreal: Sir George Williams Art Galleries, Concordia University, 1983). However, Rita Letendre was the lone woman among its twenty founding members. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October, 9 (summer 1979): 50–64. Reprinted in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1985). Discussions on the grid, in support or rejection of Krauss’s belief that it was “a model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical” (Originality of the Avant-Garde, 22), have appeared in countless texts. See Sandra Paikowsky, Rita Letendre: The Montreal Years/Les années montréalaises 1953–1963 (Montreal: Concordia Art Gallery, Concordia University, 1989). See Esther Trépanier, Marian Dale Scott: Pioneer of Modern Art (Quebec: Musée du Québec 2000). Several other Montreal women painters, whom I would categorize as “semiabstractionists,” combined elements of representational imagery and pictorial strategies of non-figuration. Among them were Kittie Bruneau, Agnès Lefort, Suzanne Rivard, and Tobi Steinhouse.

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16 See Hélène Sicotte, “Un état de la diffusion des arts visuels à Montréal: Les années cinquante: lieux et chronologie,” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien, 16, no. 1 (1994): 64–95; and 16, no. 2 (1995): 40–76. 17 Rose-Marie Arbour, “Les expositions collectives de femmes artistes et leurs catalogues: 1965–1990,” in Francine Couture, ed., Exposer l’art contemporain du Québec (Montreal: Centre de diffusion 3d 2003), 99–165, includes material on the 1950s. Statistical analysis of the participation of abstract women artists in Montreal exhibitions has yet to be done. 18 Copies of the numerous reviews of group and solo exhibitions of the women artists discussed here are available in their artist files at various venues; see n.1. 19 For an overview of Vie des Arts at the time, see Louise Moreault, “Making Art Modern: The First Decade of Vie des Arts Magazine and Its Contribution to the Discourse of the Visual Arts in Quebec during the 1950s and 1960s” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 1997). 20 Jacqueline Moore and Louis Jacques, “Their Objective Is Non-Objective,” Weekend Magazine, 8 September 1956. 21 Michelle Lasnier, “Les Femmes peintres du Québec,” Chatelaine, October 1962, 32–5, 100–6. All subsequent quotes in English from this article are my translation. 22 Marie Carani, L’oeil de la critique: Rodolphe de Repentigny, écrits sur l’art et théorie esthétique 1952–1959 (Sillery, qc: Les éditions du Septentrion 1990). De Repentigny died in a mountain-climbing accident in the Canadian Rockies. 23 Unfortunately, a full analysis of de Repentigny’s writings on representational art has yet to be done, perhaps because he is so closely associated with the Premiers Plasticiens and the development of nonfiguration in Montreal. 24 Such newspapers included La Patrie,

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25

26 27

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Notre Temps, Le Petit Journal, Le Nouveau Journal, La Voix de l’Est, and the Herald (Montreal). Rodolphe de Repentigny, “Tableaux petits de format, mais grands par leur conception.” Rodolphe de Repentigny, “Le Group des Onze,” Vie des Arts, 3, no. 12 (1958): 31. See, for example, Le Progrès du Saguenay (Chicoutimi) under the heading “Le Monde Feminin,” 9 January 1960. Françoise de Repentigny, “Exposition

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des oeuvres de cinq femmes peintres,” Le Devoir, 21 April 1960. The exhibition was held at the Elysée and also included Laure Major. 29 Lasnier, “Les Femmes peintres du Québec,” 100. 30 For further discussion, see Hélène Sicotte, La Galerie Agnès Lefort – Montréal 1950–1961 (Montreal: Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 1996).

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PART FOUR

THE LIMITS OF PROFESSIONALISM

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10

CHAPTER 1

“I Want to Call Their Names in Resistance”

Writing Aboriginal Women into Canadian Art History, 1880–1970

Sherry Farrell Racette To write this piece I have relied on fragments, bits and pieces of information found here and there. – bell hooks1

As bell hooks points out in “Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand,” writing an inclusive art history is no easy task. Until very recently, Aboriginal women have been written out of Canadian art history, or rather art history has been written around us. How do we write ourselves in? It falls far beyond simple insertion; the erasures are far too deep. Insertion presumes a simple forgetfulness, an oversight, a neglecting of the obvious. Insertion assumes a presence. It implies a shared mode of history, a common belonging to a collective archive, and an agreed-upon understanding of what it means to be an artist. Beyond the important considerations of race, gender, culture, and social class, our distinct legal status in Canada must be acknowledged. This was particularly true for women artists working between 1880 and 1970. For much of the time period under consideration, First Nations communities lived under a profoundly restrictive regime of colonial power. Relationships between First Nations people and the Canadian state have been defined by the Indian Act, a piece of legislation enacted in 1876 and surviving, through many amendments and revisions, until the present time.2 In 1881 Indian agents were granted the powers of justices of the peace, enabling them to prosecute individuals who transgressed the legislation.3

Provincial police, the North-West Mounted Police, and later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were also expected to enforce the act. Among its many powers is that of determining who is and who is not an Indian pursuant to the legislation. Between 1886 and 1915, amendments to the act outlawed traditional ceremonies and dance and restricted freedom of movement by implementing a pass system, and in 1921 unsanctioned public appearances in traditional dress were forbidden. Sections 114 and 140 of the act became known collectively as “the culture ban.” These oppressive amendments were a critical factor in the lives of Aboriginal people living under the jurisdiction of an act whose scope was expanded over the course of the twentieth century. In 1939 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Inuit people also came under the authority of the Indian Act. And, while a new edition of the act published in 1951 removed many of the most oppressive amendments, they were never formally repealed. Through the Indian Act and the Indian agents located in each First Nations community under federal jurisdiction, the Department of Indian Affairs exercised constant surveillance. The level and type of interference and control varied as government policies shifted, and implementation was influenced by the personal character and attitudes of individual agents and department bureaucrats. This was a regime of power that influenced every aspect of an individual’s life. Consider the most basic aspect of art historiography: the artist biography. For much of Canada’s existence as a nation, Aboriginal people have lived as colonized and subjugated non-citizens under strict state control. Lacking the most basic civil rights, Aboriginal women resided in a segregated world, strategically set apart from other Canadians. Their lives were strictly circumscribed and documented (or not) in very different ways. As Inuit musician Lucie Idlout shouts in her 2003 song E5-770, My Mother’s Name: “You imposed your name number, E5–770, my mother’s name … identities of thousands cattled ‘E.’”4 With such a radical erasure of individual identities, the difficulties of constructing the most basic biographical information on Aboriginal women artists can be significant.

Objects without Artists When I read bell hook’s “Aesthetic Inheritances” several years ago, it was a call to arms. Her words helped me articulate my process as a researcher and historian, and my frustration with women’s invisibility: “I want to call their names in resistance, to oppose the erasure … that historical mark of racist and sexist oppression. We have too often had no names, our history recorded without specificity, as though it’s not important to know who – which one of us – the particulars.”5 Although hooks was writing about African-American quilt artists, the simple action of identifying or naming individual Aboriginal women artists struggles against the same imposed anonymity. 286

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Although these issues of erasure affected all Aboriginal people, it was more difficult for women to emerge as individuals from the generic mass of “Indian,” “Eskimo,” and “tribe.” Huron painter Zacharie Telariolin Vincent (1815–86) was acknowledged as a painter with “some artistic excellence,”6 but Marguerite Vincent La8inonkie (c. 1783–1865) is relatively unknown. Northwest Coast sculptors Charles Edenshaw (Haida; 1839–1920) and Mungo Martin (Kwakwaka’wakwa; 1880–1962) emerged in the early twentieth century as named individual artists, but their wives, Isabella Edenshaw (1858–1926) and Abaya Smith Hunt Martin (1899–1963), are unrecognized. Marguerite Vincent La8inonkie had a major role in the development of moose-hair embroidery on birchbark, a distinctive and important Huron art form (Fig. 10.1). Isabella Edenshaw was an extraordinary weaver of fine Haida baskets and hats (Fig. 10.2). Abaya Smith Hunt Martin was also a noted weaver, her work including Chilkat dance aprons, and was one of three actors who portrayed the female lead in Edward Curtis’s The Land of the Head Hunters (1910). We should know these women, we should sing their names. The historical construction of the “professional artist” is also problematic, since the term “professional” is tightly bound to European economic and social structures and “artist” is a deeply gendered occupational category. However, if broken down into its essential components – specialized training, peer recognition, public presentation, and principal economic activity – Aboriginal women are, and have been for millennia, artists. Female arts practices were, and continue

Fig. 10.1 Moose hair and porcupine embroidered birchbark trays made by Marguerite Vincent La8inonkie of Wendake for Lord and Lady Elgin, during Elgin’s term as governor general of the Province of Canada (1847–1854).

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Fig. 10.2 An example of the fine spruce-root hats woven in the early twentieth century by Haida artist Isabella Edenshaw and painted by her husband, Charles Edenshaw.

to be, marked by rigorous mentorship, evaluation, and public display. Women’s work that met aesthetic and technical standards entered into economic systems as valuable objects of exchange or moved into political and ceremonial life heavily loaded with social and cultural value. Recognition of individual women as artists is further challenged by the categories into which their work falls. The categories of “craft” and “ethnographic material culture” are in themselves faceless categories, again erasing women who are already faceless and nameless. Doreen Jensen (Gitxsan; 1933–2009) rejected these categories in her essay for the exhibition catalogue for Topographies in 1996: “I do not accept … pedantic distinctions between art and craft … Nor can I believe in categorizing work by living artists as either ‘traditional’ (valid anthropological artifact) or ‘contemporary’ (valid fine art object). Such distinctions are at best irrelevant; at worst, they are racist.”7 While contemporary artists can challenge these categories, Aboriginal women’s art history cannot avoid the realm of the anthropologist – the museum. Many artworks from the historic period are in museum collections with little or no provenance. The conventional museum strategy has been to organize collections and exhibitions into regional categories or “culture areas” using the system first proposed by Clark Wissler in 1917 and refined by Alfred Kroeber in 1939.8 These persistent generic identifications, combined with a lack of specific information, effectively erase the human maker. This has been done so effectively that rarely does an individual walk into a museum exhibition and think, “Wow! Look at the amazing work of Aboriginal women artists.” Yet many, and possi288

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bly the majority, of objects in museum collections are the products of women’s artistry and creative work. The publication of Franz Boas’s Primitive Art in 1927 led to an increased appreciation of objects in museum collections as works of art, but it became a means of further alienating them from their human connection. That same year, the National Museum and the National Gallery of Canada collaborated on The Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art – Native and Modern, framing the work of Emily Carr and others with baskets, masks, and Chilkat blankets.9 Boas and the curators of “Native and Modern” encouraged their respective publics to value a beautiful beaded dress or a finely executed basket as art, but such appreciation did not correspond with an equal valuing of the person who created it. She disappeared into a vague, romantic memory whose only purpose was to establish the authenticity and value of the object. Only recently has there been a change in this practice of erasure. In Native North American Art (1998), Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips seek to address the issue of absence by shifting conventional regional or tribal identifications with the simple insertion of the word artist into the figure captions and the word people after tribal affiliations, as in: Cree artist, Lakota people. This is a subtle strategy, but it serves to evoke the presence (although genderless) of the individual who envisioned and executed the work and the human context of its creation.

If There Is No Word for Art, Can There Be Artists? It just comes to you. I’m making one basket and I’m thinking about the next design I’m going to do, or you wake up in the middle of the night and you have an idea. That’s when it comes to me. – Mary Adams10

Two senior Mohawk basket artists from Akwesasne were interviewed in 2000 for the public radio series Meet the Masters. Mae Bigtree described her creative process and Mary Adams shared stories of sleepless nights wrestling with a creative and technical challenge. Their words resonate with every artist, yet the discourse around Aboriginal arts practices sometimes negates or romanticizes the struggle to achieve artistic excellence. In 1995 Apache curator and art historian Nancy Mithlo began an interrogation of what she described as the “Top Three Indian Art Clichés” and challenged one of them in her public lecture “Is There Really No Word for Art in Our Language?”11 The question was raised in response to a platitude that has developed around the difficulty of finding neat translations for the words “art” and “artist” in Aboriginal languages, a phenomenon, it must be noted, that exists in most languages not rooted in race t t e

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Latin. Even the Japanese did not have a word for “art” until the nineteenth century.12 The conventional and somewhat romantic articulation of “there is no word for art” tends to present a world where art infused all aspects of life, and by default either nobody or everybody was an artist. If making art is as natural to us as breathing, our art is like leaves that fall off trees. This vagueness blurs the presence of the artist who envisions the work and lies awake fretting over creative decisions. A session at the Native American Art Studies Association meeting in 1999 continued the discussion, and the late Lakota anthropologist Beatrice Medicine expressed her concern that such a simplistic trope ignored the complexities of Native languages.13 While this discussion was underway, Canadian Aboriginal scholars were exploring intellectual concepts embedded within their own languages. Willie Ermine’s discussion of the Cree concept mamatowisowin has been widely circulated within Cree and Anishinaabek intellectual circles.14 Mamatowisowin, as understood by Ermine, a fluent Cree speaker, is the creative life force connecting all of creation and the human capacity to tap into that force by using the mind, the senses, and the body. Both Ermine and Métis author Maria Campbell have spoken about the Cree vocabulary’s description of a creative force that exists both within and outside the individual, and creativity as the channel that connects them.15 Anna-Leah King, in conversation with her father, respected scholar and elder Dr Cecil King, brought the Anishinaabek term menoh into the conversation.16 Menoh, as explained by Dr King, a fluent Anishinaabewin speaker, is the “quality to all things in life that make it ‘aesthetically’ pleasing to the senses.”17 Menoh describes the aesthetic qualities of the object or experience, and the sensual and emotional response provoked. There are vocabularies related to specific arts practices and media and the notion of skilful execution. These initial explorations of Cree and Anishinaabewin indicate the potential within the complexities of Indigenous languages to discuss art and art making in our own terms. The ability to link to these creative and aesthetic energies was a gift and an ability that could be nurtured, and was related conceptually to dreaming and visioning. Individuals were often chosen and mentored by senior artists but also sought guidance from mature artists of their own volition. This often happened within families, and today artistic skill, knowledge, designs, and the creative impulse continue to be passed from one generation to the next. Artists often worked as collaborating partners, drawing from a network of creative kin. Grandmother-mother-daughter and sister collaborations were common, and cross-gender creative relationships with sons, brothers, husbands, and grandfathers were not unknown as well. Women’s creative abilities and technical skills were a source of status and respect but also brought deep internal benefits. Mary Adams once commented,

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“Making baskets is my medicine” – words echoed by Saskatchewan Métis bead artist Isabelle Dorion Impey, who declared, “Beading is my joy.”18 Women’s artistic excellence emerged over time, based on a foundation of discipline, respect for their media, and openness to that elusive creative life force. Every woman was not an artist, but those who were artists achieved recognition within their communities and their work often set aesthetic standards for generations.

“They Are Artists at That Kind of Work”: Stitching Economies in the Nineteenth Century The St. Regis Indians are extensively engaged in basket making. They make fancy baskets of many kinds and are artists in that kind of work. – Bureau of Indian Affairs19

The exhibition space of women’s art was primarily the human body and domestic spaces. Their most important arts practice was dressing people within their family circle, which involved the communication of important information to a multi-dimensional audience of people, animals, and spirits through complex designs woven in fibres and porcupine quillwork. New media introduced through European trade were quickly integrated into women’s arts practices and European men, and later women, became new consumers and new bodies upon which to exhibit their work. During the initial fur-trade period, European men knew the women who created the embellished clothing that was beautiful and essential to survival. However, shifts in modes of production led to a more anonymous artist. In their seminal works, Ruth Phillips (Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art) and Ruth Holmes Whitehead (Micmac Quillwork) identified the early eighteenth century as the time when women in the northeast began to develop new forms specifically designed for new consumers, shifting over time to accommodate changes in gender and taste.20 While the souvenir trade in eastern Canada has received the most scholarly attention, women in many regions either adapted traditional forms or developed new ones for economic purposes. Métis and northern Cree women dressed a steady stream of men moving north and west throughout three centuries of exploration, trade, and settlement (Fig. 10.3).21 Women from the Haida, Tlingit, Ntlakyapamuk, and other nations of present-day British Columbia did a vigorous trade in basket forms developed for outside consumption.22 Women actively marketed their goods, and many of the bags, moccasins, and baskets in museum collections were purchased from women on urban streets, at trading posts, tourist sites such as Niagara Falls and Banff, and the docks of Halifax and Vancouver.

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Fig. 10.3 Cree goods displayed at a northern Hudson’s Bay Company post, photographed by a crew member of a Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship, c. 1911.

In 1892 the American commissioner of Indian affairs commented on the economic importance of basket production at Akwesasne (St Regis), reporting that Dwyer and Lantry of Hogansburg, New York, had purchased $40,000 worth of baskets in that year.23 Also in 1892, Akwesasne’s Canadian Indian agent reported that “they are still making baskets in large quantities.”24 The importance of women’s art production to the economy of Akwesasne (which straddles two federal and three state/provincial boundaries) was frequently noted in Canadian and American government reports. In addition to the Haudenosaunee women of Akwesasne, Kahnawake (Caughnawaga), and Kahnasatake (Oka), Indian agents from Quebec and the Maritimes reported that Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, and Algonquin communities also earned substantial portions of their annual income from women’s art production. These arts practices, which merged agency and necessity, had evolved over centuries as women artists engaged in trade networks as creators and consumers. The Aboriginal woman artist with her wares was a popular subject in Canadian art and photography for more than two centuries.25 From Cornelius Krieghoff’s mid-nineteenth-century paintings of Mohawk and Huron-Wendat women in Montreal and Quebec City to twentieth-century drawings and photographs of Mi’kmaq women selling baskets in Halifax (Fig. 10.4), Aboriginal women were seldom represented without their artwork. Such images can provide information about Aboriginal women artists, including the way they presented themselves and their work, and will occasionally reveal their individual identities. A woman’s personal appearance and presentation of her artwork can be considered a self-curated space. The red shawl, red calico blouse, and black top 292

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Fig. 10.4 A stylish young Mi’kmaq woman sells a variety of splint baskets in this Edith Smith watercolour painted c. 1930.

hat with trailing green ribbon hatband worn by Krieghoff’s Woman with Basket of Moccasins would have created a visual focus on a busy Montreal street, and drawn customers to the finely beaded bags and moccasins displayed in the woman’s basket.26 Other images show women using their own bodies as the mode of display, suspending baskets and moccasins from strings that hung in groups from their hands or from a belt around their waists (Fig. 10.5). Photographs of Tuscarora and Mohawk women at Niagara Falls show similar care in dress and display. While it is possible that some representations were imaginary or posed, their consistency over time and distance suggests that women “dressed up” to sell their works, perhaps to perform the forest daughters that their late Victorian customers wanted to see. Readers of The Living Age (1855) were encouraged to view these artists as ornamental primitives, synonymous with the natural landscape and integral to the authentic tourist experience: “As we came through the woods on Goat Island, this morning, we encountered various groups of Indian women sitting on the grass weaving baskets, and other fancies for sale. As we listened to their musical tones they sounded like bird-voices and running waters … It is a pleasant surprise to meet these tawny children of the forest, clad in their gay garbs, for they mingle picturesquely and naturally with the sights and sounds of Niagara.”27 This sylvan scene was described in travel narratives and was the subject of stereographic photographs sold as souvenirs.28 race t t e

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Fig. 10.5 Iroquois Woman from Kahnawake is one of many Cornelius Krieghoff paintings of women walking from their communities to sell their baskets, moccasins, and other collectibles in nearby urban centres.

This carefully constructed image sometimes masked the desperate poverty that began to envelop Aboriginal communities as settlement advanced and colonial powers began to strip away their autonomy. As early as 1830, Johann Kohl commented enthusiastically on the “little baskets, embroidered slippers, pretty embroidery with elk’s hair upon elk’s leather, porcupine quills upon birchbark” produced for sale and distribution by Huron-Wendat women at Lorette.29 However, he was deeply moved when he stumbled across a darker scene at “Indian camps” outside Bytown (Ottawa): We … found two women – an elder and a younger, mother and daughter [who were] earning their living by basket-making. They worked in the evening and at night, and in the day-time the daughter carried their little manufactures to the town … A hundred yards off there was another “camp” … which was an Algonquin camp … The occupants were precisely as in the tent of the Iroquois, an old and a young woman … While we were talking, the former sat still without granting us so much as a look, though her fingers continued in busy motion over the large basket 294

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that she had in hand; and the elastic strips of wood were pushed hither and thither, and the superfluous ends fell under her knife almost with the rapidity of an American steam saw-mill. We inquired, the daughter being interpreter, whether she would not now allow herself a little rest, as it was now ten o’clock; but she replied very briefly, “The baskets bring in very little. They must be ready to-morrow. We work every night.” When asked how old she was … the old lady laid aside her basket, spread out her ten fingers, and then struck her two hands at regular intervals seven times; she then snatched her basket again, and went on plaiting as busily as before.30 Kohl included this lengthy description in his published narrative because “I could not get out of my head the picture of this grey-haired woman of seventy, sitting there on the bare damp ground in the comfortless forest, so hard at work” and offered it as evidence against the “accusations of sloth, so commonly made” by the white settlers whose aggression had pushed these women to the fringes of their former territories.31 It can possibly provide a backstory to the photographs of very young women in quaint dress selling goods (Fig. 10.6): a performance of the picturesque maiden while the elderly artist slept for a few hours before beginning her work again. However underpaid and desperate the working conditions, women’s artistry grew increasingly important to community economies and in some cases enabled Fig. 10.6 These young Tuscarora women, photographed by William Notman c. 1860, are dressed to attract the interest of potential customers visiting Niagara Falls.

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a degree of independence from colonial control and interference. In the years following Canadian Confederation in 1867, families engaged in basket and beadwork production continued to move freely across the border. The revenues generated by their work provided the rationale for exempting them from the degree of control exerted on other communities. The Annual Report for the Department of the Interior for 1876 noted that the Anishnaabek women of Rama “make large quantities of baskets,” and it was also reported that entire Abenaki families “go to the United States in the months of June, July, August and September to sell their baskets, hats, fancy baskets, ear pendants and other work in ash, birch-bark and basswood, which, with skins, comprise the whole industry of this Tribe.”32 Freedom of movement was critical in marketing women’s “baskets, hats, mitts and moccasins,” which were described as the only source of revenue for their community.33 For a time, these revenues were so significant that they appeared under the category of “Other Industries” in budget spreadsheets in Department of Indian Affairs annual reports. In 1875 the superintendent’s report for Ontario listed revenues from basket and beadwork sales totalling $41,748, with the highest revenues generated by the women of Six Nations ($7,174), the Chippewa, Munsee, and Oneida of the Thames ($4,000 each), and Akwesasne ($1,200).34 Basket making was becoming an industry and, with the exception of “fancy baskets,” became increasingly utilitarian. Women who took their own goods directly to consumers were able to exchange their baskets and beadwork for cash, but by 1895 the department reported “a depression” in the sale of fancy baskets and moccasins and “speculators” had secured control of marketing for almost half of the goods produced.35 While Indian agents continued to describe women as having “admirable skill” and their work as “this art,” the revenues of previous decades disappeared. By the turn of the century, Indian agents reported beadwork and basket making as positive indications of industriousness, but women were no longer able to ward off poverty with their active hands. However market values fluctuated, women who excelled at beadwork, quillwork, and basketry were recognized by their communities, and often beyond. Mi’kmaq quillwork and basketry were extremely popular in the Maritimes and were frequently chosen for special gifts and presentations to visiting dignitaries. One artist, Christina “Christianne” Paul Morris (1804–86), achieved celebrity status in the mid-nineteenth century. Ruth Holmes Whitehead has cobbled her biography together, tracing her through Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition prize lists and Halifax newspapers and identifying her as the subject of as many as seven portraits.36 Morris’s porcupine quillwork was given to the royal family, including a quillwork cradle for Queen Victoria’s infant son Prince Edward, a duplicate of which is the only surviving piece that can be attributed to her.37 Photographs of Mi’kmaq quill artists, including Christianne Morris, were sold as cartes de visites and postcards. A note accompanying an 1889 photo296

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graph of Mary Paul of Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, offered information on her artistic achievements: “somewhat well known for her porcupine quill work, many specimens of which have found their way to Britain, and been much admired. Table mats, card baskets, backs and seats for chairs, moccasins, etc. are among the articles which attest to her taste and skills”38 (Fig. 10.7). While few pieces in museum collections can be directly attributed to an individual artist, it is significant that certain women were singled out publicly from the hundreds producing baskets, beadwork, and quillwork for a market that prospered for half a century. The faces of the artists, even without their names, silently claim authority over the unidentified pieces that rest in museums and private collections (Fig. 10.8).

Fig. 10.7 Mi’kmaq women began to make quillwork panels for furniture in the 1840s. This chair seat features a large, central eight-pointed star, one of several celestial motifs used in Mi’kmaq quillwork compositions.

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Fig. 10.8 A postcard of a dignified Mi’kmaq woman artist holding a basket. She is likely Christianne Paul Morris or Bella Marble of Shubenacadie.

The Subversive Stitch: Making Art under Regimes of Power Then there was the beadwork – in cushions and stands, candlesticks and brackets, mirror and mantle mountings, caps and moccasins, wall pockets and toilet cases – in most ornate and dazzling array, and forming a rich source of Indian goods from which to select presents for friends across the seas or anywhere or materials to add to the curios in our own land. – Montreal Daily Witness 39

In 1883 the Montreal Daily Witness enthusiastically reported on the “Native Handicrafts and Art” exhibited as part of the Kahnawake Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition. By the late nineteenth century, the Department of Indian Affairs was actively endorsing and supporting participation in local and regional exhibitions as a means to stimulate interest in agriculture and demonstrate “progress” to a broader public. Women artists used these events as perfor298

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mative spaces. Traditional arts were exhibited and demonstrated. Baskets and beadwork developed for the souvenir trade were marketed alongside displays of drawings, paintings, and quilts. Prizes were awarded in a wide range of categories. The activities of outstanding artists can sometimes be traced through newspaper coverage of exhibitions and published prize lists. The prize list published in the Daily Witness provides a record of women whose artwork was recognized at the 1883 exhibition, most of whom were from Kahnawake and neighbouring reserves. class x. Moccasins, plain – 1st, Mrs. C. Leborne. Moccasins, fancy – 1st, Mrs. Parquis. class xi. Coarse bead work – 1st, Mrs. Jos. Williams, Mrs. Jos. Laronde and Miss L. Jocks; 2nd, Mrs. Lefebvre and Mrs. Jos. Barnes. Fine bead work – 1st, Mrs. Jos. Williams, and Mrs. Jos. Laronde; 2nd, Mrs. A. Delisle. Needle work – 1st, Mrs. M. Lefebvre, Miss Williams, Miss M. Laronde, Miss L. Jocks, Mrs. D. Jacobs. Collection of bead work – 1st, Mrs. Jos. Williams; 2nd, Mrs. Jos. Laronde.40 Of the eleven women awarded prizes, Mrs Joseph Williams and Mrs Joseph Laronde emerge as prominent artists, winning in almost every category. Of particular interest is the “Special” category featuring more recently introduced art forms. “Miss M. Laronde,” who won in the needlework category, also had a strong presence in drawing and painting. She was awarded two first prizes, while the celebrated Huron-Wendat painter Zacharie Vincent placed second. Her work attracted the attention of the Daily Witness reporter: “Art of a meritorious and promising order was exhibited in three pictures by Mdlle. Marianne Laronde, of Académie N.D. des Anges, St. Laurent – St. Mary’s Church, Waltham, Mass.; Windermere Lake, and Clarens being the subjects.”41 What became of this promising young artist? Her paintings have not survived. No further mention of her can be found in Department of Indian Affairs annual reports, although she may have been the “Mary Anne” living with her husband and parents Joseph and Louise Laronde in the 1901 Kahnawake census.42 In “Tenuous Lines of Descent: Indian Arts and Crafts of the Reservation Period,” Gerald McMaster describes the impact of the strategies undertaken by the Canadian government – outlawing cultural expression and restricting freedom of movement while simultaneously imposing a rigorous program of forced assimilation.43 Tangled motives resulted in the Canadian government’s desire to demonstrate and control “Indianness” in public venues but at the same time race t t e

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promote the “success” of assimilationist policies. In public expositions across the country, traditional art forms visually represented the past, while newer forms, particularly those introduced through missionary work or education, celebrated the present and future. Such displays, characterized by the rich visual diversity described in the Daily Witness, were aimed not only at Canadian but also international audiences.

World’s Fairs and International Expositions A strange intersection of government control, nascent anthropology, and celebratory colonialism resulted in First Nations and Inuit people’s prominent visual presence in the performance of Canadian identity on the global stage. An American consul’s report on the 1890 Edinburgh International Exhibition commented somewhat acerbically that “Canada was represented by various kinds of North American Indian work calculated to keep Great Britain fast in the faith that the greater part of American life is still barbarian.”44 This coincided with the increasingly violent suppression of the very traditions performed. While deeply problematic, these international expositions provided a new public space for women artists. Aboriginal public performance in the late nineteenth century took several forms, although the theatrical and literary tended to dominate. These often overlapped in terms of venue and mode of expression: low-brow Wild West and medicine shows, public recitations, and government-sponsored expositions. Public recitals were perhaps the most respectful performance venue, although the public demand for performance of “Indianness” deeply affected the women who participated. Mohawk poet E. Pauline Tekahionwake Johnson (1861–1913) was best known for dramatic, costumed recitations of her poetry. Cree singer and elocutionist Frances Nickawa (1898–1928) and Mohawk author-performers Ethel Brant Monture (1894–1977) and Bernice Dawendine Loft Winslow (1902– 97) followed in her footsteps.45 Performers at the turn of the twentieth century frequently “exhibited” and performed as family groups. Some of these families worked a circuit, moving from exposition to exposition, with Wild West and medicine shows filling the gaps between major venues. Jeremiah Bartlett Alexis (Jerry Lonechild; 1854– 1930) and his wife, Elizabeth Paul, put on Wild West and medicine shows in the Maritimes throughout the 1920s, using performances as venues for selling art.46 Esther Deer (1891–1992) from Akwesasne, whose stage name was Princess White Deer, began her career as a member of the Deer Family Troupe (Fig. 10.9). By the 1920–21 theatre season, she had appeared in two New York productions: Tip Top at the Globe Theatre and the Ziegfeld 9 O’Clock Frolic at the Danse de Follies.47 In “Performing the Native Woman,” Ruth Phillips suggests that 300

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Fig. 10.9 Princess White Deer poses in a feathered headdress, breech clout over shorts, and beaded accessories in this postcard made from a photogravure by Emil Otto Hoppé, 1921.

public performances claiming and lampooning stereotypic tropes were the most effective spaces for negotiating those very tropes.48 Visual artists who participated in expositions also used performative spaces to embody the outlawed, censured “Indian,” teach in the public eye, and create art forms suppressed in their home communities. But, in so doing, they suffered many indignities. Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition in 1893, conceived as a celebration of colonization, required the participation of global Indigenous peoples upon whom the advancement of white civilization could be projected. Efforts to present the anthropology and ethnology displays as scholarly undertakings were somewhat undermined when Buffalo Bill set up his Wild West show adjacent to the exposition and Putnam’s Monthly Historical Magazine included an enthusiastic but sensational description of “several hundred savages” camped along the bay.49 The magazine’s editor, Frederick Putnam, curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum and chief of the fair’s anthropology division, attempted to distinguish the exposition from other forms of performance, declaring that it was “not a Wild West show [but] part of the department of ethnology and archaeology.”50 The “Living American Indian” section in the Official Guide advertised “full-blooded natives” living on the grounds “in their native habitations and costumes.” Canadian participants included twelve Inuit families from Labrador, several Cree and race t t e

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Dene families, and “representatives from several tribes from Vancouver Island,” including a large Kwakawaka’wakw group organized by Franz Boas.51 The bolder performances were expected from men who sang, danced, and enacted ceremonies, while women’s roles were to recreate scenes of domesticity, sew clothing, and create various traditional arts forms. In addition to the village area, women’s art was exhibited in a number of other venues. In the Official Directory of the exposition, Department M, “Ethnology, Archaeology, Progress of Labor and Invention,” positioned Group 172, “Woman’s Work,” next to Group 174, “The North American Indian,” which was subdivided into Class 959, “The Living Exhibition of Families,” and Class 960, “Specimens of Their Special Work and Industries.”52 Although women’s work and Native American Indian work were spatially and conceptually juxtaposed, individual women exhibitors were listed elsewhere by their name, medium, and community. No such listing was published of global Indigenous exhibitors, who were identified collectively as “native.” The Smithsonian exhibit “Women’s Work in Savagery” included eighty cases of embroidery, leatherwork, pottery, weaving, and baskets.53 The Canadian government also included Aboriginal people and “handicrafts” in their exhibition area. Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed viewed the participation of the Department of Indian Affairs as a success, declaring it an “opportunity of demonstrating to the public the results of the policy of education” by exhibiting “an interesting collection of native dresses, specimens of ornamentation in bead, quill and silk work [next to] specimens of penmanship and original composition produced at Indian schools.”54 This included a “living exhibition” of children “who had been for some time inmates” of Canada’s industrial schools. The Indian agent from Six Nations also reported that needlework and beadwork had been included in a “good exhibit” that they had sent to Chicago.55 Not surprisingly, given their role in constructing exotic and authentic representations of the undesirable past, no female artist who created work or participated in the Columbian Exposition was mentioned by name. With few exceptions, individual women participants in world expositions can be identified only through the notes of the organizing anthropologists and community memory. Paige Raibmon has identified three of the five Kwakwaka’wakw women in Boas’s Chicago group: Quany (Kua-Nah), Whane, and Doqwayis.56 Doqwayis, a high-ranking woman, was described by the correspondent of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as “chief of the colony,” who led the dance procession and “made a speech by proxy” at the dedication of the cedar longhouse the group occupied for the duration of the exposition.57 Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler’s Anthropology Goes to the Fair offers the names of three Nuu chah nulth women from Vancouver Island at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, Missouri.58 Ellen Curley, Annie Atlieu or Atliu, and Mrs Emma George were noted weavers and basket makers. Ellen Curley and Annie Atliu were 302

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from Clayoquot Sound, and Emma George was from Gold River. They were part of a group recruited by agents for the Field Museum of Chicago. Of the three, only Ellen Curley’s name can be attributed to an artwork in a museum collection, in the form of a finely woven whaler’s hat commissioned by Charles E. Newcombe, the agent for the Field project.59 The Nuu chah nulth were not representatives of the Department of Indian Affairs and its policies. Their group was entirely comprised of artists, and they were compensated for their time with purchases by the Field Museum. The competing transnational interests of governments, entrepreneurs, rival anthropologists, and museums jockeyed for space and representative authority at international expositions, resulting in a confusion of objectives and outcomes. It would seem that this lack of a central, controlling agency created small opportunities for individuals. The exposition became a space of continuance for Aboriginal arts practices at a time of official suppression, however transient and illusory. The Kwakwaka’wakw’s Chicago performances, enacted before thousands of spectators, were gestures of resistance directed at the legislation outlawing those same ceremonies and dances. The money they received as remuneration sponsored feasts and potlatches on their return.60 For some, participation was a single, isolated opportunity, but others negotiated a precarious path from one performative space to another. In 1909 a young Labrador Inuit woman was crowned queen of the YukonPacific Exposition in Seattle. Her name was Columbia Eneutseak (1893–1959; Fig. 10.10).61 She was born at the “Eskimo Village” at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and photographed as a winsome child at the Louisiana Fig. 10.10 A 1909 postcard celebrates the crowning of “Miss Columbia” Eneutseak as “Queen of the Carnival” at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle, wa.

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Purchase Exposition in 1904.62 With the exception of a few years under the care of her grandparents in Labrador, Eneutseak lived on the exposition circuit, demonstrating crafts and traditional skills while wearing exquisitely sewn caribou clothing. Jim Zwick, in Inuit Entertainers, describes her mother, Esther Eneutseak (1877–1961), as the leader of a family troupe who moved from exposition to exposition.63 A young, single mother of fifteen years of age at the Columbian Exposition, Esther Eneutseak travelled with her troupe to world’s fairs in Paris (1900), St Louis (1904), and Seattle (1909), with interim appearances at the Barnum and Bailey circus and Coney Island, eventually moving to Hollywood.64 In 1911, following their arrival in California, eighteen-year-old Columbia Eneutseak wrote and starred in the short silent film, The Way of the Eskimo.65 No prints of the film have survived, so it is difficult to compare it to others of its time. However, Columbia and Esther Eneutseak continued to work on the exposition circuit and in the film industry, negotiating a radically different life from the one they performed in the public sphere.

Subverting the Educational Agenda: Indian Handicrafts and Lessons in Drawing What they succeed at decidedly is in becoming good artists. – Indian agent, Wikwemikong First Nation, Ontario66

In local, provincial, and international expositions, the academic, trade, and artistic work of children in residential and industrial schools was exhibited in opposition to the world evoked in anthropological displays of tradition. This was the official educational policy Canada celebrated at international expositions, but not all children were in residential custody. Small community or “day schools” also existed under a variety of administrative arrangements. The quality of teachers varied wildly but included Charles Harrison, a missionary at Masset in the Charlotte Islands, who wrote extensively on Haida culture and was an admirer of the artist Charles Edenshaw. There were also a surprising number of Aboriginal teachers who were deeply committed to their communities.67 As the artists performing culture at expositions discovered, it was possible to slide other agendas into what was often a punitive educational program. The Indian Handicraft program at the Qu’Appelle Industrial School is an example of a program that slipped past the Department of Indian Affairs, an intervention initiated by the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. The guild, which originated as a group of volunteers in Montreal in 1902, had included Aboriginal arts within its mandate from its inception, selling beadwork and sweetgrass baskets in its shop.68 In 1909 the guild began a working relationship with the 304

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Department of Indian Affairs. Three years later, Amelia McLean Paget, the daughter of a Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trade family, embarked on a trip on behalf of the guild to assess the state of traditional Aboriginal arts in Saskatchewan. Paget’s report described her meeting with Melanie Blondeau (1866–c. 1932) in the small Métis community of Katepwa, offered her enthusiastic assessment of Blondeau’s beadwork and quillwork as “excellent” and “beautiful,” and expressed her desire to have Blondeau teach “the little Indian girls” at the Qu’Appelle Indian Industrial School.69 Paget convinced the guild to embark on an energetic letter-writing campaign and urged the Department of Indian Affairs to take “this opportunity of having such a splendid teacher, so competent in every way.” The department’s Duncan Campbell Scott replied: “While the school authorities, of course, are not called upon to furnish instruction of this kind … I think that if the Department could secure the services of this girl at a small wage, say $15.00 or $20.00 a month, it would be well to make the appointment in the interests of the children of the school.”70 The Qu’Appelle Industrial School became the only residential school in Canada with a line-budget item for “Indian Handicraft” instruction in the annual reports of the Department of Indian Affairs. What was never acknowledged in Paget’s campaign was that she had actually known Melanie Blondeau since childhood, and, although their families had different histories and social positions, they shared a relationship with the arts practices they both sought to preserve. In addition, they had each applied for and received Métis scrip.71 Amelia McLean Paget was born in 1867 at Fort Liard in the North-West Territories. Her grandmother, Anne Campbell, had married Scots fur trader Alexander Hunter Murray in 1846 at Fort Simpson.72 Anne Murray was noted for her excellent beadwork and sewing skills.73 Melanie Blondeau was the daughter of Simon Blondeau and Françoise Desjarlais. The last of the Métis buffalo hunters, the Blondeaus had settled at Lake Katepwa in the Qu’Appelle valley. Returning to the valley in 1913, Paget identified women in the Blondeau family as “noted artists” before she visited their homes. Following Scott’s begrudging approval to hire “this girl,” Melanie, who was fortyseven years old, developed a program of instruction in traditional arts. Although she left the position in 1926, the budget item for “handicraft instructor” for the Qu’Appelle school appeared continuously in annual reports from 1914 to 1930.74 Based on school enrolment, it could be said that the position of Indian handicraft instructor influenced the lives of as many as 900 girls over the duration of the program, and may be partially responsible for the continuing vibrancy of traditional arts practices in the region. Unlike girls attending other schools, those leaving the Qu’Appelle Indian Industrial School had essential traditional arts skills and knew how to make marketable items for sale. More important, they spent four hours a week with a woman from outside the school, who spoke their language and knew many of their families. In terms of pedagogical space, it would have been the antithesis of the race t t e

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overcrowded classrooms and the school laundries and kitchens where the female students were obligated to clean and cook for the entire institution. The essential ‘indigeneity’ of the processes of teaching beadwork and quillwork, along with the quiet companionable space of mentorship and watchful learning, created a place of subtle resistance and mutual support, subverting the assimilative purpose of the institution. Student work was exhibited with great success at the Regina Exhibition, winning several prizes. Such success in traditional arts garnered the girls recognition as “Indian girls” and generated pride in their collective identity. Amelia Paget and Melanie Blondeau had used the respectable embrace of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild to manoeuvre Duncan Campbell Scott, the architect of the residential school system, into supporting cultural expression. That this was done consciously is speculative, but it is important to note that the lifespan of this program coincided with the period when many aspects of cultural expression were systematically criminalized. These students, unlike many girls returning home from other residential schools, had adequate and sometimes excellent beading and sewing skills. Once freed of school restraints, they were able to define their own practices. The Métis floral beadwork taught by Melanie Blondeau moved outward into the community, embracing pipe bags and dance outfits and revitalizing the very traditions the Department of Indian Affairs was attempting to eradicate. Elsewhere, other forms of creative expression generated spaces of resistance or respite. The Canadian government expected First Nations girls graduating from government schools to embody its assimilationist policies, becoming perfect counterpoints to their mothers and grandmothers. One might anticipate that arts education would play a significant role in schools under federal jurisdiction, if only to channel female creative energies away from the traditional arts, which were so interconnected with outlawed cultural practices. In fact, there was minimal focus on the arts, as revealed in the 1888 Annual Report on schools under federal jurisdiction, which included “learning drawing” in its enumeration of teachers, salaries, student statistics, and taught subject areas.75 Most of the schools included in the survey had very low enrolments. Only eighty of them provided drawing lessons and not all students participated. Was drawing for older students? Or for the artistically gifted? Were drawing lessons gendered? A note beside one of the schools listed suggests that art had no place in industrial schools, where “the girls [learn] sewing, housework &c,” while the fact that the schools were divided by gender makes it possible that more girls received drawing lessons than boys. At Fort William the boys did not receive art lessons, but half of the girls did. At Wikwemikong, only twelve of forty-two boys received drawing lessons, compared to fifty-seven of sixty-one girls. Twenty Aboriginal teachers were among the list of the eighty individual teachers who offered drawing lessons. Although statistically insignificant in terms 306

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of the overall teacher population, they constituted 25 per cent of the teachers whose students studied drawing. Forty per cent of students in Ontario received drawing lessons, and that high number is entirely attributable to these teachers, particularly at Six Nations and Tyendinaga where they were in charge of the majority of the schools. Agatha Gabow, a teacher with seven years’ experience, was described as “trained in the Wikwemikong Institute … she is painstaking and her knowledge of the Indian tongue is of apparent service.”76 Floretta Maracle of Six Nations was also praised as “an excellent teacher being active and animated … full of snap and verve.”77 The decision to include drawing was entirely a teacher’s decision, since it was not the intention of the Department of Indian Affairs that First Nations girls (or boys) aspire to become artists in the same way that other Canadian children might.78 If Melanie Blondeau and Amelia Paget negotiated spaces of resistance through beadwork, it could be suggested that other teachers did the same with drawing. In the first case, all the students were girls; in the second, the majority likely were girls. It was not until 1942 that the Department of Indian Affairs articulated a renewed interest in art. The Annual Report declared that “progress at Indian day and residential schools in the Province of British Columbia has been particularly gratifying” and provided a description of programs that had been underway for some years. Vocational courses for girls had been implemented, consisting “of the treatment and spinning of locally grown wool and the knitting of woollen garments, Cowichan sweaters, and socks.”79 This was clearly designed to train girls as workers in the Cowichan sweater industry. The report also mentioned “Indian arts and craft” courses designed for boys. In addition, it included a description of an innovative program implemented at the Inkameep Day School: “The teacher in charge … has succeeded in the dramatization of a number of Indian legends. The presentation of these at the Banff Drama School created a great deal of interest among Indian educationists in Canada and the United States. Mr. Walsh, in addition to these presentations, published during the year, in co-operation with his pupils, a booklet entitled The Tale of the Nativity.”80 Anthony Walsh was teaching in a tiny school in the Okanagan valley with an average enrolment of eleven students.81 His art program included drawing, painting, printmaking, dance, and theatre. Walsh actively sought exhibition and performance opportunities for his students. In particular, he utilized the vehicles of the Royal Drawing Society of London and the International Red Cross.82 He also submitted the children’s work to international specialists on children’s art, the Santa Fe Indian School, and even Walt Disney. It is important to acknowledge that many (and occasionally most) of the participating students were girls. Caroline Baptiste, Netty Kruger, Edith Kruger (Sin-nam-hit-quh), Bertha Baptiste (Clotilla), Teresa Baptiste, Gertie Baptiste, Irene Baptiste, and Jane Stelkia all played critical roles (Fig. 10.11). Photographs reveal that they were very young. In 1938 eight-year-old Edith Kruger had two drawings in the group submission race t t e

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Fig. 10.11 A painting by Teresa Baptiste, one of the students in Anthony Walsh’s arts-based program at the Inkameep Day School, Osoyoos First Nation.

that received a “First Class Commendation” in the “snapshot category” from the Royal Drawing Society. 83 In their final submission to the Royal Drawing Society in 1942, Edith won a Silver Star and Bertha Baptiste was awarded a Bronze Star for a drawing in beadwork.84 Jane Stelkia, one of the few surviving Inkameep alumni, spoke about their drawing: “There was one girl that can draw your face all from memory; and it’s perfect. Everything that you see on the drawings was all from memory. I think it’s because we lived it … Like, the fish, what they were doing, they were fishing or hunting, breaking horses … We were all good riders. All the girls and the boys back then, they’re all good riders. Where I was born you see deer, you see bear and all the rest of the kids that lived right across here and back that way. They all walked to school or ride to school, they see these animals and the animals are among us.”85 This promising program was ended by the outbreak of the Second World War, when Anthony Walsh joined the Legion War Service and subsequent teachers were either uninterested in or actively opposed the curricular emphasis on the arts. Chief Clarence Louis compared the children’s experience at Inkameep with what followed: When I look at the artwork … the thing that I find so special about it, it just shows what could’ve been done with the First Nations people in this 308

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country rather than sending them off to residential school and causing all that trauma and loss of language, loss of art, loss of culture, all the tragedy that happened during that time period … This artwork just shows to me that it’s a tragedy, this school should have kept on going, schools like it should have kept on going but really the federal government just quashed the entire program and it was residential school. They closed down all the day schools and just went to the residential school era, full force.86 As Chief Louis stated, most of the children were sent to regional residential schools, although Gertie Baptiste, one of the most promising young artists, managed to telephone her mother and convince her to take her back home.87 Baptiste never completed her education and spent her remaining childhood years working on her family’s ranch. Most of the Inkameep alumni spent their adult lives working as labourers in the fruit orchards of Canada and the United States. Their artistic potential was never realized. Coinciding with tentative fissures in the Department of Indian Affairs’ harsh assimilationist agenda, arts education, whether traditional or in newer forms, provided staff and students an opportunity to construct spaces of creative expression. But teachers were not able to influence the larger educational experience of children, or government attitudes toward the potential of women to become artists. The momentary softenings of government policy that allowed the development of arts programs celebrating culture and expression were followed by longer periods of rigidity and oppression. Women and girls were still living under the firm control of the Department of Indian Affairs, which continued to see them as homemakers, domestic servants, and craft producers.

From Artist to Producer Canadian Indians are contributing in greater measure their unique skills and art forms to meet the public demand for Made-in-Canada products. – Department of Indian Affairs88

The economic potential of the arts cycled in and out of government policies, but artistic talent continued to be seen almost exclusively in terms of its economic potential. In 1939 the Department of Indian Affairs reorganized under the Department of Mines and Resources. The newly reconstituted department had seven divisions, including the Welfare and Training Division, which was charged with the “marketing of handicraft.”89 This entry into marketing corresponded with a time of great poverty in Aboriginal communities. The days of the family-based travelling artist were over. Now firmly under department control, handicraft “production” became increasingly focused on the manufacture of curios. In race t t e

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1948 Ellen Neel, the first woman to carve large totem poles and create a business to market her own artwork, addressed the “cheapening” of traditional art forms in a public address at the University of British Columbia: In my family, carving was a means of livelihood. My grandfather was Charlie James – the famous ‘Yakuglas.’ He carved for over forty years. To his stepson, Mungo Martin, he taught the rudiments of his art … Totems were our daily fare, they bought food and furnished our clothing. There was no problem of sale, since his work was eagerly sought after. Now the situation is different. Curio dealers have so cheapened the art in their efforts to profit, that I doubt if one could find a single household where the authenticity of the art is important to them. I have strived, in all my work, to retain the authentic, but I find it difficult to obtain even a portion of the price necessary to do a really fine piece of work. This being so, it’s difficult to blame my contemporaries for trying to get enough from their work to live on … though I believe they are wrong in cheapening their heritage.90 Neel directly confronted the government program of curio production, but her artistic practice disrupted regimes of power in other ways. Over time the discourse of the Department of Indian Affairs had pushed women out of the category of “artist” and shifted it onto men. Neel proclaimed herself an artist in a field dominated by men, at a time when women’s art forms were under enormous pressure to conform with production modes designed to satisfy demand for inexpensive “Made-in-Canada” souvenirs. The Canadian Handicrafts Guild continued to urge the department to champion aesthetic and traditional standards and forms, but by the 1950s the guild’s executive was bemoaning their demise.91 Other organizations such as the British Columbia Indian Arts and Welfare Society, the Saskatoon Arts and Crafts Society, and Manitoba Indian Crafts sought to recognize the higher aesthetic standards of outstanding artists and alleviate the profound poverty in many communities by organizing exhibitions and sales of traditional and contemporary art. Aboriginal women’s work was also exhibited by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts as early as 1943, but the pieces were displayed as examples of an excellent but generic arts practice. Throughout the 1960s, traditional arts continued to be positioned in the category of handicraft, with the artists identified as “producers.”92 The government continued to handle marketing and reported annual revenues in excess of one million dollars. In 1961 the government implemented the use of “maple leaf tags attached to Indian craft work [to] attest the authenticity of the product.”93 These occasionally identified the name of the maker and community. With the advent

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of the Inuit cooperative movement, the phrases “Eskimo art” and “Eskimo artist” were introduced into government discourse directed at the fine arts market, but First Nations women were tethered to traditional arts production and firmly excluded from the emergence of Aboriginal people as contemporary artists. Their exclusion and segregation was to be performed on a global stage.

Where Were Aboriginal Women Artists at Expo ’67? Perhaps I’m contributing to an understanding between our two peoples, but basically I’m performing the familiar Indian role of providing entertainment for white men. – Buffy Sainte-Marie94

Canada’s hosting of the World Exposition (Man and His World) in Montreal in 1967 coincided with the nation’s centennial. The celebratory mood embraced Aboriginal people, whose recently acquired citizenship and growing political strength were quickly folded into the country’s enduring penchant to incorporate “Natives” as decorative and exotic elements in the performance of national identity on the world stage.95 The new Cultural Affairs Section of the Department of Indian Affairs (established 1965) recognized First Nations men as contemporary artists, selecting nine male artists to create eight murals for the Indians of Canada Pavilion.96 Two Inuit men were also commissioned to create a carved mural for the Tundra restaurant in the Canada Pavilion, which appropriated many aspects of Inuit architecture and design.97 For men, Expo ’67 marked their entry into the larger art world. Tom Hill, one of the nine invited artists, recalled, “I can remember saying that up to Expo we were always the quaint little folk. Here at Expo there was something a lot more. The pavilion caused a great sensation.”98 He later described it bringing a “sense of power” to the artists, who in coming together discovered their collective artistic voice.99 But, if male artists felt empowered to step into the world of contemporary art freed from the boxes of ethnography and souvenir production, where were the women? Women were not entirely invisible. Gladys McCue Taylor (1913–93), a renowned Anishinaabe quillwork artist from Curve Lake, Ontario, was highly visible in the exposition’s international promotional strategy.100 Cree singer Buffy Sainte-Marie performed but was only a visitor at the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Alanis Obomsawin was part of the “Indians of Canada Day” on 4 August. The Indian Rights Association newsletter Indian Truth described her as a “model, beautician and able spokesman for Canada’s Indian.”101 But Obomsawin had actually been singing professionally since 1960, was featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1965, and by 1967 was developing multimedia

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educational kits and working as a consultant for the National Film Board of Canada.102 Elizabeth Okalik of Whale River, with her husband, Prime, demonstrated stone sculpture at the Canada Pavilion.103 Six Nations potter Elda Smith (1919–76) not only exhibited with other fine craft artists at the Canada Pavilion but also had her work presented as gifts to visiting heads of states, including Queen Elizabeth.104 More often, however, women artists were anonymous, with their work serving as iconic symbols of either the past or cultural persistence. The Indians of Canada Pavilion announced the arrival of a new contemporary artistic practice and several of the nine men who participated went on to shape its development: Norval Morrisseau, Alex Janvier, Bill Reid, and Tom Hill. It was represented as an exclusively male domain. Recent critiques of the pavilion have commented on its overwhelmingly masculine tone.105 As Ruth Phillips notes, “the Indian was always He.”106 This echoed the masculine discourse of the exposition itself – Man and His World, Man the Producer. The exclusion of women artists was further complicated by the careful selection of young women who acted as hostesses, representing “the living concept [and] the very embodiment of what an Indian can be” – an uncomfortable echo of the world expositions of the previous century.107 Aboriginal women were attractive bodies performing “woman.” From fiftyfour-year-old Clara Linklater-Tizya of the Yukon, chosen to represent “Indian women” at the opening of the pavilion, to the beautiful young women who entertained and worked as hostesses, women’s performing bodies were objects positioned in a largely male narrative.108 Sainte-Marie and Obomsawin were also cast in this marginalized role and, considering their prominence at the time, were inexplicably underutilized. Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller point out a further irony: one of the young hostesses reportedly had a university degree in graphic art.109 The role of Aboriginal women at Expo ’67 can be partially attributed to the widespread, institutional sexism all women artists struggled with during this time. However, for First Nations women artists, this was exacerbated by the government’s desire to turn men into “professional artists” as an employment strategy. The arts continued to be linked with welfare, training, and employment, and bureaucrats recycled the notion that “becoming good artists” was a given strength of Aboriginal people. Finding employment for men was made a priority and women artists undermined this employment strategy if they left their domestic sphere. The Indians of Canada Pavilion was funded directly through the Department of Indian Affairs and thus represented only Treaty and status Indians under the federal jurisdiction of the Indian Act. Daphne Odjig (1919–; Odawa) had begun her Nanabush series during this time but would not have been considered for inclusion in the pavilion because she had lost federal recognition when she married Chester Beavon, a non-Indian. It is also unlikely that the government would 312

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have invited Ellen Neel (1916–66) had she still been alive, since she was also a First Nations woman who had lost her status through marriage. It was, in fact, largely from the ranks of women who had either left or been pushed from the confines of the federal regime that Aboriginal women artists were to emerge during the next decade.

Breaking Through A handful of Aboriginal women artists broke through to establish themselves as artists in the mid-twentieth century. Three women from the Northwest Coast were key figures in the revitalization and reinvention of the unique art forms and ceremonies that were so vigorously suppressed during the culture ban (dozens more worked behind the scenes). The artistic achievements and activism of Ellen Neel (Kwakwaka’wakw), Doreen Jensen (Gitxsan), Freda Diesing (1925–2002; Haida), and others have been swept aside as the story of rebirth has been reconstructed into a heroic male narrative organized around relative latecomer Bill Reid (1920–98). As Marcia Crosby reminds us in “Making Indian Art ‘Modern,’” Ellen Neel is an important artist whose career needs to be re-evaluated.110 She was the first woman to work in monumental scale, producing large totem poles during the 1940s and 1950s that stand around the world. Neel had been carefully trained by her grandfather Charlie James (c. 1870–1938) and by 1949 was restoring poles at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. Media coverage in the Vancouver Province describing the large totem pole she carved for Denmark read: “Girl Carves It: Danish Museum to Get Pole from City.”111 The headline is indicative of the sexism Neel struggled against. She was a thirtyseven-year-old mother of a large family, hardly a “girl.” Her small-scale totem poles were often selected as gifts for women, and recipients of her work included actress Katherine Hepburn and Maria Tallchief, the Osage ballerina (Fig. 10.12).112 While Neel’s marriage to a non-Indian liberated her from the control of the Department of Indian Affairs, it also excluded her from federal projects and funding. As Carolyn Butler Palmer reminds us, “it must also be remembered that Ellen Neel was a high-status Kwagiutl noblewoman who raised her own children in a house next to the freight tracks in Vancouver’s East End – one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.”113 The sole support for her family of eight children, Neel was forced to create pieces for the souvenir market as she was pushed away from museum projects that preferred older men who represented the “last totem pole carver” much more poignantly than a young woman with a number of children who often gathered around their mother while she worked on a pole.114 The liberties that Neel took with her practice are of particular interest today. race t t e

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Fig. 10.12 Ballerina Maria Tallchief receiving a small totem sculpture made by Ellen Neel during a visit to Vancouver around 1950.

Moving away from anthropological reproduction, Neel played with her smallerscale pieces, even carving movie-star faces among traditional motifs. She borrowed and rearranged. She produced the first silk-screen print of a Northwest Coast design in 1949.115 Her printed motifs on fabric foreshadow the emergence of clothing artists and designers by almost half a century. Neel’s use of humor, irony, and play, which caused her fall from critical favour during her lifetime, also suggest that she was ahead of her time. The emphasis on the Haida revival also neglects the seemingly more flexible gender lines in other Northwest Coast nations. Charlie James actively recruited Ellen Neel as his successor. Her uncle, Mungo Martin, created several large-scale projects at Totemland near the Royal British Columbia Museum, including a longhouse, greeting figures, and a totem pole, assisted by his son, David Martin, and his granddaughter, Mildred Hunt. Mildred Hunt (Fig. 10.13) was active between 1948 and 1950 and is recognized as an associate carver by Victoria’s Royal British Columbia Museum, but she is a totally neglected artistic figure.116 Judith Morgan (1930–; Gitxsan) emerged as a contemporary painter during the same time period while still a student at the Alberni Residential School.117 She 314

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Fig. 10.13 Mildred Hunt working on a totem pole during her apprenticeship with her grandfather Mungo Martin at Thunderbird Park, Victoria, c. 1949.

attracted the notice of the British Columbia Indian Arts and Welfare Society and exhibited at the conference where Ellen Neel delivered her scathing critique of the curio trade. In 1949 twenty of her works were exhibited at the National Museum of Canada. Morgan attended the Kansas City Art Institute but remained in the United States for many years, raising a family of five children.118 Her promising artistic career was truncated by family responsibilities and separation from the movement whose beginning she was part of. She completed her fine arts education in 1976 and returned to Gitxsan territory where she continues to paint. Doreen Jensen and Freda Diesing were active in the development of the ‘Ksan Village and its associated cultural arts program at Hazelton, British Columbia (established 1958).119 They were also among its first students and both women had remarkable interdisciplinary careers as teachers, curators, and artists. Freda Diesing was a very influential teacher and the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art was established and named in her honour.120 Along with Daphne Odjig, Kenojuak Ashevak (1927–), and Jessie Oonark (1906–85), these women were the senior artists who widened the path for the women and men who followed them. The 1970s was the decade of Aboriginal women artists breaking race t t e

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through. Kenojuak Ashevak collaborated with her husband on a ninety-six-foot mural at Expo ’70 at Osaka, Japan. Her print Enchanted Owl (1960) was made into a commemorative stamp in 1970 and is one of the most recognizable works of Canadian art. Daphne Odjig received her first major mural commissions in the same decade.

I Call Their Names: Our Artistic Mothers and Grandmothers In 1998 Armand Garnet Ruffo wrote “Out of Silence,” which was in part a response to a statement made by Beth Brant at a gathering of Aboriginal writers. When Brant declared E. Pauline Johnson the spiritual and literary grandmother of contemporary Aboriginal literature, Ruffo wondered to whom she had given birth – who were the mothers?121 This led to his subsequent work on Bernice Dawendine Loft, whom he describes as writing during “one of the bleakest periods in Native Canadian history.”122 I would like to evoke Ruffo’s persuasive argument that we give careful and thoughtful consideration to the context in which Aboriginal women lived when we determine the value of their work. We must carefully frame any negative judgment, whether based on modest output, failed potential, or economic-survival strategies, with a true appreciation of the grinding poverty, government control, and racism experienced by Aboriginal people. This is our artistic lineage and we must honour it. The dozens of contemporary Aboriginal women artists who now simultaneously challenge and form contemporary Canadian arts practices walked down paths, however overgrown and faint, that were made by generations of women who made art for its joy and as a means of survival. We must also honour broader, more inclusive definitions of art and artists, and respect the different ways that communities identify and celebrate artistic achievement. In preparing to write this essay, I posted a question on Facebook asking people in my network to identify names of women practising before 1960. This elicited the names of Isabella Edenshaw and Judith Morgan.123 I also sent e-mails to community museums and cultural centres. The resulting correspondence offers something to this discussion. Christine Sioui Wawanoloah, a visual artist from Odanak, had received my forwarded e-mail from the museum. She asked for clarification, “Does it include basket weavers, bead workers, writers, singers, dancers, teachers of cultural essentials etc.? Does their work have to be largely diffused in Canada or locally?” Christine then took my inquiry to the local meeting of the Quebec Native Women’s Association and reported the group’s thoughtful and consensual response: “I asked the women who were present to name women who correspond to your research criteria … You’ll have to remember that here in Odanak, basket weaving was once an industry in which most families participated. Baskets were made by hundreds to feed the demand 316

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of the (back then) market. But fancy weaving was not for everyone. You had to have talent, imagination and dedication for that particular style of weaving.”124 By contrast, Sue Herne of the Akwesasne Museum replied, “It may not fit into your format to recognize [Akwesasne basket artists] as a group, but that would be the best way. We do have some who have gained more recognition than others … but it is truly a community effort and accomplishment.”125 Sue sent me a photograph of Mary Adams’s baskets, including one trimmed with impossibly tiny baskets that formed the textured surface and decorative edging, providing me an opportunity to study Adams’s resolution of the technical problem that had caused her so many sleepless nights (Fig. 10.14). She also sent beautiful photographs of women basket makers (Fig. 10.15) and a list of eighty women who were making baskets prior to 1950. On the list are also sixteen men who worked as basket artists, a reflection, I think, of the importance of collective recognition to the people of Akwesasne. Sue gathered the names from various sources but is also consulting with the recently revived Snye Homemakers group. Though each community responded to my inquiry differently, all drew it into a larger dialogue, connecting me with a process that I found both enlightening and moving. Their replies validated the importance of community in both conceptualizing and identifying important women artists.

Fig. 10.14 Sweetgrass and ash-splint baskets illustrating Mary Adams’s skilled execution of the “bird mouth” stitch (left) and texture created by the innovative application of tiny, miniature baskets (right).

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Fig. 10.15 An intergenerational group of Akwesasne basket artists hold an assortment of their wares, with ash splints around large basket forms in the foreground, c. 1928.

In my own work, I have located and partially reconstructed the practice of Métis quillwork and beadwork artists working on the northern plains in the nineteenth century.126 I call their names: Nancy Kipling La Bombarde, Madeleine Amyotte Desnommé, Mary Monkman Tait, and Judith Morin Delaronde. I call the names forwarded to me by the women of Odanak: Judith Wawonolett and Anna Capino. Anna Capino created “magnificent” baskets well into her late eighties.127 Even as an elderly woman, she was unanimously identified by her peers as “the best basket maker on the reserve,” executing “fancy” basket forms with innovative stitches and ambitious scale, including a widely exhibited baby bassinette and stand.128 I respectfully call the names of the women of Akwesasne: Mary Kawennatakie Adams Agnes Anies Armstrong Josephine Warisose Angus Christie Keresite Arquette Margaret Konwakeri Arquette Florence Kastitsiahawi Benedict Louise Iakonikonriiostha Bigtree Cece Cook Delia Karihwaienhne Cook Florence Orakwinon Cook 318

Veronica Ariwatere Cook Catherine Kateri Cree Cecelia Kaiatanoron Cree Sadie Curleyhead Anna Nekawina’a David Annie Teiotenion David Florence Kaheriiostha David Lenora Robin David (Micmac) Madeline Kenkiokoktha David Theresa Teres David Rethinking Professionalism

Sarah Kawennahare Day Charlotte Warisaro Delormier Josephine Kanahtenhawi Delormier Minnie Wanik Delormier Charlotte Warisaro Diabo Christine Kanontawaks Francis Agnes Iosakentiio Garrow Gertrude Tewateronhiokotha Gray Judy Sateioianere Hemlock Jean Tewatenihe Herne Mary Kaniharos Herne Anna Anen Hopps Anna Karoniawaks Jacobs Betty Kariwasata Jacobs Christina Kawennite Jock Mary Onwari Jocko Isabel Katsitsenhawi Agnes Kaheratonkwas Lazore Christie Keresite Lazore Josephine Katsitentha Lazore Laura Lazore Margaret Saionatonti Lazore Marian Wariiannen Lazore Sarah Wahiaronkwas Lazore Mary Tekahentakwa Leaf Rita McDonald Cecelia Mitchell Evelyn Kawennotas Mitchell Josephine Warisose Mitchell Katie Kateri Mitchell

Sarah Konwanentawi Mitchell Winifred Kanastatsi Mitchell Charlotte Warisaro Morey Annabelle Tawenhakie Oakes Theresa Kanentenhawi Oakes Theresa Kahrakwas Peters Cecelia Kanerahtihson Point Eva Kanentakwas Point Lillian Waianoron Point Sarah Kanonwaronkwas Ransom Irene Kasennenhawe Richmond Annie Karakwas Skidders Marita Kaierithon Skidders Cecelia Sesir Smoke Agnes Karakwine Sunday Cecilia Tsiotenhariio Sunday Theresa Tsiorensawinon Sunday Evelyn Kawennotas Tarbell Mary Wenniseriiostha Tebo Margaret Karonkiasa Terrance Cecelia Konwaneratawi Thomas Georgia Karihwenhawi Thomas Mary Wahtontha Thomas Elizabeth Katsitsiaienne Thompson Harriet Akat Thompson Julia Wahiaronnion Thompson Katie Kawisens Thompson Anna Warasentha White Gladys Kanonshisake White Harriet Kanonsaroroks White

I also call the names of children whose artistic potential was never realized, women who gave up, who died young, whose work lies nameless in private and museum collections. I call the name of Vitaline Quintal McCallum, whose son, Raymond McCallum, created stunning beadwork to honour her memory and her aesthetic standards.129 I call the name of Veronique Carriere Goulet of Cumberland House, whose artistic output is only a cherished memory held by her children, since not a single piece remains in their possession. I call the name of “Mrs. Peter Gloade,” whose name is written in pencil on the underside of a quillwork box in the British Museum with the notation, “Shubenacadie, ns 1949.”130 race t t e

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Reclaiming Aboriginal women’s art history is a collective project, and it appears to be a somewhat gendered one. Daphne Odjig may have become a historical footnote without the efforts of several women, including Lee-Anne Martin (Mohawk), who, upon her return to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, discovered Odjig’s The Indian in Transition (1978) neglected and in storage. She arranged for the work to be restored, declared it Odjig’s masterpiece, and had it formally reinstalled in 2006.131 In 2005 the Kamloops Art Gallery organized Daphne Odjig: Four Decades of Prints, which toured extensively. Bonnie Devine (Anishinaabe) curated The Drawings and Paintings of Daphne Odjig: A Retrospective at the Art Gallery of Sudbury in 2007. In 2009 it became the first solo exhibition of a First Nations woman artist at the National Gallery of Canada, seven years after Marion Tuu’luq claimed that honour for Inuit women.132 Art historians and curators Ruth Phillips, Ruth Holmes Whitehead, Judy Hall, and Cath Oberholtzer are among those working with museum collections and seeking individual women artists, but their work has been largely published within the fields of anthropology, material- culture studies, and ethnohistory, rarely in art history. Janet Berlo has critiqued the lack of serious critical attention to the work of Inuit women artists.133 The task of painstakingly reconstructing Isabella Edenshaw’s practice is currently underway. Megan Smetzer is studying nineteenthand twentieth-century Tlingit beadwork artists in northern British Columbia and Alaska, and offers the name of Anisalaga (Mary Ebbetts) Hunt (1823–1919), the Tlingit foremother of the prolific Hunt family.134 Anne DeStecher has undertaken the challenge of writing Marguerite Vincent La8inonkie’s artistic biography, a task that has taken her to museums in North American and Europe and an estimated forty sources to gather the “bits and pieces of information found here and there” required to write about a forgotten woman artist.135 While it is encouraging to see this movement gain ground, it is inevitable that gaps will remain and many women and their artwork will remain enveloped in silence. But, as Armand Ruffo points out, understanding the silence is as important as hearing the voices in Aboriginal women’s art history.

notes 1 bell hooks, “Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand,” in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Toronto: Between the Lines 1990), 153. 2 Sidney L. Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 266–71.

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3 Keith D. Smith, Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance: Indigenous Communities in Western Canada, 1877–1927 (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press 2009), 64, 105. 4 Lucie Idlout, E5–770: My Mother’s Name, Arbor Records, 2003, cd. 5 hooks, “Aesthetic Inheritances,” 115. 6 “Story of an Indian Artist: His Curious Life in the Canadian Forests and

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8

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10

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Villages,” New York Times, 17 November 1895, 6. Grant Arnold, Monika Gagnon, and Doreen Jensen, Topographies: Aspects of Recent BC Art (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery), 91. Alfred L. Kroeber, “The Cultural Area and Age Area Concepts of Clark Wissler,” in Stuart A. Rice, ed., Methods in Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1931), 248–65. For a discussion of this exhibition, see Anne Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art in the National Gallery of Canada,” Journal of Communication, 31, no. 1 (2006): 197–214; and Diana Nemiroff, “Modernism, Nationalism and Beyond: A Critical History of Exhibitions of First Nations Art,” in Reesa Greenberg et al., eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge 1996), 289–308. Mae Bigtree and Mary Adams, interviews, “Meet the Masters: Akwesasne Basketmakers,” North Country Public Radio Online, http://www.northcountrypublic radio.org/upnorth/masters/akwesasne/ak wesasne.php (accessed 20 January 2010). Nancy Marie Mithlo, “Is There Really No Word for Art in Our Language?” Lecture, Atlatl National Services Organization for Native American Arts, Tulsa, Okla., 1996; “Is There Really No Word for Art in Our Languages? Old Questions and New Paradigms,” Whitewater Native Pride Lecture Series, University of Wisconsin, 12 February 2009; and “The Top Three Indian Art Clichés,” lecture, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, nm, 1996. Fran Lloyd, Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art (London: Reaktion Books 2002), 19. Karl Hoerig, Under the Palace Portal: Native American Art in Santa Fe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2003), 177. Willie Ermine, “Aboriginal Epistemology,” in Marie Battiste and Jean Barman, eds., First Nations Education in Canada:

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17 18

19

20

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The Circle Unfolds (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1995), 104. Maria Campbell, Achimoona (Saskatoon: Fifth House Press 1985), 1. Anna-Leah King, “Singing Ourselves In” (ma thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2004), 20. Ibid., 20–1. Mary Adams, artist statement, Crossing the Threshold: Thirty-Two Women Artists, archived exhibition, 1999, University Art Museum, State University of New York at Albany, www.albany.edu/museum/ wwwmuseum/crossing/crossing.htm (accessed 24 August 2009); and “Isabelle (Dorion) Impey,” interview with Leah Dorion and Maria Campbell, Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, 30 May 2003, the Virtual Museum of Métis Culture and History, www.metismuseum.ca/ resource.php/01327 (accessed 23 August 2009). Bureau of Indian Affairs, report of agent in New York, Sixty-First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, dc: Government Printing Office 1892), 345. Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1998); and Ruth Holmes Whitehead, Micmac Quillwork: Micmac Indian Techniques of Porcupine Quill Decoration, 1600–1950 (Halifax: Nova Scotia Museum 1982). Sherry Farrell Racette, “Sewing for a Living: The Commodification of Métis Women’s Artistic Production,” in Myra Rutherdale and Katie Pickles, eds., Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2005). Karen Petkau, “Baskets, Carrying a Culture: The Distinctive Regional Styles of Basketmaking Nations of the Pacific Northwest,” The Midden, 34, no. 4 (2003): 6–9.

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23 Sixty-First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 345. 24 Dominion of Canada Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 1892, 28; Indian Affairs Annual Reports (hereafter Annual Report), 1864–1990, Library and Archives Canada (lac), www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ databases/indianaffairs/ (accessed 20 August 2009). 25 Phillips, Trading Identities, 31–2. 26 Cornelius Krieghoff, Woman with Basket of Moccasins (1847–52), McCord Museum (m84.53); William Notman, Tuscarora Women Selling Curiosities, Niagara, Ontario (c. 1860), McCord Museum (n–0000.193.237.1); and Wallis and Shephard, Houlda Sione and Alda Groulouis, Huron-Wendat Girls with Souvenir Goods, Lorette, Quebec, McCord Museum (mp–0000.27.217). 27 E. Littell, ed., “From the Stone Tower at Niagara,” Littell’s Living Age, 46, no. 585 (11 August 1855): 351. 28 Frederick H. Johnson, Every Man His Own Guide at Niagara Falls without the Necessity of Inquiry or Possibility of Mistake; including the Sources of Niagara, and All Places of Interest, both on American and Canada Side (Buffalo, ny: Phinney and Company 1852), 81. 29 Johann George Kohl, Travels in Canada and through the States of New York and Pennsylvania, trans. Percy Sinnet (London: George Manwaring 1861), 180. 30 Ibid., 272–4. 31 Ibid., 275. 32 Annual Report 1876, 22. 33 Ibid., 23. 34 Annual Report 1875, 89–91. 35 Annual Report 1895, 32. 36 Ruth Holmes Whitehead, “Christina Morris: Micmac Artist and Artist’s Model,” Material History Review, 3 (spring 1977): 1, 14. 37 The piece is in the collection of the Desbrisay Museum, Bridgewater, ns. 38 The subject of the photograph has alternately been identified as “Mrs. Noel,”

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44 45

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Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax (ns p113/ n-12, 718). “Caughnawaga’s Manhood and Beauty – Gorgeous Array of Indian Goods,” Montreal Daily Witness, 29 September 1883; quoted in the Annual Report 1883, 153. Ibid., 154. Ibid. Mary Anne Laronde, thirty years old, living with her husband, James McComber, three sons, and her parents in Household 344, Sault-Saint Louis, Chateauguay, Quebec, District 148, Census of Canada, 1901, mfm. t–6518, p. 31, lac. Gerald McMaster, “Tenuous Lines of Descent: Indian Arts and Crafts of the Reservation Period,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 9, no. 2 (1989): 205–36. Sixty-First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 693. Cecilia Morgan, “Private Lives and Public Performances: Aboriginal Women in a Settler Society, Ontario, Canada, 1920s– 1960s,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4, no. 3 (2003): 1–16; and Jennifer S.H. Brown, “Frances Nickawa,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=8313&&PHP SESSID=p4aji30qh2kriof6cu3g5bpns1 (accessed 2 March 2010). Jeremiah Bartlett Alexis alias Jerry Lonechild with His Wife Elizabeth Paul (c. 1920), Nova Scotia Museum (p113/ n-11,255). Burns Mantle, Garrison P. Sherwood, and Louis Kronenberter, The Best Plays of 1920–21 and the Year Book of Drama in America (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company 1921), 393, 425. Ruth Phillips, “Performing the Native Woman: Primitivism and Mimicry in Early Twentieth-Century Visual Culture,” in Lynda Jessup, ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001), 36. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

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(New York: Hill and Wang 2001), 93; and Eben Putnam, “Archaeology and Ethnology at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Putnum’s Monthly Historical Magazine, 1 (May 1892–April 1893): 182–6. Ibid., 182. John Joseph Flinn, ed., The Official Guide to the World’s Columbia Exposition: In the City of Chicago, State of Illinois, May 1 to October 26, 1893 (Chicago: Columbian Guide Company 1893), 54–5. Moses P. Hardy, ed., The Official Directory of the World’s Columbian Exposition: A Reference Book of Exhibitors and Exhibits (Chicago: W.B. Conkey 1893), 1065. Rosemarie K. Bank, “Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition,” Theatre Journal, 54 (2002): 595. Annual Report 1894, xix. Ibid., xviii. Paige S. Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the LateNineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005), 52. Seattle Pacific Intelligencer correspondent, “May Moving Celebrated,” Victoria Daily Colonist, 9 May 1893, 5. Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2007), 223. The hat is in the collection of the Maryhill Museum, Goldendale, Wash. Raibmon, Authentic Indians, 66–7. Kenn Harper, “Nancy Columbia: The First Inuit Queen,” Taissumani: Around the Arctic (20 August 2009), Nunatsiaq Online, http://www.nunatsiaqonline .ca/stories/article/taissumani_aug._28 (accessed 29 January 2010); Columbia and Esther Eneutseak (Neg. 1995.38.37.228); and Woman from Labrador at the YukonPacific Exposition (1906), Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, wa (5502.14). Nancy Columbia with Dog, Missouri Historical Society (n35943).

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63 Jim Zwick, Inuit Entertainers in the United States: From the Chicago World’s Fair to the Birth of Hollywood (West Conshohocken, Penn.: Infinity 2006), 63–131. 64 Paula Becker, “Miss Columbia Is Declared Queen of the Carnival at the AlaskaYukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle on August 19, 1909,” Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State University, http:// www.historylink.org/ index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&f ile_id=8881 (accessed 28 January 2010). 65 Zwick, Inuit Entertainers, 156–60. 66 Annual Report 1883, 96. 67 Many of the individuals listed as teachers are prominent names in Aboriginal history, including Anglican ministers (Henry Cochrane, E.R. Steinhauer) and political activists (Alfred McCue, Scobie Logan). 68 Ellen Mary Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999), 106. 69 Amelia M. Paget, “Report on the Qu’ Appelle Agencies” (1913), file 40,000–9, vol. 7908, rg 10, lac. 70 D.C. Scott to Mr Pedley, Ottawa, 22 February 1913, file 41.000–9, vol. 7908, rg 10, lac. 71 “Half Breed Claim of Ann Amelia McLean,” file 315563, vol. 679, series d-11-1; “Half Breed Claim of Melanie Blondeau,” claim 158, vol. 1325, series d-11-8-b, rg 15, lac. 72 Alexander Hunter Murray Biographical Sheet; William J. McLean Biographical Sheet, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Winnipeg. 73 Nan Shipley, “Anne and Alexander Murray,” The Beaver, 47, no. 3 (1967): 37. 74 Qu’Appelle Industrial School, Annual Reports, 1914–31. 75 Annual Report 1888, 290–307. 76 Ontario Department of Education, Report of the Minister of Education, Ontario 1885 (Toronto: Warwick and Sons 1886), 147. 77 Ibid., 129. 78 For a discussion of art education and

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79 80 81

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83

84 85

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social class, see F. Graeme Chalmers, “Teaching Drawing in Nineteenth Century Canada – Why?” in Kerry J. Freedman and Fernando Hernandez, eds., Curriculum, Culture and Art Education: Comparative Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press 1998), 47–58. Annual Report 1942, 165. Ibid., 166. This program has recently been the focus of considerable scholarly and curatorial attention, led by Andrea N. Walsh’s multifaceted collaborative community-research project. Outcomes include an exhibition, a website on the Virtual Museum of Canada, and Nk’Mp Chronicles: Art from the Inkameep Day School (Oliver, BC: Osoyoos Museum Society and Osoyoos Indian Band 2005). “The Rise to Fame of the Inkameep Day School and Its Child and Youth Artists, 1936–1942,” Historical Timeline, Drawing on Identity: Inkameep Day School and Art Collection, Virtual Museum of Canada, http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Inkameep/english/timeline/index.php (accessed 30 January 2010). The Oliver Echo, 13 April 1938; quoted in Katie Lacey, “Osoyoos–Fairview–Oliver Chronicles, 1858–1958,” Okanagan Historical Society’s 21st Report (1957), 93–9. Historical Timeline, Drawing on Identity: Inkameep Day School and Art Collection. “Jane Stelkia Speaks about the Inspiration for the Drawings” (24 October 2003), clip 16, Video Catalogue, Drawing on Identity, http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/ Exhibitions/Inkameep/english/ catalogue/video_catalogue.php (accessed 30 January 2010). “Chief Clarence Louie Speaks about the Unrealized Potential of the Inkameep Day School” (25 October 2003), clip 10, ibid. “Gertie Baptiste Biography, People of the Past,” Oysoyoos Indian Band Development Corporation website, www.oib.ca/oldsite/gertie.htm (accessed 8 February 2010). Annual Report 1965, 31.

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89 Dominion of Canada, Report of the Department of Mines and Resources 1937, 189; Annual Reports, 1864–1990. 90 H.B. Hawthorn, C.S. Belshaw, and S.M. Jamieson, The Indians of British Columbia: A Study of Contemporary Social Adjustment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1958), 259. 91 McMaster, “Tenuous Lines of Descent,” 219. 92 Throughout the 1960s, Indian handicraft production was among several Department of Indian Affairs economic-development strategies. See, for example, “Indian Handcraft Production,” Annual Report 1961, 51; and a “national survey for production and marketing of Indian crafts” in the “Small Business and Cooperatives,” Annual Report 1967, 57. 93 Annual Report 1963, 30. 94 Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo ’67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 17, no. 2 (2006): 166. 95 First Nations and Inuit people had been recognized as citizens in an amendment to the Citizenship Act in 1956 but did not have the right to vote in federal elections until 1960. 96 Annual Report 1967, 53. 97 “Contemporary Inuit Arts in Canada, Arts and Culture in Canada Fact Sheet,” 9 July 2009, 3, Canada Council for the Arts, www.canadacouncil.ca/publications_ e/fact_sheets/zs128945748721381306.htm (accessed 25 February 2010). 98 Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 168. 99 Ruth Phillips, “Commemoration (de)Celebration: Super-Shows and the Decolonization of Canadian Museums, 1967–1992,” in Barbara Gabriel and Suzan Ilcan, eds., Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGillQueen’s University Press 2004), 104. 100 Sandra Alfoldy, Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, on:

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101 102

103 104 105

106 107 108 109

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McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005), 121. Gladys McCue Taylor also exhibited regularly with the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. Later in life she became a successful actor. Alanis Obomsawin, Indian Truth (Indian Rights Association 1963–67), 40–3, 45. “Alanis Obomsawin Biography,” National Film Board of Canada Online, http://films.nfb.ca/rocks/main31.html (accessed 10 February 2010). “Contemporary Inuit Art.” “Indian Crafts Osaka-Bound,” Ottawa Citizen, 21 November 1969, 41. Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 162–5; Phillips, “Commemoration (de)Celebration,” 107–8; and Aurora Wallace, “The Geography of Girl Watching in Post-War Montreal,” Space and Culture, 10, no. 3 (2007): 349–68. Phillips, “Commemoration (de)Celebration,” 108. Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 162. Clara Tizya fonds, April 1967, vol. 10, no. 1, mss 359, Yukon Archives. Rutherdale and Miller, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 162. Media coverage identified Doreen or Barbara Stevenson as a “go-go” dancer and a university-trained commercial artist. Marcia Crosby, “Making Indian Art ‘Modern,’” Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties, a Digital Archive of Artwork, Ephemera and Film, http://van couverartinthesixties.com/files/sixties_ making-indian-art-modern.pdf (accessed 29 January 2010). Palette, “Girl Carves It,” Vancouver Province, 20 January 1944, 21; ephemera/clipping, Ruins in Process, vancouverartinthesixties.com/archive/ 135 (accessed 29 January 2010). “Ballerina Maria Tallchief with Ellen Neel and Totem Pole,” photograph, Victoria Public Library Special Collection no. 62660, Ruins in Process, vancouverartin thesixties.com/archive/151 (accessed 29 January 2010).

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113 Carolyn Butler Palmer, “Renegotiating Identity: ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art as Family Narrative,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 29, nos. 2–3 (2008): 204. 114 Ronald Hawker, Tales of Ghosts: First Nations Art in British Columbia, 1922– 1961 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2003), 134. See also Marcia Crosby, “Making Indian Art ‘Modern,’” 7–8, for an discussion of Neel as a politically engaged contemporary artist; and Essays, Ruins in Process, www.vancouverartinthesixties.com/essays/ making-indian-art-modern (accessed 23 January 2010). 115 Canadian Museum of Civilization, In the Shadow of the Sun: Perspectives on Contemporary Native Art (Hull, qc: Canadian Museum of Civilization 1993), 214. 116 Mildred Hunt is listed as an associate carver along with noted artists such as Art Thompson, Robert Davidson, and Bill Reid. Photographs show her with her grandparents and working on a totem pole. See “Associate Carvers,” Thunderbird Park: Place of Cultural Sharing, Royal British Columbia Museum Online, http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/exhibits/ tbird-park/html/late/ex18/carve2g.htm (accessed 2 March 2010). 117 Marcia Crosby, “People: Judith Morgan,” Ruins in Process, vancouverartinthesixties.com/people/70 (accessed 16 February 2010). 118 “Gitskan Paintbrush: JP Morgan, Artist/Author,” http://indianarts and craft.com (accessed 16 February 2010). 119 The ‘Ksan project was initiated by the Hazelton Library Association, a group of Gitxsan and local residents who raised funds and sought support for the Skeena Treasure House (1958), a reconstructed traditional village and school for Northwest Coast arts (1970). ‘Ksan Community Association, “The Story of ‘Ksan,” ‘Ksan: Breath of Our Grandfathers (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada 1972), 12–13.

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120 Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art, Northwest Community College, brochure. 121 Armand Garnet Ruffo, “Out of Silence – The Legacy of E. Pauline Johnson: An Inquiry into the Lost and Found Work of Dawendine – Bernice Loft Winslow,” in Christl Verduyn, ed., Literary Pluralities (Peterborough, on: Broadview 1998), 214. 122 Ibid., 216. 123 Thank you to Christina Froschauer and Ryan Rice for their responses. 124 Christine Sioui Wawanoloah, personal correspondence with the author, 4–6 February 2010. 125 Sue Herne, personal correspondence with the author, 4–10 February 2010. 126 Farrell Racette, “Sewing for a Living.” 127 At eighty-eight she was still a highly respected artist and participated in Gaby Pelletier’s study of Odanak basket making. See Gaby Pelletier, Abenaki Basketry, Canadian Ethnology Service Paper, no. 85 (Ottawa: National Museum of Man Mercury Series 1982), 1. 128 Ibid., 65, 50. 129 Thank you to Raymond McCallum and Keith Goulet for permission to call their mothers’ names.

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130 Quillwork box, British Museum (Am1976.03.130). 131 “Daphne Odjig’s Masterpiece Adorns the Walls of the Museum,” Canadian Museum of Civilization communiqué, 14 September 2006, Press Release Archive, Media, Canadian Museum of Civilization, www.civilization.ca/cmc/media/pressreleases/year-2006/daphne-odjigs-masterpiece-adorns-the-walls-of-the-museum (accessed 5 February 2010). 132 The exhibition Marion Tuu’luq was organized by the National Gallery of Canada and toured for two years. Marion Tuu’luq passed away three weeks before the exhibition opened, at the age of ninety-two. “Marion Tuu’luq – The Glorious Fabric of Art,” press release, 8 October 2002, National Gallery of Canada Press Release Archive, www.gallery.ca/english/ 554_860.htm (accessed 8 April 2010). 133 Janet Catherine Berlo, “Inuit Women and Graphic Arts: Female Creativity and Its Cultural Context,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 9, no. 2 (1989): 293–315. 134 Megan Smnetzer, personal communication with the author, 7 October 2010. 135 Anne DeStecher, personal communication with the author, 7 February 2010.

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11

CHAPTER 1

From “Naturalized Invention” to the Invention of a Tradition:

The Victorian Reception of Onkwehonwe Beadwork Ruth B. Phillips

American needlework writer Florence Hartley had words of high praise for the artistry of Onkwehonwe1 women in her 1859 handbook, The Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work: “The bead-work of the North American Indians is among the most beautiful. The Canadian Indian women sell large quantities to the visitors to the Falls of Niagara, and a great deal of it finds its way to our large cities. It is of every imaginable form, and generally is done on a bright scarlet ground with pure white beads. It is very successfully imitated by the lovers of this kind of work” (Fig. 11.1).2 Among the detailed instructions she provided for specific projects we also find her recommendation for a good type of shoe for babies: “It will be observed by the reader,” she notes, “that this infant’s shoe is, in point of fact, a small Indian moccasin, imitated from one of those ingenious fabrics, which are so often brought under the notice of the ladies who visit Saratoga Springs and the Falls of Niagara [Figs. 11.2 and 11.3]. The imitation might be very advantageously extended to other articles of Indian manufacture, particularly watch cases, card boxes, several kinds of mats &c. Ornamentation with beads, in the Indian style, could also be applied to many other articles unknown to the aboriginal artists.”3 Appreciative comments such as these are regularly found in the needlework columns of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet we read them today with some surprise, for we have been sensitized by several decades of post-colonial scholarship to the oppressive colonial policies and racism that marked relations between settler society and Indigenous peoples during the period. The egalitarian tone

Fig. 11.1 Onkwehonwe artist (probably Tuscarora), pincushion for long hatpins, late nineteenth century.

Fig. 11.2 Drawing of a “small Indian moccasin” from Florence Hartley’s The Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work (1859). The author recommended this and other genres of Aboriginal beadwork sold at Niagara Falls as sources worthy of imitation by her readers.

Fig. 11.3 Opposite Moccasins for a small child. Collected by Captain D.F. Tozier, a US revenue officer, probably between 1870 and 1890.

and the ready admiration for Onkwehonwe beadwork expressed by this typical mid-Victorian author (and presumably shared by her readers), her recognition of the makers as “artists,” her willingness to recommend imitation of their work (the sincerest form of flattery), and the seeming lack of self-consciousness in crossing cultural boundaries are all unexpected. The contemporary reader might also be surprised at the high value placed by mid-nineteenth-century publications on objects like the large beaded pincushions used for ladies’ hatpins and the hanging wall pockets made to hold men’s pocket watches at night, because until recently the most influential arbiters of taste and 328

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authenticity – curators, scholars, and elite collectors – considered these very Victorian-looking objects to be inauthentic and of little cultural interest or monetary value. We also easily miss the undertone of celebratory excitement that such passages would have conveyed to Victorian readers because we now take for granted so many of the things that were still fresh and new to mid-nineteenth-century women. These include the revival of needlework and embroidery documented in the pioneering work of Rozsika Parker;4 the availability and affordability of a wide variety of manufactured materials such as beads, cloth, and other craft supplies; the vacation, made possible by newly constructed railways and canals; and a new market for souvenirs of visits to the tourist destinations that sprang up at places like the Thousand Islands, Saratoga Springs, and Niagara Falls. These interlinked phenomena, of course, participate in and figure the Victorian ideology of progress, a perspective that was more culturally inclusive during the middle years of the century than would be true toward the century’s end. The admiration for the innovative creativity of Onkwehonwe beadworkers illustrated by Florence Hartley’s remarks is one piece of evidence for this positive climate of reception, and it is all the more striking in contrast to the equally strong rejection expressed by elite taste makers fifty years earlier. By 1900, settlercolonial women and professional ethnographers had ceased to see themselves as engaged in a shared artistic project of needlework production and promotion and had instead come to regard both Onkwehonwe beadwork and its makers as frozen in the stasis of a pre-modern folk culture. For their part, many Onkwehonwe had come to see these beadwork styles as traditional and to display them as outward signs of their distinctive identities. This essay explores the reasons for this radical change in attitudes. I will argue that the changes in settler and Indigenous responses need to be understood in the context of several key phillips

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political, aesthetic, and ideological shifts that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. They reflect, on the one hand, the changing attitudes of settlers and colonizers as they adopted more rigidly racialized notions of cultural difference, and, on the other, the Indigenous resistance to the intensified assimilationist policies and laws that the new formulations of cultural hierarchy supported. A small but telling piece of evidence of this radical shift is the costume worn by one of the characters in a popular play of 1900 that promoted women’s suffrage. At the beginning of the play the female characters are presented as oldfashioned and unenlightened. But then, to quote a contemporary advertisement, they are “transformed into blooming young maidens, right before your face and eyes.”5 In one production, a cast member representing the pre-feminist state of one character wears an Onkwehonwe chatelaine bag at her waist (Fig. 11.4). Fifty years earlier, as Gerry Biron’s research has shown, the wearing of such bags for formal photographic portraits was a sign of the sitter’s fashionable modernity.6 The structural opposition of the colonized or rural “other” as emblematic of a primitive or traditional past, with the self as progressive, contemporary, and even avant-garde, is, of course, a fundamental trope of modernism. In the remainder of this chapter I will use the shift in the reception of Onkwehonwe women’s beadwork arts from celebration of progress to nostalgia for lost authenticity as a way of interrogating late-Victorian primitivism. I will argue that this reception of beadwork reveals not only the contradictory impulses contained within the ideology of progress, but also the countervailing pressures experienced by the Onkwehonwe to stabilize threatened identities and to affirm cultural continuity.

Tastes, Textiles, and the Ideology of Progress The Victorian era was a period of dynamic change in almost all areas of life, driven by the forces of industrialization and urbanization and by the consolidation of global empires, the expansion of the middle classes, the growth of consumer society, and the politics of gender. With these developments came transformations in everything from men’s and women’s accepted roles to popular and elite tastes in the decorative arts. The modernist movement of the twentieth century has telescoped the long period of Victoria’s reign (1837–1901), and we speak today of a “Victorian era,” “Victorian style,” and “Victorian thought” as if there had been a single homogenous epoch and visual culture. The period was, of course, extremely complex, and attitudes about everything from race to domestic interiors changed during its sixty-four-year span. In order, then, to understand and appreciate the factors that the Onkwehonwe negotiated in the creation of many of the visual and artistic forms they continued to practise 330

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Fig. 11.4 The cast of The Spinster’s Convention, a popular play performed in Westminster, vt, in 1902. The actor on the far left wears an Onkwehonwe beaded chatelaine bag to indicate her old-fashioned style of dress and attitude towards women’s place in society.

and to regard as traditional, we will need to think of Victorian taste, values, and ideology as inherently unstable and to examine the genesis of their specific forms in relation to the forces at work in particular decades and social milieus. The Victorians, like people of other modernizing societies, reacted to the experience of rapid economic and social change with two strong but often contradictory responses. The first was an affirmation of their belief in progress and the second was nostalgia for that which progress was making obsolete – communal values, closeness to nature, “simpler” ways of life, and handmade things that they could see disappearing all around them. As had been the case for centuries, nineteenth-century intellectuals and consumers projected their own preoccupations onto the arts and imagined lifestyles of colonized, Indigenous peoples. Responses to needlework, both Onkwehonwe and mainstream, reflect in microcosm these oscillations between the celebration of progress and the mourning of loss that are the twin markers of modernity. Progress was defined in evolutionary terms, as development from the simple to the complex, and it was understood as the cumulative result of the human capacity for invention. During the first half of the Victorian era, in consequence, Victorian intellectuals and consumers alike were ready to recognize, celebrate, and capitalize on inventiveness wherever and in whatever cultural tradition they found it. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the beadwork made by Onkwehonwe phillips

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Fig. 11.5 Pincushion for hatpins made by Lady Dawson, wife of the principal of McGill University.

and Victorian women was so close in style that the two productions are frequently confused in contemporary collections. For example, a pincushion in the McCord Museum made by the wife of Sir John William Dawson, prominent Canadian geologist, writer on evolutionary theory, and principal of McGill University, is very similar to those made by Onkwehonwe women around the same time (Fig. 11.5). Lewis Henry Morgan, the founding figure of American anthropology, was the first scholarly writer to study Onkwehonwe material culture. Morgan also brought together a collection of Onkwehonwe clothing and other items for the New York State Museum – the first systematic collection of Native North American objects to be assembled according to the principles of the new science of ethnography he helped to found. In a report issued in 1851 to the board of regents of the University of New York, Morgan illustrated and described numerous examples of beadwork he had collected (Fig. 11.6). He wrote of one bag: “On the reverse side of the satchel are two stars, which as specimens of fancy beadwork are tastefully and ingeniously made. This is not an original Indian Article, but a naturalized invention.”7 While today’s reader, still influenced by modernist definitions of authenticity, might read Morgan’s denial of the bag’s traditionality as negative, it was in fact an expression of appreciation and approval. And the same value for invention and newness implied in Morgan’s praise also informed the attitudes and tastes of the buyers of Onkwehonwe beadwork during the 1850s and 1860s. As evidenced both by the popular magazines 332

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Fig. 11.6 Gä ya ah or satchel purchased by Louis Henry Morgan for the New York State cabinet (later destroyed by a fire). Illustrated as Plate 18 in Morgan’s Fifth Report to the Regents of the University of New York (1851).

of the day and by the material record preserved in museums, this widely shared value for “invention” expressed itself through an almost obsessive desire for “novelties” that permeated consumer culture. We have concrete if silent testimony, for example, that mid-Victorian consumers appreciated the distinctive colour harmonies and design elements characteristic of Onkwehonwe beadwork because they stood out from those that characterized other similar articles made by non-Natives. During the past few years, and thanks largely to the detective work of Gerry Biron and a few other private collectors, we have become aware of a sizeable corpus of early photographic images – daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards – in which settler women and girls sit for their portraits wearing or holding the fashionable chatelaine bags beaded by Onkwehonwe women (Figs. 11.7 and 11.8). This segment of nineteenth-century visual culture constitutes an invaluable new source of hard evidence that testifies to the prestige and fashionability of Onkwehonwe beadwork during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The photographic technologies that were developing so rapidly during this period made the commissioning of individual portraits widely available not only to members of the expanding middle classes but also to Indigenous sitters. As in other genres of portraiture, within these new media, a sitter constructed her desired persona through her choice of clothing, adornment, and accessories and in collaboration with the commercial photographer. As Jennifer Salahub suggests in her essay in this volume, at a deeper level, a period logic may be at work phillips

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Fig. 11.7 Portrait of three women, one holding an Onkwehonwe beaded chatelaine bag. Daguerreotype, early 1860s.

Fig. 11.8 Portrait of two young girls with Onkwehonwe beaded chatelaine bags hanging from their wrists. Daguerreotype, 1850s.

Fig. 11.9 Portrait of Caroline Parker (Ga-ha-no), 1850. Photograph of a lost hand-tinted daguerreotype, c. 1849.

linking women’s innovativeness and agency with the Victorians’ appreciation of needlework and their enthusiasm for the new photographic arts that seem often to promote its design values. But even apart from such a possibility, the fact that so many women chose to feature Onkwehonwe beadwork when having their portraits taken speaks strongly to their sense of its value and up-to-date fashionability. Similarly, Caroline Parker, the sister of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Seneca collaborator Eli Parker and a beadworker Morgan particularly admired and collected, sat for her portrait around 1849 in the distinctive Victorianized Onkwehonwe woman’s outfit Morgan documented so carefully in his publications, an outfit that also included a chatelaine bag (Fig. 11.9). In the years that followed, Onkwehonwe professional entertainers, community leaders, and others also had themselves portrayed in beautifully beaded clothing.8 An 1859 needlework column written by a Mademoiselle Rouche for the British publication The Lady’s Newspaper offers further evidence of the positive climate of appreciation that prevailed during these years. Her drawing of a bag similar to those in the photographs is published together with detailed instructions for the imitation of its motifs and colours and a long, heavily romantic evocation of the environment in which she imagined Tuscarora women to have produced the originals (Figs. 11.10 and 11.11). “This beautiful piece of bead-work carries us … far across the Atlantic, into the recesses of Indian life,” she wrote. “It carries us to a camp, perhaps located on the picturesque shores of some vast lake, where the giant trees shut out the oppressive beams of the burning sun … Around the habitation hunting and fishing implements might be hung about in proof that the supply of nature’s wants was as much a pleasure as a necessity to the half-civilized sojourner in those uncultivated glades and forest depths.” Her admiration for Onkwehonwe skill is equally evident in her assurance that the bag was “a faithful representation of one of those specimens of native skill, which prove to us that taste is not confined to any clime or country, nor yet to any condition of existence,” and that “we consider [it] well worthy of a place in our own journal, both on account of its real beauty and because it is a genuine article.”9 In the 1850s, then, neither sophisticated connoisseurs of needlework like Mlle Rouche nor leading intellectuals like Lewis Henry Morgan judged the authenticity and value of Onkwehonwe beadwork to be compromised by the acculturation of its makers or by its mixed stylistic character (Fig. 11.12). As I have noted, by the end of the century, styles and genres of beadwork that had once been shared would become exclusively identified with the Onkwehonwe in the popular imagination. In parallel – partly as a result of the collections and publications Louis Henry Morgan assembled, together with his Seneca collaborators – these beadwork styles would also come to epitomize traditional art and authenticity for members of Onkwehonwe communities.

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Fig. 11.10 Pattern for making an Onkwehonwe beaded bag published in The Lady’s Magazine, a British women’s periodical, in 1857. Fig. 11.11 Right Onkwehonwe beadwork artist (probably Tuscarora or Mohawk), late nineteenth century.

From Hide and Quills to Cloth and Beads: Necessity and Novelty as the Mothers of Invention In North America the energies of immigration and westward expansion for which massive appropriation of Indian lands was a precondition constituted a further force that drove large-scale social and economic changes. For the Onkwehonwe, intent on remaining in their traditional homelands and, in the United States, on resisting removal to the western Indian territories, this period was one of struggle to subsist on radically reduced and inadequate reservations, to adapt to the settler cultures around them, and to defend traditional beliefs and cultural expressions in the face of increasingly restrictive and compulsory government policies of assimilation. The new forms that beadwork took, and the special prominence it assumed within Onkwehonwe visual culture, were important responses to these challenges. The Onkwehonwe had been enthusiastically trading for cloth, beads, and other trade goods since first contact with Europeans over four hundred years earlier. Like other Native North Americans, they were highly selective traders. 336

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Fig. 11.12 Unknown needlewoman, Berlin work slippers for a man, c. 1860. These slippers display the floral motifs and colour palette of monochromatic shades of red, blue, gold, and green used in some of the most popular genres of Onkwehonwe beadwork.

Historian Daniel Richter has written that “native customers did not so much purchase ‘European goods’ as they did ‘Indian goods’ made in Europe or North America to suit the customers’ tastes.”10 The Onkwehonwe, like other Indigenous peoples, sought out and incorporated into clothing and ornaments specific materials, colours, and textures that could serve as “analogues” for their preferred materials. The strong demand for red English stroud cloth can be explained by its resemblance to the Indigenous use of scarlet vegetable dyes so admired by early European explorers, and by the potency attributed to the red ochre with which northeastern Native peoples had, still earlier, ornamented their bodies and their hide robes.11 Similarly, as George Hammel has argued, the colour and light-reflective surfaces of certain glass beads could carry associations with power, intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, and the “good mind” that had traditionally been associated with shell, crystal, mica, and copper.12 As lands were appropriated and former hunting territories were brought under cultivation, the hides and other Indigenous materials the Onkwehonwe had previously used for clothing became scarcer. By the early nineteenth century, the use of manufactured goods had become a necessity rather than an option in most parts of Onkwehonwe territories. Spinning, weaving, and sewing were among the first crafts taught by the new missionaries who came among the Onkwehonwe during this period. When women joined the Quaker mission to the Allegheny Seneca in 1805, for example, they wrote to their Philadelphia supporters to request “Brown Forrest Cloth, Tow Linnen or brown Sheetting, and white flannel,”13 and in 1807 they reported that “some of the Indian women and girls appear to be much disposed to be instructed by our women Friends. Many of them have already learned to make soap, and some can spin and knit a little.”14 The Congregationalists also taught sewing at their school at the Buffalo Creek mission in New York, attended by Tuscarora and Seneca students. phillips

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During the 1830s, according to a memoir written later in the century, Mrs Asher Wright, the wife of the missionary at Cattaraugus, New York, encouraged commercial sewing as a form of economic aid. She provided cotton, flannel, and calico cloth, gave lessons in cutting and sewing clothing, and later procured a contract from the US Department of Indian Affairs to manufacture clothing for distribution to western Indian tribes. Because the sewing sessions were accompanied by the teaching of the Gospel, they provoked opposition from Onkwehonwe traditionalists. According to Mrs Wright’s biographer, however, “such was the desire to do this work that many women came miles to get it … Several women took machines and learned how to use them, hoping to be able to pay for them in work.”15 The intensification of white settlement also brought increased exposure to Euro-North American fashions and decorative arts and opened up new markets that enabled the Onkwehonwe to participate in the cash-and-barter economy. The uses they made of these new artistic ideas and materials offer evidence both of the welcoming of the new and of the retention of the old. Morgan observed in his field notes, for example, the Tonawanda Seneca’s continuing appreciation for the traditional materials he also admired. The porcupine quill, he wrote, was “equally beautiful with the bead, and to the Indian much more so.”16 But the best evidence of continued tension between the attractions of pre-contact tradition and nineteenth-century innovation lies in the objects themselves. For example, preference for the aesthetic qualities of native-tanned hide is directly implied by the way that, throughout the nineteenth century, Onkwehonwe moccasin makers used the commercially tanned hides on which they came to rely “inside out” to make visible the untanned side, whose texture and colour more closely resembled those of native-tanned deerskin (see Fig. 11.2). When we compare the new beadwork styles and object types invented by the Onkwehonwe during the Victorian era to the similar colour palettes, floral motifs, and object types being made by non-Native women during the same years, we can see in Onkwehonwe work evidence of conceptual continuities with an older aesthetic. There is a relative predominance of white beads in the Onkwehonwe “white on red” style of beadwork, for example, that recalls both the preference for red trade cloth so often noted by the early-contact period observers and the associations of spiritual power conveyed by earlier ornaments made of white-shell wampum beads. I would also suggest that, while non-Native women favoured floral and bird motifs because of their associations with the divine creation and the afterlife, for Onkwehonwe artists these motifs expressed fundamental principles of the interdependence of human and natural worlds that are articulated, for instance, in the Onkwehonwe Thanksgiving Address.17 In 1941 the ethnologist Frank Speck asked several Seneca beadworkers at the Allegheny reservation in New York to make sets of beadwork samples of the patterns known to them. Most of the forty-five samples, which are now in the 338

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Peabody-Essex Museum at Salem, Massachusetts, bear paper labels giving the names of the patterns in Seneca and English. They constitute a kind of pattern book of variations that illustrates not only the imaginative range of the Seneca beadwork artists who made them around 1940 but also the systematic nature of beadwork as a codification of cultural knowledge. A considerable number of the samples reveal their makers’ finely observed knowledge of plant and animal life. Mrs Walter Jimerson wrote to Speck, for example, that the pattern she called “Dead meadow” ( “Oh-gwah-daz-ganh”) represents “a meadow that has been burnt and is starting to grow again.”18 The patterns for “raccoon tracks,” “lizard tracks,” and “crow foot” make precise distinctions among the traces left by different animals on the ground (Fig. 11.13).19 Other patterns, however, suggest how change and new forms of experience become incorporated into a traditional visual language. In contrast to patterns titled “Old-fashioned” ( “Oh-ee-wah-gahyonk”) or “Iroquois lace”20 that reproduce the dense geometric symmetries of the traditional beadwork borders applied to leggings, skirts, and other garments, the jagged, wavering lines and purposeful asymmetry of “drunkard’s path” (“Jonay-ga-anh-Ho-ah-donk”) are powerfully expressive of another social reality (Fig. 11.14). Particularly intriguing is the presence of two patterns that, while almost identical in their semi-circular arrangement of projecting lines, are given quite different names. One is identified as “War bonnet” in English and “Gust-to-nah” in Seneca – the term for the traditional Onkwehonwe man’s headdress that predated the Plains style feather bonnet that had become the stereotypical symbol of North American Indians in the late nineteenth century (Fig. 11.15). Thus, while the English conforms to outsider expectations, the Seneca affirms the continuity of changing styles with an ancient tradition. On the other sample, an almost identical design is termed “sun rise” (“da gah gwet gant”), establishing an association with the ritually important appearance of the sun, the source of power for warriors and leaders. As a pair, these samples suggest the multiplicity of meanings that can be encompassed by beadwork designs and their ability to establish clear conceptual links between the traditional and the modern. The process of meaning making and motif innovation that is evidenced by these samples – which were made a century after Morgan documented Onkwehonwe beadwork at the Tonawanda Seneca reserve in New York and the Six Nations reserve in Canada – provide evidence that beadwork had continued to provide a site for the negotiation of tradition and change for Onkwehonwe women during the intervening decades. Through beadwork design and production, these artists found ways to reconcile inherited systems of value with the new experiences imposed by the settler world within which they lived. The continuing prevalence of floral references in Speck’s beadwork samples carries forward into the mid-twentieth century the strong associations between women and floral imagery that had become fixed during the middle of the nineteenth.

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Progress versus Nostalgia: The Changing Climate of Victorian Reception During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Onkwehonwe and Victorian needlewomen were, then, involved in a linked artistic project. As I have argued elsewhere, the Western and Victorian equation of flowers with ideal “feminine” qualities of fragility, beauty, and godliness converged with traditional Onkwehonwe associations of plants and the crops cultivated by women with the sustenance of human life to create a shared visual artistic language.21 Morgan, like mid-nineteenth-century patrons, saw Onkwehonwe women’s beadwork production as evidence of their potential for assimilation into “civilized” society, their innate artistry, and their progressive qualities of innovation and industriousness. It is, of course, important to acknowledge that a true “sharing” between non-Indigenous Victorian women and members of a cultural community who were also objects of their charitable attempts to civilize could neither be an exchange among equals nor divorced from sentimentality. In souvenir stereographic cards made around 1860, the postures of the white women bending down to buy the beadwork of Tuscarora women seated on the ground seem to express – however coincidentally – the undoubted power hierarchies of the period (Fig. 11.16). The mid-century effusions of Mademoiselle Rouche were tinged with nostalgia, and by the end of the century the sentimental and the nostalgic had been amplified from undertone to dominant melody. Late-Victorian consumers bought Onkwehonwe beadwork less as a substitute for their own work than as souvenirs of their touristic experiences and relics of peoples they believed to be disappearing. Three interrelated intellectual, social, artistic, and economic developments of the late-Victorian period are responsible for this radical change in the climate of reception: the professionalization of anthropology and the elaboration of evolutionist theory; reformist movements in the decorative arts; and feminist resistance to the ideology of the “Angel of the House.”

Fig. 11.13 Opposite Beadwork pattern samples: Oh-gwah-daz-ganh (“Dead Meadow”) and Joack-oh or oh-see-deh (“Racoon Tracks”), commissioned by anthropologist Frank Speck in 1941 of Seneca beadwork artists at the Allegheny reservation in New York. “Dead Meadow” was made by Mrs Walter Jimerson. Fig. 11.14 Beadwork pattern samples: Oh-ee-wah-gah-yonk (“Old Fashioned”) and Je-nay-gaanh-Ho-ah-donk (“Drunkard’s Path”), commissioned in 1941 by anthropologist Frank Speck of Seneca beadwork artists at the Allegheny reservation in New York. Fig. 11.15 Beadwork pattern samples: da gah gwet gant (“Sun Rise”) and gus sto-nah (“War Bonnet”), commissioned in 1941 by anthropologist Frank Speck of Seneca beadwork artists at the Allegheny reservation in New York.

Fig. 11.16 George Barker stereo card showing Victorian tourists and Tuscarora beadwork artists selling their work on Luna Island, Niagara Falls, c. 1870.

The shift in anthropological attitudes can be seen clearly in the contrast between Morgan’s early writing and that of later nineteenth-century anthropologists. In 1850, as we have noted, Morgan saw the “mixed” clothing styles of the Onkwehonwe, which incorporated elements of the new beadwork styles, floral designs, and Victorian dress fashions, as welcome evidence of a “revolution” in process in which the Onkwehonwe were replacing their old hunting way of life with an agrarian life style that would lead to civilization, assimilation, and citizenship. The “mixed character” of their arts, he wrote, “exhibit [sic] the application of Indian ingenuity to fabrics of foreign manufacture, as shown in their reduction into use, [more] than originality of invention. But this class of articles … furnish [sic] no slight indication of artisan capacity.”22 Thus, while regretting the loss of unique pre-contact Onkwehonwe traditions that was made inevitable by modernity, Morgan also found evidence of new invention and “originality” in the unique forms of adaptation created by the Onkwehonwe. By the end of the century, however, ethnologists had come to see “invention” not as progressive but, rather, as “acculturation.” For late-nineteenth-century writers on evolution in art such as Hjalmar Stolpe, the melding of Western and Indigenous styles was a “corruption” of a cultural authenticity that, in evolutionist terms, could be identified only with pre-contact forms.23 Both Morgan and Stolpe were evolutionists, but, as Adam Kuper has explained in his discussion of nineteenth-century theories of the primitive, the emergence of a new scientific version of cultural evolutionism, between about 1860 and 1880, selectively applied Darwinian theories of natural selection to create a much more racialized version of evolutionist thought.24 The transformation of the “softer” theories of cultural evolution that had been developing since the eighteenth century into a “hardened” late-nineteenth342

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century version was controlled as much by the politics of imperialism as by science. Assumptions about the moral, technological, and artistic superiority of European “civilizations” responded directly to the needs of imperial and settler societies as they sought to justify their colonizing projects. As Edward Tylor proclaimed in ringing tones at the end of his immensely influential Primitive Culture, which ran through four editions between 1871 and 1903: “To impress men’s minds with a doctrine of development, will lead them in all honour to their ancestors to continue the progressive work of past ages, to continue it the more vigorously because light has increased in the world, and where barbaric hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear view. It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.”25 Such doctrines shaped the climate in which not only Indigenous North American but also other world arts were received during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as has been compellingly demonstrated, for example, by Tim Barringer’s work on late-Victorian displays of the arts of India and by Annie Coombes’s analysis of the British reception of Benin brasses.26 By the late 1880s, mixture and hybridity in Indigenous art had come to be read not as evidence of “invention” but as contamination and degeneracy, a cultural analogue of the physical weakness attributed to mixed race and “primitive” peoples.27 Scientific racism had an impact on the practical, methodological dictates of contemporary anthropological study, even among scholars who did not accept these theories of race, and because the subsequent work of art historians on Indigenous artistic traditions is dependent on the collections these anthropologists made, not only the inclusions but also the exclusions they made have had an impact on diachronic understandings of stylistic and imagistic development. The evolutionist intellectual project of late-Victorian anthropologists involved the tracing of patterns of cultural diffusion and the evolution of material culture from simpler to more complex forms; “mixed” styles, in the view of these anthropologists, were useless for their reconstructions. During the early 1900s, ethnologists like Franz Boas at the American Museum of Natural History and Edward Sapir at the National Museum of Canada actively discouraged the ethnologists working for their museums from collecting commercial and “acculturated” Victorian-style Onkwehonwe textiles. This paradigm of authenticity remained current through much of the twentieth century, influencing the attitudes not only of non-Native ethnologists but also of Onkwehonwe ethnologists like Arthur Parker. In describing his motivation for starting the tremendously influential Indian Arts Project at the Rochester Museum of Science in 1935, Parker wrote that he wanted to “capitalize [on] the best in ancient art and to redevelop it as a racial contribution … We are saving the old arts and passing them on to the youth of the reservations and the very effort phillips

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made to achieve this is reawakening interest in the native pattern of thought … Instead of cheap and tawdry souvenirs that have nothing of the old art in them, our workers will now make objects that have ethnological value. They will be typical of the days when Indian art was original and pristine.”28 The intrinsic contradiction of the evolutionist project is demonstrated by the fact that the style Parker identified as “traditional” to the Onkwehonwe was the midnineteenth-century Victorian style of ceremonial clothing that had been recorded by Morgan and Eli Parker. By the 1880s, it had become widely accepted within settler and imperial societies that the only remaining “real” Indians were those of the Plains because their way of life and material culture appeared to be the least altered by contact with settlers. Pan-Indian styles incorporating Plains styles of beadwork, feather headdresses, and fringed clothing gained popularity, and Plains or Pan-Indian elements began to be incorporated into Onkwehonwe clothing, especially that worn by entertainers. Needlework columns also began to feature Plains-style loom-woven beadwork with geometric designs.29 This development, too, is most clearly documented in the photographic record, which by the late nineteenth century had come to include numerous portraits of Onkwehonwe wearing a range of richly beaded dress combining Onkwehonwe and Plains components as a way of referencing both popular stereotypes of Indianness and specific Onkwehonwe identities. Such outfits appear not only on performers in Wild West shows and other entertainments, but also on itinerant beadwork sellers, political delegates, and sitters for family portraits.30 While space does not permit an exploration of the contrasting beadwork styles made for these different purposes, it is important to note in the context of this discussion that they incorporate the innovative floral styles of the mid-century, demonstrating that, in only a few decades, they had become part of the accepted currency of Onkwehonwe traditionalism. The second factor that influenced the Victorian reception of Onkwehonwe beadwork was the movement to reform Victorian taste itself. By the 1870s, the Berlin work and other kinds of fancy needlework that had been so popular two decades earlier had come under attack from upper-middle-class taste makers (see Fig. 11.12). The Great Exhibition of 1851, organized to showcase the new industrial products of all nations, had the unanticipated effect of creating a strong negative reaction against the quality of the designs, materials, and workmanship of the factory-made goods on display. It stimulated the efforts of prominent design reformers like Charles Lock Eastlake and William Morris to combat the vulgarity of what one historian has termed the “lavish, exuberant, gay and brightly-coloured taste” of the mid-nineteenth century (Fig. 11.17).31 Although the reformers continued to regard nature as the ultimate source of decorative motifs, they opposed illusionistic naturalism and the brightness of chemical dyes. The new byword was “appropriateness”: design should not

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overwhelm the form and function of the object being ornamented. Morris’s wallpapers, fabrics, and embroideries offered widely influential models of more stylized design that was less illusionistic and executed in a duller colour palette according to a high standard of hand crafting. The lavish use of domestic ornaments such as beaded wall pockets, shelf valences, and mats also came under attack. In his 1868 Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details, Eastlake specifically criticized the proliferation of knick-knacks and fancywork and the rococo design of the typical mid-century Victorian domestic interior.32 Eastlake’s and Morris’s work led, in the 1870s, to the creation of a new embroidery movement known as Art Needlework, promoted through the School of Art Needlework that was founded in Britain in 1872 and by its successor, the Royal School of Needlework. The new style was introduced to North America through the Royal School’s exhibits at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Fair where it influenced Candace Wheeler, founder of the New York Society of Decorative Arts. When the American needlework writer Constance Harrison quoted

Fig. 11.17 William Morris (designer) and Ada Phoebe Godman (embroiderer), wall hanging, 1877.

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Morris’s anti-illusionistic dictum in her 1881 book – “Take from the flowers such of their qualities of form or color as serve your purpose and neglect the other qualities” – she was directly reflecting this new taste culture.33 Art embroidery, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the art nouveau style that arose a few years later would lead, in the early twentieth century, to the even more radical simplifications of modernism and a still closer identification of form with function. Despite Morris’s own left-wing political radicalism, the emphasis placed on artisanal as opposed to industrial production did not lead to a democratization of the new arts but rather contributed to a widening gap between elite and middle-class taste cultures. Although the new styles and genres did not immediately displace those of the mid-century, they introduced new, class-based, distinctions of taste that were soon reflected in the needlework columns. The earlier styles of beadwork that were still being produced by Onkwehonwe women for the souvenir market became marginalized in relation to the work promoted by the avant-garde taste makers and were relegated to the vulgarized realm of popular culture. At the same time that mid-Victorian aesthetics were being challenged, the capacity of historic and exotic objects to evoke other times and places was being reinforced, shifting consumers’ appreciation away from the utilitarian value of Indigenous souvenir arts and toward their symbolic meanings. Harrison, the advocate of art embroidery, for example, enthused about Penobscot baskets which, when displayed in the home as part of an eclectic mix of other historic and exotic objects, constituted a “sign-manual of many ages and nations.”34 Another needlework writer of the 1880s, Jenny June, also defended fancy work against those who considered it a “time waster.” Significantly, her argument was grounded in the historical resonances of needlework rather than its ability to meet needs for order and embellishment in the home as stressed by other writers – in her words, needlework’s “acknowledged value in the preservation of much that is historically interesting.”35 In the context of these shifts in the external climate of reception, Onkwehonwe beadwork came to be seen by non-Native consumers as “historic” rather than contemporary. The third factor that informed the late-Victorian reception of Onkwehonwe beadwork was feminism. Women’s rights activists rejected the rigid confinement of women within the domestic sphere and their prescribed role as the Angel of the House – the ideology within which needlework had been defined as the quintessential feminine art. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women began to lobby actively for the recognition of women’s actual contributions to the public world of work, for political suffrage, and for acceptance as professional artists. The New York Society of Decorative Arts and, a little later, the Canadian Handicrafts Guild used women’s traditional role as needlework and embroidery producers to create new and influential organizations that promoted quality of craft

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and design as a means of empowering women economically.36 Elsbeth Heaman has shown that displays of women’s needlework and other handicrafts at Canadian agricultural fairs and exhibitions provided a point of entry for women into public space, as happened most effectively at the Women’s Pavilion of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.37 While the exclusive representation of women through needlework also came under attack from late-nineteenth-century feminists as “a meagre and insufficient index of what industries our women are engaged in,” and as a trivialization of women’s labour,38 in other contexts feminists drafted women’s textile arts into service in ways that, I would argue, parallel Indigenous women’s mobilization of these media to resist assimilationist pressures. As Lisa Tickner has argued with regard to the embroidered pennants, banners, and other visual emblems that were featured in the protest spectacles staged by British suffragettes, “in so far as they mobilized women’s traditional needlework skills – so much a part of the contemporary feminine stereotype as to be almost a secondary social characteristic – it was to challenge the terms of that femininity in a collective political enterprise.”39 As with other Victorian social movements, the effects on Native women of non-Native women’s social activism were mixed. The economic goals of the reformist needlework organizations were historically realized largely through charity bazaars, popular throughout the Victorian era as a way of raising money for missions and helping the unfortunate. In this spirit women’s handicraft organizations included Onkwehonwe and other Native arts in their programs. During the height of official assimilation policies designed to hasten the disappearance of Native cultures, the Canadian Handicrafts Guild worked to preserve them, exhibiting Onkwehonwe beadwork alongside other “folk” handicrafts. In 1911, for example, the guild sent to King Edward VII’s wife, Queen Anne, a “woven beadwork lamp drapery [made] by Ka-ha-ri-ne, Caughnawaga [Kahnawake]” together with other representative items of fine Canadian craft.40 In retrospect, however, we can also see negative aspects of the guild’s championship that flowed from its acceptance of the standard classification of Indigenous visual traditions as folk and ethnic art. As was common during the early twentieth century, furthermore, the guild appropriated Indigenous arts into a narrative of Canadian history that positioned their makers as forerunners and authenticators of a triumphant settler society. In urging the importance of working with Native artisans and needlewomen, one guild member wrote, for example, that “it is to Indians and French Canadians, where we must look for primitive and characteristic national work.”41 By the early twentieth century, such primitivist discourses had become virtually unavoidable, even for reformers, and during much of the twentieth century Indigenous peoples would be forced to exploit the possibilities they offered while attempting to resist and destabilize them from within.42

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Beadwork as Onkwehonwe Tradition Morgan and his successors would undoubtedly be surprised to find that the transitional and “mixed” styles they alternately admired and decried are today considered to be authentic and traditional Onkwehonwe art. Beadwork, whether worn for longhouse and community celebrations or exhibited and sold as fine art or craft, has become a primary public sign of uniquely Onkwehonwe identity and difference.43 Why and how did the beadwork styles and object types of the mid-nineteenth century become “set” into tradition? Why did Onkwehonwe women continue to work in beads after Victorian women had gone on to other media? Why did they not take up the later style of art embroidery? There were, as we have seen, different kinds of forces at work, some of them conscious and calculated and others the result of external circumstances. Art embroidery was an upper-middle-class movement that reinforced social distinctions by more clearly demarcating the boundary between the vulgar and the tasteful. Access to its models and raw materials was, thus, limited to members of a privileged class. But a factor that was equally if not more important was the active desire of the Onkwehonwe to retain and preserve traditions that connected them with their past and that carried into the future the patterns and techniques of mothers and grandmothers (see Fig. 11.11). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, heightened pressures to assimilate increased the importance of distinctive styles of beaded clothing as a primary means of affirming cultural identity. Tuscarora beadwork artist Dorothy Printup made the connection between beadwork and identity clear when she recalled her mother Matilda’s experience at the Carlisle Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania during the early years of the twentieth century. “When she took her work to Carlisle they stripped her of all her beadwork and anything that was Indian and burned it. So she made up her mind they weren’t going to kill the Indian in her. She kept sewing, people would take it to Niagara Falls and sell it for her … She was determined to keep doing beadwork.”44 In conserving mid-Victorian beadwork styles, Onkwehonwe beadworkers were, then, choosing against change and for tradition, counter to the dominant ideology of modernity. As celebrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson at the beginning of the Victorian era, the North American vision of progress was inherently restless. “In nature,” Emerson wrote, “every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.” For Emerson, progress also implied the successive dissolution over time of all cultural traditions. “The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing.”45 In modern industrial consumer societies, the restlessness of progress finds a quintessential expression in fashion. All peoples use dress as a way of expressing meaning, and styles of dress change gradually everywhere. 348

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But, as fashion historian Elizabeth Wilson has written, “what is added to dress as we ourselves know it in the West is fashion.” In her definition, fashion is “dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion, in a sense, is change.”46 In modernity those who do not subscribe to the system of fashion and change become defined as traditionalists, modernity’s opposite number.47 There were, then, two consequences of Onkwehonwe artistic choices for cultural preservation during the nineteenth century. One was the kind of class-based segregation along lines of taste that has been theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, according to which Onkwehonwe beadwork was defined at the end of the nineteenth century as popular rather than elite art.48 The other was the discursive assignment of Onkwehonwe beadwork arts to the realm of the traditional, the folkloric, or the ethnographic, a categorization that has lasted to the present day. We are only now emerging from the paralysis of this polarity. The work of Onkwehonwe scholars and artists like Tom Hill, Richard Hill, Sr, Sam Thomas, Jolene Rickard, Shelley Niro, and Hannah Claus has been critical to the repositioning of beadwork within Onkwehonwe art and visual culture (Fig. 11.18). Since the late 1980s they and others have been arguing eloquently for the authenticity of mixed styles and for the traditionality of arts that have been in production for more than a century and a half. Tom Hill and Richard Hill, Sr, for example, featured an Onkwehonwe-Huron beaded pincushion opposite an indisputably “authentic” Pre-Columbian ceramic figure in the first pages of the inaugural publication of the National Museum of the American Indian, and Tom Hill illustrated two mid-nineteenth-century Onkwehonwe beaded caps on the opening page of his essay, “Visual Prayers,” affirming their cultural authenticity through histories of use and continuity with the traditional men’s gustoweh headdress. “The caps,” Hill writes, “are evidence of Native Americans’ vigorous assertion of identity during the Victorian era.”49 In her 1992 essay and photographic work on beadwork history, Tuscarora artist and art historian Jolene Rickard reworked a snapshot of her grandmother’s booth at the New York State Fair. She addressed the interrelationships among beadwork, definitions of authenticity, and Onkwehonwe women’s artistry in terms of cultural survival: “I see the connections between beadwork, our teachings, our forced migration, and photography, as survival strategies. We have put our thoughts into objects, to carry through time.”50 Such interventions have been critical in causing the climate of reception for Onkwehonwe beadwork to shift once more, so that non-Native audiences are again responding to Onkwehonwe beadwork with a respect that recalls that of the mid-Victorians. Changing academic theories have also contributed to this shift. Scholars now understand the kinds of mixed styles that mid-nineteenthcentury Onkwehonwe invented as typical and creative responses to the contact situations that resulted from colonization and trade. Nineteenth-century beadwork phillips

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Fig. 11.18 Samuel Thomas, Onkwehonwe woman’s outfit worn ceremonially in the longhouse and for celebrations. One of two outfits made by the Ska-Ni-Kwat (“We are of one mind”) project, c. 2001. Thomas organized the project to create a way for people of different faiths, races, and ages to work collaboratively through artistic creativity and beadwork.

made by Victorian women, both Onkwehonwe and non-Onkwehonwe, evidences both the fertile creative exchanges and the terrible social and economic inequities of the period in which it was produced. In the fine detail of the processes of exchange and innovation summarized here we gain glimpses not only of how individuals negotiated the daily reality of the oppressive conditions of their lives, but also of how, even amidst grim realities, individuals on both sides of the cultural divide could come to respect and value each other’s artistry and creativity. If today Onkwehonwe beadwork and other similar Indigenous artistic traditions are being celebrated not only for their inherent aesthetic qualities and highly skilled workmanship but as valuable historical evidence of the way people responded to contact and colonialism, our ability to see beadwork in this light must also be credited to the work of two contemporary Canadian women artists, Shelley Niro and Hannah Claus. In light of the focus of this volume it seems fitting to end with a brief discussion of their work. 350

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Fig. 11.19 Shelley Niro, Thinking Caps (detail), mixed-media installation, 1999.

Shelley Niro’s Thinking Caps (Fig. 11.19), acquired for the National Gallery of Canada in 2008, was initially commissioned for the McCord Museum’s Across Borders exhibition in 1999. The curators asked Niro to make a work that would reflect on the exhibition’s presentation of historical and contemporary Onkwehonwe beadwork. Niro responded by making four beaded hats, each honouring the capacities and qualities that characterize the successive stages of a woman’s life – girl, young woman, mature woman, and old woman. Each hat is placed on a pedestal in front of a word picture in Mohawk and English framed by overlapping photographs of the hands of a woman of that age making beadwork. The words link to the beaded imagery Niro created for each hat to evoke not just the emotional but also the intellectual vitality of each phase of life. The stress on the intellectual – which is also directly referenced by the title “Thinking Caps” – is central to Niro’s celebration of beadwork not only as an artistic medium but also as an expression of Indigenous knowledge. It embodies her phillips

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critique of the residues of exoticism, evolutionism, antiquarianism, and kitsch that continue to cling to Onkwehonwe beadwork, as well as her opposition to the more general relegation of textiles made by women to the realm of the minor and decorative arts. Beadwork, Niro is telling us, is a major artistic medium that continues to serve as a major site of women’s empowerment and expression. Like the lightning flash that adorns her thinking cap for the young woman, beadwork art is a force to be reckoned with. Niro’s powerful intervention into the confused history of reception for Onkwehonwe beadwork that has been recounted here exemplifies the recent emergence of the kind of conversational community around Indigenous art that Griselda Pollock, following Thomas Kuhn, has identified as linking art historians and artists in a common project of critique and paradigm change.51 Hannah Claus has also meditated on Onkwehonwe beadwork as a medium whose social and aesthetic resonance demands continuing exploration. The first of a series of works in which she has been carrying on this exploration is her 2001 piece, he didn’t know her name, now in the collection of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (Fig. 11.20). Out of Chinese paper, Claus made a Onkwehonwe woman’s shirt, its intricate beaded pattern lovingly recreated with tiny holes pricked with a pin along the lower edge. The work was made to honour Claus’s Mohawk grandmother, whose name is no longer known to her descendants. The making of this piece is thus part of a personal exploration of identity and family history that for Claus, as for so many contemporary Indigenous people, has become confused and obscured by the forces of modernization, racial oppression, and colonial legislation. Suspended from the shirt are delicate dried blossoms of Queen Anne’s lace – elements that link the quietism and precision of the artist’s enquiry to the meditations expressed in the art of her female ancestors, the lineage affiliation that defines an individual’s identity within the matrilineal Onkwehonwe system. I will conclude with a more recent piece by Claus, Repeat along the Border, a video shown in the 2008 touring exhibition Oh So Iroquois, curated by Ryan Rice for the Ottawa Art Gallery (Fig. 11.21).52 The Across Borders exhibition, which had first stimulated Claus’s interest in Onkwehonwe beadwork, also raised for her a long-term concern with the border, considered both as an artificial interruption of Onkwehonwe communities and as a space of articulation and artistry in Onkwehonwe textiles. Claus speaks of her video piece as a continuation of what she calls her “border work,” a concern with horizons, the line of life and what is above and below the line. Her video takes he didn’t know her name, the exquisite paper shirt she made in 2001, as its point of departure, and the shadow of that piece and its inquiry into names, lineage, and ancestry haunts the footage she shot at her ancestral community of Tyendinaga. She overlays this landscape with archival imagery of an historical beaded woman’s garment from

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Fig. 11.20 Hannah Claus, he didn’t know her name, 2001.

Fig. 11.21 Hannah Claus, still from Repeat along the Border, video, 2006.

the McCord Museum’s collection. The movement of the work takes the beaded pattern down from its first appearance as a pattern in the sky to ground level, where the legging border meets the earth. Like Niro, Claus seems to be telling us to attend to Onkwehonwe beadwork not just as decoration but also as exploration, as an art form that works through texture, order, precision, beauty, meaningful pattern, and repetition across time.

notes 1 The term Onkwehonwe (“people,” or “real people”) is today preferred along with the alternative “Hodenosaunee” (“people of the longhouse”) to “Iroquois.” All three refer to a confederacy of six nations, the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora, living in western New York State and southern Ontario and Quebec. 2 Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work (Philadelphia: G.G. Evans 1859), 25. 3 Ibid., 27. 4 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Routledge 1989). 5 The Spinsters’ Convention (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company 1900). The characters in this satirical play included Calamity Jane Higgins, Tiny Short, Patience Desire Mann, Charity Longface, Hannah Biggerstaff, Frances Touchmenot, and Professor Makeover. The photograph in which the Onkwehonwe bag appears was taken at a performance at Westminster, vt, and is in the collection of the Westminster Historical Society. I am grateful to Gerry Biron for sharing his research and copy of the photograph. The advertisement is cited in connection with a photograph taken at another performance of the play at Towanda, Ill., in 1910 and reproduced online at http://towandahis tory.org/Objects/lif_1908_1214.pdf (accessed 15 July 2010). 6 Gerry Biron, “A Cherished Curiosity: The

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9

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Niagara Floral Style Beaded Bag in the Victorian Era,” American Indian Art Magazine, 35, no. 4 (2010): 42–51. Lewis Henry Morgan, “Report on the Fabrics, Inventions, Implements and Utensils of the Iroquois Made to the Regents of the University, January 22, 1851,” in Fifth Annual Report of the Regents of the University (Albany, ny: Benthuysen 1852), 112; quoted in Elisabeth Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press 1994), 256. Biron, “A Cherished Curiosity,” and Gerry Biron, Made of Thunder, Made of Glass: American Indian Beadwork from the Northeast, Selections from the Collection of Gerry Biron and JoAnne Russo (Saxton’s Harbor, vt: privately published, 2006). Mademoiselle Rouche, The Lady’s Newspaper, 2 April 1859, 217. For a fuller citation and discussion of this passage, see Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle, Montreal, and Kingston, on: University of Washington Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press 1998), 218–22. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1992), 83. On the notion of analogues, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes

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12

13

14

15

16

17 18

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Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). See George Hammel, “Trading in Metaphors: The Magic of Beads,” in Charles F. Hayes III, ed., Proceedings of the 1982 Glass Trade Bead Conference (Rochester, ny: Rochester Museum and Science Centre 1983). Rachel Coope to her father, 1806, Quaker Collection, Haverford College, Haverford, Penn.; quoted in Lois Barton, A Quaker Promise Kept: Philadelphia Friends’ Work with the Allegany Senecas, 1795–1960 (Eugene, OR: Spencer Butte Press 1990), 9. Report to the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, spring 1807, Philadelphia, Quaker Collection, Haverford College, Haverford, Penn.; quoted in Barton, A Quaker Promise Kept, 9. Harriet Caswell, Our Life among the Iroquois Indians (Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society 1892), 206. Lewis H. Morgan, field notes, Tonawanda, 1850, Manuscript Journals, vol. 2, fourth booklet, Morgan Papers, University of Rochester Library; quoted in Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan, 155. Phillips, Trading Identities, 155–96. Letter from Mrs Walter Jimerson to Frank Speck, Steamburg, ny, 7 July 1949, e 44, Frank Speck files, Peabody Essex Museum Archives, Salem, Mass. Speck commissioned at least two women to make samples and to provide English and Seneca names for the patterns. All but a few of the samples retain their labels, some of which are handwritten and almost certainly by the maker since they do not match Speck’s handwriting. Others labels are typewritten, presumably by Speck, from lists sent with the samples, one of which was enclosed with Mrs Jimerson’s letter. The possibility that, over time, some of the labels and samples may have been scrambled must also be considered. Raccoon tracks: e29,028 “Joc-ack-ah (or) oh-see-dah” [sic]; Lizard tracks: e29,370

phillips

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23

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25

26

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28

29 30

“do dese oh sedah”; Crow foot: e29,372 – “ga-gar (?)-oh-sedah.” Old Fashioned: e28,369 “Oh-ee-wah-gahyonk”; Iroquois lace: e29,367 “odaah.” Phillips, Trading Identities, 182–96. Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851; repr. New York: Corinth Books 1962), 353–4. Hjalmar Stolpe, Evolution in the Ornamental Art of Savage Peoples, Ethnographical Researches, trans. Mrs. H.C. March (Rochdale, uk: J. Clegg 1903) [1880, Swedish publication]. Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (New York: Routledge 1988), 1–5. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London: John Murray 1903), 2: 453. See Tim Barringer, “The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project,” in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (New York: Routledge 1998), 11–27; and Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press 1995). See Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge 1995). Arthur Parker, “Museum Motives behind the New York Arts Project,” Indians at Work, 2, no. 21 (1935): 11–12; quoted in Christina Johannsen, “Efflorescence and Identity in Iroquois Arts” (phd thesis, Brown University, 1984), 189. See Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1908, for a pattern of this sort. See Pieter Hovens, “Survival and Assimilation: The Visit of the Dutch Anthropologist Herman Ten Kate (1858–1931) to the Iroquois,” in Hovens, ed., North American Indian Studies 2: European Contributions to Science, Society, and Art (Aachen and

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32

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34 35

36

37

38

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40 41 42

Göttingen, Germany: Edition Herodot 1984), 36–42; and Pieter Hovens et al., The Ten Kate Collection (Altenstadt, Germany: National Museum of Ethnology and Zkf Publishers 2010), 21–38. John Steegman, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870 (London: Nelson 1970), 308. Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (London: Longmans, Green and Company 1858). Constance Harrison, Woman’s Handiwork in Modern Homes (New York: Scribner’s 1881), 11. Ibid., 9. Jane Cunningham Croly [Jenny June, pseud.], Ladies’ Fancy Work: A Manual of Designs and Instructions in All Kinds of Needlework (New York: A.L. Burt 1886), 3. See Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Ottawa and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press for Carleton University Press 1999). Elspeth Heaman, The Inglorious Arts of Peace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999), 275. Jean Grant writing about the 1898 Toronto exhibition in “Woman at the Fair,” Saturday Night, 10 September 1898, 9; quoted in ibid., 270. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907– 14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988), 60. McLeod, In Good Hands, 150. Ibid., 203. Trudy Nicks and I have explored this dual process of exploitation and resistance in our essay, “From Wigwam to White Lights: Popular Culture, Politics, and the Performance of Native North American Identity in the Era of Assimilation,” in

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Iain McCalman and Paul A. Pickering, eds., Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 159–79. See Johannsen, Efflorescence and Identity. Beadworkers’ panel at the conference “Re-imagining Iroquoia: A Cross-Disciplinary Examination of Indigenous Representation and Museum Practice,” Castellani Art Gallery and State University of New York at Buffalo, ny, 22 October 2000. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” in Essays First and Second Series (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, Riverside Press, 1865), 282; quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, “The Inevitable Pit,” London Review of Books, 22, no. 18 (21 September 2000): 10. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago 1985), 3. Petr Bogatyrev, The Function of Folk Costume in Modern Slovakia (The Hague: Mouton 1971). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1984). Tom Hill, “Visual Prayers,” in Tom Hill and Richard W. Hill, Sr, eds., Creation’s Journey: Native American Identity and Belief (Washington, dc: Smithsonian Institution 1994), 68. Jolene Rickard, “Cew Ete Haw I Tih: The Bird That Carries Language Back to Another,” in Lucy Lippard, ed., Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans (New York: New Press 1992). Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge 1988), 15–17. Ryan Rice, ed., Kwah I:ken Tsi, Oh, So Iroquois (Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery 2008).

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CHAPTER 1

Professional/Volunteer

Women at the Edmonton Art Gallery, 1923–70 Anne Whitelaw

In 1978 a room in the Edmonton Art Gallery (eag) was dedicated to the memory of Maud Bowman (1875–1944), one of the founders of the Edmonton Museum of Arts (ema) in 1923, and its first director.1 The small room on the second floor, mostly used to display the gallery’s collection of Canadian art, was hung with paintings acquired during Bowman’s tenure at the museum (1923–43). The official opening of the Maud Bowman Gallery was a traditional affair, featuring a Sunday tea hosted by the gallery’s Women’s Society, a group of middle-class women accustomed to serving refreshments at similar events. For gallery staff and members of the board of directors, the event celebrated the contemporary success of an institution that had struggled for many years to survive. For members of the Women’s Society, it was an occasion to mark the achievements of this particular woman, and to reflect on their own outstanding contributions – both social and financial – to the Edmonton Art Gallery. I have described this event in some detail because it illustrates both the historical roles undertaken by women in museums and the prevailing attitudes toward the place of women within the institution. Maud Bowman appears here in the role of a museum professional – the first director, and the only female director of the art gallery until 2000; the naming of a part of the museum in her honour demonstrates the board’s recognition of her significance some thirty-five years after her death. The Women’s Society in this story occupies the more familiar role of the museum volunteer, providing refreshments and hosting guests yet remaining on the margins of the event itself. The ritual of Sunday afternoon tea, rather than the sophisticated canapés and cocktails evening reception that usually accompanies the celebration of an occasion of this importance, locates the event

(and its female participants – both alive and dead) within the genteel realm of the domestic. In other words, this event indexes how women’s positions in cultural organizations are circumscribed by assumptions about gender roles, the nature of professional labour, and cultural capital. While this observation is now a commonplace, a full analysis of the varied roles taken up by women in museums has yet to be undertaken. Indeed, although there have been several volumes exploring women collectors, curators, patrons, and artists,2 women’s volunteer organizations – the women’s societies, auxiliaries, and committees that have provided labour and funds to many cultural organizations since the nineteenth century – have largely been ignored by museum scholars.3 As volunteers, members of the Women’s Society of the Edmonton Art Gallery were present at all gallery events as purveyors of refreshments and exhibition guides, membership solicitors, and sellers of objects at the museum shop, and their presence continues to be visible on the labels of the many works purchased by the gallery through the more than one million dollars in funds they raised between 1943 and 1992.4 As fundraisers extraordinaire, the members of the Women’s Society ensured that the eag not only had the money to develop an acquisitions program but was also able to maintain operations during times of financial crisis. Such activities, however, are rarely discussed by museum scholars, including those particularly interested in the participation of women in museums. Whether because of the domestic character of many of their activities, or the assumption that members of the Women’s Society are little more than stereotypes of “the ladies who lunch,” the work of women’s museum volunteer organizations remains unexamined. In its focus on the activities of the Women’s Society of the Edmonton Art Gallery from the 1940s to the early 1970s, this chapter aims to redress the imbalance in the literature by giving greater consideration to the work of women’s voluntary labour in the museum, seeking to understand both why it was taken for granted at the time and why it continues to be overlooked in the present. Part of my strategy here is to situate the work of the Women’s Society in relation to the activities of two other women working in a voluntary capacity in the same period: Maud Bowman and Dorothy Dyde, chair of the ema’s acquisition committee between 1952 and 1964. As I will show, Bowman’s status as founding president and then as director of the ema put her in a leadership position that commanded respect from both the board of the museum and major figures in Canadian art of the time. Despite this, the same board had difficulty seeing her labour as anything more than the voluntary work of a cultured woman; upon Bowman’s retirement, a male director was appointed with salary and a Ladies’ Auxiliary was instituted. Dorothy “Bobby” Dyde, on the other hand, came to the Edmonton Museum of Arts with a much more extensive cultural pedigree, and, while she was never in a position of official power, she was the driving force in the expansion of the museum in the 1950s and early 1960s. Despite sharing 358

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social and economic status with the members of the Women’s Society, Dyde consciously separated herself from them and their activities, never attending their meetings and instead opening up her house to them on select occasions to enable a viewing of her personal art collection. Through the examination of the contributions of these women and the disparity in the ways they were perceived, this essay seeks to understand the tension between the visible and the invisible that underlies accounts of the work of women in museums. I will argue that the nature of the activities of the Women’s Society – and their presence as an ongoing collective – rendered their labour invisible not only to the paid staff of the Edmonton Art Gallery but also to the scholars who have written the histories of such institutions. Figures such as Maud Bowman and Bobby Dyde, on the other hand, retain a degree of visibility because their contributions to the gallery’s history more closely approximate what we might understand as professional museum work. That both women’s contributions were largely voluntary in nature would seem to align them more closely with the members of the Women’s Society, yet it is clear that as individuals with welldefined roles they will continue to be visible in histories of the eag even as those histories turn to the period when women leaders were replaced by men with professional accreditation.5 Indeed, the question of professionalization is a constant thread running through the essay, not because the women of the Edmonton Art Gallery necessarily aspired to such a status, but because it was always the shadowy bar against which all their work was measured.

The Director as Volunteer: Maud Bowman Maud Bowman’s leadership of a cultural institution – albeit a small one – was unusual. Her economic, educational, and social status is worth noting, since she does not fit the conventional model of a female museum leader as described in the literature. Bowman’s husband was a notary and census records show that the family took in boarders to supplement income; she was not an artist, and had not received training in librarianship or museum practices, although she did take a summer museum training course at McGill University in 1935 once she had been director for six years. Also, Bowman did not have the economic means to form a personal collection of major works of art, one of the primary ways in which women have historically instituted museums.6 The founding of the Edmonton Museum of Arts followed a path familiar to many other cultural institutions in Canada: individuals, motivated to develop the cultural life of emerging cities, garnered support from patrons and artist societies and created institutions that would provide objects for the education and, ostensibly, the moral improvement of their citizenry. The lack of wealth in the prairie provinces in the early 1920s meant that the kind of “instant art wh i t e l aw

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collections” that accompanied the formation of institutions in the east was not possible.7 In 1923, the year Bowman approached members of the Edmonton Art Club, the Edmonton Art Association, and select prominent citizens about the desirability of a museum of the arts, art activities in the city were still in their infancy. The Edmonton Art Club had been formed in 1921 “to propagate a generally wider, keener and more cultivated appreciation of the fine arts; to elevate the plane of local artistic effort; to encourage the production of original work among its members by the holding of exhibitions and cooperation in the sale of work.”8 Like many artist societies across the country, the club provided an opportunity for professional artists and skilled amateurs of both genders to view each other’s works, to participate in critiques, and to exchange ideas on the fine arts. In addition, its annual exhibitions gave many Edmontonians their first exposure to the fine arts. The Edmonton Art Association was founded in 1914, its membership consisting mostly of art teachers. Robert (R.W.) Hedley, supervisor of art for Edmonton public schools and later instructor in art at the Normal School, was one of the most prominent members and was active in the formation of the Edmonton Museum of Arts, ultimately succeeding Bowman as director in 1943. Maud Bowman was not a member of the Edmonton Art Club, nor does it appear that she was affiliated with the Edmonton Art Association. She was a member of the Edmonton branch of the Women’s Art Association of Canada (waac), discussed in chapter 1 of this volume, from its inception in 1911 to 1919 and was president of the Edmonton Women’s Musical Society between 1912 and 1922; as such, she was part of the network of women’s clubs that were affiliated with the city’s Local Council of Women.9 It was from this vantage point rather than through conventional art circles that Bowman solicited support for the museum.10 Her initial engagement with the Edmonton Art Club regarding the creation of a museum was recorded in the club’s minutes as: “Mrs. Bowman of the art section, Local Council of Women, had approached [club president William Johnstone] with a view to mutual help in securing a permanent art collection for the city.”11 This differs from the received history of the Edmonton Art Gallery which describes its founding as having been instigated by the Edmonton Art Club.12 The club’s minutes, however, note meetings between members of the Edmonton Art Club and Maud Bowman, and include references to “having to come to an agreement over terms,”13 although these were not specified. As if to underline possible tensions between Bowman and the Art Club, none of the five signatories to the Act of Incorporation of the Edmonton Museum of Arts was a member of the Edmonton Art Club.14 However, the Art Club lent works for the ema’s first exhibition in 1924 and held its annual exhibitions as well as its monthly meetings in the rooms of the museum until the early 1970s, demonstrating that the two institutions had a shared interest in raising awareness of art in Edmonton. 360

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Bowman began her work for the Edmonton Museum of Arts as the president of its board of trustees and de facto director. But, when it became evident that a full-time director was needed for the organization in 1929, she stepped into the position and assumed all its attendant roles and responsibilities. As the director of the Edmonton Museum of Arts, Bowman occupied a position of authority that granted her agency in shaping knowledge about the arts both in Edmonton and, in her engagement with other museum professionals, across North America. On examination of the museum’s archives, however, it soon becomes clear that, in the eyes of the board, Bowman was never able to shake her clubwoman status and was not treated in the way that her position warranted. Throughout her tenure as director, Bowman was a leader and indefatigable worker for the Edmonton Museum of Arts. From obtaining loans of paintings from the National Gallery of Canada and local collectors for the ema’s initial exhibitions to negotiating with the city for display space, hanging pictures, and organizing the children’s art classes, Bowman initiated and implemented the museum’s programming. As part of her work as director, she travelled regularly to observe the workings of museums in several North American cities. Reports describe her attendance at meetings of the American Museums Association and the American Federation of Artists, and discussions with curators and directors at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Museum of Toronto, and, of course, the National Gallery of Canada. She returned from each of these meetings with strategies for boosting the activities of the Edmonton Museum of Arts, particularly in relation to its educational work. The people Bowman encountered on these travels recognized her importance as the founder of the Edmonton Museum of Arts, hailing her as “a keen propagandist for Canadian Art in the West.”15 Yet, despite the connections made during these travels, the progress of the ema remained relatively slow, with few works entering its collection in the first few decades and relatively small grants from the city covering operating expenses. Bowman frequently bemoaned the lack of interest in the work of the museum by Edmonton’s citizens and the lack of financial support from the provincial and civic governments.16 Indeed, the citizens of Edmonton – including the wealthy men sitting on the ema’s board – provided little financial assistance in the first few decades of the museum, a situation that placed an even greater burden on Bowman to accomplish the museum’s work within a very limited budget.17 The issue of funds is important since Bowman seems to have worked largely in a volunteer capacity during the time she headed the Edmonton Museum of Arts. After her husband died in 1934, the question of money became a more important issue, and at various times in her correspondence with H.O. McCurry, assistant director of the National Gallery of Canada, she wrote of her desperation over finances, both personally and in relation to the museum. The board of the ema, however, did not see Bowman’s financial issues as problematic. In wh i t e l aw

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response to McCurry’s request that some money be found to pay Bowman “a regular salary,”18 the president, Dr Harold Orr, noted that the museum director’s financial situation was not as acute as she claimed, since she lived with three unmarried daughters, all gainfully employed.19 That Bowman had, on occasion, paid for supplies for the museum’s art classes rather than her property taxes does not seem to have concerned the many wealthy businessmen on the museum board, although they eventually acceded to paying Bowman an honorarium – which, in 1938, was in the amount of $450, the rough equivalent of $7,000 in today’s currency.20 The decision to compensate Bowman by means of an honorarium rather than a salary clearly underscores the perception of her work as a voluntary contribution rather than as a professional endeavour. In spite of her fears that the museum would cease to function at any moment because of a lack of funds, Bowman managed – with little apparent help from her board of trustees – to carry on producing exhibition and educational programs. The work for which her male successor would receive a salary, however, yielded her only intermittent honoraria. Given that Bowman had neither the social standing, the educational background, nor the cultural capital to position herself as a natural leader of the art museum, her experience of leadership at the ema between 1929 and 1943 presents the picture of a woman struggling between the demands of a professional organization and assumptions that, as a woman, her role was predominantly that of a (voluntary) caretaker.

The Women’s Society and Professional Volunteerism Maud Bowman remained director of the Edmonton Museum of Arts until 1943 when ill health forced her to resign. She died the following year. In his director’s report of 1944, her successor, Robert Hedley, announced the formation of the Women’s Society of the ema, stating that a Ladies’ Auxiliary “can do more than any other body … to further the general interest in the museum.”21 The first president of the Women’s Society was Aura Wells, the widow of Dr R.B. Wells, a wealthy art collector and long-time president of the museum. From the beginning, much of the focus of the Women’s Society’s activities lay in raising interest in the museum, although the membership also acknowledged the importance of fundraising for its programs. The first report of the Women’s Society gave some idea of the tone of the new organization. Written by Mrs Wells, it stated: Proving Kipling’s opinion that the “female of the species is more deadly than the male,” listen to the record of our Women’s Society of the Museum of Arts which was formed as recently as the fall of 1943. We have collected over five hundred dollars. 362

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The object of our Society is threefold: – 1. To assist our Curator, Mr. Hedley, in his work in the Museum, 2. To arouse keen interest among Edmontonians in the Museum, 3. To raise money to provide a scholarship for a deserving pupil or to buy for the Museum a picture by a Canadian artist.22 Initially, much of the work of the Women’s Society was relatively modest in scale: it held membership teas on Sunday afternoons (Fig. 12.1), provided refreshments for museum events, and organized a Christmas bazaar. What funds it raised were folded back into the society to finance future social events. It became clear to many of the women, however, that as a group they were adept fundraisers and they devised more activities to support the museum financially. One such activity was the organization of a handicrafts store in 1945, which was open a few

Fig. 12.1 A Women’s Society tea party at the Edmonton Museum of Arts, as pictured in the Edmonton Bulletin, February 1949 (left to right: Mrs H.C. Gourlay, Mrs Julian Garrett, Mrs Gordon Swallow).

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days a week in the museum and sold novelties, curios, and, on a commission basis, the work of a number of craft artists living in the city.23 This endeavour was relatively lucrative, although it demanded a considerable amount of effort to acquire work to sell in the first place, and to dispose of whatever did not get purchased. “The Museum Shop” also offered art reproductions for sale, first from the National Gallery of Canada, then of Inuit prints as these started to circulate to handicrafts stores and museum shops across the country in the early 1960s. The Women’s Society also organized monthly luncheons, Sunday afternoon concerts, fashion shows, gala balls, and auctions – all in order to raise funds for the gallery. Its most productive period was during the 1970s and 1980s when it regularly raised between $50,000 and $100,000 a year – most of which was turned over to the gallery for acquisitions. In this work, the Women’s Society undertook many of the same activities assumed by other museum voluntary organizations across western Canada.24 Committed to working with what it sometimes referred to as the “Men’s Society”25 (that is, the museum’s board of trustees) to raise awareness of the museum’s activities among the broader public, it took on projects that were largely social in nature and that would reach a broad audience of both men and women. As the museum evolved, so did the role of the Women’s Society and the activities it sponsored. While hosting social events continued to be an important part of its work, the group’s commercial fundraising activities also expanded as it took on management of the Art Sales and Rental Gallery,26 developed sponsorships by local businesses for the “Art Mart,” and selected items for sale in the gallery store. These activities increased in the 1970s as many of the hostess functions were taken over by professional catering companies and as the women themselves showed more interest in less traditional kinds of contributions to the running of the gallery. Despite the considerable amount of funds it raised for the Edmonton Art Gallery’s acquisitions, the Women’s Society had very little say in how that money was spent when it came to the purchasing of art.27 There were, however, some notable exceptions: in its first few years, the Women’s Society purchased a moss cradle bag (reputed to be two hundred years old and purchased from an Aboriginal family in northern Saskatchewan), an embroidered panel from Asia, and a painting by A.Y. Jackson, purchased in memory of a long-time member in 1956. Monies were also donated to buy display cases for existing objects in the collection, specifically several collections of “Indian and Esquimaux curios” that had been donated to the ema in the 1930s and 1940s. These art objects, however, seem to have been haphazard acquisitions for the Women’s Society. In a short history of the society compiled in 1965 by its archivist, Mabel L. Grant, the cradle bag and the fan are listed alongside other objects purchased by the Women’s Society to support the gallery’s activities, including a twenty-five-cup percolator, a floor polisher, and tablecloths.28 The grouping of artworks with 364

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more mundane items indicates the equal value placed by the Women’s Society on all its activities, but the limited number of cultural objects on the list suggests that this was not an area of acquisitions in which the women were much involved. This clearly frustrated members: a motion was passed at the meeting of 11 April 1963 that a request be made to have a representative of the Women’s Society appointed to the gallery’s acquisition committee, “in view of the fact that the Women’s Society give a considerable contribution.”29 No such appointment was made, however, and the women renewed their request in January 1965; the gallery’s board responded by suggesting that a Women’s Society representative act as a liaison between the acquisition committee and the society, rather than become a fully fledged member of that committee. Further underlining the women’s desire to have their contributions recognized, the society asked that plaques identifying works purchased using Women’s Society funds be affixed to appropriate works.30 At the society’s annual meeting in April 1965, members were shown a selection of works acquired for the permanent collection that year and asked to vote on which ones should be designated as having been purchased by the Women’s Society. Still, the women did have some input into the nature of acquisitions supported by their funds when, in 1967, they dedicated $2,000 to a gift to the gallery to mark the Canadian centenary. After much discussion, the society decided to use the funds to purchase Inuit sculpture, a proposal that was accepted by the acquisitions committee.31 While the gallery had some Inuit objects in its collection, it had not been an area of active acquisition; this now changed, and in 1969–70, fifty-five prints and sculptures were purchased by the Women’s Society and given to the gallery. The society’s decision to make the acquisition of Inuit art its centennial gift is not surprising; women’s groups at other Canadian museums such as the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Toronto had undertaken similar projects. This is likely due to the early sponsorship of Inuit art by the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, whose predominantly female membership was instrumental in arranging for the circulation of Inuit art through Hudson’s Bay Company stores and in their own Montreal galleries and then in fielding sales of the first editions of Cape Dorset prints through Canadian museum gift shops. Indeed, the Women’s Society sold Inuit prints in the museum shop beginning in 1960, an activity that undoubtedly further encouraged its choice of Inuit art as a centennial gift to the Edmonton Art Gallery.32 The purchase of Inuit art appears to be an isolated instance of the Women’s Society having a decision-making role in the purchase of works for the eag. Even as the women increased the amount of funds raised for acquisitions, their involvement in how those funds were used decreased. There was yet another request, also unsuccessful, in September 1972 that one, and possibly two, members of the Women’s Society be appointed to the acquisitions committee; and a 1972 request that funds be used to purchase ceramics for the permanent collection wh i t e l aw

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was firmly rejected by the gallery’s director and chief curator.33 The society’s request in 1976 that its funds be spent on “historical Canadian” works rather than the modernist paintings and sculptures that were the focus of the eag’s collecting activities at the time was better received.34 Such an arm’s-length relationship to the spending of the monies raised is characteristic of the majority of Canadian museums’ women’s societies at the time. A notable exception is the Women’s Committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which had much greater involvement in decisions regarding art purchased with its funds. The Women’s Committee can be credited with the development of the ago’s collection of contemporary Canadian and American art from the 1940s through the 1980s.35 The Women’s Society of the Edmonton Art Gallery clearly valued its contributions as fundraisers, hosts, and educators and did not try to obtain the same degree of control over the use of its funds in the realm of acquisitions as did its counterpart organization in Toronto. Yet the debate over inclusion of even one representative member on the gallery’s acquisition committee suggests a reluctance on the part of the gallery’s board and staff to view the women as anything other than money-making art lovers. A glimpse of this attitude might be obtained from a 1970 directive from then board president Al Pyrch that he participate in the selection of work for the Art Rental and Sales Gallery run by the Women’s Society, in order to ensure that the works chosen for sale were of a quality suitable to the status of the organization. A further assertion that “the Gallery’s aim of professionalism must also be the aim of the Women’s Society”36 must have irked the society, which by that point had contributed a significant amount of money and labour to the operation of the gallery and had done so with the highest level of efficiency and skill (Fig. 12.2).

Negotiating Visibility and Invisibility in the Museum The timing of the formation of the Women’s Society in the year following Maud Bowman’s resignation as director is not surprising: the formation of a Women’s Society was encouraged in 1943 because it was evident that women were needed to do the myriad little tasks unbecoming the professional (viz. male) director. As a (married) woman of the middle class, Maud Bowman was expected to “look after” or to “care for” (in the fully domestic sense of the term) the work of the museum. Bowman was not alone in this work. In their accounts of the centrality of women to the formation of art museums and other cultural organizations in North America from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, Kathleen D. McCarthy, Dianne Sachko Macleod, and Karen Blair have shown that the nature of such participation ranged from the contributions of elite women whose wealth and independent collecting activities afforded them the power and the finances to establish museums outright, to the work of less wealthy – although still elite – 366

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Fig. 12.2 Members of the Women’s Society Spruce up the Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton Journal, 11 July 1959.

clubwomen who saw the arts as an invaluable component of city life and worked hard to build community support for the establishment of museums and galleries.37 While these models may differ in the character of their institutional impact, the women involved experienced similar challenges to their authority and knowledge from the predominantly male professionals who assumed increasing control over the running and mandates of museums and galleries. wh i t e l aw

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Wealthy women collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller provide one model for thinking about the importance of women in the formation of cultural institutions. Both built extensive personal collections, both on their own and with the assistance of experts but independently of their husbands. Both saw the development of a collection – and its presentation in the private spaces of their homes – as a way to distinguish themselves from their husbands by asserting their own taste and values and positioning these as separate from the very influential opinions of the masculinist public sphere. Gardner established her own museum and functioned as its curator, bringing the domestic and the aesthetic together not only through the very existence of the institution itself but in her precise instructions regarding the layout of the objects throughout its rooms.38 Rockefeller, for her part, used her connections in the arts community to spur the formation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (moma). She was quite decisive in the formation of her own collection and was particularly interested in the work of modern European artists, an interest that was decidedly not shared by her industrialist husband. In establishing moma, Rockefeller called on two other female art collectors, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, and the philanthropist Josephine Boardman Crane to serve on its board of trustees.39 As Dianne Sachko Macleod details, during this period the women had control over the functioning of the institution. However, as the museum became established, and its status as purveyor of cultural value became more apparent, the men whom Rockefeller had invited to sit on the board of trustees exerted an increasing amount of influence on both the nature and presentation of art in the museum. As Director Alfred Barr, Jr, asserted his masculinist aesthetic of a functionalist modernism at moma, Rockefeller and her cohort were slowly but surely edged out of their positions of power and influence. A turning point in this process came with Artemas Packard’s 1938 “Report on the Development of Modern Art,” which, in its recommendations for future directions, asserted that “no really significant development of contemporary art can take place in this country without the whole-hearted participation of men.”40 Arguing that lack of public interest in art was due to its cultivation by women, Packard and his supporters administered what can only be described as a slap across the face to the many women who had worked tirelessly to create and maintain art institutions across North America. This is just one example of the process outlined by McCarthy whereby the professionalization of the museum institution occurred at the expense of women’s contributions both paid and unpaid.41 Whether it was the replacement of women working as de facto curators on the organization and classification of objects in museum collections, or the wholesale removal of women from positions of power, it is clear that by the 1930s, in most major art museums in North America, women had been replaced by men with professional degrees.

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In considering this particular history of “art matronage”42 as a model, there are instances in the history of Canadian art institutions wherein wealthy female collectors (alone or in concert with their husbands) have assisted in establishing or building art collections and/or museums. Lianne McTavish discusses Alice Lusk Webster’s role in building and organizing the New Brunswick Museum’s Art Department elsewhere in this volume; Harriette and Goldwyn Smith’s donation of their home, The Grange, as well as their art collection to the Art Gallery of Toronto is another example of female involvement with patronage. But in many other instances – particularly in parts of the country where art collecting was not a priority among the elite (Edmonton, for example) – women’s roles follow more closely the clubwoman model described by Karen Blair than the “Enchanted Lives” of America’s Progressive Era patrons. Indeed, the clubwoman model offers a more pertinent lens through which to understand the experience of the Edmonton Museum of Arts, particularly in its early championing of art as one component of a much broader attempt to impart the values and priorities of an educated and cultured society.43 Much of the motivation behind women’s clubs’ championing of cultural activities lay in the suitability of these activities to the broader reformist aims and goals of the club. Voluntary activities by women across North America included suffrage associations and groups focused on work and health reform, children’s welfare, and public morality. As Karen Blair suggests, art, music, and theatre existed alongside such advocacy for social reform and frequently received support only where it was seen to complement this work.44 There is also a distinct class affiliation evident here, since women’s social-reform organizations attracted middle- and upper-middle-class women, not the elite philanthropists described by McCarthy and Macleod (although many of these women sympathized with and supported these reformist activities and often used their collections as springboards for more political activities). Blair’s account of club women and their role in establishing cultural institutions helps make sense not only of Maud Bowman’s work for the Edmonton Museum of Arts but also of some of the better-known Canadian organizations such as the Women’s Art Association of Canada. The waac’s affiliation with the National Council of Women of Canada and its sponsorship of training programs for working-class women in needlework and other handicrafts fit the altruistic objectives of the women’s art clubs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blair’s account, however, does not extend past 1930, thus leaving the work of those art groups operating within the clubwoman model in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s unexamined. This omission seems to have much to do with what appears to be the relative conservatism of both the activities of groups such as the Women’s Society and the women themselves, most of whom were stay-athome wives and mothers whose decisions to volunteer for an elite institution such as an art gallery were often motivated by social rather than political interests.

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Wendy Kaminer suggests that the lack of critical discussion of voluntarism has to do with second wave feminism’s need to reject it because it did not fit into the politics of the women’s movement. Voluntarism, in this view, “represented a tradition of public housewifery … The new woman of the 1970s could be an activist; she could work for free to change an inequitable system but she could not be a volunteer.”45 The clubwomen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the other hand, could more easily be inscribed into a narrative of self-empowerment and activism because their actions were viewed as opposing the conventions of domestic femininity of the time. Referring to clubwomen as “torchbearers,” Karen Blair writes, Can we label club life as feminism? … Yes, their members were pathbreaking in the founding of arts institutions and programs for culture, and in their support for professional arts institutions. They were visionary in creating new vehicles for community involvement in the arts. Their handling of finances, politics and organization clearly places them in the arena of women who were breaking out of the domestic realm. Yet insofar as many members justified their behavior on the basis of old-fashioned goals like love of nation, family, beauty, home, and sharing, the work was acceptable and nonthreatening to upholders of the status quo.46 Looking at the experience of Maud Bowman in light of this quote, it is possible to see how her single-mindedness of purpose and dedication to the cause of the Edmonton Museum of Arts would have been viewed as inhabiting that intermediate position between feminist empowerment and the conservative domesticity of the early-twentieth-century clubwoman. How well this sat with the members of the museum’s board of trustees is not clear: Bowman’s correspondence reveals an emotional woman who would become petulant if she did not get what she wanted. Some members of the board felt that she was something of a liability for the future of the institution and confided to the National Gallery’s H.O. McCurry that “many business men who ought to be generous donators have taken offence at something said and refuse to have anything to do with the museum.”47 Whether this was an accurate representation of Bowman’s character or rather reflected discomfort with the tactics of a forceful woman is difficult to say. Certainly, as time wore on and the fortunes of the Edmonton Museum of Arts failed to improve, the fact that the board felt the need to note that it had “a suitable man” ready to replace Bowman points to the view held by many by the 1940s that museums – even relatively small ones in outlying provinces – should be staffed by men. An interesting counterpoint to the clear-cut division between professional men and volunteer women is Bobby Dyde. Dorothy “Bobby” Dyde was a member of the eag’s board of directors from 1952 to 1964 and the chair of its acquisi370

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tion committee.48 She was a major force in the increased professionalization of the museum during this period, suggesting the creation of a subcommittee of the board to oversee the collecting and exhibiting activities at the gallery and developing a cataloguing system for the works in the museum’s permanent collection. As chair of the selection and exhibition (later acquisition) committee, Dyde used her considerable network of artists, dealers, and museum professionals across Canada to obtain suitable works of art for the museum. During her tenure, the number of paintings and sculptures entering the collection on a yearly basis increased threefold from donations, purchases, and bequests. In addition to increasing the flow of works to the institution, Dyde also worked with Director John MacGillivray in the formulation of an acquisition policy for the gallery, presented to the board of trustees in 1963.49 In addition to being on the board of the Edmonton Art Gallery, Bobby Dyde was a trustee of the National Gallery of Canada, a position she held from 1952 until 1968 when the creation of the National Museums of Canada Corporation dispensed with the need for a separate National Gallery board. She was a familiar figure to many members of the Ottawa and central Canada art establishment because of her first marriage to Alan Plaunt, the co-founder (with Graham Spry) of the Canadian Radio League in 1930, a lobby group that strongly supported the creation of a national broadcasting system. When her second marriage to lawyer H.A. Dyde brought her to Edmonton, she carried on her strong friendships with such leading Canadian artists as Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, and Frances Loring, often inviting them to stay at her house if they were travelling through the city. Such connections – particularly those with the National Gallery – were vitally important for the Edmonton Art Gallery, which was still struggling to make a name for itself in the 1950s and 1960s. Often frustrated by the conservative taste of Edmonton’s citizens, Dyde nevertheless championed the gallery’s activities and was a strong advocate for art in the west in her correspondence with the National Gallery and other organizations.50 Dyde’s involvement with the eag contrasts significantly with that of the members of the Women’s Society. From the outset, she aligned herself with the professional work of cataloguing the collection, providing coherence and clarity to what was by the 1950s a varied assortment of paintings, sculptures, Aboriginal objects, and items of historical interest. Separating works of aesthetic importance from the study collection and the collection of historical objects, Dyde redefined the museum’s permanent collection as consisting exclusively of works of fine art, thus enabling the institution’s change of name from the Edmonton Museum of Arts to the Edmonton Art Gallery in 1956. With the 1961 hiring of John MacGillivray, the gallery’s first director with training in museum practices, Dyde was able to undertake other projects key to the professionalization of the gallery, in particular the formulation of an acquisitions policy that put the eag in line with other major art institutions in the country. Dyde’s graduate degree in wh i t e l aw

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library studies and her membership in the intellectual, political, and cultural circles surrounding the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission and the National Gallery of Canada gave her a level of cultural capital unrivalled by any other member of the eag’s board or staff. Yet she also felt the need to solidify her position by distinguishing her volunteer activities from those of the Women’s Society with whom she shared her social and economic class. Dyde quite deliberately distanced herself physically from the Women’s Society by not attending their meetings, and attending luncheons and teas only when her presence as a museum board member was warranted. And, while she occasionally performed a role as a hostess, it was in the context of welcoming individuals into her own home, and then only as an invitation to view her significant collection of Canadian art. Dyde’s need to separate herself physically and psychically from the women affiliated with the Women’s Society is not surprising in light of her desire to contribute to the professionalization of the Edmonton Art Gallery. Her selection of tasks, her management of projects, and her ability to bring important acquisitions to the gallery are more in line with the work of the director than either a member of the board or a volunteer. Indeed, with the hiring of a professional for the position of director in 1961, Dyde appears to have become less involved in the major projects undertaken by the institution, and she ended her long tenure on the eag’s board in 1965 when she lost her fight to erect the gallery’s new building across the river from the University of Alberta. Despite the nature of her contributions, Dyde’s gender meant that she would be judged by the values of the time and of her class that deemed women’s place to be in the home. But, unlike the members of the Women’s Society, whose labour was more often than not taken for granted by the museum’s board, Dyde’s contributions to the professional development of the Edmonton Art Gallery ensured that she maintained a more visible profile among board members and museum staff alike.

Conclusion This account of the work of Maud Bowman, the Women’s Society, and Bobby Dyde illustrates the diversity of roles occupied by women at the Edmonton Art Gallery from 1923 to the early 1970s. During this period, women’s participation in museum work was seen almost entirely in terms of voluntarism, a view underscored by the unwillingness of the board of the Edmonton Museum of Arts to pay Maud Bowman the regular salary of a museum director. The formation of the Women’s Society in 1943 to assist with the range of necessary tasks that were no longer considered appropriate to a professional male directorship further points to the close association between women and voluntarism in the museum. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bobby Dyde skilfully navigated her way through the

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shoals of this sophistry and deliberately distanced herself from the Women’s Society in an effort to secure the professional status she deserved by virtue of her education and accumulated cultural capital. Despite their shared connection to voluntarism, however, the women discussed in this essay received markedly different treatment. As its first director, Maud Bowman is a central figure in contemporaneous newspaper and archival accounts of the gallery’s founding, her gender further marking her for attention since she was one of the few women occupying such a position of authority in Canada. While less known, Bobby Dyde was also recognized, if only for her role in securing important bequests for the institution at an early phase of its development. As for the Women’s Society, though it raised more than a million dollars, it remains absent from the remembered history of the Edmonton Art Gallery, an observation that can be extended to the histories of most art institutions in North America. The lack of visibility accorded to the work of women’s societies in museums can be attributed to several factors: the lack of records of their activities, the socially conservative and domestic character of many of their endeavours, and their group status. Exceptionally, the Women’s Society of the Edmonton Art Gallery kept careful records of its activities, including minutes for all meetings, some correspondence, and newspaper clippings of almost all its events, and these are found alongside the archives of the Edmonton Art Gallery in the City of Edmonton Archives. Other women’s societies that were not that lucky or organized have faded from view. That many institutional archives were initiated and continue to be maintained by voluntary women’s organizations is a telling irony given the lack of archival presence of many museum women’s societies. Certainly, the limited documentation of women’s society activities has deterred many historians from writing about them. Even where documentation exists, however, the socially conservative and domestic character of many of the activities initiated by women’s groups has been another deterrent to serious scholarly analysis. As the preceding account describes, the Women’s Society’s fundraising activities were oriented around bake-and-craft sales, membership teas, and gift shops that drew support from and were largely geared toward the members of Edmonton’s social elite. Recent feminist research has overturned the bias against women’s practices of consumption as legitimate sites of inquiry,51 yet even these are cast in a model of politicized action and do not make a place for the kinds of traditional activities that formed the core of the Women’s Society’s fundraising. Perhaps most significantly, however, the collective nature of volunteer organizations and their fluctuating membership make them difficult subjects for analysis. Although there are central figures associated with the Edmonton Art Gallery’s Women’s Society, it is the activities of the organization rather than of individual presidents that are recorded. In addition, the members of the society

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identified themselves with the group and regularly cited the contribution of all Women’s Society members to the success of specific events. There is a degree of effacement that occurs in the annual reports of the Women’s Society that further reinforces the collective nature of its work – an effacement that is also found in the acknowledgments and thanks given to the Women’s Society by the gallery’s board in its own annual reports. Considered in relation to the existing literature on women in the museum, this aspect of collectivity underscores the inability of contemporary scholars to address the work of voluntary societies. Much of this is due to the continued bias in historiography toward narratives of individual accomplishments – as seen, for example, in the many accounts of figures such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Abby Rockefeller, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whose money and cultural capital led to the formation of many important cultural institutions. Such a reliance on exceptional narratives of particular women, however, undermines the work of ordinary women without whose labour such institutions would not have remained open. In this, scholars are displaying the same the kind of outlook expressed by those nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century men who swept aside the work of their wives, mothers, and sisters to establish what they considered to be more professional (and therefore serious or legitimate) institutions. Maud Bowman and Bobby Dyde can find a place in this narrative, but the Women’s Society remains invisible. As a result, these women have been twice marginalized: first by the board and professional staff of the Edmonton Art Gallery, who dismissed their aesthetic taste and gave minimal recognition to their activities, and second by accounts of women in art institutions by scholars who cannot narrate their activities in the familiar terms of personal accomplishment or innovation. Understanding the role of women in museums in the first seventy years of the twentieth century thus requires analysis not only of those figures such as Maud Bowman and Bobby Dyde whose activities were recorded and whose accomplishments can be measured according to dominant conceptions of cultural labour and professional success. It also requires attention to those unnamed figures without whose largely unacknowledged work the museum would not function. In order to make this acknowledgment possible, we need to develop a frame of analysis that moves beyond narratives of personal achievement and innovative cultural leadership to account for the multiple forms of agency experienced by women across the institution. This means taking seriously the work of the women’s societies (including the bake sales, fancy-dress balls, and gift shops) and rendering it visible in any analysis of the operations of the art museum.

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notes 1 The Edmonton Museum of Arts was renamed the Edmonton Art Gallery in 1956 to better reflect its exclusive focus on the fine arts. In 2001 the institution changed its name to the Art Gallery of Alberta. Because this essay covers the period 1924 to the early 1970s, I will use the name by which the organization was known at the time under discussion. 2 In addition to the growing literature on women artists in Canada and elsewhere, individual studies of women collectors, patrons, and curators include Mary V. Dearborn, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 2004); and Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York: Atheneum 1990). 3 Publications on women’s volunteer organizations include Anna Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1991); and Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy and Power (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press 1990). 4 The Women’s Society of the Edmonton Art Gallery was founded in 1943. In 1988 it changed its name to the Art Associates of the Edmonton Art Gallery to reflect the participation of men as well as women in its voluntary activities. It ceased activities in 1992. 5 There is currently little written about the history of the Edmonton Art Gallery outside of my own research for the exhibition I curated at the Art Gallery of Alberta (Building a Collection: 80 Years at the Edmonton Art Gallery, 21 January–6 April 2006). This material is also the basis of my current book manuscript “The Art of Museum-building in Canada (1920–1990).” Mention is made of the

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formation of the gallery and the role of Maud Bowman in Nancy Townshend’s A History of Art in Alberta 1905–1970 (Calgary: Bayeux Arts 2005); Bowman is also featured in K. Sanderson, 200 Remarkable Alberta Women, ed. Elda Hauschildt (Calgary: Famous Five Foundation 1999), where she is erroneously described as the founder of the Edmonton Art Club. Given the reach of her connections in the Canadian art world from the 1940s through the 1970s, Bobby Dyde’s name appears frequently in the literature on Canadian artists but no single study has yet been undertaken of her life or her activities. 6 Relevant examples of such female patronage include Isabella Stewart Gardner, who founded her eponymous museum in 1903; Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller’s founding of the Museum of Modern Art; and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force’s formation of the Whitney Museum of American Art. See Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991); and Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture 1800–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2008). 7 See, for example, the histories of the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) and the Art Museum of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). The core of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts collection was formed in 1877 when Montreal businessman Benaiah Gibb donated his collection of fine and decorative art to the Art Association, together with land on Phillips Square for the construction of a museum building. Similarly, Harriette Smith and her husband, Goldwyn, made the Art Museum of Toronto possible through the donation of The Grange and adjacent

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parkland in 1900; the gift was accompanied by a group of paintings and sculptures presented to the nascent organization by the Smiths together with other interested Toronto collectors. Minutes of the Edmonton Art Club, 1921–27, 6 October 1921, Edmonton Art Club fonds, ms 726, box 1, file 1, City of Edmonton Archives (cea). An Edmonton chapter of the National Council of Women of Canada was briefly formed in 1894, largely owing to the visit of the governor general and Lady Ishbel to western Canada. The local council was re-established in 1908. See N.E.S. Griffiths, The Splendid Vision: Centennial History of the National Council of Women of Canada, 1893–1993 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1993). As such, Bowman’s involvement with the Edmonton Museum of Arts follows a different path from that of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which enjoyed support from women active in the Winnipeg Branch of the Women’s Art Association of Canada. See Virginia Berry, Taming the Frontier: Art and Women in the Canadian West, 1880–1920 (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, and Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2005). Minutes of the Edmonton Art Club, 1921–27, Special Meeting, 8 November 1923, Edmonton Art Club fonds, ms 726, box 1, file 1, cea. See, for example, Archie F. Key, Beyond Four Walls: The Origins and Development of Canadian Museums (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1973), 156. Minutes of the Edmonton Art Club, 1921–27, Special Meeting, 8 November 1923, Edmonton Art Club fonds, ms 726, box 1, file 1, cea. The signatories to the 1924 document of incorporation of the Edmonton Museum of Arts were John Imrie, managing editor of the Edmonton Journal, John MacDougall, financier, Dr R.B. Wells, medical doctor, Lucien Dubuc, judge, and Bowman, who was listed on the document as

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“married woman.” Council minutes, 1924–28, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 1, cea. Ontario Society of Artists, President’s Annual Report 1929–30, http://www.ccca.ca/history/osa/english/ references/1930-rpt.html (accessed 21 January 2010). In the first few decades of its existence, the Edmonton Museum of Arts received a grant from the provincial government of $1,000 in 1930 and 1931 only. A request for funding in December 1947 resulted in a grant of $500 a year from the province starting in 1948. The city of Edmonton, meanwhile, provided quarters for the museum in various municipal buildings and paid for heat and electricity until the ema’s move to a permanent building in 1952, at which point it increased its financial grant to $5,000 a year. Council minutes, 1928–42, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 2, cea. An indication of Bowman’s frustration can be gleaned from her Director’s Report of 1935–36: “You have listened to the Financial report and to the report of the Membership Committee, and you will perhaps wonder why I should ask if it is worth while trying to carry on. Allow me to ask a few questions, is it right that such a handful of citizens be expected to provide a Museum for all the rest, do the Educators in this city realize the importance of Art as a factor in education, are the business men awake to the necessity of Art in manufacture and of its invaluable aid in the training of experts in every avenue of business? Is the average citizen aware of those values to say nothing of the aesthetic and spiritual value of Art, or are we all asleep dreaming our dreams of material gains without a thought of our own responsibility in the matter?” Council minutes, 1928–42, Annual General Meeting, 23 April 1936, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 2, cea. H.O. McCurry to E.H. Hill, 24 August

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1936, Carnegie Corporation, Alberta, box 291, file 7, Edmonton Museum of Arts, vol. 1, National Gallery of Canada Archives (ngca). In his letter, McCurry points out that the museum had paid Bowman only $150 in 1934–35 and nothing at all in 1935–36, and notes that should council decide to pay Bowman a regular salary, the National Gallery might be prepared to assist it on a 50–50 basis for a limited period of time. Harold Orr to H.O. McCurry, 4 November 1936. Carnegie Corporation, Alberta, box 291, file 7, Edmonton Museum of Arts, vol. 2, ngca. Council minutes, 1928–1942, Annual General Meeting, 17 October 1938, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 1, cea. Council minutes, 1942–47, Annual General Meeting, 2 November 1943, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 3, cea. Council minutes, 1942–47, 9 January 1945, Report of the Women’s Society, 1943–44, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 3, cea. The sale of handicrafts may be linked to an existing interest on the part of members of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild who had opened a store in Edmonton after May Phillips’s trip out west to promote the work of the guild. See Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999), 157. The Vancouver Art Gallery’s Women’s Auxiliary began its operations in 1943 and the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Women’s Committee was formed in 1948. For two examples of such references, see the minutes of the Women’s Society meetings on 29 October 1952 and 19 January 1961. Minutes of the Women’s Society, 1943–64, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 12, vol. 1, cea. The Junior League of Edmonton initiated the art-rental project in 1957 as a volun-

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tary contribution to the Edmonton Art Gallery. Its management was handed over to the Women’s Society in 1964. This seems to differ from the experience of some other museum women’s societies. See, for example, Catherine Logan’s study of the Women’s Committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario, whose members consulted directly with such art professionals as the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr in their selection of works for presentation to the gallery. Catherine Logan, “Acquiring Authority at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre: Canadian Women and the Cultural Volunteer Experience” (ma thesis, Carleton University, 1997). Mabel L. Grant, “A Short History of the Women’s Society of the Edmonton Art Gallery. From its Inception in 1943 to Midsummer, 1965,” Minutes of the Women’s Society, 1965–68, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 2, cea. Minutes of the Women’s Society, 1943– 64, 11 April 1963, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 12, vol. 1, cea. Minutes of the Women’s Society, 1943– 64, 9 December 1964, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 12, vol. 1, cea. The Gallery Council rejected the idea of plaques attached to the front of paintings but agreed to identify works purchased with Women’s Society funds by a label on the back of works, and to include that information on any identifying label. Minutes of the Women’s Society, 1969– 80, 10 September 1969, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 12, vol. 3, cea. See the discussion of Alice Lighthall’s role in the formation of the Indian and Eskimo committee of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in McLeod’s In Good Hands, 226– 7. See also Nelson Graburn, “Authentic Inuit Art: Creation and Exclusion in the Canadian North,” Journal of Material Culture, 9, no. 2 (2004): 141–59. See letters to the acquisition committee from Karen Wilkin, curator (15 June

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1973), and Terry Fenton, director (June 1973), Council minutes, 1973–74, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 16, vol. 2, cea. Council meetings etc., February 1976– January 1977, acquisition committee, 12 February 1976, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 16, vol. 6, cea. See Logan, “Acquiring Authority at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.” Minutes of the Women’s Society, 1969– 80, 15 April 1970, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 12, vol. 3, cea. McCarthy, Women’s Culture; Karen J. Blair, ed., The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Art Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1994); and Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects. Wanda Corn, “Art Matronage in PostVictorian America,” in Wanda Corn, ed., Cultural Leadership in America: Art Matronage and Patronage (special issue of Fenway Court, 27; Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 1997), 9–51. Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects, 156–60. Artemas Packard, “A Report on the Development of the Museum of Modern Art, Based on a Survey of the Present Organization and Activities of the Museum Conducted during the Years 1935–36,” typescript, 1938, Museum of Modern Art Archives, 88–9; quoted in Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects, 167. McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 111–45. See Corn, “Art Matronage,” for use of this term. See, for example, Maud Bowman’s Director’s Report of 1932–33 which states in part: “We know that Edmonton needs a Museum, that without it our educational system is incomplete, our Youth growing up with very little opportunity for learning of the things which endure. For after

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all neither Edmonton nor Canada will be remembered because of Lands or money bags, but because of contributions to Science and Art.” Council minutes, 1928–42, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, box 14, vol. 2, cea. Blair, The Torchbearers, 36. Wendy Kaminer, Women Volunteering: The Pleasure, Pain and Politics of Unpaid Work from 1830 to the Present (Garden City, ny: Anchor Press 1984), 3–4. Blair, The Torchbearers, 7. Harold Orr to H.O. McCurry, 4 November 1936, Carnegie Corporation, Alberta, box 291, file 7, Edmonton Museum of Arts, vol. 2, ngca. Despite the Women’s Society’s references to the gallery’s board of directors as the “Men’s Society,” a few women had been appointed to the board, starting of course with Maud Bowman but followed by Mrs. W.J. Dick (convener of the entertainment committee) in 1936 and Miss Brugueyroux (secretary) in 1946. The Acquisition Policy was presented to Council on 14 May 1963. See Council minutes, 1962–64, box 14, vol. 9, Edmonton Art Gallery fonds, cea. See, for example, her letter to H.O. McCurry, 10 December 1952: “Our Museum opened at long last the other day and it looks very well. Thanks to Mr. Southam, Mr. Laidlaw and to Alex [A.Y. Jackson] who gave some magnificent sketches a few years ago the Canadian collection is good. The Horrors are being hidden as fast as possible. I think we have the best Canadian collection west of Ontario – but don’t tell anyone! It is very limited but the quality is good.” Board of trustees – Mrs H.A. Dyde, box 359, file 12, ngca. See, for example, Erika D. Rappaport, “‘A New Era of Shopping’: The Promotion of Women’s Pleasure in London’s West End, 1909–1914,” in Jennifer Scanlon, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press

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2000), 30–48; and Anne Friedberg, “‘… Therefore I Am’: The Shopper-Spectator and Transubstantiation through Purchase,” in Christoph Grunenberg and

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CHAPTER 1

“Marjorie’s Web”

Canada’s First Woman Architect and Her Clients1 Annmarie Adams

How did Canada’s first registered woman architect establish a network of clients? This chapter uses the analogy of a spider’s web to examine how the life membership of Esther Marjorie Hill (1895–1985) in the Victoria Handweavers’ and Spinners’ Guild in Victoria, British Columbia, led to commissions for kitchen renovations and her life-long interest in functional domestic design. Its major contribution to our historical understanding of women’s organizations is its approach through oral, visual, and built sources. Based on interviews with Hill’s friends and clients, newspaper articles about her life, documentation of extant projects in Victoria, and Hill’s papers held in the University of Toronto Archives, “Marjorie’s Web” reveals the ways in which one woman architect constructed her network, within living memory. It argues, too, for recognition of the multiplicity of networks that constitute a woman architect’s career. The title’s nod to E.B. White’s classic 1952 children’s story, Charlotte’s Web,2 is deliberate. Just as White’s protagonist, Charlotte A. Cavatica, a lowly spider, used her web to showcase both her talents as a weaver and her intellect (in order to champion her friend the runty pig, Wilbur), Marjorie Hill’s web of weaverclients provided an effective arena in which to demonstrate and advertise her considerable design skills. Charlotte’s world also resonates with Hill’s in other subtle ways; both were weavers of nearly invisible webs, both worked alone for most of their careers, and both had social and physical impacts on their immediate surroundings.

Biography Esther Marjorie Hill was Canada’s first woman registered architect.3 The only child of Jennie Stork Hill and Ethelbert Lincoln Hill, she was born in Guelph, Ontario, on 29 May 1895.4 Marjorie’s childhood was remarkably literary and progressive. Jennie Stork Hill was a poet and mathematics teacher.5 She was among the first women to be admitted to the University of Toronto in 1884 and was active in many significant women’s organizations.6 Hill’s father was a science teacher, a school inspector, and eventually a public librarian. He was extremely supportive of his daughter’s career choice, and his wide range of interests likely inspired her.7 In 1907 the Hill family moved from Ontario to Alberta so that Ethelbert could become the science master at a Calgary high school; five years later, he became chief librarian of the Edmonton Public Library, a position he held until 1936, when the family relocated to Victoria.8 In 1914 Marjorie Hill entered the University of Alberta, obtaining a ba in 1916, simultaneously completing the first two years in architecture in the Faculty of Applied Science.9 Hill was admitted to the Department of Architecture at the University of Toronto in 1918; in the summer of 1919 she worked for Wickson and Gregg, architects in Toronto.10 Following her landmark graduation in June 1920 from the University of Toronto (Fig. 13.1),11 she was employed for three and a half months in the interior decorating department of Eaton’s department store in Toronto.12 Hoping to register as an architect in her home province of Alberta, Fig. 13.1 Marjorie Hill beamed as she graduated from the University of Toronto. Surrounded by her male colleagues, she was the first woman in Canada to graduate with a degree in architecture, in June 1920.

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Hill applied to the Alberta Association of Architects (aaa) in January 1921. According to Hill’s obituaries, it took a letter from her father to convince the association to accept her. There is also a story that the association denied her application, changing their entrance requirements by adding a year of office experience as a strategy to exclude her. No such changes, however, were actually enacted at that time.13 Perhaps to gain more office experience, Hill worked for MacDonald and Magoon Architects on the Edmonton Public Library (erected 1922–23; demolished 1968)14 during the summer of 1922. Following a return to the University of Toronto in 1922 to study town planning, Hill headed to New York where she studied briefly at Columbia University. She then worked in two offices of early women architects. From August 1923 to November 1924 she was with the architectural firm of Schenck and Mead, her responsibilities included working drawings, detailing, supervising the office, and correspondence. Hill was also employed by Kathryn Budd.15 These successful New York professionals must have served as significant role models for the young Canadian. Marcia Mead and Anna Schenck were particularly interested in “the feminist side of it [architecture]” and they specialized in housing, like many other American women architects.16 Hill was finally accepted as a member of the aaa in 1925. Despite her heroic accomplishments as the first Canadian woman to graduate in architecture and the first to register as a professional architect, Hill is surprisingly unknown in Canada.17 Few architects can name her and even in Victoria, where she lived for nearly half a century, her work is relatively undiscovered. She is not mentioned in Harold Kalman’s two-volume, 933-page survey, A History of Canadian Architecture, for example. In order to find out more about the elusive Marjorie Hill, McGill University sociologist Peta Tancred and I took out a classified advertisement in the personal section of the Victoria Times Colonist in the spring of 2000, seeking interviews with anyone who had known Hill personally. Since she had died only fifteen years previously, we thought our chances of reaching out to her friends and clients were fairly good. Respondents were enthusiastic and numerous, including a journalist who followed up on the story, bringing us even more exposure.18 Friends and clients of Hill were only too happy to educate us about this remarkable woman. The memories we collected were largely anecdotal and concerned Hill’s private social life rather than her output as an architect. Her architectural career and accomplishments were not at all what people wanted to talk about. Many of the calls we received were from members of the Victoria Handweavers’ and Spinners’ Guild, founded in 1934 and the first of its kind in Canada.19 The callers remembered “Miss Hill” as a long-time colleague whose work was considered “technically superb.”20 Many callers reported on Hill’s difficult and eccentric personality. She was known to bang her cane on the floor when she could not hear well. And she loved the colour purple, an infatuation borne out in her weaving, clothing, and the interior of her own home.21 She lived with her 382

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Fig. 13.2 Marjorie Hill kept both a spinning wheel and a drafting table in her home in Victoria, B.C. She won many awards for her weaving.

parents, and then with her father following the death of her mother in 1939. She practised both architecture and weaving from their home, at 29 Gorge Road East (Fig. 13.2), where Ethelbert Hill had a hand-set and hand-fed printing press.22 She had an unusually close relationship with her “devoted father of whom she speaks with love and reverence,” even weaving his clothes.23 Hill had turned to weaving and glove making in Edmonton during the Depression, when architectural commissions were hard to come by, and handicrafts remained a lifelong passion. She enjoyed these crafts, and they were a powerful showcase for her general design skills; she taught, wrote about, and won prizes for her weaving and glove making. The Alberta committee of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, for example, awarded her a certificate for proficiency in glove making in 1937. Hill was certified to teach weaving by the Shuttle Craft Guild of Basin Montana in 1940, and she received a course-instruction certificate for Advanced Hand Weaving in 1951;24 she also practised pillow-lace design, drafting, spinning, and printing. Hill was the only artist selected from Vancouver Island for the Fine Crafts Exhibition in Ottawa in 1957, to which she sent weavings.25 According to the members of the Victoria Handweavers’ and Spinners’ Guild who contacted us, Hill was an outstanding technician, “a wonderful weaver,” who made “no mistakes.” She was particularly interested in the edges of her textiles; as one caller said, Hill was “very funny about the edges.”26 Newspaper articles about her numerous prizes confirm Hill’s considerable technical skill, as does her role as chair of the standards committee for the guild.27 Weaving was much more than a technical challenge for the architect, however. She stressed that each woven article was designed for a specific purpose and “not something adams

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that is turned out by the hundreds and is available in any store.” She urged weavers to sell their products, believing strongly that this would raise the standards by which they would work.28 Through her early publications we know that she also saw handwork, as she called it, as a way to “strengthen and develop us mentally, morally and spiritually as well as physically and also add to the total of our happiness.”29 Did architecture also make Marjorie Hill happy?

Architecture Informants familiar with Hill’s building-design process were hard to find. Hill had no employees or associates whom anyone remembers, and she rarely discussed feminist or architectural issues. Her buildings include many no-nonsense modernist houses designed after about 1946, when the Veterans’ Land Administration office in Victoria apparently began to recommend her to returning vets and their families eager to settle in Victoria following the end of the war. Walter Wilson, for example, contacted Marjorie Hill in 1946 with an idea for a small home when he returned from overseas. She charged him $50 for the plans.30 Clients received good value for their investment. The Ray and Jocelyn Hanson house of 1946 (Fig. 13.3), for instance, is a neat rectangular dwelling whose central entry is marked by a classical revival porch, perhaps inspired by Hill’s Beaux-Arts-style education at the University of Toronto or her work on the neoclassical Edmonton library. Most of Hill’s houses in Victoria are even plainer than the Hanson house; they are modest, rectangular, pitched-roof dwellings, with a central entry in the long side of the building. A house plan that Hill published in 1956 in the Victoria Daily Colonist is typical of her domestic work.31 The plan (Fig. 13.4) is nearly bisected by day- and night-time zones; to the right of the raised main entry is a generous living/dining room, with brick fireplace. To the rear is a well-planned, U-shaped kitchen with eating area and an adjacent laundry room. To the left of the main door, accessible by a double-loaded corridor, are three modest bedrooms. The only bathroom of the house sits between, on the edge of the bedroom zone, next to, but inaccessible from, the utility room, no doubt an efficient arrangement for plumbing design. The accompanying rendered perspective drawing (Fig. 13.5) by Hill is much more elaborate than most of her drawings, including landscaping and even a figure on the large sun deck of the carport. Is the figure a woman? Hill’s profile as a house specialist is typical of women architects in other countries, especially the United States and England. There, housing, interiors, and, later, historic preservation have served as significant subspecialties for women within the male-dominated profession. As American architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright has explained: “A spattering of ‘women’s fields,’ namely

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Fig. 13.3 The Hanson house of 1946 is a modernist house with a neo-classical entry. Its simplicity is typical of Marjorie Hill’s residential design in the post-war period.

Fig. 13.4 Left Marjorie Hill published this generic house plan in 1956.

Fig. 13.5 Below The perspective Hill published in the daily newspaper was more elaborately rendered than her usual drawings.

domestic architecture and especially interiors, evolved as areas of specialization where it was permissible for women to practice, since here they were dealing with other women’s needs. Such rigid categorization … avoided the tension between accepted female sex roles and women’s rights to equal opportunities within the profession.”32 This predominance of residential projects among women architects was also the case for architects in English Canada. As Peta Tancred and I pointed out in Designing Women: “Even the most superficial perusal of the architectural press gives the impression that the earliest Canadian women architects became special experts in the architectural subfields of housing, interiors and, later, historic preservation. These aspects of architectural practice were and are considered less prestigious than the design of public and commercial buildings, which tend to be large, more high profile, and more frequently published than housing projects. With the creation of specific ‘ghettos’ for women within the profession, the perceived threat that they would replace men was diminished.”33 In 1948–49 Hill designed the Frank Moore house (Fig. 13.6) at 2386 Queenswood Drive in Saanich. Owned and occupied in 2000 by the son of Hill’s original clients, the house is compelling evidence of the ambiguous relationship of the architect with many male clients. In our conversations with clients, mostly more than a half-century after they had commissioned Hill, many insisted that they had actually designed their houses and that Hill had functioned only as a draftsperson paid to realize their ideas. Brian Moore clearly remembers his father, Frank Moore, taking credit for the house design. He seemed surprised at our suggestion that Hill had acted as more than a draftsperson on the project.

Fig. 13.6 Elevations of the Frank Moore house of 1948–49, signed by Marjorie Hill. According to his son, Frank Moore claimed that he designed the house.

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Women’s Work This pattern reiterates in architectural terms what women in many other maledominated professions have long noted – that their work is wrongly perceived as only realizing ideas generated by men. Hill was not the only pioneering Canadian woman architect to suffer from this gendering of conception and execution. Alexandra Biriukova, the first woman to register with the Ontario Association of Architects (1931),34 designed the Forest Hill home of Group of Seven founder and artist Lawren Harris in 1930.35 Modern-day art historians have presumed that Harris was responsible for this icon of Canadian Modernism, despite the fact that Biriukova is named as the architect on the contract drawings. “There is some doubt … about just how much credit Biriukova should receive for this house,” wrote University of Calgary art historian Geoffrey Simmins in his Centennial History of the OAA. “The client himself may have played a large hand in its design … Certainly the house’s geometric plan and clear, axial sequence of spaces – a square extended by two attached rectangles with chamfered corners – accord with Harris’s own interests in the spiritual value of pure forms.”36 Why does Simmins presume that Biriukova was not the designer? Comparing Marjorie Hill to Canada’s first lady of painting, Emily Carr, is irresistible, not only because they both were long-time residents of the same city, Victoria, but also because it is useful to admit how unfathomable it would be to suggest that Carr’s paintings were simply technical realizations of male clients’ ideas. Yet art-historical accounts have tried to show how Carr was influenced, shaped, or guided by better-known male artists, like Harris. An example of this is Gregory Betts’s recent book on Harris, wherein he describes Carr as hypnotically passive: “In 1927, Emily Carr walked wide-eyed in this workspace listening to modern music and allowing herself to slip into the trance of Lawren Harris’ ruminations on art, nation, and spirituality. She was utterly transformed.”37 Architectural discourses have maintained an even deeper investment in the notion of the originating male genius than have discourses around art, which – Betts’s account notwithstanding – have been subject to rigorous feminist critique.38 The profile of the best-known American woman architect, Julia Morgan, corresponds to the contours of Hill’s biography in many respects. Like Hill, Morgan was unmarried, frequently worked alone, rarely discussed architectural issues, and by most accounts was modest and relatively eccentric.39 Her list of clients, like Hill’s, grew through women’s networks, especially Morgan’s association with Phoebe A. Hearst, the wife of American mining magnate and US Senator George Hearst, and, indirectly, through semi-public, purpose-built institutions for women, such as a dozen or so Young Women’s Christian Association commissions throughout the world.40 Her reputation also benefited from commissions such as the fairy-tale home located halfway between San Francisco and adams

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Los Angeles for Phoebe Hearst’s son, media baron William Randolph Hearst. Morgan’s role in the design of Hearst Castle is quite remarkable not only for its scale and notoriety but also because of the project’s technical challenges. In a reversal of the usual stereotype wherein men are expected to excel at the technical aspects of architecture, while women are responsible for colour schemes and decoration, Morgan was particularly skilled at construction. For example, when she worked with Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck on joint commissions, Morgan focused on technical details, while Maybeck was responsible for the more artistic, conceptual stages of building. As Wright and others have articulated, one of the major prejudices against the advancement of women as architects in the twentieth century has been the difficulty of accepting women as construction experts. The image of a professional woman on site, perhaps wearing a skirt and high heels, was problematic for many male clients and builders, who expected architects to inspect progress in construction in the midst of heavy equipment and the dirt and chaos of a typical building project. Women architects, like their male counterparts, had to be respected and understood by construction workers. The appearance of women architects, therefore, has taken on particular importance, often holding them back from obtaining large commissions. When Hill was interviewed by newspaper reporters, they frequently noted her small frame and femininity. An article in the Toronto Mail and Empire, for example, described Hill speaking “from the depths of a big leather chair among whose shadows the slight little figure was almost submerged, and which lent to her words of real wisdom an almost comic suggestion. She looked so very girlish curled up in that chair, her face so small and appealing – not at all the type of aggressive feminism that generally invades new territory.”41 Even the reports of her convocation included references to her feminine appearance: “In her white dress, academic gown and mortarboard, carrying a bouquet, there was ample evidence that hard study does not mar a charming appearance.”42 Hill’s work promoted women in a less obvious way than Morgan’s and she certainly never found a sponsor the likes of Phoebe Hearst. For example, working for Miss A. Lee she renovated the pre-First World War Oak Bay Cottage into two independent spaces for women in 1950. Our interviews indicated that Hill also gave informal advice to many women regarding renovations.43 And, while Morgan helped other women launch their careers, producing three licensed women architects in her San Francisco office,44 there is little evidence that Hill had much contact with other women architects beyond her early work for Anna Schenck, Marcia Mead, and Kathryn Budd in New York in the 1920s. Why did Morgan’s and Hill’s practices yield such different results? They used women’s groups in similar ways, and yet Morgan achieved fame perhaps because she managed to tap into a more powerful and professional network rather than rely on a web of amateur clients. Perhaps this points to a key difference in the 388

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meanings of network and web. While networking implies an activity that is planned and directed toward making contacts for the job, “webbing” is a form of being connected, which, as a spin-off, provides contacts with others, particularly women.45 Note that, despite Morgan’s more effective mode of networking, her designs even today are often overshadowed by her famous male client, William Randolph Hearst, in much the same way that Biriukova’s were credited to Lawren Harris.46 Architectural historian Cynthia Hammond has explained how Nikolaus Pevsner minimizes the role of women in historical British architecture. Hammond writes: Despite the evidence of [Lady Elizabeth] Wilbraham’s interest in architecture and her work on Weston Park, architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner can only grudgingly bring himself to say that “It was built by Sir Thomas and Lady Wilbraham in 1671, Lady Wilbraham being credited with the design.”47 Similarly, he describes the church Wilbraham built in 1701 as “an enterprise of Lady Wilbraham.” No other work of architecture in his book has these awkward designations. In the vast majority of cases in Pevsner’s encyclopedic survey of English architecture, a building is “by” the architect, with no other qualifications (“by Butterfield,” “by Scott,” etc.).48 According to Hammond, Pevsner’s bombastic phrasing creates a complication in the text where no complication need arise. In creating this dissonance, this rupture in the language of the text, Pevsner subtly erodes Wilbraham’s authorship. Perhaps because of the difficulty of gaining appropriate recognition for their work, few women architects had partners, including both Morgan and Hill. As Karen McNeil has shown, Morgan at least had a prestigious downtown office in San Francisco and a loyal office staff, legitimating her professional stature. McNeil explains: “The precise location and use of space in Morgan’s office played an integral role in establishing and maintaining her authority, especially in relation to clients and employees. With a space to call her own, Morgan also had the chance to foster a work culture such as she had never previously known, one that emphasized camaraderie over competition and hierarchy, generosity over profit, and merit and skill over gender.”49 Hill, on the other hand, worked completely alone with only her father and her weaving colleagues as a social network. She was a member of the Baptist Church, and even designed an addition to a church in Victoria, but interviewees suggested that Hill was challenged in this milieu. “She was a regular churchgoer but the men didn’t want her around – she was always fighting,” reported longtime family friend Isabel Reid in 2000.50 There is anecdotal evidence in the history of architecture that many creative women preferred to work alone, an adams

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idea that resonates with E.B. White’s tale. This is noted by literary critic John Griffith: “The more interesting characters in Charlotte’s Web – Charlotte, Wilbur and Templeton – do not belong to communities … They are all loners, uncommunitied individualists who remain so until the end of the story … Charlotte and Templeton can come and go as they like; if they remain in the barn, it is because they choose to.”51 And “spiders do not live in colonies like ants and bees; each spider must (as Charlotte puts it) live by their own wits … Spiders do not even have family ties to ‘socialize’ them: their mating is not marriage, and since spiders die before their offspring hatch, they are never parents in the social sense. In and for itself, the spider could well serve as a natural emblem of the solitary life.”52 Hill and her spidery counterpart also share skills and talents that are out of the ordinary. “Charlotte is an artist or craftsman; she makes webs, which, in the mythology of the story, is a marvellous, inimitable skill,”53 perhaps akin to Hill’s talent as a weaver.

Kitchen Specialist Many architects with few or no employees are restricted to small-scale commissions. This is likely one of the reasons that Marjorie Hill and many other women architects were hired for residential renovations, especially kitchens. Indeed, kitchens became one of Hill’s specialties. Typical of commissions for kitchen renovations was the job she did for Hugh and Jean Macartney in 1966. Hill removed the old pantry and chimney in their gracious 1930 Uplands (Victoria) home and built a new, modern kitchen, including her signature high (thirty-nine inches rather than the standard thirty-six inch) counters, a built-in oven, a lazy Susan, rounded counter edges, and a pass-through from the cooking to the eating area. Unlike many of Hill’s male clients, Jean Macartney gives her architect full credit for the kitchen’s innovative design, describing her old weaving-guild chum as “a very clever lady.”54 As a kitchen specialist, Hill recommended that the room be well located and oriented to receive plenty of natural illumination: “The kitchen should be placed so as to receive as much sunlight as possible, for health reasons.”55 Note that Hill was especially concerned about the energy expended by women in the kitchen, perhaps following the well-published time-motion studies by pioneering home economists: “Nothing helps the housewife so much in maintaining a perfectly clean kitchen as does sunlight. It silently combats and destroys many disease germs and it brings cheer and encouragement to the homemaker as she moves about her daily tasks. Let the kitchen have all the space it needs for the fixtures and appliances it must contain and no more because extra space means extra labor for the housekeeper to keep it clean and tidy and extra energy to traverse the unnecessary area.”56 390

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Fig. 13.7 This unusual fold-out drawing by Marjorie Hill shows the plan of a kitchen as well as the interior elevations of the room. Her deep interest in kitchen storage is evident in the details, including the design of the cutlery drawer.

Hill’s delightful, unusual drawing for the Moore kitchen shows her deep interest in kitchen planning (Fig. 13.7). Every detail of the kitchen interested her, likely one of the reasons she chose to draw the room at the large scale of 1/2 inch = 1 foot; she even designed the partitions in drawers to fit different sizes of utensils. The fold-out style of the drawing, too, which shows both plan and interior elevations simultaneously, illustrates her near obsession with kitchen storage and its relationship to the shape of the room. “Frequently the kitchen is given whatever space is left over when the rest of the house has been decided upon; but the right way is to plan the kitchen for itself and what it must contain and allow it to take its proper place in relation to the dining and living rooms,” she wrote in 1920.57 It is unlikely that the weaver’s guild members who hired Hill to redesign their kitchens would ever have hired an architect (or even spoken to one) if not for their participation in the group. The weavers of Victoria were upper-middle-class women, mostly married to doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. Most were stayat-home mothers (the Macartneys have five children) who saw weaving as a adams

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pleasurable break from the intense domestic labour and round-the-clock, DrSpock-inspired mothering demanded by the post-war home and suburb.58 Hill’s open kitchens and fascination with storage served this busy, stressful world that she and many other unmarried women architects experienced only as observers.

Apartments as Feminist Hill was interested in apartment design throughout her career. Arguably, her best building is a boldly modernist apartment block at 1170 Fort Street in Victoria (Fig. 13.8), and she herself occupied an apartment at 1318 Beach Drive after her father’s death in 1960. Perhaps apartment were especially attractive to Hill because of the efficiency of unit plans (she advocated small houses) but also because they offered opportunities for ordinary women to network in informal ways. Modernism informed Hill’s attitude toward residential design in general. Many of her buildings are unbroken rectangles in plan and rather spare; the placement of large or special windows indicates the position of circulation systems or the most important public spaces. Most important, Hill advocated a frank and honest use of materials from the earliest days of her career. “The sooner we cease to tolerate, in our homes as well as in our public buildings, features which are not what they appear to be, such as tin or galvanized cornices made to look like stone, on stone or brick buildings, and wooden columns painted and sanded to imitate stone, the better for our own lives and our national life,” she wrote only eight months after her graduation.59 She also warned readers to furnish rooms minimally, and to make their own furniture if possible. “I speak from experience,” she wrote, perhaps referring to her achievements in weaving.60 While her post-Second World War architecture was informed by Modernism, her publications of the interwar period were wholly inspired by Arts and Crafts ideals. Both schools of thought favoured a spare minimalism and pointed to a blurring of socio-economic distinctions: “Put into the plan of the house only such rooms as are needed. But be sure to get in all that are needed … The simplest things are always the best whether we are honest hard-working people or millionaires.”61 Hill warned against decoration for its own sake, seeing it as frivolous: “No house is ‘pretty’ in the real sense of the word, and any attempt at picturesqueness at the expense of comfort and convenience, as often is the case, is a practice to be condemned.”62 Indeed, Hill’s architectural theories in the 1920s harkened back to those professed by British Arts and Crafts architects at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in her call for architectural honesty. Many Canadian architects were drawn to these theories. Percy Nobbs, who practised in Montreal from 1903 to 1964, Toronto-based architect Eden Smith, and others had realized 392

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Fig. 13.8 This apartment building is perhaps Marjorie Hill’s finest structure. Its cantilevered roof and stark geometry show the influence of European modernism.

Arts and Crafts ideals in their Canadian buildings by the time of Hill’s publications. Given her Arts and Crafts inclinations, it is not coincidental that the young architect urged readers to choose the English cottage style over the urban bungalow. She illustrated her articles for Alberta farm wives with a house she claimed “spoke of home,” a two-storey asymmetrical structure featuring halftimbering and neo-medieval diamond-pane windows on the upper floor. Arts and Crafts theorists such as William Morris purposefully sought out a pre-industrial, rural aesthetic in their city houses as an expression of their anti-industrial political beliefs. In the 1920s Hill’s interest in the home as a workplace for women, too, was evident. She criticized basement laundry rooms on hygienic grounds, but also for the amount of movement they necessitated. She urged women to think beyond their kitchens – “too many women,” she wrote, “[make] a fetish of their kitchens” – going so far as to suggest that the future of Canada depended on domestic design.63 Like many Arts and Crafts architects, she preferred simple geometrical patterns and monochrome colour schemes, warning that busy, nature-based patterns could even cause real bodily pain: “It gives one unpleasant feelings just to look at the huge floral designs perpetuated in some carpets and if one attempts to walk on such covering one always, subconsciously at least, fears to get a thorn in one’s foot! Seek therefore to get – if you desire a carpet – one woven in plain colors or with very modest conventional figures.”64 By the post-war period, when Hill finally had a chance to realize some of her ideas, she was much more interested in Modernism than in Arts and Crafts ideals. In fact, her fascination with the apartment as a building type was a reflection in part of Modernist influence. The association of apartment living with women’s empowerment is well known. Apartments were generally smaller than adams

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houses, which meant they were easier to care for. By Hill’s time, too, the tradition of erecting apartment buildings just for working women in major urban centres was well established.65 Multi-unit living meant mothers there were less isolated than in the suburbs, making childcare and housework shared concerns. It is also likely that apartment living inspired many friendships among women, who may have met in the shared spaces of the buildings or in social gatherings that included tenants. Architectural historian Elizabeth Cromley has outlined how New York apartment living was seen as threatening to conservative notions of correct femininity because the new arrangement might provide too much leisure time.66

Networks Architectural historians rarely mention the issue of networking among women architects.67 This may be because such professional networks were non-existent, or at best completely unorganized. The case of Marjorie Hill would suggest that the client networks of some women architects might have been invisible, since they operated and in fact thrived in informal settings, like a weaver’s guild. Certainly, networking among men architects germinated during the intense years of architectural education, which featured all-night work in studio in order to meet deadlines. Like military training and medical interning, such intense pressure and fatigue made for life-long friendships.68 But, since Hill’s class of four students at the University of Toronto included no other women, this would not have been the case for her.69 She worked entirely alone during her whole career. This is extraordinary. Indeed, Edmonton architects Mary Imrie and Jean Wallbridge are exceptional as an all-woman partnership in Canada.70 In addition to their successful architectural firm, the two women also seem to have lived openly as lesbians, known locally as “The Girls.” Remarkably, their relationship seems to have made them more acceptable to Edmonton society, perhaps because they were less risqué or even “predatory” than unmarried heterosexual women. The cover of our book, Designing Women, featured a beautiful photograph of McGill architectural students in the 1940s, sharing ideas and perhaps a laugh over a drafting table. Such photographs are extremely rare. As Gwendolyn Wright has noted: “In order to appear successful, each woman architect had to stand apart from other women, both from her few peers and from the many beneath her in the hierarchy. To band together with others facing similar difficulties would be to acknowledge that women, generically, were subordinate, and that the system was discriminatory.”71

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Fig. 13.9 Marjorie Hill is surrounded by woven cushions and furniture in her signature colour, purple.

Conclusion Scottish architect R. Weir Schultz warned in 1908: “I should like here to say generally that before women architects are likely to be employed to any extent they will have to overcome many difficulties, allay many prejudices, and gain the confidence of that section of the public that dabbles in bricks and mortar.”72 It is my contention that weaving served to address this widely held belief in the case of Marjorie Hill. Weaving was transitional to Hill’s architectural practice, just as domestic crafts had eased Hannah Maynard’s entrée into photography several generations earlier.73 It blurred the boundaries between amateur and professional realms. Weaving is traditional, unpaid women’s work and notably a craft rather than an art. And, unlike the other two women’s groups to which Hill belonged, the University Women’s Club and the Victoria Horticultural Society, the Handweavers’ and Spinners’ Guild showcased her design talents. Weaving is, of course, a form of design, requiring considerable skill and touching on many of the same issues as post-war house design: form, function, massing, and colour. A candid snapshot (Fig. 13.9) of Hill as an older woman, surrounded by woven cushions and furniture in her beloved purple, underlines the importance of weaving in her self-image.

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Did Hill, Biriukova, and other women architects willingly confine themselves to the realm of domestic architecture? Did Hill’s supportive network of Victoria craftswomen serve as something of a safety net? Perhaps Hill’s web of amateur weavers allowed her practice to thrive in post-war Victoria. In this way, professionalism was cloaked, or perhaps we should say interwoven, with domestic ideologies. And, like a spider’s web, the set of contacts that comprised Hill’s everyday life is a subtle, barely visible endeavour, one that I believe has been missed in the search for epic and monumental histories, and one whose value can perhaps only now be detected with the practised and careful scrutiny of a fully developed feminist architectural history.

notes 1 Thanks to Jennifer Barr, Linda Fraser, Cynthia Hammond, Loryl MacDonald, Cheryl Mahaffy, Valerie Minnett, Lara Rabinovitch, Silvia Spampinato, Peta Tancred, David Theodore, Julia Tischer, and Peter Ward. 2 E.B. [Elwyn Brooks] White, Charlotte’s Web (New York: Scholastic Book Services 1952). 3 On the history of Canadian women architects, see Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred, Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000); Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, “Slowly and Surely (but Somewhat Painfully) More or Less the History of Women in Architecture in Canada,” SAAC Bulletin, March 1991, 5–11; Annmarie Adams, “‘Archiettes’ in Training: The Admission of Women to McGill’s School of Architecture,” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, 21, no. 3 (1996): 70–3; Sarah Bassnett, “Measuring Milestones: Feminist Histories of Architecture in Canada and the United States,” Resources for Feminist Research, 29, nos. 3 and 4 (2002): 233–43; and Women in Architecture Exhibits Committee, Constructing Careers: Profiles of Five Early Women Architects in British Columbia

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(Vancouver: Women in Architecture Exhibits Committee 1996), 20–5. Betty Little, “‘First’ Architect: Hill Celebrates her Birthday,” Oak Bay Star, 30 May 1984. “Mrs. Hill was an earnest Christian worker, and had a deeply religious spirit reflected in excellent verse that she wrote, some of which we have published from time to time.” “Jennie Stork Hill,” Mt Forest Confederate, 14 September 1939; Hill’s impact on her mother’s poetry is mentioned in “Tree-winds,” Toronto Mail and Empire, 7 August 1920, 9; and a poem, “Star of Peace,” is in b86–0106/001, box 1, University of Toronto Archives (uta). Stacey Gibson, “Fairly Determined,” University of Toronto Magazine, spring 2002, http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/?p=541 8#commentanchor (accessed 13 May 2009); Mrs Hill was a member of the Edmonton school board, on the board of the Royal Alexandra Hospital, and served for five years as president of the Local Council of Women and national convener of economics for the National Council of Women. On Jennie Hill’s life, see “Mrs. E.L. Hill Dies after Long Illness,” Victoria Times, 14 September 1939. Hill’s obituary claims that her father was supportive but that her mother had been resistant to Hill becoming an architect because she, too, had wanted to do so.

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8

9

10

11

12 13

See “Architect E.M. Hill,” Montreal Gazette, 14 January 1985, d12. B.M. Greene, ed., Who’s Who in Canada 1956–57: An Illustrated Biographical Record of Men and Women of the Time (Toronto: International Press 1956), 939. Hill claimed that her father had always wanted to live in Victoria. See “One of Four Is Sole Returnee,” Oak Bay Star, 3 July 1980, b86–0106/001, box 1, uta. Hilda Ridley, “Pen Portraits of Progressive Women,” Christian Guardian, 30 March 1921, 8. A particularly rich source on Hill’s early career is the statement she made to the Alberta Association of Architects dated January 1925: Esther Marjorie Hill, b86–0106/001, list c, c2, uta. Hill’s graduation was reported widely in the press. See “New Trail Blazed by a Varsity Girl,” Toronto Globe, 3 June 1920, 10; “First Woman Architect Receives Big Ovation,” Toronto Globe, 5 June 1920, 8; and “Only Woman to Receive Applied Science Degree,” Edmonton Journal, 5 June 1920, 10. “First Woman Architect Receives Big Ovation,” 8. See Hill’s application for an aaa membership on 4 January 1921 and a letter from the aaa returning documents Hill had submitted previously, 5 January 1924: Esther Marjorie Hill, b86–0106/001, list c, c2, uta. The changes made to the requirements by the aaa are mentioned only in secondary sources. See, for example, Monica Contreras et al., “Breaking in: Four Early Female Architects,” Canadian Architect, 38, no. 11 (1993), 18–23; and Hill’s entry on the Library and Archives Canada website, www.lac-bac. gc.ca/women/002026-407-e.html (accessed 28 May 2009). Her father’s intervention, however, is noted in Hill’s obituaries. Note that the 1906 Architect’s Act, item 9, says that the aaa will admit graduates after one year’s study with an architect, and the 1922 version says (item 6e) that the association will welcome any per-

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16 17

18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25

son who holds a degree and has worked for one year for an architect. It thus appears from the official documents that no relevant change was made to the act at the time of Hill’s application. Hill’s father wrote an article on the building. See E.L. Hill, “Edmonton Public Library,” Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, July–August 1926, 149, 151, 153–6. Marcia Mead to “To whom it may concern,” 14 January 1925, Esther Marjorie Hill, uta. “Girl Architects Organize a Firm,” New York Times, 8 March 1914, 15. There are two student papers on Hill’s work: Cobina G. Herrington, “The Elusive Miss Hill,” 14 March 1988, Library of the Ministry of Tourism, Recreation and Culture, Victoria, bc; and Elizabeth Langford, “1170 Fort Street: Reading Hill’s Modernism,” 13 March 1997, University of Victoria. “Designing Woman,” Victoria Times Colonist, 15 June 2000, b7. The Victoria Handweavers’ and Spinners’ Guild began in April 1934 when ten women gathered to hold a weaving class at the Women’s Institute. See http://www.vhwsg.ca/index.html (accessed 27 May 2009). An article on its tenth anniversary describes the guild’s nature and aims: “Hand Weavers’ Guild Marks Tenth Year,” Victoria Daily Colonist, 28 April 1944. Author’s interview with Ruth Arnett, 2000. Hill’s love of purple is described in “Day Hospital Earns Plaudits from two Former Patients” (Victoria, source and date unclear, uta), which states that she even had purple Kleenex. “Retired Architect Enjoys Many Hobbies,” Victoria Daily Times, 27 August 1968, 15. Little, “‘First’ Architect.” This certificate is held in Esther Marjorie Hill, b86–0106/002: Awards, uta. On Hill’s weavings, see “Retired Architect

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26 27 28

29

30 31 32

33 34

35

36

37 38

Enjoys Many Hobbies,” 15; and Kay McGregor, “Marjorie Hill, Architect, Also Is Skilled Weaver,” Victoria Times Colonist, 14 June 1953. Author’s interview with Jean Macartney, 26 July 2000. McGregor, “Marjorie Hill, Architect, Also Is Skilled Weaver.” Sally Lou Ahern, “Victoria Architect Gives Valuable Weaving Tips,” date and source unclear, uta. Esther Marjorie Hill, “Glove Making Is Handicraft with Great Cultural Value,” Edmonton Bulletin, 13 April 1934. Author’s interview with Walter Wilson, 2000. “View and Sunshine in Privacy,” Victoria Daily Colonist, 13 April 1956, 26. Gwendolyn Wright, “On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture,” in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession (Berkeley and London: University of California Press 2000), 280. Adams and Tancred, Designing Women, 38. International Archive of Women in Architecture database information for Alexandra Biriukova. See: http://lumiere.lib.vt.edu/iawa_db/view_all.php3?p erson_pk=21®ion=&table=lic&cSel= (accessed 30 May 2009). “A Canadian Artist’s Modern Home,” Canadian Homes and Gardens, April 1931, 40. Geoffrey Simmins, Ontario Association of Architects: A Centennial History, 1889– 1989 (Toronto: oaa 1989), 107. Gregory Betts, Lawren Harris: In the Ward (Holstein, on: Exile 2007), 89. The feminist critique of art history is extensive. See in particular the pioneering work of Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews, January 1971, 22–39, 67–71; and Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the History of Art (London: Routledge 2003). Use-

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40 41 42 43

44 45 46

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49 50

ful reviews of the literature are available in Sally Hagaman, “Feminist Inquiry in Art History, Art Criticism, and Aesthetics: An Overview for Art Education,” Studies in Art Education, 32, no. 1 (1990): 27– 35; Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” Art Bulletin, 69, no. 3 (1987): 326–57; and Lisa Tickner, “Feminism and Art History,” Art Bulletin, 69, no. 3 (1987): 92–128. On the gendering of genius, see the classic text, Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990). See Karen McNeill, “Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture and Professional Style, ” Pacific Historical Review, 76, no. 2 (2007): 229–68. Ibid., 267. “Miss Marjorie’s Plans,” Toronto Mail and Empire, 7 August 1920. “First Woman Architect Receives Big Ovation,” 8. Ann Crofton reported, for example, that Hill gave her advice on corner windows by using a face analogy. Crofton’s sister had gone to university with Marjorie Hill. Author’s interview with Ann Crofton, 2000. McNeill, “Julia Morgan,” 267. I am grateful to Peta Tancred for pointing out this important difference. Shockingly, Morgan was referred to as Hearst’s secretary in a film clip shown to visitors of Hearst Castle. Mark A. Wilson, Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty (Layton, ut: Gibbs Smith 2007), xv. See Nicholas Pevsner, The Buildings of England (Staffordshire), ed. Nicholas Pevsner and Judy Nairn (London: Penguin 1974), 305. Cynthia Imogen Hammond, “Wings, Gender and Architecture: Remembering Bath, England,” (phd thesis, Concordia University, 2002), 79. McNeill, “Julia Morgan,” 260. Author’s interview with Isabel Reid, 2000.

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51 John Griffith, Charlotte’s Web: A Pig’s Salvation (New York: Twayne Publishers 1993), 38. 52 Ibid., 39. 53 Ibid., 38. 54 Author’s interview with Jean Macartney, 26 July 2000. 55 Esther Marjorie Hill, “The Small House and Its Problems,” Agricultural Alberta, 1, no. 3 (1920): 29. 56 Ibid., 29, quoted in Lara Rabinovitch, “Lady in Purple: Canada’s First Woman Architect,” 29, August 2002, McGill University, 11. A copy of the paper is housed at the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, Concordia University. 57 Hill, “The Small House,” 29. 58 Annmarie Adams, “The Eichler Home: Intention and Experience in Postwar Suburbia,” in Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins, eds., Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1995), 164–78. 59 Esther Marjorie Hill, “Common Faults in House Design,” Agricultural Alberta, 1, no. 8 (1921): 10. 60 Hill, “The Small House,” 12. 61 Ibid., 29. 62 Esther Marjorie Hill, “Location and Design,” Agricultural Alberta, 1, no. 5 (1920): 7. 63 “Miss Marjorie’s Plans.” 64 Hill, “Location and Design,” 7. 65 Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 (Montreal and Kingston, on: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996), 152–8. 66 Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press 1990), 22–4.

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67 I know of no source that discusses networking among women architects; art historian Janice Helland explores the subject for painters in her book Professional Women Painters in NineteenthCentury Scotland: Commitment, Friendship, Pleasure (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate 2000), 123–49. 68 Dana Cuff refers to the studio in the architecture school as the sine qua non of design education. See Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge, ma:mit Press 1991), 44. 69 “One of Four Is Sole Returnee.” 70 Cheryl Mahaffy is currently writing a book, “Women Building Alberta”; she reports that golfing was an important activity for women architects there. Also note these two interesting anecdotes. First, Alberta architect Doris Tanner considered going into business with Mary Imrie; Tanner’s daughters have a letter from their grandmother to their mother cautioning against this partnership since the business might, in fairness to Imrie, require Tanner to delay having children. Second, Tanner’s daughters often played at the Imrie/ Wallbridge house while their mother had meetings. See Cheryl Mahaffy, “Doris Tanner, Unsung Architect,” Legacy, 9, no. 4 (2004): 26. 71 Wright, “On the Fringe of the Profession,” 283. 72 “Here and There,” Architectural Review, 24 (September 1908): 153. 73 See Jennifer Salahub’s chapter on Hannah Maynard in this volume.

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Contributors

annmari e adams is director and William C. Macdonald Professor at the School of Architecture, McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec. She is the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 (1996), Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943 (2008), and co-author with sociologist Peta Tancred of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (2000). jani ce and e rs o n has a phd in art history (2002) from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where she is also visual resources curator. Together with Brian Foss, she curated Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2000), and with Melinda Reinhart is co-author of the Artists’ Database of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. She is also co-author of the Canadian Exhibition Reviews Online database. al e na bui s is a phd candidate in the Art Department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She completed a master’s degree in Canadian art history at Concordia University in 2008. Her current dissertation research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc), focuses on seventeenth-century Dutch material culture in the North American colonies. Buis’s publications include a chapter entitled “The Raw Materials of Empire Building: Depicting Canada’s ‘Home Children,’” in Depicting Canada’s Children (2008), an interview with Inuit artist and art historian Theresie Tungilik in Inuit Art Quarterly, and several articles in Cahiers métiers d’art/Craft Journal. sh e rry farre l l race tt e is an interdisciplinary scholar with an active arts practice. Her current interests include First Nations and Métis art criticism and history, museology, and revitalizing and decolonizing practices. Her recent publications include Clearing a Path: New Ways of Looking at Traditional Indigenous Art (with Carmen Robertson) and Art in Our Lives:

Native Women Artists in Dialogue (with Cynthia Chavez-Lamar and Lara Evans). She was the 2009–10 Anne Ray Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is currently teaching at the University of Manitoba in the Departments of Native Studies and Women and Gender Studies. cynthia i mo ge n h ammo nd teaches architectural history in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She completed her phd in 2002 (Concordia) and her sshrc-funded post-doctoral fellowship (McGill University) in 2006. Her forthcoming book on gender and the built environment of Bath, England, will be published by Ashgate. In addition to writing and publishing on architecture, cities, and landscapes, Hammond maintains a studio practice and has recently co-founded a design firm, pouf! art + architecture. krist ina h une ault is associate professor and a university research chair in art history at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Her phd (1998) is from the University of Manchester, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. She is the author of Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain, 1880–1914 (2002). More recently she has been publishing on the visualization of self-other relations in art by women in British North America and Canada. Together with Janice Anderson and Melinda Reinhart, she is a co-founder of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. loren l e rne r is professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Canadian art is the main area of her research, with an emphasis on drawing and print culture and topics ranging from diasporic and ethical consciousness to gender, class, and the experiences of childhood. In 2005 she was the curator of Picturing Her: Images of Girlhood at the McCord Museum of Canadian History, in Montreal, Quebec. Her writings on children and youth have appeared in Canadian Children’s Literature, Journal of Canadian Art History, Historical Studies in Education, Girlhood Studies, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, and Healing the World’s Children (2008). Lerner is editor of Depicting Canada’s Children (2009). lianne m c tavi s h is professor of the history of art, design, and visual culture in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. She has published widely on early modern visual culture, the history of the body, and critical museum theory, including the monograph Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (2005). Her new book, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study in the Challenges of Exchange, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. 402

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ki rk ni e rgart h teaches history at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. His research on the relationship between culture and politics in Canada has been published in the Journal of Canadian Studies, Labour/ Le Travail, Acadiensis, and the International History Review. He is also the author of a forthcoming book: ‘The Dignity of Every Human Being’: New Brunswick Artists and Canadian Culture between the Depression and the Cold War. mary o’connor is professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research is in the field of gender and the everyday. Her most recent book, co-authored with Katherine Tweedie, is Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (2007). She has curated two exhibitions, one with her students, The Archive and Everyday Life (Hamilton Artists Inc., 2010), and, with Janice Hladki, Embodied Matter (McMaster Museum of Art, 2006). She has published or given papers in the fields of modernism, women’s life-writing, women and health, AfricanAmerican women writers, and photography. sand ra pai kows ky recently retired from the Art History Department of Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She is also the First Distinguished Scholar at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia. A founder of the Journal of Canadian Art History/ Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien, she was managing editor for several decades and remains as its publisher. From 1981 until 1992, she was the director/curator of the Concordia Art Gallery. Among her numerous publications, she was a co-editor of The Visual Arts in Canada (2010) and authored a chapter on representational modernist painting. Her current research includes James Wilson Morrice’s images of Venice, the writings of Walter Abell, and the work of John Fox. rut h b. p h i l l i p s is Canada Research Chair and professor of art history at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology from 1997 to 2002. Currently, she directs the Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (grasac), an international research collaboration involving Indigenous communities, museums, and universities. Her books include: Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011); Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast (1998); Native North American Art (co-authored with Janet Catherine Berlo, 1998); and Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (co-edited with Christopher B. Steiner, 1999).

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jennif e r sal ah ub teaches art history and craft history at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta. She received her phd in the history of design from the Royal College of Art, London (1988), where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. Salahub has curated exhibitions on Domesticity in Canada 1840–1867 (2003) and Quebec Samplers (1994) for the McCord Museum of Canadian History, in Montreal, Quebec, and maintains a broad publication profile, ranging from exhibition catalogues and reviews to scholarly articles and book chapters, including a contribution to Majesty in Canada: Essays on the Role of Royalty (2006). Her ongoing research projects include work on Marion Nicoll and the history of craft at the Alberta College of Art and Design, as well as a social history of embroidery in Canada. anne wh i t e l aw is associate professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Her research examines the intersections of art historiography and cultural institutions in Canada, with a particular focus on practices of exhibition and collecting. She has published extensively on the display of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada and on the writings of art historian John Russell Harper, and is co-editor with Brian Foss and Sandra Paikowsky of The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (2010). Her current research includes a book on the relationship between federal cultural institutions and art galleries in western Canada, and an exploration of the work of women’s volunteer committees in North American art museums.

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Bibliography manuscripts Archives of Ontario, Toronto Department of Education, Select Subject Files Art Gallery of Ontario Library and Archives, Toronto Florence Wyle Artist File Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Laura Gilpin Archive British Columbia Archives, Victoria Albert H. Maynard Files Richard Maynard’s Diary Transcript from the Princess Louise Excursion and Victoria Island, August 1879 Canadian Centre for Architecture Archives, Montreal Guy Desbarats Papers Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Documentation Centre, Department of Art History, Concordia University, Montreal Jane Hamilton Artist File

Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa Duncan Campbell Scott Papers McLean, Ann Amelia. “Half Breed Claim.” File 315563, Vol. 679, Series d-11-1, rg 15. Paget, Amelia M. “Report on the Qu’Appelle Agencies 1913.” File 40,000-9, Vol. 7908, rg 10. Wartime Information Board Records Library of Congress Collections of the Manuscript Division, Washington, dc Henry Putnum Correspondence Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Library, Montreal Anne Savage Artist File National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Board of Trustees Correspondence Carnegie Corporation (Alberta) Papers Frances Loring Papers Jack Humphrey Papers Walter Abell Papers New Brunswick Museum Archives, Saint John Saint John Art Club Papers

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Virtual Museum of Canada. Drawing on Identity: Inkameep Day School and Art Collection. www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/ Inkameep/english/index.php (accessed 30 January 2010). Wright, Gwendolyn. “Women in Modernism: Making Places in Architecture.” Keynote address, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 25 October 2007. www.bwaf.org/down loads/WRIGHT-WomenInModernism.pdf (accessed 21 June 2009). dvds & sound recordings A Girl Is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. Directed by Beverly Willis. Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, 2009. Film. Idlout, Lucie. E5-770, My Mother’s Name. Arbor Records, Winnipeg Manitoba, 2005. Sound recording. Sherman, Leah and Angela Grigor. “A Comparison of the Influences of Anne Savage and Arthur Lismer.” Montreal: Concordia University Libraries, Oral History Montréal Studies, 1985. Sound recording. By Woman’s Hand. dvd. Directed by Pepita Ferrari and Erna Buffie. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada 1994.

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Index Illustrations denoted by italicized page numbers Abell, Walter, 61–2, 64–7, 70–1, 78n37, 109, 119–20 Aberdeen, Lady Ishbel Maria, 144, 165n32, 376n9 Aboriginal art, 25, 285, 288–92, 327; and art history, 17, 316–20, 343; basket production, 292, 296–7, 299, 316–18; beadwork production, 296–7, 299, 318–19, 327–9, 332–3, 335–6, 338–9, 344, 346, 348–52, 354; by children in residential and industrial schools, 304–9; Haida revival and gender lines, 314; historical erasure of, 287–9; Inkameep Day School program, 307, 324n81; mamatowisowin (Cree), 290; menoh (Anishinaabek), 290; and museum collections, 288–9, 297; and the “professional artist,” 287–8; and professionalism, 17, 48n51; public performance, 300–4; quillwork, 296–7, 319; representations in Canadian art, 292; Wild West shows, 300– 1; and women artists, 287–93, 295–300, 302– 20; women’s art production as commodity, 291–7, 309–11, 313, 316–17, 324n92, 337. See also World Exposition (Man and His World) Aboriginal people, 285–316; and colonization, 232–3, 294–6, 299–301, 304–9, 311, 316, 327, 329–30, 336–7, 339, 343, 349–50, 352; and “the culture ban,” 286; and racism, 330, 352 academicism, 33, 37–8 Adams, Annmarie, xxiv, 6, 9, 212, 218, 221n9 Adams, Elizabeth Kemper, 3–4, 35, 44n2 Adams, Mary Kawennatakie 289–91, 317, 317, 318 advertising, 25, 27, 136, 142, 153, 168–70, 173, 175–7, 180–1, 183–4, 187, 191n43, 192n55, 201, 205–8, 208, 219, 221n9, 222n39; sexuality in, 170, 177–81 Aesthetic Movement, 151, 153 Affleck, Ray, 195, 210, 221n5

Alasua, Asia, 238 Alberta Association of Architects (aaa), 382, 397n13 Alexis, Jeremiah Bartlett (Jerry Lonechild), 300 Alfoldy, Sandra, 9, 19, 45–6n21 anthropology, 249, 252n28; and art, 246–8, 253n28. See also ethnography architects, 194–5, 209, 219 Architectural Forum (magazine), 209 architecture: Canadian architecture, 195; creative partnerships in, 213–14; domestic architecture, 386, 390, 393, 396; and feminism, 198–9, 382, 384, 388, 392–3; feminist architectural history, 213–14, 396; husband/wife partnerships in, 213–14; International Style, 209, 223n44; landscape architecture, 209–11, 212–13, 384; and modernism, 195–8, 202–3, 205, 207–9, 213, 215, 218; post-Second World War architecture, 202, 206; and professionalism, xxiv, 6, 9, 212. See also women architects Armstrong, Elizabeth Adela. See Forbes Art Association of Montreal (aam), 10, 34–5, 110–11, 119, 125, 375–6n7. See also Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa) Art Center (New York City), 168, 174–7, 185– 7, 191n35, 191n38, 191n43 art centres, 60–1, 64 Art Directors Club, 175–6. See also Art Center art education, xxi, 34–5, 111, 114, 118–21, 130n66, 234, 248; as artists’ profession, 12, 22–5, 27, 34, 174; for “art in use,” 174–5; and atelier model, 34; drawing lessons, 306– 8; formalization of, 35; and merit-based achievement, 35, 38; teaching children, 63, 65–7, 79n52, 96, 98, 119, 305–9; women in, 58, 121 Art Gallery of Alberta. See Edmonton Museum of Arts Art Gallery of Ontario, xxiv, 365, 375–6n7; Women’s Committee, 366, 377n27

Art Museum of Toronto. See Art Gallery of Ontario Art Needlework movement, 345–6. See also School of Art Needlework art nouveau, 346 Arts and Crafts movement, 18, 174, 346; in architecture, 392–3 Ashevak, Kenojuak, 315–16 Asian art and material culture, 83–4, 86, 89, 91–2, 100; Chinese art, 94 Asian costume, 83, 90; and conceptions of femininity, 91; and exoticism, 91; and masculinity, 90 Atlieu, Annie, 302–3 Automatistes, 57, 262–3; and painting, 259–61, 265, 267, 270; and post-Automatism, 264–5, 271; and Surrealism, 260. See also Refus global Ayre, Robert, 274–5 Bailey, Alfred, 97–9 Baker, Marilyn, 28, 58 Baptiste, Bertha (Clotilla), 307–8 Baptiste, Caroline, 307 Baptiste, Gertie, 307, 309 Baptiste, Irene, 307 Baptiste, Teresa, 307, 308 Barbeau, Marius, 110, 232–3, 244, 248, 252n28, 256n74 Barnard, Julia, 58, 61 Barr, Jr, Alfred, 368, 377n27 Barrett, Rosina J., 25, 49n72 Bauer, Catherine, 213 Beauchemin, Micheline, 277–8 Beaver, A Magazine of the North, 231 Beaver Hall Group, 110, 122, 124–5, 128n16, 130–1n83 Bennett, R.B., 108, 112 Berczy, Charlotte Allamand, 22, 24 Berlo, Janet, 289, 320 Bigtree, Mae, 289 Biriukova, Alexandra, 387, 389, 396 Biron, Gerry, 330, 333 Blackwell, Anne, 12 Blair, Karen, 366, 369–70 Blondeau, Melanie, 305–7 Boas, Franz, 242, 289, 302, 343 Bobak, Molly Lamb, 39 Bonheur, Rosa, 125–6 Bonstelle, Jessie, 173 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 261–2, 272 Bouchard, Simone Mary, 16–17 Bourdieu, Pierre, 37, 89, 149, 349 Bourke-White, Margaret, 168, 189n3 434

Bowman, Maud, 357–62, 366, 369–70, 372–4, 375n5, 376n10, 376n14, 376n17, 376–7n18, 378n43, 378n48 Bowness, Alice, 20 Brant, Beth, 316 Braubach, Ida, 11, 11 Brison, Jeffrey, 41, 60 Brittain, Miller, 63, 71 British Columbia Indian Arts and Welfare Society, 310, 315 Brook, Eva, 32 Brown, Eric, 107–8 Brymner, William, 35, 110, 115 Buchanan, Donald W., 109, 116 Butlin, Susan, 7, 18, 30, 46n35 Cameron, Dorothy, 278 Campbell, Heyworth, 175–6, 191n43 Campbell, John Douglas Sutherland (Marquis of Lorne), 11, 127n6, 151 Canada Council for the Arts, 41, 74–5 Canadian Art (magazine), 55–6, 74, 274. See also Maritime Art Canadian art history, 43, 75–6, 106, 109, 116– 17, 120; and Aboriginal women, 43, 285; Canadian art canon, 76–7n11, 123–6; exclusion of Indigenous peoples in, 115; and landscape, 116–18, 123; and masculine artistic identity, 124–5; and masculinist histories, 126; women’s inclusion/exclusion in, 123–6 Canadian Artists’ Representation/le Front des artistes canadiens (carfac), 7, 45n18 Canadian Arts Council, 39, 51n126 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), xxii, 38, 106–9, 113–15, 119, 121–2, 311; and educational programming, 112; and national identity, 126, 372 Canadian Business and Professional Women’s Club of New York City, 32, 172 Canadian Craftsmen’s Association, 19 Canadian Forum (magazine), 62 Canadian Group of Painters, 59, 110, 119, 225 Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 18–19, 304–6, 310, 325n100, 346–7, 365, 377n23, 377n32, 383 Canadian Home Journal (magazine), xxiii, 194–7, 197–8, 199–203, 203–4, 206, 208, 214–16, 216, 219, 220n2, 220–1n4, 221n10; and advertising, 205–8; as dialectical image, 195–6, 219–20; and domestic space, 196. See also housing-design competition Canadian Museums Committee of the Carnegie Corporation, 41, 64, 86, 95, 97–100, 104n76, 109 i nd e x

Canadian Radio League, 371 Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (cwahi), xx, xxi, xxvin8 Capino, Anna, 318, 326n127 Carleton County Vocational School (New Brunswick), 68 Carlyle, Florence, 7, 30 Carr, Emily, 31, 125, 227, 233, 289, 387 Carter, Edith, 58 Carvers Association of Povungnituk, 236 Cassatt, Mary, 47n42, 125 Cawthra, Mabel, 18, 32 Châtelaine (magazine), 201–2, 221n10, 222n27, 274, 275, 277; and feminist issues, 201 Cheang, Sarah, 90 children in art, 226–7, 233–4, 236–8, 240–2, 244 Clarence H. White School of Photography, 168, 185 Clark, Paraskeva, 41, 45n13, 61, 78n37, 125 Clarke, A.F.B., 109 Claudet, Antoine-François Jean, 164n21 Claudet, François-George, 164n21 Claus, Hannah, 349–50, 352, 353, 354 Clifford, James, 104n85; and ethnographical intervention, 227, 238, 240, 242, 249 Cobb, Myrna, 144–5 Collyer, Nora, 125 colonialism: and Aboriginal people, 286, 294– 6, 300–1, 311, 316, 327, 329–30, 337, 349– 50, 352; and assimilation of Aboriginal people, 233, 299, 306, 309, 330, 336, 341–2, 347–8; and Canadian national identity, 115; and cultural evolutionism, 342–3; internal colonialism, 226, 250n6; and Inuit population, 226–7, 230–3, 248; and museums, 86, 90–1, 93, 100; Victorian colonialism, 331, 350 community-based art: in New Brunswick, xxii, 59–66; during wartime, 39, 66, 75 consumerism, 181–2, 208; and femininity, 182; and public life, 182 Coonan, Emily, 31 Cott, Nancy, 38 Coughlin, Grace, 68–9 Courtice, Rody Kenny, 32, 39, 51n126, 125 craft, xx, xxi, 45–6n21, 138, 288; Aboriginal handcraft, 17, 147, 288, 327–8; and commercialism, 148; crazy quilts, 149, 153–4, 166n57; as decor, 149–50; domestic handcraft, xxii, 24–5, 138–9, 149–51, 153, 395; and femininity, 155; and the Industrial Revolution, 148; and marginalization, 17–18; and i nd e x

modernism, 9; needlework, 25–6, 138–9, 149–50, 155, 287, 327–9, 331, 335, 344–7; objets d’art, 148–9; photography as, 138, 150–1, 154–5, 157, 161–2; and professionalism, 9, 17–19; rug hooking, 68; separation from artistic sphere, 138; as subversive act, 139, 347; in Victorian era, 138–9, 149–54; weaving, 68, 287, 383–4, 390, 395; as “women’s work,” 138 Crawford, Julia, 61, 64, 66, 70–4, 74 cultural capital, 9, 20, 84, 94, 149, 358, 362, 372–4 cultural democracy, 61, 65, 67 cultural evolutionism, 342–4, 352 Curley, Ellen, 302–3 Currelly, C.T., 84, 91–2, 94, 96–8 Daly, Kathleen (Kay). See Pepper Dana, John Cotton, 86, 95–8, 100 Daoust, Sylvia, 16 Davies, Blodwen, 6, 28, 45n10 decorative arts, 83, 341 de Crèvecoeur, Jeanne, 16 Deer, Esther (Princess White Deer), 300, 301 Deichmann, Erica, 63, 71 Deichmann, Kjeld, 63, 71 de Montigny-Giguère, E. Louise, 16 Dénéchaud, Simone, 16 Department of Indian Affairs, 286, 296, 298, 302–7, 309–10, 311–13, 324n92 Department of National Health, 42, 228, 251n14 Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 42, 228, 230, 251n14, 255n66 de Repentigny, Françoise, 274, 277 de Repentigny, Rodolphe, 274, 276–7, 280n22, 280n23. See also Jauran Desbarats, Guy, 195, 199, 203, 203–4, 205, 209, 221n5, 222n29, 223n44 dialectical image, 195–6, 219–20 Diesing, Freda, 313, 315 Dignam, Mary Ella, 30, 31 domesticity, xxii, xxiii, 7, 22, 24, 26, 28, 121–3, 138–9, 189, 196, 220, 227; and craft, 138–9, 153; and family obligations, 45n13, 205–6; and mimesis, 206, 218. See also domestic space domestic space, xxiii, 26, 138, 220; and Aboriginal women artists, 291; in advertising, 170, 183–4; and commercialism, 148, 183–4; and femininity, 151, 196, 198; and interior decoration, 149–51, 206–7; photographs in, 149–50; photographs of, 177; and Victorian taste, 148– 51, 153, 162–3; and women’s labour, 184 Doqwayis, 302 435

drawing, 225–7, 230, 233, 235, 244, 246–50; and empathy, 241, 254n53; landscape drawing, 234; life drawing, 234, 236–8, 240–3 Dreier, Katherine, 173 Dufferin, Lady, 151 Dukelow, Mary, 22 Duplessis, Maurice, 260, 262, 279n2 Dyde, Dorothy, 358–9, 370–4, 375n5 Eastern Arctic Patrol, 251n14 Eastlake, Charles Lock, 344–5 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 135 Edenshaw, Charles, 287, 288, 304 Edenshaw, Isabella, 287, 288, 316, 320 Edmonton Art Association, 360 Edmonton Art Club, 360 Edmonton Art Gallery (eag). See Edmonton Museum of Arts Edmonton Museum of Arts (ema), xxiv, 359– 62, 365–6, 370–2, 375n1, 376n14, 376n16, 376n17, 376–7n18, 378n43; fundraising for, 362–4, 366, 373; and Inuit art, 365; women on the board of, 378n48; women’s involvement at, xxiv, 38, 370–1, 374; and Women’s Society, 357–9, 362–6, 363, 367, 369, 371–4, 375n4, 377n30, 378n48 Edson, Allan, 34–5, 50n101 Egan, Alice. See Hagen Elliott, George, 55–8, 62, 70, 75–6, 76n4, 76n6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 348 Eneutseak, Columbia, 303–4, 303 Eneutseak, Esther, 304 Ermine, Willie, 290 etchings and engravings, 225, 234 ethnography, xxiii, 341; and colonialism, 249– 50; and cultural evolutionism, 342–4, 352; relationship to art, 246–8; and representations of Aboriginal people, 232, 238, 240, 242, 332; and scientific racism, 147, 343; in the Victorian era, 342–3 Evans, Katharine N., 27 Expo ’67. See World Exposition (Man and His World) (Montreal) family, 196; and the family home, 199, 202 Farr, Dorothy, x, 7, 14, 46n32 Fauteux, Claire, 16 Fauteux-Massé, Henriette, xxiii, 268, 270, 270, 273, 276–8 Federation of Canadian Artists, 39, 51n126, 56, 60–1, 64 Feminine Mystique, The (Betty Friedan), 200 femininity, 21–4, 62, 183, 189, 198, 370; and

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masquerade, 182; as professional strategy, 22, 24, 31–2 feminism, x, 194, 198; in the late Victorian era, 346; maternal feminism, 39; second-wave feminism in Canada, 200–1, 370 feminist architectural history, 213–14 feminist art history, x, xx, 3, 9, 18, 42, 124 Ferron, Marcelle, 262, 263, 267, 277–8, 280n9; in Paris, 271 Field Museum of Natural History, 97, 303 figure study, 34; and the nude model, 34–5; women artists’ training in, 35 First Nations people, x, 324n95; and art, x, 300; and the Indian Act, 285–6; and professionalism, 17; representations of, 115; and women artists, xxiii, 285, 320. See also Aboriginal people Forbes, Elizabeth Adela Stanhope (Armstrong), 12, 13 Ford, Harriet, 30 Fredericton Art Club, 56, 66 Friedman, Alice T., 208 Furneaux, Vola, 244, 246, 249, 256n77, 257n79, 257n83 Gadbois, Louise, 16–17 Gagné, Eugénie, 22, 23, 48n62, 145 Galbreaith, Clara, 32 Gamut, The (New York club), 32, 50n99 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 91–2, 368, 374, 375n6 gender: and divisions of work, 98–100, 121, 145; and equality, 57, 98; gender-based discrimination, 4, 6–7, 11–12, 28, 30, 34–5, 45n11, 45n13, 62, 99–100, 144, 260; genderbased separatism, 30, 32; heteronormative gender roles, 196, 202, 205–6, 208, 219 George, Mrs Emma, 302–3 Gervais, Lise, 267, 269, 277–8 Gillett, Violet, 64–6, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 81n79 Glazer, Penina Migdal, 50n87, 120 Godman, Ada Phoebe, 345 Gordon, Elizabeth, 209 Gordon, Hortense Mattice, 32, 276 Goslee, Lucy J., 14, 15 Gould, Jan, 144 Graham, Mary Kate, 27, 29 Grant, Brigid Toole, 66, 80n59 Great Depression, 41, 57, 383; democratic discussion of art during, xxii, 57, 60; effect on the Canadian art market, 114; representations in mural painting, 70 Great Exhibition, 344

i nd e x

Greer, Germaine, 144 Grierson, John, 67 Group of Seven, xxiii, 37, 59–61, 76n4, 110, 114–15, 117–18, 121, 123, 128n17, 244, 246; and Canadian artistic identity, 115, 120, 245; and national identity, 116, 246 Gunterman, Mattie, 21 Hagen, Alice Egan, 19, 26, 27, 27 Hall, Mary G., 22–4, 24 Halmos, Paul, 58, 77n17, 77n18 Hamilton, Jane, 12–13 Hamilton, Mary Riter, 30 Hamilton, Mrs S., 12 Hamlin, Kimberly A., 90 Hammond, Cynthia, xxiii, 35, 389 Harris, Lawren, 56–8, 60–2, 64, 75, 76n4, 116, 125, 228, 233, 244, 246, 371, 387, 389 Harris, Richard, 195 Harrison, Constance, 345–6 Hartley, Florence, 327–8, 328 Hawarden, Lady Clementina, 138–9, 139 Hearst, Phoebe A., 387–8 Hearst, William Randolph, 388–9, 398n46 Heaslip, Annie H., 22 Hedley, Robert (R.W.), 360, 362–3 Heliconian Club (Toronto), 32, 225 Helland, Janice, 8, 43 Henry, Polly Ann (Pauline), 140, 164n20 Herne, Sue, 317 Heward, Prudence, 125–6 Heynen, Hilde, 206, 211, 219 Hill, Charles, 126, 244, 255n69 Hill, Esther Marjorie, xxiv, 6, 223n50, 380–2, 381, 383, 385, 387–90, 391, 394–9, 395; and Alberta Association of Architects, 6, 382; and apartment design, 392–4, 393; and Arts and Crafts influence, 392; and domestic design, 390–3, 396; and Edmonton Public Library, 382, 384; and feminism, 392–3; and Frank Moore house, 386, 386, 391; and house design and layout, 384; and interior decoration, 381; and kitchens, 380, 390–1; and modernist architecture, 392–3; and Oak Bay, 388; and Ray and Jocelyn Hanson house, 384, 385; and Shuttle Craft Guild of Basin Montana, 383; and the University Women’s Club, 395; and the Victoria Handweavers’ and Spinners’ Guild, 380, 382–3, 391, 395; and the Victoria Horticultural Society, 395; and weaving, 383–4, 390–1, 395; and women’s health, 390; and Young Women’s Christian Association, 387

i nd e x

Hill, Ethelbert Lincoln, 381, 383, 396–7n7, 397n8, 397n13 Hill, Jennie Stork, 381, 396n5, 396n6, 396n7 Hill, Kate Foss, 27 Hill, Tom, 311–12, 349 Hiller, Susan, 246 Hitchcock, Helen Sargent, 175 Holden, Sarah, 30 Holdsworth, Deryck W., 202, 215 Holmes, Robert, 234 Home ’53. See housing-design competition home improvement, 207–8 home renovation, 217–19. See also home improvement hooks, bell, 285–6 Houghton, Margaret, 32 House Beautiful (magazine), 177, 209 housing, 194 housing-design competition, 202, 214; and Home ’53, 194–6, 197–8, 201–3, 203–4, 205–7, 210–11, 214–20, 216–18, 220–21n4; and modernism, 208, 215 Housser, Fred, 37, 59, 117–18 Housser, Yvonne McKague, 39, 42, 51n126, 125, 232 Hudson, Edith, 84–6, 95–100, 101n7 Hudson’s Bay Company, 229, 231, 236, 292, 365 Humphrey, Jack, 61, 63, 68, 71 Hunt, Anisalaga (Mary Ebbetts), 320 Hunt, Mildred, 314, 315, 325n116 Husserl, Edmund, 240–1 Idlout, Lucie, 286 Impey, Isabelle Dorion, 291 Imrie, Mary, 394, 399n70 Indian Arts Project (Rochester Museum of Science), 343 Industrial Revolution, 148 Innupak, 248 interior design, 203; and Home ’53, 215 inter-subjectivity, 240; and empathy, 241, 254n53 Inuit: artistic representations of, 227–30, 233– 8, 240–3, 246, 249; and Canadian art history, 244; and Canadian identity, 300; colonial treatment of, 226–7, 230–3, 248; and paternalism, 241; and representations of maternity, 227, 233–4, 236–8, 241–2; and sculpture, 238, 240, 243, 255n66, 257n79, 257n82; and women artists, 320. See also Aboriginal people; Pepper, Kathleen (Kay) Daly Irigaray, Luce, 206

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Jackson, A.Y., 109–10, 113–15, 120–1, 228, 232–3, 244–6, 245, 256n74, 364, 371, 378n50 James, Charlie, 310, 313–14 Jarvis, Lucy, 41, 56–7, 61–4, 66–8, 72–3, 75–6, 75, 78n40, 79n46, 80n59 Jauran, 264. See also de Repentigny, Rodolphe Jensen, Doreen, 288, 313, 315 Jessup, Lynda, 120 Jimerson, Mrs Walter, 339, 340, 355n18 Johnson, E. Pauline Tekahionwake, 300, 316 Johnston, Patricia, 176 June, Jenny, 346 Kahnawake Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition, 298–9 Kaminer, Wendy, 370 Kane, Paul, 115–16 Keene, Minna, 21 Kelly, Hannah Rusk, 32, 33 Kent, Elizabeth, 203, 204, 206, 215 Keppel, Frederick, 97 Kerr, Estelle, 32 King, Anna-Leah, 290 King, Dr Cecil, 290 King, Harold, 56 Kingston Conference of Canadian Artists, 39, 58, 60–1, 119, 121, 123 Kinnear, Mary, 11, 44n6, 121 Knowles, Annie McGillivray. See Knowles, Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles, Elizabeth (Annie) McGillivray, 32, 50n99, 170, 189n7 Knowles, Farquhar McGillivray, 170, 189n7 Kohl, Johann, 294–5 Korinek, Valerie J., 201 Krauss, Rosalind, 264, 280n12 Krieghoff, Cornelius, 115, 292–3, 294 Kruger, Edith (Sin-nam-hit-quh), 307–8 Kruger, Netty, 307 ’Ksan Village, 315, 325–6n119 La8inonkie, Marguerite Vincent, 287, 287, 320 Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Natural History Society (nhs) (New Brunswick), 83–92, 84, 94–5, 100 Ladies’ Home Journal (magazine), 178–9 Landori, Eva, 276–7 landscape painting, xxiii, 59, 106, 118, 245; and national identity, 116–17, 125–6, 246; women’s exclusion from participation, 35; and women’s recognition, 42 Lang, Byllee, 58, 61

438

Laronde, Marianne, 299 Laronde, Mrs Joseph, 299 Lasnier, Michelle, 274, 275, 277–8 Lebensold, Fred, 195, 199, 203, 203–4, 205, 209, 221n5 Leduc, Fernand, 261, 264 Lee, Jo-Anne, 124 Lefort, Agnès, 16, 278, 280n15 Lemoine, Berthe, 16 Leonowens, Anna, 26–7 Letendre, Rita, xxiii, 42, 265, 266, 267–8, 272–4, 276–8, 280n11 Letheby, Frances, 17–18 Levinas, Emmanuel, 241, 254n56 liminal space, 210 Lindsay, Jeffrey, 195, 210 Linklater-Tizya, Clara, 312 Lismer, Arthur, 109, 111, 119, 130n67, 232, 256n74 Living, Marion A., 25 Long, Marion, 32, 35 Loring, Frances, 19, 30–1, 39, 50n95, 371 Louis, Chief Clarence, 308–9 Luckyj, Natalie, x, xx, 7, 14, 46n32 Lury, Celia, 181 MacDonnell, Harriette J., 27 Macleod, Dianne Sachko, 366, 368–9 MacLeod, Pegi Nicol, 39, 41, 56–7, 61–4, 68– 73, 69, 71, 78n37, 79n44, 80n70, 80n71, 81n75, 81n76, 110 Macphail, Agnes, xxiii, 35–6, 196, 199–201, 200, 205, 210, 219–20, 222n27 Macpherson, Mary-Etta, 194 Major, Laure, 267, 269, 273, 277 Maltais, Marcelle, xxiii, 267, 268, 273, 277–8 Manitoba Indian Crafts, 310 Maritime Art Association (maa), 46n33, 64–6, 76n2, 104n76 Maritime Art (Canadian Art) (magazine), 64–6, 68, 70 Martin, Abaya Smith Hunt, 287 Martin, Mungo, 287, 310, 314 Massey, Charles Vincent, 114, 129n33 Mattison, David, 158 Mauss, Marcel, 89 May, Mabel, 31, 39, 125 Maynard, Hannah, xxii, 20, 21, 22, 135–6, 137, 139–42, 139, 143, 144–8, 147, 151–5, 152, 155–6, 157–8, 162–7, 159–61, 395; and experimental photographs, 136–8, 158–62; and “Living Sculptures,” 158; and “Living Statuary,” 159–60; and quilt-inspired gems,

i nd e x

155, 157; and self-promotion, 136, 142, 153– 4, 157, 162; and the Spiritualist movement, 160–1 Maynard, Richard, 140–2, 143, 144–6, 151, 154, 158, 165n34, 167n74 McCarthy, Kathleen D., 85, 91, 366, 368, 369 McCurry, H.O., 19, 63, 69, 78n37, 99, 109, 361–2, 370, 376–7n18, 378n50 McInnes, Graham, 30, 51n115, 62–4, 71, 109 McLaughlin, Isabel, 32, 125 McLean, Anna, 173 McLuhan, Marshall, 115–16 McNeil, Karen, 389 McNicoll, Helen, 13, 37–8 Mead, Marcia, 382, 388 Meadowcroft, Barbara, 122 Medicine, Beatrice, 290 Meloche, Suzanne, 270, 271, 273, 277–8 Miller, C.H.A., 14, 47n44 Miller, Maria Morris, 22–4 mimesis, 206, 211, 218; and the feminine, 206; in painting, 264 Mithlo, Nancy, 289 Mock, Elizabeth Bauer, 209 model homes, 196, 202, 214–15 modernism, xxiii, 31, 33, 36, 59–62, 70, 194– 6; and Canadian architecture, 195–6, 203, 205, 207–8, 215, 218, 392–3; and drawing, 235; effects on professionalism, 36–9, 57; and femininity, 62; and masculine creativity, 59; and painting, 264; and photography, 170, 176–7, 179, 183–4, 189; women’s inclusion in, 61–2, 70–2 modernity, xx, 36, 39, 170; in advertising, 177– 9, 207; and capitalism, 182, 184; effects on domestic architecture, 208–9, 219; and fashion, 349 Molinari, Guido, 264, 277 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa), 35 Monture, Ethel Brant, 300 Morgan, Judith, 314–16 Morgan, Julia, 387–9, 398n46; and Hearst Castle, 388 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 332, 333, 335, 338, 339, 341–2, 344, 348 Morgan, Sher, 144–5 Morrice, James Wilson, 115–16, 244 Morris, Christina “Christianne” Paul, 296, 298 Morris, Kathleen, 125 Morris, William, 344–6, 345, 393 mothers in art, 226–7, 233–4, 236–8, 240–2, 244 Muntz, Laura, 12, 30, 45n13, 46n32, 49n70

i nd e x

mural painting, 61, 63, 69, 80–1n75, 81n76, 81n79; and New Brunswick schools, 70 Murdock, Catherine, 88–9, 100 Museum of the Natural History Society (nhs), 83, 87–90, 93, 95, 97 museums, 38, 41; women’s work in, 83, 85–91, 95–100, 102n11, 357–62, 364, 366–74 National Council of Women of Canada (ncwc), 5, 39, 44n4, 51n125, 369, 375n9 National Film Board (nfb), 66–7, 108, 230–1, 312 National Gallery of Canada, 11, 59–60, 95, 97, 99, 107–12, 114, 119–20, 123, 126, 127– 8n6, 225, 255–6n69, 289, 320, 326n132, 351, 361, 364, 370–2, 376–7n18; and educational programming, 112 nationalism: and Canadian art, 113, 246; and Canadian national identity, 108, 112–13, 115–16; following the First World War, 112– 13; and limitations on democratization, 120; as promoted by museums, 108; representations in art, 60; women’s relationship to, 124 Natural History Society of New Brunswick, 87 needlework, 25–6, 138–9, 149–50, 155, 287, 327–9, 331, 335, 344–7; as challenge to femininity, 347 Neel, Ellen, 310, 313–14, 314, 315 Newark Camera Club, 168, 170, 190n12 Newark Museum, 86, 95–6, 98–9 New Brunswick Museum, xxii, 83–7, 92, 94– 100; and Art Department of, 83–4, 85, 86, 91–3, 93, 94, 95, 98, 100, 369 Newton, Lilias Torrance, 31, 44n9, 125–6 New York Society of Decorative Arts, 345–6 Nickawa, Frances, 300 Nicol, Pegi. See MacLeod Niro, Shelley, 349–51, 351, 354 Nochlin, Linda, x, 144 Nolin, Alice, 16, 16 Non-Figurative Artists Association of Montreal/L’Association des artistes non–figuratifs de Montréal (nfaam), 264, 273; women’s participation in, 264, 280n10 North (magazine), 42, 228, 230, 231, 244, 257–8n87 Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, 9–10, 135 Nurse, Andrew, 58, 60 Nutt, Elizabeth Styring, 108–9 Obomsawin, Alanis, 311–12 Observatory Art Centre (oac) (University of New Brunswick), 56, 62–4, 66, 67, 76n2

439

Odjig, Daphne, 312, 315–16, 320 Okalik, Elizabeth, 312 Onkwehonwe people, 327, 329–30; assimilation of, 341–2, 347–8; and authenticity, 335, 349; and beadwork, 327–9, 328–9, 331–3, 332–3, 335–6, 336–7, 338–9, 340, 341, 344, 346– 52, 350, 354; and chatelaine bags, 330, 331, 333, 334, 335, 354n5; and colonization, 336–7, 339, 343, 349, 350, 352; material culture of, 330, 332, 337–8, 342–3; portraits of, 334, 344; shifts in reception of beadwork, 346, 349; Victorian appreciation of beadwork, 332–3, 335, 341, 344. See also Aboriginal art; Aboriginal people Ontario College of Art, 225, 234, 244, 248 Ontario School of Art, 11–12, 25, 34–5 Ontario Society of Artists (osa), 10–14, 17, 30, 46n30, 46n32, 46n34, 225 Oonark, Jessie, 315 Packard, Artemas, 368 Paget, Amelia Anne McLean, 25, 305–7 Painters Eleven, 57, 276 painting, xxi, 43, 125; Abstract Expressionism, 262, 271; and abstraction, 260–5, 267; and amateur/professional divide, 55; and the armature, xxiii, 265, 267–8, 272; and Automatistes, 259–61, 265, 267; Canadian women painters, xxiii, 7–9, 260, 264; china painting, 25, 30, 149–50, 153; geometric abstraction, 261–5; and the grid, 262, 264, 267, 270, 272, 279; landscape imagery, 270; miniature painting, 25; and the Montreal School, 261; nonfigurative painting in Montreal, 42, 259–1, 264–5, 267, 271, 274–5, 277; Parisian influence on Quebec non-figurative painting, 264, 271; participation of women in Montreal non-figurative movement, 259, 264–5, 267–8, 270–9, 280n15; and Plasticiens, 259–1, 265, 267, 270; and post-painterly abstraction, 272 Palmer, Carolyn Butler, 313 Palm-Jost, Ottilie, 32 Panet, Louise-Amélie, 22, 24 Panton, Mrs Jane Ellen, 150 Parker, Arthur, 343–4 Parker, Caroline, 334, 335 Parker, Rozsika, 155, 328 Parsons, Talcott, 40 Paul, Elizabeth, 300 Paul, Mary, 297 Pauloosie, 248 Pepper, George, 128n17, 225–6, 228, 232–3, 236, 244, 248, 251n15, 251n17, 255n66, 255–6n69, 256n77, 257n87 440

Pepper, Kathleen (Kay) Daly, xxiii, 32, 125, 225–30, 229, 232–8, 233, 237, 239, 240–58, 243, 247–9; education in Paris, 225, 234–5, 253n34, 253n36; and ethnography, 232, 238, 242, 249; and representations of Inuit people, 42, 225–30, 232–3, 236–8, 240–1, 246, 249– 50; trips to Povungnituk, 226, 233, 235–8, 240, 244, 246–8, 249, 256n76, 256n77 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 389 Phillips, May, 18, 27, 32, 377n23 Phillips, R.A.J., 228, 251n15, 257n87 Phillips, Ruth, xxiii–xxiv, 147, 289, 291, 300–1, 312, 320 photography, xxi, 135; and advertising, 176– 80; and amateur/professional divide, 20–1, 173–4; cabinet cards, 154–5, 157; cartes de visite, 141, 162, 296, 333; and class, 143; and commercial/artistic divide, 20–1, 138, 173–7, 191n38; as craft, 138, 154–5, 157, 161–2; as decor, 149–50; documentary and artistic functions, 20; and domestic space, 158, 161, 177, 183–4; female photographers, 20–2, 140, 142–4, 164n18, 173–5; Kodak camera and snapshot photography, 20, 173– 4; landscape photography, 146; and memory, 160; and modernism, 20, 170, 174, 176–7, 179, 183–4, 189; Photo-Secession, 174; pictorialist photography, 175–6; portrait photography, 141–2, 153, 333; as profession, 135, 141–2, 153, 162, 168–9; and professionalism, 20–2; spirit photography, 161, 166n70, 166n72; in Victorian era, 143, 335 Pictorial Photographers of America (ppa), 168, 175–6, 185. See also Art Center Plaskett, Joseph, 58 Plasticien painting, 259–61, 265, 267, 270; neo-plasticism, 264; Premiers Plasticiens, 263–4, 270; and the Quiet Revolution, 264; Seconds Plasticiens, 264 Pollock, Griselda, 123, 352 portraits, 226, 228–30, 233–4, 236–8, 240–3, 249; photographic portraits, 141–2, 153, 333 Povungnituk people, 226, 236, 246–8, representations in art, 227–30, 233–8, 240–3, 246, 249. See also Inuit Power, Ethel, 177 Prieto, Laura, 23–4, 26, 28, 30, 57, 59 Princess Louise, 11, 151 Printup, Dorothy, 348 Prisme D’Yeux, 57 professionalism, xx–xxiv, 3–52; and Aboriginal artists, 17, 25, 43, 287–8; and academicism, 37; and amateur/professional divide, 7–10, 13–14, 17–18, 20, 28–30, 37, 44n4, 55–7, i nd e x

76, 76n4; and the art market, 73–4; and the arts of accomplishment, 24–5, 150; and discrimination, 4, 6–7, 11–12, 28, 30, 34–5, 45n11, 45n13, 62, 99–100, 144, 260; a distinct female path to, 23–7, 30, 120–2, 127; and the domestic, xxiii, 22–8; and ethnicity, 4; and Eurocentrism, 17; and the female workforce, 10, 14, 16, 22–3, 27; and femininity, xxiii, 22–6, 28–9, 90, 100, 120–1; and geographic location, 32; and gentility, 7, 21–2, 24, 28, 31–2; and geographical influence, 32; and “impersonal” service professions, 58, 77n17; and individualism, 38; and labour, 43; and masculinity, 59, 101; and modernism, 37–9, 57, 70; and national identity, 40–2; and “personal” service professions, 58–9, 77n17; and public service, 39; and regional characteristics, 33; and sale of art, 12, 38; and service to society, 12, 39, 60–1, 75; and social class, 14–15, 24, 47n42; and state sponsorship, 39– 41, 51n125, 58, 64, 74–5; and teaching, 12, 22–5, 27, 34, 58, 121, 174; and voluntarism, 358, 369–70, 372, 374; and volunteer museum work, 84, 358–9, 361–2, 372–4; in wartime, 39, 46n26; and women’s inclusion/exclusion, xxii, xxiv, 43, 45n13, 59, 120–1, 127, 199; women and museum work, 83, 85–91, 95–100, 102n11, 357–62, 364, 366–74 professionalization, xxii, 56, 58–9; and democratization, 119–20; and North American museums, xxii, 84, 86–7, 94–8, 100, 359, 368, 371–2 Project Naming, 249, 257n86 Prus, Maria Fisz, xxiii, 195–7, 210–12 Prus, Victor Marius, 195, 210, 212–13 Putnam, Frederick, 301 Quany (Kua–Nah), 302 Qu’Appel Industrial School, 25, 304–6 Quebec Native Women’s Association, 316 Reed, Ernie, 67 Reed, Hayter, 302 Refus global, 16, 260–1. See also Automatistes Reid, Bill, 312–13, 325n116 Reid, Dennis, 124 Reid, Lorna, 235 Reid, Mary Hiester, 19, 28, 30 Reeves, Gladys, 22 Rendell, Jane, 196 Richards, Frances, 25, 26 Rickard, Jolene, 349 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 261–2 i nd e x

Robertson, George, 74–5, 109, 114 Robertson, Sarah, 31, 125 Robineau, Adelaide Alsop, 26 Rockefeller, Abigail Aldrich, 368, 374 Rosenblum, Naomi, 140, 142–3 Rouche, Mademoiselle, 335, 341 Royal Academy (England), 8–9 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (raic), 194, 214 Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (rca), 6, 8, 11–12, 28, 35, 46n30, 59, 127n6, 225, 310 Royal Commission on the Development of the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Massey Commission), 41, 58, 60, 74 Royal Drawing Society, 234, 307–8 Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology (Toronto), 84, 91, 96–7, 99 Royal Photographic Society (London), 21, 168, 187 Royal School of Needlework, 345 Roycroft Arts and Crafts community, 170, 173 Ruffo, Armand Garnet, 316, 320 Ruskin, John, 234 Saint John Art Club, 66, 79n56 Saint John Vocational School (sjvs), 64, 70 Saint-Martin, Fernande, 277, 279 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 311–12 Sammons, Hester, 18 Sangster, Joan, 231 Sapir, Edward, 343 Saskatoon Arts and Crafts Society, 310 Saturday Night (magazine), 25, 27, 44n9, 70 Savage, Anne, xxii, 31, 38, 106–7, 107, 109– 31, 110–11, 117, 122; as art educator, 111, 114, 118–21, 126 Schenck, Anna, 382, 388 School of Art and Applied Design. See Victoria School of Art School of Art Needlework, 25, 345 School of Art at the University of Manitoba, 58. See also Winnipeg School of Art School of Paris, 271 Schreiber, Charlotte, 7, 8, 11–13, 28, 46–7n36 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 113–14, 305–6 Scott, Marion, 62, 73, 125, 271–2, 272, 277; and the School of Paris, 271 sculpture, 9, 72; and Inuit sculpture, 238, 240, 255n66, 257n79, 257n82; and racial stereotyping, 230 Seath, Ethel, 114, 125 Second Sex, The (Simone de Beauvoir), 201 Second World War, 57–8 Semple, Jessie, 25 441

Sherman, Leah, 119, 130n66 Shore, Henrietta, 13 Simmins, Geoffrey, 387 Simon, Joan, 202, 215 single-family home. See single-family house single-family house, 194–5, 202, 215 Slater, Miriam, 50n87, 120 Smith, Eden, 392–3 Smith, Edith, 27, 49n70, 293 Smith, Elda, 312 Smith, Madge, 66, 68, 79, 80n71 Snively, Marilla, 18 Society of Artists and Amateurs of Toronto, 10 Soucy, Donald, 23 Southam, Harry, 114 spatial relations in the home, xxiii, 205, 219 Speck, Frank, 338–9, 340, 355n18 Spivak, Gayatri, 227 Stein, Edith, 241 Stelkia, Jane, 307–8 Stevens, Dorothy, 32 Stieglitz, Alfred, 174, 190n26, 191n30 Stolpe, Hjalmar, 342 Strutt, James W., 214–15 subject formation, 205 suburbs, 195–6, 218, 220, 222n27; and gender constructs, 208; women’s experience of, 201 Sullivan, Françoise, 277–8 Sutherland, Elizabeth, 70, 72 Sutherland, Margaret, 30 Swinth, Kirsten, 28, 30, 33, 35 Taçon, Edna, 32 Tallchief, Maria, 313, 314 Tancred, Peta, 9, 212, 221n9, 382, 386 Taylor, Fred, 60–1, 64, 78n29 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 184 Taylor, Gladys McCue, 311, 325n100 Thomas, Samuel, 349, 350 Thomson, Tom, 61, 115; and national identity, 116, 118 Thresher, Eliza, 22, 24 Tickner, Lisa, 347 Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 148 Tippet, Maria, xx, 7, 45n11, 49n70 Tomes, Nancy, 120 Toronto Art Students League, 28, 34 Tucker, Liliane, 35, 36 Tully, Sydney Strickland, 30 Tuu’luq, Marion, 320, 326n132 Tylor, Edward, 343

442

Van Gogh, Vincent, 57, 76n8, 123 Varley, Frederick, 228, 233 Vermette, Mariette, 277–8 Vickers, Jill, 124 Victorian era, 330–1; beadwork, 331–2, 335, 338, 341, 346, 348, 350; colonialism during, 331; and craft, 138; and desire for novelty items, 332–3; and feminine propriety, 136, 144–5; and feminism, 346–7; gender roles; and imitation of Onkwehonwe material culture, 335; interest in Onkwehonwe beadwork, 330, 331, 332–3, 335, 341, 344; material culture of, 330, 332–3, 335; needlework, 335, 344–5; needlework as challenge to femininity, 347; photography, 143, 333, 335; and primitivism, 330, 342, 347; and shifts in reception of Onkwehonwe beadwork, 346, 349; Victorian taste, 148–51, 331, 344–6, 348–9; Victorian women as professional artists, 346–7 Victoria School of Art (Montreal), 27 Victoria School of Art and Design (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), 27, 108, 119, 130n67 Vie des Arts (magazine), 274 Vigée-Lebrun, Elizabeth, 125 Vincent, Zacharie Telariolin, 287, 299 Vipond, Mary, 41, 112, 120 Voyer, Monique, 277–8 Wallbridge, Jean, 394, 399n70 Walsh, Anthony, 307–8; and Inkameep Day School, 307, 324n81 Watkins, Margaret, xxii, 20, 32, 45n13, 168– 171, 169, 174–5, 171, 178–83, 185, 187–93, 188; and advertising, 168–70, 175–7, 180–1, 183–4, 187, 191n43, 192n55; and Clarence White, 185–7, 192n65; and modernism, 170, 177–9, 183–4; as professional, 168–9, 172–3; and professionalization, 170 Watson, Edith, 20 Wawanoloah, Christine Sioui, 316 Webster, Alice Lusk, xxii, 83–6, 91–6, 98–101, 369 Westmacott, Esther K., 11–12, 25 Whane, 302 Wheeler, Candace, 148, 165n39, 166n56, 345 White, Clarence, 174–5, 185–7, 192n65 White, E.B., 380, 390 White, J. Pye Weed, 68, 80n71 Whitehead, Ruth Holmes, 291, 296, 320

i nd e x

Whitelaw, Anne, xxiv, 38, 108 Wilbraham, Lady Elizabeth, 389 Wilbraham, Sir Thomas, 389 Wilde, Oscar, 26, 151–2 Wilkinson, Doug, 231 Williams, Mrs Joseph, 299 Wilson, Elizabeth, 349 Winnipeg Art Gallery, 365, 376n10; and Women’s Committee, 377n24 Winnipeg School of Art (wsa), 58. See also School of Art at the University of Manitoba Winslow, Bernice Dawendine Loft, 300, 316 women architects, 195–6, 201, 211–12, 214, 380, 382, 384, 386–90, 394–5; and appearance, 388; and authorship, 211, 213, 386–9; and feminism, 198–9, 382, 384, 388, 392–3; and independence, 380, 389; and networking, 380, 387–9, 392, 394, 396; and personal lives/lifestyle, 387, 389–90; and self-promotion, 380; and work culture, 388–9, 394 women artists, 5, 7: and Aboriginal artists, 17, 43, 287–91; and amateur/professional divide, xxiii, 7–10, 13–4, 17–18, 20, 28–30, 37, 44n4, 57–9, 107, 173–4; art-historical writing on, 7; biographies of, xx, xxvn6; and commercial practices, xxiii, 14, 22; francophone artists, 16–17, 260; and marginalization, xxiii, 11–12, 43, 57; and professionalism, xxi, 7, 107, 119–20; and regional differences, 16; in wartime, 39. See also professionalism Women’s Art Association of Canada (waac), 28–32, 39, 360, 369 women’s clubs, 28–32, 172–3, 175, 360, 369– 70; and networking opportunities, 30, 32–3, 172–3 women as persons, 199–200, 205–6. See also Macphail, Agnes women’s right to vote, 260 women’s right to work, 199–201. See also Macphail, Agnes women’s role in the home, 199, 205. See also women’s role in society women’s role in museums, 83, 85–91, 95–100, 102n11, 357–62, 364, 366–74 women’s role in society, 39, 43, 196, 199, 201, 205, 260 women’s societies, 30–2, 38, 50n99, 83–91, 95, 357–9, 362–7, 371–4; and museum fundraising, 363–6; and networking, 89 Wood, Elizabeth Wyn, 32, 39–41, 40, 51n126 Woolf, Virginia, 36–7, 205

i nd e x

World Columbian Exposition (Chicago), 301– 3; and Women’s Pavilion, 347 World Exposition (Man and His World) (Montreal), 311; Aboriginal women’s participation in, 311–13; and Indians of Canada Pavilion, 311–12 Wright, Evelyn, 55–8, 60, 76, 76n2 Wright, Gwendolyn, 213–14, 223n49, 384, 386, 388, 394 Wurster, William, 213 Wyle, Florence, 30–1, 39, 50n95, 110 Yochelson, Bonnie, 174–6 Zemans, Joyce, 61, 108 Zonta Club (New York City), 32, 172–3, 225; professional activities of members, 173

443