Through September 23, 2007, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, the first nationally touring exhibition of Carr’s work in more than thirty years. It comprises some 200 objects — paintings, drawings, watercolours, caricatures, ceramics, carvings, books, maps, photographs and ephemera.
In addition to the 150 works executed by Emily Carr (1871-1945), the exhibition presents works in parallel by Native artists and other historic and modern Canadian works inspired by their traditions, as well as archival documents that provide context for the appraisal of Carr’s work. This exhibition, which provides new interpretations of the work of this celebrated painter, an eccentric and reclusive figure, looks at her legacy and the social and political context in which her art evolved. The exhibition is organized in partnership between the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada.
Born in Victoria in 1871, the youngest of five sisters, Carr lost her parents when only in her teens. With the help of her sisters, she studied art in San Francisco, England and France. On returning to Canada, she earned her living teaching art in schools. In 1899, 1907 and 1912, she spent time in First Nations villages in the Pacific Northwest, where she developed a deep interest in this culture, already compromised by the arrival of the Europeans. By 1912, she had produced an important body of work expressing her immense admiration for Native art and culture. Her standing among Canadian artists was confirmed by the works she executed in 1929 and 1930, in which her deep attachment to the landscape is powerfully expressed. Her health began to decline in 1937, and from 1941 she devoted herself to writing, although she made a last series of landscape studies in 1942. Carr died in 1945.
Widely admired for her work both as a painter and a writer, Carr is at once one of the most familiar and most unknown of Canadian artists. Despite her position as one of the most significant influences on the course of landscape painting in British Columbia during the twentieth century, the range of her achievements and nature of her role within Canadian art have never been fully explored. This exhibition looks at our evolving perceptions of Carr and her practice. It is divided into three sections that shed light on key periods in her œuvre: her introduction to a wider national public, the initial interpretation of her works by contemporaries and today’s different points of view.
The first section constitutes a partial re-creation of the 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art – Native and Modern, which stressed the importance of First Nations art in the region and the extent to which it influenced non-Native artists like Paul Kane, Edwin Holgate, A. Y. Jackson, Anne Savage and Emily Carr, among others. This exhibition introduced Carr to the general public and also enabled her to meet artists of the Group of Seven, including Lawren Harris, who was to play an important role in the rest of her career.
The second section highlights the memorial exhibition of 1945, Emily Carr: Paintings and Drawings, organized mainly by Lawren Harris, which focussed on the artist’s modernism and the inspiration she drew from the landscape around her. This section illuminates Carr’s subjective approach and her spiritual interpretation of nature.
The third section presents a contemporary interpretation of the artist’s subjects — trees and skies, totem poles and Amerindian villages, widely advertised by the tourist industry of the day — juxtaposed with images of the logging activities of the 1930s, some of which demonstrate that Carr was an environmentalist before her time. Viewers also discover Carr herself as revealed in her caricatures, self-portraits and writing and through the eyes of her friends, critics and art lovers.
The curators of the exhibition are Charles C. Hill, Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada ; Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator, Historical Exhibitions, and in charge the Emily Carr Collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery ; and Johanne Lamoureux, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Montreal. Jacques Des Rochers, Curator of Canadian Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is in charge of the presentation of the exhibition in Montreal. -- www.mmfa.qc.ca
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