A Word to Us All . . . by J.E.H. MacDonald, and: J.E.H. MacDonald: Designer by Robert Stacey (review)

HUMANITIES 285 with a comprehensive list of primary and secondary sources and useful cross references to both published and archival materials. McLeod also includes the appearance of important cultural productions (books, films, theatrical performances) and appendices which list lesbian and gay organizations, periodicals, bars, and clubs. As a reference book for historians of recent lesbian and gay history and culture, McLeod's work is of obvious importance. Th~ only previous guide was the chronology compiled in 1982 by the late James Fraser, which summarized this period in a scant five pages. McLeod has increased the number of entries by a factor of about fifteen and provided the kind of thorough bibliographic support that every scholar longs for. This work should also prove useful to those interested in the development of movements of social protest more generally, especially those, such as feminism, that arose from similar historical circumstances. Although Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada is not itself a history (and McLeod rightly disavows any pretence of having provided one), the chronology suggests an interesting (if inchoate) narrative, one that reveals that social movements rarely emerge ex nihilo (as in the largely discredited 'Stonewall' theory of recent lesbian and gay history), but develop as the result of painstaking efforts and incremental developments (as well as disappointing setbacks). It is, of course, the work of historians proper to redraw this outline and fill in its contours, and one looks forward to the kind of careful and considered accounts that a book such as this should engender. (CRAIG PATTERSON) J.E,H. MacDonald. A Word to Us All ... Illustrated poem, with a note by Robert Stacey McBwnie-Cutler Editions, 16. $20.00 Robert Stacey, with research by HWlter Bishop. J.E.H. MacDonald: Designer Archives of Canadian Art, Carleton University Press. 130 . $49.95 The paradigm ofthe easel painting- oil on canvas, framed, both swallowed up by and yet culturally validated in a museum context - has been an insidiously insistent one in the written and exhibited history of Canadian art. It is ironic almost to the point of tragedy that artist J.E.H. MacDonald did not want painting to be given higher.status than what he considered other, equal arts - design, lettering, layout, and the so-called crafts-yet this is exactly what has happened to his career as it is known to most people. We think ofhim as a painter, the senior member of the Group ofSeven, and call to mind his famous oil paintings such as The Tangled Garden (1916) or The Solemn Land (1921) when we hear his name. This painterly output, though large (when he died in 1932 at the age of fifty-nine, MacDonald left 286 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 some 150 canvases and 600-800 oil on panel sketches), forms only one facet of a rich and varied career as a designer, writer and poet, teacher and lecturer, and William-Marris-styled visual artist. These two books, organized and pushed intopublished form by independent writer/ editor/ curatorRobert Stacey, do much to correctour generally single-faceted view of MacDonald. A Word to Us All is a small keepsake publication, produced in a run of five hundred numbered copies. It reproduces a facsimile of an illustrated poem written by MacDonald in 1900, exhorting Canadians to peace, not fighting in Britain's Boer War in South Africa. In his 'note/ which runs for twelve pages, Robert Stacey does an exemplary job of describing in detail the context ofMacDonald's poem, both in the artist's own career and in the culturalenvironment of the day. The little book is intended as a companion keepsake accompanying Stacey's larger effort, his J.E.H. MacDonald: Designer, which attempts to be a catalogue raisonnee of all the artist's surviving work in two-dimensional design. MacDonald earned his living in the design, lettering, and illustration trade for the first part of his career. It.was while he was employed as the chief designer at Grip in Toronto that he met Tom Thomson, and some of the members of the future Group of Seven. But a g~eat deal of the design work reproduced in this book was created through the later years...