Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau, Art and the Colonial Narrative in the Canadian Media by Carmen L. Robertson (review)

Carmen Robertson contends that Norval Morrisseau "plays a more important role in the construction of Canada's cultural imaginary than he does in the nation's history of art," and in this thoroughly researched book, she describes the various ways that popular media has assisted and sometimes directed Canada's colonial project even as it documents Morrisseau's artistic career from the early 1960s to the present. Drawing on a multitude of sources including contemporary articles and reviews in the popular press, two National Film Board videos, and numerous published accounts of the artist and his work written by professional associates, curators, and scholars, Robertson illustrates how the image of Morrisseau has been framed in ways that help support an idea of indigeneity that served neither the artist nor his work but, rather, the country's need for an Indigenous other. By constructing and adhering to a persistent racialized discourse that includes narratives of the primitive, the naive, the unruly, and the unschooled, Canada's media contributed to the transformation of Morrisseau into a visible example of the imaginary Indian. In effect, the media portrayed multiple aspects of the artist's persona during his fifty-year career in ways that mostly served to reiterate and confirm the usual stereotypes and signifiers of Nativeness in order to reaffirm Canada's image of itself as a monolith of Whiteness.

For instance, Copper Thunderbird, Picasso of the North, and Shaman Artist, three familiar referents directly related to Morrisseau's artistic oeuvre, shrewdly differentiate him from mainstream contemporary art practice by locating his work within a discourse of primitivism, just slightly outside the larger tenets of modernism and, thus, of less artistic significance than that of his academically trained (read more assimilated) Indigenous contemporaries. Other narratives focus on his personal life and present him in socially constructed terms that salaciously describe his erratic behaviour, his alcoholism, and his jail time, to subtly, yet strategically, direct the ethnographic lens through which the press and the general public have tended to regard him.

Robertson argues that these diverse narratives create a "vocabulary of difference" that guides the public's attention to Morrisseau's Nativeness and instructs them on how to assess the value of his work, while concurrently stabilizing and supporting a Canadian colonial view of Indigenous peoples and their art. Moreover, the "disciplining and confining gaze of the press media" successfully circumscribes the artist's own attempts to advocate for a more honest, serious approach to his work. Robertson argues that Morrisseau's artistic significance has been "hijacked by other interests" and ends her book with a particularly ironic example of how the media and others have manipulated images of Morrisseau and his art to their advantage. She describes the progression of his monumental painting "Androgeny" from a gift to the Canadian people on the occasion of his induction into the Order of Canada in 1983 to its use as a carefully selected pictorial backdrop for then Prime Minister Stephen Harper's political messaging in 2008.

In addition to a cogent critique of the press and media coverage of Morrisseau's life and work, Robertson offers a painstakingly thorough record and history of the emergence of contemporary Indigenous painting in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, told mainly through articles in the mainstream press, essays from exhibition catalogues, and quotes from Indigenous contemporaries. This account presents a rarely discussed aspect of Canadian art history and delivers an important contribution to scholarship in the field of Indigenous visual and cultural studies.