Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image by Marjorie M. Halpin (review)

226 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 that her aim is to write an awe-inspiring story worth reading rather than a clinical case study. At the same time, Morley does not gloss over the disturbing reality of Kurelek's lifelong obsessions; she is careful to provide multiple perspectives on this 'latter-day Don Quixote' (p 182) whose religious vision tends to entail psychological blindness, dogmatism, and insensitivity to the little ironies of daily living. Itis Morley's central thesis that Kurelek's pervasive bitterness is mainly the result of a harsh father's thorough hostility to his son's artistic nature. In Siding with the artist who 'forced his will to forgive [his father] while his emotions fought a rearguard action' (p 296), she emphasizes his quest for true patriarchal authority and underestimates his parallel quest for matriarchal order, for the Mother Church, for creativity and wisdom. The latter quest is perhaps the most urgent in his life, yet he understates its pursult himself. As Morley shows, his personality is more like his father's than he would like to admit. Colour plates of eight of Kurelek's paintings and over ninety photographs , many of them from his scrapbook, illustrate the text well and create almost a biography within the biography. Regrettably, though, the approximately 4" X 3" reproduction of The Maze {J6" x 48" in the original) is far too small to reveal any of the harrowing details of Kurelek's most striking attempt at self-analysis. Morley's story itself, of course, amounts to an extended analysis of The Maze and other mazes of Kurelek's that are so remarkably exemplary of the strange collusions of life and art, of creativity and near-pathology. It is the awareness of these collusions in artists' lives that challenges biographer and reader alike to fresh seeing. In addition to its interpretive strengths, this biography brings together useful information on the history of Ukrainian-Canadian immigration and of the creative as well as the liberal arts in twentieth-century Canada. (K.P. STICH) Marjorie M. Halpin. Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image Museum Note no. 18. University of British Columbia Press. 59, illus. $15.95 paper In the '930S and '940s, as the influence of the Group of Seven began to subside and as cities other than Toronto developed important artistic communities, a large number of modern Canadian painters with an interest in international concerns and in human contentin art, rather than in Group-style wilderness landscape, gained national attention. This past year there were welcome additions of various kinds to the literature on these artists, including Louise Dompierre's John Lyman 1886-1967 (Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University), Natalie Luckyj's Expressions ofWill: TheArt ofPrudence Heward (Agnes Etherington Art Centre and McMichael Canadian Collection), Pellan: sa vie, son art, son temps by Germain Lefebvre (Editions Marcel Broquet), and George Johnston's informal book on his friend Carl Schaefer, Carl: Portrait of a Painter From Letters and Reminiscences (Penumbra Press). ,ack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image, although it is a briefcross-disciplinary study written from an anthropologist's point of view, also makes an interesting contribution within this context. It was produced as a Museum Note in a series publishedby UBe Press in association with the UBe Museum ofAnthropology , and it accompanied an exhibition of the same title that Halpin, a curatoratthe Museum, mounted last year. The book, for all its modesty of scale, is rich with well-chosen reproductions of Indian artifacts, old photographs, and especially Shadbolt's drawings and paintings, and these reproductions are of such a remarkable calibre that they seem to bring the book instantly to life. Although Shadbolt had begun his career teaching at the Vancouver School of Art in the late '930s, it was a full decade later that he produced his first major group of paintings, which were improvisations based on Northwest Coast native masks. Since then Indian objects have provided themes for many more of his pictures. Halpin's book deals selectively with Shadbolt's Indian paintings both as local images (Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz are all cited on page 2 in Halpin's affirmation of...