Pegi By Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Canadian Artist (review)

A young woman setting out to make art in Canada today enters into a duel with discouragement, a challenge all the more daunting in the first half of the twentieth century. The life story of artist Pegi Nicol MacLeod (1904–49) seems at first an exception to the pattern, offering key elements required – talent, beauty, charisma, and early death – to nurture a legend. Yet, well regarded as MacLeod is said to have been during her lifetime, the silence that has shrouded her since remains an enigma to which Laura Brandon's carefully researched biography, Pegi by Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Canadian Artist, gives only passing attention.

Now, more than half a century after that early death and the large memorial exhibition at the National Gallery (opened by Vincent Massey, the future governor-general), attention is being paid in triplicate – a travelling exhibition circulated by the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG); an nfb film by Michael Ostroff, and this very readable biography – all three tributes launched at Carleton last February by then Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson.

The question reasserts itself: in the decades between these two GG speeches, what happened to MacLeod, and why?

Pegi by Herself is a book the author felt impelled to write ('I have fallen under the spell of her compelling personality,' writes Brandon); her mission, to right a wrong. The same commitment sees her, assisted by CUAG's Sandra Dyck, borrowing works from twenty-six collections for a large touring retrospective, a huge undertaking. The author invokes as her model historian Simon Schama's Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, but a closer fit is suggested by Deirdre Bair's comment on publication of her biography of Anaïs Nin: 'I had become fascinated ... with the idea of how and why and what women write about themselves.' In Pegi by Herself, it is through generous excerpts from her letters and those of her friends that a portrait is built.

Born a year after Nin, MacLeod made explorations of the freedoms of the zeitgeist that were, modest by comparison, but were courageous enough as witnessed by testimony from an impressive roster of sources, all skilfully integrated under an affectionate umbrella of family history. 'Like some cheerful souvenir of a long-ago Caribbean holiday, Pegi and her painting hung around the fringes of our family's life,' writes Brandon. The book begins and ends with reference to Mary Greey, the author's 'Toronto-bred mother,' a member of Pegi's circle who had acquired a painting by MacLeod that hung in the family room throughout the author's English childhood, the painting credited as touchstone for her project.

Admirable in its sustained empathy, and particularly evocative in its descriptions of art works, Brandon's account of MacLeod's life and work hovers between higher-order gossip on the one hand –– all those picnics, parties, excursions, and weekends in the country –– and, on the other, a genuine lament for the talent, energy, and ambition so long obscured.

But the enigma remains. To make MacLeod's work and life present to our collective imagination requires analysis of the causes of her prolonged disappearance. How to explain, for example, that her name was never once mentioned, nor was a single image of her work shown, by my own teachers, among them Arthur Lismer and John Lyman, named in the book as MacLeod's friends and colleagues? Her good friend H.O. McCurry, director of the National Gallery, willing to banter with and protect her, writes to his peers on the Guggenheim Fellowship Committee: 'There is a slight tendency to exhibitionism and an inclination to dart from one project to another without persevering in any particular department.' We need to know more about what the artist was led to believe about herself and how she was actually perceived.

Regarding Margaret Kathleen Nichol of Listowel, Ontario, reinvented by herself as Pegi Nicol, a hint emerges through Brandon's careful palimpsest that the...