Art or Memorial: The Forgotten History of Canada’s War Art (review)

Art or Memorial is the second volume in the Beyond Boundaries Series: Canadian Defence and Strategic Studies, a somewhat unusual home for Canadian art history. (The first was Jack Granatstein’s The Generals: The Canadian Army’s Senior Commanders in the Second World War). But the author, Laura Brandon, is the curator of Canadian War Art at the Canadian War Museum and has spent many years researching Canada’s official war art collections. Those collections now number over thirteen thousand objects, generated primarily through three separate programs: the World War I Canadian War Memorials Fund, the World War II Canadian War Records Fund, and the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program of 1968–95.

Brandon grounds her study in theoretical perspectives drawn variously from Marx, reception theory, and more recent studies in social memory and its formation, notably by Pierre Nora and Raphael Samuel. She sets the scene with quotations from two men, the first is Raymond Williams: ‘[T]he more actively all cultural work can be related either to the whole organization within which it was expressed, or to the contemporary organization, within which it was used, the more clearly shall we see its true values.’ Indeed, Brandon explains that, despite the initial impetus to commission war art coming from Lord Beaverbrook, it was successive Canadian governments that caused war art to exist, determined what should be depicted and how, and attempted to control the meanings of the works it commissioned. It should be further noted that all those who have cared for the art, like Brandon herself, are employees of the government of Canada. Government control was effected early on through the promotion of certain types of work, traditional and representational over modernist and abstracted, and even, more recently, by censorship. Artist Allan Harding MacKay received a commission that included a portrait of Colonel Serge Labbé. But the portrait was subsequently rejected by the Department of National Defence, not because of poor quality – tellingly it graces the cover of Brandon’s book – but likely because it did not conform to the image that dnd wanted to present to the public at that time. ‘During the Somalia Inquiry of 1994 Labbé was accused of failing to ensure adequate preparation for members of Canadian Joint Force Somalia, particularly for members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment Battle group.’ The work was subsequently accepted by the Canadian War Museum.

Brandon’s approach to her topic is both discursive and episodic and focuses variously on specific works (Walter Allward’s Vimy Monument) administrative decisions, the role of religious imagery, individual artists (Alex Colville, Aba Bayefsky, Pegi Nichol MacLeod), and major exhibitions in order to illuminate aspects of her arguments. Particularly interesting is her discussion of the role of the First World War for the formation of the Group of Seven’s signature style, a style frequently understood to derive its inspiration overwhelmingly from the Canadian landscape. She underscores how significant for A.Y. Jackson and Fred Varley, and through them for the Group’s other members, was exposure to the blasted wastes of mud and wilderness created through years of trench warfare, not to mention depictions of these by British modernist artists such as Paul Nash.

The second quotation Brandon uses to preface her book is from John R. Gillis: ‘“[M]emory work” is like any other kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex class, gender, and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom and for what end.’ Thus, apart from the role of government, Brandon teases through several issues – how Canada’s war art, despite the best efforts of many, was ignored for years by art historians, the media, and the community, and then achieved widespread public attention. Groundbreaking exhibitions such as 1976’s A Terrible Beauty: The Art of Canada at War co-curated by Heather Robertson and Joan Murray and Brandon’s own 2000 Canvas of War: Masterpieces from...