The Art of John Snow by Elizabeth Herbert (review)

In December 2012, the City of Calgary proposed designating the home of the late artist John Snow (1911–2004) as a municipal historic resource. The modest two-storey house, built in 1911, was already designated a provincial historic resource, and while the age and location of the house in the older neighbourhood of Lower Mount Royal alone might justify those designations, it is Snow’s importance as an artist, cultural philanthropist, and supporter of avant-garde arts that undoubtedly prompted this new honour. It was in this neighbourhood that Snow, a lifelong resident of Calgary, produced his paintings, sculptures, and the many colourful lithographs for which he is best known. He is also known for salvaging old commercial lithography equipment, abandoned in the snow in an alley, and reassembling it for his basement studio, a story that is almost the stuff of local legend.

Appropriately, author Elizabeth Herbert provides a substantial and engrossing account of Snow’s affinity for the medium of lithography, and the incident of the salvaged commercial equipment is placed within the context of the printmaking renaissance that occurred during the 1950s in the United States and Canada. Advances in photographic reproduction were making commercial lithography obsolete, a windfall for artists whose access to the medium was no doubt helped by the discarded and now affordable lithography presses and stones. There is thoughtful discussion of Snow’s complex response to a medium that he believed to be both craft and art (in Calgary, a much discussed and controversial idea at the time) and that he embraced as an affordable art form, a means of making art more available to a less affluent public. This egalitarian philosophy informed his artistic endeavours and deserves to be better known. Herbert also argues that printmaking for Snow served as a communal activity that enhanced collegial relationships with artists like Maxwell Bates and others who were involved in cultural enterprises and that promoted all the arts. Snow’s support of contemporary music, film, and theatre is well known, but she also casts new light on his lifelong engagement with literature.

Herbert’s text focuses on the intellectual and formal content of Snow’s work, set within the context of, time when, and place where modernist art was slow to be embraced. She suggests that the very popularity of his ubiquitous and colourful images of figures, flowers, and still life – accessible, decorative subjects seemingly devoid of meaning – works against their serious assessment. Instead, his images can be interpreted in terms of the influence of modernist literature: specifically that they share structural similarities with the work of Samuel Beckett and Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch. Other modernist influences on his art were abstraction, via the work of British sculptor Henry Moore and American artist Hans Hoffman, and kindred spirits and fellow Alberta artists Maxwell Bates and Illingworth Kerr. The close association between Snow and the more prominent Bates, and their mutually supportive relationship as artists and friends, is also explored at length. As figurative artists, both Bates and Snow obviously had much in common, but Herbert documents, for the first time, not only Bates’s influence on Snow’s figures, but also their substantial differences, focusing on the female figures in their work. In a complex argument she suggests that in different manifestations, the ‘uncanny female,’ a psychologically ambiguous, often menacing figure, is a central image in the work of both artists.

Elizabeth Herbert is an instructor in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary and former Glenbow Museum curator. In The Art of John Snow, based on such primary sources as the Personal Papers of John Snow, other manuscript collections, interviews with contemporaries, and secondary sources, she provides a masterful and well-deserved reassessment of the artist’s stature in modernist Alberta art. Excellent production values, some 100 colour illustrations, notes, and an extensive bibliography do justice to the text.