Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (review)

Beyond Wilderness. The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art is composed largely of excerpts from essays and reproductions of Canadian landscape art produced from the 1960s to the present. All of them may easily be found elsewhere. Nevertheless, Beyond Wilderness is an important and welcome addition to Canadian art history. O’Brian and White assembled this material in response to The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, an exhibition, curated by Charles Hill for the National Gallery of Canada in 1995, that displayed landscape art by members of the Group of Seven (and their colleague Tom Thomson) in a manner many scholars believed reiterated the position that these artists held from just before the First World War to the 1960s. Accordingly, their unpopulated, pristine, northern wilderness landscapes, rendered in bold expressionistic styles, were the first to unite the nation around a single vision of the country, fully to reject European art, and to introduce modernism. But, according to the contributors to Beyond Wilderness, the Group of Seven’s success must be explained in other ways, such as its full participation in Western culture’s cult of the wilderness. Further, their styles belonged to modernist European art, while their exclusion of Native and French Canadians, women and immigrants from non-Western cultures from their national vision, prevented them from producing a ‘pan-Canadian’ art. Hill’s exhibition would have made more sense, O’Brien says, if its title had ended with a question mark. O’Brian and White have in a sense added that question mark by bringing together post-1960s textual and visual counter-narratives in a highly readable format with high-quality illustrations. They also include five new articles, two of which – Johanne Sloan’s ‘Conceptual Landscape Art: Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow,’ and Leslie Dawn’s ‘The Britishness of Canadian Art’ – provide new and interesting support for the book’s overall argument. Undoubtedly then, Beyond Wilderness will find a strong audience not only among academics, who might well make use of it in the classroom, but also with anyone interested in the legacy of Thomson and the Group of Seven.

Because the thirty-four previously published articles in Beyond Wilderness were written over a period of forty years, and because the editors needed to summarize these views, the book has a problem with repetition. Author after author denies the Group’s ability to represent the nation as a whole, points out the European sources of their styles, explains the National Gallery’s responsibility for the Group’s international success at Wembley in 1924, etc. Another problem is the lack of weight given to French Canada. Many statements throughout the book seem to define Canada as English Canada. For example, the introduction states, ‘In the first half of the twentieth century, art in Canada was focused on a wilderness painting movement.’ Surely the authors mean ‘art in English Canada.’ Further, the book includes only one previously published article by a French-Canadian art historian and the art of only one French-Canadian artist. The addition of the commissioned interview with Johanne Lamoureux strengthens the French-Canadian component, but only to a small degree, since it repeats some of Trépanier’s information. It also leaves readers with the sense that the editors, having decided to exclude French-language articles, intended to compensate with the interview. Since most English Canadians cannot read French, this decision was practical, but it is also ironic, given the subject of the book.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the editors believe the romanticized view of the Group of Seven reigns strong today in the form of ‘unrelenting’ exhibitions, publications, gallery attendance, souvenir items, and prices for their work. Beyond Wilderness, O’Brian says, cannot ‘dislodge’ such ‘profoundly entrenched’ ideas. It can only ‘take stock of how this vision came about.’ This statement seems ingenuous since, in fact, Beyond Wilderness opens the way, not just...