National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s (review)

Leslie Dawn’s recent book, National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s, offers readers a critical re-examination of many of the key events and players largely responsible for the creation and construction of an essentialized Canadian visual identity. By revisiting several of these events, such as the British Empire Exhibitions at Wembley in 1924 and 1925, the Exposition d’art Canadien at Musee du jeu de Paume in Paris in 1927, and the Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern exhibition in Vancouver in 1927, Dawn eloquently portrays how human agency played a crucial role in the development of an accepted image of Canadian identity.

Divided into ten chapters that reflect extensive and commendable archival research, Dawn renders a clear image of how the Canadian visual and material culture functioned on a transnational level by focusing mainly upon the relationships between Canada and Britain, and Canada and France. Dawn elucidates the complexities of negotiating both a desire for an autonomous, recognizable Canadian artistic identity and a reliance on approval by British and French art circles. Such an undertaking required a highly complex form of censorship orchestrated by the major artistic institutions in Canada, mainly the National Gallery of Canada and its director, Eric Brown, who in turn dictated not only what subjects artists were producing, but also which artists were used to confirm a Canadian visual identity in Canada and abroad. As Dawn notes in the introduction, ‘This brief but complex and conflicted period was a crucial time of transition and disruption when the nation was both formulating its own identity and renegotiating who would be granted visibility and a voice on the basis of this identity.’

By offering alternatives to the conventional narrative of national identity, Dawn exposes ‘a multiplicity of ambiguities,’ which were used to secure a distinct vision of Canada largely represented by the uninhabited landscapes of the Group of Seven. This vision, however, was predicated on the disappearance of Natives from the landscape completely. This ‘discourse of disappearance’ was strictly policed so that artists such as James Wilson Morrice, W. Langdon Kiln, and Emily Carr’s paintings of Natives, which alluded to a Native presence rather than absence, could be concealed from view in Canada and abroad. Such images directly challenged the constructed and unified vision of Canadian identity. As Dawn explains, ‘Native Populations had no viable place within the “native” Canadian culture, except as emblems of their own disappearance.’ The empty landscape thus became a viable symbol for a new national identity that accounted for lack of a Canadian ancestral or ancient volk, which would have proven rightful ownership and entitlement to the land. Dawn, therefore, deconstructs ‘a nostalgic and cherished vision of the 1920s,’ which he claims still ‘lingers within segments of a fragmented Canadian mentality.’ National Visions, National Blindness is an exceptional contribution to the study of Canadian art and identity.