Miller Brittain: When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears (review)

Tom Smart’s book is the catalogue for an exhibition of the work of Saint John, New Brunswick, artist Miller Brittain (1912–68). Smart, who is the executive director and ceo of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, became intrigued with Brittain’s work when he was curator of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in the late 1980s. In this critical biography, Smart sets out to show the coherence of Brittain’s oeuvre and to refute a common perception that the artist produced an uneven body of work. Smart argues that Brittain’s training at the Art Students’ League in New York in the early 1930s provided the artist with a foundation in technique and composition that remained central to his work throughout his career. Brittain was a figurative artist who used his skill as a draughtsman to explore emotion, psychology, and the human condition. Smart maintains that Brittain’s experience in New York taught him to use art as a means for exploring life.

Smart supports his claim by analyzing the formal features of particular works and setting Brittain’s art production in its social and artistic context. In tracing the development of the artist’s work during the 1930s, Smart recognizes Brittain’s proclivity for portraiture, and his use of satire to depict middle-class subjects. The author maintains that, by the end of the 1930s, Brittain had become a ‘skilful mythologizer’ of the ‘plight of Everyman.’ Smart situates Brittain’s foray into mural production in the early 1940s by showing that Brittain was one of numerous Canadian artists who looked to the mural movements in the United States and Mexico as models both for state-sponsored art production and for the kind of socially engaged art they wanted to produce. Brittain’s active service in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, and his work as an official war artist are discussed in terms of their impact on his outlook on life. Smart describes a series of Conté drawings of the day-to-day life of airmen as capturing the underlying trauma of war through the depiction of ordinary events. He locates a series of motifs – star, spear, and trailing plume – that became central to his postwar art production in a painting of air battle, Night Target, Germany (1946). Smart interprets the recurrence of these symbols in Brittain’s later work as evidence that the artist was attempting to come to terms with feelings of anguish and terror first experienced during the war.

Following his return to Saint John after the war, Brittain began to paint biblical themes, which Smart describes as at once a response to the war and an exploration of the struggle between good and evil. This postwar period saw a change in Brittain’s style, as well as in his subject matter. Charting the critical reception of Brittain’s work, Smart explains why the artist was hard to situate. He argues that his paintings were difficult for some critics to understand because they were unlike the work of his contemporaries. He also works to dispel simplistic autobiographical interpretations of Brittain’s work, which have tended to read the despairing sensibility of the paintings of this period through the artist’s experience at war, his grief over his wife’s death, and his alcoholism. An essay by Allen Bentley, an English professor at St Thomas University in Fredericton, which looks at the influence of English poet and visual artist William Blake on Brittain, is helpful for understanding Brittain’s attraction to biblical themes and the visionary quality of the postwar work.

This catalogue is the first comprehensive analysis of Brittain’s work, and although I would have liked to hear more about Brittain’s influence on other artists, Smart’s analysis shows why Brittain should be considered a significant Canadian artist. While I found Smart’s argument that Brittain’s body of work is unified by the artist’s solid...