Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada: A Mennonite Artist in the Canadian Landscape, 1925–1995 (review)

This lavishly illustrated book records the work of Mennonite artist Woldemar Neufeld (1909–2002). The text by Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Tiessen locates this work within the context of Neufeld’s life. Neufeld was born into a well-to-do family in a part of Ukraine that many Mennonites still think of as Russia. He experienced the trauma of dispossession as a child. When Bolshevik soldiers threatened to take his grandfather away, his father volunteered to take his place and was executed. The remaining family came to Canada in 1924 as part of a refugee group of over 20,000 Mennonites.

The Neufeld family settled in Waterloo, but he went on to work in Cleveland, New York, Vancouver, and Connecticut. Although he was influenced by the Group of Seven painters he met during his early years, he always resisted the wilderness mythology (what he called the ‘pines of Thomson’) and was drawn to the recording of human structures and the celebration of human activities. The strong influence of Pieter Bruegel is evident in his ‘Harvest in Waterloo County,’ which the editors reproduce alongside Bruegel’s ‘The Harvesters.’

Neufeld was a prolific artist who moved back and forth among styles and media, working in oils, watercolours, and block prints. Having learned colour-block printing from Japanese Canadians in Vancouver, Neufeld had many successful years in New York City, where reviewers ‘applauded the child-like joie de vivre’ of his prints. He also began working with a combination of pen-and-ink drawing and watercolour, inspired by the bridges and buildings of New York to ‘paint in increasingly fine detail.’

Neufeld’s life reflects a ‘desire to move forward’ and ‘try to smother the horrors of his Russian past.’ Despite his happy subjects, however, the paintings in this book acquire a darker shading as a result of the narrative of departure and return that accompanies them. Most poignant are the paintings Neufeld did after his return to Waterloo (1968–95). The impossibility of return to the childhood home in Russia is a story not so much repressed as hidden out in the open.

Some of Neufeld’s paintings of Mennonite homesteads in Waterloo bear a strong resemblance to paintings by the beloved folk painter Henry Pauls, whose work has also been researched by the Tiessens. Both painters saw themselves as visual historians. Pauls recorded the estates in Russia as he remembered them, and Neufeld recorded what he saw around him in Waterloo County. On one level, this palimpsest of images is simply a result of the regular patterns of agrarian life. Rows of vegetables planted in a Mennonite garden look much the same in Waterloo as they did in Russia. The painstaking detail, however, communicates an urgent sense that the human constructs must be recorded before they are destroyed. Theorists refer to this as the ‘belatedness’ of trauma.

Neufeld is quoted as saying that his paintings are a record of ‘what we came to from Russia, where all we did was flee and hide.’ In his assessment of Neufeld’s work, Michael Bird concluded that it has nothing to do with the supposed Canadian themes of survival. According to Bird, the paintings represent a ‘primordial innocence never fully lost after the fall’ but redeemed by ‘meaningful human work’ which is part of a ‘divine scheme.’ Such an interpretation can only be sustained if you turn a blind eye to the memory of trauma that shapes all Neufeld’s work. As the Tiessens put it, ‘His works of rejoicing were . . . also works of mourning and of a hidden remembering by means of forgetting.’ These paintings go beyond nostalgia because Neufeld’s achievement was to record what is there in such a way that it is simultaneously a recording of what is lost.