“The Dignity of Every Human Being”: New Brunswick Artists and Canadian Culture between the Great Depression and the Cold War by Kirk Niergarth (review)

This is an exceptional study of the intellectual currents running through the New Brunswick artistic community during the 1930s and 1940s. Niergarth successfully demonstrates that the members of this community developed much of their work in reaction to a romanticized vision embedded in the landscape art of the Group of Seven — that is of northern lakes, forests, or plains devoid of human presence, especially the colonizing forces of industrial expansion. Readers may debate the extent to which the entire work of the Group of Seven neglected such human forces, or the extent to which it may have been a reaction against the landscape depredations of capitalist development, but Niergarth leaves no doubt that the figures he has studied — Walter Abell, Jack Humphrey, Millar Brittain, and Pegi Nichol MacLeod — insisted on artistic expression that foregrounded the human experience of working people in Canada, and that they interpreted the most important determinants of such experience as being the uneven forces of industrial development and the experience of war in the 1930s and 1940s.

The best way to characterize the New Brunswick artists’ impulse would be as art about and for the people, but not necessarily by them. Niergarth demonstrates that his subjects should have been the scions of affluent Maritime families but for the impact of the Great Depression. Their backgrounds had provided the New Brunswick artists, especially the men, with the education and training to be taken seriously by the gendered world of the Canadian artistic establishment, but the Depression meant that they enjoyed little certain employment that would serve as the basis for their artistic endeavours or allow them to live as had their families. The combination of artistic sensitivity and imminent impoverishment meant that the New Brunswick artists were alert to the discrepancies, and consequent lack of transformative potential, between landscape art and the lived experience of people. The New Brunswick artists responded by arguing for “social realism” (20) in artistic expression that attempted to capture human experience in industrial and urban environments.

Niergarth argues that this social realism reflected the New Brunswick artists’ commitment to a “democratic” art. Walter Abell, for example, hoped that a more democratic art would help supplant a “cultural plutocracy” with a “cultural democracy” (12). The goal of art should be to inspire and mobilize the power of working people who were otherwise deprived of meaningful political influence because of the economic and social inequalities of the modern capitalist world. The New Brunswick artists were, intellectually, fellow travellers with many of the writers for contemporary leftist periodicals such as Canadian Dimension or New Frontier. While the artists had leftist sympathies, they were not politically engaged as party members or in campaigns. Rather, the artists hoped to prompt popular action, first against economic and social inequality at home and then, as the war against fascism opened into World War II, against injustice on a broader scale. In his assessment of their political position in Canadian society, Niergarth suggests that the New Brunswick artists were neither cause nor effect. For example, he points to the difficulty in determining whether Abell’s 1941 speech on “Art and Democracy” was an appeal for activism by the people or was inspired by them. The New Brunswick artists existed in a dialectic between themselves as artistic producers and the people as consumers of their art.

Despite this dialectical relationship, the New Brunswick artists aspired to be of the people, as may be seen in Pegi Nichol MacLeod’s, and later commentators’, insistence that the Observatory Art Centre she was instrumental in founding at the University of New Brunswick in 1941 was a response to local community demands. However, the artists were unable to derive direct support from the people they hoped to represent and inspire...