Carmichael’s Triumph?

Following the Arts Carmichael's Triumph? The work ofFranklin Carmichael has often been unjustly neglected, and perhaps the desire to offset this historic neglect was behind the selections made for the Carmichael retrospective last summer in Kleinburg, the most complete show ofhis work ever mounted. At the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Carmichael's latest curator was determined to show him as a grand landscape artist. If that meant too largea selectionofmediocre work, too bad. This was a show ofCarmichael as a member of the Group of Seven, as a graphic designer, as a book illustrator, even as a maker offurniture. He was, apparently , to look like a Renaissance man. Megan Bice, curator of the McMichael, and Mary Carmichael Mastin, the artist's daughter, saw to it that the exhibition was impressively large. Watercolours were secondary. Oil paintings, over sixty of them, reigned supreme. The determination to make Carmichael into an important landscape painter meant that the exhibition stressed his early paintings and his mid-career work in the La Cloche mountains. Buthis greatest achievement was as a watercolourist . He was in 1925, with A.J. Casson and Fred Brigden, the founderof the Canadian Society ofPainters in Water Color. In the show itselfhis watercolours - at their best, dazzling, effortless, and fresh - appeared mainly in the third room. In the catalogue, the breadth of Carmichael's work is discussed as ifboth oil painting and watercolour were equal, though in the show they're clearly not. More stress should have been laid on works such as Snow Flurries: North Shore ofLake Superior, an almost breathtaking achievement. But in the course of bringing all the work together to demonstrate the artist's achievement, the curator lost sightofwhat was best. The artist, as is so often the case, knew better. "All his life he aspired to the same effect in oils that he could achieve in Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 25. No. 2 (El<' /990Summer) watercolors," Bice notes in the catalogue. In the show we slowly discover this point for ourselves. Carmichael was first known in art circles as the friend of Tom Thomson, with whom he worked at Grip Ltd. and shared a studio. It is clear from the show that Thomson's way of painting strongly influenced Carmichael. In Sketch for a Muskoka Road, he imitated the indeterminately foliated butdefined trunks of Thomson's early work, such as Afternoon , Algonquin Park (also in McMichael , so we could easily compare). Carmichael's clouds and snow also show Thomson's influence but at this time he lacked Thomson's way of understanding structure, even of vaporous things, and Thomson's colour genius. He absorbed one ofThomson's favourite compositional motifs, that of the foreground screen through which the viewer looks toward a distant view, and used it to good effect. But what Carmichael chose to look through is different; he might instead paint a flowering tree, as in Spring, or a bright red Sumach bush. He was a more decorative artist. What Thomson offered Carmichael - the vocabulary Carmichael used to form his own sentences - was still with him after Thomson's death in 1917. Carmichael 's Autumn Sunlight (1920) is a paradeofThomson effects, from the fiery hues ofred-orange, orange, and yellow to the foreground shapes oftrees with a more distant skyline. (The clouds, more geometric , are different - and Carmichael's own.) It was with Autumn Hillside of 1920 that Carmichael achieved his first use of the pictorial motifthat was to be common to his later work and was in time to become almost his signature. A bank of cloud (here lavender) is a curtain that lifts to reveal, like some distant heaven, the clear sky and rolling hills. The viewer looks at the scene two ways at once. The thrill ofthe work is that ofa noble moment, nobly conceived. In the foreground are a tree stump and purple rocks; in the middle ground, pine trees looking like buxom Victorian ladies; and in the 155 Franklin Carmichael 1890-1945. Wabajisik: Drowned Land l929130. Watercolour on paper. 52.0 x 69.5 cm. Private collection. background the gold, yellow and cream foliage ofbirches; while in the far distance are the two skies, one further back indicating clear weather. The rhetoric is in high Canadian style, but there is something too pretty, too ingratiating, as though Carmichael himself doubted that he could make the Canadian landscapepainting team. Did he perhaps find the group's ethos vain rhetoric? Apparently not. In 1920 he was a member ofthe Group ofSeven. The problem lay in his age; he was the youngest, the most junior, till A.J. Casson was invited to join in 1926. Carmichael could rise to great heights commemorating the elegiac vision ofCanada in the Group mode - as in October Gold, where he combined a scene from a height and a foreground tapestry of colour handled in a bolder. more block-like way. His masterpiece as an oil painter is L<'al Pat/I'm, where he used paint to create a loosely drawn net of colour in his foreground screen. But very soon these brilliantly lyric paintings were 156 blotted out as he came under the influence of Lawren Harris. Where Thomson had given Carmichael a sense of colour and its beauty. Harris gave him structure. In Carmichael 's works of the 1930s, he managed the structure but at the same time began to overwork and overfinish. This killed him as a painter oflarge works. There are still good moments in his sketches in oil where he achieved a light touch. as in his Fann , Cedar Brae (1940). Mainly, he could not relax in the large works: the fearofbeing not good enough may have been too great. He may also have felt comfortable in a smaller sphere. He was crisp and practical ; he liked things and people in order. In 1942 he resigned from the Canadian Group of Painters over the squabbling of Paraskeva Clark and Carl Schaefer. both vociferous arguers. as Isabel McLaughlin . president of the Group at the time, remembers. (The incident occurred at her house on Balmoral Avenue in Toronto.) It wasn't so much the strong Revue detudes ca11adie1111es Franklin Carmichael 1890-1945. Untitled 1925. Watercolour over graphite on paper. 23.3 x 34.2 cm. Private collection. personalities that irritated him. Miss McLaughlin feels: it was her failure to keep the meeting in order. As well as being a perfectionist. stern in his demands on himself and others. Carmichael was a man who did not want his work to be the same as anyone else's. Founding the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colar must have meant a lotto him. Now he was the one in power, the active partner in the way Harris, MacDonald , Lismer, and Jackson had been the active partners in the Group of Seven. Casson. Carmichael's assistant and apprentice at Rous and Mann. recently recalled the event as follows : "In 1925 water color was considered second rate. In the Ontario Society ofArtists exhibition held at the Art Gallery of Toronto [in Marchi. watercolors were hung in the dark corridor to the tearoom. Seeing this, I said to Carmichael. 'Let's start a watercolor society.' 'There's been about four · tries at that but let's try.' said Carmichael." But Carmichael felt they were not well Jouma/ c~fCanadian Studies enough known, says Casson, "and suggested old Fred Brigden, the dean of watercolor at the time, to head it up." Casson's story of the corridor cannot be checked since no hanging map of the Ontario Society of Artists show exists. but the story of the smart young men approaching Brigden rings true. Certainly the corridor to the tearoom was used for material considered to be of less prestige for many years. In 1969and 1970. when I was at the Art Gallery, the chiefcurator. Mario Amaya. told me I could hang Tom Thomson's sketches there. The place. which no longer exists. was narrow and dark. The walls. once cream. by then had a yellowish tinge. Carmichael's eagerness to start a watercolour society revealed that he knew where his gift lay . In the watercolour. he was a master in complete control. From early on - as with his watercolour of S11111achs. painted around 1915 - he was at home in this delicate. subtle medium where the sensitive artist triumphs over 157 Franklin Carmichael. Photo: Fred Haines. McMichael Canadian Art Collection Archives. 158 Revue d'hudes canadiennes the bold. Here he could use his sense of design and be himself - quiet, precise, brilliant. He used the dry method in the English watercolour tradition, thinking perhaps ofwatercolourists such as Samuel Fowler and John Sell Cotman as models. But he found a way to express the shape of clouds which was uniquely his. Even later, as a teacher, he used to urge students like Charles Goldhamer to capture the shape ofthe clouds. That was the key, he felt, to success. Carmichael's watercolours are hard to copy because they're simple and tonal. He used a restricted colour range and he often let bits of the paper show through, even to punctuate certain areas, as did Fowler. Casson recalls that Carmichael was the one who told him to use a thin coat ofyellow ochre to control the sizing in the Whatman paper they favoured. For him, watercolour was the supreme art, one attuned to his subtlest impulse. He was a subtle man. All the more reason, therefore , for this comprehensive exhibition to have included more watercolours. Here, where Carmichael was sublime, we were offered only a sampling. No doubtthe organizers ofthe exhibition wished to focus on the overall character of Carmichael's career. A retrospective means a look backwards. But why not look at what's best in an artist's work? The suspicion remains that Journal ofCanadian Studies works in oil were stressed because they suited the organizers' view ofCarmichael, one they wished to perpetuate. Also doubtful is their idea that Carmichael would have returned to Gambit #1, his only non-objective painting, done as a special project for an Ontario Society ofArtists show. Carmichael, who stopped painting for several years after this work, had only just started working again when he died ofa heart attack in 1944. Casson recalls that after Carmichael's death he saw a half-finished painting on Carmichael 's easel butdid not look to see what it was. He was, however, glad to see that Carmichael was painting again. (Carmichael had said to him about his work when he stopped painting, "If no one's going to buy them, why should I paint them?" Times were tough!) Abstraction was not Carmichael's game and this painting, so influenced by Harris, is not good. Carmichael pursued and achieved a different, and in some ways more elusive, goal in a medium that is still not as recognized as it should be today. His watercolours will continue to excite his admirers and will endure. His heavier, more political oils - in the Canadian patriotic sense - will likely appear only in a nationalist art history. JOAN MURRAY The Robert McLaughlin Gallery 159 ...