Take Comfort: The Career of Charles Comfort/La carrière de Charles Comfort (review)

Charles Comfort (1900–94) recently took the spotlight in a retrospective exhibition organized by Mary Jo Hughes for the Winnipeg Art Gallery and a subsequent nationwide tour. An accompanying book, titled Take Comfort: The Career of Charles Comfort, catalogues ninety-six artworks and is authored by Hughes, along with four contributing authors, Rosemarie L. Tovell, Rosemary Donegan, Anna Hudson, and Laura Brandon. Published in both English and French, Take Comfort also includes an interactive cd-rom. The cd-rom takes an archival document as its starting point – a 1930s guestbook from the Comfort home in Toronto – and relays a wealth of biographical and anecdotal knowledge via hotspots on the many signatures and illustrations, which can be explored page by page.

Although Comfort occupies a virtual no man’s land in popular attention between the Group of Seven and the advancements in abstraction after mid-century, he is, in fact, so much a part of Canadian art history, both as an artist and as an administrator, that this monograph serves, in many ways, to recover the recognition of the artist, who had been esteemed among his peers. Despite Hughes’s call for more attention to be paid to Comfort, the largely biographical approach and reportorial tone of her introductory essay may do little to pique the interest of a newcomer to his work. This first essay of five does, however, do a thorough job of tracing the artist’s career. Tovell’s contribution also traces Comfort’s development but, more specifically, in watercolours from his early days in Winnipeg to his establishment in Toronto. A formal analysis takes priority, with a satisfying account of the influence of W.J. Phillips on the artist.

Hughes is apt to point out that ‘condescension toward commercial art’ has wrongfully stunted the growth of discourse on Comfort, but as this publication proves, the artist’s commercial activities were vital to his overall aesthetic development, not to mention fellowship. Donegan’s essay on Comfort’s murals makes headway in this area, showing that the artist’s ability to satisfy a client’s vision made him quite successful with mural commissions. How successfully, or even appropriately, these murals speak to today’s viewers is another matter, which Donegan hastily skims over. It is hoped, as Hughes promises, that this study is just the beginning of greater explorations into Comfort’s career.

An engaging critical tone is struck with the contribution of Hudson on Comfort. Hudson’s essay, ‘Charles Comfort’s Moment in the Relationship of Art and Life, 1935–1945,’ takes an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of Comfort’s handling of art and life in his work. With references to Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, among others, Hudson’s approach to Comfort’s ‘imagined international cultural community’ incites interest in the artist’s intellectual profile and should make any reader want to open more doors on the artist. Hudson’s critical analysis pays due respect to the artist while pointing out problematic issues. On Comfort’s adoption of symbols in his work, Hudson bravely states, ‘He was playing with fire; he risked cliché.’

Thinking about the reception of art, Brandon’s essay on Comfort’s war art, and the Hitler Line (1944/1970) in particular, asks, ‘[I]s the perceived veracity of an image predicated on observation or expectation?’ Brandon’s contribution is a necessary one – tackling what Comfort considered his best work of art. Anyone interested in war art should place this essay on his or her reading list.

Young Canadian (1932) is another one of Comfort’s most striking paintings, and its present location at Hart House was just one of the traditional haunts of Canadian art that was notably shaped by taking Comfort, so to speak. As a member of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club, the Canadian Group of Painters, the Royal Canadian Academy, the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolours, and as director of the National Gallery...