INDEPENDENT SPIRIT
Early Canadian Women Artists
By A. K. Prakash
Firefly, 410 pages, $75
You don't have to be Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton - or Belinda Stronach or Julie Couillard, for that matter - to understand the political aspects of being female. Similar biases have affected women's recognition in the art world for decades. And the situation's still far from equal: Last year, only 20 per cent of major New York museum solo shows featured women artists. And here, north of the 49th, research shows that female artists still make about half as much money as their male counterparts.
Into this context launches a much-needed tome, Independent Spirit: Early Canadian Women Artists, a coffee-table book/reference text hybrid designed to appeal to the generally art-interested as well as to collectors and academics. Authored by Toronto art consultant A. K. Prakash, Independent Spirit's mainstream draw is its lovely, large-scale reproductions of works from 36 famous (or should-be-famous) artists, while the meaty bits for specialists lie in its back-matter biographies and its appendix of Canuck-lady creatives.
It's clear from the get-go that the book's strength lies in condensing previous research rather than breaking new ground. To be fair, this is no insubstantial feat. Obtaining permissions for and images of 340 artworks from dozens of deceased artists in collections nationwide is a migraine festival waiting to happen. And until the resources turn up to co-ordinate an equivalent exhibition, this book likely contains the best one-shot visual survey of these artists that we've got.
As generally aimed as this book might be, it offers much to surprise even fully fledged arterati. For me, it was affecting to see iconic images of Canadiana - Charlotte Schreiber's realist art of children tobogganing in 1880, for instance, or Frances Anne Hopkins's first-hand painting of a voyageur-propelled canoe from 1869 - which I'd previously assumed were painted by men, owing to the time period. After all, as the text reminds us, women didn't even have the right to vote then, and were often barred from (or charged higher fees than men for) attending art classes.
Certain details, perhaps overlooked elsewhere, also generate interest. Marion Nicoll and Helen McNicoll are acknowledged for their contributions to the development of Canadian abstraction and postimpressionism, respectively. We learn that Sophie Pemberton was "the first woman to win the coveted Prix Julian in Paris in 1899," that Elizabeth Wynn Wood, "the Lawren Harris of sculpture," helped form
UNESCO, and that Mary Riter Hamilton was a respected war artist. There are also gossipy bits, such as the fact that Schreiber did illustrations for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and that Henrietta Shore was pals with Edward Weston.
Unfortunately, such pleasant discoveries are often confounded by the book's structure. The first two sections, Trailblazers and Masters of Their Craft, contain images and interpretive texts for 12 and 24 artists respectively, while the full bios for all 36 are mixed together in a third section. The result is a broken, confusing narrative for some artists. For example, page 82 mentions Henrietta Shore's life in California as if the reader is aware of it, but one must until wait to page 84 to get the back story. On a related note, the tiered Trailblazer and Master of Craft designations are highly debatable, and would seem to serve prestige-seeking collectors more than general readers.
A more severe gaffe sees important artists excluded - or, rather, an inclusion of some that makes the absence of others neon-sign noticeable. Though the book aims to stop around 1950, it includes abstract painter Marcelle Ferron and realist painter Christiane Pflug, who did their key work in the 1960s and '70s - an era that also conjures such vital female artists as Françoise Sullivan, Joyce Wieland, Mary Pratt and Daphne Odjig, among others. It would've been smarter to save Ferron and Pflug for a future volume and release a truly cohesive early-era survey here.
Other, more subtle, exclusions trouble, too. Paraskeva Clark is best known in Canadian art circles as an artist who made her political views clear via 1930s paintings on labour strife. Yet Independent Spirit contains no paintings from that period, and makes no mention of them except for one line in her bio. Instead, she's pegged as a portrait painter. Further, the issue of some artists' romantic liaisons with other women feels treated, at times, in a cloudy, closeted manner.
Finally, the subtle sexism that crops up in certain of Prakash's interpretations is frustrating. Discussing Florence Carlyle's painting of a young woman with flowers in her hair, he writes that the artist "has succeeded in creating a powerful image of the female journey," as if every female's journey includes gazing out rapturously over a Tuscan landscape while swathed in gauzy pink.
In discussing Henrietta Shore, he writes that abstraction expressed her "isolation" and "withdrawal" - a telling contrast to the adjectives typically used to describe male abstractionists, like "bold" and "intellectual."
Finally, Prakash seems to interpret every painting including nuns as a signal of lonesome artistic melancholy. I'm guessing Hildegard von Bingen didn't make it onto his reading list.
Overall, Independent Spirit is a valuable reference on early women's art in Canada, even if its biases make it troubling at times. Perhaps the best compromise is to read its artworks as closely as - if not more intensively than - its text. After all, it's the works that forcefully articulate these artists' most dearly held points of view, ones that continue to resonate for many women, whether their aesthetic vision includes "lipstick on pit bulls" or not.
Leah Sandals is associate editor at Canadian Art Online ( http://www.canadianart.ca) and a regular arts contributor to NOW.