Emily Carr : New Perspectives

Best known for her paintings of First Nations villages and landscapes of the northwest Pacific coast, Emily Carr (1871-1945) is the subject of numerous biographies, scholarly articles, documentary films, plays, a musical, an opera, and poetry. Regarded as a writer, environmentalist, feminist icon of Canadian art, defiant Victorian, solitary eccentric, and documenter of Northwest Coast monumental art, she has endured, nevertheless, as a larger-than-life enigma.

This show looks at Carr through the historical lens of 20th century exhibitions that presented her work, and in the social and political contexts that defined her world. What emerges is a compelling new portrait of this much-loved artist.

The concept was the brainchild of Johanne Lamoureux of the Université de Montréal, who assisted Charlie Hill of the National Gallery and Ian Thom of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), the exhibition’s co-organizer, with the development of the show.

Featured are some 200 objects – paintings, drawings, watercolours, caricatures, ceramics, sculpture, hooked rugs, books, maps, photographs, and ephemera – including about 150 works of art by Carr – on loan from the National Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), and major institutions across the country. (The VAG has the world’s most significant collection of works by Carr.)

The exhibition begins with a partial reconstruction of the National Gallery’s 1927 landmark show entitled Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art Native and Modern, which featured 31 of her paintings, as well as her pottery and hooked rugs, and introduced her to the work of the Group of Seven and the wider art world. (Lawren Harris subsequently became her mentor and friend.)

Presented and installed in much the same way as they appeared in the 1927 show are Carr’s paintings, Haida, Tsimshian, and Kwakwaka’wakw masks, house posts, carvings and textiles and a selection of works by artists such as Anne Savage, Paul Kane, Langdon Kihn, and Group of Seven members Edwin Holgate and A.Y. Jackson.

Next, a section based on the 1945 Emily Carr Memorial Exhibition reveals Carr as a Modernist artist, whose adept use of intense colours and expressive sweeps of paint resulted in dynamic, unconventional works. Rather than continuing her efforts on “correctly” documenting First Nations material culture, Carr as Modernist sought to evoke their essence. Her interests in primitivism and spirituality – two dominant trends in early twentieth-century modern art – are evident in her paintings of First Nations sculpture and the Pacific coastal landscape. Featured are her finest works dating from 1910 to 1942, covering the breadth of her career.

The final section explores how Carr consciously created her public persona through her caricatures, self-portraits, and writings. As a counterbalance, it also provides alternative perspectives on her identity, as proposed by many and varying audiences. In recent interpretations of her somewhat contradictory relationships with the landscape and First Nations, Carr has been seen as a participant in west-coast cultural tourism and industrialization.

Opening here at the National Gallery (2 June - 4 September 2006), the show later travels to the Vancouver Art Gallery (7 October 2006 - 7 January 2007), Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario (24 February - 20 May 2007), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (21 June - 23 September 2007) and Calgary's Glenbow Museum (25 October 2007 - 26 January 2008).

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Presented by Sun Life.

Pressetext

Emily Carr
New Perspectives