Oldal 181 [181]
WORLD WAR II AND CANADIAN LANDSCAPES
Jackson later put it, “[w]hat to paint was a problem for the war artist. There
was nothing to serve as a guide. War had gone underground, and there was
little to see. The old heroics ... were gone forever ... The Impressionist technique
I had adopted in painting was now ineffective, for visual impressions were not
enough” (47).
Their great good fortune, however, was to discover among the war artists
in the programme a number of English artists, such as Paul Nash, Wyndham
Lewis and Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, working in modern styles
such as Futurism and Vorticism. What they learned from these artists enabled
the Canadian artists to produce landscape paintings that captured not only
the horror of the war but also, almost perversely, it’s austere and at times el¬
emental grandeur, lessons that they carried over into their treatment of land¬
scapes in the post-war period.
Back in Canada, 1920 marked the emergence of the Group of Seven, with
Jackson and Varley among its founding members. In short order, and despite
the opposition of conservative painters and critics, it became the country’s
leading art movement, its central subject was the land itself, in particular the
North. The Group of Seven cemented landscapes as the central genre in Ca¬
nadian painting, and works by its members became iconic. But the dominance
of the group lasted little more than a decade: it disbanded in 1933 as indi¬
vidual members began to go their own way. Both professional and amateur
painters began taking an interest in new movements in the art world. This was
commented on by a leading Canadian art critic, Walter Abell, ina 1944 review
of an exhibition mounted by the Canadian Army that showcased not the of¬
ficial war artists but works created in leisure moments after military duties by
rank-and-file members of the army:
On the purely artistic plane, the exhibition offers two surprises. It is unexpectedly
high in its general level of attainment and unexpectedly modern in its predominant
point of view ... The dominance of a relatively modern point of view suggests that
the country, or at least the younger art-minded section of the country, is more
contemporary in its outlook than we had realized (101-102).
Abell’s “relatively modern” suggests the limitations of what Canadian artists
were prepared to accept — for example, it was not until after World War II, in
the 1950s and 1960s, that abstraction attained a recognized and respected place
in Canadian painting, Various forms of representation remained the default
mode, a factor both influenced by and sustaining the landscape tradition.
The circumstances and conditions shaping the work of the war artists in
World War II differed considerably from those of their predecessors in the
Great War. In the first place, those in the earlier war were given few instructions.
The primary interest and ultimate purpose of the Canadian War Memorials
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