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OCR
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 elemental grandeur, lessons that they carried over into their treatment of landscapes 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 Canadian 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 individual 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 official 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 ¢ 179 «
