William Bothwell To

“Idon’t know much about art but I know what I like”, she said. “Perhaps”, suggested John Canaday, “you mean that you like what you know?” Someday, maybe in another life, I’ll take a course in art history. I should like it to be taught by Mr Canaday but that would, indeed, have to be in another dimension. He died in 1985.

I met him in New York in the mid 60s - the years, that is, not the numbered Manhattan streets. It was at one of those ‘happy hour’ occasions when everybody, a glass in hand, makes small talk with everyone else. At that time it was mainly about what was going on in Vietnam.

“Mr Canaday”, I said, ”I am a Canadian and I’m intrigued by your name”. “It has nothing to do with Canada.” he replied. “An ancestral Kennedy crossed the Atlantic, a refugee from the Irish potato famine. When asked his name, he said in a Celtic brogue, ”Me name is Kannaday”. Recorded phonetically by an immigration official, that became Canaday. A new legal surname was born.

After we were interrupted by the woman who liked what she knew, we discussed his limited appreciation of the abstract expressionism that was being sold everywhere as “art”. Putting down his drink, he enacted the quotation marks with four hooked fingers, two on each hand. As art critic for the New York Times he had been as scornful of the development of “abstract expressionism” just as Toronto’s Hector Charlesworth had been of the Group of Seven’s work in the 1920 pages of Saturday Night. Charlesworth accused A.Y. Jackson and his associates of “throwing pots of paint in the face of the public”.

I had enjoyed Canaday’s 24 portfolio series, ‘Seminars in Art’, published by the Metropolitan Museum. He was guarded in his assessment of the work of Wassily Kandinsky whose 1911 breakthrough had introduced the world to ‘expressionism’ and to the metaphysical artistic quest that went beyond representational painting. Photography had long been able to capture and preserve natural images. The later nonobjective abstract expressionist, painters sought to express feeling, to make visual by evocative brushwork and palette knife the audible properties of music.

Charlesworth-like, conservative critics accused the work of the ‘New York school’ of being “paint for paint’s sake”. They raised anew the question “What is art”? Some asked why wallpaper decoration deserved space in art galleries. Norman Rockwell’s 1962 magazine cover, ‘The Connoiseur’, shows a businesssuited man standing hat and umbrella in hand, silent as Keats said Cortez did upon a peak in Darien (but was that not Balboa?), before what was still seen by many as the incomprehensible work of a charlatan.

“Do you know the work of Canada’s Jean-Paul Riopelle?”, asked Mr Canaday. “Yes”, he replied. “A poor man’s Jackson Pollock”. I did not add that this poor man had recently purchased a Riopelle from Jerold Morris at Laing’s Gallery in Bloor Street. “We have been ‘had’ by freaks and incompetents who mingle with serious and talented artists”, said The Times critic. He had a point. Leeway had been left for those who lacked artistic training and discipline. But artists are also seekers and discoverers. I did not mention the work of Montreal’s Paul-Emile Borduas or Rita Letendre or Toronto’s Harold Town and William Ronald.

So-called abstract painting has long fascinated me. A work enjoy particularly was painted by young Geert Van der Veen whom Lois and I met when he worked in a Yorkville gallery. Almost half a century later his “Bouquet d’automne’ hangs over a staircase in my house, its flaming red, white, gold and blue suggestive of an autumn bonfire. One sees what one will in a non-objective work. In most of them the very movement of the painter’s hand is felt. In 2007 I saw Geert`s ‘obit` ìn The Globe.

There are other non-representational works that sit well with my reproduction of a David Milne painting from his Palgrave period. One is an artist`s print signed `M. Watson, 1968`. It was purchased at an ODSS art department sale of student work. Another, oil on board, is also by a student. Unsigned and in my favourite blue, it includes graceful undulations suggestive either of something blowing in the wind, moving in the water or forming in the mind. I should like to identify the unremembered artist.

One appreciates the Group of Seven’s variegated forests, blue snow and iron-red rocky shorelines. In books one notes the earlier pastoral scenes reminiscent of Europe painted by earlier Canadians. Lawren Harris`s transitional and theosophical abstractions have a lasting appeal. So do Mark Rothko’s soft-edge ‘colourfields’, especially those before which I feel myself warmed, somewhat like the youngsters who stand naked before a fireplace in Paul Peel’s ‘After the Bath’.

It is in the emotion-filled ‘autonomist’ works that I take particular pleasure, with apologies to my realist friends who prefer the flowers and pipe-smoking old characters framed in so many local art shows. I inherited a 1932 Lake Penage scene painted by Ernest A. Dalton (1887-1963) whose work I compare to that of Doris McCarthy who has her 100th birthday this week. Above it hangs a 2002 abstract by Stanley Vogt of Barrie that could be an aerial view of the forested shore of Dalton’s northland bay. But must one look for images?

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder. The appreciation of art is in the soul of the viewer. There are those who say that children can produce acceptable abstract paintings. By all means, encourage them to try. Then give them drawing lessons. When it comes to art we are in the realm of the spirit. Wordsworth wrote, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy”. He added “exterior semblances” [slavery to realism?] “belie the soul’s immensity”.

I treasure a small framed watercolour painted by a six year old. On the reverse side childish lettering says, “Grampa, you can have my painting. Love, Emma”. She is now in pre-Meds at Queen’s.

Our heritage in art is essential to understanding our civilisation and ourselves.