Iconography North and South

A painting by one of the Group of Seven is going up for sale later this month. If you don’t know who the Group of Seven are, you’re likely not Canadian.

The Group of Seven are the hero-painters of Canadian art. They paint, some would say, the Canadian soul, with an emphasis on "Canadian." One friend of mine even claims that only Canadians really “get” the Group of Seven. It’s an intriguing hypothesis. If others don’t “get” their art and Canadians do, how do we “get” it?

My friend who makes this claim has paddled rivers and lakes for many years, from the lakes of Algonquin Park to the rivers of the high arctic. He’s done a fair bit of mountain climbing too. Perhaps he is tailor-made to “get” the Group of Seven, painters who took their canvas and brushes into the Canadian wilderness and painted what they saw. But since few Canadians have my friend’s wilderness resume and yet also “get” the Group of Seven, it must be something else beside one’s backcountry bona fides. I submit that the "something else" is the myth Canadians have of Canada and themselves.

Look at this classic Group of Seven painting, September Gale by Arthur Lismer: a tree in the foreground, standing resolutely in the midst of wilderness, not a soul around, only the water, the wind, the emptiness. The colours are muted, the sky not particularly inviting. The wind has raised the water into whitecaps. It is not a day I would want to go skinny-dipping in the lake or even, for that matter, to try paddling across it. THIS is Canada, cries the myth. Believe it. Canada looks like this; the rest is just, shhhh, Pretend.

The truth of the matter is that Canadians live mainly in Pretend--the industrialised, urban centres along the 49th parallel. Canadians don’t pretend to NOT live in Pretend; they know its where their homes are but it’s not, to borrow from the national anthem, their native land; Canada’s native land is out THERE. Where? you ask. Why there, just look at the Group of Seven paintings. There! Ah yes, the Group of Seven paints what Canadians think of as their native land: those empty spaces/places that make Canada Canada. Canadians get the Group of Seven because they paint Canada (perhaps they even invented it), by golly…even if most Canadians haven’t seen it.

I began wondering what, in the visual arts, is the equivalent of the Group of Seven in the U.S. The artists in what’s called the Hudson River School did all sorts of lush, pastoral paintings where wilderness was depicted as gorgeous (rather than wild). In any case, I don’t believe their work has much resonance today. Could it be Pop Art? It has its share of iconic images, but it holds none of the nation’s mythologies. When I turn to individual artists, names like Norman Rockwell, Frederic Remington and photographer Ansel Adams come to mind. One could argue that each claims a certain piece of American mythology.

If I cast them aside, however, it’s clear that what remains is not a school of art but a singular iconic image that stands above all the rest: American Gothic by Grant Wood. I can’t think of another painting that has been more spoofed, imitated, parodied than American Gothic. When I take it seriously rather than as satire, it reeks of good ole American self-reliance. Life isn’t easy, we work hard, we’re decent god-fearing folk. We don’t ask much and know that if we work hard, we'll meet our modest needs. America likes to think this is where it got its DNA. The myth America holds of itself lies in those somber, earnest faces.

Of course it’s a description that seems to bear little, if any, resemblance to America now. The family farm has disappeared, corporations work the land, needs haven’t been particularly modest. It would seem that the iconic imagery of both countries is but faintly connected to the daily lives of its citizens.

However, that might change for American Gothic. How we see any particular work of art changes as our context changes, and America has a new and painful context. American Gothic was painted at the start of the Great Depression, and given what American is now going through, the painting may resonate again in a way that it hasn’t for many years. Suddenly what was once spoofed may become all too familiar. The painting has people at the center, standing straight (I could say as opposed to gay, but that seems too easy, so I won’t), connected to the land as cultivators, but the house—domesticity—is clearly more central than the land. We know the land must be there, but this couple is about the house…as is America. One could say that a-house-for-every-family IS the essence of the American dream. It is also one of the key players in the current economic collapse. The dream of home ownership, implied in American Gothic and acted out in the past fifteen years, has made American Gothic relevant once again

Canada's iconic imagery, in stark contrast, is a world of wilderness, without a human footprint, uninviting. There is nothing domestic about it. The Group of Seven will continue to hold the legend of the Canadian land as a place apart, as the defining inheritance of its citizens. The land hasn’t left, and as long as it remains, those of us living in Pretend will find the Group of Seven as relevant as ever.