At the end of each year I trawl through images of paintings that are thought to have been created a century ago. Together they show how rich and varied art was at a time when most histories are devoted to accounts of the rise of modernism. Today’s collection of work from 1924 consists of portraits, self-portraits and other figurative paintings.

Although the great majority of paintings seen in galleries and collections are made in oils, or watercolours, my first two works were both created in pastels by specialists in that medium.

Firmin Baes’s double portrait of Two Brothers was painted using pastels, in the studio against a backdrop perhaps showing their home in the countryside.

Ants Laikmaa was another accomplished pastellist who painted many fine portraits. Among them is this posthumous Portrait of Fr. R. Kreutzwald, also known as In the Distance I See Home Thriving. Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882) is the father of Estonian national literature, and in addition to being a distinguished physician, he is the author of the national epic Kalevipoeg which is closely related to the Finnish epic, the Kalevala.

Léon Bakst is best known for his designs for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, but in the years following the 1917 Revolution he painted portraits. He completed this Portrait of Rachel Strong, future Countess Henri de Buazhelen against a background that could have been one of his stage sets.

Lovis Corinth was nearing the end of his life when he painted his wife in Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress. She was an artist in her own right, and had continued painting in the early twentieth century, joining the Berlin Secession in 1912. She also painted actively when at their chalet. In 1933, after her husband’s death, she emigrated to the USA, where she produced the first catalogue raisonné of his paintings.

Corinth painted other members of his family at this time. His Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat shows their shy daughter starting to develop her mother’s vivacity.

His Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee illustrates his race against time before he died the following year.

Five to Twelve was one of Christian Krohg’s last paintings, showing the artist with a long white beard, and almost bald, asleep in a chair underneath a pendulum clock. The face of the clock is completely blank, but the title tells us the time: it’s ten minutes to midnight, very late in his life. The following year Krohg retired as the director of the State Academy of Art, and died in Oslo a few months later.

For Emily Carr 1924 was a crucial year, in which she met with Seattle artists, most importantly Mark Tobey, who helped rebuild her confidence in her art. Her Self-portrait shows her still suffering from her earlier rejection, as she faces away from the viewer, and is working on a painting that is unrecognisably vague and formless.

Meanwhile, Pierre Bonnard’s life in the Midi was coming to something of a crisis.

Several of the artists who had moved to the French Mediterranean coast around the turn of the century were keen yachtsmen. Here Bonnard shows Paul Signac on board his yacht, in Signac and his Friends Sailing.

Bonnard’s private life hadn’t found the same fair winds, though. In Before Dinner, there are two places laid at the table, and two women behind. One at the left has her back towards the other, who stands by the table as if waiting for something to happen. A dog is just emerging from behind the chair at the left, and looks up the standing woman. The following year Bonnard finally married his longstanding partner Marthe in a quiet civil ceremony in Paris, in August. None of their friends attended that wedding, and within a month his former lover Renée Monchaty shot herself in the chest, as she lay in a bath of white roses.

Late in his career, the radical artist Paul Sérusier drew more heavily again on early modern painting, including that of the late Middle Ages in paintings such as Tapestry (Five Weavers). So much for modernism.

At the start of 1937, Emily Carr was sixty-five, and about to confirm her international recognition with representation in group exhibitions in London’s Tate Gallery the following year, and at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Painting from her caravan, The Elephant, she was continuing to innovate in her views of the landscape around Victoria, British Columbia.

Carr described Above the Gravel Pit (1937) as “a skyscape with roots and gravel pits”, that she wanted to be “free and jubilant, not crucified into one spot, static.” Her paintings in these final years of her career show the ultimate development of her brushstrokes into the unifying framework. Vibrant blue waves of the sky contrast with the greens and browns of the earth below. But Carr links the sky and trees with both hints of colour and echoing patterns made by her brush: these extend into the shallow chalk scarp and the two tree-stumps in the right foreground.

Then she suffered her first heart attack; The Elephant was too much effort for her, and she had to rent summer houses and cabins to continue her painting. She turned more to writing, and in 1941 won a literary award for her first book, Klee Wyck, a collection of short stories about her travels in the Pacific North-West.

In her Dancing Sunlight (1937-40), vortexes of brushstrokes have replaced all solid form. Trees, light, foliage, even the sky have been swept into those strokes sweeping across the canvas like a whirlwind. She had earlier been absorbed by abstract art, but had continued to represent real objects using techniques which restructured them, rather than abstracting.

Somberness Sunlit (1937-40) shows a similar approach, in this case with the sunlight that has penetrated through the canopy, dissolving the form of the tree trunks.

Over this period, Carr had a growing concern with the deforestation occurring on the West Coast, which paralleled the earlier encroachments and destruction by Europeans of First Nations cultures. Themes that she had previously expressed in paintings such as Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1931) were now rephrased using patterned and unifying brushstrokes, in paintings such as this untitled work from 1938-39.

Odds and Ends (1939) is another of her most important paintings, not just from this period, but from her whole career. It shows the young and very high trees left behind as being of no commercial value after felling. Carr described the low stubs left on the stumps as being the trees’ tombstones.

In 1939, she suffered her second heart attack, further curtailing physical activity.

In Plumed Firs (1939-41), Carr revisits a similar motif, following felling, with greater unification of her brushstrokes and marks between sky, forest, and the bare land left afterwards.

She suffered her first stroke in 1940, and a second in 1944. Although she continued to paint in her final years her pace was drastically reduced, and she concentrated her efforts on writing.

In 1941-42, Carr painted a small series based on her earlier sketches and paintings among the First Nations peoples in around 1912. A Skidegate Beaver Pole (1941-42) is one of those, developed from a group of sketches made in the Haida village of Skidegate in 1912. Its totem is painted more confidently earlier; those old sketches and paintings now looked tentative in their careful accuracy. Here the surrounding vegetation, forest and sky are all expressed in swirling brushstrokes.

In August 1942, she travelled to Mount Douglas Park, near Victoria, for her last painting trip. She had been organising works to be given in trust for the citizens of British Columbia, which now form the core of the Emily Carr Trust collection. She died in 1945.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

After more than a decade of neglect, Emily Carr’s art had finally achieved the recognition that it deserved during the late 1920s, and by 1930 her career was transformed. She was a national if not international success.

Big Raven (1931) is one of Carr’s major works, and evolved from her original watercolour showing this massive totem at Cumshewa in 1912, through The Raven (1928-29), included in the previous article. Vegetation around the totem has transformed into viscous waves, swirling around the hillside and the base of the totem. The raven itself is a smooth, preternatural sculpted object. Even the sky now resembles the inside of a huge theatre, with sheets of light around. The whole painting has a monumental appearance, an elegiac gravity typical of her new approach to First Nations motifs.

Zunoqua of the Cat Village (1931) shows a totem of particular interest to Carr, representing the female ogre Dzunukwa or Zunoqua. She is the ‘wild woman of the woods’, a thief of children but capable of bringing wealth to the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. Carr wrote that she found these figures terrifying in their expression of power and domination. Scattered among the swirling vegetation are many cats, which look equally menacing.

As Carr returned to visit villages in the Haida Gwaii that she had last seen in about 1912, she noticed the changes that had taken place: suppression of the potlatch system, and clear-cutting of the forest. This comes through in these later paintings of First Nations cultures, as mourning for the disappearing people, a pervasive grief for what was rapidly being lost.

Lawren Harris had advised Emily Carr to concentrate on “the tremendous elusive what lies behind” those First Nations villages, and during the 1930s she shifted her attention more to the forest and landscape. Forest, British Columbia (1931-32) is one of her finest paintings of a theme she had been developing since Totem Walk at Sitka (1907) and Wood Interior (1909), shown earlier in this series.

Its broken processional composition consists of a series of theatrical planes, behind which columns of tree-trunks recede into the depths. These are illuminated from within. Carr had been influenced by abstract art, although she didn’t intend to paint abstracts herself, producing many finished charcoal drawings of the interiors of forests as she worked her ideas up for these paintings.

Old Tree at Dusk (c 1932) uses similar sculptural language in a more open setting, with the heightened drama of night. Her brushwork is also starting to build structure into the bark of the trees.

Blue Sky (1932-34) is another major work, showing a clearing with an elevated canopy formed by high trees. Her brushwork in the sky continues to become more structured, forming a high arch to echo that in the trees and resemble the interior of a cathedral.

In 1933, she bought a caravan which she named The Elephant, and had towed to different landscapes around Victoria to enable her to paint there. Two years later, Carr held her first solo exhibition in eastern Canada, hosted in Toronto by the Women’s Art Association of Canada.

During the mid 1930s, Carr painted some wonderful coastal views, including her watercolour Seascape (c 1935). I suspect this is a view not too far from Victoria, where she lived. Unusually for watercolour, she appears to have used colour almost straight from the tube, and structured both land and sea with her brushstrokes.

Her Young Pines and Sky (c 1935) shows less sculptural form, and greater reliance on brushwork, both in forming the slender trees and in the arched cloud and sky.

She took the theme of exceptionally tall trees to its extreme in her Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1936). Using a point of view close to the ground, in the middle of a cleared area, three isolated trees reach right up into the sky, where her patterned brushstrokes shimmer in the light.

Carr uses rich colours and intensely patterned brushwork in her dramatic Strait of Juan de Fuca (c 1936). This runs between Vancouver Island to the north, and the Olympic Peninsula, and her view captures the majesty of its scenery, sea and sky. The patterning of Carr’s brushstrokes and the sweep of the land to the left is echoed in an upward sweep apparent in the sea at the right. This suggests that she may have been envisioning the landscape through the optical distortion of a very wide-angle or fish-eye lens.

In the distance, on the opposite side of the strait, are the blue Olympic Mountains, contrasting with the rich green of the near shore at the left, and the orange-red of the sun.

Emily Carr was now 65, and finally established among the leading North American artists of the day. As the world headed inexorably towards war, her paintings were about to travel to Europe at last.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.