[.ca] Group of Seven in Western Canada (ISBN 1552634396)

Amazon.ca:
The first book to put a regional focus on Canada's best-known art movement, The Group of Seven in Western Canada remarkably puts a distinctly Western spin on this groundbreaking Toronto-based early 20th-century art collective. Edited by the senior curator of Calgary's Glenbow Museum, Catharine Mastin, and created as a companion piece to a landmark exhibition, The Group of Seven in Western Canada features six eye-opening perspectives on the Group's Western production and over 130 first-rate colour and black-and-white illustrations. Marcia Crosby's "T'emlax'am: An Ada'ox" is particularly intriguing in its insight into A.Y. Jackson and Edwin Holgate's interpretations--and misinterpretations--of the Skeena people, while Robert Stacey's chapter, "Heaven and Hell: Frederick Varley in Vancouver," dishes the dirt on the portrait painter's troubled relationships with his wife and lovers. Yet the underlying theme--that the Group's Western activities have been downplayed until now--comes off as a little strained, reflecting longstanding, and still current, regional Canadian cultural rivalries. The Group's members spent so much time in the West that their time there remains very much a part of the official record. Lawren Harris, Frank H. Johnson, and Frederick Varley all worked on staff at Western art institutions, later member Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald was a native Winnipegger, and other members--notably A.Y. Jackson and J.E.H. MacDonald--made regular painting trips to the West. Indeed, in 1920, when the Group of Seven was founded, free rail passes were still available to Canadian artists on the understanding that they would make images that would familiarize Eastern Canadians with this vast and newly accessible area, and all of the Group's members used the perk. Ironically, a significant percentage of the paintings reproduced in this book are owned by Eastern Canadian collections, a reminder that for decades the Group of Seven's works were notoriously undervalued on the Western Canadian art market. --Deirdre Hanna