A.Y. Jackson, Terre Sauvage, 1913 (detail), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa© Courtesy of the Estate of the late Dr. Naomi Jackson GrovesPhoto © NGC

by Holly Gordon

“I don’t know if I’m going to be the kicking boy or the straw dog or something like that, but — it’s going to be a lot of fun,” says art historian Tom Smart.

It’s a decades-old discussion: Is it time for the Group of Seven to bow off the Canadian art stage and say its adieu, or does the early 20th Century painting group deserve to stay in this country’s art consciousness as a living legacy?

In this second annual debate co-hosted by The Walrus and the National Gallery of Canada, Smart — former executive director and CEO of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection — argues the former; Ross King, fellow art historian and author of Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, champions that the group stands firmly as a living legacy.

Speaking over the phone from Toronto, Smart adds the debate had one catch.

“The Walrus people are pretty mischievous, so they’ve asked us to take on the counter-intuitive argument,” details Smart, whose work at the McMichael involved connecting the Group of Seven to contemporaries. “So rather than have Ross argue the points that he wrote in his book, and me to argue the contemporary relevance of the group, we’re arguing our opposite positions.”

Smart laughs, and adds: “So I’ve had to bone up on all of the history that Ross so eloquently writes in his book, and then sort of toss it back at him.”

It’s a book King started writing while curating a Group of Seven exhibition at the McMichael four years ago — while Smart was executive director. The two have been picking each other’s brains to prepare for this debate, and their intimate knowledge of the material should make for a passionate discussion, no matter who’s the kicking boy or straw dog.

Sitting firmly (for the debate, anyway) on the side of history, Smart makes a convincing argument — one that many who are tired of the Group of Seven’s status, almost a century after their time, would herald. Smart attributes part of the problem to the group (originally formed by Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and Frederick Varley), but also lays blame with the general public.

“On the one hand my point… is that these artists took the stage in the late 19-teens and early 1920s, and they served a very important purpose — and then they wouldn’t get off the stage,” he says. “And they crowded the debate, and they wouldn’t let other artists or other modes be received, and we, the Canadian people, wouldn’t let them leave the stage. So we’re both kind of culpable in that way.”

He adds that he thinks Canadian art was elevated by the group’s work, but “didn’t develop in a way that fit the American painters or American art, the American figurative tradition took hold in the ’20s and ’30s.”

King, speaking over the phone from his home in England, argues the group’s work is inherent in today’s art, and it’s impossible to ignore the Canadian painters’ influence on regional landscape paintings and the country’s psyche.

“I think they were brilliant colourists, brilliant designers, and so I really felt that they do have a legacy,” he says. “I think they do still speak to us. They’ve almost become part of Canadian DNA or something like that, we respond to them.

“I think they’ve changed the way we see our landscape; maybe the way we see ourselves as Canadians,” continues Ross. “And I think, crucially, the fact that they had enormous success, something that I think has been lost over the past 80 years or so is that they were feted in America, but more especially in Britain, in the 1920s and they really became internationally famous. And so I think they gave confidence to Canadians to think that they could go and create something that was world-class, or that they could stand comparison with their contemporaries anywhere else in the world.”

King points to Diana Thorneycroft’s recent work, Group of Seven Awkward Moments, and Douglas Coupland’s re-imagined paintings from artists in the group, as well as its mentor Tom Thomson, as evident contemporary links.

“And so I think all of that does lend itself to suggest that yes, the Group of Seven are still relevant to Canadian painters today,” King concludes.

Smart concedes on this point.

“Doug is using these cutting-edge technologies to redefine images of the group and Diana is using their work as backdrops for very critical comments on Canadian history, Canadian legend, and Canadian society — in a very contemporary way.

“So in that way it has relevance, but they are historical,” he counters. “They are artifacts and their work is artifacts and it should be appreciated in those terms.”