Eric Brown: "Breaking Barriers"

"BREAKING BARRIERS," THE STORY OF ERIC BROWN

     "Eric Brown, a young and unknown Englishman, won his wings as first director of Canada's National Gallery, and piloting it through barriers of resistance to change, public apathy and artistic orthodoxy, brought it to a safe landing in a terrain of recognition and respect. This very human story tells of the remarkable understanding and support given by an outstanding Canadian, Sir Edmund Walker, to his youthful colleague, of the effective work of the trustees of the gallery when only five in number, of lasting friendships and recurring conflicts, of starting married life on one hundred dollars a month, and of the close bonds of affection between husband and wife which carried them safely through all adventures," wrote his wife Maud, as a brief summary of the story yet to come.
     "It so happened that Eric's coming to Canada (from England), coincided with a vitally important time in the development of the country's art. A strong national spirit was developing. Painters were becoming dissatisfied with the academic approach to art, realizing that the rugged majesty of our landscape could not be portrayed with the brush of a Corot or even a Constable. And so the search began for a new concept and a new language of art. Eric (Brown) described this movement in one of his articles written in the early twenties, pointing out that something had happened, though when and where it actually began was difficult to say. The Canadian Art Club (including Morrice, Ernest Lawson, Horatio Walker, Homer Watson, William Brymner, Maurice Cullen, Suzor-Cote and Clarence Gagnon, among its members) seeded from the Ontario Society of Artists in 1907, and that awakened a spirit of rivalry," wrote Maud Brown, in her biography of her husband, Eric Brown.
     Eric Brown had written the following about this new and exciting direction coming down the pike. "Painters went west to the prairies and north to the wilderness and saw them with an introspective as well as photographic eye. Then one fine day the O.S.A. hung a picture of Tom Thomson's called 'Northern River,' in the place of honour and the National Gallery bought it, and the battle, though no one knew it, was joined because here was a new idea....here was decoration of a splendid kind, within a frame and what was more puzzling still, it was decoration plus character, the inmost character of the country it represented, to say nothing of the character of the man who painted it."
      Maud Brown writes, "Thus the new trend began, with Canadian artists beginning to see and compose decoratively, emphasizing pattern and color scheme, and searching out the spirit of their country. This was rebellion, said the older men; wait and see, said the tolerant; but the young in heart were glad. The most spectacular result was the formation of the Group of Seven (artists) in 1920. The story of these seven young painters who banded together in a protective and active alliance is too well known to need retelling here. One thing that I recall very clearly is a visit to Toronto at a time when at least four members of the Group were returning from their first sketching trip in the northlands of Algoma. Eric had been asked casually to go and see the sketches they had made. As so often happened, I went along with him, and as we went from one studio to another and saw the stacks of small sketches each had brought back with him, our astonishment and delight grew beyond belief. This was something different, something exciting! Eric waited with the keenest interest to see the large canvases that would ensue from such promising material."

THE WEMBLEY EXHIBITION

     "Eric's absorption in the gallery, and his fostering of the country's art as a whole, alerted him to every opportunity to promote their growth. When the news filtered through to him that the British Empire Exhibition, to open at Wembley in north-west London in 1924, would include a section devoted to the fine arts, he saw what a blessing it would be for Canada, if her contribution were well chosen and thoroughly representative - and what a disaster if its management should be assigned to some self-centered and narrow-minded organization," recorded Maud Brown, of her husbands negotiations to mount a dynamic and diverse exhibit of nationally significant art, at the prominent British showing. "He wrote post-haste to friends in England who gave him the names of the two men who were responsible for art at Wembley. He wrote to these immediately before they had time to make other plans. Setting the facts before them, with due emphasis on the rift that existed in Canada, he suggested that the task of forming a committee to select the Canadian pictures might well be left to the National Gallery. The authorities were in complete agreement and to Eric's amused delight, the upshot was that the manager of the British Empire Exhibition suggested to the Canadian Government that the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery was an appropriate authority to take charge of the Canadian Section of Fine Arts. There was nothing irregular or unusual about this procedure, but it offended the amour-propre of the Academy. It felt that the gallery was usurping its privileges and expressed itself emphatically on the points at issue. In retrospect, it appears plain that the academicians could not then be said to represent the art of the whole country; and their deep-rooted dislike of the unconventional and experimental in art was proof that, had the selection of the pictures been left to them, there would have been but meagre representation of those very artists whose works made our Canadian contribution such an outstanding success.
     "As the time for the British Empire Exhibition approached, the ever-faithful George Harbour was sent ahead to London to cope with the preliminary arrangements, and Eric and I followed, arriving a month before the opening day. The spring was wet and cold and 'Wembley mud,' was the byword of the day. For me, with no responsibilities except the typing of a few letters, it was fun to see the mushroom city grow. Eric's hardest job was to gain the 50 percent more wall space so badly needed for all the pictures chosen to be hung. The exhibition authorities told him over and over again this could not be done, but as with the man in the parable begging bread, importunity won the day. Art last came the crucial test, press day. Our pictures were well hung and looked well. They had colour force, individual attack, and deep sincerity. We waited unperturbed. The art critics, thirty or more of them, came drifting into the galleries. They had already seen the British, Australian, New Zealand, and South African contributions, and were looking more than a little bored. The Empire's art had obviously left them cold. Here it would be one more paragraph to add to their already hopelessly stereotyped articles; some of the confessed as much to us afterwards. But after their first look round, you could almost hear their gasps of surprise. Notebooks and pencils came out and there was a buzz of conversation. Here was something new! They talked to each other, they talked to us. They wanted to know if Canada really looked like this. Were the shadows on the snow really as blue as Albert Robinson had painted them? Surely MacDonald had exaggerated the brilliance of the autumn colours. Who were all these painters, and why had their work never been seen before? The show was a success and we knew it. No need to wait for the evening papers; the critics had been unanimous in their praise. One of them, I think it was Mr. Wilenski, came round to Eric the same evening to hear more of art in Canada."
      The art director's wife writes that, "I doubt if any other exhibition ever gave Eric so deep a satisfaction. He had nursed it along with the greatest of care because he was so keen that Canada should take her rightful place in the art of the day. What was more, his unfailing support of the modern movement in Canada was now abundantly vindicated. The next year, the second year of Wembley, Canada repeated her initial success with an entirely new group of paintings. The Group of Seven, well able to fend for themselves, had already won recognition in the United States. An exhibition of their paintings had toured that country with great success for two years and had got excellent press notices. In Ottawa it was a different story, when, in 1927, the trustees arranged to show the the pictures from Wembley in our own galleries. The canvases looked just as well. They still glowed and sang with colour. Here, you felt, was simplicity of method and a direct approach that surely would please. The opening night fame, and contrasted sharply with the press day at Wembley. A great many guests arrived. They were stirred, but not with admiration. There was more indignation than approbation. People bristling with anger asked me, 'How can your husband allow such things to be hung. Well, that was Ottawa in the twenties. Today these same pictures, many of them having found a permanent home in the National Gallery collection, are considered almost academic. Reproductions of them greet us everywhere. Thomson's 'Jack Pine,' Varley's 'Stormy Weather,' 'Georgian Bay,' and Jackson's 'Red Maple,' adorn the walls of homes and schools all over the country."
     "The part Eric played in nurturing contemporary Canadian art and in making it known outside Canada, I realized only much later," wrote his friend W.G. Constabe. "Once the exhibition at Wembley and Paris were over, his main business in London was with old masters, and it was with these that most of our earlier meetings and discussions were concerned. But I grasped at once that, for him, the old master collection at Ottawa was only one aspect of a single problem, that of making Canada conscious of the arts as an element in civilization and of stimulating the production in Canada of works of art on an increasingly high level."
     Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery in London, noted of Mr. Brown, on news of his passing, that "Eric Brown was known to all lovers of art in the English speaking world, as one of the most sensitive and distinguished of all gallery directors. He understood painting as an artist, but he retained the detachment of the critic. His was, in fact, a supremely civilized mind in which great enthusiasm was concealed by irony, humour and tolerance. It was rare good fortune that the National Gallery of Canada, in the early stages, should be directed by a man of such distinction and so avoid the amassing of mediocre work which is the usual fate of growing galleries."
     Frances Loring wrote, "I felt that he was a much-loved friend and I owe him much gratitude for his unfailing help and appreciation. Art in Canada has lost its greatest champion. It would have been a hard struggle without his courage and help."
     When one looks at the transition of Canadian art, and we praise the artists who have made our creative enterprises so progressive on the world scene, we must also look back in time, to the true visionaries, who were willing to take a gamble on change of direction, expression and future ambitions. Eric Brown withstood an horrendous amount of criticism from those, of the art establishment in this country, who desired stalwart devotion to the way things had been for decades. Eric Brown decided otherwise, and with the help of exceptional artists like Tom Thomson, and members of the Group of Seven, he found the foundation to launch Canadian art into an exciting new era of experimentation and discovery.
    Eric Brown saw something in the work of the Group of Seven period artists, and certainly in the panels painted by Tom Thomson, that reminded him of his own intimate interpretations of nature, especially noted after one particular camping adventure to Algonquin Park with his wife Maud. If words could be interpreted as a painting, his little story would have looked like a Thomson panel. It reads as follows:
     "We had explored our lake afresh from the head of the creek, where the wolves had sung on moonlight nights, to the string of tiny lakes back of the shelter hut. We had sketched and photographed; we had climbed the hills to the stands of original white pine, where the morning mists hung so long after the sun had burnt them up elsewhere that we imagined forest fires, and were always wrong. We had watched a porcupine swim half a mile from an island to our beach without distress, and a swimming lynx had crossed our canoe one early morning and had stared us out of countenance from the shore. Loons, ospreys, pileated woodpeckers, had been nearer nieghbours than humans; and as for the deer, they had stumbled over our tent ropes and whistled round our camp most nights, and the salt we left in a hollow log was always gone by morning which probably explained their interest in us.
     "No form of travel equals the ease and comfort of paddling a sixteen foot canoe, loaded with two people and a month's supplies, and moving at a steady four miles an hour, in any depth of water, from a foot to a mile. As we washed the supper dishes and got our hands clean for the night, the heavens put on such a show for us by way of good-byes as we had never seen before and never have since. The auroa was blazing from every point of the compass. Red, blue, green and yellow streamers flamed and flickered, waxed from the horizon to the zenith and back again. We lay down in our tracks, with our heads on a log, and watched entranced. It was unbelievably remote and infinitely grand in its changing color, shape and movement. Words could do no justice, so we said nothing but occasionally pointed when the coruscations were especially brilliant. Our cup was as full as it would hold, and, when at last the flames died down and the stars returned to their duty, there seemed nothing more that nature could do for us. We almost hoped that we should never go back, for the sake of remembrance of it; and as it has turned out, we have never made that particular trip again."