{"id":37223578069,"date":"2024-08-06T10:00:50","date_gmt":"2024-08-06T14:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/?p=37223578069"},"modified":"2025-11-25T13:58:44","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T18:58:44","slug":"turning-the-old-boys-painters-upside-down","status":"publish","type":"media-article","link":"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/fr\/article-media\/turning-the-old-boys-painters-upside-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning the \u2018Old Boys\u2019 Painters Upside Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turning the \u2018Old Boys\u2019 Painters Upside Down<\/h1><\/div>

The Tyee<\/h2><\/div>

By: Adele Weder<\/strong><\/p>\n

August 6, 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n

Original URL: Turning the \u2018Old Boys\u2019 Painters Upside Down | The Tyee<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Acrylic<\/span><\/div>

Kent Monkman\u2019s epic reinterpretations of North American history have made the Cree artist internationally renowned. Detail of Study for mistik\u00f4siwak (Wooden Boat People):<\/strong> Resurgence of the People<\/em>, 2019, by Kent Monkman. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the Sobey Art Foundation, copyright Kent Monkman.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

You know their work, even if you\u2019re not an art history buff. You\u2019ve seen them on posters, calendars, your parents\u2019 Christmas cards: the Old Boys of Canadian art. Cornelius Krieghoff\u2019s snow-capped cabins. The Ontario wilderness as seen by Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris and the rest of the Group of Seven. William Kurelek\u2019s adorable scenes of children at play. All male, all white, sure, but all brilliant.<\/p>\n

The Old Boys\u2019 art comprises the bulk of\u00a0Generations: The Sobey Family and Canadian Art<\/em><\/a>, but the exhibition is turbocharged by radical contemporary and Indigenous art, also culled from the Nova Scotia-based Sobey family collections. The exhibition references the two generations of Sobeys (founders of the pan-Canadian grocery store chain) but also multiple generations of Canadian artists who are not often shown together in a single exhibition, and certainly not physically adjacent to one another as we see here. The works of brilliant Indigenous artists\u00a0Kent Monkman<\/a>,\u00a0Annie Pootoogook<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Brian Jungen<\/a>\u00a0are installed in such a way that they are equal to or more prominent than the Old Boys\u2019 works.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Oil<\/span><\/div>

European settlers audaciously braving what they see as the New World, a colonial trope rebutted by Monkman.<\/strong> Crossing the St. Lawrence with the Royal Mail<\/em>, 1859, by Cornelius Krieghoff. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Sobey Art Foundation.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

For that, we can thank Vancouver-born-and-raised\u00a0Sarah Milroy<\/a>, the director and chief curator of the\u00a0McMichael Canadian Art Collection<\/a>\u00a0in Kleinburg, Ontario, where the show first launched.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see how Milroy\u2019s West Coast roots have helped shape her approach to art. She grew up in a Shaughnessy household headed by two very progressive parents. Her father, John Nichol, was president of the Liberal Party of Canada in its progressive heyday and the founding chair of\u00a0Pearson College of the Pacific<\/a>\u00a0in Sooke. Her mother, Elizabeth Nichol, co-founded the\u00a0Equinox Gallery<\/a>\u00a0in 1972, a hothouse for emerging West Coast artists. Artists like\u00a0Bill Reid<\/a>\u00a0used to hang out in the family home, telling stories over tumblers of scotch, and the gallery was a warm space for connections between people from all walks of creative and corporate life.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur home felt like the core of Canadian art,\u201d recalls Milroy. So from a very young age, Milroy was exposed to a literal dialogue among artists, an experience that would later inform her curatorial approach. As she puts it, \u201cFriendliness is all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The curatorial choice to hang the two eras\u2019 paintings in close physical proximity creates a powerful impression. \u201cWhen you put Krieghoff together with Monkman, you\u2019re allowing people to see what Monkman is riffing on,\u201d says Milroy. Instead of a stand-alone rebuttal, you can see a dialogue. And possibly a means of decoding and recontextualizing that fusty old colonial art.<\/p>\n

Monkman, a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation, subverts the traditional imagery painted by Krieghoff and his cohort of audacious settlers on the shores of the New World. The art turns the tables, depicting Indigenous people as the heroes and the masters of the land, pulling half-drowned European settlers out of the water, while a gender-fluid Indigenous figure stands regally near the head of the skiff. \u201cI always loved the term\u00a0mistik\u00f4siwak<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 Cree for \u2018wooden boat people,\u2019\u201d says Monkman in conversation with Milroy in the\u00a0Generations<\/em>\u00a0catalogue<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s how our people identified the Europeans.\u201d As Milroy observes, \u201cHe\u2019s taking the language of the oppressor and turning it upside down.<\/p>\n

Krieghoff became famous for his highly skilled and idealized renderings of early settler life. In\u00a0Generations<\/em>, you\u2019ll see his sanitized version of early Canadian winter homesteading as well as his grandiose painting of settlers navigating the treacherous waters of the St. Lawrence River. But in a rare juxtaposition, you\u2019ll see Monkman\u2019s visual response adjacent to Krieghoff\u2019s colonial mythology, larger and domineering. It doesn\u2019t cancel Krieghoff\u2019s relevance in art history, but it sets the record straight. \u201cWhen you show him together with Monkman, you can understand a little bit better,\u201d says Milroy. \u201cYou can see evidence of the colonial gaze and you can see evidence of the Indigenous rebuttal to it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Oil<\/span><\/div>

Algoma Hill<\/em>, 1920, by Lawren Harris. Oil on canvas. Collection of Donald and Beth Sobey, copyright Family of Lawren S. Harris.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Oil<\/span><\/div>

On its own, you might see the rugged Harris landscape, at top, as romantic solitude, and that impressionistic Milne streetscape, at bottom, as bourgeois delight. In the context of this exhibition, it\u2019s also easy to see a landscape splashed with blood, and a streetscape that\u2019s blindingly… white.<\/strong> Grey Billboards<\/em>, 1912, by David Milne. Oil on canvas. Collection of Frank and Debbi Sobey, copyright Estate of David B. Milne.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

While the Monkman-Krieghoff playoff nudges us to rethink the most obvious 19th-century colonial tropes, the\u00a0Generations<\/em>\u00a0exhibition offers new ways of looking at the hallowed Group of Seven giants as well. Take a look at Lawren Harris\u2019s\u00a0Algoma Hill<\/em>: in a traditional installation, with nothing but other Algonquin School paintings in the room, you would probably read that mid-canvas burst of red as a blaze of autumn foliage. Contextualized by Monkman\u2019s nearby Indigenous counter-narrative, that red paint can more easily be read as an eruption of blood, or passion.<\/p>\n

Some of the Old Boy paintings project themselves as isolated from the contemporary works, rather than in dialogue with them. Observe David Milne\u2019s\u00a0Grey Billboards<\/em>, an early 19th-century canvas whose rough brushstrokes and rendering of light would make it right at home in an exhibition of the\u00a0impressionists<\/a>. In the\u00a0Generations<\/em>\u00a0exhibition, the painting looks uniquely and weirdly and predominantly\u00a0white<\/em>, and it becomes even whiter after you view the Monkman imagery. It also shows women trussed up in corsets, bonnets and petticoats \u2014making you appreciate how in many ways society has changed for the better.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Acrylic<\/span><\/div>

Road Work<\/em>, 1969, by Alex Colville. Acrylic polymer emulsion on Masonite. Empire Co. Ltd., Stellarton, Nova Scotia, copyright A.C. Fine Art Inc.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Coloured<\/span><\/div>

Family in Kitchen<\/em>, 2006, by Annie Pootoogook. Coloured pencil on paper. Collection of Rob and Monique Sobey, copyright Estate of Annie Pootoogook.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Mixed<\/span><\/div>

Notice how Colville\u2019s road worker, at top, seems to float on the gravel road, as weightless as the family on the kitchen floor in Pootoogook\u2019s distorted perspective, at centre. Then look at how Kurelek\u2019s tiny figures seem to be struggling ominously in the snow trench, at bottom, within the same sort of force field as the Family in Kitchen drawing.<\/strong> After the Blizzard in Manitoba<\/em>, 1967, by William Kurelek. Mixed media on Masonite. Collection of Donald and Beth Sobey, copyright Estate of William Kurelek, courtesy of the Wynick\/Tuck Gallery, Toronto.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

What about the banality and relentlessness of everyday work? Some of us find the subdued colours and expressionless faces of Alex Colville to be cold, detached and vaguely patriarchal. In\u00a0Road Work<\/em>, the lone figure \u2014 a highway worker \u2014 has literally turned his back to us. When it\u2019s around the corner from a drawing by Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook, I can look at Colville\u2019s working man a little differently. Pootoogook\u2019s drawing\u00a0Family in Kitchen<\/em>\u00a0presents the kitchen as a workplace, with the people in the drawing hovering over a seal carcass. Both artists render their subjects as weightless, almost floating above the ground; liberated, or maybe just entirely detached. You might never notice this about Colville\u2019s work until you can see it right after looking at Pootoogook\u2019s.<\/p>\n

William Kurelek\u2019s work has a similar kind of illustrative quality as Annie Pootoogook\u2019s drawings: graphic novels without any words. But Kurelek\u2019s beloved snowscapes of kids cavorting about had always seemed a little\u00a0too<\/em>\u00a0happy to convey the conflicts of childhood and the impending misery of adolescence. Yet if you look closely at the Kurelek painting in the\u00a0Generations<\/em>\u00a0exhibition, you might notice the metaphoric impending danger: Hey, that little kid is sliding helplessly down the trench wall, and that other kid is perched precariously on a sliver of ice! Help, help, help!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Oil<\/span><\/div>

Do you see solitude or a frenzy of human spirits in Thomson\u2019s night sky? See if anything changes when you glimpse it after gazing at the Monkman painting.<\/strong> Moonlight<\/em>, circa 1915, by Tom Thomson. Oil on canvas. Empire Co. Ltd., Stellarton, Nova Scotia.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

Renowned for his rich colours and unpopulated wilderness renderings, Thomson is beloved not only by critics but also by crowds, evidenced by the popularity of the current exhibition at the\u00a0Audain Art Museum<\/a>\u00a0in Whistler.\u00a0Moonlight<\/em>, the Thomson painting installed in the\u00a0Generations<\/em>\u00a0show, is a characteristically brilliant work: behold a quiet moonlit night in a rugged wilderness with no trace of people. And yet as The Tyee\u2019s Dorothy Woodend\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0of Thomson\u2019s other works now exhibiting in Whistler, the painting shows \u201can in-the-moment vibrancy, as electric as a live wire.\u201d<\/p>\n

But look at any one of Monkman\u2019s works, and then look again at Thomson\u2019s sky: the dark, undulating clouds seem not just electric but alive and connected to something or someone else. Seafarers? Invaders? A fish frenzy? Spirits of the age-old inhabitants? The painting becomes your own private Rorschach test.<\/p>\n

So do the contemporary artists trump the 19th-century Old Boys? By contextualizing the \u201ccolonial tropes\u201d with modern and Indigenous perspectives, Milroy encourages bridging the generations, rather than remaining divided. As she writes of Krieghoff\u2019s works \u2014 but it applies to all the Old Boys \u2014 they offer us a time machine, so that we can better understand how we got to this point: \u201cConfections of fact and fiction, they still invite us to enter a world that is not our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Generations: The Sobey Family and Canadian Art\u2019\u00a0<\/em>exhibits<\/em><\/a>\u00a0at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria until Oct. 27.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

<\/i>Open PDF<\/span><\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Ces informations sont aussi disponibles en fran\u00e7ais.<\/em><\/p>\n

Media wishing to request artist\/curator interviews, guided tours, obtain high-resolution images of exhibitions, artwork, or review copies of publications are asked to contact Sam Cheung at\u00a0scheung@mcmichael.com<\/a>\u00a0or 905.893.1121 ext. 2210.<\/p>\n<\/div>

About the McMichael Canadian Art Collection<\/h2><\/div>

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is an agency of the Government of Ontario and acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Gaming, and the McMichael Canadian Art Foundation. It is the only major museum in the country devoted exclusively to Canadian art. In addition to touring exhibitions, the McMichael houses a permanent collection of more than 7,000 works by historic and contemporary Canadian artists, including Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, Indigenous artists and artists from the many diasporic communities. The gallery is located on 100 acres of forested landscape and hiking trails at 10365 Islington Avenue, Kleinburg, north of Major Mackenzie Drive in the City of Vaughan. For more information, please visit mcmichael.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Media Contacts<\/h3><\/div>

Sam Cheung<\/h4>\n

Media Relations and Communications Associate
\nMcMichael Canadian Art Collection
\n905.893.1121 x2210
\nscheung@mcmichael.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

Grace Johnstone<\/h4>\n

Director, Marketing, Communications and Sales
\nMcMichael Canadian Art Collection
\n905.893.1121 x2265
\ngjohnstone@mcmichael.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"featured_media":37223578071,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_tec_requires_first_save":true,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_tribe_blocks_recurrence_rules":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_description":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_exclusions":"","_ecp_custom_15":"","_ecp_custom_16":"","_ecp_custom_17":""},"class_list":["post-37223578069","media-article","type-media-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media-article\/37223578069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/media-article"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37223578071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcmichael.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37223578069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}