Anne Savage: a latent collection

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Falling between virtual exhibition and web publication, Anne Savage: A Latent Collection is a project stemming from our examination of the large number of works by Canadian artist and pedagogue Anne Savage (1896–1971) held in Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery’s permanent collection. This body of work, composed essentially of sketches, drawings and painted panels donated between 1963 and 2001, is both the most substantial monographic grouping of works within the Gallery’s collection, and the greatest number of works by Savage held at a single institution. However, while it has been exhibited a number of times at Concordia since the late 1960s, this body of work remains largely “latent”, in the sense that it has not yet truly been the subject of an in-depth critical examination encompassing its complex socio-historical, cultural and political implications. Until now, Savage’s oeuvre has primarily been feted as part of the legacy of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts, largely due to her influence on two founders of the Faculty, Leah Sherman and Alfred Pinsky. In contrast with this somewhat celebratory tendency, the Gallery has, since 2003, geared its research activities toward contemporary art and critical curating, allowing this body of work to slip into “latency”. This project thus aims to renew interest in Anne Savage’s work, by problematizing it in light of contemporary issues in art history, issues that resonate strongly with the Gallery’s mandate and the critical considerations it privileges.

In developing this project, we combed through both the approximately eight hundred of Savage’s works held in the Gallery’s collection, and her personal archives, also housed at Concordia. From these two sources, for the most part, we selected a diverse array of artworks and documents, and reexamined them from several perspectives, with the goal of understanding how Savage’s practice as a female artist and educator interacted with the discursive, social, cultural and ideological structures specific to her era, such as colonialism, nationalism, and the professionalization of the artist. Privileging feminist and decolonial methodologies, deployed in parallel with historiographical approaches and formal analysis, this partial rereading of Savage’s oeuvre focuses on certain important elements of her artistic and professional career that highlight her somewhat ambiguous position within a complex network of relationships, discourses, and institutions.

The project is divided into four sections, focusing on the four primary modes of action Savage deployed during her career: DEPICTING, TRAVELLING, IMAGINING and TRANSMITTING. Each section includes a brief analytical essay, and a collection of visual, textual and sound-based related content. These two components can be consulted simultaneously, while reading the essay, or independently, using the various integrated browsing and scrolling functions. While not purporting to be comprehensive, and avoiding an overly academic form, ill-suited to web platforms, Anne Savage: A Latent Collection aims to be a reflexive and pedagogical tool for recontextualizing Savage’s oeuvre within a contemporary frame of reference, in order to broaden knowledge of, and, hopefully, encourage new research on her work.

Concept, research, and texts:
Katrie Chagnon / Elisabeth Otto

Research assistance:
Claire Embree-Lalonde

Translation:
Simon Brown (English) / Catherine Barnabé (French)

Editing:
Edwin Janzen

Graphic design:
Karine Cossette

Programming:
Croustille

Photo credits:
Concordia University Archives, Denis Farley, Paul Litherland, Paul Smith, National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario

We also wish to acknowledge the valued support of: Janice Anderson, Kristina Huneault and the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, Edward B. Claxton, representative of the Anne Savage Estate, Cyndie Campbell, Charles C. Hill and Jacqueline Warren from the National Gallery of Canada, and Caroline Sigouin, technician at the Record Management and Archives, Concordia University.

Works and archival material presented on this website are reproduced with permission of the Anne Savage Estate.

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A close examination of Anne Savage’s body of work held at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery inevitably involves questioning the historiographical constructions that have contributed to the almost mythical status of this artist-teacher at Concordia University. One of the most enduring of these constructions, largely based on biographical anecdotes and fuelled by Savage’s own ideas, pertains to her intimate and even sacred relationship with the natural spaces she painted, a relationship that Leah Sherman has described as “her romantic and spiritual attachment to the landscape.”¹1 Leah Sherman, “Anne Savage, 1896–1971,” in Anne Savage, (Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2002), 7. [1] As Alena Buis shows in her essay “A Story of Struggle and Splendid Courage: Anne Savage’s CBC Broadcasts of The Development of Art in Canada,” drawing from Catherine M. Soussloff’s analysis,²2 Catherine M. Soussloff, “The Artist in the Text: Rhetorics in the Myth of the Artist,” in The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 138–158. the cliché of the artist in communion with nature was already very present in Savage’s aesthetic thinking of the 1920s and 1930s, and indeed contributed to the consolidation of a nationalistic mythology based on the representation of the Canadian landscape during this period.³3 Alena Buis, “A Story of Struggle and Splendid Courage: Anne Savage’s CBC Broadcasts of The Development of Art in Canada,” in Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970, eds. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012), 116–117. Although she did not correspond to the heroic image of the landscape painter embodied by the Group of Seven in the “official” narrative of Canadian art, critical, biographical and historical literature on Savage’s work reflects an equally romantic—albeit different—vision of the artist’s relationship with nature, a vision that merits reassessment in the present day [2].

This reassessment takes place in light of recent scholarship questioning the ideological and gender-based opposition between the Group of Seven and the Beaver Hall Group stemming from discourses on painting of the 1920s and 1930s.⁴4 I am thinking specifically here of Jacques Des Rochers and Brian Foss’s reevaluation of the history of the Beaver Hall Group in the exhibition 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group, presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2015. The exhibition catalogue contains several informative studies that reposition the Beaver Hall Group in relation to the Group of Seven, and revisit certain discourses (modernist and feminist, in particular) associated with these groups. Jacques Des Rochers and Brian Foss, eds., The Beaver Hall Group: 1920s Modernism in Montreal (Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015). Indeed, for many years, Canadian art historians fostered the dichotomy between the manly aesthetic of the Toronto-based Group of Seven, focused on the idea of wild and uninhabited nature, and the supposedly “humanized,” individualized and thus feminized aesthetic of the Montréal-based Beaver Hall Group, of which Savage was a member.⁵5 See Kristina Huneault, “‘As well as men’: The Gendering of the Beaver Hall,” in The Beaver Hall Group: 1920s Modernism in Montreal, 263-292. [3-4] Seen by feminist art historians as a counterpoint to the “macho ‘bushwhacking’ that surrounded the Group of Seven,”⁶6 Ibid., 282. the vision of nature espoused by Savage and her colleagues (including Mabel Lockerby, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris and Sarah Robertson) is often seen as contributing to the creation of an idyllic image of the Québec countryside, to the extent where it has often been equated with a nostalgic form of regionalism.⁷7 On the question of regionalism, see Esther Trépanier, “The Beaver Hall Group: A Montreal Modernity,” in The Beaver Hall Group: 1920s Modernism in Montreal, 161-181. [5]

The portrait of Anne Savage painted by Joyce Millar in her 1992 article on the women of the Beaver Hall Group, for example, fully endorses this notion. Millar depicts Savage as an artist “in tune with her own region, [who] used the rolling hills and valleys of the Québec landscape to emphasize the decorative qualities of her art.”⁸8 Joyce Millar, “The Beaver Hall Group: Painting in Montreal, 1920–1940,” Woman’s Art Journal 13, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1992): 5. While acknowledging that Savage was indeed heavily influenced by A.Y. Jackson’s work, Millar also contends that “Savage’s landscapes […] reflect not the deserted, overtly nationalistic expressions of the Group of Seven, but rather a joyous, lyrical colour and form, a land in harmony with its inhabitants.” ⁹9 Ibid. [6-11] In this rather conventional reading of Savage’s work,¹⁰10 Millar’s thesis mirrors the essay in the exhibition catalogue for Anne Savage’s 1979 retrospective exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Janet Braide, Anne Savage: Her Vision of Beauty (Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1979). the harmonious manifestation of rural life through objects that suggest human presence, such as farmhouses, ploughing farm tools and simple fishing vessels [12], is celebrated as an antithesis to an implicitly masculine attitude towards nature as something to be conquered.¹¹11 See also Evelyn Walters, The Women of the Beaver Hall (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2005), 16. This idea is certainly not baseless, but we must examine the possibility that it paradoxically fuels the development of a counter-myth, effectively erasing the complexity of Savage’s oeuvre, along with all the contradictions and internal tension it contains.

Indeed, what is perhaps most interesting about Anne Savage’s many drawings, sketchbooks and pochades in Concordia’s art collection is the heterogeneity of their themes and subjects, all nonetheless connected to varying degrees with the rural landscape [13]. Being preparatory artworks, these pieces are able to enlighten us as to Savage’s creative process and her meticulous compositional methods, the schematism of which sets them clearly apart from realist or purely documentarian pictorial approaches [14]. By the same token, this body of work draws our attention to the specific personal, material and social conditions within which Savage carried out her artistic practice. As many commentators have noted, the artist’s family situation and her twin vocations of teacher and practitioner greatly influenced her approach, determining, notably, her choice of subjects, the format of her works, and their modes of execution.

Born as she was into an upper-middle-class family at the end of the Victorian era, Anne Savage was materially able to pursue a career, which she chose to divide between artistic practice and teaching. According to her biographers, this division of her professional life was mirrored by a division of her calendar: during the school year, she spent most of her time teaching, while her intensive artistic activities took place primarily during the summer break. This partitioning would have a significant effect on both her artistic output and its reception. A close connection was indeed created between her painting, practised outdoors, and the places where she regularly vacationed with her family, in particular, her cottage on Lake Wonish, in the Laurentians [15], and Metis Beach, in the Lower Saint Lawrence, where she had spent summers as a child and continued to visit family later in life [16-17]. Savage’s class privilege and professional life gave her a certain degree of financial independence, typical of the early twentieth century’s “New Woman,”¹²12 Huneault, “‘As well as men,’” 265–269. effectively permitting her to practise as a “vacation painter”, a fact that has been invoked to justify both the lack of continuity in her oeuvre, and the predominance of drawings, pochades and oils on panel in the body of work held at Concordia.¹³13 Leah Sherman, “Anne Savage: A Study of Her Development as an Artist/Teacher in the Canadian Art World, 1925-1950,” in Histories of Art and Design Education, ed. David Thisetlewood (London: Longman Group UK, 1992), 145-146. According to Leah Sherman, these formats—as opposed to larger canvases—seemed to better suit the pragmatic limits of Savage’s practice, while at the same time allowing for a certain spontaneity and authenticity in keeping with her romantic vision of landscape.¹⁴14 Ibid.

However, in re-examining Anne Savage’s sketchbooks, panels and other works in the Gallery’s collection, what particularly stands out is the rigour and diligence with which she carried out her aesthetic research. Exploring specific colour palettes and often returning to a fixed set of subjects (trees, rocks, forests, lakes, hills, sunflowers, buildings, animals, etc.), Savage usually organized these elements on different planes according to recurring compositional schemas. Her work thus demonstrates a particular attention to composition and formal aspects of the painting’s surface, rather than to spontaneous representation of landscape per se [18-21]. Likewise, the documents held in the Anne Savage fonds, and in the documentation centre of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, both based at Concordia, demonstrate her thorough and sustained commitment to the artistic milieu of her time. Her work as a teacher, her frequent exhibitions, sales of artworks and membership in important art associations (Beaver Hall Group, Canadian Group of Painters, Art Association of Montréal) firmly counter the prevailing image of a well-bred young lady from Montreal who, for her own pleasure, translated into brushstrokes the beauty of the Québec countryside.¹⁵15 Huneault, “‘As well as men,’” 269.

— KC

Translated by Simon Brown

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Although not as well-travelled as some artists of her generation, Anne Savage did make several significant voyages throughout her career, thus participating in the emergence of a then-new form of cultural tourism in Canada.¹1 For further reading on the relationship between art and tourism in the early 20th century, see the work of Lynda Jessup: “Artists, Railways, the State, and ‘The Business of Becoming a Nation’,” PhD thesis (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992); “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change…,” Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 144-179; “Marius Barbeau and Early Ethnographic Cinema,” in Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture, eds. Lynda Jessup, Andrew Nurse and Gordon E. Smith (Gatineau: Museum of Civilization Corporation, 2008), 269-304. From the same book, see also Sandra Dyck’s chapter, “‘A Playground for Tourists from the East’: Marius Barbeau and Canadian Artists in Gitxsan Territory,” 305-348. After having spent a certain period of time in the late 1910s and early 1920s in Minneapolis, where she studied commercial art at the Minneapolis School of Design, Savage travelled to Europe in the summer of 1924. During this trip, she explored French and British cities such as Concarneau, Quimper and Oxford, where she produced numerous urban and architecturally inspired works [1-2]. Over the following years and decades, Savage would also travel to Western Canada on three different occasions—the first time as an artist, the following two as an educator—, thus benefitting from the burgeoning railway industry and the connections being made between it and Canadian artistic institutions during this period. In 1927, she was invited by the National Gallery of Canada and Québec anthropologist, ethnologist and folklorist Marius Barbeau to travel to the Skeena River in British Columbia with her friend, the sculptor Florence Wyle, in order to visually document the Indigenous culture of this region for the purpose of preserving, and, by the same token, promoting it [3]. Savage would also return to Western Canada in the summer of 1937 to give art education classes in Edmonton and Calgary and again in 1949 to teach at the Banff School of Fine Arts²2 Anne McDougall, Anne Savage: The Story of a Canadian Painter (Montréal: Harvest House, 1974), 40, 72-81; Barbara Meadowsworth, “Anne Savage,” essay accompanying the 1992 Anne Savage retrospective at the Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, accessed October 20, 2018, https://www.klinkhoff.ca/fr//artists/25-anne-savage%2C-a.r.c.a./Klinkhoff..

Savage returned from these trips with numerous drawings of landscapes passed through and sites visited, some of which would serve as models for larger format paintings and, more generally, fuel her artistic imagery. It is in this sense that the sketchbooks in the Gallery collection are of interest; they allow us to not only retrace Savage’s primary travels outside of Québec, including her 1924 trip to Europe and her later Canadian travels [4-5], but also to observe the visual documentation strategies she was able to develop in this mobile context, and to question the aesthetic—and, in a certain sense, ethnographical—approach that these strategies imply. It is, moreover, of particular interest to examine the visual production stemming from Savage’s travels to Western Canada, especially her 1927 trip, for the complex historical and political questions it raises, notably in the context of recent decolonial art history.

Savage and Wyle’s trip to Skeena Valley, in Gitxsan territory³3 Located in northwestern British Columbia, the Gitxsan territory (known as Lax Yip) is inhabited by the Gitxsan (or Gitksan) First Nation, whose name means “People of the River Mist.” This nation includes several communities living along the Skeena River, including Hazelton, Kispiox, Glen Vowell, Kitwanga, Kitwancool and Kitsegukla. The Gitxsan also share part of their land with other Indigenous peoples such as the Nisga’a, Tahltans and Tsimshians, with whom they used to trade salmon. Of matrilinear tradition, the Gitxsan nation is organized into different clans or lineages that are responsible for the control and inheritance of land and fishing territories. Its ancestral culture revolves around language (a dialect of Nass-Gitxsan part of the Tsimshian language family), as well as traditional arts such as weaving Chilkat blankets, carving sheep horn spoons, and erecting totem poles as memorials. Dating mainly from the second half of the nineteenth century, the colonial history of the Gitxsan people is marked by territorial conflicts and acculturation policies imposed by the federal government. For more information, see: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/gitksan and http://www.gitxsan.com/., was part of an ambitious ethno-artistic project headed up by Marius Barbeau and supported by various departments and institutions of the federal government, for whom art was becoming a vector for constructing a modern national identity, promoting the nascent tourism industry, and reinforcing a colonial vision of Indigenous peoples. Besides the National Gallery, the institution with which Barbeau was affiliated, and its director at the time, Eric Brown, the Department of Indian Affairs, Canadian National Parks, the Canadian National Railway (CNR) and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) were also involved in the project.⁴4 For a deeper analysis of the connections between these various actors and Canadian government bodies, see: Leslie Dawn, National Vision, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 118; Dyck, “A Playground for Tourists from the East,” 305-306; and Charles C. Hill, “Backgrounds in Canadian Art: The 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern,” in Emily Carr: New Perspective on a Canadian Icon, eds. Charles C. Hill, Johanne Lamoureux and Ian M. Thom (Ottawa and Vancouver: National Gallery of Canada / Vancouver Art Gallery / Douglas & McIntyre, 2006), 93-121. By engaging artists, Barbeau and his collaborators hoped to facilitate the actualization of the vast project of preserving totem poles in situ and establishing a national park in Gitxsan Country, among other things. With the support of the CNR and John Murray Gibbon, publicity agent for the CPR and “enthusiastic promoter of cultural tourism,”⁵5 Hill, “Backgrounds in Canadian Art,” 98. Barbeau obtained free passes for artists to the “wild” regions of Alberta and British Columbia “in exchange for their creation of marketable images”⁶6 Dyck, “A Playground for Tourists from the East,” 306. to be put at the service of the nationalistic and economic interests of the various actors involved.

Barbeau had in fact already organized a collaboration of this type with the American painter W. Langdon Kihn. From 1922 to 1924, Kihn had painted numerous portraits of members of the Stoney and Gitxsan First Nations, the ethnographical details (clothing, etc.) and “contemporary” presence of whom somewhat contradicted the rhetoric of disappearance held at the time and based on imaginary and essentialist conceptions of the “Indian.”⁷7 This is the thesis Leslie Dawn defends in National Vision, National Blindness. Later on, Barbeau would bring to the project six other established Canadian artists, who, for their part, would return from the sojourn with more so-called “picturesque”⁸8 This expression is borrowed from the eighth chapter of Dawn’s book: “Representing and Repossessing the Picturesque Skeena Valley.” depictions of Indigenous life in Western Canada: A.Y. Jackson and Edwin Holgate in 1926; Anne Savage and Florence Wyle in 1927; and George Pepper and Pegi Nicol MacLeod in 1928. With the exception of George Pepper, the works of these artists—and others, such as Emily Carr—were presented in the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern, a major exhibition organized in 1927 by Marius Barbeau at the National Gallery of Canada that juxtaposed in an innovative but, in hindsight, highly problematic manner Indigenous (“native”) and non-Indigenous (“modern”) art in Canada.⁹9 Marius Barbeau, Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1927). Several studies have highlighted the problems and contradictions of this exhibition. Besides those previously cited, by Leslie Dawn, Sandra Dyck, Charles C. Hill and Lynda Jessup, see: Ann Katherine Morrison, “Canadian Art and Cultural Appropriation: Emily Carr and the 1927 Exhibition of West Coast Art: Native and Modern,” MA thesis (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1991); and Marcia Crosby, “T’emlax’am: An Ada’ox,” in The Group of Seven in Western Canada, ed. Catherine M. Mastin (Toronto and Calgary: Key Porter / Glenbow Museum, 2002), 89-112. [6-7]

Some of these works were also reproduced in a book that would be published the following year, The Downfall of Temlaham (1928), a collection of orally transmitted Gitxsan tales gathered in the field and liberally reinterpreted to reconstruct the story of the “fall” of the Temlaham nations, “a native Garden of Eden on the banks of the Skeena,”¹⁰10 Barbeau, The Downfall of Temlaham (Toronto: Macmillan, 1928), vi. destroyed by European contact [8.1]. Of Savage’s plentiful visual production from the 1927 trip, a sole painting was included, a nostalgic depiction of a depopulated, distant and long-lost place entitled Temlaham, Upper Skeena River, identified (by Barbeau?) as a “Paradise Lost” in The Downfall of Temlaham.¹¹11 Although the 1927 exhibition catalogue, at number 76, indicates a “Group of Sketches, Upper Skeena River”, it remains unclear as to exactly which sketches are being described, and whether Savage’s “sketches” (probably in oils) were indeed included in the exhibition. Texts consulted only mention the painting Temlaham, Upper Skeena River, which today is held by a private collector. [8.2] However, the body of work created during this trip in its entirety suggests a less abstract and considerably more ambivalent position in regard to the Indigenous people she met and painted during her first trip to the West Coast than Barbeau’s line of rhetoric might suggest.

According to her 1967 interview with Arthur Calvin, Anne Savage was already aware in 1927 of the problematic nature of the project [9]. Describing Marius Barbeau as a “most disrespectful” and “silly man,” she recounts that the Indigenous people living along the Skeena River were fiercely opposed to the totem pole restoration project, as it went against their ancestral beliefs.¹²12 Arthur H. Calvin, Interviews with Anne Savage, transcripts, Anne Savage Fonds, Concordia University Archives, file 18.3, 13-14. [10] Despite the apparently unfavourable conditions that were to surround the trip, Savage and Wyle’s experience with the “Indians” of British Columbia were, in her own words, “extraordinary,” and she “came home with a nice album collection of sketches.”¹³13 Ibid., p. 14. While in fact several sketchbooks remain from this and her two following trips, the “album” to which Savage refers is doubtlessly the 52-page pad acquired in 1983 by the National Gallery along with one of Wyle’s sketchbooks (1920–1928) and a 1931 book of poems written by Wyle and illustrated by Savage. Given the historical importance of the 1927 sketchbook, it isn’t surprising that it is one of Savage’s only to be held in the collection of a national museum—namely, the institution that originally instigated the project—, rather than in the Ellen Gallery’s collection at Concordia.

Oscillating between an obvious intent to meticulously document the Gitxsan people’s way of life and material culture and the creative licence proper to artistic exploration,¹⁴14 Dyck, “A Playground for Tourists from the East,” 313. the graphite and ink drawings and small oil paintings that Savage executed in Skeena Country combine several visual techniques and genres [11] : panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains and “vertical” forests of Western Canada,¹⁵15 In the interview with Calvin, Savage claims to have disliked the landscapes of Western Canada, finding them to be overly “vertical”. Arthur H. Calvin, Interviews with Anne Savage, transcripts, 28. which sometimes seem to be drawn from the train (much like the scrolling landscapes cut into postcard-type thumbnails found in the Concordia sketchbooks marked “West” [12-13]; depictions of villages such as Kitwancool and Kitwanga, sketched from a certain distance and sometimes lacking in detail, where totem poles, longhouses and their inhabitants stand out from a mountainous background; and portraits of Indigenous women, some of whom are clearly identified by name, as well as objects from Gitxsan material culture (such as totems, masks and sculpted spoons) that Savage would isolate and carefully reproduce in drawings accompanied by written descriptions.

When examining these images today, it is difficult to determine the exact nature of Anne Savage’s attitude towards the Indigenous peoples of Western Canada that she spent time with over the summer of 1927 [14-15]. Did her interest in their culture stem from an intimate engagement or a fascination that was to leave a strong impression on her, or was her curiosity essentially aesthetic and decorative in nature and, moreover, dominated by a conception of the land as being primarily an unpeopled landscape, in the spirit of the Group of Seven, as Sandra Dyck suggests?¹⁶16 Dyck, “A Playground for Tourists from the East”, 313. There is no definitive answer to this question. One thing, however, is sure: we cannot look at these works now without taking into account the critical issues raised by artists’ involvement in the economy of the “tourist gaze”¹⁷17 This term attributed to John Urry is used by Lynda Jessup in her article “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada”, 147. From John Urry, see also: The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990); Consuming Places (New York: Routledge, 1995). in early twentieth-century Canada, an economy whose ideological and historical aftereffects have been nothing short of decisive in Canadian art history. [16]

— KC

Translated by Simon Brown

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Anne Savage’s landscapes [1], once empty, were by the end of the 1920s inhabited by Canada’s past. This online exhibition reproduces three panels from the collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, two of them painted on both sides, featuring five of Savage’s paintings of imagined scenes from Canadian history [2]. These panels, executed by Savage around 1930, initially formed part of a larger murals project [3] at Baron Byng High School in Montréal, where she taught art (1922–48). While the students painted the high school’s halls with scenes from history, nature, technology, and other subjects [4–9], Savage decorated the library with panels and reliefs by Louis-Philippe Hébert and Florence Wyle [10–11]. When the school closed in 1980, the remaining panels landed in the hands of the cultural heritage foundation of the former Protestant School Board of Greater Montréal. Only in 2001 were they donated to the Ellen Gallery, thanks to the efforts of Savage’s former student and Concordia professor (and Faculty of Fine Arts co-founder) Leah Sherman (1925–2015).¹1 Leah Sherman, Anne Savage (Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2002), 21.

On the occasion of Anne Savage’s last exhibition held at the Ellen Gallery in 2002²2 A subsequent exhibition of works by Anne Savage, co-curated by Leah Sherman and Paul Langdon, was presented at the FOFA Gallery in 2007., the panels were shown to a wider audience for the first time. While the exhibition’s catalogue tells of the genesis and turbulent past of the “Baron Byng Panels” up to that point, Leah Sherman focuses in her essay on their importance in Anne Savage’s teaching,³3 “In subject matter, style and intention, they exemplify the educational and artistic goals that inspired Savage’s teaching and painting. She wanted to bring an awareness of Canadian art and Canadian history to her students and make art a part of their everyday lives.” Sherman, Anne Savage, 21. but does not try to understand the artist’s conception of landscape representation. Emphasizing Savage’s “spirit of discovery, romanticism and humanism,”⁴4 Ibid. Sherman does not mention the content the scenes depicted. The panels, titled Indian Fur Traders, Early Settlers, and Indian Camp, are presented as a somewhat Canadian form of modernist romanticism, without pointing to the settler-colonial Canadian state’s contemporary efforts, throughout the 1920s, to erase First Nations peoples and cultures.⁵5 At the end of the 1920s, governmental efforts to assimilate First Nations peoples into the settler Canadian society, which had begun already in 1876 with the Indian Act (still in force with amendments), reached its all-time high. The Indian Act denied Indigenous peoples key rights and banned certain forms of cultural expression, such as (until 1952) the potlatch ceremony practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. During his term as superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs (1913–35), Duncan Campbell Scott enforced this legislation relentlessly, and, in 1920, established the residential school system for Indigenous children.

In recent years, settler-colonial art history⁶6 For more on settler-colonial art history, see Damian Skinner, “Settler-colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts/Histoire de l’art colonialo-allochtone: proposition en deux volets,” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien 35, no. 1 (2014): 131–45. has set out to reread the artistic production of modernism in Commonwealth countries and to deconstruct the ideas and ideologies behind national art histories. Following this approach, but without remaining confined to it, this essay understands Savage’s murals at the intersection of two ideas—of history as geography, and of painting as design—and offers a reading of the artistic and socio-cultural contexts of her artistic production.

Indian Fur Traders [12] is the only one of these three murals that shows direct contact between First Nations peoples and the French colonizers in the form of barter, with the furs being traded by both parties placed in the centre foreground of the image. Savage evidently preferred this scene of economic exchange over representations of specific historic episodes in colonial history, as some contemporary mural projects did: for example, the murals [13] at the Chalet de la montagne du parc du Mont-Royal (1930–32), with its seventeen painted panels by twelve Montréal artists depicting distinct moments in Montréal’s colonial history (1545–1760): Jacques Cartier’s arrival in Hochelaga, Samuel de Champlain’s stay in Montréal, and the foundation and early settlement of Ville-Marie.⁷7 For an extended analysis of the history and iconography of the decorative program of the Chalet du Mont-Royal, see: Laurier Lacroix, “Les tableaux historiques du Chalet de la montagne du parc du Mont-Royal. Étude historique et iconographique” (Montréal: Service du développement culturel, 2003), 2, 9–10, 13 (accessed October 10, 2018). http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/EXTBURMTROYALTCFR/MEDIA/DOCUMENTS/%C9TUDE-TABLEAUXHISTORIQUESDUCHALETDUMONT_ROYAL-2003.PDF As Laurier Lacroix has pointed out, even as this history represents a nationalist standpoint, the depiction of First Nations peoples in these historic scenes [14] reflects the archeological interest of the Chalet’s architect, Aristide Beaugrand-Champagne, in Iroquois culture.⁸8 Ibid., 78.

Savage seems less interested in the weight of history than in the artistic challenge of merging landscape and history painting in a single panel: the group of traders is framed by various sorts of trees, which cut through the image’s vertical plane and lend the painting rhythm and structure. The encounter’s location is not clear, but the birches remind us of the Ontario landscapes of a Tom Thomson, although the birch branches Savage’s paintings are less expressions of wilderness⁹9 F. B. Housser writes of the influence of wilderness on the art of the Group of Seven: “The so-called northern wilderness of Canada has made a fringe of civilization across a continent. The wilderness has influenced our trade routes and has already undoubtedly had an effect in the formation of our racial character.” F. B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1926), 14. than evocations of decorative patterns—and even more so in the unfinished version of the same scene on the panel’s rear side [15], in which a group of trees, stylized in arabesque forms, becomes the painting’s central motif. Savage had encountered the Art Nouveau movement [16–19] in her artistic training (1914–19) at the Art Association of Montréal.¹⁰10 Here she studied with William Brymner and Maurice Cullen, both landscape painters, who introduced her to Impressionism and European modernist tendencies. See also: Jacques Des Rochers and Brian Foss, eds., 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group (Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015), 305. In this panel, her training in illustration [20], at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1919, becomes apparent.

In another panel [21], Anne Savage pays homage to another class of colonial hero—the Early Settlers on their way west. The scene shows a settler family, with children and cattle, following a covered wagon¹¹11 The covered wagon, or Conestoga Wagon, is a symbol of the North American settler, and was generally used to transport up to five people and their belongings over long distances across the prairies before the completion of the continental Canadian and American railways. In Canada, the covered wagon was used chiefly by Swiss and Mennonite settlers in what is now Ontario. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/conestoga-wagon. Integrating this American element into her panel may have been a reference to contemporary Hollywood cinema, with its “Western” genre, popular since the 1920s—for example, The Big Trail (1930), one of the first of its kind, featuring John Wayne as a white settler-hero. Further murals drawn by students at the Baron Byng school seem to draw even more directly from pop-culture imagery. dragged by a horse through a freezing mountain landscape. The unfinished backside [22] of this panel gives us a hint as to how the artist organized¹²12 For more on Anne Savage’s “compositional model” of the early 1920s, see: Esther Trépanier, “The Beaver Hall Group: A Montreal Modernity,” in 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group, eds. Jacques Des Rochers and Brian Foss (Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015), 163. her paintings. First, the painting’s overall structure is outlined in pencil; foreground and background share the same colour, while the middle ground in the painting’s upper two thirds is reserved for some trees, hills, and clouds, which give the composition its texture. The trail of the early settlers in the foreground is still missing in this version. This rear panel gives us insights into Savage’s design theory [23]—formulated in the 1950s, when art was expressed through the four elements of colour, shape, texture, and tone. As the artist explains, “the direct way is to start with an object and then fill in the space around it—both results are good as long as spaces have been attended to—shapes overlap—colour repeats—and there is something light and dark—interesting texture and all important shape—in other words the activities are simply good design carried into everything you do.”¹³13 Anne Savage, Design Activities, Anne Savage Fonds, Concordia University Archives, file 12.32, 3. [24]

Anne Savage’s Indian Camp [25] is inhabited by a fictitious First Nations family positioned amidst an indistinct, perfectly symmetrical autumn landscape in Art Nouveau design. Savage’s “imaginary Indian”¹⁴14 This construction, as explained by Marcia Crosby, took place through “collecting and displaying ‘Indian’ objects and collecting and displaying ‘Indians’ as objects or human specimens, constructing ‘pseudo-Indians’ in literature and in the visual arts.” Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” in Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art, eds. John O’Brian and Peter White (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 219. does not represent a specific First Nation, but a stereotype, as indicated by the simultaneous presence of a variety of canoe normally used on the waterways of eastern Canada, a tipi used by the First Nations of the Great Plains, and a totem pole typical of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest. Even though there is no exact date for the execution of these panels, certain valuable clues suggest that they were done after Savage returned from her trip west in 1927, where she accompanied her friend Florence Wyle to the Skeena River. From the sketchbooks Savage kept of her trip, we know that she was aware of the customs of the B.C. First Nations as she documented their longhouses and totem poles, made portraits of their people, and learned about the family crests carved onto the totem poles and the artefacts of the Kitselas and Gitxsan First Nations. Hence, the stereotyped representation of this “Indian camp” stems neither from disinterest nor ignorance, but is underpinned by a modernist outlook that integrated Indigenous art into the narrative of Canadian modernism, rendering First Nations cultures as part of Canada’s prehistory.¹⁵15 Anne Savage was part of the_ Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern_ (1927), organized by National Gallery of Canada director Eric Brown and anthropologist Marius Barbeau. Anne Savage’s imaginary “Indian Camp” does not come from a distinct place, but the past.

Recent decolonial efforts and grassroots movements¹⁶16 See, for example:
www.idlenomore.ca. are reclaiming the spaces occupied by the “imaginary Indian,” and contemporary Indigenous art plays a crucial role in this movement. The Canadian artist of Cree ancestry Kent Monkman¹⁷17 For more on Kent Monkman, see:
www.kentmonkman.com. is a central figure in this effort, creating history painting for a colonized Canada that deals with subjects of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience. Monkman [26] reverses the colonial gaze to upend received notions of history and Indigenous people by reimagining the Western institution of the art academy with reversed roles of artist and model, of onlooker and looked at, and ultimately of colonizer and colonized.

— EO

👀

The historiographic construction of Anne Savage as an art educator was until recently dominated by her former students Leah Sherman and Alfred Pinsky, who followed in her footsteps eventually and founded the Faculty of Fine Art at Concordia University. In their accounts,¹1 Anne Savage, “First Talk on Canadian Art Series,” The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, Anne Savage Fonds (ASF), Concordia University Archives (CUA), file 2.2, 6–7. See Arthur H. Calvin, Interviews with Leah Sherman and Alfred Pinsky, transcripts, ASF, CUA, file 18.3. recalling their training under Savage at Baron Byng High School in Montréal, they emphasize her natural talent as an art educator and her intuitive approach, which had a lifelong effect on the lives of her students [1]. The image drawn of Savage’s career was one of a “symbiotic relationship” between her careers as an artist and an art teacher.²2 Leah Sherman, Anne Savage (Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, 2002). Questioning this image demands a closer look into the artist’s conception of art education, as well as her own understanding of a double career as a Canadian woman artist and an educator in the twentieth century. A look at her papers, held in the Concordia University Archives, gives us a more differentiated view on a woman artist who built a career for herself, not only in Montréal and Québec but across Canada; and on an art educator who advocated for the importance of art in everyday life for all generations of Canadians, and who was convinced that art education should be a professional career option for women.

Her advocacy for art education includes not just twenty-eight years as an art teacher at Baron Byng High School, but also (from 1937) morning classes for children organized by the Art Association of Montréal, working (from 1950) as an art supervisor for the Protestant School Board, and lecturing, even after her retirement, in McGill University's Art Education program (1955–59). Parallel to her teaching, Savage was also educating a wider public with her lectures, most prominently her eight talks on The Development of Art in Canada [2.1–2.16], broadcast on CBC Radio in January and February 1939. The wider cultural significance and political aspect of Savage’s broadcasts, a project aligning two major Canadian cultural institutions—the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Gallery of Canada—has been extensively discussed by Alena Buis.³3 See: Alena Buis, “‘A Story of Struggle and Splendid Courage’: Anne Savage’s CBC Broadcasts of The Development of Art in Canada,” in Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1950–1970, eds. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 106–34. Buis sees Anne Savage’s role as an “implementer” of nationalist ideas on art, telling Canadian art history as a succession of heroic (male) artists from Paul Kane to the Group of Seven.⁴4 Prior to Savage’s broadcasts, authors associated with the Group of Seven had already formulated a vision of a “genuine” Canadian art. See, for example: F. B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1926). Her close friendship and collaboration with A. Y. Jackson in preparing these talks may suggest the idea that Savage was merely the “popularizer” of the “patriarchal canon of Canadian art,”⁵5 Buis, “‘A Story of Struggle,’” 124. but a look into the documents proves more complex.

The Anne Savage Fonds holds both the final typescripts of the talks and the annotated versions by A. Y. Jackson. Jackson’s corrections to the typescript sometimes target facts (names, years, etc.) or spelling; but only rarely does he change the sense of a word—as, for example, “the love of landscape goes far back into Anglo-Saxon past” into “our love of landscape,”⁶6 Savage, “First Talk,” 3. or addressing the listener directly as “you,” instead of “my Canadian hearers,”⁷7 Ibid., 6. to create a sense of community⁸8 By 1937, seventy-five percent of Canadians had a radio. Buis, “‘A Story of Struggle,’” 108. and belonging with listeners. In the letters Jackson and Savage exchanged around this time, Jackson briefs and de-briefs with each talk: advising her regarding possible comparisons between artists, sharing firsthand memories from his time with the Group of Seven, and giving feedback after each episode. From time to time, Savage asks Jackson for advice (“I wish you would check it”)⁹9 For excerpts from their correspondence, see: Anne McDougall, Anne Savage: The Story of a Canadian Painter (Montréal: Harvest House, 1977), 152–56 (153, in this instance). and endures in return his patronizing tone (“It is a quite little job you have undertaken”).¹⁰10 A. Y. Jackson, letter to Anne Savage, January 15, 1939, in McDougall, Anne Savage, 152.

The following passage, from the first of the CBC lectures, may serve as one example of a major change (addition) to the original typescript. In the first version [3], Savage wanted to introduce

Canadian landscape painting as a popular movement, well received and appreciated at home and abroad; yet the final typescript relates a different story: Canadian landscape Painting [is] a story of struggle and splendid courage. You can imagine in a country like ours with its rigorous climate and vast distances just how little thought or interest could be afforded to anything as impractical as Art,—yet that rare figure of the artist appears at every stage of our development, seizes and preserves for us conditions of life in whatever period he comes. He lives unknown, often ignored, but when Time puts the value on a country’s activities, his work shall take its place in the record of our struggle on the road to a finer understanding of the World surrounding us.¹¹11 See: Savage, “First Talk,” 6–7; and “First Talk on Canadian Art Series” (original annotated version), The Development of Art in Canada, 1939, ASF, CUA, file 2.1, 6–8.

This change from Canadian landscape painting as a popular success story to a story of “struggle and splendid courage” is remarkable, if not very surprising, considering her close ties with the Group of Seven. The group’s biographer, F. B. Housser, compared its members to the early Canadian “pioneer and the explorer.”¹²12 Housser, A Canadian Art Movement, 156. Certainly the male pronoun in the foregoing passage is no accident, as Savage is telling the history of Canadian art through a lineage of men—although she admitted in a later talk, Some Women Painters of Canada, [4] that women “contributed”¹³13 Savage describes the women artists’ contributions in terms like: charm, joyous grace, warmth, power, beauty, etc. Anne Savage, Some Women Painters of Canada, n.d., ASF, CUA, file 2.20, 2. as well.

And yet, these women artists’ “braveness” lay not in their venturing out into the Canadian wilderness as did their male counterparts, but in a struggle nonetheless: “the struggle to meet the home demands and over and above to find time for the expression of their creative ideas.”¹⁴14 Ibid. Interestingly enough, Anne Savage singles out two women artists who chose, as she did, an unmarried life: Emily Carr [5] and Prudence Heward [6]. So the struggle is of a different nature. Emily Carr is presented, first of all, as a successful writer [7] who revolted against Victorian conservatism—another Canadian story of “struggle” for the sake of art: “It was against this spirit of smug conservatism which Emily revolted. She found the same attitude in Art School where she got what instruction was available—No one was interested in the vast wilderness full of Indian lore—she was the first to use the native material of B.C.”¹⁵15 Ibid., 4. And as Carr’s eastern counterpart, and a fellow student of William Brymner, Montréal artist Prudence Heward struggled with her “frail physique” through the “creative power” of her paintings.¹⁶16 Ibid., 5. In an undated talk on The Art Profession [8] (most likely from the 1950s), Savage dismisses almost completely the notion of a commercial woman artist, since in general success in this profession would require absolute desire and the will to realize it (“survival of the fittest”). She lists instead a multitude of career alternatives for women—illustrator, interior decorator, metalworker, and others—although she highly recommends a career as an art educator. Being an art teacher offered her the opportunity to “go on with my studies in the real Art world,” while promoting the arts as “a valuable asset … to anyone’s existence.”¹⁷17 Anne Savage, Undated notes for a lecture on “The Art Profession,” n.d., ASF, CUA, file 2.35, 4. Anne Savage never thought of choosing one career path over the other; yet here she is promoting the profession of art education as “ideal” for women, since it would allow them to perform their duties as a housewife at the same time. This is not the only moment where we can observe something of an “ambiguous feminism” in her writings.

The distinction between the “real” art world and the world of art education was personally important to her; in her teaching, however, she transgressed these two worlds in favour of a shared learning experience with her students. Former student Leah Sherman describes Savage’s style as an educator as teaching “in a way which didn’t separate learning and teaching. … Whenever she taught anything she discovered something. She was always giving a great deal of information and knowledge but at the same time you felt that you were a partner with her in a learning experience.”¹⁸18 Calvin, Interviews with Leah Sherman and Alfred Pinsky, transcripts, 4. But in order to be the best art teacher, one doesn’t have to be the best painter; in an interview given not long before her death, Savage indicated that having an interest in problem solving was important: “I think that if you can experience as much as you can experience in what you’re trying to teach, then you’ll be able to do it with much more efficiency.”¹⁹19 Arthur H. Calvin, Interview with Anne Savage, transcripts, ASF, CUA, file 18.3, 3. This efficiency she manifested not only in her constant artistic practice during the summer months when she was off school, but also through a keen interest in current writings²⁰20 For some examples: Belle Boas [who later became art director at the Horace Mann School, New York, and an associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University], Art in the School (1924); Morris Davidson, Painting for Pleasure (1938), for the ambitious amateur; Ralph Pearson, The New Art Education (1941), a survey of new tendencies in art education; the British child educator in Roger Fry’s circle, Marion Richardson, Art and the Child (1948); and, last but not least, Herbert Read, Education through Art (1943), on the theory and practice of art education. Thereafter she followed an integrated approach to art education drawn by thinkers like the German Rudolf Steiner at the beginning of the twentieth century, including, for example: Leon Winslow, Art in Secondary Education (1941); and books by Victor D’Amico, art education pioneer and director of the education department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and others. on child psychology and new developments in art education in Europe and North America. In short, Anne Savage was not only “[working] instinctively, basing her teaching on her own discoveries as a painter and remembering her own search as a child,”²¹21 McDougall, Anne Savage, 59. as her biographer chose to see her, but a passionate art educator, who drew deeply from her own artistic practice and her profound knowledge of art education and art history.

— EO

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Archives and files

Concordia University Archives, Anne Savage Fonds – 1909-1971.

Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Documentation Centre, Concordia University.

Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, Concordia University, Artist Database: Anne Savage. http://cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists/displayArtist.php?ID_artist=108

National Gallery of Canada Archives, National Gallery of Canada Fonds, Art and artists – Correspondence with/regarding artists – General, Anne D. Savage; Paintings, water colours, pastels – Oils purchased – Canadian, work by Anne Savage; Loans, exhibitions, and outside activities – Exhibition in Gallery, West Coast Art – Native and Modern – Exhibition (1927-1928).

Canadian Museum of History, Marius Barbeau Fonds.

General documentation about the artist

Braide, Janet. Anne Savage: Her Expression of Beauty. Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1979.

Calvin, Arthur H. Anne Savage, Teacher. Master thesis, Montréal: Sir George Williams University, 1967.

McDougall, Anne. Anne Savage: The Story of a Canadian Painter. Montréal: Harvest House, 1977.

Meadowsworth, Barbara. Anne Savage (1896-1971): Retrospective Exhibition. Montréal: Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, 1992.

Sherman, Leah. “Anne Savage: A Study of her Development as an Artist/Teacher in the Canadian Art World, 1925-1950.” In Histories of Art and Design Education. Ed. David Thisetlewood, 142-151. London: Longman Group UK, 1992.

Sherman, Leah. Anne Savage. Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2002.

Feminist perspective

Anderson, Janice and Kristina Huneault, eds. Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012.

Buis, Alena. “‘A Story of Struggle and Splendid Courage’: Anne Savage’s CBC Broadcasts of The Development of Art in Canada.” In Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970. Eds. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson, 106-131. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012.

Ferrari, Pepita. By Woman’s Hand. 58 min., 1994. Montréal: National Film Board of Canada; Animations Piché Ferrari Inc. https://www-nfb-ca.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/film/bywomanshand/

Huneault, Kristina. “‘As Well as Men’: The Gendering of the Beaver Hall.” In 1920s Modernity in Montreal. The Beaver Hall Group. Eds. Jacques Des Rochers and Brian Foss, 263-292. Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015.

Huneault, Kristina. I’m Not Myself at All: Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2018.

Millar, Joyce. “The Beaver Hall Group: Painting in Montreal, 1920-1940.” Woman’s Art Journal 13, no. 1 (spring-summer 1992): 3-9.

Walters, Evelyn. The Women of the Beaver Hall. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2005.

Decolonial perspective

Crosby, Marcia. “Construction of the Imaginary Indian.” In Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art. Eds. John O’Brian and Peter White, 219-222. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

Crosby, Marcia. “T’emlax’am: An Ada’ox.” In The Group of Seven in Western Canada. Ed. Catherine M. Mastin, 89-112. Toronto and Calgary: Key Porter / Glenbow Museum, 2002.

Dawn, Leslie. National Vision, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006.

Dyck, Sandra. “‘A Playground for Tourists from the East’ : Marius Barbeau and Canadian Artists in Gitxsan Territory.” In Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture. Eds. Lynda Jessup, Andrew Nurse and Gordon E. Smith, 305-348. Gatineau: Museum of Civilization Corporation, 2008.

Jessup, Lynda. “Artists, Railways, the State, and ‘The Business of Becoming a Nation’.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992.

Jessup, Lynda. “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change…” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 37, no. 1 (spring 2002): 144-179.

Jessup, Lynda. “Marius Barbeau and Early Ethnographic Cinema.” In Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture. Eds. Lynda Jessup, Andrew Nurse and Gordon E. Smith, 269-304. Gatineau: Museum of Civilization Corporation, 2008.

Morrison, Ann Katherine. “Canadian Art and Cultural Appropriation: Emily Carr and the 1927 Exhibition of West Coast Art: Native and Modern.” Master thesis. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1991.

Skinner, Damian. “Settler-colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts/Histoire de l’art colonialo-allochtone: proposition en deux volets.” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien 35, no. 1 (2014): 131-145.

Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications, 1990.

Urry, John. Consuming Places, New York: Routledge, 1995.

Historical and historiographical references

Barbeau, Marius. Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1927.

Barbeau, Marius. The Downfall of Temlaham. Toronto: Macmillan, 1928.

Des Rochers, Jacques and Brian Foss, eds. 1920s Modernity in Montreal. The Beaver Hall Group. Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015.

Hill, Charles C. “Backgrounds in Canadian Art: The 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern.” In Emily Carr: New Perspective on a Canadian Icon. Eds. Charles C. Hill, Johanne Lamoureux and Ian M. Thom, 93-121. Ottawa and Vancouver: National Gallery of Canada / Vancouver Art Gallery / Douglas & McIntyre, 2006.

Housser, F. B. A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven. Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1926.

Lacroix, Laurier. “Les tableaux historiques du Chalet de la montagne du parc du Mont-Royal. Étude historique et iconographique.” Montréal: Service du développement culturel, 2003. http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/EXTBURMTROYALTCFR/MEDIA/DOCUMENTS/%C9TUDE-TABLEAUXHISTORIQUESDUCHALETDUMONT_ROYAL-2003.PDF

Soussloff, Catherine M. “The Artist in the Text : Rhetorics in the Myth of the Artist.” In The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, 138-158. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Trépanier, Esther. “The Beaver Hall Group: A Montreal Modernity.” In Une Modernité des années 1920. Le Groupe de Beaver Hall. 1920s Modernity in Montreal. The Beaver Hall Group. Eds. Jacques Des Rochers and Brian Foss, 161-260. Montréal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2015.