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| Group of Seven, 1920. From left to right: Frederick Varley, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Fairley, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and J. E. H. MacDonald. It was taken at The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. Photo: Arthur Goss. |
Four future Group of Seven artists were officially commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund to depict the war. On the homefront, Arthur Lismer and Frank Johnston depicted Canadian efforts, and overseas, AY Jackson and Frederick Varley captured the battlefields of Europe. Unofficially, a fifth member, JEH MacDonald, lent his hand to the war effort by producing illustrations for honour rolls, posters, and other patriotic impressions.
The Group of Seven are the
quintessential Canadian visual artists, known for depicting a stark
Canadian wilderness which some argue bears the mark of military experience.
As Colleen Sharpe, (curator of a previous exhibition at Calgary's
Military Museums on the emergent Group of Seven and war), wrote in
2009, "The iconic features of the Group of Seven's art -
disturbed ground, prominent rocks, muddy colours and skeletal tree
trunks - have not been widely acknowledged as originating in the
landscape of the First World War, yet it seems no accident of
chronology that these men painted many of their seminal art works
directly following the war."(Colleen Sharpe, "Artists and
Soldiers", in Art in the Service of War: The Emergent Group
of Seven (2009), p. 3) Maria
Tippett also saw a direct military connection in the formation of the Group's style, writing that "The low-keyed
colours of no man's land and the trenches - muddy brown, yellow
ochre, and cool grey - came to permeate the post-war canvases of
Varley, Jackson, and others who had lived and painted at the front."
(Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art, and
the Great War (Toronto, 1984), p. 108) 
She also notes that exposure to British modernists
during their time in England, was a wartime connection that
would bring change to Canadian art.
She also notes that exposure to British modernists
during their time in England, was a wartime connection that
would bring change to Canadian art.The Canadian War Memorials Fund was the organization which did the most to support Canadian war art during the First World War. Headed by Lord Beaverbrook, the Fund commissioned artists to create a permanent artistic record of the conflict. It prioritized the documentary aspects of art, giving artists the opportunity to explore the battlefields and sketch what they observed. The Fund supported British artists as well, but historians have argued that its major contribution was the support of artists, and the organization of critics and gallery executives, "which enabled a national school of art to fluorish." (Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art, and the Great War (Toronto, 1984), p.6.) From November 1916, the CWMF gave artists full-time officer's rank and wages to memorialize the war.
The Great War occurred at a time when
artistic taste was changing. As Jackson himself wrote, the war would
let Canadian art "emerge from all its tribulations. Its worst
foe materialism is being walloped, and will never be quite so
formidable again. And all the academic bunch are dying off,
gradually very gradually ... the future will take care of us."
(Tippett, p. 7) For Jackson, more traditional means of portraying
battle no longer rang true. As he put it, depictions of clashes of
arms, with crisp lines, and vibrant colours had, "gone
underground. There was little to see. The old heroics, the death
and glory stuff, were obsolete." (Tippett, p. 13)
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| House of Ypres Painted by Alexander Young Jackson Beaverbrook Collection of War Art CWM 19710261-0189 |
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| Private A.Y. Jackson c.1915 60th Battalion, enlisted June 1915 McMichael Canadian Art Collection Archives |
Jackson spent time convalescing in
France before being sent back to England. He was taken on strength
of a reserve battalion and in Shoreham Camp when he heard about the
CWMF and decided to approach Lord Beaverbrook. The environment in
the battalion contributed to this decision. Jackson noted there was
"not enough food and too many military police" with
disgruntled soldiers being "drilled and disciplined by men who had
not been in France". (Tippett, p. 14) Shortly after he left the
battalion a mutiny broke out in the unit.
It was the battlefield itself that inspired; the alien mudscapes, and shattered woods. Maria Tippett wrote that, "Nothing
came to symbolize the war for the artist and the combatant as much as
the land upon which it was fought....Pock-marked with gaping
water-filled craters, strewn with bones, metal, and all the refuse of
modern warfare, the topography of the front line offered few familiar
associations....The machine had superseded God's handiwork; his
landscape was being reshaped by man's instruments." (Tippett, p.
58) Tippett notes that it was this violent new meaning and
manifestation of the landscape that made Romantic-Realist conventions
seemingly out of place. Jackson felt that his style needed to be
adjusted as well: "the impressionist technique I had adopted in
painting was now ineffective, visual impressions were not enough."
(Tippett, p.59)
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| A Copse, Evening Painted by Alexander Young Jackson Beaverbrook Collection of War Art |
These landscapes and the new techniques
used to portray them were directly influential in the development of
a national school of art for Canadians after the war. As Tippett
writes, "After the war Jackson and his fellow artists
deliberately sought to paint 'swampy, rocky, wolf-ridden, burnt and
scuttled country with rivers and lakes scattered all through it.' The
Group of Seven's concern to demonstrate...the 'spirit' of painting in
Canada, was thus associated with a sense that this could best be done
by employing methods and techniques they and their colleagues had
either seen used or themselves employed to paint the war-torn
landscape of the Old World." (Tippett, p. 109)
The Glenbow museum of Calgary is currently exhibiting the work of AY Jackson and Otto Dix, drawing comparisons around the idea of nation and the influence of the Great War on their art.
