O Canada!
TAUBE, MICHAEL
O Canada! The assault on Cornelius Krieghoff, Canada's national painter. BY MICHAEL TAUBE Cornelius David Krieghoff may be Canada's best-known artistic product, though "byproduct" is perhaps the...
...Krieghoff portrayed the Indians, in particular, as heroic hunters and fishermen, surrounded by beautiful backdrops of open forests, mountains, water, and snow...
...His paintings are stocked with blue and red toques, sleighs, dogs, boisterous adults, and young children...
...Christopher Hume, who writes for the Toronto Star, is a bit more descriptive, calling Krieghoff "a chocolate-box artist whose kitschy compositions come to us like a quaint series of postcards from a bygone age...
...Picturesque sleigh races were common...
...After opening late last year at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the show has headed out for display in most of the major Canadian museums...
...To churn out a large number of small portraits like a modern-day silk-screen artist smacks of mass production, free marketeering, and entrepreneurship—everything they hate...
...It's true that Krieghoff was enamored of the rustic beauty of the nineteenth-century French-Canadian countryside, but he also knew its volatile populace was ready to explode in a moment's notice over everything from a lack of food to forced work...
...He also had the sensibility and manners to socialize with a broad spectrum of society...
...The anti-Krieghoff camp, unfortunately, argues with more conviction...
...The hardship of winter was a common theme, as was the joy and exuberance of being with family and friends...
...The course often includes a trip to examine the collection of Kenneth Thomson, which, at nearly 250 paintings, is the largest private Krieghoff collection in the world...
...BY MICHAEL TAUBE Cornelius David Krieghoff may be Canada's best-known artistic product, though "byproduct" is perhaps the better word...
...And this milieu helped determine what he painted...
...Some subjects, such as an Indian trapper on snow-shoes, were "produced very frequently, sometimes in virtually identical versions...
...It is a pity that Krieghoff, who so loved Canada, should receive such shabby treatment from her art-scene scribblers...
...His paintings do have their defenders...
...Like other successful North American immigrant artists, Krieghoff gained the support of a strong anglophone community with artistic interests and great wealth...
...Today's art critics typically see only the condescension, missing the fact that Krieghoff idealized Indians every bit as much as he idealized French Canadians...
...The reason Krieghoff did so many of these paintings is, of course, that they were very popular with his patrons...
...Nor should he—if the reason for the attacks is Krieghoff's lack of a properly postmodern vision of Canada...
...Krieghoff saw Canadians as "self-assertive and proud, a people who often lived in harsh surroundings, but who did more than merely endure...
...The traveling exhibition has an entire wall devoted to these single-figure portraits...
...Michael Taube is a columnist for the Moncton Times & Transcript in Canada...
...In October 1995, with encouragement from Thomson, Reid decided to undertake a massive research project to examine Krieghoff's paintings in galleries and private collections across Canada...
...Reid also masterminded Krieghoff: Images of Canada, the volume accompanying the show...
...The project has blossomed into the largest ever traveling exhibition of Krieghoff, over 152 paintings...
...And perhaps more than anything else, it is this scent of commercial success that so repels Canada's current crop of art critics...
...Krieghoff's images of Canada are romantic, of another time, and in many ways about another place," Reid writes...
...The art critic for the right-leaning National Post, John Bentley Mays, calls Krieghoff a "hack," totally devoid of "creative imagination" and talent...
...The artist Jerry Pethick, writing in Canadian Art, claims Krieghoff was "an informed and intelligent person . . . gifted as a visual artist...
...Krieghoff also painted innumerable single-figure portraits of Indians during the Quebec years...
...Writing in the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, Ian Lums-den, director of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, attacks the various "critics and Marxist art historians" who have savaged "the romanticized works of Krieghoff as being racist and exploitive of the natives and habitants, who have been so quaintly and condescendingly depicted for the edification and entertainment of the artist's English-speaking patrons...
...Blake Gopnik, critic for the Globe and Mail, probably won't get a Christmas card from his boss for observing that "this paragon of Canadian art was a plain lousy painter...
...For though his talent may not have taken him much beyond the reach of Christmas cards, he deserved better than to have become a whipping boy for Canada's modern disease of anti-Canadian snobbery...
...A Canada that in part existed only in his vision, and presumably in the hopes and beliefs of those who encouraged him...
...The only problem is that the jury is still out on whether Krieghoff had any talent...
...While his white subjects were often depicted with alcohol, there is not a single example of alcohol in any of the native paintings...
...The book is magnificent and will be the standard-bearer for all discussion of Canada's national painter: his work, his life, and his passions...
...The painter seemed to believe in an underlying Canadian reality that was brave, unapologetic, and cheerful...
...He was completely self-taught and a great self-promoter, selling small paintings and portraits like there was no tomorrow...
...And so were bloody accidents and drunken driving...
...It has been estimated that he painted nearly two thousand pictures— detailed, cheery depictions of nineteenth-century Canadian life: native communities, winter sports, sleigh rides, and pioneers...
...The German-Flemish painter was born in Amsterdam in 1815, emigrated with his parents to North America in 1835, and eventually settled in Montreal in 1840...
...His boss is the aforementioned Krieghoff collector Kenneth Thomson, owner of the Globe and Mail...
...Dennis Reid, the chief curator and art historian at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, is an admirer of Krieghoff, and he has for years taught a graduate seminar on the painter's work at the University of Toronto...
...Reid, for his part, refuses to accept such criticism...
...His critics have argued ad nauseam that Krieghoff's paintings are nothing more than jovial misrepresentations of what was a thoroughly hard life for French Canadian immigrants and the native peoples...
...This book includes all of the paintings in the exhibition, plus three chapters of new scholarship on the artist...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 9
