Is it too much to call David Milne the forgotten man of Canadian historical painting? I think so, but not by much.
Milne, a recluse who dwelled in poverty much of his life — in tents, in wilderness shacks, in at least one totally unfurnished, ramshackle house, much to his long-suffering wife’s dismay — has never been much knit into the dominant mythmaking of early 20th century Canadian art. The long shadow cast by the mighty Group of Seven and their dearly departed touchstone, Tom Thomson, took care of that.
Understand this has nothing to do with talent — in my view, Milne outshines them all, with the possible exception of Thomson — and everything to do with temperament. Milne shared an era with the Group but not a sensibility and, in the forging of a nationalist artistic myth, he was an outlier by choice. He preferred, quite simply, to be alone.
A new exhibition of Milne’s work at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection wisely keeps its distance from that disconnect. It shows, not tells. It’s a tacit declaration of significance on the part of co-curators Sarah Milroy and Ian Dejardin, the museum’s chief curator and director, that Milne himself might enjoy. Indifferent, or so it seemed, to all but the act of painting itself, he’d likely prefer the work speak for itself.
That might be why, even now, Milne’s name is less than household, though among generations of painters he’s revered. Let’s not call him an outsider — the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Milne Study Centre, which opened in 2012, says that much; all the major museums in Canada own his work — but he’s always been a square peg in the carefully carved round hole of our artistic heritage of the day.
Not being easy may have helped keep Milne at arm’s length for most of us. There’s nothing cut and dried about the artist, who meandered across the border between Canada and the United States with ease, never fastening to art as a national project on either side of it. It all makes him hard to pin down, and harder to pin down in the Canadian canon so the McMichael show, wisely, gives us something to cling to.
The exhibition unfolds chronologically, in chapters, though it’s less a timeline than it is an often bleak, starkly beautiful artistic picaresque. Born in Bancroft, Ont., in 1882, Milne was raised in a log cabin in Burgoyne, so it was surely to the surprise of many when, at 21, he declared he’d be moving to New York City to study graphic design. The young Milne’s study of art history was informal and self-directed as he absorbed the Metropolitan Museum’s growing collection of modern European painting: Cezanne, Bonnard, Matisse and, more than any other, Monet.
The show opens with the young artist’s output from this stimulating period of near-daily brushes with nascent greatness: city scenes, busy with loud billboards filled with colour and text. They’re the least unique works in the show and fair enough, even for an artist like Milne, who practically exists as a genre of one; even so, there’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come in the pictures’ often chilly bleakness, despite the urban bustle.
One painting, Grey Billboards from 1912, feels drained of life in an exquisitely matter-of-fact way. Milne never approached the pedantic in his work, but he couldn’t help but paint the inner landscape of his mind. Within a few years, overcome with anxiety by the encroaching city around him, Milne and his wife retreated to the upstate hamlet of Boston Corners, where he would paint unfettered.
It made little sense, careerwise; he had been included in the Armory Show in 1913 — a big deal, especially for a young artist — and his work had been noticed and lauded. But in the country, Milne’s work began to bloom.
A handful of works tucked in a corner here, from 1914 to 1917, will stop you dead. Alcove, a ruddy scene of Milne’s attic studio, seems carved from ochre clay. In Bright Curtains, the dark figure (always his wife, maybe the only other human being to exist in his world) is caught in the clench of earthy green, as though swallowed by undergrowth. Though they’re informed by his ravenous viewing — Alcove openly cites Matisse’s The Red Studio — there’s no whiff of copy or homage. You’ll not see works like this by anyone other than Milne; they are entirely his own.
Another piece, titled simply Black, means what it says and in more ways than one. Milne’s wife, reading a newspaper, is swallowed in shadow, along with much of the frame. From this, Milne still extracts a sombre scene of impossible depth and melancholy; if black has ever been used with more restrained viscerality, I haven’t seen it.
The show’s arc gives us an artist increasingly detached from all but his painted world. A series of images of Bishop’s Pond are unnervingly stark and gorgeous. In Black Reflections, Bishop’s Pond, 1917, is a stand of trees, small daubs of colour still clinging to denuded branches, the last gasp of autumn. In the foreground, the pond is an unearthly black.
It’s landscape of the mind and of the soul, an inversion of any expectation of the sublime. It’s starkly unheroic, detached from what any of his contemporaries, in their aggrandizing pictorial tales of a mythic Canadian wilderness, would choose as a national project (the Group wouldn’t form until 1920). Milne, who shared Thomson’s stark immediacy with landscape, if not his esthetic, couched his appraisal of the group’s ambitions with his assessment of Thomson’s untimely drowning in 1917: “(I)t would have been wiser to have taken your 10 most prominent Canadians and sunk them in Canoe Lake — and saved Tom Thomson.”
Gallows humour isn’t something Milne’s work brings to mind, though the gallows themselves might be. In 1917, he was awarded a commission as a war artist and arrived after the signing of the Armistice to depict ruined battlefields, devoid of battle. They picked the right man for the job — his eerie, unpeopled images of the aftermath are sparse, with vast expanses of white space, and a master class in less-is-more; they carry a sense of devastation more austere and profound than carnage possibly could.
Austerity, of course, was Milne’s milieu, both in art and in life. After a brief return to Canada in the early 1920s — with the group ascendent, communion was hard to find — Milne crossed the border for good in 1929 and took up residence in a tent near the mining community of Temagami, Ont.
He continued along the lines of a Canadian wilderness counternarrative, painting black pits of mine shafts and ruined ponds. Paintings like Group member J.E.H. MacDonald’s Forest Wilderness, a romantic view of a preserved wilderness beyond the clear-cuts, were coming to define the blossoming moment. Compared to Milne, it feels like so much candy floss: froth blowing past the heavy underpinning of Milne’s subterranean world view.
It’s a long journey into the light for Milne, but better late than never. In the 1930s, he came to the attention of National Gallery director Alan Jarvis, who in turn brought him to major collectors like the Massey family and J.S. McLean. Milne, who saved virtually everything he made — and had sold almost nothing — suddenly had open wallets to serve and his last years were spent in relative contentment, restrained though it might have been.
A final section, “A Sudden Opening,” reflects joy, Milne-style. A pale, twisted tree (One Small Maple, 1936), bathed in warm white and seen up close, is almost buoyant; Setting Stars, 1935, feels something like hope.
One piece from 1931, big billows of warm clouds crowding a small house so that it looks almost packed in a box with cotton balls, is Milne at his most ecstatic. Ollie Matson’s House Is Just a Square Red Cloud, he called it, satisfied and filled up at last.
David Milne: Modern Painting continues to Jan. 13.
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