142 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016For the latest exhibition reviews, visit canadianart.caMONTREAL
MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS“1920s MODERNISM
IN MONTREAL:
THE BEAVER HALL GROUP”
by André SeleanuThis wide-ranging retrospective highlighted the work of the Beaver Hall
Group, a pioneering association of artists that flourished in Montreal between
1920 and 1923. The exhibition successfully integrated the group’s complex
interests in pictorial Modernism, gender equality and Montreal as a hub
of Canadian modernity.
The Beaver Hall Group significantly helped to create acceptance for figura-
tive Modernism in Quebec and in Canada. In contrast to the Group of Seven,
whose paintings generally showed untamed landscapes expressing a newfound
Canadian self-confidence, Beaver Hall members embraced all painterly genres.
And so while member Anne Savage painted landscapes strongly reminis-
cent of the Group of Seven, Prudence Heward, Lilias Torrance Newton, Randolph
Hewton and Edwin Holgate, among others, chose to explore the portrait, or
the nude, sometimes against a natural setting. Sarah Robertson painted scenes
of Quebec villages; Adrien Hébert painted the bustling port of Montreal.
The co-curators, Jacques Des Rochers, curator of Quebec and Canadian
art (before 1945 ) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Brian Foss, art
historian at Carleton University in Ottawa, placed equal weight on consider-
ations of gender equality and Canadian modernity. In Des Rochers’s words:
“We re-examined the historical facts pertaining to questions of gender and
found that this was a complex, authentic testimonial to Montreal’s modernity.”
Since the 1960 s, art historians have tended to focus on the women of the
Beaver Hall Group, a view influenced in part by how Savage herself publicly
recollected the group. Based on extensive archival research, the MMFA
retrospective instead depicts Beaver Hall as an innovative experiment in
gender collaboration. Of the 19 members in the group’s first annual exhibi-
tion in 1921 , 11 were men and eight were women. In light of the domination
of the artworld by men’s groups in this and other decades, Beaver Hall took
a tremendously progressive stance.
“Beaver Hall’s depictions of people, as nudes or portraits, are among the
most touching ever painted in Canada,” says Des Rochers. In the first part of
the show, a series of portraits illustrated how the group’s profound collabora-
tions forged links with the wider Montreal arts community. A striking portrait
of Hewton attributed to painter Audrey Buller, who was a friend of the group,
has powerful Expressionist and Renaissance overtones, with its background
of blue-green hills.
A leitmotif of the exhibition is the humanized landscape, a tradition
promoted by Cézanne, where sitters are depicted in tones similar to the
landscape behind them. Heward and Holgate excelled at this, often setting
their paintings of women and men against the Quebec countryside. Newton’s
striking Nude in the Studio ( 1933 ), muscular and self-confident, was, in its
time, judged as excessively erotic. Heward’s psychologically powerful portrait
of two apparently anxious immigrant women was also considered daring,
with its powerful colour scheme of black, red and blue.
The exhibition’s intense, individual works, curated with complexity,
clarity and historiographic rigour, called for repeated visits. As such, a short
review can only do so much to express how critical the Beaver Hall moment
was for the development of 20th-century Canadian art, and the fascination
it exerts on us still. ■REVIEWS
Prudence Heward The Bather
193 0 Oil on canvas 1. 62 m x
10 6 cm COLLECTION ART GALLERY
OF WINDSORReviews_Sp16_16TS_LR.indd 142 02/04/16 12:30 PM