Extraordinary Painter
Book review: Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto, published by Penguin Canada (2009–185pp).
by Michael Cox
The Vancouver Art Gallery has more than 200 works by the west coast artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) in their permanent collection, and it is a rare day when they don’t have at least one room displaying her paintings or drawings. She is, arguably, the best known of early twentieth century British Columbia artists. During this summer’s show of Rembrandt, Vermeer and other Dutch Masters, you can also see an exhibit upstairs, Two Visions: Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt (running to September 13), where the two local artist’s images of the natural world and of First Nations totemic art are compared.
Emily Carr is best known for her iconic paintings of dark forests inhabited by the totem poles and long houses of the first peoples of the Pacific northwest: the Salishan, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Nisga’a, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlinglit nations whose artistry was once dismissed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as vestiges of a “savage” culture. It was not only the famous totem poles these people created, but carvings, bentwood boxes, masks and jewellery: now highly collectible, expensive, and revered world-wide as “Canadian” aboriginal art.
Emily Carr. Indian Church, 1929
