Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

In an arc familiar to art historians, the iconoclastic often becomes iconic. The Canadian Group of Seven painters, reviled in the 1910s and 1920s as purveyers of “color riots” and “Noisy Chaos” (in King, 307-09), were thoroughly domesticated and institutionalized by the 1990s. When Margaret Atwood frames “Death by Landscape” (Wilderness Tips, 1989) with descriptions of Group paintings, her ekphrasis serves both to enrich and complicate the tale’s unsolved mystery and to undo this process of cultural absorption and popularization, restoring an uncanny wildness to the paintings that her own fiction can exploit. She revalidates one aspect of the Group’s original vision by reproducing their most visually challenging techniques in her own verbal effects. Traditionally, painters and writers technically manipulate the flatness of canvas and page to suggest spatial, temporal, or emotional depth, but certain Group paintings deliberately flout these goals to confuse, shock and mystify the eye. I will show examples of the types of paintings that Atwood alludes to (by Tom Thomson, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and David Milne) to examine how Atwood’s textual effects both challenge spatial, temporal and interpretive frames, and figuratively remove a certain cultural packaging, a commercial “framing,” of the Group of Seven. Her ekphrasis suggests the fluidity of personal and artistic histories, the confused search for and resistance to closure, and the human eye’s and human imagination’s contradictory urges both to penetrate surfaces and resist the allure of depth.