Canadian Art Matters: Revising the Survey

I have been teaching full-time as an art history faculty member at the University of Lethbridge, south of Calgary, Alberta, for four years. In this period, I have been spending more and more time reflecting on my pedagogical practices and approaches in an effort to be a more inclusive, responsive, and learner-focused instructor. This journey has meant reflecting on how I was taught art history, the texts I read in undergraduate and graduate courses, and the ways that pedagogical foundation informs my own research. Despite attending three different universities in Canada, with some of the top scholars in the field, these institutions—and the way that art history was relayed to me—did not represent the range of racial, gender, cultural or socioeconomic diversity that makes up this country. I am now tasked with trying to teach colonial settler art history in Canada without a solid road map to follow. In the following text I outline the centrality of nation-building and nationalism to the writing of art history. I argue that a shift toward transnational and transhistorical approaches to teaching art in Canada is crucial if our students are to see themselves in the discipline and if we hope it to resonate for Canadians. I tease out the importance of attending to transnational histories as we engage in the writing of an art history that attends to the messiness of Canadian history. Lastly, I offer two tangible examples of what transnational and transhistorical examples look like in the classroom.

Building Art History, Building a Nation

The writing of art history in Canada has, like the discipline of history, largely followed a nation-building narrative. Since the discipline of art history formed in the nineteenth century, the nation and national narratives have been the overriding foundation for much art historiography. As Kristy A. Holmes notes, “From the early to mid-twentieth century, the publication of several surveys helped to consolidate the history of Canadian art as a field of study. Texts by Newton MacTavish, William Colgate, Graham McInnes, and Donald Buchanan, among others, established a narrative that linked the development of visual art with that of the colony-to-nation narrative of traditional Canadian history.”[1] J. Russell Harper’s Painting in Canada, established the “narrative and analytical framework that would set the standard for the study of Canadian artistic production for decades to come.”[2] The social and cultural turn in both the disciplines of history and art history in Canada has radically altered these fields. These disciplinary shifts happened in art history without much fanfare, whereas fierce debates about the place and direction of Canadian history began in the 1990s. The historian Michael Bliss critiqued the turn to social history, arguing for a return to the national narratives that had guided the ideological foundations of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Canadian historical discourse. Jeffrey D. Brison responded in 1997 to both Bliss’s 1991 lecture and to JMS Careless’s 1969 essay “‘Limited Identities’ in Canada,” which critiqued the focus historians had placed on writing a Canadian history rooted in national/ist narratives. Brison pointed out that the task of the historian is not to argue that all is “well and good [with] the nation” but, rather to write history that will “help Canadians reconceptualize the nation and help people gain an understanding of how and why the nation has come into being, how it has evolved, and what forces have come into play in its making or unmaking over time.”[3] Prominent Canadian historian, Jack Granatstein, published “Who Killed Canadian History?” a year after Brison’s essay, claiming that Canadian history had been killed by social historians, multiculturalists, anti-intellectual bureaucrats and educationists, and trendy child-centred teachers, and that “history” if one could even call it that, was “only a politically-correct celebration of history’s victims, told at the expense of the nation-building narrative that was essential for the creation of a united and informed citizenry.”[4] Granatstein was clearly invested in the nation-building narrative of history.

Just as historians were beginning to reckon with the shortcomings of the nation-building, or nation-to-colony narrative, so too were art historians. Scholars turned their attention to women artists, artists of colour, and Indigenous artists, suddenly complicating the traditional narrative, shining a light on hitherto underexamined topics and many of the taken-for-granted assumptions which had been at the heart of the discipline in Canada.

I came late to art history. I finished an undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Alberta in 2003 and eventually found my way into a graduate program in art history at the University of British Columbia in 2008. It was there that I took my first course on Canadian (colonial-settler) art. The course included some women artists, but no artists of colour or Indigenous artists. Our course text was Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art with supplemental readings. I don’t know if it needs saying, but as one might imagine from the textbook’s title, the course was largely filtered through the lens of landscape painting and national identity, even as Beyond Wilderness itself attempts to critically address the place of landscape in Canadian culture. I can see now that this early training bled into the way I approached my PhD research on historical art in Canada. The nation-building narrative was ever-present even as I tried to resist it, and I kept pitting my work on women artists, the nude genre, and figurative modern art against the nation-building agenda of art historiography when what I really wanted to do was push against it. I realize now that was because I had not been taught the skills that Elizabeth Cavaliere outlines in her essay in this Pressbook: how to critique Canadian art history’s devotion to nation-building and the nation-state as a social construct. As I think about my own pedagogical approaches, I am endeavouring to address these issues in my own classroom. The history of art is and has been strongly rooted in national narratives that often elide issues of connectivity to larger art historical discourses in the development of both historical and contemporary art history. “Historians have been yoked to the nation since the discipline professionalized in the closing days of the nineteenth century.”[5] I see a transnational approach to Canadian art as key to moving away from nationalist history which reinforces and reinscribes a history of white, male, heterosexual, colonial settlers to the near-exclusion of Indigenous, Black, people of colour, immigrants, women, queer and trans people. As history education strategist Samantha Cutrara has recently posited, what is included in history curriculum in terms of diverse histories is typically included without context, an “add and stir” addition to the curriculum.[6] Teaching history or art history through a transnational lens can help to address the issue of context and to diversify the curriculum so that more students are able to see themselves in the material being taught.

What is Transnational History?

There is no single, perfect definition of transnational history endorsed by all, but a number of working definitions do exist. The prominent historian Akira Iriye, proposes transnational history as “the study of movements and forces that have cut across national boundaries.”[7] Historian Sven Beckert furthers this idea, proffering as a starting point for this kind for this kind of work, “the interconnectedness of human history as a whole, and while it acknowledges the extraordinary importance of states, empires, and the like, it pays attention to networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions that transcend these politically defined spaces.”[8] In short, reframing Canadian art history in light of the global, partaking in the paradigm shift of transnationalism, means decentring national narratives and focusing instead on the flow of ideas, peoples, artistic connections and affinities, and institutions beyond political borders.

Why is this shift in teaching (and my own research) so important? Because when done well, transnational history rethinks not just national history, but also challenges nationalist history. As Ramsay Cook writes,

Although the nation—however defined—is a perfectly legitimate unit of historical analysis, ‘national’ history readily metamorphoses into ‘nationalist’ history, teleological history, history as a weapon…History, including ‘national’ history, is an intellectual discipline applied to understanding the past; nationalism is an interpretation of the past purporting to explain the present and designed to shape the future. The distinction is crucial.[9]

As I noted, my own undergraduate coursework in Canadian art history reveals that nationalism remains a powerful influence upon the writing of art history. Transnationalism offers a different entry point into history, working against the framework of the nation state. As legal and political historian Mae M. Ngai explains, “If social history rewrote history from the bottom up, transnational history proceeds from the outside in. By directing attention to the circuits and flows of social forces and discourses that span nations and cultures, we unfasten the blinders of national history.”[10] This approach thus moves away from “greatness” and meta-narratives which many students do not identify with. Teaching Canadian art histories to emphasize transnational, transhistorical, and transdisciplinary connections rather than reinforce an outdated focus on nationalism and the colony-to-nation narrative is particularly important given the complicated and interconnected issues of regionalism, colonialism, and diaspora in Canadian art.

There is no one way, nor one right way, to approach transnational history. German historian Hartmut Kaelble suggests that transnational history offers a complex approach, which both corresponding and contradictory methods. He states, it “comprises a wide variety of complementary and sometimes conflicting approaches and methods, such as history of transfers, comparative history, global history, history of regions and history of international relations.”[11] My approach to transnational art history is one that does make use of comparative history, but also attends to the flows and transfers of ideas, artists, art movements, and larger socio-cultural ideologies and this approach can alter our writing and understanding of art in Canada. As historians have noted, comparative approaches presuppose “that the units of comparison can be separated from each other,”[12] and thus risk reifying the boundedness of those units or case studies and may overlook the mutual influences and continuities therein. Comparative history often ends up reinforcing ideas of national greatness and may run the risk of asymmetrical comparison, especially in terms of intercultural comparisons, “a tendency for comparison between given cultures to cast such cultures as monads, and so to repeat the pitfalls of reification associated with comparisons at the national level.”[13] As a result, a transnational focus on art history has proven to be a richer and more critical framework for the teaching Canadian art history.

Transnational Art History in the Classroom

The self-taught colonial-settler artist Paul Kane is known in Canada for his sketches and oil paintings of the Indigenous peoples, customs, and landscapes he encountered as he ventured west across Canada beginning in 1846 with the help of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Inspired by the American artist George Catlin’s experiences and his project to “salvage” Indigenous culture, Kane would redirect his own artistic focus in Canada. Kane made 700 sketches during his two voyages west, some of which he later turned into more than one hundred oil paintings in his Toronto studio. His field sketches are a valuable resource for cultural anthropologists, while his oil paintings often contain inconsistencies in terms of geographic, historic, and ethnographic details. Flat Head Woman and Child, Caw-wacham (c.1849–52) was one of Kane’s best-known paintings. It depicts a woman with an infant whose head is being reshaped in a cradleboard; the woman’s own profile highlights the result of the procedure. The painting is inspired by Kane’s travels to the Columbia River Valley and is a composite based on separate watercolours of members of two or three different tribes: one Cowlitz (the infant) and the other Song-hees or Southern Coast Salish (the woman).[14] Nineteenth-century responses to Flat Head Woman and Child addressed both aesthetic and ethnographic aspects. When Kane exhibited the painting at the 1852 Upper Canada Provincial Exhibition, critics praised his handling of the landscape in the background, as well as offering a “trait of Indian customs.”[15] However, Kane’s artworks and project have been the subject of much more recent criticism. For example, art historian and critic Heather Dawkins  has asserted Kane’s total disregard for tribal distinctions in many of his paintings, including Flat Head Woman and Child, was a result of his investment in the colonial and imperialist idea of the salvage paradigm, the idea that documenting Indigenous peoples and culture would salvage them for posterity as they were considered a vanishing people.

Halfway across the world, Gottfried Lindauer, a Czech artist, migrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1874. Lindauer is today known as one of the most prolific and best-known painters of Māori subjects. Trained at the Academy Fine Arts in Vienna, Lindauer eventually settled in Auckland where an Auckland businessman, Henry Partridge, commissioned Lindauer to paint numerous portraits of Māori over a thirty-year period as well as large-scale representations of Māori life and customs. Like Paul Kane, Lindauer travelled extensively around New Zealand. He lived in Nelson, Auckland, Christchurch, Napier, and finally from 1889 onward, in Woodville. Besides portraits of eminent Māori, Lindauer also painted a number of portraits of ordinary Māori, many of whom wear European dress, which they would have done in their daily lives. This is quite a contrast to Kane’s interest in depicting the Indigenous peoples of Canada as ethnographic subjects, always represented in traditional attire, although not always wholly accurate. While Lindauer executed many portraits as commissions for Māori sitters themselves in Western attire, the majority of his Māori portraits for European patrons show his sitters in traditional and ceremonial Māori costume and thus adhere to European taste for the exotic and different.

Lindauer often painted numerous portraits of the same person. He painted the well-known chief, Renata Tama-ki-Hikurangi Kawepo of Ngāti Te Upokoiri/Ngāti Kahungunu in both Māori dress, holding a mere (a broad-bladed weapon or club), and in European dress in images from 1885. Lindauer’s intentions bear some similarities to Kane’s, however his savvy understanding of patron desires, his use of photography as the basis for many of his paintings, and his talents as an artist, set him apart from Kane. As such, I do not bring Lindauer into the Canadian art history classroom to assert an equivalence or equality between the two artists. Where Kane’s paintings are ethnographic portraits, Lindauer’s are not. He names his sitters and renders his subjects in such detail that their moko (tattoos), for example, is not mere ornamentation.

It would be easy to compare Kane and Lindauer and to argue in class that Lindauer’s work is superior, both artistically and ethically. But as I’ve outlined above, this kind of comparative history can run the risk of simply reinforcing an idea of Aotearoa (New Zealand) national greatness. Instead, I focus on the ways in which Kane and Lindauer offer case studies of colonial-settler art history, with very specific regional and geographic differences. Students come away with an understanding of the global nature of colonialism and the role of representation in the colonizing process. In discussion groups and assignments, the students themselves critically evaluate the differences and similarities between the artists and their artworks, but not in an effort to argue one is “better” than the other, but instead to focus on the transnational flow of colonial ideologies, processes, and conventions of representation. In other words, differences are contextualized, geographies and cultures are not universalized, and students keep sight of the interconnected flow of ideas, texts, and bodies while also being mindful of the very powerful realities of national and colonial borders. Teaching with transnational history in mind also contributes to some of the key learning outcomes I stress in my classroom: slow looking; object description; situating art objects and artists in context; assessing and evaluating information from multiple disciplinary perspectives; and articulating their own critical perspectives on course material. Lindauer and Kane are but one example of how I am slowly working to challenge the canon, to transnationalize my teaching of art made in Canada and it is clear to me that it has a meaningful impact on students. Student feedback and course evaluations have shown that students come away with a more critical understanding of Canadian art history as well as viewing history in all its complexity and messiness.

Revisioning Canadian colonial-settler art history survey courses ensures that they are more accessible, inclusive, and critical. I argue that to teach Canadian art history as part of larger, transnational histories can contribute to the decolonization of the discipline. Integrating diverse perspectives, other voices, and collaborative pedagogical approaches to teaching allows the development of knowledges in the lecture hall that may promote nation-to-nation dialogue within the current borders of Canada. As Marsha Meskimmon has stated, this method of teaching forces us as educators “to address the question of how we claim to know (rather than what we claim to know) and to move away from ‘mastering’ a field of study towards creating epistemic communities through dialogue”[16] Transnational history enables a better Canadian art history by challenging national art history, helping to dismantle the canon, and, when done effectively, centres the student. I agree with Samantha Cutrara’s argument that:

the history classroom seems like an ideal place to develop the fodder for a new “we” in Canada, a place to deconstruct the stories we have been told and to find new ways to put them back together again. A place where stories can shrink and be replaced, augment and develop who Canada is now and who it could be in the future…This is not an impractical and idealistic imagining of Canadian history education, but a transformative one designed for the student—not for the nation, or for history, or for the discipline.[17]

I extend her reasoning to the art history classroom; students must not feel alienated or distanced from art history but recognize themselves in it. This requires a different approach to teaching it. Transnational art history should involve a critique of national histories conceived in isolation from those of the rest of the world in order to move away from the ethnocentrism so often characteristic of traditional Western art history. Transnational histories offer a range of insights—about mobility, the relationships that link and transcend political entities, the development of networks and states, the particularities of culture, and more—that are often overlooked in nation-bound studies. Perhaps, most importantly, moving away from the seduction of the nation can boost civic engagement in our students and enable them to see themselves in the narratives of our shared past.