Abstract
Canada used the international attraction of totem poles to promote railway tourism on the Canadian National Railway (CNR) in British Columbia in 1924. The railway went by a series of Native Reserves created without signed treaties. The project later involved a series of Canadian Modernist artists to document their experience on the railway. The results were integrated into an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. Some of the artists received additional commissions to create murals and posters for the railway and its hotels. While portrayed as a milestone in Modern Canadian art, the project further relates to the network of bureaucrats, writers, curators and artists responsible for the 1924-1925 Wembley Exhibition. As Jiji Ryu notes in her dissertation on the exhibition: “The interrelations between artists, organizations, institutions and art administrators have been marginalized…, falsely polarizing our understandings of the academic and the avant-garde, the international and the imperial.” However, the interrelations Ryu documents radiate out beyond the territorial limits of the United Kingdom and have great bearing on the rise of international Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. In short, the birth of Modern Canadian art was a bureaucratic arrangement dictated by the Empire’s British elite in London, including among others, Roger Fry, John Nash, and Edwin Lutyens, and overseen by Eric Brown, an English expatriate from Nottingham who served as the first director of the NGC until his death in 1939. These imperial interconnections shed light on the construction of Modernism in the broader English-speaking world.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Modern Art, Gitxsan, Wembley Exhibition, National Gallery of Canada
