Don’t be bummed when you discover that of the 165 works in the exhibition titled Morrice and Lyman in the Company of Matisse, now running at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, only 13 – six paintings, seven drawings – are by Henri Matisse.
True, on the promotional banners staggered along the Islington Avenue approach to the Kleinburg gallery northwest of Toronto, the French master’s name is at least twice the size of those of Canadian painters J.W. Morrice and John Lyman. It’s a lure, in other words, but not a terribly misleading one. And once a visitor begins to move through the five spaces installed by McMichael chief curator Katerina Atanassova, the quality of her choices and the sensitivity of their placement soon dispel whatever qualms over quantity one may have.
Certainly the title of the exhibition is exactly right. So is the sequence of the names of the marquee players, with Morrice accorded 83 places on the gallery walls, and Lyman 63. While the three painters crossed paths in the early decades of the 20th century, to call them good friends would exaggerate the intensity and frequency of their contact. Morrice, the hard-drinking, peripatetic son of a Montreal textile manufacturer, met Matisse in Paris in 1908, hung out with le maître in Tangiers in the early winters of 1912 and 1913, and possibly reunited with him in Nice in 1921. Lyman, 21 years Morrice’s junior, was also a wealthy Montrealer and had his most concentrated exposure to Matisse in Paris in spring, 1910, when he studied at the Académie Matisse.
The McMichael exhibition makes clear this was a trio linked more by aesthetic affinity than influence – by what the dictionary defines as “a natural liking” by “resemblances in the general plan or essential structural parts” of their art.
This is a rich, ravishing show, a fitting envoi for Atanassova, who’s ending a five-year stint at the McMichael to assume the curatorship of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa. “In essence,” she said the other day, “it sums up everything I always wanted to do: Canadian art in a global context, Canadian masterpieces seen next to ones” by their international contemporaries (Matisse, in this instance) or antecedents (her acclaimed 2013 show featuring Toronto painter Kim Dorland in tandem with the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson, David Milne and Emily Carr).
While Morrice and Lyman in the Company of Matisse is not entirely her own creation – its original iteration ran earlier this year at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec – it’s very much her recreation, supplemented by numerous new loans and groupings and additions and didactic panels not seen in Quebec City. The walls, too, have been painted in sensuous hues – raspberry truffle red, autumn gold, eternal blue, black onyx – the better to emphasize each artist’s love of colour, form and light while making palpable the paintings’ varied settings – a fruit market in Tunis, a Cuban fishing village, the canals of Venice, a pier in the Eastern Townships.
Thirteen Matisses are nothing to pooh-pooh. As Atanassova notes, loans of Matisses “are very hard to get across the border these days.” Unsurprisingly, most in the show are from Canadian collections, including Nude on a Yellow Sofa, a 1926 canvas that has the distinction of being the first Matisse acquired by the NGC. Pretty much all the Matisses here are knockouts, but Morrice and Lyman easily hold their own, with Morrice in particular affirming his world-class bona fides and Matisse’s characterization of him as “the artist with the delicate eye.” One of the strongest ensembles is found in the third gallery, where a 1941 Matisse still life in oils, Ivy Branch, is flanked on the viewer’s right by Lyman’s Still Life with Fruit (1946) and on the left by another Lyman, 1954’s White Lilacs, and Morrice’s Flowers, from 1911.
There is a certain irony to Morrice and Lyman getting the big McMichael treatment. Or should that be rectification? The gallery, after all, is a Valhalla of sorts for the Group of Seven – five of its original members are buried on its grounds, in fact – and its nationalist art project. As Robert Fulford has written, the Group “remain the only creative Canadian artists in any field who have captured the public imagination of English Canada for more than a generation.” The great and for some enduring myth of the Group is that its members single-handedly produced a pure, highly spiritual Canadian art, rooted in a direct confrontation with the rugged Canadian landscape, free of European “taint.”
The cosmopolitan Morrice and Lyman, by contrast, welcomed this taint. Lyman in particular celebrated the Fauves, Post-Impressionists and the Nabis as the best incarnations of the modernist impulse. However, the Canadian art world had little truck with such modernity. In 1905, Morrice, then 40, was celebrated with 11 exhibitions in five countries, yet none in Canada. Eight years later, Lyman’s first solo show, of 42 works at the Art Association of Montreal, received a critical thumping and laughter from the public, prompting his return to Paris.
Today we know Lawren Harris and company were hardly the “naive independents” of myth, that their work was deeply informed by Art Nouveau, commercial graphic design, Scandinavian landscape painting and such Paris-educated Québécois as Suzor-Coté. A similar revision has occurred with Morrice, who for many now stands as Canada’s greatest painter, and with Lyman too, though he’s still relatively underrated.
Still, the record for a Morrice sold at auction in Canada is slightly more than $1.6-million, for a full-size canvas. The auction record for Harris is $3.51-million, for a small oil-on-board. Currently the McMichael owns 25 works by Morrice, three Lymans and 103 Harrises.
For Atanassova, a show such as Morrice and Lyman in the Company of Matisse “is just the beginning of numerous dialogues. How about van Gogh? How about Emily Carr and J.E.H. MacDonald? How about Monet and Maurice Cullen? How about Henrietta Shore with [U.S. photographer Edward] Weston? I hope that the younger generation of curators are going to pick that up. Contemporary artists, too, they need to be mindful of the heritage and tradition … because if you’re not familiar with what was before, how would you make your steps toward the future?”
Morrice and Lyman in the Company of Matisse is now open at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 10365 Islington Ave., Kleinburg, Ont., until Jan. 4, 2015