Free Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto

Barbeau planned the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern together, intending to point out the similarities between the new modern painters and Native traditions. Modernist painting originated in Europe, and members of the Group of Seven were influenced by it, but by linking the Canadian version to Native art a historical precursor and inspiration could be established, suggesting a shared identity.
    Both Barbeau and Brown knew of Emily Carr. As early as 1921 the Victoria painter Sophie Pemberton, who had achieved such success in London and Paris so many years before, recommended Emily’s paintings to Harold Mortimer-Lamb, an arts patron from Vancouver. He in turnsent an enthusiastic letter to the director of the National Gallery. Not much came of it, but at some point Barbeau visited Emily in Vancouver and bought two of her paintings. It was he who suggested that Brown also visit her.
    While the 1927 exhibition was not quite propaganda, it did have an agenda, both didactic and nationalist. Emily Carr fit that agenda as a modernist, as a Westerner, and as someone who embodied the hardy, pioneering spirit that the Group of Seven promoted as specifically Canadian. The fact that she also made use of Native motifs further recommended her to the organizers.
    Most of the works Emily exhibited had been made some time before 1927, but now, as a result of the attention, she threw herself into developing her “Indian” pictures, with the added inspiration of the paintings she had seen in Toronto, especially those of Lawren Harris. The effect on her of seeing the group’s work was revelatory. Her diary entries from the trip to eastern Canada are passionate and effusive. She felt that, at last, she had seen a truly Canadian art, and that there was a place in it for her own work.
    Emily returned to Victoria brimming with confidence. She immediately set out on a sketching trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands, and then on another up the Skeena River, effectively recapitulating the trips she had made years earlier.But now she went as a mature artist, not so much interested in ethnographic investigation or to make records, but as a painter returning to her source of inspiration. And although her style absorbed the influence of Harris and the group, it developed along its own original lines. The group had staked out their part of the country and now she did the same with hers. She shared some of their interests but defined herself as separate, as a woman, and as a Westerner. She wanted to paint what had not yet been painted, and through her own sensibilities.
    Emily began to exhibit much more, and to achieve wider recognition. Above all, she was taken seriously as an artist at last. Success, one could call it, although sales were still few and far between.
    In the following decades Emily Carr’s paintings would be constantly on exhibition, not only locally, but also in Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Amsterdam, and London. She would travel again, to eastern Canada as well as to New York and Chicago, not as a student but as an artist the equal of any other. And when she settled down once more in Victoria, the woman who had once felt so isolated and lonely would receive a constant stream of visitors—artists, students, journalists, academics, and even the merely curious who had heard about the famous painter in their midst.
    Following that landmark year of 1927, her work would evolve into the distinctive style we know today. All the threads of a lifetime would come together—the landscape, the modernist palette and styles, the Indian motifs, the desire to make a Canadian art, her spirituality—all of it synthesized in paintings of intensity and power. She would also begin to write stories and biographical works. In her lifetime, she became as well known for her writing as for her painting.
    Emily had always had admirers, but now, on more than one occasion, the word “genius” was linked to her