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Overview: Writings
Donald W. Buchanan was an observer and a chronicler of the unfolding of Canadian Art in national and international publications at a crucial time in our nation's development from 1935 to 1966. Starting with his first published article on a Canadian artist, David Milne, in 1934 and Canadian Art in 1938, and books on Morrice in 1936 and 1947, on Pellan in 1962 and Canadian Art in 1945 and 1950, Buchanan gave Canadians a strong sense of their distinctive visual arts heritage. He wrote informatively about Design beginning with his first article and catalogue essay titled "Design For Use" in 1946 and in 1947 respectively. (Please see the Design section of this Site.) In 1957 Buchanan also wrote about fine crafts in his Introduction to the First National Fine Crafts Exhibition catalogue by the National Gallery of Canada. He cited as desirable qualities for fine crafts: "purely technical perfection, smoothness, and facility of execution" as well as "freedom of expression, skill in choice and handling of materials and a harmonious relationship of form and colour... present[ed] in equal measure", culminating with: "Is the finished article one which will give constant pleasure both to eye and hand? That should be the final criterion." -Donald Buchanan, "Introduction," First National Fine Crafts Exhibition, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1957, pp. 1-2).
By 1957 Buchanan wrote that: "The best of Canadian work is now being merged in the universality of art." -Donald Buchanan, Catalogue of the Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art, Introduction, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1957, p. 1).
Concomitant with Buchanan being the co-editor of Canadian Art from October/November 1944, he was a prodigious writer. His twelve books, one hundred and twenty-one articles, nine exhibition catalogues, and four reports are a testament to this impressive accomplishment. (Please see Buchanan's Bibliography.) 
What are some of the observations that can be made about Donald W. Buchanan's Writings? 1. Buchanan writes early about Canadian art, and promotes and defends Canadian art in an international context. Take, for instance, his comments on David Milne in 1935, in one of his very earliest articles: "In the famous Armories Exhibition of 1913, when the canvases of Picasso, Matisse, and the others, arrived to astonish the Americans, Milne was among the New York artists who had pictures hung in the same show." -"David B. Milne", The Canadian Forum, 15, No. 173, Feb. 1935, p. 191.
Or this affirmation about Morrice while his exhibition was on at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1938: "Here for the first time... are most of the principal paintings of a Canadian artist whose fame, until his death in 1924, was perhaps greater in Paris than that of any other North American painter except Whistler." -"World of Art" Saturday Night, 53, Jan. 15, 1938, p. 6.
Or this declaration: "That Morrice is a harmoniste after Whistler in much of his early work, especially in those nocturnes of Venice, is obvious, yet, in so far as painting may be defined as something done with a brush, Morrice was a better painter than Whistler. As he matured, while he retained an interest in the delicacy of Whisterlerian patterns, he also became equally alive to the expressive brush strokes that were a feature of the art of Manet." -James Wilson Morrice: A Biography, (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1936), p. 96.
-James Wilson Morrice, (Toronto: Canadian Art Series, The Ryerson Press, 1947), p. 26.
2. Buchanan's article titled "World of Art" in Saturday Night, Jan. 15, 1938 is an excellent example of good, lucid writing.
3. Like writers on Canadian art in The Rebel (1917 – 20) and in The Canadian Forum in the 1920s, and Fred Housser in A Canadian Art Movement (1926), Buchanan associated the Group of Seven's and Tom Thomson's art with Canadian nationalism as early as 1938. Initially rather tentative, "...one may say [not I think] that the members of the Group of Seven, were impelled by a strong and ever conscious impulse;" he then emphatically declared that "they were imbued with a moral purpose almost, their object the depiction, in bald, simple outlines, of Canadian landscape as they felt Canadians should see and understand it. This expressed purpose was their manifesto, and it was a manifesto of nationalism." -"The Story of Canadian Art", Canadian Geographical Journal, 17, No. 6, Dec. 1938, p. 279.
In the same article, he accommodates others: "But no one, surely least these men of the Group themselves wished Canadian painting to settle down into a sort of landscape routine, symbolizing nationalism." -p. 279.
In 1945 he wrote: "By emphasizing shapes and contours in their canvases, artists like Jackson, Harris and Lismer made even the most casual spectator conscious of rock-girt lakes, towering mountains and clear horizons. These they proclaimed as symbols of Canadian sentiment." -Donald W. Buchanan, Canadian Painters From Paul Kane to the Group of Seven, (Oxford and London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1945), p. 20.
Also, in 1945, Buchanan states that newer Canadian painting of the same Canadian subject matter rendered nationalist by Group of Seven and Tom Thomson was regionalist by a different hand. "A sturdy regionalism, replete with such symbols of northern geography, as towering pines, burnt stumps and rock girt lakes, was typical of the newer type of Canadian painting during the nineteen twenties. This approach had originated with the nationalist 'Group of Seven' which had as its recognized leaders, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris and the late J. E. H. Macdonald." -"Contemporary Painting in Canada", The Studio, Vol. 129, No. 625, April 1945, p. 99.
In the same article he introduces the novel concept of "integral regionalism": "Only thirty years ago [1915] most of our painting was in the doldrums of a derivative academism based on Barbizon and Royal Academy models. It took unbounded strength in 1914 and 1915 for a few artists to break away and to be frankly indigenous, to be simple, crude and direct, and to preach the gospel of integral regionalism." This "integral regionalism" becomes "nationalism" in the next sentence: "Even in the early nineteen twenties their nationalism was still being regarded as sheer rebellion." -p. 111.
And a year later, Buchanan declared: "A firm nationalism in painting, making full use of such symbols of northern geography as towering pines, rock-girt lakes, and sharply etched clouds, was typical of the work of the Group of Seven." -"A.Y. Jackson, the development of nationalism in Canadian painting," Canadian Geographical Journal 32, Number 6, (June 1946), p. 284.
Buchanan writes about "their [Group of Seven] honest, straightforward declaration of nationalist principles." -"Canadian Painting Finds an Appreciative Public," Culture, a Quarterly Review, vol. XII, No. 1, Mars 1951, p. 51.
To a degree Buchanan's opinions of the Group of Seven were in line with the National Gallery of Canada and as portrayed by the National Film Board and the CBC, his employers.
4. One of Buchanan's most important contributions to writing about Canadian art is his adamant declaration that other artists could produce just as Canadian and national art as the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. Buchanan valued the primacy of aesthetic response over subject matter. He started in 1941 with Morrice: "It is something peculiarly Canadian, that touch of ruddiness in the atmosphere, especially on winter days." -"The Gentle and The Austere: A Comparison in Landscape Painting" University of Toronto Quarterly, (1941), pp. 72-73.
In the same essay, he more emphatically stated: "The feeling which Morrice had for Canadian landscape, particularly its winter atmosphere, was true. It was perhaps even truer, on occasion, than the vision of many of those who have since avowed their belief in a declared Canadianism. For Morrice, in his Quebec paintings, was not telling you, like a lesson that this was nationalist landscape and northern air and skies; instead he was simply depicting on canvas, with great sensitivity, his own conception of those snow-covered scenes which he had used to sketch, out-of-doors, on his numerous visits home." -p. 73.
In conclusion, "...he [Morrice] remains to date our finest and most sensitive artist." -p. 74.
And, in 1946, he wrote: "By those interested in modern painting in Canada, personal vision and individual expression on the part of the artist are to-day taken for granted. This was not so, however, forty years ago [1906]. Such qualities were then little appreciated by Canadian collectors. Yet, at that time, although he was a lonely and unique figure among his Canadian contemporaries, our first great painter of the modern movement, James Wilson Morrice, was already at the full height of his career. -"James Wilson Morrice – Pioneer of Modern Painting in Canada," Canadian Geographical Journal 32, Number 5, (May 1946), pp. 240.
And, in 1947: "...he (Morrice) remains to date our finest and most sensitive landscape artist." -James Wilson Morrice, (Toronto: Canadian Art Series, Ryerson, 1947), p. 14.
With his close affiliation with the National Gallery of Canada and its lack of support for Morrice, [see Leslie Dawn's National Visions; National Blindness, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006)], Buchanan's emulation of Morrice took a great deal of courage and independence.
Next Buchanan championed Goodridge Roberts: -"Canadian Painting Finds an Appreciative Public," Culture, a Quarterly Review, vol. XII, No. 1, Mars 1951, p. 53.
And, in the same article, "To-day, of course, our younger painters do not all follow this same emotional approach [as the Group of Seven followed], - far from it." -p. 52.
Unfortunately, Buchanan does not elaborate on this very interesting point. Originally from the West, from Lethbridge, Alberta, and valuing aesthetic response above all, Buchanan could be more pluralistic. He had a different sense of Canada. But Buchanan did not go as far to say that centres of artistic production in Canada could peacefully co-exist and were equal in value. He did, however, come close to this kind of thinking.
5. Buchanan initiated and continued in a formalist analysis of Canadian artworks. To give several examples: "In one of his [Milne's] finest paintings... you are at once attracted by the clean, white ends of two barns.... Their white brings your eye rushing into the picture. This is high excitement. Your vision is startled. It hangs suspended first on one patch, then on the other." -"David B. Milne", The Canadian Forum, 15, No. 173, Feb. 1935, p. 193.
"The sketch, which was done in the open air, possesses local atmosphere and detail: it bears clearly indicated each individual house on the opposite bank of the river, also various boats which are frozen in the ice; its values are sharp and varied enough to allow an illusion of recession to the landscape. In the canvas these values, however, have been softened to a more even pitch, the houses have been turned into a highly arbitrary and undulating design across the background, the boats have been made broad patches of colour, while the sleigh in the foreground becomes a decorative fixture and the ice at the bottom of the picture curls up in a rhythm that is complementary to that of the houses at the top." -James Wilson Morrice: A Biography, (Toronto: Ryerson, 1936), p. 4.
"In these two canvases, 'Landscape, Trinidad'... he has at last achieved a personal synthesis. He lays out his broad planes of colour on the canvas, that intense blue in the sky and that pink on the houses, and he merges them with other objects in a thrilling way by the use of his brush in drawing trees, in drawing the boy, and in making sweeping patches of light across the ground underneath." -"World of Art" Saturday Night, 53, Jan. 15, 1938, p. 6.
"Between the early period when he was imitating Whistler and the later period after 1905, when he was painting thinly and freely, there was an interlude during which his work was marked by a passion for texture, for the feeling of la matiere, the surface quality of the pigment. Red and other backgrounds began to be covered, heavily here, slightly there, with blues and creams, olive greens and violets, so that through the overpainting you might see patches of the underpainting. Layers of pigment were built up with purpose to give variety to the surface, until the painting began to assume the surface patina of an ancient oriental bowl." -James Wilson Morrice, (Toronto: Canadian Art Series, Ryerson, 1947), pp. 27-28.
"His [Goodridge Roberts] business is rather painting itself, the interplay of colour and texture and form." -Growth of Canadian Painting (London and Toronto: Collins, 1950), p. 85.
And, in the same book: "Goodridge, or 'Goody' as his friends call him, has, however, always been more interested in the plastic quality of paint than in the rhythm of words." -p. 86.
6. Buchanan wrote about Quebec art in English, and therefore introduced awareness of Quebec art in other parts of Canada and abroad. In 1945, in The Studio, Buchanan wrote about new art in Montreal: "where a few artists of both Anglo-Saxon and French origin are now linked together in what is called an "art vivant" movement." -"Contemporary Painting in Canada", The Studio, Vol. 129, No. 625, 1945, p. 100.
Besides his opinions about Goodridge Roberts, Buchanan also explained Pellan's distinctive characteristics: "One should note here that while Pellan vigorously opposes the 'automatiste' form of surrationalism developed by Borduas and his followers, he is willing to use, as in this water-colour, the subconscious in his own way. The raw material of surrealism he has been quoted as saying, 'should still be filtered through the conscious mind. The painter should be like a fisherman who keeps some fish that he brings to the surface and throws the rest back.'" -Growth of Canadian Painting (London and Toronto: Collins, 1950), p. 98.
Pellan gave French Canadian art a "'blow'... through his work has demonstrated to scores of younger painters that beauty is something to be produced, not simply reproduced." -Growth of Canadian Painting (London and Toronto: Collins, 1950), p. 98.
Buchanan also wrote a book on Pellan (1962). "There is definitely a mingling of influences... To-day, contemporary painting, related to French influences, can be seen best in Montreal in the work of such notable Canadian artists as Alfred Pellan and Paul-Emile Borduas. The assimilation of French values in art in now being fitted slowly into the Canadian pattern." -"Canadian Painting Finds an Appreciative Public," Culture, a Quarterly Review, 12, No. 1, Mars 1951, p. 53.
7. Buchanan wrote with affection about his home province, Alberta, in:
"From Lethbridge where I was born, it was sixty miles, straight as the wind blew, to the nearest peaks, and much farther by road. But their presence was unfailing, transcendental, unforgettable." -A Nostalgic View of Canada, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1962), 2.
This book was also published as To Have Seen The Sky with excerpts published in Canadian Art in 1963 in an article titled "Prairie Approach to a Canadian Vision: the Childhood Years".
8. Even at an early date (1937) Buchanan wrote with authority about world art. For example, in 1937 Buchanan aptly observed: "...you can see in Turner's Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover how Turner, with his rich palette, his luminous treatment of atmosphere, inspired the French Impressionists of the late nineteenth century", in "Van Horne Gallery", Toronto Saturday Night, (Mar. 13, 1937). He wrote about Paul Nash in 1934, an interview with Matisse in 1950, and Zadkine.
9. His range included these other topics: the Edwards Collection, the National Gallery of Canada, films, National Film Board, Mexican art, the Canadian Pavilion at the Universal and International Exposition in Brussels, 1958 and others.
10. Using his own advice to "better to understand the artist himself, to appreciate his purposes, as intimately as you can judge them," Buchanan wrote about the artists he collected. These included:
A prodigious writer from 1935 to 1966 on Canadian Art, Buchanan helped formulate and share Canada's culture. |
