Iconic Art Catalogue

The Telegraph Journal
Allen Bentley

Creating an exhibition catalogue is a delicate and intricate affair. Apart from a thorough knowledge of the territory, it demands probing aesthetic insight, intuitive critical judgement, argumentative tact and humility, and an objective distance to allow the essential ‘mystery‘ of the art to remain intact, haunting the reader/viewer.

Ian Lumsden’s work on Catharine McAvity’s paintings, now on display at the New Brunswick Museum, demonstrates all these realities with exceptional force and elegance. Indeed, his catalogue (expertly designed by Julie Scriver of Goose Lane Editions, with a brief foreword by Jane Fullerton and commentary by Peter J. Laroque of the New Brunswick Museum) is virtually the iconic art-catalogue. Lumsden alone might well secure this considerable, yet relatively unknown, painter an abiding place in the middle to upper echelons of Canadian art. His research is 90 per cent original, relying on his own emails and conversations with McAvity’s relatives, colleagues and peers.

Not the least important feature in Lumsden’s achievement is the embodiment in his commentary of the late Northrop Frye’s revelation that criticism of any art form involves two distinct movements of the mind occurring simultaneously. Analysis, says Frye, proceeds centrifugally toward the ‘core’ of the art, making it intelligible, and centripetally, illuminating the cultural and social realities out of which the art, and the artist, emerged.

We can actually see and feel these movements unfolding in the evolution of the catalogue’s discourse as McAvity’s initial, rather enclosed life expands through sympathetic engagement with hosts of creative people – first, with her husband, then Barry Lord (curator of NBM) and later, conjoint (Jack Oughton), with many Canadian ‘greats’ including Jack Humphrey, Miller Brittain, Ted Campbell, Tony Onley, David Milne and – on the international historical scene – the work of Jean Dubuffet, Matisse, Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Miro, Picasso and Klee.

Lumsden demonstrates that all of these ‘influences’ shaped McAvity’s oeuvre into a great aesthetic arc that govemed and sustained her vision. That arc begins in simple, but sexually and politically charged, floral motifs. It expands through sprawling abstracted landscapes with almost visionary content and culminates in an “apotheosis of [her] attempt to conflate the plastic values of form and pure colour with the vocabulary of landscape.“

Counterpointing the dialectic of the catalogue are carefully selected images of McAvity’s work, defining iconic moments in her development as an artist. This is a most sophisticated and compelling strategy on Lumsden’s part, because the visuals sustain the argument exactly at the point in the text where evolutionary change occurs.

This is certainly an accurate synopsis of the exhibition. lf it cannot be a substitute, it is a near-perfect archive of it. Being intelligent and completely self-referential, it is something to be kept and cherished in itself.