Epic Tom Thomson exhibition comes to Whistler's Audain Art Museum
The largest retrospective of the iconic Canadian artist’s works to date features 133 paintings
Tom Thomson, Sunset.
Audain Art Museum presents Tom Thomson: North Star from June 29 to October 14
WHEN WHISTLER’S AUDAIN Art Museum launches Tom Thomson: North Star on June 29, it will be the most important historical exhibition the venue has held since it opened in 2016. The show features 133 of the iconic artist’s paintings—the largest number ever displayed in a single setting.
Thomson, who was born in 1877 and died prematurely in 1917, was among the most influential Canadian artists of the early 20th century, an early inspiration for what became the Group of Seven. His works capture the natural world, specifically Ontario’s northern lakefronts. Co-curated by Ian Dejardin and Sarah Milroy of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, the exhibition focuses on Thomson’s small en plein air oil sketches while also including some of his larger in-studio works. The pieces come from the collections of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the National Gallery of Canada, as well as several other Canadian museums and private collections, and are presented chronologically and thematically.
“This is the largest gathering of Tom Thomson’s works ever in B.C.,” says Audain Art Museum director and chief curator Curtis Collins in an interview with Stir on-site. “It allows us to compare and contrast what Thomson was doing with the landscape of Ontario to works in our permanent collection by Emily Carr, who was doing a similar effort with regard to landscape in B.C. Thomson is representing Lake Country: scraggly trees, rocks, and the Canadian Shield whereas Carr is looking at the rain forest. But both of them were undertaking a very similar process, taking what was then the European avant-garde post Impressionism and grafting it onto the Canadian landscape.
“In the case of Thomson, with these en plein air or outdoor paintings that he would do in the field, you might find just a few very bold strokes of colour to represent the sky, a rock, a tree, so there’s that very free and loose handling of the paint that I would call a kind of shorthand for representing the landscape. It’s a very bold and a much more daring use of colour for the time.
“This is an incredible opportunity for anyone in B.C. to see Tom Thomson’s works,” he adds, “and the difference in seeing them in person as opposed to reproductions of them is that you really get to see the texture in the works.”
Tom Thomson, Purple Hill.
Some of the pieces refer to pointillism, wherein Thomson uses small dabs of paint in contrasting colours to make up what are very textured sky, rock, and lakes; he’s applying that French technique to the Canadian landscape. Most of the images are in and around Algonquin Park, in the Canadian Shield. Few of the works have people in them, in contrast to the paintings of Carr.
“One of the things Thomson played a major role in in the early 20th century, within a cultural and political and social context, is that Canada was trying to establish itself as a standalone nation, no longer just a colony of Britain,” Collins notes. “So in order to be a standalone nation as the Dominion of Canada, as it was then referred to, you had to have cultural practices that were your own rather than just an extension of say the mother country. So by representing the Canadian landscape, in this case Ontario, in this very bold fashion, it was about establishing the Canadian identity. The Canadian identity within the context of Tom Thomson and later the Group of Seven was very much connected to the ruggedness of the land.”
In keeping with the post-impressionist tradition out of Europe, this show is divided up into seasons. Times of year are very particular to Thomson, with the changing colour of the leaves in works like Autumn Foliage. There are in-studio works like The Pointers on display, along with the smaller works done in the field. “Thomson is camping out, so there’s that kind of Canadian adventurer wilderness aspect which was central to his practice,” Collins says. “He’s sleeping in tents, packing his paint and his brushes on his back, and camping out in fairly rugged terrain. And I think that’s a good fit for Whistler, because people come here to experience the outdoors, to be in the landscape. So to have a show that is rooted in that similar curiosity about the landscape and being part of the landscape is a good fit.”
Works like Woodland Waterfall from 1916 still retain their immediacy. Thomson’s use of a very dark outline of a birch tree, for instance, a pronounced graphic quality, was unheard of in Canadian art at the time. Works like Marguerites, Wood Lillies and Vetch, have an energized quality to them.
“The sketches crackle with energy,” Collins says. “They have some sculptural qualities to them, too, in that he’s playing with the paint and using textural effects, and not just as a way to cover the canvas, but where the paint becomes part of the image in a way that in Canada at the time would have been very radical.
“It’s a real coup for us to get this exhibition,” he adds. “Tom Thomson has an iconic status in Canada.”
Tom Thomson, Petawawa Gorges.
Collins’s hope is that people will go through the Audain’s permanent collections after taking in the Thomson exhibition to see the former in a broader context. The works can be compared not only to those by Emily Carr but also those in the museum by Gordon Smith, Takao Tanabe, and Frederick Varley.
This exhibition, along with blockbusters from the past such as Riopelle: The Call of Northern Landscapes and Indigenous Cultures, Itee Pootoogook: Hymns to the Silence, Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob, and Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage, has helped cement the Audain Art Museum’s status on a national level. “It marks the museum as now squarely on the national scene,” Collins says. “When the McMichael Canadian Art Collection organizes and tours this show, when they’re looking at venues in western Canada, I get the first call because we’re now producing shows at a level that is commensurate with institutions that are much bigger, like the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the McMichael. Now we’re seen on the national scene as a museum that can present things of the highest quality. We have the requisite space to undertake such a big show.”
Along with a show of this quality comes condition reporting. Every work is checked multiple times to ensure it remains in pristine state. “That’s all part of being a museum at a national standard,” Collins says. “This building, where we can maintain very accurate, very steady heat, humidity, and security controls, also allows us to have a show of this nature. Such a show doesn’t go just anywhere. It will be a real treat for visitors this summer.
“Seeing these works in person is a very different experience than seeing them reproduced in a magazine; you just don’t get the same sense of the artist’s hand and that manipulation of texture.” Collins says. “Carr and Thomson are grafting European avant-garde onto very Canadian landscape and that’s what positions this show as unique.” 
Related Articles
