Legacy Article - My Father, H.G.Glyde

Legacy Article "Maxwell Bates at the end of the 20^th century"
May – July 1999
by Nancy Townshend

"A prophet is not without honour except in his own country." So rang a 1931 Calgary newspaper editorial in support of the recent modernist art of Alberta's Maxwell Bates and W.L. Stevenson.

And yet as we close this century, the same words could still be applied to the art and writings of Maxwell Bates. Stevenson is now remembered, thanks to the Edmonton Art Gallery. In 1975, the EAG started amassing a significant collection of Stevenson's diverse work—painterly landscapes, still lifes, cafe scenes, primarily in oils—making it the world's treasure trove of this artist's work. And, to cap it all, the late Mark Joslin curated a very beautiful, sensitive retrospective on Stevenson for the gallery in 1992.

But not Maxwell Bates. He remains "without honour...in his own country" (Alberta especially and Canada generally) in the collecting and exhibiting sense of this phrase.

Certain accolades have been given to him. The Government of Canada awarded Bates a Companion of the Order of Canada (posthumously) in 1980. On May 21, 1971, the University of Calgary bestowed an honorary doctorate.

But what of the collective memory that Albertans and Canadians presently have of Bates and his art?

I know (I've heard all the arguments before): "he was a BC artist." But, in reality, he lived in Alberta twice as long, for 40 years. (Bates lived in Calgary from his birth in 1906 until 1931 and from 1946 to 1961. He lived in BC from 1962-1980.)

I know: "he was a regionalist artist" (you know "local boy, done good"). Yet, in 1931, within months of arriving at age 25 in London, England, he exhibited at the Redfern Gallery and the Bloomsbury Gallery. He participated in annual shows at the Wertheim Galleries with the Twenties Group—Barbara Hepworth, Victor Pasmore, and William Townsend—artists in their twenties who became England's most prominent artists of the 20th century. As well, his art appeared beside that of Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, Magritte, Klee, Giacometti, Henry Moore, and others in the 1937 Artists International Association Exhibition—the West's response to Hitler's Aryan ideal and his Degenerate Art Show. More like an international artist, wouldn't you say?

I know: "he didn't paint 'art for a nation'," (that British Ontario term which Charlie Hill of the National Gallery of Canada used for his re-enactment of the Group of Seven shows and the National Gallery's catalogue on the Group of Seven in 1995). Think of the effect this exclusive 'art for a nation' packaging has had for the last 70 years—the art of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson being the all-inclusive Canadian art— to the exclusion of the art of First Nations, David Milne, John Lyman and Goodridge Roberts, and Albertans Walter Phillips, W.L. Stevenson, and Maxwell Bates.

I would argue that instead Bates painted "art for all mankind." His Prairie People series 1947-8 and his Puppet and Scarecrow works express profound opinions about the human condition. "Man is manipulated by forces over which he has no control," observed Bates in the Daily Colonist on February 17, 1970. Bates even seems to be suggesting Post-Modernism by presenting supposedly pretty pictures which cast an entirely different meaning when combined with their titles. Or, vice versa, pleasant titles with upsetting content, such as Kindergarten, 1965, a work which also embraces the three qualities Bates upheld in painting: directness, simplicity, and intensity. (His witty series on artists at work, including Nicholas Poussin Painting Venus and John Ruskin Checking a Stone in Venice in 1964, his amusing series of the more sensational goings-on in a hotel called The Secrets of the Grand Hotel, 25 monoprints also in 1964, and such landscapes as Storm lighten up his total oeuvre.)

I know: "he is hardly in the Canadian art history books." But that IS my point. Scant little exists in the Canadian art history books on Bates's non-objective canvases painted in Calgary in 1928. Yet they were painted within a year of the exhibited non-objective works of Toronto-based Bertram Brooker and of Kathleen Munn's work. Usually, coverage of Canada's Second World War art consists of all the art of the Canadian Official War Artists. No mention is made of Canadian artists who were Official Prisoners of War, like Bates. So his very significant writings on the nature and purpose of art are eclipsed. Not only are these writings significant in content, but they were produced during Bates's off-hours while he worked as forced labour on the transport gang in a salt mine in Germany for five years, seven days a week (in contravention of the Geneva Convention). These writings about the manifestation of art with respect to time and space are comparable to those on aesthetics by Kant in the West and Abhinavagupta in the East. By contrast, Kant and Abhinavagupta wrote their respective treatises as civilians.

Fellow artists spoke highly of him. Artists such as Jock Macdonald, Roy Kiyooka, Buck Kerr, Luke Lindoe, Ted Godwin, and all the Limners in Victoria. In an interview in 1996, Ron Spickett (AKA Gyo-Zo) explained to me the importance of Bates in his student years at the Alberta College of Art: "Max was the first adult male outside of Jock who took art seriously to the proper level."

Bates publicly defended and furthered art in a variety of ways. He published profound opinions about the function of the artist in the Atlantic Monthly and the Alberta Society of Artists' Highlights as early as 1948. He wrote about Alberta's art history in various volumes of Canadian Art magazine (articles on the art of Jock Macdonald and Spickett for instance) and the ASA's Highlights from 1948 to 1960 (see his ground-breaking article "Some Problems of the Environment" in 1948 and "Divided We Fall" in 1957). After the Liberation, Bates chose to make his living as an architect in Calgary to give complete independence for his art. As a professional architect, he favoured public art. Not only did he say so (in an address given in 1956 to fellow architects at the very first session of a course in Banff sponsored by the Alberta Society of Architects), but he DID so. For example he arranged for the commissioning of Luke Lindoe for his St. Mary's Cathedral in Calgary. But, most of all, his substantive art in shows during his lifetime to 1980 was his public record.

Do we ever see this art in Alberta anymore? What then of the collective memory of Bates and his art in the collecting and exhibiting sense of this phrase?

Why hasn't Bates been given his due? Maybe in the contested space of Alberta's art history previous storytellers had different agendas. Ditto present officials. (For Calgarian Kay Snow, in her book Maxwell Bates: Biography of an Artist, Bates's British Albertan background was an asset. This is not always so.) Maybe collectors are not cooperating.

(I'm beginning to understand how an almost complete cultural amnesia can happen.)

At the very least, Bates's art for art's sake content, his splendid use of materials, his compassion for humanity, and the integrity of his art and his thoughts deserve better treatment. I believe they constitute, in good measure, Alberta's and Canada's legacy to the visual arts and aesthetics of the 20th century.

Nancy Townshend is currently preparing her section (to 1970) of A History of Art in Alberta, co-authored with Mary-Beth Laviolette. The Alberta 2005 Centennial History Society commissioned the book and the University of Alberta Press is the designated publisher.