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Off the Shelf: Climbing the Cold White Peaks

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It’s been quite a while since I’ve turned up with one of those book-review type things I once optimistically promised to do around here once a month (the last being this look at various lo-fi artist books in my collection), and this overdue instalment is already breaking my ground rules in that this book did not come off my over-burdened book shelves but rather was borrowed from Mills Library at McMaster University.

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That said, if someone out there knows where I can acquire my own copy of Climbing the Cold White Peaks: A Survey of Artists in and from Hamilton 1910-1950, do let me know. Though necessarily dated in its scope, Stuart MacCuaig’s biographical account of the personalities that built the foundations of Hamilton’s art community is an indispensable resource for understanding the local cultural landscape through the works of its past.

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John Gordon (above), and Hortense Gordon (below)

The timeframe of MacCuaig’s account focuses on the first half of the twentieth century starting from the moment when the Hamilton Art School ceded its independent status and became an amalgamated department within the Hamilton Technical and Art Institute. Embedding this history within the school’s walls reinforces the extent to which the majority of the artists cited in Climbing the Cold White Peaks received their training at this institution, predominantly under the tutelege of John Gordon. The shadow cast by this temperamental, ruddy-faced Scot touches upon many of Hamilton’s early artists and consequently accounts for much of the conservatism that defined Hamilton’s art during these decades. In a twist of poetic irony, it is John Gordon’s equally outspoken wife Hortense who goes on to introduce Hans Hoffman’s brand of abstract expressionism to Hamilton and make an equally prolific name for herself as part of the Toronto-based Painters Eleven.

One of the more satisfying aspects of this history is the equal prominence given to women as important players in Hamilton’s artistic evolution, from the artists who also made names for themselves as selfless educators and early art therapists for wounded soldiers to the Women’s Committee that undertook much of the tireless work to make the Art Gallery of Hamilton into a respectable public gallery. MacCuaig’s narrative is unerringly inclusive (if, perhaps unavoidably, overwhelmingly white) and summons forth a wide array of artists with connections to Hamilton’s scene, no matter how brief or tenuous. At times, the effort to claim civic ownership on an artist who may have only lived in Hamilton for a handful of years has a whiff of desperation about it, but such migratory impulses were standard practice during the 1910s and 1920s when Hamilton art students were actively encouraged to complete their training and pursue careers elsewhere – most frequently, Toronto or New York. With such a deliberate drain on creative minds, it becomes easy to understand how Hamilton went for so long without developing its own distinctive cultural voice.

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One of Leonard Hutchinson’s Depression-era woodblock prints

Surprisingly, the story of Hamilton’s art takes a more productive upswing during the Great Depression when artists like Leonard Hutchinson started making works in the social realist mode with direct reference to the plight of Hamilton’s working class. Not only do his powerful woodblock prints stand out as some of the most memorable works within the book’s dreary march of bland landscapes and nude women, but Hutchinson also emerges as a vital figure for early arts activism, helping to found the Hamilton chapter of the Artists Union in 1936 and organizing local group exhibitions in support of Spain’s fight against Franco’s fascism. In a chapter otherwise dominated by the success of Hamilton-born illustrators in the American magazine circuit, there’s something reassuring in knowing that Red Hutchinson (so nicknamed for the red hooded pullover he would wear to protests) was doing the sort of work that precipitated an RCMP raid on his King Street studio.

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Gore Park as depicted by Juanita Symington (above) and Frank Panabaker (below)

This rebellious chord aside, Hamilton’s art community carried on in much the same conservative strain of its inception, with biographies of artists through the 1940s still naming John Gordon as their earliest influence. A familiarly reverential tone starts to enter into the narrative as one begins to suspect that more of these artists were still alive and well in Hamilton when MacCuaig wrote this history in the mid-1980s. Much of the respect doted upon Hamilton’s most well-known painters such as Frank Panabaker and Juanita LeBarre Symington is well deserved given the wider reputations they carved out for themselves in Canadian art, though a safely staid status quo still pervades Hamilton’s art at this time when post-war sentiments elsewhere in the world were shaking art to its very foundations. The two near-identical paintings of Hamilton’s Gore Park above, by Panabaker and Symington, are both included in the same chapter of Climbing the Cold White Peaks without even a hint of a self-conscious blush.

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Elizabeth Bradford Holbrook, pictured with one of the friezes destined for Hamilton’s Federal Building and eventual neglect

Similarly, MacCuaig is sometimes too eager to correct any less than shining views of Hamilton into his overall positive take on the glory of the city’s artistic legacy. Given the recent furore over the fate of Elizabeth Bradford Holbrook’s friezes for the Federal Building in downtown Hamilton, I derived a special delight from seeing her biography included among her peers. Holbrook is presented on these pages as a no-nonsense and hard-working sculptor of classic Hamilton grit who couldn’t even be deterred by a fire that utterly destroyed her studio and its contents in 1951. When she is quoted as saying that, ‘Hamilton’s a tough place for an artist,’ I’d rather take her at her word than swallow MacCuaig’s pouting, conciliatory, ‘Undoubtedly that was once the case, but sculptors elsewhere in Canada have also found it necessary to struggle for acceptance.’

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The Contemporary Artists of Hamilton on a field trip

The final chapter of Climbing the Cold White Peaks gives promising indications of the forces that would come to shape Hamilton’s art community into the latter half of the twentieth century with the founding of the Contemporary Artists. As a precursor to artist-run centres like Hamilton Artists Inc. (which published this book back in 1986), the Contemporary Artists were a self-determined, closed membership peer group that achieved two considerable aims: to forge a recognized identity as Hamilton artists, and to exhibit their works outside of Hamilton to a wider regional and national audience. While the lack of any other organizing principle and good ol’ entropy led to the dissolution of the Contemporary Artists by 1971, they collectively kickstarted many of the trends that would define the potential for Hamilton artists to be exactly that in the decades that followed.

Among the many quotable moments in these forty years of a growing art scene is this observation from Pearl McCarthy of The Globe and Mail on the occasion of Hamilton’s 100th birthday that provided one of the most stirring end points of this history:

(The Centennial Exhibition) shows that Hamilton has had artists excellent enough to win fame and fortune abroad; that many good artists have stayed on the scene, painting, teaching and campaigning for an adequate gallery. But it also indicates that the city which could produce this talent still has to show its wares in an old building, with art playing the part of the respectable “poor relation” in the civic family… The building… suggests that the people of the city’s second century… have work to do.

More than halfway through Hamilton’s second century, there is plenty of work still waiting to be done, from taking a critical look at how those next forty years turned out to moving constantly forward in the present-day. But having a look at how we got started is always a step in the right direction.


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