It is with great pleasure that I welcome you today to the opening of “A Vital Force” an exhibition of The Canadian Group of Painters. Gemey Kelly approached me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d be interested in giving tonight’s opening remarks. I couldn’t be more thrilled to make a few, brief comments to welcome the exhibition to Sackville and to the Owens. The exhibition, put simply, gathers together work from the painterly collective known as the Canadian Group of Painters, a group founded in 1933. “A Vital Force” brings together 48 works by 48 of the group’s central members and all the works are from the first 20 years of the collective’s existence. Now, that’s the bare bones description, but, of course, Alicia Boutilier’scuration of the show invites us into a more nuanced engagement.

As a scholar of Canadian cultural production from the first half of the 20th Century, I’d like to give some context out of which the group formed.Just to be clear here: I’m not primarily an art historian, so I’d like to speak for a moment about the political contexts before moving onto artistic consequences.

In 1933,when the group was formed, Canada was in the midst of the Great Depression and the very organizing principles of political, social, and cultural life were changing. On the one hand, we see the opening up of political life, with the emergence of a third, national political party to offset what had largely been a two party, Liberal/Conservative, political system in Canada. On the other hand, the early 1930s also saw increased political repression. Protests and strikes were often met with brutal, state-sanctioned force while unemployment rates skyrocketed and crops failed. Canadian communists were arrested, tried, and jailed in Kingston under Section 98 of the criminal code. A play about those communists, Eight Men Speak, was banned after a single performance. I’m by no means the first to to make the connection here between politics and the paintings around us:for example, a new edition of the play was recently published with Paraskeva Clark’s Petroushka on itscover.So, in the face of the opening up and closing off of political life in Canada, people gathered from across political lines to work towards something that would come to be called the Popular Front. The Popular Front largely emerged to put aside political squabbles in the face of growing global fascism—remember,fascism was building abroad and at home. Important here, today, are the cultural consequences of this new political form and organizing principle. At the same time a political Popular Front emerged, we see the emergence of an artistic Popular Front. Artists who had previously squabbled over form, content, genre, and generational differences, were now willing to adopt a model of collective artistic organization across party lines, as it were. Nowhere do we see affiliation across generation and style more prevalently than in the case of the Canadian Group of Painters.

This model of collective organization is largely at odds with the heightened posturing and inflated egos wrapped up in the history of an international modernism, which tried to continually perch on a sharp cutting edge. We don’t find many modernist manifestoes calling for cross-generational and cross-generic work to be supported and shown together. But this, the Canadian Group of Painters, was to be organized, as Lawren Harris put it, without “an axe to grind” and therefore “genuinely generous.” So, as you experience these paintings this evening and over the coming weeks, I’ll encourage you to approach the work with a special attention to this spirit of generosity upon which the group was formed. Indeed, let’s try to reconstruct in our minds the urgency of what was a new, risky, and bold type of collective action. While many of us are more familiar with recent instances of artist-centred organization—our own Struts Artist Run Centre is a great example—maybe we would do well to remember the founding principles of an older form of organization. Let’s ask ourselves what can we learn, both operationally and aesthetically, from a founding principle of generosity.