Complexity and Contradiction in Canadian Public Sculpture: The Case of Walter Allward

Abstract

[The Great War] was a war of mass death in which massed men were fed for 1500 days to massed fire power so that more than 6000 corpses could be processed each day without letup. When it was over, 10,000,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed and mass death had become an acceptable part of the experience and values of European civilization. (Rubenstein 1983, 161) I feel that the unveiling of that monument [at Vimy] and all that was connected with it was really something more than the simple display of a great memorial. It has a tremendous bearing on our whole national development. (Scott 1936) The idea that is running in my mind is that it is through sacrifice that we achieve the spiritual things which your [word illegible] figures represent. (Col. H. C. Osborne to Walter Allward, December 12, 1928) Richard Rubenstein, quoted in the first epigraph above, was not writing inscriptions for Great War memorials. His expression of modern memory could never comfort the numbed, grieving nations attempting to reestablish themselves and their moral order after that War. The buried cries of those mourners are typically displayed in the remarks of Canon Scott and Colonel Osborne. War memorials--especially the Vimy Memorial that they are talking about--sought to voice the unspeakable within the discourse of comfort. (2) An array of elegant evasions enables this exercise. For vulnerable flesh, substitute bronze and granite. Upon the earthbound killing ground, raise a monumental elevation. To an audience wracked by grief, chant a hymn of sacrifice. Walter S. Allward's (1876-1955) memorial at Vimy, France, to Canada's Great War dead performs these functions on a gigantic scale. (3) Hundreds of tons of granite and reinforced concrete weighted with twenty allegorical figures (each of them, double-lifesize), flanked by two soaring pylons towering ten stories above a magnificent hilltop setting, ought to have a lot to say about what they commemorate. (4) The recent (April 9, 2007) TV coverage of the ceremonies marking the 90th anniversary of the Canadian Corps' assault upon Vimy Ridge threw images of the newly renovated and repaired Memorial into millions of Canadian living rooms. The background grandeur that the sight lent to the speeches, ceremonials, and color commentary reinforced the assumption that the statuary convincingly embodied a nation's grief and remembrance. Unnoticed went the possibility that the Memorial's proclamation of comfort amid tribulation remains in fact severely qualified and compromised. A lengthy series of monumentally inscribed statements--11,285 of them, in fact--insinuate a message at once starker and emotionally distant, a laconic registry of heartache and loss. Allward's forced inclusion on his memorial of 11,285 names of the Missing--properly read--undermines his allegorical grande machine of consolation, fostering contradiction rather than complexity in his statement. What we can term the failure of the allegorical is not confined to Allward's masterwork, but extends onward to his final public commission. The opacity of the chief allegorical figure that dominates the William Lyon Mackenzie Memorial at Queen's Park in Toronto (unveiled in 1940) conveys that failure in another fashion. Both pieces demonstrate that Allward's habit of allegorized discourse had reached the limits of its intelligibility. This exhaustion of attributed meaning helps account for the implosion of Allward's career as a public sculptor, an implosion that would haunt him for the decade and a half that he had left to live. His frequent applications to various potential patrons resulted in failure, itself a result of the passing of a symbolic discourse that had engaged him too fully. I A friend of Walter Allward's at Toronto's Arts and Letters Club wrote that Allward's 1898 visit to Paris involved more than romance: [T]hey honeymooned in Paris so that Walter could more closely examine the Rodin sculptures (Hopkins). …