FAUVISM AND CULTURAL NATIONALISM

Abstract

This essay argues that early twentieth-century Paris, as the most artistically avant-garde metropolitan centre of its time, enabled a group of artists and writers from British colonies to define their own national identity. Their nationalism was not primarily political but cultural. The Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson, the Canadian life-writer and painter Emily Carr and the Australian artist Margaret Preston all encountered in Paris the work of the Fauvists, and through it they came to recognize the stylistic particularity of the indigenous art of their own homelands. Through the agency of the Fauvist inflection of Post-Impressionism, they were enabled to perceive the 'native', Celtic, indigenous Canadian or Aboriginal, as a powerful aesthetic, rather than as a primitive and outmoded convention. A specific focus for artistic iconoclasm, and the breaking down of the traditional genre boundaries of academicians, was the influential philosophy of Henri Bergson. To investigate his ideas in relation to the arts, John Middleton Murry created the influential journal Rhythm , with Fergusson as its art editor and, soon after it began, with Katherine Mansfield as assistant editor and contributor. Though the magazine had no explicit political affiliations, its stance was implicitly anticolonial; its watchword was taken from the Irish cultural nationalist J. M. Synge: 'Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal.' It looked for contributors, both artists and writers, who eschewed realism in favour of a pared-down aesthetic that could stimulate an intuitive response in the perceiver. Its impact was felt in New Zealand, Australia and Canada; what Carr wrote after her training in Paris expresses the paradox of discovering the local through the international: 'I was glad I had been to France. More than ever I was convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate.'