In a ceremony on Wednesday (16 October) at Vancouver’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House, the Audain Art Museum unveiled its latest acquisition: a historical watercolour by Emily Carr (1871-1945). Held for many years in private collections, War Canoes, Alert Bay (around 1908), was displayed next to an oil-on-canvas depiction of the same scene painted in 1912, which was previously gifted by the collector and philanthropist Michael Audain to his Whistler-based museum. The event marked a reunion of two closely related Carr masterworks over 100 years after they were painted.
The two works attest to the evolution in Carr’s style. The 1908 watercolour unveiled Wednesday is still heavily influenced by a certain British style of painting, while the 1912 work, painted after Carr travelled to Paris, boasts vibrant Fauvist colours and bold strokes that recall Paul Gaugin’s paintings of Tahiti.
Audain says he and his wife Yoshiko Karasawa “spent many years enjoying the vibrant oil on canvas before donating it to the museum nearly a decade ago”. When it sold at Heffel in May 2000, the oil-on-canvas version of War Canoes, Alert Bayfetched just over C$1m ($683,000, including fees), becoming the first work by a Canadian female painter to sell for a seven-figure sum at auction, according to the museum. The watercolour version of War Canoes, Alert Bay sold this past May for C$871,250 ($636,000, including fees), also at Heffel, demonstrating the growth in the market for Carr’s work.
Michael Audain (left) and representatives of Heffel Fine Art Auction House and the Audain Art Museum at Wednesday's unveiling of the museum's latest Emily Carr acquisition © Hadani Ditmars
“To now have both pictures housed together permanently,” Audain says, “contributes to the unparalleled quality of the museum's Emily Carr collection."
Curtis Collins, the Audain Art Museum’s director and chief curator, tells The Art Newspaper that the two works will be hung next to each other on the central wall of the museum’s Carr Gallery as of Thursday (17 October).
"When comparing the two paintings side-by-side, a dramatic shift in her artistic perspective is immediately evident," Collins says, adding that the pairing “provides an essential context for better understanding the development of modern art in Canada".
“You can see the same purples and greens in a few works Carr did of villages in Normandy and Brittany that she painted while she was in France,” Collins says of the oil-on-canvas work. “It’s interesting that she brings that high-key palette back to Canada. It’s another example of artists in the early 20th century grafting the European avant-garde onto North American scenes, at a time when North America was lagging behind in terms of current ideas about painting.”
Emily Carr, War Canoes, Alert Bay, 1912, oil on canvas, Audain Art Museum collection, gift of Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa Courtesy the Audain Art Museum, Whistler, British Columbia
Audain says that “if she had gone on living in Paris, she would have been considered one of the great post-Impressionists”. He added that Carr was not only an early champion of Indigenous culture but also a master at “capturing the mystery of deep forest”.
When he was a boy growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, Audain says Carr was disparaged as a “crazy woman who went around town pushing her pet monkey in a carriage. I remember my stepmother saying she didn’t know how to use her colours properly.” But after he returned from a trip to Europe, he saw her work in a whole new light and became a lifelong fan.
He noted that although Carr’s work was included in a 2002 National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition that travelled internationally and featured pieces by her, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe, “she has yet to have a solo exhibition in the US”. He says he has had conversations with representatives of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but no exhibition plans have come from those dialogues.
Still, Audain remains hopeful that Carr will have a significant stateside showcase soon. “With Eva Respini as head curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery[—which has an important Carr collection—]I’m confident that we’ll be able to get a Carr exhibition at a decent American art museum.”
Heffel has another closely-watched Carr work coming up for auction next month in Toronto. After a dealer discovered the 1912 canvas Masset, QCI at a barn sale in New York and bought it for $50, the painting is expected to fetch C$100,000 to C$200,000 ($74,000-$148,000).