A Grand Eye for Glory: A Life of Franz Johnston

Canada.

INTRODUCTION

The first exhibition of the painters who called themselves the Group of Seven opened on May 7, 1920, at the Art Museum of Toronto in The Grange, the beautiful old building behind the present Art Gallery of Ontario, which served as Ontario’s first official art gallery.

If the paintings the public went to see in that exhibition were not exactly novel — some of the members of the group had already exhibited similar, and in some cases the same, works in a smaller exhibition at the same gallery the previous year — they were, nevertheless, an exciting and significant illustration of the fact that a new movement was developing in Canadian art which, in shaking off the inherited and increasingly inappropriate hand of two centuries of European influence, took greater account of the unique nature of the Canadian landscape than painting in Canada had ever done before.

The painters were ridiculed by traditionalists such as H. F. Gadsby, the conservative art critic of the Toronto Daily Star who, in a contemptuous 1913 art review, had called the painters of the northlands the Hot Mush school in derisive reference to their use of thick pigments and strong colours. Yet when the group exhibited in May 1920, they found many supporters among the Toronto public and in the Toronto press, while both sides seemed to agree that the exhibition had thrown down a gauntlet regarding the direction Canadian art would take, a gauntlet whose challenge could not be ignored.

The show was an unqualified success, both critically and financially. Dozens of paintings were sold and hundreds of people were introduced to visions of the beauty and majesty of a country, their country, that they had never seen or considered, and they were delighted.

Despite some reservations on the part of some of the older critics, whose education in art had been tied for a lifetime to received European standards and practices, the majority of art critics reviewed the exhibition favourably, giving the lie to a mythology cultivated in later years by the group’s members, who liked to portray the group’s beginnings as a heroic and rebellious struggle against the united attack of unappreciative critics. Although never as beleaguered as they liked to claim, it was nevertheless unquestionably true that this new group of painters was making art differently, and that a new school of Canadian painting was born at that exhibition, whose influence on the whole of culture in Canada continues to supply us with some of our most powerful and important iconography.

Of the seven artists who exhibited more than seventy paintings at that first exhibition, one, Frank Johnston (as he was called in 1920 — he changed his name to Franz six years later for quite exotic reasons) exhibited more works than any of the others, yet when the history of the group is pursued in biographies, commentaries, and books of art criticism, he is the one who is either ignored, or at best dealt with peremptorily, while his name appears as a minor footnote to the larger history of art in Canada.

A. Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris barely mention Johnston in their autobiographies, while Peter Mellen and Dennis Reid, in their own very excellent surveys of the group, consign him and his contribution to the sidelines, so that in any collection of the most authoritative books about the Group of Seven and their work it would be difficult to make up ten pages in total that concern Johnston and his art.

And yet Toronto journalist Donald Jones, in an article in the Toronto Star in September 1983, quotes the art critic Pearl McCarthy as considering that Canada has probably produced no virtuoso in any technical line from finance to poetry to surpass Franz Johnston.

Prefiguring McCarthy, for thirty years between the middle of the 1920s and the late 1940s the best critics writing for the major Canadian newspapers scarcely had a bad word to say about his paintings, whose best examples are perennially popular exhibits at the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Winnipeg, the McMichael Canadian Collection in Kleinburg, the London (Ontario) Public Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and are valued works in dozens of private collections. Indeed, at an auction in the fall of 1997, paintings by Johnston reached six or seven thousand dollars, and one sold for nearly twenty-three thousand dollars.

With this in mind, it is interesting to consider how such an artist could become so marginalized from a community in which he was once a central figure. After all, Johnston was a fundamental influence on the development of Canadian art and culture from as early as 1906, when he was one of a close-knit group of artists working together at the famous commercial art firm of Grip Ltd. He shared with these artists their early painting trips to the wilderness, discussed and shared their experimentation, and reveled in the excitement of their new art. Johnston was elected to full membership of the Ontario Society of Artists at the young age of thirty-two, and the Royal Canadian Academy ten years later (although he characteristically resigned from both on matters of principle.) That he was, furthermore, by virtue of constant and strong sales over more than twenty-five years, widely considered to be the most financially successful artist of his generation — A Toronto Telegram reviewer in 1934 guessed that Johnston was probably the most sold of any Canadian painter — contributes to the enigma of the energetic, busy, successful Johnston reduced to little more than a mere shadow lurking in the background of the famous Group of Seven, and more generally, of Canadian art history.

By every account, Johnston was a charming, good-natured, genial character who was known and loved for his little beard and twinkling eyes and ready laughter, as a Toronto Telegram writer noted in June 1934. He was, the writer continued, a man who loves life and living more than paint and painting, which was probably only impressionistically correct, although the statement does convey the energy and life-force of the man who loved to explore Ontario’s wildest and most inaccessible places, who wrote poetry and fairy stories for his children, and loved going to the movies and taking part in amateur theatricals. With his Vandyke beard and black beret — which he said he had to wear because the public expected it of an artist — Johnston played the artist to the gallery, and the gallery returned him its affection, installing him as its favourite son. Vivacious, dedicated, and hard-working, Johnston loved painting, singing, games, handicrafts, playing practical jokes on his family and friends, and almost anything intelligent and absorbing.

In his 1979 book, Memoirs of an Art Dealer, Blair Laing, the prominent Toronto art dealer, described the Johnston he knew as an aggressive and jovial salesman, and happiest in the role of selling his own pictures. A bit of a rake and a great ladies’ man, he would appear resplendent in an artist’s tam, a bow tie with long side ribbons, and a well-trimmed imperial beard. By the mid-1940s, Johnston was selling his pictures for more money by far than any other living Canadian.

Johnston was successful because he worked hard at being successful.

Despite all his ostentatiousness, Laing writes, Johnston was one of the hardest working and most enthusiastic painters I have even known. If one had a customer for a certain type of painting he might stay up and work all night, if necessary, to have it ready for the next day, and a sale.

In a career which was to make him one of the most sought-after artists in Canada for upwards of twenty years, Johnston also made an important contribution to art education in Canada. Before he had reached his fortieth birthday, he was invited to take over and rebuild the Winnipeg School of Art, where he was a gifted and admired teacher and an extremely effective principal, and to direct the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He performed both tasks admirably for four years before he returned to teach at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto.

During his time in Winnipeg, his contribution to the developing culture of the city went beyond his formal duties as an educator and gallery director. He believed that art could, and should, touch everyone’s life and, the better to promote his views, he wrote a popular weekly column about every aspect of art in a clear, direct, and unpatronizing style in a mass-circulation city newspaper. He subsequently taught at his own private art school which he and his son, the artist Paul Rodrik, built entirely by themselves on land Johnston had acquired on the shores of Georgian Bay, close to the area where his wife’s family had lived for generations, and during all these varied endeavours he exhibited constantly, in good galleries and in international exhibitions, to almost universal acclaim.

Jolly, sociable, and outgoing, Johnston was nevertheless thoughtful and generous to his family, students, and friends, although his son Paul Rodrik has also written about his father’s doppelganger, the