On Bertram Brooker.

Glamour of the Underfolk.

"There is so much heat in my heart, that Humanity cannot escape being scorched, no man shall escape the heat of my heart. [...] I am the overflowing scourge whom God has sent down to chasten the earth. [...] I am the champion of the Underfolk." (Brooker, 155-156)

Unlike the majority of Canadian artists working in the first half of the twentieth century, Bertram Brooker wrote voluminously about his own work and that of his contemporaries, expounding and elaborating his aesthetic theories in different milieus. His attempt to articulate a peculiarly Canadian form of Modernism that could respond to the demands of his adopted nation frequently involved a mildly antagonistic engagement with the specifically English strains of Modernism, embodied, at least in his mind, by Wyndham Lewis, who he refers to as a pessimistic and reactionary humanist (Brooker, 215). And while the influence of Vorticism is clearly present in much of his work, and the critique of the Time Cult is also echoed, Brooker's answer to the issues which Lewis raised were very much his own.

Of Alex Colville.

Bodies in a grave, Belsen (1946)

A retired war artist who had documented the acceleration of technology and the destruction of flesh, both around battlefields and in Auschwitz, Alex Colville abandoned the figure for years after the Second World War. He finally re-introduced it with a series of nude, Grace type figures, dotting the shore to which he had returned. As his career progressed, Colville drew far closer to the technological theodicy promulgated by Marshall McLuhan, carrying on the vitalist fantasies of Bertram Brooker. Like the latter, and for much the same reasons, he regarded his work as a very special kind of primitivism, claiming that his own work has the "characteristics of an essentially unsophisticated, that is to say, primitive art" (quoted in Burnett 18) one which was intrinsically bound to a spiritual understanding of a new and technologically advanced world. But where Brooker's figures exuded a vital quality that radiated through space and frequently fragmented it, Colville's are only devices for measurement that flatten the figure as an 'arrested happening' (Dow 127) intended to testify to the eternity of Being: The hallucinatory re-codification of space and time with the irreality of a neo-Thomist theodicy. And yet, in spite of Colville's (and many of his commentators') insistence on the unity, harmony and measure of his work, built right into this hallucination of eternal order is its immanent collapse. And it is this, as much as the tension which he manages in the ambiguous, decontextualized moments he creates, that causes a further problem, one less moral than logico-mathematical.