in 1910 was bristling with painters, writers, and artists of all kinds who would one day be very well known, and Gibb knew most of them. He had sold Henri Matisse’s first painting and exhibited his own works with artists like Pierre Bonnard, Georges Seurat, and Edouard Manet. Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, and Matisse were among his close friends.
Emily and Alice lived in the Latin Quarter, one of the most exciting parts of Paris at this time, but, as if it had taken all their courage and adventurous spirit just to get there, they were strictly conservative in their socializing. They didn’t seek out the renegade galleries that were showing Matisse and Gauguin. They didn’t eat at nearby local cafes where the Russians, Leon Trotsky and Wassily Kandinsky, played chess or where Modigliani, Braque, and Picasso ate and argued. And they didn’t seek out the galleries where the paintings of artists like Matisse, Duchamp, and Léger were shocking the art world.
Instead, they socialized at the American Student Hostel Club and ate only at the cafés where other English and North Americans ate. Partly, no doubt, this was because of language; Emily said Alice could speak French but wouldn’t, and Emily couldn’t. Whatever their reasons, they stayed carefully sheltered behind a curtain of English.
Art school was another matter. At the Académie Colarossi, Emily, at thirty-eight the oldest in the class, didn’t speak a word of French, and no one there spoke English. She could only understand the critiques she was given through the hand and facial gestures of the teacher. Also, at this time the class was all men, and she missed other women. “There was not even a woman model,” she noted.
One day she heard a good Anglo-Saxon “Damn!” behind her and turned to see a student furiously rip the lining from his pocket to use for a paint rag. They made a deal: Emily would provide clean paint rags in return for translation services. In this way she found out the teacher thought she had a good colour sense and was doing very well.
But the English speaker didn’t attend class often enough, so she moved to the studio of a Scottish artist, John Fergusson, where English was not a problem. Fergusson had been greatly influenced by the Fauve school. These were the artists, like Matisse, who used distorted perspective and brilliant colour to convey emotion. A critic once called them “wild beasts” or “fauves” in French, and the name stuck.
Emily was moved by their violent colour, their surging rhythm and design, but, as if she suffered from an allergy to large cities, she again became ill. She spent weeks in hospital and a month in Sweden with Alice while she recovered. Back in France (after Alice returned home), she avoided Paris and studied with Gibb in the villages of Crécy-en-Brie and St. Efflame in Brittany in northern France.
Gibb was deeply impressed by Emily’s painting. His wife told Emily she had never seen him so interested in a student’s work, and Emily in turn was inspired by his teaching. Gibb didn’t merely copy the landscape he saw in front of him; he painted what his imagination saw, in the colours Emily found so exciting.
She recognized his “keen interest” in her work and valued his criticisms – but she was irritated that, like Olsson in England, Gibb never invited her to tea or showed her his own work or invited her to join his other students. Finally she asked, “Why do you never allow me to see your own work now, Mr. Gibb?”
“Don’t have to,” he replied. “Those others don’t know what they are after, you do. Your work must not be influenced by mine. You will be one of the painters, – women painters – of your day.”
It was high praise and Emily was delighted, though she noted his qualification. “He could never let me forget I was only a woman,” she mourned. But Gibb taught her well, and encouraged her to bring out her B.C. totem pole paintings and repaint them using some of his methods and colours. His only complaint was that she worked too hard.
A few weeks before she returned to Victoria, Emily left Gibb to study in another French seaside town, Concarneau, with her only woman teacher, an artist named Frances Hodgkins. The two women had a lot in Emily Carr_common: Hodgkins too, was escaping the conservative art community in her native New Zealand. She was single, about Emily’s age, loved animals and the French countryside, had painted the native Maoris of New Zealand, and supported herself with teaching and painting. The two women were also similar in temperament; both had a keen sense of humour and a caustic temper. Each had also turned down a suitor in order to pursue her commitment to being an artist.
With Gibb, Emily had painted strictly in oils. Now Hodgkins, a superb teacher and brilliant water-colourist, insisted Emily return to the watercolours she had been using in Canada. Under the direction of Frances Hodgkins, Emily did not revive her old muted palette but adopted her new teacher’s Fauve-bright colours. She also learned to use, as Hodgkins did, a strong, dark line to outline forms and to paint the large features of a scene without getting distracted by detail. For the first time, Emily moved clearly into the realm of “modern” art by painting how a scene affected her, rather than trying to transcribe a literal picture. It was an important breakthrough and something she had been striving for.
Before she left Paris in the fall of 1911, two of Emily’s paintings were hung in the Salon d’Automne, a prestigious salon for new, modern artists. This was the same exhibit that introduced the Cubists – Matisse, Jourdan, Léger, Rouault, and Valminck – to the art world. Emily’s two small paintings aroused little notice, but it was an important achievement for her, and a validation. She went home proud of her developing style and of how her art had grown and been acknowledged in France. More, her exposure to the radical artists and art ideas she met in France showed her that defiance could be an acceptable part of an artist’s career. This would make her stronger for what was to come.
Emily and some of her pets, in the garden at Hill House. She loathed being a landlady. Her “creatures,” especially her kennel of English bobtail sheepdogs, comforted her.
7
Buried in Dirt
Mind you, I could make any house do me but some places don’t belong to your type – squares in rounds and rounds in squares… There must be a place somewhere for me.
– Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands
When Emily returned from France she felt stronger “in body, in thinking, and in work” than she felt after England. She had learned invaluable lessons about colour, form, and how to say what she wanted with shape and colour. She knew the work she had done there was her best to date, but it was radically different from what was traditionally considered “good art” and when she showed it to her family and close friends, they turned away in embarrassed silence. As Emily recalled, “One [sister] was noisy in her condemnation, one sulkily silent, one indifferent to every kind of art.”
The following spring, in Vancouver, she put on a show of her French paintings. Her bold colours were unlike anything people had seen before. They were shocked. Most people thought the new work was a joke. “This is small children’s work!” they said. “Where is your own?” Emily never took criticism lightly and now, although the newspapers gave haltingly positive reviews, she remembered only the negative responses.
To Emily, the new work was brighter, cleaner, simpler, more intense. It had all the “bigger, freer seeing” she had been striving for. But the public thought it outlandish. Her paintings were insulted and jeered at. Her friends, when they came to visit, didn’t mention painting and averted their eyes from her walls.
Emily had a habit of hovering at her own exhibits in hopes of overhearing people’s spontaneous comments. When her pictures were hung at an exhibition of The Fine Arts Society, she heard people laugh at her work. She said, “It could not