Theosophy At The Birth Of Canadian Art:

Lawren Harris Icebergs Davis Straight Detail

Theosophy and the Group of Seven.

Theosophists have always been extremely proud of the Group of Seven, that group of mystically numbered theosophical Canadian artists who gave Canadian art its first ray of inspiring light as a uniquely national art movement. Of course this is not strictly true there were distinctly Canadian artists before the Group of Seven.

Starting during the First World War Canadian Art began to come into its own with the emergence of a national identity that was won with the blood shed in Europe on behalf of the Empire. It can be argued that European Modern Art also found itself on the other side of the trenches. What stirred in Canadian art was an echo of that post war European Cultural Revolution.

Theosophy emerged onto the world stage before modern art and had already made a significant impact on the Anglosphere by the late 1880s with the publication in London of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s magnum opus the Secret Doctrine in 1888. By the turn of the Century European art was in the full throws of a revolution that reverberates still. Theosophy was revolutionary in the extreme and held artists in the highest esteem.

Canada’s first national art movement embraced a universally human and divine vision of the artists place in a grand cosmic order that included all peoples and all possibilities of spiritual and creative life.

Walrus Magazine has published an article by Brett Grainger which explores the themes and spiritual convictions of the Group of Seven. I admire the candour intellectual honesty and courage of this article.

The Secret

Speaking of Emily Carr’s relationship with the Group of Seven and Lawren Harris in particular, Grainger writes:

“What he couldn’t have fully appreciated was that the ambivalent, restless energy in Carr’s new work had something to do with her uneasy relationship with Theosophy. While attracted to its syncretism, she bridled at the elitism and smugness it seemed to breed. She especially hated how her new friends in Toronto were constantly belittling Christianity. Their long-winded parsings of theosophical dogma bored her stiff; it seemed all head and no heart, and she found herself missing the warmth of a personal Jesus.”

“Then, in January 1934, she attended a lecture by Raja Singh, a Christian Hindu, and felt her heart leap in her chest. “Oh, this is live, vital religion,” she wrote. She wanted to see life “dipped in love” through communion with a personal divinity. “God as love,” she wrote, “is joyous.” Though she feared the disapproval of Harris and the rest, she was relieved by her decision to “go back sixty years to where I started.” In language reminiscent of Emerson’s assault on the “corpse-cold” rationalism of New England theology a century before, Carr attacked Theosophy as “bloodless,” a “cold storage of beautiful thoughts,” and heaved Blavatsky’s work into the fire.”

Read all of it because its great theosophical reportage. Of course we will nit pick him on some details which he gets wrong, for instance Blavatsky’s Masters were not “dead Tibetans”, or at least they didn’t think they were.

The Secret: Brett Grainger:  Walrus Magazine: