Canadian War Museum Presents Work by Women War Artists

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Paraskeva Clark, “Maintenance Jobs in the Hangar,” 1945 (Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum)

Shanawdithit is often described as the last of Newfoundland’s Beothuk, an Indigenous nation eradicated by British colonizers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Just in her 20s, Shanawdithit died of tuberculosis in 1829, but not before creating drawings of the genocide.

Some of those simple drawings and maps are the opening act in a remarkable exhibition, Outside the Lines, featuring the work of women war artists throughout this country’s history.

The show is on now through Jan. 5, 2025 at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Different iterations of the exhibition will then tour across Canada for three years. 

One of Shanawdithit’s drawing, billed as Violent Encounter, depicts a meeting between a group of Beothuk warriors and British soldiers in central Newfoundland. The Beothuk are stick figures in red; the British in black. We learn that two British soldiers were killed, with at least one of their heads placed upon a stake. 

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Mary Riter Hamilton, “Gun Emplacements, Farbus Wood, Vimy Ridge,” 1919 (photo courtesy of Canadian War Museum)

Shanawdithit is one of the few artists in this exhibition who recorded warfare witnessed first hand. Even though women have always been victims of war, the patriarchy has long considered women artists too delicate to be given ringside seats to capture bloody battle. 

That was certainly still the case during the First World War. Mary Riter Hamilton, for example, was only allowed to paint battlefields after the armistice. She arrived at Vimy Ridge in France when warfare had stopped but rotting corpses were still poking out of the ground. Some of her scenes of wrecked landscapes, such as Gun Emplacements, Farbus Wood, Vimy Ridge, 1919, manage to portray the horrors of war without soldiers clashing. Hamilton’s paintings were largely pooh-poohed by the art establishment a century ago but her work has become increasingly popular among ordinary art lovers since.

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Molly Lamb Bobak, “Private Roy,” 1946 (Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum)

During the Second World War, Molly Lamb Bobak, a uniformed servicewoman, became Canada’s first official female war artist. Even before the beginning of the formal exhibition, which is presented in chronological order, we see Bobak’s Gas Drill, 1944. The nine women in gas masks, although outfitted in military gear, unwittingly seem to strike the poses of rehearsing ballet dancers. 

Adjacent to Bobak’s painting is Stack, 2004, by contemporary war artist Gertrude Kearns depicting four figures of indeterminate gender, each pointing an automatic rifle in a different direction to ward off fire from any quarter. Kearns’s soldiers also strike well-rehearsed, theatrical poses similar to those of Bobak’s soldiers.

Kearns, unlike most of the other participating artists, has faced mortal danger while doing her job. That was during the war in Afghanistan, when a vehicle in a military convoy was hit by a suicide bomber. Kearns was in that convoy but she was uninjured.

Some of Kearns’s paintings based on Canadian soldiers’ exploits in Rwanda and Somalia have not always placed our troops in favourable lights. Veterans groups have complained. But the museum continues to exhibit Kearns’s work. Four of her paintings are in this exhibition. One is The Dilemma of Kyle Brown: Paradox in the Beyond, 1995, depicting one of the Canadian soldiers involved in the torture death of a Somali citizen caught stealing from a Canadian base.

Outside the Lines shows how the role of women military artists has evolved from the earliest work shown, an 18th century drawing by Elizabeth Simcoe of a York military barracks, to the two world wars, the Afghanistan slog and finally to contemporary times, including an exhibition case titled antipersonnel of supposed landmines and other sneaky weapons encased in wool by Barb Hunt.

“Earlier, women painted what they were seeing,” said Stacey Barker, the exhibition's curator. “They’re not making a statement.”

Kearns, like many of her contemporaries, makes statements. And so did Daphne Odjig, one of the most celebrated Indigenous women artists of the 20th century. Odjig did not specialize in military themes but one of her most famous semi-abstract paintings, Genocide No. 1, 1971, shows a series of tortured expressions on Indigenous faces caught in a whirlwind of horror. 

Odjig, the Anishinaabe, and  Shanawdithit, the Beothuk, were painting the same topic: The genocide of Indigenous people by the colonizers. Shanawdithit’s drawing is a matter-of-fact portrayal of rival warriors. Odjig’s painting is filled with pain and horror as intense as one of the world’s most famous anti-war paintings, Guernica, the 1937 Picasso masterpiece of the bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica by German and Spanish fascists. Like Picasso, Odjig definitely made a statement. ■

Outside the Lines continues at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa until Jan. 5, 2025, followed by a three-year tour of different iterations of the exhibition across the country.

Related stories: Mary Riter Hamilton: new book tells the story of a suffragette battlefield artist scorned by the National Gallery of Canada

Mary Riter Hamiltion: This pioneering artist journeyed to Europe in 1919 to paint devastated battlefields and the graveyards of Canadian soldiers. Her life was never the same

Bruno Bobak and Molly Lamb Bobak: A new biography details the troubled marriage of two of Canada's war artists

Talk of the Town: Molly Lamb Bobak captures urban vistas and crowd scenes in loose but evocative work on view in Greater Vancouver

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