David Milne’s Homecoming

×

Expand

David Milne, “Reflected Forms,” 1917

watercolour on paper (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Women’s Committee Cultural Fund; photo by Stephen Topfer, AGGV)

David Milne was billed as “Canada’s best kept secret” when an exhibition of about 90 of his works were displayed earlier this year at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.

Most, but not all, British critics were delighted to get in on the secret. And now the same exhibition, David Milne: Modern Painting, is at the Vancouver Art Gallery for a summer-long run that ends Sept. 9.

Of course, in Canada, Milne’s genius is no secret even though it’s been about 30 years since his last major exhibition.

Born in 1882, Milne’s contemporaries included the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. But he wasn’t part of any clique. Instead, he usually worked in isolation, producing a unique body of work that includes some of Canada’s finest early Modernist paintings.

×

Expand

David Milne, “Painting Place III,” 1930

oil on canvas (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Vincent Massey Bequest, 1968; photo courtesy of NGC)

The show was co-curated by Ian Dejardin, formerly the director of the Dulwich and now director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., and Sarah Milroy, recently appointed chief curator at the McMichael, where the exhibition heads next, opening Oct. 5.

Milne was not born into a family of means and worked as a school teacher in rural Ontario before moving to New York City in 1903, where he studied and worked as a commercial artist. He was there when paintings by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were first exhibited in North America. As well, Milne knew Alfred Stieglitz, the influential American photographer and modern art promoter, and often visited his gallery.

×

Expand

David Milne, “Billboards,” circa 1912

oil on canvas (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; gift of Douglas M. Duncan, Toronto, 1962; photo courtesy NGC)

Milne’s early New York paintings look more Impressionistic than Modernist. But from the start, his work and writings reveal he was obsessed with creating his own style and more interested in pattern, form and processes of perception than the actual objects he painted.

Most of his canvases use plenty of white paint. Ian Thom, the gallery’s recently retired senior curator, says the patches of white in Milne’s New York paintings are meant to catch and focus the eye – something Milne called “the dazzle spot.”

×

Expand

David Milne, “White Trees in a Green Valley,” circa 1916

oil on canvas (Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, acquired with the assistance of the Women’s Committee and the Winnipeg Foundation, G-62-10; photo by Leif Norman)

Milne participated in New York’s first Armory Show in 1913, an event still considered a premier showcase today. But just as he was starting to attract attention, he moved in 1917 to the upstate hamlet of Boston Corners.

“Milne was willing to do anything, endure any hardship, to protect the sanctity of his own thoughts,” says Thom.

Milne joined the military and left for the First World War in 1918, arriving too late to see action. But he was a war artist for several months after armistice, documenting wrecked military hardware and scarred landscapes. One gallery is devoted to these paintings, which illustrate Milne’s mastery of the dry brush watercolour techniques that allowed him to work on the fly at several locations each day.

An adjacent gallery contains what Milroy calls Milne’s “pale paintings,” work he did when he returned to Boston Corners in 1919. He had soon built a small cabin on nearby Alander Mountain so he could paint in solitude.

Of note from this time are several renderings of a stump in the snow that Milne described as “a king wearing an ermine robe.” He painted it so often it has been compared to Monet’s haystacks. Later, Milne did many paintings of lilies, although his were wild lilies from in the forest, not ones grown in a garden like Monet’s.

During this period, Milne completed what he called one of his crowning achievements, White The Waterfall (The White Waterfall). The lines and colours are spare, reduced to the basic elements of a landscape, but the effect is mesmerizing.

×

Expand

David Milne, “Red Pool, Temagami,” 1929

oil on canvas (private collection, Toronto; photo by Michael Cullen)

In 1929, Milne returned to Canada. He worked in remote cabins in Northern Ontario, and, in one case, a canvas tent in Temagami, a small mining town. His paintings of abandoned mining sites veer to abstraction.

Milne worked with great fervour in the late 1930s. The show’s final three paintings are small but mighty, says Thom. Summer Colours, Blue Lake and Sunset Beyond the Islands “explode out of their little frames.”

Milne continued working until his death in 1953 after a series of strokes. ■

David Milne: Modern Painting is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from June 16 to Sept. 9, 2018.