The Art World of my novel-in-progress, "Forty Mermaids."

  My new novel, Forty Mermaids, to be published in 2026, is about a fictional Montreal artist’s development as a painter during the first half of the 20th century. My central character, Merle, faces obstacles to her work. Like many “women artists,” she struggles to carve out time from homemaking to pursue her painting. Her work is misinterpreted by art critics. Friends advise her to concentrate on domestic life. Like many innovators, she runs into conventional notions about what art is. As well, the Great Depression of the 1930s was not a good time for those in the arts. 

       While the administration of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt  provided opportunities and funding for American artists through the Works Progress Administration, Canada had no such program. During World War II, however, the Canadian  government funded artists to work on pictures about the  war effort.

        I have always liked art, and one of my favourite places in Ottawa is the National Gallery. Years ago, at university, an advisor suggested  that, after I got my Masters in History, I should go into art history - ludicrous advice, considering my financial situation at the time. In recent years, however, when my husband began to paint, I watched art history videos with him and got interested in the styles, categories and trends in art over time.  In preparing to write about my central character, Merle, and her journey in art, I have done some research into Canadian art in the 20th century.

    When Merle was a girl, in the early years of the past century, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven painters were considered radical innovators. They were impressionists, and like the French Impressionists who came before them, they were considered shocking at first and later became institutions.  In 1916, for instance, when J.E.H. MacDonald painted “The Tangled Garden”, a critic said he had “thrown his paint pots in the face of the Canadian public.” The Group of Seven was known at first as “the Algonquin School” because many of their paintings were inspired by scenes in Algonquiin Park, north of Toronto.

    The Group of Seven artists held that “an Art must grow and flower in the land before the country will be a real home for its people.” To them, the Canadian landscape had a spiritual dimension and also a nationalist one.  By the late 1920s, they had “defined” Canadian art in their work, they had become a national treasure, and many painters were creating landscapes in their style.  The Toronto-based Canadian Group of Painters, prominent in the 1930s, included Group of Seven members.

    My central character, Merle, is aware of these developments in art, but, as a Montreal-based busy mother in the 1930s, she wasn’t a part of the Canadian Group of Painters. I have made her a part of John Lyman’s artistic circle in Montreal during the 1930s, which grew into the Contemporary Arts Society of the 1940s. John Lyman (1886-1967) and his wife, Corrine, who were real people, not fictional constructs, had a weekly salon which attracted painters and others in the arts, and included such well-known artists as Goodridge Roberts, Fritz Brandtner, Philip Surrey, Jori Smith, Marian Dale Scott and Andre Bieler.

        Lyman  grew up in Montreal in a well-to-do family who sent him to study art in Paris in 1907.  There he met the Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice, who became his mentor. When Lyman returned to Montreal in 1931 after his years abroad, he wrote: “Even before the flattest Quebec landscape, I feel that I have more to say than before the magnificent sites of Europe.”  He wrote an art column in The Montrealer.

        Nevertheless, he was unenthusiastic about the national reverence for Group of Seven style impressionist landscapes, as if they were  the only “real” Canadian artists. Influenced by Matisse in Paris, Lyman thought of art as the use of colour and form to create a sensation in the viewer. Everything extraneous to the sensation should be omitted or downplayed. Colour was to be chosen for aesthetic reasons, not to imitate nature/ reality.  Portraits and nudes that fused colour and form in an innovative way, and landscapes pared down to their essentials were as  “Canadian” as wilderness landscapes.

        Lyman’s painting, “Woman with a White Collar,” 1936, which hangs in the National Gallery of Canada, is a good example of his philosophy. It’s a colourful portrait of a woman whose white collar stands out against her red gown, which matches her lips. Her swan-like neck and face are painted simply, with no frills or fanciness, against a beige background. She looks like a university graduate in a robe, or like a choir member.

        Lyman's pictures, whether landscapes or portraits, stress simplicity, shapes and colour, but are not abstract; that is, one can tell what is being depicted. They have not departed from nature entirely.  During this phase of her artistic development, my character Merle was painting similarly.  In my novel, she joins the Contemporary Arts Society in Montreal, which Lyman founded in 1941, and participates in its modernist exhibitions.

        Meanwhile, in the art world, cubists, surrealists and abstract impressionists were pursuing their visions.  Lyman wasn’t fond of these movements, but took the view that individual expression, taken to extremes, produces meaningless art, which anyone can interpret to suit themselves. He was critical of Alfred Pellan and Paul-Emile Borduas, two experimental French Canadian artists.

        Unlike many of the Contemporary Arts Society members, Borduas did not have a well-off family to pay for his art education. Instead, at age sixteen, he was apprenticed to Ozias Leduc, a church decorator, and took evening classes in art until the parish priest of Notre Dame in Montreal, got him funding to study in Paris. On his return in the late 1930s he continued to work with Leduc, then  taught art with the Montreal Catholic School Board and two other institutions. At L’Ecole du Meuble he attracted a number of disciples who agreed with him that the source of creation is the subconscious, and modernism about emotional, non-rational impulses. One critic said he painted in splashes and dashes, but Borduas saw that as a strength, not a weakness. 

        He joined the Contemporary Arts Society and by 1945 he was vice-president of the Contemporary Arts Society.  Some of its more representational (figurative) members felt that individual expression, taken to extremes, produced abstract art that was meaningless, because anyone could interpret it to suit himself. John Lyman and his closest friends in the CAS were frightened by Pellan’s cubist tendencies and Borduas’s embrace of surrealism.  Lyman allegedly said,“If Pellan and Borduas are right in the direction they’ve taken, then my life has been wasted."

        In 1948, the young francophone experimental members of the CAS wanted to elect Borduas president, replacing Lyman, The organization split, then Lyman dissolved it.  In A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 2nd ed., the author, Dennis Reid, said that “the CAS had reached the extent of its flexibility.  Borduas and his disciples, like Jean-Paul Riopelle, pursued abstract expressionism, and in 1948 published an aesthetic manifesto called Refus global, which called for personal liberation in the face of social customs, isolation, and Church domination. Historians see Refus global as marking the beginning of modern francophone culture in Canada.

In my novel, Merle and Paul-Emile become art friends as peer professionals in the CAS, and she feels badly about his financial struggles and premature death.  Merle is not content to paint the same kind of picture over and over as a trademark, but to grow in her art, and as her career continued, got into abstract impressionism. Reading about the Contemporary Arts Society in Montreal opened up a fascinating new area of knowledge to me and one which I may pursue in some way or other.