My art research for my new novel, Forty Mermaids (Ottawa, Baico, 2026, info@baico.ca)

The fictional central character in my new novel, Forty Mermaids is a serious artist who participates in a real-life artists' group, the Montreal-based Contemporary Arts Society, which was a force for modernism between 1939 and 1948. Instrumental in starting this organization was John Lyman (1886-1967.

 Lyman, who grew up in Montreal, was connected to the prosperous Morgan family of department store fame in that city. At twenty, he went to Paris, where he met and made friends with the Canadian painter, James W. Morrice, and studied at the Matisse school. His 1913 exhibition in Montreal did not go over well with either critics or the public the time, experimental, unconventional art was mistrusted. The public and the art gate-keepers were used to representational, figurative art, which "held a mirror up to nature." 

 After receiving these bad reviews, Lyman and his wife, Corinne Saint-Pierre, spent the next eighteen years in Europe and California, until strained finances after the 1929 Crash brought them home to Montreal. There, along with Andre Beiler and a couple of other painters, he started L'Atelier, a school associated with McGill University extra-mural education. L'Atelier was modelled on Parisian art schools, which provided models, space and discussion with professional artists. 

 At the time, the once reviled Group of Seven's art was being hailed as the exemplification of Canadian culture. Their impressionistic art embraced the "true north strong and free"; the artists painted rugged landscapes and attracted many imitators. Lyman was not one of them. He felt that true art did not have to prioritize landscape; rather, he felt that true art lay in Canadians who created art derived from their "sensibility and imagination", not necessarily from scenery.

 Aficionados of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa may have seen several Lyman paintings, including "Woman with a White Collar," a stylized portrait which shows the subject's heart-shaped face and swan-like neck and makes vivid use of red.

 In the 1930s, John and Corinne Lyman held regular salons to which they invited people interested in the arts. They had a core group of about forty regulars, as well as drop-ins, and provided their guests with good food, wine and conversation about arts and culture. Some of those who attended were starving artists; others, like my fictional heroine, had independent resources; in her case, her husband's financial support. Still, her objective was to support herself through her art. 

 John Lyman also wrote an art column in the Montrealer that set a "new level of art criticism in Canada,' to quote Dennis Reid's Concise History of Canadian Painting, Oxford U. Press, Ed.2, 1988. During the 1930s he had several successful one-man exhibitions, and organized others for the artist members of the Contemporary Arts Society. (Non-painters who wanted to support the CAS were welcome to be members, as well as those for whom art was a vocation and profession.) Both French and English Canadians were members. Their experimental art began to catch on. 

 In Forty Mermaids, my objective was to show the various facets of my fictional protagonist's life and how she tried to achieve a balance between love, politics and art. I learned a great deal from reading Dennis Reid and highly recommend it for those, like me, who are interested in Canadian art. It was fun placing my heroine in the middle of the Montreal modernist movement.