In life, the Group of Seven was together for thirteen years. In death they're...together forever
I find cemeteries fascinating because they reveal so much about their inhabitants. Weeping marble angels and intertwining Celtic circles reflect differing religious beliefs, identical white crosses mark soldiers' or veterans' graves, mausoleums memorialize wealth and pretentiousness. An inscription on a headstone will likely give length of life and sometimes cause of death: a drowning or an epidemic. There might be a fragment of poetry, or, more recently, an engraved photo of the deceased.
Gravestones most often tell stories about families buried together in a common plot, but on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, a tiny cemetery contains only the remains of six Canadian artists, all members of the Group of Seven, and their wives (or most of their wives.) In late 2003, they were joined by gallery founder Robert McMichael; eventually his wife Signe will be buried there, too.
The cemetery is tucked away at the end of a path through a dense stand of spruce and pine behind the entrance to the gallery's parking lot. It's easy to miss, and although I visit the McMichael Collection regularly, I had no idea it existed until autumn 2002 when my companion, an art historian, cried out: "Wait, there it is! We've got to see this." The day was chilly, and the sign marking the entrance to the Group of Seven Memorial Grounds gave me the creeps: "Sponsored by Dignity Memorial™, proud to be a part of Service Corporation International."
Who are these people? How do you "sponsor" dead artists? Did Dignity Memorial™ own or rent the site? The sign acknowledged the participation of the provincial cemeteries branch, and a nearby sign identified the cemetery as "Historic Site Historique," but it all smacked of commercialism, as if displaying the artists' work, the core of the renowned McMichael collection, was not a sufficient customer draw.
There was no gate, and not another soul in sight. We ventured down the path past a Heritage Canada cairn commemorating A.Y. Jackson, one of the six artists buried here, and came to a grassy clearing in the woods. The gravestones, raw, unpolished chunks of marbled granite, were arranged in a rough semicircle, forming a partial fairy ring, a miniature Stonehenge. Each stone was flanked by dwarf cedars and flowering shrubs; a little white sign gave biographical details. An artist's name was etched on each rock--A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, EH. Varley, Arthur Lismer, Frank Hans Johnston, and A.J. Casson. Except for Bess Harris, the etched names of the interred wives--Esther Lismer, Florence Johnston, and Margaret Petry Casson--were smaller than their husbands'. Set in a silent woodland glade, these rocks were powerful reminders of the mountains and wild northern landscapes the Group of Seven had painted with daring and passion, but as I walked around the circle, I noticed that two important names were missing: J.E.H. MacDonald and Franklin Carmichael. Both were founders of the Group in 1920. Casson had joined later to replace Johnston, an early dropout, and two more painters, Edwin Holgate and Lemoine FitzGerald, buried elsewhere, had joined in the last years before the Group disbanded in 1932.
Fred Varley, curiously, lies alone. A casual visitor would come away with the impression that Varley, like A.Y. Jackson, had been a bachelor, yet during his long life Varley had a wife, Maud, whom he deserted, four children, and many famous liaisons with women whose glowing, sensual portraits he painted. Where lies Vera Weatherbie, Varley's green goddess, or Kathy McKay, his patron, companion, and muse in his last years? Or Maud?
The cemetery haunted me as an ultimate act of cultural appropriation, reminiscent of anthropologists who made off with aboriginal bones to display in their museums, but when I spoke with Robert McMichael in May 2003, he explained that the inspiration had come from A.Y. Jackson. In March 1968, Jackson, eighty-five and in failing health, wrote to McMichael with a request: "Some time when you are not busy you might enquire about a lot in some quiet little cemetery near to Kleinburg. I was going to acquire one in Hemmingford, Que. where some old friends are buried but I don't like the direction Quebec is taking." The separatist movement was becoming militant, and while Jackson loved to paint the Quebec countryside, he'd made many sketching trips to the McMichaels' property overlooking the magnificent Humber River gorge.
The McMichaels had built their log home in 1954, and they regularly enlarged it to display their growing collection of works by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven (Thomson, a friend and colleague of the Seven, drowned in Algonquin Park in 1917 and is buried near his family's home at Leith, Ontario.) In 1965, the McMichaels donated their home, grounds, and collection to the province of Ontario as a public gallery, but they continued to live "over the store," as Robert put it, and to act as collectors, directors, guides, and curators. They had arranged to be buried on the grounds, and since they regarded Alex Jackson as almost family, why not include him? Jackson agreed, and enthusiastically promoted the idea of a common resting place to the surviving members of the Group. Jackson lived with the McMichaels from 1968 until his death in 1974.
There are precedents for the Group of Seven cemetery: British artists, along with other national heroes, are buried in Westminster Abbey, Soviet leaders in the Kremlin wall next to Lenin's tomb, and French artists in the Pantheon in Paris. These cemeteries are intended to honour the dead with a certain immortality, but a heated debate is raging in France over plans to move the 130-year-old remains of novelist George Sand to the Pantheon from her family's village plot.
The McMichaels chose the cemetery site, at that time a treeless knoll, and had it surveyed and consecrated by the provincial cemeteries branch. On April 15, 1969, Arthur Lismer, eighty-three, became the first painter to be buried there. Lismer, a gifted cartoonist, had earlier sketched seven graves by a lone tree with the wry caption "Here lies the Group of Seven: A Dynamic Cemetery."
Lismer was joined by Fred Varley in September. Varley, eighty-eight, had been living with Kathy McKay in Unionville, a town northeast of Toronto, since her husband's death. The McKays had given the impoverished, temperamental artist a home for fifteen years, and Varley's youngest son, Peter, lived in a farmhouse close by. "Kathy told me that Bob McMichael was the first on the phone when my grandfather died," says Peter's son, Christopher. "Kathy had a lot of doubts, as did my father. I have heard it said that Kathy divided the ashes in half, gave half to McMichael, and scattered the other half over her own family's burial plot in Gormley, Ontario. The question is, which half did she keep, the top or the bottom?"
The Cassons were delighted at the prospect of joining the others at McMichael, but burial was a sensitive issue with Lawren and Bess Harris. They had lived in Vancouver since 1941, exiled from Toronto society since Lawren had divorced his first wife, Trixie, and Bess her first husband, Fred Housser, in 1934. The Harrises were theosophists, believers in the spiritual harmony of the universe, and by 1969, Lawren, ill with heart disease, was preoccupied with the spiritual realm. Bess was protective, and when scholar Dennis Reid raised the topic of Lawren's burial in the McMichael cemetery, Bess blurted, "Over my dead body!"
Within weeks, Bess was dead. Lawren died four months later. On a cold, cloudy day in March, 1970, two pine boxes containing their ashes were lowered into the ground at the McMichael cemetery amidst a crowd of family, friends, and artists.
Whatever their private misgivings, members of the Harris and Varley families, and Kathy McKay, attended the highly publicized graveside services, and Johnston's son and widow were so pleased to have his remains reburied at the gallery twenty-six years after his death in 1949, they invited the public to his October 1975 memorial service.
Yet exhumation poses moral, religious, and emotional problems for the living. J.E.H. MacDonald, who died in 1932, remains in Toronto's Prospect Cemetery, and Carmichael, buried in the family plot in St. James's Cemetery in Orillia, Ontario, in 1945, will not be moved. "Bob McMichael had been somewhat adamant that I should re-inter my parents," says Carmichael's daughter, Mary Mastin, "but I can't bring myself to disturb their remains. My mother chose the site, and they are buried in the same grave under a pine tree. I want to respect my mother's wishes, and the Orillia connection is stronger by far."
The McMichael cemetery is owned by the people of Ontario, but critics find collecting the bodies or ashes morbid and distasteful: the Group of Seven, a loose coalition at best, had gone their separate ways more than twenty years before the McMichaels fell in love with their paintings. Yet for Robert and Signe, the living artists and their families were friends. They enjoyed their company for many years, and in addition to buying hundreds of sketches and canvases, they offered praise, reverence, warm hospitality, and publicity at a time when the Group's reputation was being eclipsed by abstract expressionism, pop, and op. Today, the gallery advertises itself as "the spiritual home of the Group of Seven."
Robert said that the Varley family and Kathy McKay "wholeheartedly" agreed to Fred's gravesite, and that the Johnstons "sought us out." Relations between Bess Harris and the McMichaels were so cordial before her sudden death that she bequeathed more than $50,000 to the gallery to buy one of Lawren's major canvases, Mount Lefroy.
For years the cemetery was austere and unadorned, and Robert loathed the gallery's decision to "glamourize" it by adding the "cookie-cutter" shrubs and the signs, as if the artists were on exhibit. McMichael, long retired from day-to-day participation in the gallery, was trustee for life, yet the work was done without his and Signe's knowledge or consent. Dignity Memorial™ is a funeral company that had nothing to do with the burials or creation of the cemetery. "The sign doesn't belong there!" Robert said. "I objected very forcefully, violently. The signs will be removed."
The signs, I later discovered, had been removed the day before our interview; only the plain, white "Historic Site Historique" remained. The McMichaels had not yet been told. The gallery explained that the funeral company had made a donation to cover the costs of the signs and upkeep, but the contract had expired.
"I am very, very pleased," said Robert McMichael. As for the offending shrubs, "I'd like to get those out too."
When I next visited the cemetery in early October 2003 the shrubs were gone. Robert McMichael was buried there on November 24.
ET CETERA
One Man's Obsession by Robert McMichael. Prentice-Hall Canada, Toronto, 1986.
A Study in Dynamic Cemetery (above) by Arthur Lismer, 1932. In 1969, Arthur Lismer was the first of the Group of Seven buried at Kleinburg. His lampooning in this cartoon of the formal disbanding of the Group in the early 1930s proved oddly prescient.
The cemetery (right) at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Currently buried there are six members of the Group of Seven and gallery founder Robert McMichael. Inset: gravemarker for A.J. Casson (1898-1992), buried with his wife, Margaret Petry.
Robert McMichael (right) with his wife Signe at the unveiling of First Snow, Algoma by A.Y. Jackson (second from left) at the official opening of the McMichael Conservation Collection, July 8, 1966. The McMichaels cofounded what would later become the McMichael Canadian Art Collection when they purchased Montreal River, an oil painting by Group of Seven member Lawren Harris, in 1955. In subsequent years, the McMichaels acquired numerous other works of the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, building a collection of twentieth-century Canadian painting considered by experts to rank in importance third to that of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
~~~~~~~~
By Heather Roberston
Heather Robertson writes from King City, Ontario.
Source: Beaver, Apr/May2004, Vol. 84 Issue 2, p28, 4p