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Transcendental nature and Canadian national identity: Franklin Carmichaels representation of the Canadian landscape
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2019
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Abstract
Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945) was a founding member of the first major Canadian art movement, the Group of Seven. He believed in the uniqueness of the Canadian landscape, embracing natural and landscape elements throughout his work as a successful graphic designer and an artist working in a variety of fine art media. Carmichael’s abstracted and expressionistically colored impressions of the wilderness created an intimate viewing experience while maintaining a commitment to the unique character of the Canadian landscape. He and the Group of Seven traveled throughout the Canadian wilderness, painting en plein air and endeavoring to break from European tradition in order to embrace the rise of national sentiment begun by the creation of the Canadian Confederation in 1867 and fueled by World War I. Inspired by the philosophic and spiritual sentiments of the American Transcendentalists in the mid-nineteenth century, Carmichael artistically explored the distinctiveness of the Canadian wilderness as well as the spiritual and Transcendental experience of nature. In the context of this transnational philosophic framework, American Transcendental ideologies complemented the Group’s individual artistic philosophies and spiritualities. Carmichael’s own library included books on Transcendentalism, German Romanticism, Kantian philosophy, and the works of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. This thesis will demonstrate that Franklin Carmichael’s distinctive use of color and space, his portrayal of the relationship between humans and nature, and his subject--the Canadian wilderness evidences his and the Group of Seven’s transnational philosophic affinity for early nineteenth-century Transcendentalism as well as his enthusiastic commitment to artistically solidifying Canada’s national identity.
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1 online resource (vii, 75 pages) :
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Art