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Elizabeth Wyn Wood, citation de son article 'Art and the Pre-Cambrian Shield' dans la revue "The Canadian Forum", vol. XVI, no. 193 (février 1937) - page 17 du PDF + note 38.
"In his essay 'Art and Society,' in Yearbook of the Arts in Canada (1936), Brooker again decried the 'demand for meaning or moral in a work of art' as well as 'propagandists art in the service of a cause.' He reaffirmed his belief that art's concern was solely with perfection and 'the holiness of beauty.'
Reviewing the Yearbook in The Canadian Forum, Frank Underhill, the Forum's editor, criticized this attitude, commenting, 'European artists have been compelled to rethink the whole question of the relation of the artist to society, and the finer spirits among them are deciding one after another that in our troubled generation the artist must be red or dead.'
This review raised a blistering attack from the sculptor and Group associate Elizabeth Wyn Wood, who characterized Underbill's attitude as a 'mild epidemic of the Early Christian Martyr – Communist – Oxford Group fever which demands the consecration of all talent to the services of a readily recognizable cause... What should we do instead? Paint castles in Spain – crumbling? Paint the Russian proletariat standing on the fallen Cossack, a modern Saint George and the Dragon?... Such things are not authentic stimuli to the Canadian Artist... Let us [instead] camp for a while on our northern pre-Cambrian shield... [so that] we may offer [the refugees from a smouldering civilization] the spiritual sustenance of an art which grows on the bare rock and bare chests.'
To this, Paraskeva Clark cried, 'Come out from behind the Pre-Cambrian Shield,' denouncing Elizabeth Wyn Wood's 'exaltation of the individual [which blinds] an artist to the forces which approach to destroy that relative security in which he is permitted to exercise his individuality.' She affirmed that 'those who give their lives, their knowledge and their time to social struggle have the right to expect great help from the artist,' and finished with an impassioned plea that artists leave the unreality of the barren rocks and identify with the struggle of their fellow men."
"In his essay 'Art and Society,' in Yearbook of the Arts in Canada (1936), Brooker again decried the 'demand for meaning or moral in a work of art' as well as 'propagandists art in the service of a cause.' He reaffirmed his belief that art's concern was solely with perfection and 'the holiness of beauty.'
Reviewing the Yearbook in The Canadian Forum, Frank Underhill, the Forum's editor, criticized this attitude, commenting, 'European artists have been compelled to rethink the whole question of the relation of the artist to society, and the finer spirits among them are deciding one after another that in our troubled generation the artist must be red or dead.'
This review raised a blistering attack from the sculptor and Group associate Elizabeth Wyn Wood, who characterized Underbill's attitude as a 'mild epidemic of the Early Christian Martyr – Communist – Oxford Group fever which demands the consecration of all talent to the services of a readily recognizable cause... What should we do instead? Paint castles in Spain – crumbling? Paint the Russian proletariat standing on the fallen Cossack, a modern Saint George and the Dragon?... Such things are not authentic stimuli to the Canadian Artist... Let us [instead] camp for a while on our northern pre-Cambrian shield... [so that] we may offer [the refugees from a smouldering civilization] the spiritual sustenance of an art which grows on the bare rock and bare chests.'
To this, Paraskeva Clark cried, 'Come out from behind the Pre-Cambrian Shield,' denouncing Elizabeth Wyn Wood's 'exaltation of the individual [which blinds] an artist to the forces which approach to destroy that relative security in which he is permitted to exercise his individuality.' She affirmed that 'those who give their lives, their knowledge and their time to social struggle have the right to expect great help from the artist,' and finished with an impassioned plea that artists leave the unreality of the barren rocks and identify with the struggle of their fellow men."
