The artist Duane Linklater says that in Cree the phrase for \u201cHow old are you?\u201d would be directly translated as \u201cHow many winters are you?\u201d He likes the idea that each of us is half winter. <\/p>\n
That is his explanation for a 2022 series of oversized cotton and linen hide-shaped hangings stained and marked with geometric patterns. They are a reference to the winter count, a method of pictographic record-keeping among the Plains nations: Annually a single important event was depicted on a hide, with a year beginning at the first snowfall and continuing to the first snowfall of the next one. <\/p>\n
Linklater\u2019s hangings form an impressive centrepiece in Winter Count: Embracing the Cold, a large exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa that features Indigenous, Canadian and European art, both historic and contemporary. <\/p>\n
The show begins by emphatically establishing Indigenous precedence in the wintry land now called Canada with a section on storytelling. It includes a few settler images of winter, most notably Cornelius Krieghoff\u2019s dramatic genre scene Crossing the Ice with the Royal Mail, Quebec and William Kurelek\u2019s The Ukrainian Pioneer, no. 5 showing small figures against a vast white field. In contrast, the Aps\u00e1alooke photographer Wendy Red Star depicts herself as winter, countering tropes of exotic \u201cIndians\u201d with a proud reclamation of Indigenous iconography. <\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Wendy Red Star, Winter, 2006, one of four images, archival pigment print, 53.3 \u00d7 60.9 cm.Wendy Red Star \/Minneapolis Institute of Art\/Na\/Supplied<\/p>\n The point is made more viciously by Kent Monkman in Charged Particles in Motion, a satirical painting that demolishes Paul Kane\u2019s Winter Travelling. It\u2019s a mid-19th-century dog-sled scene by an artist who romanticized his depictions of First Nations and M\u00e9tis people, and hangs nearby. In Monkman\u2019s version, his gender fluid alter-ego Miss Chief Testickle dashes through the landscape with her dog team, knocking over a pathetic European trapper whose three dogs include a French poodle.<\/p>\n The show, organized by a team of National Gallery curators from the Canadian, European, and Indigenous Ways and Decolonization departments, then switches gears in its second room. Many visitors will have come specifically for this big-name display in which Quebec winter scenes by Marc-Aur\u00e8le de Foy Suzor-Cot\u00e9, Maurice Cullen and James Wilson Morrice face off against a series of rare Impressionist snowscapes by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. <\/p>\n You might be doubtful that Monet, the man who painted water lilies, knew much about the topic but both the occasional hard winter in the Paris region and an 1895 trip to Norway gave him opportunities to observe effects of light on snow and ice. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Claude Monet, The Pond, Snow Effect, 1874\u201375, oil on canvas, 46.4 \u00d7 68.6 cm.Claude Monet\/Hasso Plattner Coll\/Supplied<\/p>\n Perhaps not surprisingly, the Canadians come off stronger but what is really notable about this section \u2013 and the exhibition in general \u2013 is the range of work the National Gallery has assembled from a large number of institutions. Only 48 of the 164 pieces in the show are drawn from the gallery\u2019s permanent collection, with significant loans from private collections and Scandinavian and American museums. <\/p>\n In the Impressionist gallery, there is also a work by the Norwegian artist Frits Thaulow who shows the Seine in Paris under an unusually large amount of snow in 1893. He was profiting from the weather to export his talent for snowscapes to the eager French, who also loved Quebec snow scenes by artists such as Morrice and Clarence Gagnon.<\/p>\n Somewhere in here there is another show about that triangle: Impressionism in France, Impressionism in Canada, and the contrast between Scandinavian and Canadian approaches to landscape. There are comparisons made with the Group of Seven: Most notably Lawren Harris\u2019s Snow II hangs beside Winter Brook by the Swedish painter Gustaf Edolf Fj\u00e6stad\u2019s. It is one of several instances where the Scandinavians\u2019 more pointillist, more detailed, or often simply more naturalistic work, is overshadowed by the Group\u2019s stronger commitment to modernism. <\/p>\n