Alex Janvier’s Triumph

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Alex Janvier rises from his wheelchair to speak at a preview of his captivating retrospective, on view at the National Gallery of Canada until April 17. He’s 81 but still cuts an impressive figure as he reflects on the long road that brought him – and more than 150 of his distinctive paintings and drawings – to this symbolic pinnacle of the Canadian art world. Janvier is only the third indigenous artist, after Norval Morrisseau and Daphne Odjig, to be honoured with a solo retrospective at the Ottawa gallery. His unscripted remarks touch on hockey, fishing, his family and his affection for his home in Cold Lake, Alta., but also include more pointed observations about bureaucracies and the irony of a system of cultural genocide that also gave him a gift: the opportunity to paint.

Just a few decades ago, this exhibition would not have happened. As a federal institution, the National Gallery was complicit in a system that marginalized indigeneity. Janvier and other aboriginal artists of his generation were dismissed by the mainstream art world for many years, their output relegated to the humble status of artifact.

Janvier has fought long and hard to have his work recognized for what it is – art. Greg Hill, the National Gallery’s curator of indigenous art, hired in 2007 as the institution’s first aboriginal curator, is of Mohawk descent; Janvier is Denesuline and Saulteaux. Historically, they would have been enemies, Hill observes at the preview, noting their meetings, nonetheless, are cordial. But banter aside, he doesn’t mince words about the significance of this moment for aboriginal people: “Finally, we’re here.”

For Janvier, “here” has been a long time coming. He never considered himself anything other than an artist – not a craftsman, nor a maker of relics. But he faced countless roadblocks as he tried to convince the art establishment that his paintings, and the stories behind them, have value.

As a student at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and Art in the late 1950s, Janvier was exposed to European art history. One of his teachers was Carl Altenberg, whose Bauhaus sensibilities would prove inspirational; he also discovered Joan Miro and Wassily Kandinsky. Janvier’s Composition series, which dates from 1963, could easily stand alongside the work of such groundbreaking painters from the early 20th century.

Hill acknowledges the European influences, but says it’s also important to recognize the indigenous sources of Janvier’s imagery, like the bead and quill work made by the women in his family. His blend of modernist and indigenous iconography could not have emerged at any other time, by any other hand.

While at the Blue Quills Indian Residential School in St. Paul, Alta., from 1943 to 1953, Janvier, like thousands of other native kids, was indoctrinated into Christianity. But it was also here that his determination to establish his own identity was born.

After residential school, he wanted to further his studies outside Canada, but the Indian Act stood in his way. “Indian Affairs wouldn’t allow me to go anywhere abroad,” he says. “They controlled everything. They were the native CIA.” He was accepted at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, but the Indian agent in charge of the Cold Lake Reserve, 300 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, where Janvier returned after school, threw up a barrier, telling the young artist: “Those guys are too clever and too smart for you – you can’t go there.” Calgary, it seems, did not suffer the same reputation.

After his post-secondary studies, and a short-lived career with the Department of Indian Affairs, a resolute Janvier declared his intention to be recognized as one of Canada’s great artists when he joined forces in the early ’70s with six other artists, including Odjig and Morrisseau, as well as Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Carl Ray and Joseph Sanchez, to form the Professional National Indian Artists Inc. Winnipeg newspaper reporter Gary Scherbain coined a name for them – the Indian Group of Seven – and it stuck. Their purpose was to defy the labels that had sidelined their work and, ultimately, they helped lay the path to official recognition that aboriginal art is contemporary art.

Janvier’s early works are steeped in abstraction, but also infused with stylized animal and human imagery. A series of maze-like untitled drawings from 1963 show figures dancing to a backdrop of circles and intricate patterns in wild colours. It was only later that Janvier experimented with a more figurative approach, and started to examine the realities he had lived. In 1990, for instance, he painted the provocative Intertribal Indians Unlimited, in which youth wear uniforms decorated with Christian symbols while other figures – a buffalo, an elder, a young man crying – are swallowed in chaos. It’s a powerful work and, at almost six feet high and 23 feet long, one of the largest in the show.

“Alex wanted the exhibition to be a story of his life,” says Hill. And so it is. Spanning 65 years of artistic creation, it’s a narrative about spirituality, respect for the land and defiance of authority – as well as a testament to patience and perseverance. Janvier may be 81, but he still paints every day. It’s clear he has more to say.

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