'Naked Ladies': The Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1913-1945

The nude in Canadian art has held a contentious position as a site of censorship and debate since the early twentieth century. In 1927, Canadian artist John W. Russell was driven to return to Paris following public outcry over his nude painting in that year’s Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. In 1931, The Art Gallery of Toronto (AGT) refused to hang Bertram Brooker’s painting Figures in Landscape, and two years later Lilias Torrance Newton’s painting, Nude, was removed from a Canadian Group of Painters exhibition at the AGT. This talk will examine a few select case studies from Smither’s current project on the nude in Canadian art to ask why, if the nude was so central to the development of modern art more broadly, has it been overlooked in this country? What can the nude tell us about discourses of art, gender, race, and national identity?

This talk also asks why, if the painted nude was, on occasion, the subject of debate and censorship in the early twentieth century, did the photographic nude evaded controversy? What accounts for this discrepancy? Smither examines why the nude genre failed to assume a pivotal place within Canadian art history to argue that the controversy over the painted nude and its omission from the canon signals the genre’s ultimate failure—a productive failure that reveals counterhegemonic discourses about the visual arts in Canada.

Devon Smither is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Art History/Museum Studies in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge. Her research and teaching examine the intersections of nation-building and the visual arts, and the development of modern art and culture in early twentieth-century Canada and North America with a specific focus on women artists. Her research has been generously funded by, among other sources, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Her research has been published in RACAR: Canadian Art Review, Sociology Lens, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others. She is the co-author of CanadARThistories: Reimagining the Canadian Art History Survey, the first Open Educational Resource on Canadian and Indigenous Art and her research on the nude in Canadian painting and photography as been published in Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork, edited by Roisin Kennedy and Riann Coulter (2018) and is the subject of a current monograph on contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press (forthcoming). She is a founding member of Open Art Histories and Art Under the Big Sky: The Prairie Art Network and is the current English Reviews Editor at RACAR. She holds a BA with Distinction from the University of Alberta, an MA in Art History from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from the University of Toronto.