The Life and Times of Philip Surrey
Surrey (with camera) in conversation with Gabrielle Roy, seated (r to l)
Jean Paul Lemieux, Jori Smith (holding Daisy), Robert LaPalme, Margaret Surrey, Baie St Paul 1968
By 1961, Philip Surrey was ready to give up painting, disheartened by the small impact three decades of work had made. He was only 51 but most critics and curators in English Canada considered his work no more than minor artifacts of Canadian Painting in the 30s and 40s – out of date, irrelevant in an era when Abstract Expressionism was the rule and Pop Art was on the rise. No one beyond a handful of devoted private collectors seemed interested in his current work and every new painting pushed him closer to despair. He’d had two solo shows at private galleries – in 1945 at Galerie l’Art Francais and in 1953 by the Roberts Gallery in Toronto. He’d exhibited at the Watson Gallery in 1951 with John Lyman and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art with York Wilson (1955) and with G. Fiori (1961). The last was such a mismatch and disaster that he felt like shooting himself – a thought that plagued him. Whenever he looked at Carnaval de Westmount (1959), he considered offering it to the MMFA and destroying everything he’d done subsequently. The MMFA already owned Nuit (1939). They were of similar sizes (33×26, 32×24) and bookended his artistic career in Montreal in a dark and troubling way that matched his dominant mood.
Then, out of the blue, support came from unexpected directions. The editor of Vie des Arts, la revue d’arts visuels québécoise (the art magazine that did so much to establish the reputations of Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle et Alfred Pellan) telephoned to say he was planning an issue featuring Cyclistes (1952) in color on the cover and a major essay by Jacques de Roussan “Le peintre des reflets de la ville” illustrated with two color and four black and white photographs in number 31(1963). That was in the future but now there was an artistic future to contemplate. From inspiration deeper than he’d previously experienced, he found resources to successfully (as he measured success) resolve all the problems he’d set when he’d begun The Underpass several years earlier. After 15 earlier attempts, he finally had painted the ultimate version of his original vision for the piece.
When Vie des Arts 31(1963) appeared, de Roussan’s essay put into words the one great thing Surrey had learned in painting The Underpass: he had “gone his own way” and it was pointless for anyone, including himself, to compare him to any other contemporary painter. De Roussan claimed a place for him among Quebec’s great modern artists by virtue of the connection between his painting and poetry: in themes, tones, layering, Surrey rejected the supremacy of nature and fundamental goodness of man in favor of urban sensibility and individual moral complexity. For Surrey as for Baudelaire, the great darkness and sporadic illuminations of life were as complex as the carnival of crisscrossing shadows generated by the lights of the city. Surrey shared techniques with others, de Roussan conceded – the Classical precision of line in his drawing, his use of XVth century triangle instead of vanishing point perspective and an equally ancient use of tempera underpainting to intensify colors but that was surface. Surrey’s substance was poetically deep and resilient: « Les reflets et les lumières de la vie sont pour ce peintre les reflets et les lumières de la ville.» Les reflets and les lumières remain livelier, deeper metaphors than English now allows and la ville is more pointed in its republicanism and echoes of the ancient Greek “polis” than “town” or “city.” Comparison to Baudelaire, in Quebec, in that era indicated a level of cultural acceptance of a kind rarely bestowed on an artist from elsewhere in Canada.
Following the publication of Vie des Arts 31 (its archives are on-line at viedesarts.com ) Jerrold Morris of the Jerrold Morris International Gallery in Toronto telephoned and arranged to meet with Surrey in Montreal. Morris, who was famous for his support of Abstract Expressionists – especially Toronto’s Painters Eleven – wanted fifty drawings, as many pastel or oil sketches as possible and at least eight oil paintings for a one man show. In the course of their discussions, Morris prompted Surrey to re-organize his professional life. Heartened, Surrey negotiated changes in his duties as Features Editor at Weekend Magazine, cleaned his studio and tools, and on November 10, 1963 began the first of 10 workbooks in which he’d log most of his work until he stopped painting a year before his death. On the first page of a black scribbler, he wrote Nulla dies sine linea! (Never a day without drawing!) – the motto of the Art Students League – and enclosed it in an oval below his first entry:
“Sunday 9:30 pm – 10:30 pm started drawing 12×18 on grey paper for Pl.V.Marie”
Those workbooks (frequently frustrating to decode) are invaluable to the catalogue raisonné I’m now compiling but omit many essential details. Would you please visit my cataloguing page for details on how to participate even if you own only a single post-1963 Surrey. I also need all the help I can get on tracking his work between 1952 and 1963.
If Surrey had abandoned his dedication to city life painting, what would he have done with the rest of his time? When asked, he told me that he might have followed in the footsteps of John Sloan (1871—1951), the American painter he admired second only to Robert Henri within The Ashcan School. Sloan had returned to portraiture (using the underpainting and glazing method of old masters such as Andrea Mantegna) when he was defeated by the indifference of the art world to his own works. Surrey was a descendent of a sibling of the English miniaturist Richard Crosse (1742—1810) and was as proud of that natural connection as he was of his personal choice to be one of Sloan’s longtime “fellow travelers” in the Socialist Party of America in its campaigns for equal rights for women with men, blacks with whites. When asked about the connection between his Socialism and his painting, Surrey paraphrased Sloan’s “I paint with sympathy, but no social consciousness…I was never interested in putting propaganda into my paintings, so it annoys me when art historians try to interpret my city life pictures as ‘socially conscious.’ I saw the everyday life of the people, and . . . picked out bits . . . for my subject matter.” Surrey also told me that he whatever else he might have done, he would have worked to convince his friend Pierre Trudeau to establish a National Portrait Gallery on the premises of the National Gallery after it moved to its new building and would have lobbied that such a gallery would include the photographs by such master portraitists as John Vanderpant, Sam Tata and Ronnie Jaques and document all Canadians, not merely our oligarchs. Surrey was photographed by Vanderpant and Tata and many others but no one had photographed him more as he saw himself than his friend and neighbor, Gabor Szilasi – now internationally-acclaimed. This is Surrey with Gabor in 1983, months before I became their neighbor and both befriended me:
Surrey and I had been talking to one another intermittently since 1976 but it was only after the publication of my first novel in 1983 and moving to Grosvenor months later that we saw one another regularly. And chatted. Try as I might to formally interview him, he never allowed it. His unwavering response was that he was writing an account of everything I most wanted to know (and he wanted to tell): he assured me that if his memoir wasn’t published before his death, it – and everything else necessary to knowing who I was writing about when I wrote about him would be in the National Archives. Because of the age gap between us (he was 34 years older), he advised me to wait until I was closer his age before attempting such a thing. Because it felt right to commemorate the centenary of his birth in 1910, that’s what I was aiming to do when I was unavoidably delayed by episodes of illness that required lengthy recuperations. What was unlucky for me has been, I think, fortunate for the book. I’m not in a position to name a publication date but it’ll be hard to miss when it does arrive.
“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies,” according to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alfred Nobel concurred, “For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.” I’ve taken a very long route to achieve a brevity and concision proportionate to Surrey’s genius. Along the way, I’ve discovered any number of things that another biographer might have used and that students of twentieth century Canadian Art might find useful. I’ll post them here from time to time – always in English but sometimes in French translation as well.
T.F.R.