Reviews (Page 2)

Painting Friends, Véhicule Press, 1999, $22.95, by Barbara Meadowcroft, BA'51, PhD'82.

In Painting Friends, we are introduced to ten women artists who became known as the Beaver Hall Group. Although they were contemporaries and colleagues of Canadian art icons the Group of Seven, few people know them today. Their work is not lost -- the National Gallery, for example, owns 26 paintings and sketches by one of the group, Prudence Heward -- but it is seldom exhibited. Throughout their lives, Heward and her "painting friends" Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Mabel Lockerby, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage and Ethel Seath fought for recognition as artists.

They were all born in or near Montreal in the last decades of the 19th century, when there were few role models for aspiring women artists. Drawing was often part of a young woman's education in the Victorian era, but it was considered unfeminine to pursue a career as a painter. By the turn of the century, advanced art classes were available to women, and between 1902 and 1924, all the Beaver Hall women studied at the Art Association of Montreal (AAM), later the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

It was there," writes Meadowcroft, "that they received the professional training and formed the friendships that would nourish them" in the face of "frequent belittlement of women painters by art historians and critics." She quotes a review of an exhibit in 1912 which cites the work of Coonan and May, among others, as providing "pleasant bits of colour about the walls."

At the time, making a living was difficult for any Canadian artist. There was a war to be paid for, public galleries had little money for acquisitions, and private collectors considered Canadian art inferior to European. In the 1920s, artists began to form groups to develop markets for their work and to introduce a modern, Canadian aesthetic to the public. Shortly after the Group of Seven in Ontario, the Beaver Hall Group formed in Montreal, composed of men and women. The name derived from the location of their studio on Beaver Hall Hill.

The group disbanded after two years due to financial problems, but its surviving women members and other painting friends from the AAM stayed connected through the hard times of the Depression and another war. While some had families to support them, others worked as art teachers, becoming the first trained artists to teach in Quebec schools. For Savage, teaching was as important as painting, and she eventually influenced the way art was taught, serving as Art Supervisor for Montreal's Protestant School Board.

Seath taught from 1917 until the early 1960s at The Study in Montreal, and many of her students went on to become professional artists. Meadowcroft's sister was one of those, and at a retrospective of Seath's work in 1987 Meadowcroft says she realized "what a fine painter she had been... I committed myself to finding out all I could about Ethel Seath and her world."

Through the author's painstaking research, we learn about the commitment of the group to painting and to encouraging each other's careers, as well as how determined they were to succeed in a largely unwelcoming male domain. From the book's 24 splendid colour plates, we get a sense of their exceptional talent and what important work they produced. Meadowcroft also describes many paintings which we can't see, and frustrated readers should check out the National Film Board's By Woman's Hand, a documentary made about the group in 1994.

As it was for Meadowcroft, learning more about the Beaver Hall Group is a rewarding experience.

DIANA GRIER AYTON

Books received

Total Skin, Hyperion, 2000, $39.95, by David J. Leffell, MDCM'81.

Subtitled "The Definitive Guide to Whole Skin Care for Life," this book is everything you ever wanted to know about "our most familiar but perhaps least understood organ." And just like skin, the book covers the entire body from head (hair loss, dandruff) to toe (plantar warts and corns), missing none of the freckles, bumps and orifices in between. Also discussed are diseases like diabetes, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis which manifest themselves in part by changes in the skin. Lefell devotes an entire section to skin cancer, and includes a "color atlas" of the skin with photographs showing spots and marks, and describing which ones might be signs of something serious. There is a bit of an "eww" factor here, but knowing what to look for may save your life. For those worried about aging, there's information about treatments like peels, and collagen, botulism and Gore-tex injections. Lefell, a professor of dermatology and surgery at Yale, writes in a style that is both clear and engaging, and earns extra points for including a half dozen useful appendices.

Le faux en droit privé, les ...ditions Thémis, 2000, 35 $, sous la direction de Nicholas Kasirer, BCL'85, LLB'85.

Voici un ouvrage collectif qui cherche à mettre en lumière l'attachement du droit pour les fictions, les artifices et les vérités détournées à partir des études du droit de la famille, du droit des obligations, de la propriété intellectuelle, du droit de la preuve, et de l'histoire et la théorie du droit. On y retrouve les textes signés par sept chercheurs du Centre de recherche en droit privé et comparé du Québec dont 3 professeurs de la Faculté de droit de l'Université McGill : Nicholas Kasirer, Yves-Marie Morissette et Marie-Claude Prémont. Ce livre aborde plusieurs questions : Le droit s'écarte-t-il du vrai seulement à titre exceptionnel? Remplace-t-il toujours la vérité factuelle dans le seul but d'assurer une meilleure justice? La vérité construite du droit est-elle nécessairement fausse par rapport à la vérité donnée du monde des faits? Pour identifier, dans un premier temps, la part du faux en droit, et, ensuite, évaluer son rôle dans l'appréciation du juste, les chercheurs réunis au Centre amènent le lecteur sur le riche terrain du droit privé.