“Greenfield’s book rises far above conventional biography. With his depth of cultural knowledge, Greenfield explores the artistic careers of Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak, while unlocking the secrets to appreciating a wide range of visual arts.”
— CAROL BISHOP-GWYN, author of Art and Rivalry: The Marriage of Mary and Christopher Pratt
“This engaging biography illuminates the lives of Molly and Bruno Bobak, two of Canada’s most important artists, balancing their personal stories with their visual record. Greenfield’s account of the Bobaks’ lives — charting their artistic development as the hold of the Group of Seven slowly waned and abstraction came to dominate the art world — focuses extensively on their art, offering incredibly close readings of the Bobaks’ remarkable artistic contributions to Canadian art history.”
— DEVON SMITHER, Assistant Professor, Art History/Museum Studies, University of Lethbridge
“Greenfield offers new insight into Bruno and Molly Lamb Bobak’s complex relationship. They met and married in the aftermath of the Second World War, having served as official war artists, and continued to paint for decades. Based on new evidence, this book captures the Bobaks’ intertwined lives, their clashing relationship, and the enduring value of their art.”
— TIM COOK, author of The Fight for History
Also by NATHAN GREENFIELD:
The Reckoning: Canadian Prisoners of War in the Great War
Missionnaires en terre barbelée : Des Oblats prisonniers de guerre (1941-1945) (with Bill Rawling)
The Great War Album
The Forgotten: Canadian POWs, Escapers and Evaders in Europe, 1939-45
The Damned: The Canadians at the Battle of Hong Kong and the POW Experience, 1941-45
Baptism of Fire: The Second Battle of Ypres and the Forging of Canada, April 1915
The Battle of the St. Lawrence: The Second World War in Canada
Anything but a
Still Life
The Art and Lives of
Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak
NATHAN M. GREENFIELD
Copyright © 2021 by Nathan Greenfield.
Copyright in the works of art by Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak is held by their respective estates.
Unless otherwise indicated, all works of art and photographs are reproduced by permission of the Estates of Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak.
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of copyrighted materials and to obtain permission for the use of their reproductions. The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions that may have occurred. Should copyright holders identify any errors in the acknowledgement of their work, we would be pleased to incorporate corrections in future reprints or editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by James Harbeck.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover image: Photograph of Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak in London, England, by Joseph McKeown for the Montreal Star and Standard.
Printed in China by MCRL Overseas Group.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
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Fredericton, New Brunswick
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Anything but a still life : the art and lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak / Nathan M. Greenfield.
Names: Greenfield, Nathan M., 1958- author.
Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200210521 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020021053X | ISBN 9781773100920 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781773100937 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773100944 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Bobak, Molly Lamb, 1920-2014. | LCSH: Bobak, Bruno, 1923-2012. | LCSH: Bobak, Molly Lamb, 1920-2014—Marriage. | LCSH: Bobak, Bruno, 1923-2012—Marriage. | LCSH: Artist couples—New Brunswick—Fredericton—Biography. | LCSH: War artists—Canada—Biography. | LCSH: Painters —Canada—Biography.
Classification: LCC ND249.B554 G74 2021 | DDC 759.11—dc23
To Micheline Dubé, who helped me see the world through Molly’s eyes, and is there to share the places my writing takes us to,
and
To Pierre Ezra Lowrie, our first grandchild, who joined our world while this book was nearing completion.
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
— Henry Ward Beecher (American minister, 1813-1887)
A Note to the Reader
Prelude: A Scene from Their Marriage
Introduction
PART ONE: 1920-1945
Chapter 1 Learning Their Trade
Chapter 2 The Education of Two Artists as Young Soldiers
Chapter 3 War Artists
PART TWO: 1945-1973
Chapter 4 Painters Two
Chapter 5 Putting Down Roots
Chapter 6 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on the Saint John River
PART THREE: 1973-1990
Chapter 7 Picturing Desire
Chapter 8 “The Fall of the House of Bobak”
Chapter 9 A Sense of Place
Chapter 10 Two People Who Have Outworn Each Other
PART FOUR: 1990-2014
Chapter 11 The Compleat Angler
Chapter 12 “I Belong to Myself”
Chapter 13 Quietus
Coda
A Small Financial Note
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Since the central figures of this book, Molly Joan Bobak (née Lamb) and Bruno Bobak, shared a surname after their marriage in December 1945, I cannot follow the usual practice of a non-fiction writer and refer to each as “Bobak.” For a short time, I considered referring to Molly as Molly Lamb. But after a while that began to seem clunky. Although I generally find that non-fiction authors sound overly chummy if, after finishing with their subjects’ youth, they continue to use their first names, I have decided to refer to my subjects as Molly and Bruno. As well, I refer to their children, Alexander Bobak and Anny (née Bobak) Scoones, by their first names.
In order to contextualize financial information, I have provided the dollar figure as it was in the period and the 2019 equivalent in parentheses, for example, “In 1969, the painting sold for $1,000 ($6,600).”
Unless otherwise indicated in the text, I have cited each reference to Molly’s thirty-two-year long Diary in the endnotes following this format: Molly Diary, 24 February 1975. Unless indicated by date in the text, references to Molly’s (Canadian Women’s Army Corps–era) “War Diary” (hereafter, War Diary) in the endnotes are to the digital version available at Library and Archives Canada and appear in this format: Molly War Diary, 21.
Although I have reached out to both of Molly and Bruno’s children, Alexander and Anny, each has declined to be interviewed for the project. I thank Alexander Bobak for his permission to reproduce many of the images in this text. Accordingly, since I could not present their side of, say, an argument, I have refrained from using much of what Molly wrote about each of them in her letters and Diaries. I can only hope that they find my rendering of their parents’ lives and art rings true to their memories of their parents, who, as public figures, also belong to Canadians.
As indicated in the endnotes and bibliography, I have been able to use letters held in the University of New Brunswick Archives, the archives of UNB’s Art Centre, as well as letters held at the University of British Columbia. While I have been able to consult letters held in Library and Archives Canada from and to Molly from Molly’s mother and father, from A.Y. Jackson, Jack Shadbolt, Joseph (Joe) Plaskett, and a number of Molly’s other friends, I am enjoined from quoting them or summarizing their content. Needless to say, some of the particulars in these letters are fascinating; their absence does not materially alter the story told here.
We have art in order not to die of the truth. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Near 4:00 p.m. on 16 February 1996, Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak sat with several hundred other well-dressed men and women in the ornate ballroom in Rideau Hall, the Ottawa residence of the Governor General. After His Excellency Roméo LeBlanc gave a short speech about the importance of service to the nation and the nation’s duty to recognize that service, Molly and Bruno heard their names called. Together, the couple — who two months earlier had passed their fiftieth wedding anniversary and were fast approaching the same anniversary of their demobbing from the army, in which they had both been war artists (she the only official female war artist and he the youngest) — walked to the front of the room. They stopped and stood in front of the man who, back in Fredericton, was known simply as Roméo. One of his aides opened the box containing Molly’s white-and-gold medal, showed it to her, and then pinned it over her heart. Then he did the same with Bruno’s. And as quickly as that, the first formal investiture of married artists into the Order of Canada was complete.
It was a near-run thing that Bruno was there — and not only because he would not drive to Ottawa in February. Or because he hated flying. Indeed, it had been so long since he last flew that at the Ottawa airport he was surprised and unnerved by how far the disembarking passengers had to walk from the Dash 8 to the baggage pickup. The well-travelled Molly was amused by this and gently led him to the baggage carousel.
Though nominations to the Order of Canada are anonymous, Molly had a pretty good idea who had nominated them. The previous December, retired chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Antonio Lamer wrote her, saying that both she and Bruno, who had painted his official portrait four years earlier, should be awarded the Order of Canada. Accordingly, Molly was not surprised in early 1995 when she received a letter from Rideau Hall with the news that the Governor General intended to name her to the rank of Officer of the Order of Canada. She was, however, shocked that Bruno did not receive a similar letter.
“The thought that Bruno would not be honoured greatly upset Molly,” says retired art historian Stuart Smith, who was a colleague of Bruno’s at the University of New Brunswick for almost three decades and a friend to both Bobaks. “Molly told me that without Bruno receiving the honour she would refuse it.”1
Molly’s intent might surprise a casual reader of the coming pages, which — drawing from her Diary and letters — tell of the difficulties in her marriage, Bruno’s towering rages, the number of times she wrote of permanently separating, and her escapes to meetings in Ottawa, Montréal, and Toronto as well as months-long visits to her beloved Galiano Island. Nor, as we will see, did Molly think much of Bruno’s recent work. None of this mattered, however, when Molly was offered the Order of Canada’s second-highest honour.2 “Whatever my personal feelings: body of work from Bruno from the 60s, 70s, 80s is stunning. Amazing strength of colour. . . . Not by any remote chance could I compare with this stuff,” she believed.3
Smith, who himself had been awarded the Order of Canada fifteen years earlier for his role in helping to save Fredericton’s historic downtown, contacted a number of people in Ottawa, explaining that Molly intended to refuse admission to the order because Bruno was not being so honoured. “There was a rough and ready rule that as a smaller province, New Brunswick was allocated one officer and several members each year,” Smith explains. “Accordingly, after some discreet strings were pulled, it was arranged that Molly and Bruno would both be admitted to the order at the level of Member of the Order of Canada.”4
Molly’s allegiance to Bruno’s work is all the more striking given its distance from her own. “Where her mature work on flowers and crowds [is] formed from loose, Impressionistic, brush strokes and [is] oriented toward eliciting or recording fleeting moments of energy and joie de vivre, Bruno’s most important works are indebted to Expressionists like Oskar Kokoschka. His presentation of the human condition is brooding and, one can say, almost defeated,” says Smith.
At the investiture, Molly thoroughly enjoyed meeting Louis Applebaum, who received the order’s highest honour, Companion, as well as physicist Bertram N. Brockhouse, who had won the Nobel Prize the previous year, and National Film Board producer Colin Low. Garth Drabinsky, the most famous name on the 1995 list announced on 30 June, took a pass on the ceremony. At the buffet dinner, “quite the best” she’d ever seen, Molly sat next to LeBlanc and another man and had a great time. Even Bruno, who did not like large parties, had “done awfully well.”5
The next day, Molly solved the problem of Bruno’s gouty leg that flared up on their way home by finding him a wheelchair with which to traverse the airport. She wasn’t able, however, to do anything to relieve the tension caused by the “very rough flight” back to Fredericton.6
Back in Fredericton on the eighteenth, an “ugly sky” from which corn snow fell both triggered and reflected the end of the idyll. Like an inverted version of Cinderella, the day after the night before found both Molly and Bruno “in foul moods” that felt to her like a “mental breakdown,” the effect of returning to the world of “anger and resentment.”7
I’m a painter. I wake up every morning and get to work. It’s my little contribution to civilization. — Philip Pearlstein
Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak came to artistic maturity in a much different context than did many of their teachers, who found it necessary to follow the footsteps of the late-nineteenth-century artists like Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté and James Wilson Morrice and pursue formal studies in Europe. Lawren Harris and Emily Carr, two of the artists who attended the salon-like gatherings hosted by Molly’s father, Harold Mortimer-Lamb, studied in England, Belgium, and Germany. Jack Shadbolt, Molly’s most influential teacher at the Vancouver School of Art, returned to his native England to study at Euston Road School before moving on to Paris, while Frederick Varley studied at the Académie Royale in Antwerp, Belgium; both were habitués of Mortimer-Lamb’s hospitality. The British-born Arthur Lismer, who taught Bruno at the Art Gallery of Toronto in the late 1930s, studied at the Sheffield School of Art and at the Académie Royale in Antwerp before coming to Canada, where he worked at Grip Ltd., the commercial art firm in Toronto that served as a hothouse for the Group of Seven — five of its members had worked there.
Nor did the Canada in which Molly and Bruno learned about art lack for a distinct artistic identity as, for example, the editor of the Canadian Magazine believed it did in 1908, when he published Mortimer-Lamb’s article lamenting the fact that no painter had yet come to terms with Canada’s northern reality. At that time, Canada’s best-known painters were Cornelius Krieghoff (d. 1872), Homer Watson (d. 1936), and Horatio Walker (d. 1938). In addition to paintings of waterfalls and frontier life, Krieghoff’s bread and butter was wintery scenes of Quebec habitants at work and play. Watson basked in Oscar Wilde’s praise as the Canadian Constable. Walker painted Quebec’s fields and villages with Jean-François Millet’s sentimental brush.
By the end of the 1920s, Canada had produced two major schools: one that included both men and women who painted both urban and rural scenes, and an exclusively male outdoors-based one. The first of the two, the Beaver Hall Hill Group (BHHG) — named for the tony Montréal street where the artists rented space — produced mainly figurative paintings imbued with a modernist, though not, to at least one critic’s relief, “secessionist” aesthetic.* After getting over the fact that most of the portraits displayed in 1922 were by women, the Montreal Star’s critic praised the “loud, brilliant, glaring colours — passionate reds, indigo blues, greens — [that] dominate and triumph.”1 Completed a few years after the BHHG’s breakup following bankruptcy in 1922, Adrien Hébert’s Montreal Harbour exemplifies other aspects of the group’s modernist interests; it depicts the (now abandoned) Grand Trunk Railway concrete grain elevator and, before it, steamers moored, oddly, perpendicular to each other. As one historian notes, Hébert “highlights the rectilinear enormity of the port buildings as seen from close up, [the port] is framed by the geometry of the grain elevators, conveyors [belts] and ship masts.” Though there would be other influences that nudge Molly and Bruno in this direction, both knew Hébert’s work and how he pushed “natural elements,” including the sky, clouds, and even the water, “to the very edges” of his work.2 Other works by Beaver Hall Hill artists borrowed from Art Nouveau and Jazz Age aesthetics.
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson (who died three years before the Group’s founding in 1920), on the other hand, famously focused on the Canadian landscape.3 In contradistinction to Krieghoff’s scenes that were seemingly transported from a seventeenth-century Dutch workshop, Harris served up stylized razor-sharp mountains in a vista that emphasized snow and ice. Before painting what became the iconic The Jack Pine, Thomson primed his canvas with vermilion red, which “gives the tree forms a throbbing vitality and force” and makes the granite of the Canadian Shield stand out.4 A.Y. Jackson’s paintings were made “with vivid colours in a loose, sketchy manner, eliminating detail and applying his paint in thick layers”; they were derided as “Hot Mushes” and prompted questions about whether he had become a dope fiend under the influence of both Van Gogh and Impressionism while he was in Europe in 1913.5 Ten years later, Jackson, Harris, and Lismer were making regular trips to Algonquin Park, and later Algoma, to paint the “North.” Eric Brown, the first director of the National Gallery of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Toronto, defended the Group of Seven against its early critics and purchased a number of their works.
This North established itself as a mythos in Canadian art. But it was also a mythical construct, or at least one that ignored core Canadian realities. At the same time as Jackson and the others were tramping through Algoma, nearby Sudbury was a major mining town — during the First World War, its nickel, incidentally, reversed Lismer’s and fellow Group of Seven member Frederick Varley’s trajectory and went to Sheffield, where it was turned into steel and fashioned into guns and shells by the city’s famous armoury. And this North involved erasure and replacement: the Group’s work has a complete absence of Indigenous men, women, and children, or even traces of their absence. This erasure was, of course, so common at the time as to be unthinking, but its effect, as Anne Clendinning notes, was the creation of “a central Canadian regionalism that was Anglophone, white and male.”6 Neither the members of the Group of Seven nor its supporters twigged to the irony in such paeans as F.P. Housser’s claim that their “task demands a new type of artist; one who divests himself of the velvet coat and flowing tie of his caste, puts on the outfit of the bushwhacker and prospector;* closes with his environment: paddles, portages and makes camp: sleeps in the out-of-doors under the stars; climbs mountains with his sketch box on his back.”7 Even as the Group ignored First Nations peoples (as well as the voyageurs), they arrogated to themselves numerous traits of the people they did not depict.
Though both Molly and Bruno studied with members of the Group, and through her father, Molly knew some from when she was a young girl, neither was an acolyte; however, both show influences. In a few of Bruno’s war artist works, it is easy to see his debt to the Group in the interlocking trees — their fullness all the more noticeable because they are set off against blasted tree stumps that do more than simply echo paintings from Algoma and Algonquin Park. And decades later, when he painted New Brunswick rivers with a brush borrowed from the Group, he, too, was uninterested in the lands’ original inhabitants. At least one of Molly’s early postwar works was so obviously indebted to the Group that Jackson ribbed her about it. Her signature works, both flowers and crowds, are animated by the same concern for movement made famous in Thomson’s The Jack Pine. Perhaps most importantly, although much of their work was far from either the BHHG’s or the Group of Seven’s concerns (Bruno’s Expressionist-inspired nudes being the furthest), the two groups bequeathed to Molly and Bruno a nationalist artistic consciousness.
Though it can sometimes be easy to forget, the development of Canada’s artistic identity did not end with the Group of Seven. As the Depression of the 1930s deepened, the works of artists like Yvonne McKague Housser and Paraskeva Clark pointed beyond the “nation building” narrative associated with the Group of Seven and toward an avowed socialist artistic mindset. McKague Housser’s Cobalt, for example, is more than a colourful rendering of the town of Cobalt, Ontario, with yellow, green, blue, red, and ochre two- and three-storey clapboard houses running down and then up a hill. Her clear delineation of the brown rocks that poke through the deep green of the grass and the sinuous sky in the distance show her debt to the Group of Seven. The wooden towers that rise above the mine heads echo Harris’s mountains. Two things make this picture of the town in 1930 stand out, however. The first is the almost total absence of people in a town where, in 1911, more than thirty mines produced 30 million troy ounces (937 tons) of silver. The second is the dilapidated state of the homes, symbolic of the depths of the Depression.
The Petrograd-born Clark answered her own call for Canadian artists to “come out from behind the pre-Cambrian Shield” with works like Petroushka, which owes less to the 1910 ballet about puppets coming to life (to Igor Stravinsky’s music) than to her reaction to the killing of five steel workers by Chicago police in May 1937.8 In a space between a tall yellow brick and squatter red brick buildings (two others are visible behind a fence), stands a short tower made of red corrugated iron boxes. On top of it is a top-hatted figure who resembles Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags holding bags of money, while in front of him a cartoony policeman holds a Punch and Judy–like figure whose body is bent downward as if his legs were broken. “The viewer looks down on the scene in a cobblestoned yard between apartment blocks. The crowd responds to the performance with catcalls and clenched fists — an anti-fascist symbol of unity, strength, and resistance used here to indicate the artist’s support for their cause,” notes art historian Christine Boyanoski.9
Two other artists (who would be major influences on Bruno) gave a stark portrait of the times in a 1932 painting. The Young Canadian shows a male figure sitting on the ground between a farm on the left and an ominously quiet factory on the right, his arms draped over his legs. Charles Comfort was the painter; his model was another artist, Carl Schaefer. But this “young Canadian” does not have an artist’s judging, probing gaze; instead, Comfort gave him what approaches a “thousand-yard stare,” though his shock is not from the Western Front fifteen years earlier but rather from the economic crisis of the 1930s, which damaged millions in mind and body. By denying Schaefer, who looks out toward us, any knowledge of the light that glints off what is probably Lake Ontario and the deep blue sky reminiscent of Van Gogh, Comfort all but cancels out the symbolism of these colours while taking full advantage of how they, and especially the white glint, push Schaefer’s drained body forward. The angular figure in The Young Canadian anticipates the degradation of labourers John Steinbeck would soon depict in The Grapes of Wrath. Not only does Schaefer’s muscular right hand hang uselessly, his left is positioned so that several fingers hang below the picture’s bottom, thus all but obscuring the productive tool he holds: a paintbrush.
Comfort’s decision to paint The Young Canadian in watercolour also fit with the work’s theme and the times, when watercolours were popular because they were inexpensive.10 Watercolours also have a certain spontaneity that is only partially the result of the fact that they must be completed swiftly, since the colour dries quickly. Years later, Molly spoke of wetting the page and then “draw[ing] with water,” which, as we all know well, runs on its own, its natural spread producing an immediacy quite unlike the exactitude oil paints allow.11 But at the same time, measuring almost a metre high and just over a metre wide, The Young Canadian pushes the limit of the medium and set a standard of colour handling that Bruno, especially, looked to. Comfort drew on his studies of Japanese watercolours and knowing how they used blotting paper, he produced deeply blue skies with insets of grey clouds; Schaefer’s face shifts from stark white on the left to deep beige with black highlights, and many gradations from black to brown on his jacket.
As war clouds gathered first over Spain and then the rest of Europe, these artists and others turned toward even more open politics. Several artists — including Jack Humphrey, whose self-portrait casts him as an out-of-work labourer, albeit one wearing his worker’s cap on a rakish angle as if it were a beret — went to Spain. In late June 1941, with Nazi Germany triumphant in the West and advancing into Russia, dozens of politically engaged artists met at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Neither Molly nor Bruno left a record of what they knew about the Kingston Artists’ Conference. However, it was covered in newspapers and art magazines. Further, since Shadbolt, who chaired the conference’s resolution committee, and Lismer were both there, it is reasonable to assume that Molly and Bruno were aware of the gathering of artists who wanted to enlist their art in the fight against totalitarianism. Equally important to the attendees was their desire to cast themselves as Canadian equivalents of Woody Guthrie and question “the conventional wisdom that free-enterprise capitalism was the best way” to organize the nation’s economy.12 “We thought,” the artist Lucy Jarvis recalled in 1974, “here are all these totalitarian countries trying to clamp down on creativity, and we are doing the opposite thing, and we really did think of it as war work.”13
Conscious of the success of the Britain at War exhibit of British war artists then running at the National Gallery in Ottawa, and of works Jackson, Lismer, David Milne, Maurice Cullen, and seven other artists produced during the First World War under the auspices of the Canadian War Memorials Fund (sponsored by Lord Beaverbrook), the Federation of Canadian Artists (FCA) — founded at the Kingston Conference — called for the creation of an official Canadian war artists’ program. An unofficial one had, in fact, existed since 1939. Indeed, on 8 September, two days before Canada officially declared war, Frederick B. Taylor, a Montréal painter and architect, contacted the Department of National Defence urging the creation of a war artists’ program.14 After much negotiation, Taylor received permission for himself and eight other artists “to paint unofficially in the factories that produced war equipment.”15 Some twenty-two painters donated war art to a poster program run by the Departments of National Defence and External Affairs. In 1940, the Department of National Defence commissioned works from a few artists on an ad hoc basis.
For months, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King gave the FCA the same cold shoulder he had given a more august Canadian, the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, Canada’s High Commissioner to Britain, an art aficionado, who in 1939 sought to replay one of Lord Beaverbrook’s First World War roles and shepherd into existence an official Canadian war artist program. One concern in the Prime Minister’s Office was that the artists would produce modern art, which King did not like. Nor did vagueness of the FCA’s proposal and its artistic language do much to nudge open the prime minister’s door. “Neither King nor his staff was interested in discussing the philosophy of art,” deadpanned one historian.16 Even though mandarins like Hume Wrong groused that the public relations campaigns were designed “as if national feeling were a commodity to be sold” like soap powder, paying artists to help Canadians “see past the immediate struggle to a new [socialist] world” was a bridge too far for Ottawa.17
In February 1942, the FCA shifted tactics. Instead of trying to meet with King, it sent him a petition signed by almost one thousand artists. Following his usual modus operandi (memorialized by the poet F.R. Scott, who was at the Kingston Conference, as “Do nothing by halves/Which can be done by quarters”),18 the prime minster passed the petition on to John Grierson, the founding director of the National Film Board and manager of the Wartime Information Board. Though Grierson took a less jaundiced view of the need for a Canadian war artists’ program, through most of 1942, each step forward seemed to be followed by two backward. Early in 1942, Major Charles P. Stacey, the Canadian Army’s historical officer in London, had managed to “formalize the hiring of Hughes, Fisher and Ogilvie [as artists] and to obtain them commissions as officers with the rank of second lieutenant.”19 Then, records Stacey in his memoirs in April 1942, “we were told that Fisher…would not be coming, no more artists would be sent, and the appointment of [BHH alumnus] Mrs. Lillias Newton, whom Massey had asked for as a portrait artist, was rejected.”20 Stacey, however, remained committed to the “slightly illegal” program and in October 1942 added Lawren P. Harris Jr. to it.21 Though the Minister of National Defence Colonel James L. Ralston, who happened to be colourblind, was decidedly cool to the idea of an official war artists’ program, he did not overrule Stacey. Late in the year, Massey tried again. Perhaps because of Grierson’s support, King reversed himself and authorized what became the Canadian War Records program.
We don’t know when Bruno learned that the war artists’ program had been authorized. However, from Vancouver, Molly had been following these developments carefully. On 21 October 1942, two months before joining the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (CWAC), she ended a letter to Shadbolt with the words, “I’ll be seeing you in the War Records Dept,” which was both where the lieutenant Shadbolt worked and where the war artists’ program was to be housed.22
This dual biography could not have been written without access to Molly’s letters and Diary. Save for a lamentable gap from December 1942 through January 1946, while Molly was a member of the CWACs, partially filled by her comic War Diary of CWACs, the letters and Diary cover her youth through the early 2000s. The majority of the letters are to and from Shadbolt and the artist Joe Plaskett. There are a significant number to and from Jackson, and a few from Molly’s mother, her father, and an assortment of other people, including the artist and curator Donald Andrus. The letters are in collections of the University of New Brunswick and the University of Victoria. Molly’s Diary is housed at Library and Archives Canada. The letters to and from Andrus are in his possession.
There is little debate that diaries can be trusted for quotidian events, such as when Molly went fiddleheading or Bruno went fishing; there is no convincing reason to dissemble about such daily occurrences. Major events outside of one’s personal life, such as the outcome of an election, can also be trusted — and can easily be checked. On emotional or highly personal questions, however, diaries must be taken with a grain of salt, for, no matter how much confidence one might have built up in the author, in this case, of her own life, we must always remember that she presents “a view.” Or, as Molly herself underlined on 17 January 1975, when she quoted Morley Callaghan’s discussion of diaries on CBC Radio, “People only write [in their diaries] what they want other people to find.”
At first blush, it might be thought that the biographer’s task would be easier if Bruno had left a corpus of writing of similar size and variety as Molly’s. In fact, this would only have doubled the problem. For then we would have always had two contending written “views” to deal with, and we would be well on the way to a diaristic version of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on the banks of the Saint John River.
Diaries, at least diaries kept by serious diarists, are a special type of text. They share a number of attributes with literary texts: most notably, notions of story structure, quotation, time, and narration strategies (e.g., flashbacks and giving backstory when a new person is named). The episodic nature of diaries and their first-person narration links them to the epistolary novel, of which Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) is the paradigmatic example. This is not to say that Molly is omniscient and cannot be wrong; indeed, more than once over the course of three decades, she asserts something only to later report that she was mistaken. Yet, at each moment — when she makes the original assertion and when she corrects it — Molly’s prose leaves little doubt that she is absolutely sure of the probity of what she is writing at the kitchen table before making breakfast. Still, we must keep in mind Winston Churchill’s boast-cum-warning: “History will say that the Rt. Hon. Gentleman [Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin] is wrong in this matter. I know it will, for I shall write that history.”23
I judged what Molly wrote about her troubled marriage against a number of sources. The first is Molly’s own words or, to be more precise, how she spoke about Bruno and her marriage over a period of time: weeks, months, years, decades. In other words, I looked to see if her story remained constant. Second, I looked to responses to her words, from her friends as she records them in her Diary. Third, I looked to Molly’s letters to friends like Shadbolt; since he knew and visited the Bobaks, he had first-hand experience that Molly knew about when she wrote what can safely be considered cri de cœur letters. The fourth “database” I had access to were friends and professional colleagues of the Bobaks. In some cases, my interviewees were quite forthcoming with details — of events, fights, anguish — that they saw over decades. Others, remained tight-lipped, while still others, reticent about “telling stories out of school,” only confirmed general trends about the Bobaks’ “difficult” marriage.
As well, while reading Molly’s letters, her War Diary, and Diary, I have kept in mind the lessons by feminist scholars, including Judith Butler, Carolyn Heilbrun, Mary Kelly, and Verna Reid, about women’s autobiographies. Briefly, the difference they have found between women’s autobiographies and men’s is that the very form is defined by men. Think of the great autobiographies and the first two names that are likely to come to mind are Augustine and Rousseau. The autobiographical form is perforce tilted toward a man’s desire to present himself as a fully formed, unitary, heroic self. Charles Dickens plays with this very notion at the opening to David Copperfield when the eponymous protagonist asks, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”24 The answer, as is well known, is “Yes — the former.”
A quarter century after first Structuralism and later Deconstruction showed that even for male writers the idea of the unitary self is a fiction, Judith Butler, borrowing from linguistic philosopher John Austin’s speech-act theory, argued that women’s autobiographical writing is a performance that occurs within rules and social structures defined by men.* Following Butler, I view Molly’s War Diary as a self-conscious performance that makes manifest the fact that she is an artist to be reckoned with. Her intent, as we will see, was to impress upon male artists like Jackson and through him the military hierarchy that she wanted to perform the speech act (in this case, the signing of an order) appointing her as Canada’s first official female war artist. Indeed, in a letter Molly wrote to Shadbolt on 28 December 1942, less than a month after she joined the CWACs, she makes this plain, telling him that her “newspaper … went over big with the officers.”
When Molly began keeping her Diary in January 1969, she appears to have considered it a rather private enterprise. By the end of the year, however, she reconceptualized it as a public document that would set out her views on two main issues: her art (as well as her views of other artists) and her fraught relationship with her husband. Since Verna Reid’s Women Between, which examines the construction of the self in the works of four artists, including Molly’s younger contemporary Mary Pratt, was published in 2008, seven years after Molly stopped keeping her Diary, Molly could not use Reid’s term “the marriage plot” to conceptualize her own roles.25 Yet, even without the term, Molly is fully conscious that she speaks from a script that casts women in traditional roles that in large measure she rejects but in other areas, such as her unwillingness to break decisively from Bruno, she partially accepts. One of her explanations for this refusal, her worry about who will take care of Bruno, is, of course, part of the traditional view of a wife and mother, though, as we will see, Molly did not view herself as a mothering figure. In at least one work, we can note without getting ahead of ourselves, Bruno makes it clear that he wants to view Molly in precisely this role; the effect of her failure to inhabit this role is recorded in other works. When writing about art, Molly is also aware of the traditional male version of art history and how her still lifes belonged to what was usually considered a lesser genre. Molly chose to contest this ground and, as we will see below, did so largely on her own terms and was largely successful.26
While I interpret Molly’s paintings in the light of her Diaries and orient the story of the Bobaks’ marriage in concert with what Molly records about it over time, Bruno’s paintings and drawings are the narrative of his life, as both he and more than one curator and commentator of his work have noted. This is not as contentious as it might first appear. While one could extend the intentional-fallacy logic (i.e., that a work of art exists beyond the “intention” of the author and that it is not a biographical statement) to paintings, perhaps because of the iconographic tradition in Western art (Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology is only the most obvious example), art historians have been much less bothered than literary scholars by doubts about intention.
The author of a recent book on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, for example, declares without the slightest hint of a scare quote, “The Women themselves may be singularly unsexy, but the rhythmic push and pull to which space is subjected diffuses the erotic charge across the entire surface of the canvas — an instance of what Freud would term 27, Devon Smither, who is acutely aware of theoretical issues, writes in her recent doctoral dissertation “Bodies of Anxiety: The Female Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1913-1945,”
MacLeod disrupts the codes of the nude genre.… We can read in Descent of Lilies a kind of resistance: she is both subject and object, viewer and viewed. MacLeod’s nude self-portraits follow the modern turn away from tradition of a woman veiled in history or mythology to portray a woman or model “as she is.”… MacLeod was engaging with international developments in modern art, responding to the work of those European artists exploring Surrealism and psychoanalysis, and in a similar fashion to [Suzanne] Valadon, counters the eroticism of the conventional high art nude.
Accordingly, it should not be contentious to read Bruno’s or Molly’s works both as having determinable relationships to existing trends in art and as meaningful statements about their emotional lives.
Finally, as I read Molly’s Diaries, although I came to see her as an abused woman — and she came to consider herself one — this was true only in the context of her relationship with Bruno. And then, only later and partly. Molly’s Diary makes clear that she was almost preternaturally optimistic and supremely able to compartmentalize her life. To view her as a beaten-down woman is to allow the tragedy of the Bobaks’ marriage — which, as we will see, was painful for both of the persons in it — to overdetermine both her life and Bruno’s.
We must thus also view their art as art on its own terms and in a historical tradition. However much Molly’s many paintings of flowers and crowd scenes can be viewed as escapist, they are also important works of art in their own right and are fascinating documents in the history of producing pleasing art, an all-too-often forgotten aspect of art history and theory. Often derided for the speed with which she painted them, Molly’s flowers evince an interest in some of the more complex issues in the philosophy of aesthetics. And her War Diary, in particular, is best understood not just as a comic take on CWAC life but as a polyvocal literary event formed from intertextual references that is a singular work in Canadian art. Molly’s CWAC paintings do more than record what otherwise would have been largely forgotten; they show her developing a sense of rhythm that makes her crowd pictures fairly shimmer with movement.
Similarly, though I examine Bruno’s works through the prism of their marriage, to see his art solely as a form of self-therapy — to see the pain and lashing contained in his art as defining Bruno tout court — is to ignore his singular contribution to Canadian figure painting. No other Canadian painter in the period tried to bring into the Canadian weltanschauung such diverse influences as J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Oskar Kokoschka, Carl Schaefer, and even Wyndham Lewis. His encounter with the terrible violence of war forced him to aestheticize the horror he saw during the Second World War. And however much Bruno was a classic Eastern European tortured soul, he is also the author of a number of humorous works and a fascinating examination of sexuality in a group not usually associated with eros: larger women. Further, while not as adventurous as his nudes and taut works, Bruno’s fishing-themed works should not be dismissed because the phrase “fishing buddies” seems flippant; these works are a singular contribution to the Canadian pastoral.
When compared to their contemporaries, Charles Comfort, Alexander (Alex) Colville, Christopher Pratt, and Mary Pratt, Molly’s and Bruno’s lives have received little comment. The essays in Molly Lamb Bobak: A Retrospective/Une Rétrospective published by Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery in 1993 and in Bruno Bobak: The Full Palette in 2006 are extremely useful. However, neither these two books nor curator Michelle Gewurtz’s recent monograph Molly Lamb Bobak: Life & Work are full-dress biographies. Nor did the authors of these works or of the few scholarly articles on Molly’s War Diary have access to Molly’s Diary and letters. Accordingly, these works do not consider Molly’s or Bruno’s work in relation to the detailed chronicle of their lives available to me and which forms the backbone of the chapters that follow. Anything but a Still Life seeks to fill this void by telling the stories of their lives and situating Molly’s and Bruno’s work in the flow of their lives across more than eight decades of the twentieth century. Anything but a Still Life takes us from their birth, through their education, their war artist years, their early professional years, and after 1960, the decades they spent in New Brunswick, years of marital strife, and triumphant painting.