Razzle dazzle

R E V I E W

Dalhousie Art Gallery's Peter Dykhuis and Mark Stebbins consider a painting by Arthur Lismer. (Bruce Bottomley Photo)

Lots of artists will tell you that art serves a purpose – providing beauty, for example, or provoking thought. What most won’t mention is that art can save you from a U-Boat’s torpedoes. Such utilitarianism is the focus of Razzle Dazzle: The Uses of Abstraction, the newest exhibit at the Dalhousie Art Gallery.

Razzle Dazzle focuses on the work of Arthur Lismer, an official Canadian war artist during First World War. Working as a war artist, Arthur Lismer was especially drawn to the “dazzle ships” moving in and out of Canadian harbours. Once typical warships and liners, a British marine painter named Norman Wilkinson had the bright idea of painting these vessels with swirls and stripes of color to trick the eye of enemy U-Boats. Once painted, the dazzle ships looked about as grim or warlike as rubber ducks: it’s hard to believe they were actually an act of military genius. But considering the tradition of bestowing warships with high-handed names—Wilhelmina, for example, or the grimly satiric Liberator (both featured in the exhibit)—it becomes clear that war has always evoked necessary abstraction. Dazzle ships were almost inevitable.

Abstract art’s sheer simplicity is challenging, and photographs of warships from the U.S. Naval Historical Center help ground excessively exuberant canvases in reality. Some early abstracts exhibit a flirtation with representation; Jack Bush’s Sash on Red Ground (1963) evokes a women’s figure or a skein of silk. Yvonne McKague Housser’s Study in Music is painted in oil on aluminum, and its spikes and curves suggest the stylized weaponry of a stained glass window, or the illustrations on a pack of cards. Of course, that’s just how I see it: sometimes it’s impossible not to project one’s own imagination onto abstract art. Ray Mead’s Black, Orange, Blue (1961) seems reminiscent of an old-fashioned black chalkboard, a square of red near the bottom standing in for an eraser. Even Guido Molinari’s 1966 Mutation, though nothing but stripes, has me thinking of the circus.

The dazzle ships were useful—enormously so—but deception is not limited to tactical painting: on the contrary, it is almost always present in art. The soldier in Arthur Lismer’s undated Gun Turret is scrawled, childlike, in ink on paper; a cheerful, simple piece belying both the artist’s skill and the soldier’s deadly duties. The crowd on the dock in Lismer’s Olympic with Returned Soldiers  (1919) looks cheerful, celebratory until you spot the blurred figure of a man hunched over what might be a cane. And in Arthur Lismer’s Halifax Harbour – Time of War (1917) the grey smoke and white clouds blend into swooping seagulls until it’s hard to tell which is which. Not all wartime deception and subterfuge, Lismer seems to be saying, is as easy to spot as a dazzle ship.