Hilda Neatby's 1950s and My 1950s

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2006 by Dewar, Kenneth C

In the arts, Neatby's contemporaries made the same sort of impact. Artists like Jack Bush (1909-77), who helped found Painters Eleven in Toronto in 1953, Paul Emile Borduas (1905-60), the leader of the Automatiste movement in Quebec, and Bert Binning (1909-76), who led a modernist renaissance in Vancouver, helped to transform painting in Canada. In Vancouver, Binning was also a member of an architectural community-he was appointed to the faculty of the UBC School of Architecture in 1949-that was devoted to promoting the International Style introduced by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and adapting it to Vancouver tastes and conditions. One product of their efforts was the BC Electric Building (later BC Hydro) on Burrard Street, a sleek tower of steel and glass that dominated the city's skyline when it was finished in 1957. Binning designed the mosaic tiles used in the construction (Kalman 1994, 2:790-92; Liscombe 1997, ch. 1). A similar building, perhaps not quite so successful in the handling of its stylistic elements, was the Edmonton City Hall, which went up at exactly the same time and whose architect was Maxwell C. Dewar (1908-55), my father and another of Neatby's generation. As city architect, before entering private practice, he had already designed Victoria Composite High School, which had won him awards for innovative school design, although it would not have won him any praise from Neatby. The city hall had a central administrative block, rectangular in shape, the two ends of which (like the B.C. Electric Building) were pinched to form a kind of elongated lozenge, while the north and south faces angled slightly inward from the central axis. Edmonton historian James G. MacGregor calls it "the first modern building in Edmonton" (1967,287; Dewar 1988). Both buildings ruffled provincial feathers no less than a Jack Bush abstract; they also captured the optimism of postwar Canada.

All of these endeavours in the arts had lasting significance, to which one could add, in theatre, the beginning of the long-running satirical review Spring Thaw in 1948, the first production of John Coulter's Riel in February 1950, Andrew Allan's (1907-74) CBC radio drama series Stage, first broadcast at the end of the war, and the establishment of professional theatre companies in Stratford (1953), Toronto (1954), and Halifax (1963) (Moore 1994, 153-82; Charlebois 1996). Nevertheless, the defining centre of cultural production in the 1950s was literature. In addition to the individual authors and works I have already mentioned, a landmark conference took place in Kingston in 1955, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, neither the first time nor the last that American wealth has helped to sow the seeds of culture and nationality in Canada. Jointly organized and chaired by ER. Scott (1899-1985) and Roy Daniells (1902-79)-who had been one of three male applicants who had beaten out Neatby for a Royal Society of Canada fellowship in 1933 (Hayden 1983c, 20)-the theme of the conference was "The Writer, His Media and the Public." It brought together such people as Morley Callaghan, A.J.M. Smith, Dorothy Livesay (1909-96), and Malcolm Ross (1911-2002), along with younger writers and media people like Robert Weaver (b. 1921), Eli Mandel (1922-92), Adele Wiseman (1928-92), and Jack McClelland (1922-2004).