Art, Education, and a "new world society": Joseph McCulley's Pickering College and Canadian Muralism, 1934-1950

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2007 by Niergarth, Kirk

The mixture of science, religion, and radicalism of Haydon's mural was closely aligned with the ideas and ideals of Joseph McCulley. The same summer Haydon was working on his mural, McCulley published an article in Canadian Forum in which he explained that, while "science has offered to us a vision of a world of abundance [and] there is no fundamental or essential shortage of the good things of life for which we must all scramble," the industrial revolution had led to "an economic oligarchy which has in large measure tended to vitiate the potential achievements of democracy." In Canada "power ha[d] been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and ... the political scene was controlled from back stage by the economic power." Churches and schools, through institutional expansion, had also become controlled by the same interests, and institutions, he argued, "have been in a great measure defenders of the status quo." McCulley protested this state of affairs and challenged religious leaders to "keep before mankind the highest vision of its possibilities. The task is not merely to redeem individuals or to enable them to adjust themselves to the unideal conditions in which they find themselves, but to challenge them to change the unideal, to bring it nearer to the ideal, to bring nearer to realization the prophet's dream of a kingdom of God on earth." For educators, McCulley wrote, this same task required a revolution in pedagogical practice. While a school should not become "a propaganda agent," it could "keep before its pupils the objective of a more just and more equitable social and economic order" (McCulley 1934, 436-38). Haydon's mural kept this objective before Pickering College students every time they stepped into the gymnasium. Almost a perfect illustration of McCulley's article, the mural is a visual expression of his social and educational ideals.

Canadian Muralism in the 1930s and 1940s

After the official unveiling of Haydon's Pickering College Mural in December 1934, Donald Buchanan was the critic most interested in publicizing it. He published Haydon's description of the mural in Canadian Forum, and a politically sanitized version (leaving out the lines about the "closed eyes of piety" and the "open eyes of business exploitation") in Saturday Night with an accompanying photograph of the work (Buchanan 1934, 1935a). In both publications, he pointed to the influence on Haydon of Mexican muralists, Rivera and Orozco, and American artist Rockwell Kent.10 In Saturday Night, he called it "a mural worth fighting about," and in Canadian Forum he wrote of his hope "that it may provoke a dispute, if only to enliven Canadian interest in mural painting." Buchanan had good reason to think that the Haydon mural would prove controversial. This, after all, was only three years and a few kilometres removed from the Art Gallery of Toronto's refusal to hang Bertram Brooker's Nudes in Landscape, and Buchanan was bemoaning the censorship of similar paintings only a few months after his article about Haydon in Canadian Forum (1935b). In Haydon's mural, the nude figures alone, on display in a school, could have been enough to cause a stir, to say nothing of its Utopian socialism. The reaction never came. Perhaps, like Haydon, Canadian conservatives had learned something from Rivera's mural at the Rockefeller Center: controversy served radical interests far better than indifference. Or, perhaps, Haydon's mural avoided controversy because, unlike Rivera, Haydon had a politically sympathetic patron. What seems most likely, however, is that Haydon's mural was not maligned because it posed little immediate threat to the established order. If Pickering College provided an atmosphere of freedom for Haydon to produce work that questioned economic and religious orthodoxy, it was able to do so in part because the walls of its gymnasium existed at some remove from the centre of political and economic power in Canada. In other words, while it was possible for Haydon to paint an explicitly radical mural in a small private school, it would have been much more difficult for Canadian muralist Charles Comfort to do likewise on the walls of the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE).