Jane Lind restores Paraskeva Clark, an exceptional Canadian painter of Russian extraction, to our cultural consciousness with her biography Perfect Red: The Life of Paraskeva Clark. The lavishly illustrated publication is timely, since the artist, once recognized as a catalyst among a Toronto community of painters that strove to push Canadian art beyond nationalist frames and conventions best associated with the Group of Seven, remains on the verge of obscurity.
Clark was an outspoken member of the Canadian Group of Painters, an organization formed in Toronto in 1931 as a direct outgrowth of the Group of Seven and one that aimed to represent the modern movement in Canadian painting. Yet her name is less than well known despite attempts in the early 1980s to celebrate her life and work. Lind writes of her encounter with the artist, an event made possible by Gail Singer's NFB documentary Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady, filmed near the end of Paraskeva Clark's life. It was this portrayal of an engaging woman, who spoke passionately about the role of art in society, that propelled the author to produce a painstakingly researched account of the artist's life.
Born and trained in Russia, Paraskeva Clark (née Plistik) immigrated to Canada in the summer of 1931 with her second husband, Philip Clark, whom she met in Paris. She had abandoned painting 10 years earlier when she left the Free Studios in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where she received instruction after the Revolution of 1917.
It was through her work at a theatre that she fell in love with and married Oreste Allegri Jr., the son of an Italian artist and stage designer. Were it not for Allegri's untimely death in a drowning accident little more than a year after their marriage, and only three months after the birth of their son, we might not be in a position to claim Paraskeva Clark as an important figure in the history of Canadian art. Clark brought her knowledge of European modernism to a fledgling arts community in Toronto, and it was in this milieu that she began to exhibit her work and develop her skills as a practising artist.
Lind portrays Clark as a vanguard artist, and also competently describes the tensions and difficulties that she must have experienced entering into not only an art world, which the artist herself described as arrière-garde, but also a family that adhered to Victorian conventions of Toronto's proper middle class.
Philip Clark, who later became the comptroller-general for the province of Ontario, came from a "Fine Old Ontario Family," and it was expected that his wife would behave in an appropriately decorous manner. The Clark family promptly forbade the red lipstick that she wore. Her political beliefs, that veered to the left of the political spectrum, would have been at odds with her conservative in-laws. Yet Clark found a way to assert herself and her beliefs in her art. The self-portrait entitled Myself, painted and exhibited in 1933 (now in the National Gallery of Canada's permanent collection), depicts the artist dressed elegantly in black. Clark's lipsticked mouth is the only use of bold colour in the composition. Did the artist intend this canvas as a bold statement, as Lind suggests when she writes that the painting works as a declaration? "I am here! Not only am I here, but I am my own person, a woman of style and elegance to be reckoned with."
Lind often reminds the reader that we will never know the motivations of the artist, but nonetheless freely conjectures as she frequently cites thoughts and emotions attributed to Clark without sufficient documentation. A great weakness of the book is that much of the narrative in Perfect Red remains speculative. In grappling with how best to portray an artist who left behind a substantial archive and many artworks in both public and private collections, Lind opts for a conventional approach, and the outcome is a book that reads both as a chronicle of events in the artist's life and as the biographer's own process of discovering and developing an understanding of her chosen subject.
While this is not an academic book, Lind has clearly made a choice to try to discover the woman rather than critically analyze her artworks. The politically charged decades for which Clark's work is best known - the 1930s and 1940s - offer a rich context that Lind engages with where necessary, although her writing indicates a naive understanding of specific historical conditions. It is the personal aspect of Paraskeva Clark's life, the relationships and the hardships endured, that are focused on. These lesser known details offer a more complete picture of the woman who painted the political allegory Petroushka (1937), an exemplary work by one of the few socially conscious artists working in Canada during the Depression.
Such an unconventional figure in the history of Canadian art is deserving of wider recognition. Paraskeva Clark's Self-Portrait, painted in France in 1925 prior to any thoughts of a working life in Canada, is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where it is part of an installation titled History and Her Story. The clever interventions made by the curators at the AGO have made it possible for Clark to occupy a rightful place among renowned Canadian and European artists, and Jane Lind's biography will only aid in a much-needed reconsideration of this remarkable artist.
Michelle Gewurtz has worked as an art educator and curator in Ontario and British Columbia. She is currently at the University of Leeds completing a PhD dissertation titled Political Engagement and the Art of Claude Cahun, Jeanne Mammen and Paraskeva Clark.