Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada: A Mennonite Artist in the Canadian Landscape, 1925-1995 By Laurence Neufeld and Monika McKillen, eds., Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen Copyright © The Ontario Historical Society, 2010 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Document generated on 04/05/2021 9:39 p.m. Ontario History Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada: A Mennonite Artist in the Canadian Landscape, 1925-1995 By Laurence Neufeld and Monika McKillen, eds., Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen Tom Smart Imagining New Worlds in the New World: Entertainment, Agency, and Power in Upper Canada Volume 102, Number 2, Fall 2010 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1065590ar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1065590ar See table of contents Publisher(s) The Ontario Historical Society ISSN 0030-2953 (print) 2371-4654 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this review Smart, T. (2010). Review of [Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada: A Mennonite Artist in the Canadian Landscape, 1925-1995 By Laurence Neufeld and Monika McKillen, eds., Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen]. Ontario History, 102(2), 248–249. https://doi.org/10.7202/1065590ar https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ https://www.erudit.org/en/ https://www.erudit.org/en/ https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/onhistory/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1065590ar https://doi.org/10.7202/1065590ar https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/onhistory/2010-v102-n2-onhistory04948/ https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/onhistory/ 248 ONTARIO HISTORY campus, in Scarborough. In both cases For- estry could have been a big fish in newer, smaller ponds (and ponds surrounded by actual forests!). Kuhlberg believes that the failed Scarborough move may have set in motion the termination of Toronto’s un- dergraduate forestry program, concluded in 1993. Yet One Hundred Rings and Counting ends on an optimistic note. In 2007, the centennial year, Kuhlberg had found Forestry—now a faculty for gradu- ate study only—to have become a research powerhouse with a strong conservation ethic and a firm national and international reputation. In contemporary times, however, I note (as does Kuhlberg ) a relapse into old denials, particularly the belief that Cana- dian forests were inexhaustible. In com- parison with most developed countries, can we honestly label ourselves today as exemplary environmental stewards? As of early 2010, Forestry at the University of Toronto also sits on another precipice of major restructuring. Can one imagine the outcome, had Queen’s or Guelph been home to forestry? Is Lakehead University poised to be home for the leading (or only) forestry faculty in Ontario in the present century? The title of the concluding chap- ter— “all that is old is new again”—rings on even beyond the end of One Hundred Rings and Counting. I greatly enjoyed One Hundred Rings and Counting, both as an exciting and easy read and as an important historical summary of a yet broadly undocumented and important piece of Ontario’s forestry legacy. It should appeal to anyone with a concern for resource management and will have a particular pull for those with an interest in forestry or the inner work- ings of Canadian universities. I hope that this book also finds a place in the courses of Canada’s (remaining ) forestry programs. Nathan Basiliko University of Toronto Mississauga One of the gratifying events in the life of a curator or art historian is discovering a new voice. Rarely does an artist appear fully formed with a body of work that is unique, deeply felt and resonant. All the more is the pleasure when the artist’s life and work are digested between the covers of a book that explores the art fully, in depth and with an intelli- gence that accords the artist a proper place Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada: A Mennonite Artist in the Canadian Landscape, 1925-1995 By Laurence Neufeld and Monika McKillen, eds., Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010. vi + 146 pages. $50.00 hard- cover. ISBN 978-1-55458-190-0 (www.wlupress.wlu.ca) in the landscape of Canadian art. Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen have done such a service in their sensitive and nuanced analysis of the art of Wolde- mar Neufeld, a Mennonite artist whose work is deceptively simple, yet speaks to the great feelings of loss and longing clothed in the garments of what the artist saw in front of his eyes and in the back of his mind. 249book rev�ews Neufeld the person was formed out of the traumatic convulsions of the Russian Revolution. His father was executed by the Revolutionaries and, with his mother and stepfather, young Woldemar fled to Can- ada. There he grew up in the company of a large step-family and in the bosom of the Mennonite com- munity in central Ontario. Neufeld the artist channelled the contemporary Canadian landscape idioms, spawned by the Group of Seven and their acolytes, and displayed an acute visual mem- ory, absorbing the crafts of commercial art, graphic illustra- tion and woodblock printing. An art edu- cation in Cleveland gave this precocious young man an avenue to break out of what must have been claustrophobic worlds: Ca- nadian art at mid-century, and the mores and conventions of his community. Neufeld travelled across the country painting, and it would seem that he was in many ways self-taught. To be sure, he was well trained, yet his personal style and idio- syncratic voice prevented him from merely aping modes, movements and contempo- rary trends. As the Tiessens so ably convey, Neufeld answered to his own muse, dis- playing a confidence to remain aloof from fashion; he never fully embraced one way of painting or image-making that could rightly be claimed as his alone. Neufeld’s work betrays a deeply el- egaic sense, though. The over-riding theme is diaspora—a theme that the Tiessens highlight but hesitate to explore in all its dimensions. There is a sense of anxious movement in Neufeld’s images, a kind of furtiveness that persists in his images of al- leys and backyards, farm fields or broken limbs. Neufeld the artist appears to look with fondness at the idyllic civic parks, but there are surreal elements in each image that take them beyond the saccharine to a place that is neither real nor completely imagined. This is the tension in the art that the authors suggest. Neufeld’s journey as an art- ist mirrors a kind of existential wander- ing that took hold in North America as the Europe of his youth collapsed. Its exiles, particularly young artists like Neufeld, had to subsume loss and find new metaphors of home in a distant and strange land. His was the plight of the alien, and his art traces his search for the home he lost. Woldemar Neufeld can rightly be placed in the company of such fellow Ca- nadian artists as William Kurelek, Ernest Lindner and others—artists whose unique voices rendered them regionalists, or curi- osities whose work would never comfort- ably fit in the canon or the rubrics of mod- ernism. The Tiessens have done a great service by introducing us to this gifted, idi- osyncratic and generous man whose relent- less search for home still resonates. Tom Smart McMichael Canadian Collection