Birth of a Nation: Vimy Ridge
Vimy Ridge Memorial Sculpture
The Defenders, Breaking the Sword, Sympathy for the Helpless, Knowledge, Truth, Sacrifice
Walter Allward
Main Lobby, Canadian Museum of Civilization
Vimy Ridge Memorial, photo copyright Molly A. K. Shinhat
Stepping closer to Sympathy for the Helpless in search of sculptor Walter Allward's fingerprints, I am rooted. A galaxy of tiny black dots drifts across its surface. During his life, stone carvers in France used this three-dimensional map to recreate the sculptures at twice the scale in Yugoslavian limestone.
But I have stepped into someone else's sight line.
Fifty-year old Torontonian Doug Tiller peers intently through his glasses, sketching Allward's five plaster models in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's (CMC) lobby. Dressed in fading clothes, his backpack forgotten, lying nearby, Tiller spends half of his only day in Ottawa drenched in this experience.
It's unusual to see anyone so engaged in a Canadian art gallery or museum—even more so when the subject is Canadian art.
"I can almost sense his thumb pushing the clay across the surface," says Tiller of Walter Allward (1875-1955). He both designed and sculpted the Vimy Memorial in France, our monument to the 60,000 Canadians who died in the First World War.
The plaster models are five of the seventeen in the Canadian War Museums's (CWM) collection. Twenty were cast from the original clay sculptures that long since returned to dust.
"The thing that always struck me was the gesture, the romantic strength," Tiller adds. "You build the bones, and put the muscles on top.... It's beautiful."
"My grandfather was there," he says of the 1917 Battle for Vimy Ridge. If battles can liquefy maps, that experience did so for Canada. Ultimately Vimy is felt to have secured Canada's independent nationhood. Three thousand five hundred and ninety-eight Canadian soldiers were killed and seven thousand wounded.
"He said he'd never been so frightened in his life," Tiller recalls his grandfather saying. "I was too young at that time to really ask questions, and I didn't quite know."
"I think just the fact that it is what it is, just doing it (sketching) puts me in the time-space," of Vimy Ridge he adds.
...after dwelling on all the muck and misery over there, my spirit was like a thing tormented.... I dreamed I was in a great battlefield. I saw our men going in by the thousands and being mowed down by the sickles of death.... Suddenly...I saw thousands marching to the aid of our armies.
Walter Allward, 1921
Made between 1925 and 1930, the Vimy Memorial represents the zenith of Allward's career. After entering a competition in 1920, his design won over 160 others. A decade in construction and with a price tag of $1.5 million, the memorial was finally unveiled by King Edward VIII on July 29, 1936. Over 100,000 people witnessed the event.
But in 1934, Allward faced his own intensely personal tragedy. Born in 1903, his second son, Donald, also a sculptor had been working as his assistant at Vimy. On May 23 he died in a car accident in Dinard, Northern France.
"If you add the dream, this extraordinary drive to complete the memorial, to make sure that it's absolutely perfect, and then that ...it's the place where his own son dies... it just becomes an extraordinarily dramatic and emotive site both on the universal, national and the personal (levels)," says Laura Brandon, curator at the Canadian War Museum (CWM).
"It's remarkable that they have survived," she adds of the plaster models. "Essentially it's through benign neglect." Kept in storage for decades, in 1960 they were even slated for destruction. Amazingly they escaped to be restored in 1999 for the landmark exhibition curated by Brandon, Canvas of War.
"It's one thing to listen to oral history... it's another thing to read a book," or look at an object, says Dan Glenny, Director of Collections Management & Planning at the CWM. "My kids have had the experience of having a First World War veteran in the family who talked to them about it, but that's very rare ...kids...now high school or university age that have had that experience."
"So the (CWM) artifacts become more important. It's a way of personalizing the history," says Glenny, through the personal objects of the famous, like Billy Bishop, to the average unknown Canadian soldier. Combined with CWM's visual art, "it's as close as you're going to be able to get to actually talking to a living breathing person," he adds.
During my photo session with Laura Brandon, CWM's curator, she suggests a take-off of an Alex Coleville painting. If I have ever seen the painting, I don't remember it. And would this painting be the first war-related image I'd think of? Would it be so for anyone of my generation?
The thought ricochets off in many shrapnel-like realizations, difficult to dislodge.
Increasingly, the CWM faces a formidable challenge - reaching people like me, people between 25 and 45 and younger - and possibly also increasingly(?), people not born in Canada.
For us even the Vietnam War is a tiny selection of achingly brilliant films like Apocalypse Now. It is cinematic or photographic--not a lived experience or one primarily associated with painting. For us, if it is lived, ironically, it is not as soldiers but as Canadians who arrived here as Vietnamese refugees in the seventies.
And there are other distinctions. Why are some vets considered more equal than others when they all fought for our freedom? What of Sikh and Jewish veterans being banned from wearing religious headgear at some branches of the Royal Canadian Legion? Why do some veterans so frown on the placement of wreaths in remembrance of women raped in war?
Call it a generation gap, but at moments like this one with Brandon—through no fault of either of us—it feels like a chasm.
"You go in the trenches there (at Vimy) and you see what it was like—how stuffy, how small, the kinds of psychological warfare that was there because of the mud ... and the artillery." Major André Lévesque is Program Manager of the recently resurrected and reconfigured Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP).
"There's the intrinsic beauty of the sculpture per se and what it represents," he says of the Vimy memorial, "But ...it also gives us an opportunity to ask questions about what happened at Vimy Ridge."
Within one more generation, the Battle for Vimy will be over a century old. Major Lévesque hopes that art generated through CFAP will foster questioning around past conflicts as well as current ones.
Skirting minefields and unexploded grenades...where is the trench that runs back to the Battle for Vimy Ridge?
For myself, I discover that the majority of the Canadians at Vimy were immigrants, later naturalized. Britain's descendants strewn across the Empire like human seed, my own voyage reversed. For I too was born in England, the tiniest shard of India, the Empire's Jewel, much later to be transplanted to the very same colony as the men of Vimy Ridge.
And yet our birthplace, John McRae's words, Doug Tiller's sketches in India ink and, adrift in a galaxy of tiny black dots, Walter Allward's fingerprints ...float across the oceans of time and silence separating us ....
They were the dead. They rose...filed silently by and entered the fight to aid the living.... I have tried to show this in this monument...what we owed them and we will forever owe them.
Walter Allward, 1921
Published in The Ottawa Xpress
But I have stepped into someone else's sight line.
Fifty-year old Torontonian Doug Tiller peers intently through his glasses, sketching Allward's five plaster models in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's (CMC) lobby. Dressed in fading clothes, his backpack forgotten, lying nearby, Tiller spends half of his only day in Ottawa drenched in this experience.
It's unusual to see anyone so engaged in a Canadian art gallery or museum—even more so when the subject is Canadian art.
"I can almost sense his thumb pushing the clay across the surface," says Tiller of Walter Allward (1875-1955). He both designed and sculpted the Vimy Memorial in France, our monument to the 60,000 Canadians who died in the First World War.
The plaster models are five of the seventeen in the Canadian War Museums's (CWM) collection. Twenty were cast from the original clay sculptures that long since returned to dust.
"The thing that always struck me was the gesture, the romantic strength," Tiller adds. "You build the bones, and put the muscles on top.... It's beautiful."
"My grandfather was there," he says of the 1917 Battle for Vimy Ridge. If battles can liquefy maps, that experience did so for Canada. Ultimately Vimy is felt to have secured Canada's independent nationhood. Three thousand five hundred and ninety-eight Canadian soldiers were killed and seven thousand wounded.
"He said he'd never been so frightened in his life," Tiller recalls his grandfather saying. "I was too young at that time to really ask questions, and I didn't quite know."
"I think just the fact that it is what it is, just doing it (sketching) puts me in the time-space," of Vimy Ridge he adds.
...after dwelling on all the muck and misery over there, my spirit was like a thing tormented.... I dreamed I was in a great battlefield. I saw our men going in by the thousands and being mowed down by the sickles of death.... Suddenly...I saw thousands marching to the aid of our armies.
Walter Allward, 1921
Made between 1925 and 1930, the Vimy Memorial represents the zenith of Allward's career. After entering a competition in 1920, his design won over 160 others. A decade in construction and with a price tag of $1.5 million, the memorial was finally unveiled by King Edward VIII on July 29, 1936. Over 100,000 people witnessed the event.
But in 1934, Allward faced his own intensely personal tragedy. Born in 1903, his second son, Donald, also a sculptor had been working as his assistant at Vimy. On May 23 he died in a car accident in Dinard, Northern France.
"If you add the dream, this extraordinary drive to complete the memorial, to make sure that it's absolutely perfect, and then that ...it's the place where his own son dies... it just becomes an extraordinarily dramatic and emotive site both on the universal, national and the personal (levels)," says Laura Brandon, curator at the Canadian War Museum (CWM).
"It's remarkable that they have survived," she adds of the plaster models. "Essentially it's through benign neglect." Kept in storage for decades, in 1960 they were even slated for destruction. Amazingly they escaped to be restored in 1999 for the landmark exhibition curated by Brandon, Canvas of War.
"It's one thing to listen to oral history... it's another thing to read a book," or look at an object, says Dan Glenny, Director of Collections Management & Planning at the CWM. "My kids have had the experience of having a First World War veteran in the family who talked to them about it, but that's very rare ...kids...now high school or university age that have had that experience."
"So the (CWM) artifacts become more important. It's a way of personalizing the history," says Glenny, through the personal objects of the famous, like Billy Bishop, to the average unknown Canadian soldier. Combined with CWM's visual art, "it's as close as you're going to be able to get to actually talking to a living breathing person," he adds.
During my photo session with Laura Brandon, CWM's curator, she suggests a take-off of an Alex Coleville painting. If I have ever seen the painting, I don't remember it. And would this painting be the first war-related image I'd think of? Would it be so for anyone of my generation?
The thought ricochets off in many shrapnel-like realizations, difficult to dislodge.
Increasingly, the CWM faces a formidable challenge - reaching people like me, people between 25 and 45 and younger - and possibly also increasingly(?), people not born in Canada.
For us even the Vietnam War is a tiny selection of achingly brilliant films like Apocalypse Now. It is cinematic or photographic--not a lived experience or one primarily associated with painting. For us, if it is lived, ironically, it is not as soldiers but as Canadians who arrived here as Vietnamese refugees in the seventies.
And there are other distinctions. Why are some vets considered more equal than others when they all fought for our freedom? What of Sikh and Jewish veterans being banned from wearing religious headgear at some branches of the Royal Canadian Legion? Why do some veterans so frown on the placement of wreaths in remembrance of women raped in war?
Call it a generation gap, but at moments like this one with Brandon—through no fault of either of us—it feels like a chasm.
"You go in the trenches there (at Vimy) and you see what it was like—how stuffy, how small, the kinds of psychological warfare that was there because of the mud ... and the artillery." Major André Lévesque is Program Manager of the recently resurrected and reconfigured Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP).
"There's the intrinsic beauty of the sculpture per se and what it represents," he says of the Vimy memorial, "But ...it also gives us an opportunity to ask questions about what happened at Vimy Ridge."
Within one more generation, the Battle for Vimy will be over a century old. Major Lévesque hopes that art generated through CFAP will foster questioning around past conflicts as well as current ones.
Skirting minefields and unexploded grenades...where is the trench that runs back to the Battle for Vimy Ridge?
For myself, I discover that the majority of the Canadians at Vimy were immigrants, later naturalized. Britain's descendants strewn across the Empire like human seed, my own voyage reversed. For I too was born in England, the tiniest shard of India, the Empire's Jewel, much later to be transplanted to the very same colony as the men of Vimy Ridge.
And yet our birthplace, John McRae's words, Doug Tiller's sketches in India ink and, adrift in a galaxy of tiny black dots, Walter Allward's fingerprints ...float across the oceans of time and silence separating us ....
They were the dead. They rose...filed silently by and entered the fight to aid the living.... I have tried to show this in this monument...what we owed them and we will forever owe them.
Walter Allward, 1921
Published in The Ottawa Xpress
