PROVENANCE
Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
Marjorie and Howard Isman, Vancouver
Murray Isman, Vancouver
Dr. Luigi Rossi, Kelowna and Grande Prairie
Estate of Dr. Luigi Rossi

LITERATURE
Marjorie M. Halpin, Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image, UBC Museum of Anthropology, 1986, reproduced page 37 and listed page 50
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, reproduced page 209
The Rossi Collection: A Circle of Friends, Kelowna Art Gallery, 2018, listed page 45

EXHIBITED
UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image, June 17 – November 30, 1986
Kelowna Art Gallery, The Rossi Collection: A Circle of Friends, November 10, 2018 – January 20, 2019

“I have had a complex, ongoing relationship with West Coast Indian art,” Jack Shadbolt wrote in his personal journal in 1985, the year he painted Grieving Spirit.[1] Born in England in 1909 and brought to British Columbia as a toddler, he had begun sketching Indigenous masks at the original BC Provincial Museum after his first meeting with Emily Carr in Victoria in 1930, when he was a 21-year-old art teacher in Duncan, near the Cowichan reserve. “From then on masks had a special significance for me as a way to get at human states without resort to traditional portraiture. They let loose my subconscious imagination and led me to my first stylizations of the human features.”[2]

Under the dual influence of Carr and his early mentor Max Maynard, Shadbolt’s landscapes also started to speak of a sensed Indigenous presence in the shadowed forests and scarred clear-cuts:

To the outsider—and I can only regard myself as that,… they seem to stir in me a kind of tragic poetry which, if I could capture it, would add depth and primitive overlay to my imagery. I cannot see the beaches and coves and headlands and the sea without thinking this was their land. Their vision preceded me.[3]

While he was fully engaged with international trends in the art world, Shadbolt’s yearning to be rooted in the BC landscape led him to propose that the influence of Indigenous art had to be part of any development towards a true West Coast modernism. In the 1940s to 1950s, he explored this by deconstructing these non-Western symbols and abstracted representations into elements that could be applied to his own developing form of abstraction. Later, he followed design aspects of ritual to give outward expression to his own interior states and psychological tensions, combining otherworldly surrealism with Picasso-inspired dismemberment and reassembly of forms.

Grieving Spirit was first exhibited in the major exhibition Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image at the University of BC’s Museum of Anthropology, curated by anthropologist Marjorie Halpin, head of the museum’s Northwest Coast collection, to coincide with Vancouver’s centennial celebration and the world’s fair Expo 86. A centrepiece of the MOA exhibition was Shadbolt’s 1976 Coast Indian Suite, a 68-foot, 20-panel sequence of graphite drawings in which renderings of historic masks, rattles and crests hover in the foreground as they emerge from tangled forest landscapes.

In the lead-up to the exhibition, Shadbolt was moved to revisit these influences, and he completed three square-format works that incorporated “a floating configuration derived from masks or ceremonial head gear over a land or sea context,” including Grieving Spirit. He wrote, “I notice a theme of pungent commentary about the West Coast Indian civilization and its problems of survival and decline in addition to my usual previous more lyrical or poetic involvement with ritual and transformation.”[4]

In Grieving Spirit, against a background of mountains he has carefully transcribed the forms of an archival mask—a Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask representing the ancestral sun carved by Charlie James pre-1910—giving it super clarity, but has narrowed the eyes to a squinting and sorrowful gaze. These late paintings move us out of the mythological realm of international primitivism and into the present time and specific place of British Columbia.

On the 2009 centennial of Shadbolt’s birth, curator Sarah Milroy wrote: “Building on Carr’s somewhat romanticized way of experiencing the landscape, he came to hold a political view of man’s place in nature, and the competing claims of aboriginal and European settlers—a context that still stimulates public life in British Columbia today and continues to be central to the art of the region.”[5]

We thank Susan M. Mertens, editor of Jack Shadbolt: In His Words, for contributing the above essay.

1. Susan M. Mertens, Jack Shadbolt: In His Words (Vancouver: Figure 1, 2024), 144.

2. Ibid., 146.

3. Ibid., 155–56.

4. Quoted in Marjorie M. Halpin, Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image (Vancouver: UBC Museum of Anthropology, in assoc. with UBC Press, 1986), exhibition catalogue, 45.

5. Sarah Milroy, “Jack Shadbolt’s Turbulent Landscapes,” Globe and Mail, June 9, 2009.

For the biography on Dr. Luigi Rossi in PDF format, please click here.

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