The Balancings of the Clouds: Paintings of Mary Klassen

Virgil Hammock is president of the Canadian section of the International
Association of Art Critics and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts
at Mount Allison University.

Unrau’s remembrances of the life and painting of his mother, Mary
Klassen, would be more interesting if the art weren’t so awful.

Klassen was born in the Ukraine, the daughter of a Mennonite family
that fled to Canada in the late 1920s. They settled in Saskatchewan,
where they devotedly followed their faith. Klassen wanted to study art,
and her family allowed her that luxury—no small thing for a Mennonite
family in the Depression.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Klassen studied with Ernest Lindner
in Saskatoon. She was drawn to landscape art, which has always been an
important subject for Prairie artists; however, I am sorry to say that I
find her landscape paintings—at least those reprinted
here—uninspiring. One senses that Klassen avoided human subject matter
because her strong religious background would have made her
uncomfortable with subjects like figure drawing.

Like so many women art students of the 1940s, Klassen gave up the idea
of becoming an artist to marry and raise a family. And while the
production of her art works since 1940 has been minuscule, the quality
of her work has not improved since her student days.

There is reason to doubt the sincerity of either the artist or the
author in this book. (For such a personal record, it seems to be overly
footnoted, but then the author is a professor of English.) It’s a nice
homage by a son to his mother, and maybe that is enough.