Maxwell Bates: Biography of an Artist

David Kimmel is a Ph.D. candidate in history at York University.

Maxwell Bates (1906–1980) was an architect, a poet, a critic, and an
important western Canadian painter and printmaker. He traveled widely,
spent five years in a German POW camp, and had an impressive circle of
friends and acquaintances. His art sold well during his lifetime and
after, and he was presented with a number of awards of distinction and
honorary degrees. Kathleen Snow’s book about him is well researched
and competently written, but it is not the thorough critical rendering
this artist’s career deserves.

Drawing from Bates’s memoirs, poetry, critical writings, and papers,
as well as interviews with the artist’s friends, Snow’s account
takes the reader from Bates’s birth in Calgary to his death in
Victoria. But the story rarely rises above the level of richly annotated
chronology. The author includes too much irrelevant detail, as though
reluctant to have any evidence or anecdotes she researched go unused.
She advises the reader that she is not equipped to offer “a critical
appraisal of Bates’ work.” But even an absence of such commentary
does not excuse her failure to provide a full enough understanding of
how Bates fit into his artistic milieu. True, he was largely self-taught
and a “reticent” character. But he was also a part of creative
circles that included Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer in 1930s London,
Canadian artists Jock Macdonald and Roy Kiyooka, and critics Donald
Buchanan and Russell Harper. Bates’s brief studies with the German
painter Max Beckmann might have led Snow to a more thorough treatment of
the development of Bates’s distinctive naive expressionist style.
Finally, Snow occasionally resorts to unjust clichés regarding
Bates’s purported anonymity east of Winnipeg. According to David
Blackwood, who wrote the book’s foreword, Bates was known to and
respected by Ontario College of Art students in the 1950s and 1960s.
Later, Snow incongruously attributes Blackwood’s enthusiasm for the
western painter to Blackwood’s Newfoundland origins.

This book, which could have said much more about the developing
creative communities in Calgary and Victoria, is nevertheless well
documented and handsomely designed. Forty color plates are grouped
infelicitously at the end of the volume.