This weekend

Tags

Beaverbrook, Budget, Food, Fredericton, Halifax, Riopelle, Ukraine

A quiet time really, much was done this week and now it is quiet. I continue to be horrified by the situation in Ukraine and the war crimes of Russia. The Federal Budget came out yesterday and I am happy with it. I think that Chrystia Freeland as Finance Minister gave us a responsible budget and is addressing important issues. I was also happy to see Justice Brown Jackson confirmed to the US Supreme Court, I heard her speak at the hearing and was impressed with her knowledge and calm, well spoken, she will do well on the Bench. She reminds me of our Canadian Supreme Court Judges, in the way she handles herself.

I am still trying to plan a trip to Halifax which is 325 km away. I would go over 2 days so as not to be too tired.

We visited Fredericton in New Brunswick 2 years ago and at the time the Beaverbrook Art Gallery was closed for a large second expansion construction work. It reopens this weekend with a Jean-Paul Riopelle, CC GOQ RCA (1923-2002) painting exhibit.

He was a painter and sculptor from Quebec, Canada. He had one of the longest and most important international careers of the sixteen signatories of the Refus Global, the 1948 manifesto that announced the Quebecois artistic community’s refusal of clericalism and provincialism.

If ever you visit Fredericton, do go see the Beaverbrook Gallery, it’s collection is beautiful and extensive. The city itself is rich in Canadian History and great heritage architecture. It became an important military garrison town during the revolution in the colonies, several well known figures like Major Andre, Benedict Arnold and others came to Fredericton and their homes can be seen. Fredericton is the Capital of New Brunswick and is name after one of the sons of King George III.

The Beaverbrook Gallery with the new Harrison McCain wing.

I always say to people who would not visit an art gallery that if you go and see a painting that appeals to you, think that the painter is talking to you. The painting is a conversation and the painter is expressing a thought, an idea or a mood. Every painting has a story just like a book, it is up to you to make the effort to decipher what is going on.

Harrison McCain (1927-2004) was the potato king in Florenceville, New Brunswick. McCain products can be seen in all grocery stores from french fries to frozen pizza. He died some years ago and his family gave money to have this wing built at the Beaverbrook. Back in 1984, I was starting my Foreign Service Career and in those days, the Department of Foreign Affairs would send all new recruits on a Canada wide tour. We came to visit the McCain factory and HQ in Florenceville. Harrison McCain, spoke rapid-fire English — and he drove his Cadillac just as fast. He was assertive, salty-tongued, headstrong, and charismatic, he greeted us and like all multi-billionaire business tycoon, he was super confident in his product and it was a national success. After showing us around and boasting about the Frozen French Fry, he showed us a new products aimed at kids after school snack, the mini pizza. It was no bigger than 3 inches across with a tomato cheese topping. The audience test had gone very well, mothers and kids loved it. He asked if we had any questions, one colleague of mine being very earnest and a bit of an nutritional activist, said; Mr McCain how do you feel about feeding fast food to children and ruining their health. McCain was obviously very angry at this question, he immediately demanded the name of this person. We were ushered out quickly and the next day we heard that he had phoned Ottawa and spoke to the Minister asking that this individual be sacked on the spot for attacking a national brand. This person was not fired, but we were told in no uncertain terms never to do this ever again.

Sweets

Tags

Beaverbrook, Berlin, Exil Museum, Otto Dix, sweets, XMAS

It seems that the Holiday Season is the season for Sweets of all kinds. You receive them as gifts, you make some to give as a gift or for dessert or to offer to people visiting. Here at our house we have little bags of goodies, full of chocolates and other sweets we give out to guests. Then there are the cakes and pastries, here have another one, but I already had 3, it does not matter who is counting anyway it’s the Holidays.

We have enough sweets to last us until at least Valentines day. It is almost as if because it is the end of the year over eating is a way of saying, you know what, I made it through another year, I deserve a reward especially after 2020!

A few years ago when I worked on the painting exhibit by Canadian War Artists at the Canadian War Museum, I discovered a collection of Canadian paintings numbering about 1000, by Canadian men who had enlisted for the 1914-1918 conflict. Their job was to document the horrors of the battlefield for posterity. These fellows were in many cases painters, 6 of them would go on after the war to form the celebrated Canadian Group of Seven. One of those men was A.Y. Jackson. His paintings of battlefield and ravaged landscape where presented juxtaposed to those of another famous artists Otto Dix who fought against him in the trenches on the German Side. Both men knew each other and respected each others work, lived long lives but unfortunately never met. Otto Dix in Germany created the movement called New Objectivity in painting with his harshly realistic paintings. He quickly fell afoul of the Nazi regime in 1933 and was declared degenerate by their ideological standards. He stayed in Germany but was under house arrest and narrowly avoided the concentration camps.

The group of seven during the years 1919-1933 were painting Canadian Wilderness Landscapes, a first since no one before them had done it. It was new and exciting in the Canadian Art World. What many people do not know is that Max Aitken Lord Beaverbrook not only financed the work of Canadian War Artists but took care of collecting the works. Today this war art collection is mostly in the vaults of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Some pieces are seen from time to time by the public. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton houses the Art collection of Max Aitken, and it is impressive. He had the money and influence to acquire great art and the gallery is celebrated for its works of art. It is currently closed for an expansion project until 2022.

I was looking at yet another architectural project in Berlin. A city that has experienced a renaissance since 1989 with the fall of the Wall. This one is the building of a Museum to Exile, dedicated to all the people forced out in the period 1933-1940 by the policies of the Nazi Regime. Artists, opposition politicians, scientists, academics, musicians, basically anyone who was targeted and told to get out before it was too late.

The new museum to be built with an opening date of 2025 will be located in what use to be the Official Train Station of the German State, Anhalter Bahnhof. All important arrivals and departures from Berlin took place at this train station, the Kaiser used the Anhalter Bahnhof for this purpose and then it was used by the Nazi Regime for welcoming friendly Heads of Government like Italian Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini on his visit to Berlin in 1938. Between 1933 and 1940 it became also the train station used by people forced out, going into exile because they fell afoul of the Nazi Regime, thousands left for other countries in Europe through this station.

Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof in 1900.

What is left today of this once large train station in central Berlin.

The station has stood as a ruin for more than 70 years, everything else that was once part of this great building a field of ruin and open land. It is not clear why only the portico survived, but part of the Communist ideology wanted such vestiges to teach people a lesson and East Berlin was until 1990 strewn with such ruins. East Germany occupied by the Russians was full of historical and cultural sites, left mostly abandoned. Cities like Leipzing where J.S.Bach lived and worked suffered greatly at the hands of the East German government who demolished many historical sites they did not like, Dresden and Potsdam are another example of cities re-built to fit the new ideology. What was East Berlin was full of monuments to the past and it too got the bulldozer treatment. On the other hand Nazi building like the Air Ministry of Herman Goering unscathed by the war were re-used and housed Communist party functionaries and Soviet agents. This building today still stands and houses the German Government Social Services dept. it resembles in its design two buildings in Ottawa on Wellington Street, the West and East Memorial Buildings.

The Danish architectural firm of Dorte Mandrup in Copenhagen is now tasked with building the structure that will house the Exil museum, which aims to portray the history of German exile during the Nazi era. It is estimated that half a million people fled Nazi persecution.

The Anhalter Bahnhof station in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district was one of the most important long-distance train stations in Berlin during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic.

After the rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in the spring of 1933, many people left the city using this station. People like Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Klaus Mann, Lotte Laserstein, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius, Billy Wilder.

From 1942, the Nazis used the station to deport Jews to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Many of those emigrants were not allowed to work in their new host countries, or banned from practicing their actual professions. In addition to losing their homes, friends and family, they also lost their cultural and professional identity this way. Many became destitute, and were greeted by rejection and animosity in their new homes.

The construction of the museum will largely be financed by private donations, with costs being estimated to run up to €25 to 30 million ($30 to 35 million).

The New Exil Museum in Berlin, schedule to open in 2025.

Fredericton

Tags

Beaverbrook, Food, Fredericton, New Brunswick, PEI

This week we are travelling to Fredericton, the Capital of the Province of New Brunswick. It is about 4 hours away from Charlottetown, PEI. The Maritimes has a strong connection to Germany with nameplace and New England with the arrival of thousands of Loyalists who fled the civil war and revolution in 1776. Fredericton has a population of 60,000 people, it is the seat of the Legislature and of the Lieutenant Governor. It started as a garrison town, first under the French regime and then under the British.p

Fredericton is name for:

Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany KG GCB GCH (Frederick Augustus; 16 August 1763 – 5 January 1827) was the second son of George III , King of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Hanover, and his consort Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. A soldier by profession, from 1764 to 1803 he was Prince-Bishop of Osnabruck (near Munster) in the Holy Roman Empire. From the death of his father in 1820 until his own death in 1827 he was the Heir Presumptive to his elder brother, George IV, in both the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Kingdom of Hanover.

Frederick was thrust into the British Army at a very early age and was appointed to high command at the age of thirty. As Commander-in-Chief during the Napoleonic Wars, he oversaw the re-organisation of the British Army, establishing vital structural, administrative and recruiting reforms.

At one time prior to 1784, Nova Scotia comprised PEI and New Brunswick. It was one large British colony in Atlantic Canada. The territory was carved up later for administrative reasons. New Brunswick became a colony in 1784 and later a Province of Canada in 1867.

The name of the Province New Brunswick was given in 1784 to the territory in honour of King George III who was also Duke of Brunswick and Luneburg in Lower Saxony in Germany. The population of the Province is 780,000.

New Brunswick is often thought of as a place you drive through on your way to somewhere else. It borders Maine, Nova Scotia, Quebec and PEI. The original inhabitants where the Mi’k Maq and as of 1604 the French settlers arrived known as Acadians. Today New Brunswick is the only Official Bilingual (French-English) Province in Canada. The Acadians represent one third of the population. Two families dominate and control the economy, the Irvings and the McCains. The first time I drove through the province in 2016, I was coming from Ottawa, following the highway I arrived at Edmundston and started seeing on the highway signs warning of Moose crossing and giving a phone number to call if you saw any Moose on the highway. High fences were also placed on the side of the road to keep the Moose off the road. It is always better to drive in N.B. in daytime and avoid driving around sunset and at night, a crash with a moose is usually deadly.

Fredericton is known for many things, but one is the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, created by Max Aitken Lord Beaverbrook, a businessman from New Brunswick who became a close confident of Winston Churchill and owner of a chain of British newspapers. He was very influential in Britain and Canada and because of his humble origins and his willy ways was detested by some Courtiers at Buckingham Palace and some in the Government establishment. In Canada Beaverbrook is sort of a legend and so is his wife who outlived him and was every inch the Upper class doyenne. There are lots of stories about her and how people knew how demanding she could be, but Lady Beaverbrook was tenacious.

New Brunswick is also known for its good restaurants and markets, scenic spots and beautiful national parks and the famous tides of the Bay of Fundy.

So a few days in Fredericton and surrounding area to see something new.

The Senate Paintings

Tags

Beaverbrook, Canada., Canadian Army, EIIR, First World War, VRI, War artists

In 1857 the Chief Minister of the Legislative Council John A. MacDonald advised the Queen that Ottawa, a small lumber camp where the head of the Rideau Canal was located would make a wonderful spot for a new Capital of Canada. He used the talent and charm of Lady Anna-Maria Head, the wife of Sir Edmund Head, Governor General of the Province of Canada (Ontario-Quebec of today) to show the Queen the watercolours she had made of the hills around the Ottawa River. Sir Edmund lived in those days in Quebec City which was the seat of the Royal Government and had travelled to Ottawa simply to see the sight at the invitation of John A.MacDonald.

Early draft design for the West block of Parliament, mixture of French Chateau and Bavarian folly. The final design will have some elements of this draft.

Central block of Parliament in 1900. Wellington street is not paved yet.

The watercolours of Lady Head were quite beautiful and the Queen was happy to name this mud camp as the site of the future Capital of the Dominion of Canada. Construction of the Parliament buildings started on what will become Parliament Hill and the rest is history. It must have been quite incongruous to have such majestic buildings built in what was no more than a shipping and processing area for the lumber industry with a host of sawmills and other ugly industries and a population of rough necks, Bytown as Ottawa was known had more bars and brothels than schools or churches. The main buildings were completed in 1864 a full 3 years before Canada became a Unified country. The West block suffered a terrible fire in 1897 and was rebuilt the main Central block was totally destroyed by fire in 1916. In both cases the shellack used on the wood panels and floors of the building was to blame as it was highly flammable in an age where all men smoked pipes or cigars.

When the Central block of Parliament was rebuilt in 1922 after the terrible fire of 1916 which destroyed the entire building, both the House of Commons and the Senate were remodelled and enlarged given that the population of Canada had increased and the architectural style under George V (1910-1936) was very different from the fashion under his grandmother Queen Victoria who had died in 1901.

Parliament today, the Senate is on the right side of the photo and the house is   on the left side.

With the creation of a united Dominion of Canada in 1867 people started to think of themselves as Canadians and with the advent of the First World War and the enormous contribution of Canada, people were in a different frame of mind.  Though there was no Canadian Citizenship as such on paper, Canadians were still all British Subjects and will be until the Act of Parliament in 1949, people thought of themselves as Canadians. The First World War had demonstrated that we could achieve things and sometimes do better than other Countries, like Britain.

The interior decoration of the Parliament building reflects the changing history and circumstances in Canada.

I came upon the large paintings inside the Senate Chamber. For years I had assumed that they were part of a collection but did not know exactly which one and how they came about to being inside the Senate Chamber.

During the First World War (1914-1918) Canada contributed some 700,000 men to fight in Flanders. Given that we had no army prior to 1914 this was an extraordinary feat. This number represents 10% of the total population of the country at the time.

Because the army was put together very quickly there was no time to think of an Official War Art department. Other countries like Britain, France, Germany, Russia etc.. had War Artists who would sketch and paint on battlefields to record the action.

Max Aitken Lord Beaverbrook, a native of New Brunswick had moved to England where he had become the first Press Baron and a Member of Parliament in Westminster. Something you could do back then, you could run for Parliament in Ottawa or London. He set-up a Canadian War Art program and recruited Canadian artists, mostly soldiers who had been wounded to return to the battlefield to sketch and record Canadian  troops in action.

At the end of the War some 1000 paintings and sketches formed what became known as the Beaverbrook Canadian War Memorial Fund Collection. Many of the paintings are considered to be controversial and have not been shown since 1919. Others were considered acceptable by the politicians in Parliament and have been on display.

In the Senate several large canvasses where hung in 1922 and have remained ever since.

Landing of the First Canadian Division at Saint-Nazaire 1915 by Edgar Bundy.

Mobile Veterinary Unit in France by Algernon Talmage

Railway construction in France by Leonard Richmond

Arras, the dead city by James Kerr-Lawson

The cloth Hall Ypres by James Kerr-Lawson

The Watch on the Rhine by Sir William Rothenstein 

Returning to the reconquered land by Sir George Clausen

On leave by Claire Atwood

None of the above named artists are Canadians, all are British but were recruited by Lord Beaverbrook to work on the Canadian War Art project. Other paintings are in the National Gallery and in the Canadian War Museum many are still in storage in both museum.

Sacrifice by Charles Sims is an allegorical painting about death and the destruction of battle. We are standing behind the cross with Christ. The mother and child group represents rebirth and regeneration. This painting was only exhibited once in 1919 and then never again until 2000. The angle is strange because it is hanged high on a narrow balcony in the Canadian War Museum. The 9 Coat of Arms at the top represent the Provinces of Canada at the time in 1918. The message is powerful and like other paintings like FOR WHAT by Frederick Varley was very unpopular with the Prime Minister at the time Sir Robert Borden who would have preferred a happy triumphant message.

Finally here is a newly installed stain glass window in the Foyer of the Senate Chamber in Parliament to mark the Diamond Jubilee of H.M. Elizabeth II as Queen of Canada. The window faces South it was installe in 2013.

The stain glass window shows Victoria on the left side with her Coat of Arms and an image of Parliament in 1867. The right pane shows Elizabeth II with her Coat of Arms which includes Maple Leafs and the Parliament as it is today. She will be 89 years old on 21 April 2015 and in September will be the longest reigning Monarch in Canadian and British history.