Terre Sauvage: Globalizing Landscapes and the Group of Seven

Abstract

This essay argues that Canada’s nationalist art narrative is a cultural resource in the present, subject to shifts in emphasis and inflection and to revision, and that its mobilization in international exhibitions makes the National Gallery of Canada a key partner of Global Affairs Canada in advancing Canada’s international relations and foreign policy initiatives. The Gallery’s millennial exhibition (1999–2001), Terre Sauvage: Canadian Landscape Painting and the Group of Seven, provides a case study of this relationship. In an exploration of the show, which travelled to Scandinavia, Mexico, and China, this essay argues that, in pursuit of its professional interests, the National Gallery is always already working in concert with the foreign policy sphere in advancing the interests of the Canadian state and its public diplomacy. The exhibition represented the Group of Seven’s work as a material expression of the national norms and values perceived in Canada’s international orientation. For northern Europe, it represented a shared northern hemispheric identity, linking Canada on one front to the Nordic face of the European Union while opening on another to a circumpolar geopolitical imaginary; for Mexico, a common North American identity that opened more broadly to the Americas as a geopolitical space. For China, it conjured shared cosmopolitan values informing the two countries’ global orientation.