Never did she define herself as elderly. When looking for a gallery to represent her in the late ’70s, she chose Wynick/Tuck, which had a roster of young artists. “She didn’t want to be with the old guys,” says Wynick. In 1989, at age 79, she received a B.A. in English from the University of Toronto and published the first of three well-received memoirs, which contributed to what friends refer to as the “cult of Doris.” When her publisher wanted to use “old woman” in the title of the third, McCarthy prevailed. “I’m damned if I’m going to be old,” she told the Globe and Mail. The book’s final title: Ninety Years Wise.
Click here for a Doris McCarthy gallery
Even now, despite failing health, her optimistic spirit remains, says Wacko: “She told me, ‘I’m so grateful for this extra time so I can lie in bed and remember all of the great adventures we had.’ ”
The years brought McCarthy institutional honours, including an Order of Canada and five honorary doctorate degrees. Yet recognition by the art elite—public institutions and historians—has proven elusive, to her frustration. “The National Gallery doesn’t own a thing of mine and it damn well should,” she told the Globe and Mail in 1990.
Since then, the gallery has purchased four works, though only one has been displayed—in a group show about the Arctic. National Gallery curator Charles Hill reiterates the common criticism of McCarthy’s work among academics: it doesn’t forge new ground, it’s imitative, there’s no “shock of the new,” to quote the late art critic Clement Greenberg. “I think it’s responsive, not initiatory,” says Hill, who allows that he has seen most of the work only in reproduction and is not familiar with McCarthy’s later canvases. “I’m not going to say I’m any authority on Doris McCarthy. But what I’ve seen hasn’t interested me.”
Art historian David Silcox, president of Sotheby’s Canada, regards McCarthy as “someone who has always been there.” He hasn’t actively followed her work, perhaps for that very reason, he says: “Maybe I’ve been led not to look as closely or with as much curiosity as one ought.” McCarthy has always been out of step with art world fashion, Silcox notes: “I’ve always noticed there are no females in the Group of Seven,” he says wryly. “But a lot of women were as good.” McCarthy also faced what Silcox calls the entrenched “masculine mystique” governing how the North is depicted in paint.
The fact McCarthy was an older woman—a former high school teacher at that—working in a well-trod idiom led many to dismiss her, says Wynick. The gallery faced flak when they took McCarthy on in 1978, a time when photo-based and installation art was the vogue. “But the quality won us over,” she says.
McCarthy was well aware her work was out of fashion. “My paintings are so legible, I feel guilty,” she joked to the Toronto Star in 1999. Not that she gave a fig: “Most artists make the mistake of feeling they should be doing what other artists are doing instead of what they do best.”
Click here for a Doris McCarthy gallery
“She’s always been out of style except for those people who buy her paintings,” says Toronto collector Alan Bryce, who bought his first McCarthy in 1987. Over the years, McCarthy’s prices have risen slowly but steadily, as she amassed an avid following. In 2008, her 1964 oil Home fetched $57,000 at Sotheby’s in Toronto, a record price for her work at auction. (Prices at the Wynick-Tuck show range from $950 for a woodcut to $68,000 for an oil.) Bryce says he tried to summon interest for a retrospective at the National Gallery, with no luck. “Doris once said she’d stay alive to see that show,” he says.
McCarthy was thrilled that her namesake gallery was mounting Roughing it in the Bush, reports guest curator Nancy Campbell, who unearthed never-shown hard-edged abstracts from the ’60s and early ’70s, which she has masterfully mixed with works from other periods. The experience left her with a new appreciation of McCarthy’s work, Campbell says. “I want people to see that she really did have a unique place in the lexicon.” But were it not for McCarthy’s longevity, the show would never have happened, Campbell believes: “Would we be looking so closely if she had died 20 years ago?” The answer, of course, is no. Which means that even at age 100, Doris McCarthy is still delivering art lessons.
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