Considering the socio-economic realities of the Canadian art world, the decision prior to the 1960s of any Canadian to devote a life to the arts was at best risky, and as some studies suggest, especially so if the elected form of production was sculpture. Eleanor Milne's decision to do just that, thereby initiating a career which eventually led her to a position as one of Canada's very few official artists, is part of a story of interest to those concerned with a history of the status of the artist in this country. Through an album, this site has established certain information regarding Milne's life and career in the arts; this essay examines some of the factors which enabled her to achieve and maintain a high-profile job as a "government artist," as Dominion Sculptor, for some thirty years.
Surprisingly enough, the fact that Milne is a woman was probably not the major obstacle one might at first assume. To be sure, the end of World War II had resulted in a retrenchment of attitudes concerning women in the workplace, undoubtedly discouraging their involvement in the professional art world, which to this day is not without significant gender biases. Nevertheless, Milne, as someone who sought to work in the monumental vein, was actually following a path, however narrow, cleared by a succession of women sculptors in the United States and Canada who, from the mid-nineteenth century on, had been able to secure important public commissions. Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson (1871–1931), whose The Hiker, a 1906 monument to the Spanish-American War, was used in several dozen towns and cities in the United States, was one such sculptor. Closer in time was one of Rodin's American-born students, Malvina Hoffman (1885–1966), who was responsible for the 1948 monument to World War II American soldiers in Epinal, France.5 More directly, Milne was working forward from the accomplishments of American-born Frances Loring (1887–1968) and Florence Wyle (1881–1968), both friendly to the younger sculptor and both having moved to Canada where they received commissions for public monuments.6 The careers of such North American artists suggest that women were deemed capable of speaking to collective values and aspirations in stone and bronze. So often used as subjects for allegorical representations of national ideals, such as the Statue of Liberty (perhaps the best-known North American example),7 they were sometimes permitted to step off the pedestal and serve nationhood in a different yet equally plastic way.
If being a woman sculptor was not a major handicap, Milne's personal situation and her education could not have been better suited to build up the confidence required to take on a position which, among other things, demanded the articulation of a national iconography. Having been raised as a bilingual Anglophone in Québec, she was well situated to conceive of the possibility of a comprehensive vision of Canada. Her art training was indicative of her ability to function across cultural and language boundaries and, equally important, of her desire to do so.
After graduating from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Milne entered the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design in 1944. The School of Art and Design was founded by the Art Association of Montréal, a group organized in 1847. The founders were wealthy Montréal English gentlemen who wanted to establish a permanent art gallery for the city as well as to conduct art classes. When the art school opened in 1860, its monthly fee of $5.00 helped to determine who could or could not attend the school.8 The school had a large impact on Montréal's art scene, and introduced students to Canadian art. During Eleanor Milne's two years at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design her major teacher was the British-born Arthur Lismer (1895–1969). Lismer's involvement in Canadian art education made him a leader in the Group of Seven. In 1919 he had been made Vice-Principal of the Ontario College of Art, and a decade later he became the Education Supervisor of the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario).9 Lismer was hired in 1941 by the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design to oversee educational activities, an appointment which guaranteed that discussions about Canadian art and ideas key to the Group of Seven members were disseminated to succeeding generations of Canadian artists. Milne recalls seeing shows of Canadian artists at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, most notably a 1944 Emily Carr exhibition.10 Student attendance at the Museum exhibitions was mandatory, especially for the Group of Seven exhibitions featuring Arthur Lismer, which Milne claims the students felt were "old hat"11 because they featured established artists and ideas.
Returning from England in 1947, Milne enrolled in Montréal's other major art school, l'École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. It is significant that she attended both art schools, as they were competitors, both artistically and socially. When the Tachereau government established l'École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal by law on March 2, 1922,12 it was part of a project for the expansion of Francophone intellectual life and cultural institutions: "The bourgeois Canadian English already have their own museum and art school, the Art Association."13 The free tuition at l'École des Beaux-Arts made it difficult for the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design to compete, and by 1924, only elementary classes remained at the School of Art and Design. The situation at the School of Art and Design was remedied through external help, including the Royal Canadian Academy of art (R.C.A.) which instituted evening classes at the school in 1924, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Carnegie Corporation donated $5000 in 1937, enabling the School to hire well-known artist Anne Savage to conduct the "Children's Hour" on Saturday mornings. Arthur Lismer's 1941 appointment was paid for by the Carnegie Corporation.14 By the time Eleanor Milne attended the English school in 1944, it had attracted a large student body, not out of line with that of l'École. Class lists from both institutions indicate that Anglophone students were continuing to attend the School of Art and Design, while Francophone students formed the core for l'École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal.
The Montréal portion of Eleanor Milne's artistic training required her to negotiate cultural difference within Canada. Her training outside Canada, first at the London County Council College of Graphic Art and later at Syracuse University, New York, presumably enhanced her awareness of issues of identity, just as it undoubtedly made her ever more conscious of Canada's privileged situation, something she believes to this day is all too often taken for granted. Milne's observations of post-war trauma in England and France are recorded in one of her sketchbooks:
"The other day I stood in a queque [sic] which I thought would never dissolve in order to write my name on the endless list of people who live on ration coupons. Even baths are rationed here and I shouldn't be surprised if electrical fires being next on the list what with this coal shortage growing worse."15
One imagines that other stories of deprivation were learned from her Syracuse University teacher, Ivan Mestrovic (1883–1962), who had spent the war years in exile in Switzerland and whose first wife, Ruza Klein, had lost thirty members of her family in the Holocaust.16 His involvement in the 1914–1915 Yugoslavian Committee for National Liberation must have been of interest to his students, who also found in him a model for commitment to one's art. One of his students, Luise Kaish, has written of her experience at Syracuse in terms very close to those used by Milne in conversation:
"We were a very small group and we were allowed to use the studio at any time at all—late at night, weekends. And most of us did. [Mestrovic] brought to us in the autumn of his life a quality of spirit, a way of seeing form and light, and a total commitment to hard work."17There can be little doubt that Milne's decision, guided by a friend, to study with Mestrovic was both astute and fortuitous. Here was an individual, located not that far from Montréal, who was considered one of the world's most important practitioners of monumental sculpture, the first living artist to have been granted a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pertinent to her future work as Dominion Sculptor would have been Mestrovic's own involvement in designing architectural sculpture concerned with national identity. Though never completed, his massive memorial to the 1389 battle of Kosovo in which Serbian forces had been routed by a Turkish army led by Sultan Murad I, was widely known and highly esteemed through the repeated exhibition of some of the over 50 life-size figures he sculpted for it from 1905–1915.18 In addition, Mestrovic's "modern Gothic" style, already being looked at closely by artists in Canada by the late 1920s,19 must have been an invaluable reference when Milne began to design for the Gothic style Central Block in Ottawa.
Eleanor Milne's art education was experienced from the position of an upper-middle-class Canadian. She was raised in a secure family. Her father, William Harold Milne, had been invited to Canada to work as a naval architect by the Canadian Government. Her familiarity with what are called social graces enabled her to work comfortably with people of elevated status, as well as teaching her how to be graceful around people from less privileged backgrounds. Her social status and social skills gave Milne both the confidence and "the right" to share her scaffolding with the likes of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau as he observed her at work. Eleanor Milne represents what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call a particular type of embodied cultural capital, in this case distinct from other possible "definitions" of the artist, particularly the romantic conception of the bohemian creating in opposition to society. From such variables as residence and father's occupation, as well as the investment in art education and training made in and by Eleanor Milne, came a particular form of cultural nobility which was acknowledged by the Canadian elite because when it manifested itself in her work, it mirrored their culturally-configured "taste."20
Milne's artistic training was not restricted to the so-called fine arts. Through her family's support, as well as her own hard work, she had the opportunity to experience hands-on training in a number of media. Although the scope of her talents helped her to secure the position of Dominion Carver, the name change to Dominion Sculptor was grounded in Milne's intimacy with the "legitimate" arts as defined by such institutions as the Montréal Art Association and l'École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and respected by Canada's upper middle class. The new title reflected the belief that Milne's skills were beyond/above those of the physical labour involved in the craft of carving and stained glass cutting. The conceptual design stage, which was the area of production done exclusively by Milne, required talents specific to drawing and design. Here the separation goes beyond the art versus craft debate, and into perceptions of cultural capital. Milne believes that the differentiation in title is important, as it reflects training and skills.21 Not inconsequential is her family background. Her father worked as a naval architect, designing ships that other hands would build. Early on in her career, her father warned Milne about becoming a "printer's devil," concerned as he was that the work would be too heavy, requiring long hours at night without other women around, and dirty because of the constant use of inks.22 Eleanor Milne's career as Dominion Sculptor allowed her to maintain a conceptual separation between design and production, although she has always loved and engaged in hands-on carving.
Milne's cultural capital consists then of her socio-economic position, which allowed her to acquire the social knowledge necessary for holding down a major artistic position within the government system, and her artistic training, which gave her the tools to work in the fine art medium of sculpture. This background, combined with her ability to move between Canada's two official cultures as evidenced through her schooling, made her an ideal candidate for the position of Dominion Sculptor; a position created by and for the political elite of Canada, but charged with representing the Canadian population as a unified whole. Milne's confidence in working with men, again the result of a certain upbringing, enabled her to negotiate with her all-male team of carvers and assistants, as well as the mostly male public officials politically involved in her position.
In her capacity as Dominion Sculptor, Milne felt a responsibility to enhance the spirit of Canada, a factor that may account for the enthusiasm she was able to maintain for the position for three decades. Her dedication to the spiritual has been an essential part of Milne's character from her youngest days: for example, as a child she responded to the death of a family pet by telling her sister Barbara that she was going to draw a picture of the pet's spirit.23 She sought to train with Eric Gill (1882–1940), the British printmaker and sculptor whose 1918 Stations of the Cross reliefs for Westminster Cathedral had placed him in the foreground of "modern" religious art,24 and her studies with Mestrovic at Syracuse brought her into contact with an artist whose dedication to the Catholic faith was extraordinarily intense, encompassing the designing of chapels and churches which he then donated at no cost to various communities in Croatia. Not long after Milne completed her studies with him, Mestrovic received the "Christian Culture Award" from Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario.25
Milne's first major commission was for the Monumental Group of Our Lady of Fatima for the Jesuit Brothers in Beaconsfield, and she has continued to work with specifically religious imagery. Nonetheless, her notion of spirituality and art moves well beyond the obvious imagery of established faiths as one of her sketchbook meditations states:
"The claim that there is such a thing as Religious Art is ridiculous. There is no final division between the "world" and the "other world." God is just as much Reality as the things he has made."Milne's sense of the spiritual presence in all aspects of life is evident in the pieces she designed for Parliament. The History of Canada frieze has spiritual liberation as an underlying theme for all the panels, the final one showing doves struggling to soar into flight. She views her representations of First Nations peoples, the inclusion of which have not been greeted with universal enthusiasm, as a vital part of the picturing of Canada's history and spirit.26
The spiritual messages within the work in Parliament are sometimes subtle and while the artist is delighted by the fact that large numbers of visitors observe the History of Canada frieze every year, she worries that so few of them connect the philosophical aspects of the work with the historical facts represented. This may lie behind the orientation of the millennial project she is working on at the moment, a series of large acrylic paintings which will, in "dream-like" rather than realistic terms, fuse spiritual imagery with what she views to be the morality tales contained within the enormously popular Star Wars movies.
Milne's work and Milne herself as an artist are both signifiers of cultural meaning. The grand and important ideas she seeks to put forward need to be seen as historical, situated and produced not in isolation.27 They represent views which were utterly appropriate for the "spirit" of Canada as envisioned by the caretakers of Parliament in the 1960s and 1970s, decades which saw the creation of a new Canadian flag, the celebration of Canada's centennial, the adoption of the Official Languages Act, the proclamation of multiculturalism as government policy and a whole host of other nation-building or nation-confirming acts. Milne's tasks as Dominion Sculptor are now divided into two different federal positions, held by two men. Both are focused on documenting and repairing the exterior sculpture of the Parliament Buildings. Here begins another story, equally resonant with implications about the relationship between art, artist and the social in Canadian culture.