The National Gallery of Canada opened its retrospective exhibition on Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins Oct. 5.
Throughout the gallery space are quotes from Watkins’ journals. Some of the quotes emphasize her love for music — she compares a sunset to “Wagner with full orchestra” in one quote. Others provide insight into the mindset of Margaret Watkins.
A 1915 quote illustrates her view on art:
“Nothing is ever too commonplace or too useful to escape the sweet embellishment of art.”
“Around the humble cookstove, art runs in riotous castiron curves, where may rest the savory spillings from many a too exuberant soup kettle.”
The exhibition, called Margaret Watkins: Domestic Symphonies features the photographs of Hamilton-born Watkins, who remained in relative obscurity until her friend and local neighbour Joseph Mulholland found her photographs years after she had entrusted them to him.
“One day I spotted the box, opened it up astonished to find 1,200 photographs. Portraits of men, women, children, nudes, landscapes, and abstracts,” Mulholland said.
“I thought I had known Margaret Watkins. She had spoken of everything under the sun, except her past and photography.”
Director Marc Mayer was surprised he had never heard of Watkins until recently.
“We think we know so much about the past and the history of photography and then every once in a while an artist emerges who we didn’t know,” he said.
Watkins primarily considered herself a portrait and still-life photographer.
She was known for her still-lifes of mundane household items such as in her 1919 photograph “The Kitchen Sink.”
Curatorial assistant Lori Pauli said the exhibition “caught a lot of attention in art . . . because as one critic wrote, ‘that’s not art to have a photograph of dirty dishes, you could have at least washed the dishes before you photographed them.’ ”
Watkins advocated for a new, modern aesthetic, apparent in what she wrote on the back of the photograph in response to the critic:
“Evidently, the poor duffer knows nothing of modern art. Abstractions, patterns, rhythm, etc, the objects are not supposed to be interested in themselves, merely contributing to the design.
This attention to aestheticism would later get Watkins arrested on a trip to Russia. She photographed the Russian security agency KGB’s headquarters, unaware of its importance, interested in the building for purely aesthetic reasons.
Watkins led an interesting life since the day she left for New York in 1909. She would come to work for a woman named Alice Boughton, one of the premier pictorialist portrait photographers.
“What I love about that is that there’s actually a genealogy of female pictorialists. Boughton herself had trained in Paris with the famous photographer Gertrude Käsebier. So we get a lineage of women all studying and working in photography together,” Pauli said.
“Two things I wanted to stress were her connections with other female photographers and with music.”
The exhibition’s name Domestic Symphonies references Watkins musical interests, Pauli explained.
“That’s based on a title of one of her really excellent photographs, a still life of eggs on a draining board.”
“But I picked up on that title because music was a huge part of Margaret Watkins’ life.”
Pauli said she is pleased to have Margaret Watkins back in Canada, even if it’s only through her medium of works.
“I hope you can appreciate the contribution she’s made to photography,” Pauli said.
Katherine Stauble, curatorial assistant of the exhibition, said Watkins’ work was impactful in the course of Canadian art.
“I think she’s important in the Canadian canon of art history as an early woman photographer. She really saw the transition from the pictorialist movement and the modernist movement,” she said.
The exhibition will run until Jan. 6.
