Vendu pour : 128 700 $

PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist by Reverend Thomas Crosby, Fort Simpson, British Columbia
By descent to the present Private Collection, Vancouver

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Bill McLennan and Karen Duffek, The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations, 2007, reproduced figure 8.5, page 253

The carver and painter Frederick Alexcee, who was also known as Wiksamnen, was the son of a Tsimshian mother and Iroquois father. He lived most of his life in the village of Lax Kw’alaams (Fort Simpson or Port Simpson) and seems to have begun his artistic career by carving masks and other objects, examples of which are in the collection of the UBC Museum of Anthropology and the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. There is contradictory evidence about his training, with Marius Barbeau reporting that he received extensive training (in “Frederick Alexie, A Primitive”, Canadian Review of Music and Art, 1945) and Viola Garfield (field notebooks from Port Simpson, manuscript, Suzzallo Library, University of Washington) suggesting that he was self-taught. Certainly his paintings, of which this is one of the most important examples, suggest that his approach was the somewhat naive one of the autodidact.

The village of Lax Kw’alaams had an important cultural life during Alexcee’s youth, but like many First Nations villages, by the end of the nineteenth century it was considerably changed through the influence of Christianity and government policy, both of which prohibited traditional ceremonies. His paintings document the physical and cultural landscape of his childhood.

The raising of a pole was a momentous occasion in the life of a First Nations village. It required the mobilization of large numbers of people both to raise the pole and to celebrate the event or person the pole honoured through ceremony and witness. The enormous narrative detail of this work might make us believe that Alexcee’s work documents a specific event, but more likely this image is an amalgamation of a series of events associated with a pole raising. It should be read, as Bill McLennan and Karen Duffek have suggested, as a “visual metaphor” revealing “elements of Tsimshian iconography and oral tradition” rather than documenting a single occasion.

There are examples of Alexcee’s painting in a variety of collections, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Wellcome Library, London, as well as in private collections. Pole Raising at Fort Simpson, BC is particularly interesting because of the wealth of information it conveys. We see the complex and difficult process of raising a monumental totem – people with pulling ropes on both the ground and the roof of the longhouse, the crossed props that support the weight of the pole as it is raised, and the daring individuals who balance on the pole itself to secure lines. On the steps of the longhouse is a chief wearing a great Chilkat robe and two figures holding coppers. On the left side of the composition are figures with hides that were used to send the names of deceased individuals “into the universe”. On the right are figures carrying in gifts for those witnessing this event. The importance of the event is emphasized by the nine chiefs and elders we can see from behind at the lower edge of the composition, each of whom is scattered with sacred eagle down, as is the chief on the steps and one of the figures with the hides. There are over 60 figures depicted in this complex and rich image, suggesting the significance of the event, which engaged so much of the village’s energy.

Pole Raising at Fort Simpson, BC hints at the cultural richness of this Tsimshian community, something that was disappearing even at the time Alexcee painted this work. It is striking and telling that the vast majority of the First Nations work that Barbeau included in his landmark 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern at the National Gallery of Canada was historical and that the modern work was by non-First Nations artists such as Emily Carr, Langdon Kihn and A.Y. Jackson. The work of Alexcee and others was perceived as being part of the past. It would be decades before poles began to be raised in villages on the West Coast again, and rare images such as this one provided vital information on how these events should be conducted when there were few alive who remembered.

This rare and important work will be reproduced in the second edition of the college textbook Native North American Art by Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

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