Influential artist Alex Janvier combined swirling abstractions with Indigenous iconography

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The seminal Denesuline artist Alex Janvier merged swirling abstractions of natural forms with Indigenous iconography to create an art that was both unprecedented and hugely influential. A member of Cold Lake First Nations in Alberta and the collective nicknamed the “Indian Group of Seven,” Mr. Janvier died Wednesday at age 89. His death was announced at the annual general meeting of the Assembly of First Nations in Montreal, where a moment of silence was observed.

A survivor of the residential school system and a full-time professional artist for most of his long career, Mr. Janvier was recognized for his distinctive painterly style influenced by European abstract art but incorporating an Indigenous understanding of nature, the animal world and the cosmos. He was especially well known as a muralist, creating impressive frescoes in public buildings across Canada including his largest, the Morning Star ceiling in the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.

Alex Janvier was born Feb. 28, 1935, in the Le Goff section of the Cold Lake First Nations reserve near Bonnyville, Alta., one of Marie and Harry Janvier’s 10 children. His father was the last hereditary chief of the Cold Lake First Nations, before the federal government imposed an elected band council.

The family lived simply in a small house heated with a wood stove. Light was provided by coal lamps and babies were diapered with moss. The Janviers raised cattle, chicken and pigs but also trapped coyote, fox, mink and muskrat to sell the fur. Marie Janvier produced handicrafts including birch bark baskets and traditional beadwork, both of which would inspire her son’s art.

Young Alex was artistic as a child, often observed drawing in the dirt with a stick, but was only seven when he and his five-year-old sister, Elsie, were taken from their parents to attend the Blue Quills Residential School near St. Paul, 150 kilometres away.

It was one of 20 residential schools in Alberta, part of a notorious national system established in the 1880s that attempted to force assimilation on First Nations children, ultimately leading to the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008. Mr. Janvier served on the commission, and in a 2018 interview with The Globe, described the school experience as traumatizing. He said that the nuns who had come to collect them appeared very gentle to his parents but changed personality as soon as they were alone with the children. Throughout his life, Mr. Janvier suffered from hearing loss in one ear where a nun had struck him.

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“I am still trying to grow up,” he said in 2018. “They removed me from my family as a child, removed my spirituality, and tried to remove my language.

“I would like to say today that they have failed.”

The school did provide Mr. Janvier with access to drawing materials and he escaped the brutal regime through his art. By his final years, he was being tutored by Carlo Altenberg, an art professor at the University of Alberta, who introduced him to reproductions of European abstractionists including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Joan Miro.

After high school, he applied to various art schools but told a documentary crew in 2020 that he was discouraged from enrolling by the Indian agent on the reserve. Eventually he studied at Alberta’s Provincial Institute of Technology and Art, in Calgary, now the Alberta University of the Arts.

“I don’t remember what they taught me but I remember what I taught them,” Mr. Janvier said in a 2017 interview with the National Gallery of Canada. “It became a way for me to be a self starter: You begin things, you create things.”

On graduation, he initially worked as an art teacher at the University of Alberta, and later consulted on both the collection of the federal Department of Indian Affairs and on the Indigenous art included in the Canada Pavilion at Expo 67. In 1968, he married Jacqueline Wolowski, who was to provide crucial help as the manager of his career. The couple had six children and were married for 56 years.

Making a career as a contemporary Indigenous artist in Canada in the 1960s was no easy feat: The white establishment tended to view First Nations art as either something historical or mere handicraft, leaving the artists without access to the gallery system, grants, and critical and academic consideration. Mr. Janvier would soon join with others who shared his frustrations about the condescension and lack of professional opportunities.

In the late 1960s, Winnipeg artists Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness and Joseph Sánchez had been meeting at the Donald Street print shop and gallery run by Daphne Odjig to compare notes on their progress. When the four artists put out a call for others to join them in a new national organization devoted to the advancement of Indigenous art, Carl Ray, Norval Morrisseau and Mr. Janvier responded. In 1972, they founded the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., (PNIAI) one of the first Indigenous cultural advocacy groups in Canada. Because there were seven members, an article in the Winnipeg Free Press dubbed the collective the “Indian Group of Seven,” and for a while that name stuck.

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The group showed together successfully on several occasions and did get its members’ art into commercial galleries, but it disbanded in 1975 without achieving many of its larger goals. Its importance lay in the example it set for the next generation of Indigenous artists in seeking professional recognition within the art establishment while simultaneously furthering Indigenous cultural and social traditions. (Today, the only surviving member is Mr. Sánchez, an American artist, curator and museum director of Puebloan and European ancestry, who returned to the United States in the mid-1970s.)

“Alex’s contributions are significant,” said Michelle LaVallee, director of Indigenous Ways at the National Gallery. “He once told me, in reference to the efforts he and his peers put toward breaking through barriers and biases, that ‘We set out to change the world, the art world.’”

Several of the artists of the PNIAI worked in the style that became known as the Woodland School, established by Mr. Morrisseau’s brightly coloured X-ray paintings of mythic animals and shamans. Mr. Janvier’s art was significantly different and looked like nobody else’s. Familiar with the work of early European abstractionists such as Kandinsky and Miro and the Canadian painter Jock Macdonald, he was already developing by the 1970s what would become his idiosyncratic style. He used a semi-abstract iconography that made reference to both biological and celestial forms, creating paintings full of circular motifs, swooping shapes and calligraphic lines in a palette that was colourful but refreshingly light. Recognizable animals did reappear in his work over the years but mainly he stuck with abstractions that evoked Indigenous iconography without quoting it directly. In the 2017 National Gallery interview, he said he mainly sought inspiration by being in nature.

Even when considering dark subjects such as the Oka crisis and the treatment of the Lubicon First Nation, Mr. Janvier’s abstraction remained delicate. For example, Indian Residential – The Way of the Cross – English vs. French, a 2014 watercolour in the National Gallery collection, directly addresses the damage inflicted on Indigenous peoples by the Church – it features a coffin marked with a cross sitting at the centre of ruptured shapes – yet retains the airy quality so typical of his work. The overall effect of Mr. Janvier’s art, which may explain its great popularity, is one of spiritual uplift.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Janvier would become renowned not only for his paintings but for his large-scale public projects, culminating in the ceiling at the Museum of History in 1993. With the help of his son Dean, he painted Morning Star-Gambeh Then’, a 418-square-metre mural on the dome of the museum’s Haida Gwaii Salon. Divided into four sections, of white, yellow, blue and red, the painting evokes a history of the land from a Denesuline perspective. To reach the ceiling, seven stories above the ground, Mr. Janvier would lie on his back on scaffolding in a position that recalled Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

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In 2003, Mr. Janvier and his family established a gallery on the Cold Lake First Nations to sell his art and maintain firm control of his legacy, conscious of the issues of authenticity that had plagued the estate of his colleague Mr. Morrisseau.

Mr. Janvier continued to paint into his last years and in 2016, he designed another massive piece, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place), a 15-metre-wide circular mosaic on the floor of Rogers Place in Edmonton, home of the Edmonton Oilers. The mosaic, with large passages of white, pale blue and light turquoise bisected by strong lines of red and yellow, is intended to evoke the beauty of the land. In 2017, the National Gallery circulated a major retrospective of his art.

Mr. Janvier leaves his wife, Jacqueline; six children, Dean, Tricia, Duane, Kyle, Jill and Brett; and several grandchildren. Those who knew him describe someone approachable, honest and humble, but Mr. Janvier was well aware of his legacy.

“I don’t need to be remembered,” he said in the 2018 interview. “It is my paintings that are going to do that.”

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