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by Margaret Atwood

Originally published as the foreword to Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov’s monograph Charles Pachter (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992).

I am a writer, rather than a painter or an art historian, so my introduction to this book must be, of necessity, personal rather than professional, informal rather than formal. I can only see Charles Pachter in the contexts in which I have been associated with him: as a sometime collaborator, and as a long-time friend.

I first met Charles Pachter in the summer of 1959, at Camp White Pine in the Haliburton region of Ontario. I was nineteen, and had been hired to set up a nature program at this camp. Charles was sixteen, and was assistant to the arts and crafts director. I was already viewing myself as a writer, and had begun publishing my poetry; Charles himself was on the verge of recognizing his vocation as an artist. He claims I beckoned him over to the “nature hut” — which was, at that time, a dank, converted tool shed — to demonstrate to him that stroking a toad would not give him warts. I do not remember this, but recall instead his energy and inventiveness during arts and crafts workshops. In any case, this phase of my life was later to be incarnated as a Pachter serigraph image, complete with insect-eye sunglasses and green and orange butterfly wings, holding a caterpillar and smiling enigmatically. Our friendship, which led to our later collaboration, was bizarre but inevitable, and has remained so ever since.

Since Charles Pachter spent his formative years in a particular place at a particular time, I should say a little about Camp White Pine itself, and a little too about Canada as an artistic environment in the fifties.

White Pine was, and still is, a liberal Jewish co-educational summer camp. At that time it specialized, not in knot-tying and strenuous canoe-tripping of other more trad­itional camps, but in the development of social awareness. The themes of its five-day special programs were likely to be The Brotherhood of Man in one form or another; many of the songs were earnest variants of “No Man Is an Island.” But at the same time, there was a heavy unofficial emphasis on parody and satire. Jokes and practical jokes abounded, skits and mockery were endemic, and no theory or pretension was too lofty to be punctured. In both these tendencies — the well-meaning idealism and the parody — White Pine was perhaps a condensed microcosm of which Canada was the macrocosm. Who Do You Think You Are? is the title of one of Alice Munro’s short story collectives, and no Canadian needs to ask for a translation, because we have all had this indignant and scornful question addressed to us at some point in our lives, when others thought we were getting too big for our boots.

This satirical or parodic mental tendency has been expressed by Pachter in lighthearted ways — his takeoff on the art world in 1975, The Ugly Show, his commentary on Toronto interior furnishings, which he reproduced tongue-in-cheek in his one-time restaurant, Gracie’s — but it is also reflected in many of the titles of his serious work. He is capable of constructing a mysterious and beautiful image — of, for instance, an orange sofa floating in front of a window that frames a Georgian Bay windscape — and then undercutting it by calling it Davenport and Bay, a play on words which incorporates two Toronto street names. In many countries, you would not be taken seriously if you did this kind of thing. In Canada, paradoxically, it’s difficult to be taken seriously, in the long run, unless you do this kind of thing; not exclusively, but from time to time, just to show you aren’t too full of yourself. Self-mockery is de rigueur. Thus one of Pachter’s most intense and brooding images is titled Life Is Not a Fountain, a double-bladed and poignant reference to the punch line of a well-known shaggy dog joke.

But anyone who came of age as an artist in Canada of the fifties and early sixties had need of some form of defensive armour. Painting, or the pursuit of any art, particularly in middle-class households such as the one Pachter grew up in, was not considered a suitable occupation for anyone, and especially not for men. The number of young people interested in the arts, even at university, was relatively small, and we tended to stick together and to support one another. The culture as a whole still retained its frontier-society distrust of the intangible and the impractical and its provincial conviction that art, if it had to be done at all, was done better elsewhere, preferably by dead Europeans. On the positive side, however, the absence of any weighty and ever-present artistic tradition created a vacuum, into which young painters could move fairly easily without feeling they were challenging Michelangelo.

Life Is Not a Fountain, acrylic on canvas, 1976.

(Private collection, Zurich.)

By the fifties the centre of gravity for many Canadian painters had shifted from their own national ground, occupied during the twenties and thirties by the Group of Seven and their associates, to the Abstract Expressionism of New York (a direction Pachter never pursued). There was, however, a popularly accessible, highly visible trad­ition in painting: a Group of Seven serigraph reproduction hung in practically every bank and school — a wild and dangerous landscape tamed by a frame — along with the obligatory portrait of the queen. The appearance of these two groups of images in Pachter’s later work, and his exploration of their incongruity when juxtaposed, is not arbitrary: both the queen and the Group of Seven landscape formed an integral part of his earliest visual vocabulary, as they did for all Canadians of that generation. Both groups of images call up, for many Canadians, something like a collective memory, a deeply inscribed dream.

Pachter’s interest in the transmutation of popular icons — the flag, the Toronto streetcar, the queen, the moose (and others which appear less frequently in his work, such as the pope, the Supreme Court judges, Barbara Ann Scott, the hockey player, and the Ontario butter tart) — has often been commented on, but few have explored its roots in his early life. Pachter has long had a sense of double identity, linked to the fact that he did not fully realize that the family was Jewish until he was six. Thus his perspective has been that of the insider, so “inside” Canadian culture that he was chosen to represent Canadian youth in a National Film Board documentary about the Canadian National Exhibition, and met both Barbara Ann Scott and his first moose at the age of four. But it has also been that of the outsider, peering at the “official” cultural life of Canada through ethnic-tinted glasses and sensing the threat to himself inherent in a version of reality that did not necessarily stamp him with a seal of approval. Driven perhaps by a desire to enter and possess forbidden territory which he sensed was already his, Pachter has been a tireless explorer of Canadian history, both local and general. He knows Toronto thoroughly, in all three of its special dimensions and in its fourth dimension, time; he unearths old journals and recreates nearly forgotten historical figures such as Governor and Mrs. Simcoe and the early settlers of the region. He has always wanted to know what is behind, before, and underneath perceived reality.

The recognition of the gap between smooth presentation and dangerous, complex reality is not, of course, unique to Pachter; it is omnipresent in Canadian literature, and has been explored with special ingenuity in the work of writers from southern Ontario — Pachter’s heartland — such as Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, James Reaney, Graeme Gibson, Marian Engel, and Timothy Findley. It’s no accident that this culture produced Mackenzie King, a prime minister noted during his lifetime for his intense blandness and celebrated after it for the fact that he was discovered to have been ruling the country through his dog, whom he thought contained the spirit of his dead mother. It’s no accident either that it produced Pachter. Alice Munro speaks of the lives of ordinary people as “deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”[1] In many of his images drawn from observed life, such as his early “family” series of serigraphs and some of his later portraits, Pachter depicts the linoleum, but also implies the caves.

This is the environment in which Pachter grew up, then: a Canada noted for its niceness, a bland surface which concealed a wildness, a Gothic weirdness, even a menace. Any Canadian looking at Pachter’s seemingly pastoral sunbathers on a beach, their backs turned to the viewer, their eyes fixed on an endless level blue expanse of water, knows that under the surface of the lake there’s someone drowning; as indeed there is, every summer.

Pachter’s conscious exploration of the visual symbolism that surrounded him began, long before the ascendancy of Andy Warhol, when as a teenager he painted the landscape from a two-dollar bill on his bedroom wall, much to the bewilderment of his mother. It was reinforced by the early work of Marshall McLuhan, who had published his classic examination of symbolism in visual advertising, The Mechanical Bride, by the time Pachter had reached university. This book was withdrawn from circulation at the insistence of several companies whose ads McLuhan had reproduced in it, but you could buy copies of it direct from the maestro, who kept them in his cellar. I had one, and showed it to Pachter at the time. He had a natural curiosity about advertising, which a number of us shared — we were, after all, bombarded with it from morning to night — but McLuhan helped us to look at it in a more speculative way. For Pachter the results of this influence were specific, as in his lithograph of a woman’s love affair with her hot-water heater, but also more general. Throughout his career he has shown a receptiveness and a sensitivity to visual images of all sorts, whether they originate in the world of art or on a streetside hoarding. His subway mural of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens (Hockey Knights in Canada) and his Acme Bar and Grill mural (Voice of Culture) are the latest products of this visual cross-pollination.

My own collaboration with Charles Pachter developed slowly and without premeditation. By 1960, when I was in my third year at university, Pachter had entered the same university, in Art and Archeology. We had just spent another summer at Camp White Pine — a summer which, as I recall, we ended by hiding under the cabin floors of some visiting city slickers and howling like wolverines — and we continued to see one another. I had at that time a small silkscreen poster business, and it was this equipment that eventually ended up in Pachter’s hands some time after I graduated, and with which he produced an early set of serigraphs. We continued to correspond through these years, while he was in Paris and Toronto and later at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, while I was at Harvard or teaching at the University of British Columbia.

The Circle Game, his first limited-edition folio, illustrated a group of poems I had just completed, and which I’d sent to him rather casually in a letter, after he’d written saying he’d like to take a crack at illustrating something. We were both so excited by their results that we went on to do several other collaborations, including his astonishing Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein and eventually, the monumental Journals of Susanna Moodie. Pachter was eccentric among artists of his generation, for whom a studied non-literacy was the social norm, in that he permitted himself a lively verbal dimension and allowed his imagination to be accessible to verbal imagery. His procedure when he created a book, using either my poems or those of somebody else such as Alden Nowlan, John Newlove, or Dennis Lee, was to immerse himself in the texture of the poetry itself for weeks, exploring its possible meanings and directions and leaving himself open to its suggestions, before starting to create his visual images. What he was able to produce was neither simple-minded illustration nor a juxtaposition of words and unrelated visual work, but an interaction between text and image that is unusual in the field.

Since that time, in a career which has now lasted three decades, Pachter has continued vigorously to explore his several media, to diversify his imagery, and to structure and restructure his visual world. In doing so he has restructured the world around him, and has changed profoundly the way we look at our own familiar iconography, even our own banalities. His output has been immense, his wit and versatility have remained constant, and his range continues to broaden. His is a sophisticated art which draws upon many techniques and evokes many echoes, yet it remains strongly individual, and firmly rooted in a ground which Pachter has both excavated and cultivated himself.

Margaret Atwood

Best-selling author of The Edible Woman,

The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake