The Group of Seven, American Philanthropy, and the Cultural and Racial Politics of the Interwar Commonwealth

From 1936 to 1939, a travelling art exhibition consisting mainly of paintings by members of the Group of Seven toured South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. All costs were covered by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a phenomenally wealthy and powerful American philanthropical organization. Canadian art entrepreneurs and Carnegie Corporation officials intended this exhibition as a means to foster nationalist and modernist artistic practices in the other dominions of the British Empire. The model to be emulated, the organizers believed, was that of the critically acclaimed and nationally oriented Canadian school of landscape art associated with the Group of Seven. The venture was in a large measure motivated by the perceived decline of white settler populations outside Europe and the Northern United States and must be understood as part of a general project to strengthen, on a global scale, liberal forms of white supremacy. This article recounts Canadian participation in this Carnegie Corporation scheme, while placing particular emphasis on the exhibition’s passage in South Africa. It traces how some members of the Group of Seven and their institutional supporters became involved with American philanthropy, it describes how the Canadian traveling exhibition was assembled and received abroad, and it situates these activities within the racial and cultural politics of the interwar Commonwealth.