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1936: Opening of the Emma Lake Art Camp
In retrospect, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the 1936 opening
of the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop is that it occurred at all. Successive years of drought and the
Depression had taken their toll: the University was operating with a bank loan
and under a deficit; its operating grant from the province was 35% lower than
it had been in 1930.1
Nevertheless, at the request of art professor A.F.L. (“Gus”) Kenderdine,
in 1936 university president Walter Murray established a summer art school at
Emma Lake, a site 220 kilometres north of the Saskatoon campus, in the
province’s northern boreal forest. It
was the first outdoor school of art for university credit in Canada.
With an art school, Gus Kenderdine hoped “to let the young folk of
Saskatchewan see beauty in a land that men were becoming to hate as a place of
darkness and defeat.”2 Kenderdine believed “real art” should have “a
vital relationship to the life of the community,” and he hoped the Emma Lake
experience would merely be the “beginning...in a work which [would] mean much
to Saskatchewan in the years to come.”3
It was immediately
successful. Instructors from across
Canada, and eventually guest artists and critics from Europe and the United
States, came to Emma Lake. Many found
the experience valuable enough to attempt to recreate it: artists’ workshops
from Barcelona to New York have acknowledged Emma Lake as “inspiration and
model.”4
| Related Collections |  |
Beamish / Kenderdine Family fonds, MG 215
Hans Dommasch fonds, MG 172
A.F.L. Kenderdine fonds, MG 87
Ruth Pawson fonds, MG 204
Mac and Beth Hone fonds, MG 183
Emma Lake Art School, RG 2035
| Images | |
1935a: illustration from 1937 scrapbook
1936b: ‘Gus’ Kenderdine with student, 1936 scrapbook
| Sources | |
1. Annual Reports, 1936, 1937.
2. Publications Collection, Extension - B.A. Holmlund, Address at the opening of the Kenderdine Campus, 23 July 1989, p. 2.
3. 1938 Emma Lake Scrapbook, “Message from G. Kenderdine.”
4. Mina Forsyth fonds, MG 97, Emma Lake Workshops, brief from Otto Rogers to the Saskatchewan Arts Board, 1986, p. 1.
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