A New History: Russländer Painting in Ontario

In recognition of the centenary of the Russländer migration to Ontario, an exhibit of works from Conrad Grebel University College's permanent holdings is now on display, featuring the work of artists and Russläender emigrants Woldemar Neufeld (1902-2002) and Henry Pauls (1904-1995).

The artworks exhibited on opposite sides of the gallery appear to share little in common. Those of Woldemar Neufeld document the landscape and built environment of southwestern Ontario by means of immediate, trained observation. They display confident experimentation with technique and medium over the course of a decades-long professional career. Henry Pauls’ paintings, by contrast, depict a subject—Mennonite village life in southern Ukraine—from great physical and temporal distance. In a folk-art tradition, they bring to visual form a retired man’s memories of his childhood, a secure world marked by natural beauty and human industriousness.

Absent from these works is evidence of the sudden and profound transition that brought these artists together in shared experience. Both born in imperial Russia, Pauls and Neufeld—alongside 21,000 other Mennonites—emigrated from the Soviet Union to Canada between 1923 and 1930 as a response to the violence they experienced in the wake of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. This migrant community came to be known as the Russländer. Both artists were old enough to experience the loss of an imagined future, to understand the nature of the horror that compelled their families to leave home.

Their artistic work, however, elides this brutal rupture. Instead of focusing on the baffling extremes of their experience of uprooting, these painters embarked on parallel projects to bring to life a new history. Neufeld embraced the challenge of studying new structures in new landscapes, helping to define an aesthetic understanding of his Canadian home. Pauls, meanwhile, conjured artistic impressions of a vanished time and place. His work contributed to an elaboration of Mennonites’ collective memory of a period before calamity. It suggests an alternative future that might have been.

This pop up exhibition has been curated to mark the centenary of the Russländer migration to Ontario. Among varied efforts to commemorate this event, the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada has organized a cross-country train tour that re-enacts the initial journey taken by Mennonite immigrants from Quebec to British Columbia. To learn more about this initiative, visit mhsc.ca/events/russlaender-100/.