Additional Images

Provenance:

Collection of Herbert T. Schwarz, Tuktoyaktuk, NWT
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

Herbert T. Schwarz, Tales from the Smokehouse (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1976), 86.

Note:

In 1974, the same year that Daphne Odjig opened her Winnipeg gallery representing First Nations art, Odjig illustrated Dr. Herbert T. Schwarz’s “Tales from the Smokehouse”. Odjig created fourteen paintings of graphic erotica for the publication to accompany First Nations tales documented by Dr. Schwarz.

Following a 2008 exhibition of her works at the Canadian Museum of History, Odjig commented on the erotically charged images: “People were shocked at the time, although things have changed now. The native community was the least shocked of all, though. We were brought up as children to accept these things. Sexual matters were part of life.”[1]

The present work illustrates a passage in the thirteenth story in the text, The Indian and the Tall Fair Lady, a story in which a handsome but naive young man has an erotic encounter with a dark skinned woman after series of mishaps and disappointments in one of the cities “of the white people of the land.”[2]

The present painting comes from the personal collection of Dr. Schwarz, and bears his collector’s notes verso.

[1] Peter Goddard, “Family Feeling”, Toronto Star, 18 September 2002.
[2] Herbert T. Schwarz, Tales from the Smokehouse (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1976).