 Hello everyone and good evening. My name is Terri Irkart and I'm the Arts and Special Events Programmer at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. On behalf of the library and the West Vancouver Art Museum, I'd like to welcome you all to tonight's art talk and panel discussion, Leon Coupe, my dearest Kate. While I recognize that we are all in different places this evening and with the help of some magical technology, some of you are even joining us from the other side of the globe, I would like to acknowledge that the West Vancouver Library and Art Museum reside within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Swamish Nation, Slavertooth Nation and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect these nations within this territory as well as their historic connection to the lands and waters around us since time immemorial. I am personally grateful to call the Pacific Northwest my home and I'm thankful to the Coast Salish communities that continue to protect the natural beauty and animal diversity that surround me every day. It has been my great pleasure to work with Hilary Letwin and our guests tonight to bring this event to our community and I know that we are all in for a really great treat and now I'd like to pass things over to our art museum's curator extraordinaire Hilary. Hello, welcome. My name is Hilary Letwin and I'm the administrator curator at the West Vancouver Art Museum. I would like to go to the Vancouver Memorial Library for the chance to co-present this panel discussion that we are presenting this evening and I'm also delighted to introduce our new exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum, My Dearest Kate Leon Coupe. This exhibition includes just over 120 postcards that were all drawn and sent by Leon Coupe from Paris between 1902 and 1912. Many of the cards were sent to Kate Barlow Hunt, Leon's fiance and later wife who lived in London. Other cards were sent to their son Maurice and additional family members. Leon was a lawyer by profession but as we can see from the postcards in the exhibition also an extremely inventive artist. On the back of commercial postcards souvenirs with views of Paris Leon drew portraits of his beloved self-portraits landscapes and caricatures. These postcards were passed down through the family with many now held in West Vancouver by West Vancouver artist Pierre Coupe. Before we get to our discussion this evening it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to our panelists. We have Guy Atkins a writer and an artist based in London. Thank you for joining us Guy. Educated at Oxford University and Goldsmiths the University of London. Guy has written extensively on the culture of sending and collecting postcards in Edwardian Britain including in the 2014 book Come Home at Once published by Bantam Press. Their collaborative art projects explore the politics of history making often through personal and museum collecting. Atkins has developed their multi-disciplinary practice through projects with diverse communities including people in prison for a project called This Small Change from 2020 presented with the Prisoner's Education Trust in Tate with peace campaigners in a project called and there was Brian in 2018 presented for the Museum of London and a project with psychoanalysts called 20 Years of Archive Fever in 2014 presented for the Freud Museum of London. Our second panelist Pierre Coupe was a founding co-editor of the Georgia Straight and the founding editor of the Capilana Review. His work has received numerous awards grants and commissions including grants from the Conce des Arts in Quebec, Canada Council, the BC Arts Council. He received the Distinguished Artist Award from fans in 2013 was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2018 and named Faculty Emeritus at Capilana University in 2019. His work is represented in private corporate and public collections in Canada and abroad including the permanent collections of the Burnaby Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Colonna Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery among many others. So Guy and Pierre, let's start by having you both explain your connection to the postcards in the exhibition that we have. Guy do you want to start us off? Sure thanks, thanks Hilary. Yes I've been collecting and studying Edwardian postcards for about 15 years and over the last 10 years I've become particularly interested in hand drawn cards so where the sender has embellished the image on the front or has created an entirely new postcard and then posted it and I've been collecting and collecting and have really enjoyed doing so and then in 2019 I was at a market in London and which I'd been to many many many times before and I came across this folder of 50 postcards that Leon sent to Kate in 1903-1904 and I was bowled over by the might I'd never seen anything like that like these like the folder and eventually decided to buy them and become drawn into the amazing story that they show and having transcribed the 50 cards and Leon wrote an awful lot on each postcard having transcribed them. I got in contact with Pierre who amazingly had put a couple of a few of those postcards already on the internet and so I was able to link up with him and it's just been it's been an incredible experience to be able to to join the story. And Pierre we know your family connection but why don't you tell us a little bit more about the Leon Coupe project and your connection to it? Well it's such a big story in so many ways and hard to summarize but first of all thank you for the introduction Hilary and thank you guys so nice to see you both on Zoom and to keep this project going a little bit further. Well you know my father never really showed us these cards at all when we were kids in in Montreal. I think it was only later in his life that he brought them out and my brother I think was the first one to see them and I think my brother framed two sets of them for my father so that he would have them in the house in Montreal on Altsford Avenue and that's when I first saw them. My father never made a big deal of the cards he didn't talk to us about the cards he didn't talk to us about my grandfather and my grandmother so we have very little stories from him on in that regard but then after my father passed away and my mother passed away the cards that he had were distributed between me and my brother and my sister my brother Philippe and my sister Marguerite and so that's when I began to pay a little bit more attention to them and the cards that I received I received one of the framed sets that were in Montreal and they were really badly framed and so I had them reframed and and I hung them in the house in the studio here in West Vancouver and I thought that you know they were beautiful cards and I hadn't seen all the other cards in the family at that point and I thought well maybe it would be a good idea in order to have a little bit of a legacy for our children and our grandchildren to start getting the cards together and scanning them perhaps doing a self-polished little book just for the family just so everyone in the family could have an idea of what Leon did for Kate and then one day Reid Schar the the director of the Polygon Gallery came over for a studio visit and as he was leaving he noticed the set of postcards that I had framed above my computer above my desk here and he stopped in his tracks and said Pierre we have to do a book of these and that was the first time that I thought gee maybe we should take these cards a little bit more seriously maybe there's something here to share not just with the family but to share with a wider audience and so with Reid's encouragement with that kind of stimulus and then his he introduced me to Lisa Bouldicera at the Griffin Art Projects and Lisa came to see the cards and she was generous enough to include them in a group show at the Griffin Art Projects called Personne and about all kinds of matters of intimacy and of course these cards are very intimate cards here we are bringing them to the audience to a public audience and I can't imagine that either Kate or Leon ever thought that they would be seen by anyone other than the postman and and I'm sure that Leon was quite confident that his handwriting was so tiny and so indecipherable that no one else would ever take the time to even bother to read them so here we are making them public so it's been a project it's become a project and so for the last four years I've become more and more engaged with it and trying to find out ways of making them available to a more public audience and then getting the family more involved in letting me have them so the next step was after the Lisa Bouldicera show at the Griffin Art Projects Darren Morrison from the West Van Kuber Art Museum, your predecessor Hillary came to see them and he said well maybe we should do a show of them at the West Van Kuber Art Museum and then as often happens with all of my exhibition projects one director or curator resigns and you one comes in and you came in Hillary and of course you can't just inherit a project from a predecessor willy-nilly you had to come and take a look for yourself to make sure that this was something that you wanted to be behind and thankfully you were so here we are and so at that point I started to contact all the various family members and ask them if they would be willing to lend their postcards in their collection to this show and all of them were and that was I'm very grateful for that and so they began to send me all their cards which of course I had to sort and keep in you know securely because I can't afford to lose any of their cards and then had to begin the process of having them stand front and back and the process of having them frame and so it's been a long long journey doing all of that I have not yet arrived at the point that Guy has and kind I bless you for this Guy has transcribed all the texts of his cards I haven't had a chance to do that yet there's a lot more work to be done so basically that's how this project came developed and how we came to this point of having a show so I have to ask because I have my favorite but I would love to hear what your favorite cards are in the exhibition and are they a particular type of category of course we've got landscapes we've got self-portraits and portraits and caricatures so Guy can you start by telling us which of the cards are your favorite my favorite I think I think it's the self-portraits I think they really bring and the portraits of Kate as well but they seem to me to really bring out the importance of the collection as a whole how how you get drawn into this this intimate relationship that's building over time I think that's another element that's so interesting that this is a story this isn't a relationship that's this isn't these cards build the relationship and so they we move from them being engaged to the couple through to them being married and in that way those self representations and those representations of Kate carry such a weight you feel they're so charged I I love particularly the image of Leon Leon where he seems to sort of emerge from a sort of puddle of ink and you get that sense that he's and I think right through the cards you get a sense of his humor his craft but also this sort of perhaps darker side perhaps a more anxious side and he somehow is able to to to crystallize that into single cards and so the cards where yeah he's revealing something of himself I find really compelling and Pierre what about you can you pick just to feel as your favorite you know I I just love all of them and the more I look at them the more I want more of them too and and even this morning in preparation for this I was scrolling through them on my iPad while I was having breakfast and gosh you see more detail in them every time you take a look so for such tiny little things three and a half inches by five and a half inches they they they contain so much and they have such implications but I have to agree with Guy that my absolute favorite is that dark self-portrait where his face emerges from that pool of ink and that's the one that we put on the cover and then of course the other favorite is what we have on the back cover and that's his portrait of Kate which I think is so lovely it's just very moving to see those yes the self-portraits in general I love all of them the calligraphies are so so interesting the monograms his play on the the initials k h and those those ones always astonish me then I have a couple of other favorites naturally I love the ones where he's either addressing my father right after he's born in 1905 or depicting him and of course those have sentimental value for me but to just to get back to the self-portrait I have to put this in the self-portraits is that every time I see them of course I see my father because they are the spitting image of each other to the hair the moustache the nose the way they had this dark eyed gaze I mean my father's gaze could kill you from you know at a hundred yards if you wanted to I mean there was something there's a sharpness there anyway then some other favorites the one of my real favorites of course that I come back to again and again is the drawing of the the card that has the drawing of the lizard that forms the sea of our family name coupé and then there's the card that he addresses to my father in 1905 where the crescent moon in an inky blue sky forms the sea of coupé so all those kinds of plays are always interesting to me there's more and I could go on obviously I think we all could well and it's really nice actually to talk a little bit about the way in which the images work with the the text as well because as as you rightly say these are extremely small they're about three and a half by five inches and within the exhibition of course we have them framed in sets of nine and 10 and 12 depending on which family member they are on loan from or guy in guy's case and we actually have these wonderful magnifying sheets that you can hold up to the card so that you can look more closely at the detail which can get lost because they're so small in size and we've had a number of visitors pour over the cards with these magnifying sheets and and take in all of the details which when we have 120 cards can take quite a long time but it's it's wonderful to think about the interplay between the text and the image in these and I agree Pierre I think my favorite is probably the postcard with the moon as well there's also a really charming poem a four-line poem on that card and it's I think it refers to breastfeeding because Maurice has just been born the milky way and it's it's just completely charming and you do get a wonderful sense of Leon's personality in particular through not only the images but also the text and he's playful and he's inventive really an extraordinary person he tells he tells stories very very quickly as well that I love but there are Kareen Kate's sister and Kate have visited Leon on one of the it's in the aftermath of that visit and he describes the the flat after they've left and how sort of bare it is and how the the mattress that he's slept on is now back where it was meant to be and it was behind a piano and whereas Kate and Kareen have slept in his bed and you get it's such an incredible sense of the moments that he is trying to represent as well in that text and there I think there's something really magical in that and that he has he's able to convey things so in such a short space and so evocatively absolutely thank you for that so I'd like to just talk about the significance of the postcards because as I said Leon of course was a lawyer by profession and the postcards are if I'm not mistaken entirely commercial postcards that have been picked up basically souvenirs many with views of Paris and I just wondered and perhaps this is more a question for Guy what the significance of the commercial picture is on the recto of each postcard because we're focusing of course on Leon's drawings and and and the text but but was he putting any care or thought into what the images were from the postcard view? I think they give a sense of the of the postcard as a technology and how they were how they were produced and that he is using cards that are widely available there are lots of publishers competing for this this market that that's exploded in both London and Paris he I think it's interesting that he does on at some at some points choose quite loaded cards I think in terms of picking out particular spots of Paris that relate to shared memories and he's got the choice of available cards in order to do that and at the same time he uses cards from different art galleries and there are certain images within those artworks that I think are very deliberate and in fact actually then get repeated in later cards so there is the severed head of John the Baptist is one of the paintings by Moreau I think it is that's from the Louvre and that image then gets reworked into later cards by Leon of his own head which he draws by hand and sends sends to Kate and I think the fact that that he is making objects that are widely available into particular gifts for Kate is really significant and it and it's something that whilst there were other people doing that and using the postcard form as something to be to be played with it he is an outlier in terms of going to the extent that he did I don't think he's an outlier in terms of the number of cards that he sent it was a craze such that in London London went from well the UK went from sending sort of 300 million postcards a year at the end of the 19th century to sending close to a billion cards by 1914 it was that it was that quick an expansion so they were objects that people were familiar with getting but in 1903 it was it was pretty new and I'd love to know what Kate made of the of the artworks that she was receiving because they would have been new in a sense particularly the ones where he's using really kind of quite bright colors in his works they would have been incredibly exciting where he seems to be being influenced by contemporary art trends in Paris. Yes it would be a wonderful guy I would that's something I really wish I could find out more about and and have more time to study the cards and glean more of that information but there are two of the seascapes that show that his love for contemporary or for great artists and in which he inscribes the name Turner at the bottom of the card so he's clearly been looking at Turner in the National Gallery in London because he lived in London for about seven or eight years and the other thing that we should note is that he wrote all the cards to Kate in English even though he's a Frenchman but many of the cards have French phrases in them like so one of the decapitation scenes shows the guillotine and inscribed on the guillotine is entrez sans frappé enter without knocking and that phrase appears in different places too and then I just noticed this morning and one of the the cards that were sent to Kate in Barak près du Calais where she was staying in a pension that also had a charcuterie that on one of the pigs it's there's inscribed the phrase maison de retraite pour cochon retirement home for pigs so that kind of sense of humor also comes into play in those cards as well so yeah I would like to know more about who his artistic influences were and the ongoing perhaps guy is going to find out more and other people looking at them will be able to tell me more there's Turner but there's one little landscape where I he must have been looking at Monet at some point there's others one of the self-portraits reminds you of a go-gan self-portrait so I mean there are these associations that you can make whether they were deliberate whether he was actually looking at them actually influenced there's no way of really knowing for sure as there is no way of really knowing everything for sure about these cards they remain mysteries it's really nice in the exhibition that here we have two of the cards that you framed framed as double-sided and and and shown so that we can see both the recto and the verso and I think that's a fantastic way to understand the way in which he was choosing his commercial postcards and and he was clearly being selective about it guy of course your your your academic research has focused on postcard correspondence and you touched on this a little bit previously but I wonder if you can expand on it and speak a little bit about how Leon's practice for these postcards compared to those of his contemporaries yes um I think it's hard to appreciate just what an exciting technology and I think of it as a technology the postcard how exciting it was for people and in a sense the number of of of factors which came together in this period between 1900 and 1914 that makes what people refer to as the golden age of postcards we go from quite drab postcards before before the 20th century so when postcards were introduced in the 1870s and they looked something like this well exactly like this this is an 1875 postcard that was sent in the UK and what's interesting about it I suppose to a modern eye is that it's it has no image that the front is the address side and then you have the message on the back and in in the UK it stayed like that right into the into the 1890s there was a monopoly within within the UK a firm called De La Rue produced all the postcards and it was only because postcards were becoming increasingly popular in in in Europe in Germany and in France as well in the 1890s that there was this pressure in the UK to sort of liberate the postcard market and the post office allowed this and what you had was then this craze that emerges that takes advantage of the fact that so many more so many people can now read and write because education was was was was more widely available so that most homes had someone in in the house that could read and read and write the postal service got better and better in in the UK and France such that more and more regular deliveries took place such that in London at the peak there were 12 deliveries a day so that's one an hour so you could send a postcard in the morning it would arrive at lunchtime and then you could reply at lunchtime and it would get to your destination within the city by five or six o'clock so there was an instant element to the to the postcard that made it extremely exciting there were more people with some disposable income and the postcards were incredibly cheap because printing technologies were improving all the time and lots of commercial publishers were able to to make a lot of money out of this and there was this and they would encourage the collecting craze so yes the postcard was like it was in later the 20th century a holiday item as more and more people went on day trips to the seaside because the transport systems were the trains were better but people were also sending them simply to collect them simply to request something you know rather than write a formal letter you would send a postcard so you had this this this booming industry which people would take advantage of and play with and so people would draw on the front add figures to the front they would create I mean I've got one here which is which is a hand drawn postcard and that's all that was sent through the post I mean you know there's nothing on this side because the address is there with the stamp um all people would perhaps more more elaborate cards like this but there was they were still they were they and people would play with the form so here the lady who's or the man who's um pushing the cart says that he's nearly knocked my head he says on the on the on the top of the postcard so Leon wasn't you know it wasn't the only person um uh creating using the postcard as a as a as a site for creativity but having said that um and and partly this relates to I suppose how the cards have survived because typically cards once they go into the the postcard collecting world they get split up and there's a single cards um that that are bought Leon's card and I think it's because they were so beautiful um because they were so so important that they were able to survive as a set together and that means that we have we're in quite a unique position really of having a set um that that he's able to show us um what people did with postcards um over over a period of time and that is that is quite quite unique about the collection thank you for that insight I I remember as a young art history undergrad and and grad student collecting postcards from different museums of artwork from around the world that I would then sort of work into my research and it reminds me a little bit about that and it's amazing how how that industry progressed really and it looks like the message the the first postcard you showed us from 1875 just had that one line and it was basically about responding right what is that tech can you read what the text says there yeah and they were they were generally business messages I mean that's what they that's what they were used for they were used for a basic admin business administration um so it says um memorandum um if you have not written me by the post please report progress by return um so the the postcard was it was a was a handy object for business um before the images um I mean occasionally you do come across hand drawn cards from the 1870s um but and they're they're very exciting to to find but certainly not the love notes that we see Leon sending to his family members I've never seen I've never seen a love note on on on a on a draw of 1870s card no maybe they just don't exist anymore maybe they didn't survive um here I I'd love to what's that Pierre be then burn yes exactly um here I'd love to hear a little bit more about your family's plans for um these cards of course as I say they've all been framed and presented um as as per each collector within the exhibition uh so those will all go back to the individual family members uh from around the world North America and elsewhere but what happens to the project the the Leon Coupe project that you have uh so diligently put online do you have future plans for these well I have plans and I have hopes maybe more hopes than plans nothing concrete uh first of all I don't want to return any of the frame sets to anybody uh I think I'm going to keep them all and they'll have to fight me tooth and nail to get them back but no uh what I'd like to see if possible there are two things two routes that I would like to have happen now uh I would like to see the possibility of this exhibition traveling to another city it would be lovely to be able to show them in London and have Guy in London as a curator for the show there uh other curators have already seen the show and have suggested that they should be exhibited in Montreal or Paris or Tokyo where they might receive a good reception according to this person uh but I think further exhibition possibilities are something that I'd like to explore but another thing that I would that I'd hope for is for a book publication the catalogue that we've done with this exhibition at the Westman Cougar Art Museum is really beautiful and there are 60 reproductions in it with Guy Atkins text your text and my text but I think the postcards as a collection deserve a larger publication so that we can see the front and back of each card simultaneously on a page and I think that it would be nice to find someone more skilled than me it probably is Guy or you Hillary that to to write a full text about them to explore them in all of their dimensions I think that would be something that would be lovely to to have done whether there's a big market for that I don't know but again this is all speculation for me the uh as an artist the my my most my my my my deepest feeling for them is as aesthetic objects there are the historical associations the revelations the implications there are the family stories that are all attached to this but for me I see them purely as works of art now and and I'm always knocked out by not only how beautiful they are etc but how how fluent Leon's hand was how how good he was at drawing with pen and ink and then with brush and ink when you look at them more closely you see that he used a variety of techniques to to accomplish these things so I would like to see them shared for on that basis for their aesthetic value with a larger audience and I think that it would be important to have enough full books so that they all could be seen at once so plans aspirations hopes dreams uh let's just see what unfolds I mean this exhibition is and uh and the catalog has already brought new attention to the cards and brought new family members into the picture as well so I'm now beginning to learn more about the barlow hunt side of the family from people relatives in England that have recently contacted me so the project itself is you know growing in that dimension as well anyway we shall see I think for now we cannot we we who do not own any of these cards can be very envious of you who do because they are such lovely things thank you I think this is probably a a really good opportunity to wrap up but I just wanted to give Guy and Pierre the opportunity to say any last remarks that you would like to add to our discussion anything that we didn't cover perhaps um no I think I think that that was that was really lovely and really it was really nicely balanced across the different themes of the of the cards and you can it is so I mean that's the I think that's the wonderful thing about postcards actually is that they they seem to open up you know they're restless objects you know you you turn them over and they've got their text their image um their their their high art their low art you know their their their their fragile and yet they last you know then again you know and I think that's what was was so exciting and um about you know me the Pierre and Hilary you've made this this exhibition happen is just is just absolutely wonderful and it's uh uh yeah I'm I'm I'm absolutely sure it will be exhibition that that goes on elsewhere um yeah it feels very authentic I think that's the another aspect of it it's quite rare that you you get to work on a project which which feels like it's got an energy of its own and this this has um we know there isn't you all sorts of people find the cards compelling um and they are able to find their own particular interest in them um and that's that's really special it reminds me and I've talked to the Pierre about this before I'm struck by the parallel between the the Pierre the Leon Coupe project and the works of Vivian Mayer the street photographer um now I know they're very different artists but there is something incredibly authentic about the works um and that they weren't necessarily made for a big audience and that that that comes through when you get up close to the works um and that makes them incredibly human um and yeah there's a there's a momentum within the project that that that comes from that absolutely thank you Guy Pierre did you want to add anything before we do I think that's a wonderful way to end I think that's just gorgeous and I want to thank both of you so much for your participation and your and your your your your your your support for this project and for Leon's work that's wonderful thank you thank you Pierre uh so the exhibition my dearest Kate runs at the West Vancouver Art Museum until March 12th the Art Museum is open Tuesday this Saturday from 11 a.m to 5 p.m and we're happy for visitors to drop in during those hours they don't need to pre-book we have some excellent programming that's coming up including a virtual postcard printing workshop with Mark Johnson on February 24th and I encourage you to check out our website at West Vancouver Art Museum.ca for further details about our upcoming events as Pierre mentioned earlier we produced a beautiful exhibition designed by Stacey Noyes of Blissform which is available for purchase for $15 from our shop and that includes excellent essays by Pierre and by Guy and we look forward to seeing you all at the West Vancouver Art Museum very soon thank you Pierre thank you Guy have a good evening thanks Hilary thank you Guy