Our experience at the AGO was very stimulating. The museum is dramatically symbolized by a large Henry Moore bronze sculpture. The new wing designed by Frank Gehry is sleek and curvaceous, and its long cool breezeway draws you in.
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Henry Moore, 1898-1986
Large Two Forms, 1969 |
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| The inviting entrance portico |
After the noise and bustle of the street, the museum's lobby was cool, quiet, spacious, and graceful. It has Gehry's characteristic sinuous curves in its ramps and counters, realized in warm wood paneling that makes guests feel welcome. How wonderful to be in an art museum, a big-time art museum.
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Frank Gehry tacked some features onto the original
building, like this staircase, without concern
for blending respectfully. |
My first question was what do the Canadians have in the way of European masters. They have a reassuring number of Old Masters, with particular strength in Northern Europe in the 1600s. Their pride and joy is Rubens' The Massacre of the Innocents, a gruesome subject treated with Rubens' typical flamboyance. There were two excellent portraits by Frans Hals, a very nice Rembrandt, unusual and excellent works by van Dyck.
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Frans Hals, 1585-1666
Isaak Abrahamsz. Massa, 1626 |
Unfortunately, the museum chose to hang their 19th century European works in the 19th century salon style, that is from waist high to the ceiling in a ballroom-size gallery, with numbered guides in pockets on the benches, like hymnals in pews. It was tedious to work out who painted what, and virtually impossible to photograph. For the 19th century they had good examples by Monet, Gauguin, Tissot, Waterhouse.
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| 19th Century European Gallery |
There were quite a few 19th century works by less known artists—friends and colleagues of the big names. A good example is a work by Armand Guillaumin, who exhibited in six of the eight Impressionist exhibitions.
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Armand Guillaumin, 1841-1927
Le Trayas: Morning, Grey Weather, 1907 |
Their 20th century European collection is higher quality and hung properly at eye level.
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Marc Chagall, 1887-1985
Over Vitebsk, c. 1914 |
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Otto Dix, 1891-1969
Portrait of Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann, 1922 |
There wasn't much American art, but we did spot a good piece by Georgia O'Keeffe and an excellent portait by Chuck Close.
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Chuck Close, b. 1940
Kent, 1971 |
Time for a lunch break in the Frank Restaurant, which was designed by Frank Gehry. I had a delightful salmon entree with fingerling potatoes, Dan had shrimp prepared tandoori style in a salad; gourmet food in a delightful presentation. We were ready to resume our exploration.
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| Jan's lunch: salmon with fingerling potatoes |
After lunch, the question was who's who in Canadian art. Although Canada has been populated for a long time, it didn't get its independence from British rule and form itself into a nation until the mid-19th century. In addition, it is a vast territory and sparsely populated because much of it is virtually uninhabitable. The populations is still only about 35 million. For these reasons, Canada's art history is not as robust as that of the United States. The earliest works at this museum were from the mid-19th century. The earliest were a few solemn portraits that look like our colonial portraits from fifty years earlier. Again, most of the 19th century Canadian work was hung salon-style,
stacked three or four deep in a tantalizing but frustrating array. Many of the best works were genre scenes like this one.
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George Agnew Reid, 1860-1947
Gossip, 1888 |
Canadian art picked up steam in the 20th century. The big theme for quite awhile was the land itself, the vast wilderness and its native peoples. The biggest name in Canadian art is Emily Carr, the first artist to depict the landscape in a modernist style. Her early works tended toward geometric simplification.
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Emily Carr, 1871-1945
Indian Church, 1929 |
A couple of decades later, her style was lighter, more personal, and more ethereal.
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Emily Carr, 1871-1945
Trees in the Sky, 1939 |
The Canadian artist who kept grabbing my attention was Lawren S. Harris. Over the course of his career, Harris' painting evolved from Impressionist-influenced, decorative landscapes to stark images of the northern landscape, and then to geometric abstractions.
This textured style was influenced by Impressionism.
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Lawren S. Harris, 1885-1970
Autumn Forest with Glaciated Bedrock, Georgian Bay, c. 1914 |
Harris was one of the founders of the Group of Seven which simplified and abstracted landscapes in a manner that reminds me of Rockwell Kent or Georgia O'Keeffe.
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Lawren S. Harris, 1885-1970
Lake and Mountains, 1928 |
In 1938 he moved to Santa Fe New Mexico, where he helped found the Transcendental Painting Group, an organization of artists who advocated a spiritual form of abstraction.
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Lawren S. Harris, 1885-1970
Painting No. 4, c. 1939 |
We were watching for work by Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle. He was the long-term lover of American artist Joan Mitchell, but his work is not shown much in the U.S. We found a very nice abstraction; the paint was applied with a trowel in short stacked strokes.
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Jean Paul Riopelle, 1923-2002
Chevreuse II, 1954 |
I was absolutely floored by two paintings of the same woman, the artist's wife, twenty-nine years apart. His precise look at the effects of time is painfully beautiful. The artist, Alex Colville, had just died in 2012, and the museum had a small exhibit of his works in memorial; all of it was moving in its visual precision and detached philosophy.
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Alex Colville, 1920-2013
Woman in Bathtub, 1978 |
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Alex Colville, 1920-2013
Woman on Ramp, 2007 |
After dealing with all this great art in their permanent collection, Dan and I tackled the special exhibits, which turned out to be quite engrossing. A whole floor of the museum was given over to a show called "Lost in the Memory Palace," by a pair of Canadian artists named Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, which consisted of a suite of eight installations that blended sound effects with lights and imagery. One was a storm room, in which a multi-media imitation of a storm rages around visitors. I spent a long time playing with a set of 72 interactive speakers—each one played a different part of a generalized musical sound, and they were activated by shadows. The most exciting piece was all sound: consisting of 40 identical speakers arranged in a circle, each with a different singing voice, it was called "Forty Part Motet," and was attributed solely to Janet Cardiff. The singing had an ethereal, angelic quality. Many people sat reverently on stools and listened with their eyes closed. "Forty Part Motet" was installed in the Henry Moore Sculpture pavilion, in the midst of a couple dozen plaster casts of sculptures by Henry Moore. The combination of sculpture and music was transporting.
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| Plaster Cast of Henry Moore Sculpture |
Time for a latte break! Fortunately there was an espresso and pastry stand in the Galleria Italia. This remarkable structure was more or less tacked onto the old museum by Frank Gehry. On the outside it supports a sweeping, shiny curve the length of the building which also provides a pleasant shaded walkway for pedestrians. On the inside it forms a long portico with curving beams like the hull of a ship upside down, each mighty beam composed of layers of wood, symbolizing the plentiful Canadian forests. There I was happy to find a latte and a mini cream puff. Cool moment: savoring my cream puff while listening to the heavenly chorus of the "Forty Part Motet" and admiring the long arcade of wooden beams.
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| Galleria Italia |
The Galleria had a large display of sculpture by Sorel Etrog, a Romanian who immigrated to Canada early in his life. He made interesting totem-like bronzes.
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| Scupture by Sorel Etrog, b. 1933 |
The best sculpture I saw all day was by Anish Kapoor, a contemporary favorite of mine, who is always coming up with a surprise.
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Anish Kapoor, b. 1954
No. 5, 1997 |
One of their big upcoming exhibits is by Ai Weiwei, a dissident artist in China who has become an international cause because the government has made such a strong effort to suppress his work—apparently to no avail, because there is a lot of his work in the West. His works are exciting because he symbolizes ideas about social justice in novel ways that make an impact. As a preview, the museum was showing a huge snake of his design, consisting of hundreds of identical black and gray backpacks stacked end to end, that was suspended from the ceiling in a long sinuous curve. It commemorated the hundreds of school children who died in the collapse of a shoddily constructed school building. Ai wanted to call attention to it because the government was doing more to cover it up than to investigate the corruption that caused it. I took a movie of this but not a still shot.
When they closed the museum, we browsed around the shop for awhile and bought a few souvenirs, then we took a taxi back to the hotel. Needing no further sustenance, I stayed in the room and endeavored to work on the blog, but before long my eyes insisted on resting. Dan went back to the cheap Greek place and got a light meal, then called it a night.
