ART POLITICS: CANADIAN ARTISTS 68

I arrived as Curator of Modern Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in the same mood as I had arrived at Athene ten years before: to make changes and improve standards. So when I was informed by the director that a new group of art enthusiasts (the Patrons of Canadian Art) had just received their charter as a non profit corporation (the P.C.A), I rejoiced. I had just returned from a visit to “Expo 67,” the World’s Fair in Montreal that celebrated the Canadian centennial, and had in mind to exploit the attention it had drawn to the visual arts by staging the largest ever exhibition of contemporary Canadian art—an idea that the director, William Withrow, instantly agreed upon, except that the gallery was already fully programmed for 1968.

So I dredged through the AGO calendar—where I discovered that the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA), that had enjoyed annual exhibitions in the gallery for the previous 48 years, had not yet received confirmation from us of their date for 1968. And since the Society, like the Canadian Royal Academy, was already on my list of events to let go, I met with the director and suggested that the OSA should be invited to participate in the creation of a nation-wide show that would mark its last appearance with us. How the society was persuaded to accept this without a fuss I do not know, except that the Board of Directors of the AGO at that time was forward looking, its president-elect, Edmund Bovey, a man of enormous persuasiveness, and the director of the AGO, Bill Withrow, a person of commendable courage in face of the Toronto art community.

So a “National Art Exhibition Committee” was formed, with Edmund Bovey in the chair and representatives from the OSA and the PCA along with Bill Withrow and myself, the Province of Ontario Council for the Arts, Toronto art dealers, art collectors and academics – its function being to raise the necessary funds and to leave the rest to me. We needed assembly points in civic galleries across Canada, jurors from outside the country (I chose the British celebrities, Richard Hamilton and Bill Turnbull, that I had known years earlier at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and Jonas Mekas from New York, because I wanted film to be part of the show); then there were insurances to be negotiated, transportation for the selected works and schedules for two teams (one for painting and one for sculpture) to cross the country with the jurors—along with a secretary for each. The entire gallery would have to be stripped of its permanent collection and the installation would, as always, be in the hands of the AGO’s staff, under my direction as curator. Public relations were in the hands of our PR department and the opening was scheduled for November 29^th 1968.

How the president of the OSA announced this fait accompli to the members I have no idea, though it must have required considerable diplomacy. Whatever the case, the members seem to have figured that I had been at the root of their demise. Not that they were discourteous: indeed, everything seemed to go well throughout. They had even asked for, and received, my approval for one of their members to design the catalogue, (though it turned out not to have been designed by the member they named—who was listed in the credits as in charge of “Art direction” and whose sole contribution seems to have been to direct the cost to more than $8,000 ($80,000 in today’s equivalent!) while nothing about the constipated product, the cover of which I include here, was approved by me.

 

 

NOW: fast forward forty years—to 2008, when I accidentally came across the annual report of the OSA for 1968 (extract below), and discovered that, unknown to me, the president had produced a magnificent snub—for, as far as the Ontario Society of Artists was concerned, I did not exist!

No one could have gained from such a report that it was I who had conceived the show, chosen the jurors, negotiated their travels and crossed the country with them, nor that it was my installation and my catalogue introduction. In short, the spin put on the most ambitious and the most expensive of all exhibits of Canadian contemporary art, down to the present day, had turned the event into a victory for the OSA after all, at least within their own community—something of which I had been oblivious for forty years (though, come to think of it, they have never held another exhibition at the AGO).

What I remember most clearly about the show was that on opening night one of the artist participants, his mind loaded with some kind of noxious substance, announced that he intended to set fire to his huge colour-field canvas and had to be escorted out (his canvas, the largest in the show, following, next morning).

The exhibition, however, mostly served its purpose. It spread news to England and to America of the high quality of contemporary Canadian art—helped no doubt by its size, by the big prizes and by the glowing praise that came from all three jurors as well as from the well known New York movie critic, Manny Farber, and Lucy Lippard, the New York art critic who reviewed it for ArtsCanada.

 

 

Twenty three years after the above report, its author, Doris McCarthy, by then in her 80s, published her autobiography THE GOOD WINE: An Artist Comes of Age. It was reviewed in November 1991 by Susan Crean, an art critic and supporter of the women’s movement, in The Toronto Globe and Mail (Canada’s national newspaper), who saw it, in part, as:

“...an insider’s tale about the peculiar challenge of being an artist in Canada, offering an unflattering view of institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario which “jockeyed” artist’s groups like the Ontario Society of Artists out of the gallery and with them their annual juried exhibitions. McCarthy was president of the OCA at the time of the putch in the sixties ... This is a little known and rarely acknowledged chapter in our cultural history, the downside to the professionalization of public art galleries... that perforce excludes the sharing of power with anyone, especially artists...”

This book and Ms. Crean’s review of it are the only public publications I have ever come across reporting the AGO’s termination of the annual show of the OSA.