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It was a long timing coming, a glacial grind that at times tested the patience of an art-starved public. But the votes are now counted, and it's official: The new $300-million Art Gallery of Ontario is a glorious success, feted by The New York Times, the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times, and listed this week by The New Yorker's Paul Goldberger as one of the international architectural high points of the year.

But the achievement of AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum involves more than bricks and mortar and the skillful juggling of his myriad stakeholders. Under his leadership, the AGO has become a museum squarely centred on learning, committed to challenging the canon of art history in inventive ways, and democratically pitched to accommodate all kinds of visitors and all kinds of cultural backgrounds, ethnicities and histories.

It's a museum ideally suited to the city and the country it serves. Woodsy and warm as a longhouse, it offers a sense of shelter against the harrowing chill of the Canadian winter. Yet it also opens itself to Toronto in unprecedented ways, framing eye-dazzling slices of prime architectural Canadiana along its northern Dundas Street façade, and, to the south, over the architectural bricolage of downtown: the brick Victorians, the CN Tower, the exuberant Will Alsop-designed Ontario College of Art & Design, and the corporate monoliths with their blinking radio towers. You love Frank Gehry's building, and you love the city through the lens it affords.

Where the power centre of Toronto has historically sat squarely at the mercantile hub of King and Bay, the AGO's rebirth signals a palpable gravitational shift. Canada's most populous and cosmopolitan city now has a clearly defined campus of thought that stretches from the AGO and its soul sister OCAD up through the grounds of the University of Toronto, redefining it as a city driven not principally by commerce but by culture and creativity. In this arena, we can be world-beaters.

Given Teitelbaum's life story and disposition, all this might have been predicted. He grew up in Toronto, the son of painter Mashel Teitelbaum and Ethel, a community organizer and a judge at the Immigration and Refugee Board. That shared legacy shows: a sensibility that marries a deep public-mindedness with a search for understanding.

“I remember coming to the Art Gallery of Ontario as a boy and seeing the Rembrandt exhibition,” Teitelbaum told me over a plate of eggs and toast last week. “My father would ask questions like: ‘Why did Rembrandt make this? What did it mean to him? What does it say about him?' He taught me to look for meaning, to understand what my relationship to something actually is.”

A flamboyant and often troubled man, Mashel had a vexed relationship to authority in general and the AGO in particular, at times picketing the gallery for its failure to represent the work of local artists. His son grew up in that shadow.

This may be why the transformed AGO places such a premium on the voice of the artist, both literally (with audio phones giving access to the artists' own commentary on their work) and more strategically, with many small galleries allowing for an intimate connection with particular sensibilities – whether those of Peter Paul Rubens or Michael Snow. Their works now seem to pose questions. A photograph of a female crucified Christ by little-known Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol is nestled in among the gallery's collection of historical European paintings. A Bonnard landscape shares the wall with one by Lawren Harris – a provocation to the colonial mindset. The place is alive with voices, and the loose ends dangle like live wires.

In this, the gallery reflects the sensibility of its director. “What Matthew is really good at is posing questions,” says New York Museum of Modern Art director Glen Lowry, who originally enticed Teitelbaum to come to the AGO as chief curator during Lowry's tenure as director in 1993. Seeing a work of art, Teitelbaum “looks at it, thinks about it, and then finds the question that unlocks the meaning of the object,” Lowry says

This measured approach has also been instrumental in Teitelbaum's diplomatic success balancing the wishes of the Thomson family – the gallery's principal donors – with the vision of a star architect and the needs of the institution itself. Standing at the centre of this perfect storm of strong opinion, he has stayed the course. “This is now by far the best achievement for a museum in Canada,” says Guy Cogeval, the director of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, who spent two days in the gallery during the opening week, along with a throng of 68,000 fellow visitors. “Gehry has been tamed by a great personality and his team.”

The long negotiations with the Thomson clan have been handled with similar gentility and purpose. “Let's be clear here,” says Lowry, speaking of the $100-million in funds that the museum has received from the Thomsons, quite apart from the more than $300-million in art. “This is the largest cash gift to a cultural institution in Canadian history. And we are not talking about stock here. We are talking about real cash, right now. Matthew has changed the game in Canada. He has moved the bar.”

More remarkable still has been his ability to pull in a host of other key donors and stakeholders, somehow keeping all the players at the table. “He has demonstrated that you can have that kind of ambition,” Lowry says, “but that you can realize it in a very Canadian way.”

Behind it all has been Teitelbaum's commitment to learning. Looking back to his student days at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, he says: “Herbert Read, the great critic, once said that he didn't want to educate himself in public – that by the time he went public with an idea, he would have to know exactly where he stood. When I started out as a museum professional, I though that people wanted that kind of certainty. My evolution as a public thinker, though, has been exactly in the opposite direction. I think that I have an obligation to educate myself in public, so that people can be encouraged to ask questions of themselves as well.”

The museum he has brought into being is full of that sense of discovery, like a great, ocean-going vessel setting forth. You feel it in the firm hold of the Galleria Italia, with its wooden ribs. You feel it in the torque of the Gehry staircase, tumbling you through space. You feel it in the basement galleries, which house the late Ken Thomson's collection of ship models, brilliantly installed in undulating glass cabinets to suggest a museological metaphor for migration across time and space. What more can we ask of a museum than that it embody this sense of adventure?

Visiting the AGO Dec. 21 in the throes of a midwinter blizzard, I had the kind of experience that was once impossible in Canada. Moving through Gehry's beautifully calibrated galleries, I paused in front of a case of medieval miniature German boxwood prayer beads – little walnut-sized devotional sculptures that hinge open to reveal Christian narrative tableaux within. I spent another moment sitting in the inner sanctum of the Frum African collection, absorbing the striking arrangement of tribal sculptures in a calm, synthetic twilight. Taking my cue from another visitor in the Galleria Italia, I lay down on my back for a while on a bench and looked up at the curving Douglas fir beams, arcing through space.

Finally I wound up on Gehry's curving staircase. As the evening light in the clearing sky faded to apricot and violet, I noticed that the glass roof of the Walker Court was holding the snow and ice from the day's storm, revealing, from below, the patterns made by the wind. The space felt snug, like being inside an igloo.

Where the AGO was once a good, solid regional museum, it has been transformed into a place with a deep capacity to intrigue and educate. Suddenly, one wonders if one can ever get to the bottom of it. The Thomsons (and a host of other Toronto donors) gave the money. Frank Gehry gave us his heart and soul in the building, justly noted by The New York Times as one of his “most gentle and self-possessed designs.” But it was Teitelbaum who held the whole thing together. It took a while, but it was worth the wait.