The vast majority of museums in Canada are set in small, rural communities, and they have a tricky balancing act to perform. They can't be so big-city edgy in their programming that they drive their public away, but they have to deliver on the promise of education and providing a link to the real discussion about art that goes on in the wider world beyond their leafy streets.
I found myself thinking about that balance this week when I took a few days to cruise the northern reaches of the 905 region. The Varley Art Gallery in Unionville (just northeast of Toronto) and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg (just to the northwest) both sit on the fringes of the metropolis, and their curators have ties to the debates around Canadian culture and art history. How they choose to engage their communities provides a kind of object lesson in the pros and cons of populism.
The current show at Varley, The Urge to Abstraction, offers a kind of beginner course in Canadian 20th-century art history, straightforwardly and engagingly laid out for the new viewer but with enough great pictures in it to satisfy the seasoned art lover. It takes a genuine stab at enlightenment.
The McMichael's Robert Bateman show, however, strikes this viewer at least as a betrayal of public trust. Where the museum might educate it obfuscates, encouraging a disdain for intelligent, informed discussion, serving as a thinly veiled sales platform for the enterprising artist/entrepreneur, and coddling the preconceptions of a public they have not graced with the opportunity to learn better. “At least this is a lot better than a lot of the stuff they put in galleries these days,” I heard one particularly crusty old gallery-goer griping to his companion, this exhibition and its didactic materials having reaffirmed him comfortably in his perceptions that art after 1900 has been largely a sham. I wanted to push him down the stairs.
But first to Unionville. The Varley Art Gallery's show The Urge to Abstraction was organized by veteran Canadian curator Roald Nasgaard, formerly the chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario and now a professor of art history at Florida State University. Though the wall labels decline to mention it, the works are drawn from the Thomson collection. (Hey, I noticed a few old friends on the wall).
The show declares itself a pedagogical exercise; look at the works and read the labels, this show promises, and you will learn a thing or two about Canadian art history and about the pleasures of looking at abstract painting. Emblazoned on the wall are Borduas's famous words from 1948: “Make way for the intelligence of the senses!”
Now, the premise of this exercise may seem overly cautious; to find abstraction a challenge is, after all, kind of like balking at the horseless carriage. Abstraction has been with us in the West for nearly a century. But Nasgaard does a solid job of setting out the major painting movements in Eastern Canada – the Automatistes and the Plasticiens in Montreal, the Painters Eleven in Toronto – though he barely touches on developments in other parts of the country. This, however, was not the point of this exhibition, which is framed as an exercise in art appreciation. People can learn a lot from this show, and the curator assumes the gallery-goer's eager involvement.
Importantly, the quality of the paintings is in many cases extremely high, with particularly good works by Ron Martin (one of his all-blue swirling dervishes); Guido Molinari; an early Charles Gagnon titled Double Feature from 1961 (a de Kooning-inspired composition that hovers between representation and abstraction); a serene Kazuo Nakamura indigo blue painting bisected by delicate black lines; and a Richard Gorman abstraction that will tear your throat out, a tour de force of trowelled-on pigment that collapses under the weight of its own glorious excess.
Lastly, should the viewer find the show arouses more curiosity than it can satisfy, the gallery is selling Nasgaard's just-released 400-page book Abstract Painting in Canada, a vast and lavishly illustrated tome that tours the entire history of abstract painting in Canada from 1920s until the present day. The show actually has rather modest aims – to help people to learn how to see – but it overdelivers admirably.
