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.
Bateman at the McMichael seems to have the opposite aim. Clearly a barnburner of a money-maker (the place is packed), this exhibition solemnly presents Bateman as an artist grappling with the big themes of 20th-century art, an heir to Franz Kline, Clyfford Still or even Vincent Van Gogh, a lone wolf wrongly condemned by the “art snobs” who are out to get him.
This is patent nonsense, serving simply to reveal Bateman's shallow understanding of his great forebears. Just for the record: To mimic two white passages of paint in a Still painting by painting a pair of mountain goats on a rocky cliff, as Bateman describes having done in the making of Sheer Drop (1980), cannot in any meaningful way be considered an homage to the great American abstract expressionist painter, whose aim was to abolish the conventions of three-dimensional space and embrace, instead, the physical facts of paint on canvas. Such illusionism would have been an abomination to Still. It made me sad and mad to see museum-goers lapping up this pretentious silliness.
This is less odious, though, than the didactic video made by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria that the McMichael has chosen to display in the gallery, a vehicle that allows Bateman the opportunity to pooh-pooh the questions of ethics surrounding the sale of his high-priced, photo-mechanical reproductions, or to vent his grievances against the museum professionals who have (rightly) denied him a place at the table of art history.
Let's be clear: There is no conspiracy operating here. The fact is that Bateman engages with a subject matter that is dear to the hearts of Canadians: the beauty of the natural world. But he describes it in terms that are essentially those of illustration. There is no way in which his handling of paint, or his understanding of what painting is, pushes that medium forward, or even gives it a personal inflection. There is no way in which his paintings reveal interesting thinking about the relationships between man and nature; his environmentally themed paintings, for example, have all the sophistication of Reader's Digest illustrations.
It was not always so. In the early days, when his compositions were more carefully observed and less grandiose, he had his moments. Queen Anne's Lace and American Goldfinch (1982), for example, expresses a sincere delight in an everyday moment of nature observed, right down to the delicate gesture of the bird's extended claw, caught in mid-flight. I found myself thinking about this humble picture as I sat in the traffic on the way back into the city, looking at the late-summer fields lining the highway, shot through with the same golden light.
There was a modesty to it that is now long gone. Increasingly, Bateman has a heavy hand when it comes to Meaning of Life metaphors, and his technique seems workmanlike, with the paint laid on in dull, uniform strokes whether the subject is rock, fur, water or cloud. A master painter he ain't.
However, a lover of the outdoors, a passionate Canadian, an avid environmentalist, an ardent supporter of numerous good causes, a consciousness raiser about the degradations of drift-net fishing or clear-cut logging – these things he most certainly is.
Bateman has chosen to do many constructive things with his fame, and that is to be admired. But let's get serious. Our arts institutions are empowered and funded to educate members of the public, not pander to their ignorance in pursuit of a quick profit. You've got to wonder: When is the McMichael going to start acting like a museum?
The Urge to Abstraction continues until Nov. 11. The Art of Robert Bateman runs until Oct. 28.
members can read movies review going back to 1977.
38
