Shirley Thomson is heading to Mysore in the New Year. "I always go to India when I am in a period of transition," she says in her crisp voice over the telephone from her office in Ottawa. "I love India."
The last time Thomson visited the subcontinent, she had just stepped down as director of the National Gallery of Canada after a five-year run that sparked outrage -- as bizarre as that now seems -- over the 1990 purchase of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire, a painting that had graced the American pavilion -- Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome -- at Expo 67 in Montreal.
This trip coincides with Thomson's reluctant departure from her job as director of the Canada Council for the Arts at the end of this month (her replacement could be announced as early as today). "I would have liked another year," she admits when pressed, "but what can you do," she asks in a voice that conveys the audible equivalent of a shrug. "You have to be philosophical about it. I've had five years. That is very good innings."
Invariably, for a woman widely described as a workaholic, Thomson will work as she travels -- giving a speech at a Canadian Studies conference in Mysore ("lovely little town, great silks, by the way"), doing some work in Delhi for an international association of arts funders -- then meet a friend in Calcutta, a city she has never visited before, before heading south to Orissa and back through Madras, "one of my favourite cities."
If only the route to the next stage of her life were as well-defined. She has had invitations to be a visiting professor from a couple of universities and there are high-placed rumours she is in line to chair the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board. She will definitely carry on as the interim head of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) that she helped found at a Canada Council-organized summit meeting in Ottawa a couple of years ago. Nurturing this administrative baby through its infancy is the main reason she wanted another year as Canada Council director.
"For that kind of position [head of IFACCA] you have to have a very strong arts council behind you," she explains, adding that Canada is now in a very good position internationally because of the success of its artists -- think of Janet Cardiff in visual arts, Zacharias Kunuk in film and Yann Martel in literature -- and the depth of its public support for the arts. "We are both idealistic and pragmatic. I like that balance of features."
Although Thomson would probably never say so, that "balance" of pragmatism and idealism makes an apt self-description. She was born in St. Mary's, Ont., of British immigrant stock in 1930 and left home to take up a scholarship at the nearby University of Western Ontario. Along the way, she married political scientist Dale Thomson and worked as a teacher and for UNESCO.
After her marriage broke up, she reinvented herself as an art historian, earning an MA in 1974 and a PhD from McGill in 1981. And then she went gangbusters, securing a job as director of Montreal's McCord Museum in 1982, moving to the Canadian Commission on UNESCO as Secretary-General in 1985, from there to the National Gallery in 1987 and then to the Canada Council. Did I mention that she will be 73 in February?
Thomson is very cagey about the 20-year hiatus in her formal education and the two distinct stages of her life -- she doesn't even acknowledge her marriage in The Canadian Who's Who. She will say almost nothing about what is, quite frankly, an inspiring ability to reinvent herself and the transition into a stellar, late-blooming career as an arts administrator.
Her explanation -- "It took me a long time to discover a career, if indeed I have discovered it," puts a high gloss on understatement. Her discretion is legendary, but she will say, in reference to friends who are her age, that "sometimes terrible things happen and they no longer have traditional lives . . . you react to these things and you experiment."
Ask almost anybody in the arts about Thomson -- and, believe me, I've done a survey -- and the superlatives come thick and fast. I tracked down a senior arts person on the western reaches of the country who labelled her as more of an advocate than a critic, complained about her lack of charisma as a public speaker and criticized her handling of the Newman brouhaha at the National Gallery. Even so, this source quickly added that, "she did an excellent job at the Canada Council." That was definitely the feeling at Rideau Hall last month when Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson interrupted the literary awards to make an impromptu speech praising Thomson, and the audience of writers, dignitaries and bureaucrats responded with a standing ovation. Here's but a sampling of the kudos I collected.
"As an administrator and an art lover, she has brought a great sense of artistic dynamism, tranquillity and support for the Canada Council," says Thomson's political boss, Heritage Minister Sheila Copps. "She is going to leave on a very high note."
"She is energy personified," says actor Jean-Louis Roux, chairman of the Canada Council. "She has devotion, conviction, generosity and, moreover, she has faith. I hate to use a religious term, but it really is a question of faith. She believes in what she is doing and she believes in the importance of arts and culture in our society and she is constantly fighting for the politicians to be convinced of that importance."
"Brilliant," says Vancouver dance critic and former Canada Council board member Max Wyman. "The suppleness of her mind is just astonishing. She will zero straight in on an issue and come up with the most astonishing and relevant insights. One of the great joys of being on the Council with Shirley was the ability that she had to guide us deeply into philosophical issues about long-term planning and possibilities for the arts . . . She really knows how to negotiate [Ottawa] She can swim with the sharks and survive."
"Shirley was one of the best heads of the Canada Council in the last 30 or 40 years," says Peter Herrndorf, president and CEO of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. "She was very visible, she never stopped travelling across the country, never stopped being a champion of the arts or individual artists. She was very knowledgeable in certain art forms and then became more and more knowledgeable in others as she went along.
"Secondly, she has a very down-to-earth, feisty style. She can speak like a bureaucrat when necessary, but she also has a deft colloquial turn of phrase, and I think artists and people in the arts community relate to that.
"Thirdly, she was a very strong supporter of new initiatives by startup organizations. Sometimes the larger ones thought she was too preoccupied with the smaller ones, but she had a very clear instinct and a very clear philosophy that part of what the Council had to do was to seed those smaller and startup organizations and give them a chance to do really creative work.
"Lastly, she managed to get a very, very large increase in funding for the Canada Council, probably the most significant in several decades, and made sure that the money headed across the country to artists and to artists' organizations."
"The artists of Canada have never had a better spokesperson," says writer and critic David Staines, dean of arts at the University of Ottawa. "She is a manager, an advocate and a leader."
"She just sort of works," says photographer Geoffrey James, making the word resound with multiple synonyms for effective. "If she goes to an exhibition, she looks at the work -- this is something." James, who worked at the Council under three different directors before leaving to pursue an award-winning career as a still photographer, gives Thomson top marks for the way she "mended fences and dealt with realities while understanding the arts in a fairly deep way."
"For the first time in my experience here, we had debates about the arts and the merits of different artists and art forms," says Gordon Platt, head of the Canada Council's writing and publishing programs. "She was a passionate believer in the arts. She read every book on our fiction and non-fiction lists and she would proselytize the virtues of different styles of writing. She was an excellent manager. She gave a lot of latitude to her staff and she let them run their programs and make decisions. She would challenge us on things to test our thinking, but let the experts in dance set priorities for their programs and let us in literature line up our programs as we felt they should be." Being a success in any job depends, at least in part, on luck and timing. Thomson has had both at the Council, after a rocky tenure at the National Art Gallery over the $1.8-million purchase of the Newman painting, a 5.4-metre-tall canvas consisting of a blue background divided by a long red stripe.
"I think I was pretty naive when I look back," says Thomson. There was a new board coming in at the NAG and the economy was on the skids, and she admits now she didn't think there would be any "ruckus" about buying a painting by an acknowledged master of abstract expressionism.
By the time Thomson arrived at the Council in January, 1998, the economy was buoyant and Parliament had approved a $25-million increase in the agency's annual allocation, after the heavy cuts of the mid-1990s. She was also blessed in having Roux as the chairman of the Council during her tenure. The two have worked together very effectively as a team, despite the fact that both are political appointees who owe their professional loyalty and allegiance, not to each other, but to the Prime Minister's Office. Although they met for the first time when Thomson's appointment was announced back in 1997, they have since become friends.
Luck only goes so far, however. What matters is what you do with it. On that score, Thomson has more than excelled as an administrator and as a passionate spokesperson for the arts both at home and abroad. We'll hear more from her.
A Passage to India, after all, is all about discovering self.
Sandra Martin