Good morning! Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.
Journalists aren’t known for their patience: Marsha Lederman and I weren’t examples of the virtue during our many, many discussions about the mystery she uncovered at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015.
But Marsha – formerly The Globe and Mail’s Western Canadian arts reporter and now a Globe columnist – is a model of persistence.
Nine years ago, Marsha reported on the astonishing circumstances that led the Vancouver Art Gallery to acquire 10 long-hidden new works by famed Group of Seven artist J.E.H. MacDonald. The gallery was jubilant about the acquisition of the oils on paperboard, including studies for Mist Fantasy, Northland; The Elements; and The Tangled Garden.
The sketches, the gallery said, were made between 1910 and 1922, and had been buried for more than four decades in a backyard in Thornhill, Ont., then kept for another 40 years or so in the home of Toronto art collectors. They were donated to the VAG after its senior curator, Ian Thom, a highly respected Group of Seven expert, authenticated them and arranged the gift. A second expert agreed with Thom’s assessment.
But the story never sat well with Marsha. This week, after nine years of refusing to answer Marsha’s persistent questions of whether the works were fake, the gallery opened an exhibit explaining in detail that, yes, indeed, the original story was too good to be true. The 10 sketches are fakes. And the gallery has known that since 2016.
After the initial media coverage of the VAG’s acquisition, Marsha began getting calls from skeptical experts on the Group of Seven. Alan Klinkhoff, a respected Montreal gallerist, noted in a blog post that he was asked to appraise the sketches and refused.
“I was not 100-per-cent convinced,” he said in an interview then with Marsha.
“It’s my opinion that there’s an excellent chance, a very excellent chance, that they are not right, and they absolutely have to be tested,” Ken Macdonald, a retired but still active art dealer and consultant, said at the time.
Scientific analysis was conducted on the paintings by the Canadian Conservation Institute in 2016.
Over the years, Marsha repeatedly asked for the results of the tests. The institute wouldn’t answer the question, referring her back to the VAG. Freedom of Information requests came back empty. Kathleen Bartels, the long-time director of the gallery, who oversaw the donation, refused to explain.
As Marsha writes today, the mess was inherited by Anthony Kiendl when he became the VAG’s director and CEO in the summer of 2020 after Bartels left.
“I just can’t really understand why the delay in cleaning this thing up,” Klinkhoff told Marsha this week.
Kiendl says the reason it took so long for his administration to reveal the truth was logistical: he was dealing with so much when he started – the pandemic and its fallout primarily – and wanted the person he hired as the gallery’s curator of Canadian art to take on the project and create an exhibition around it, where the gallery would come clean.
In the exhibit, the gallery does come clean: Some of Marsha’s stories are included in the display. In a video created for the exhibit, Thom addresses what happened.
“When it first started, I thought this is one of the great experiences of my life. And then it just got worse and worse and worse,” says Thom, who retired from the gallery in 2018. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life, frankly.” (Thom declined an interview request from The Globe this week.)
But mystery remains.
Bartels, now executive director and CEO at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, did not respond to Marsha’s requests for an interview.
It remains unclear if MacDonald didn’t paint the sketches, who did? And how did they get to the point where they were identified as being created by one of Canada’s most iconic artists?
“Given the cards we were dealt, we’re trying to respond responsibly and ethically,” Kiendl says.
“Museums traditionally like to be authorities and we like to present accurate information and we do our best,” he added. “But I guess, from time to time, that doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.”
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.
Wendy Cox