National Gallery of Canada: Ideas, Art, Architecture 9780773570832

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART ONE: MAGNETIC SPACE
1 From Outside
2 From Inside
3 Inviting in Lawren Harris
4 Inviting in Plato on Grace and Gracelessness
PART TWO: THE FIELD BEFORE (1910–65)
5 Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions
6 Brown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism"
7 Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric
8 Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"
9 A Canadian Tragi-Comedy
PART THREE: THE EVOLUTION OF A STYLE (1966–90)
10 Humanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs
11 Centennialism
12 The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada
13 The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie
14 A "Magical Spot"
15 Potentialities
EPILOGUE: "The Spiritual Foundations of Our National Life"?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

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The National Gallery of Canada IDEAS

ART

ARCHITECTURE

Douglas Ord

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

Douglas Ord 2003 ISBN 0-7735-2509-2 Legal deposit second quarter 2003 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the National Gallery of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Ord, Douglas, 1950The National Gallery of Canada: ideas, art, architecture / Douglas Ord Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2509-2 1. National Gallery of Canada.

I. Title

N910.O7O73 2003 727'.7'o92

02003-900196-2

Typeset in 10/13 Minion and Scala Sans. Book design and typesetting by zijn digital.

Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments xi PART ONE

MAGNETIC SPACE

1

From Outside 5

2

From Inside 19

3

Inviting in Lawren Harris 33

4

Inviting in Plato on Grace and Gracelessness 45 PART TWO

THE FIELD BEFORE

(1910-65)

5

Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions 55

6

Brown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism" 75

7

Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric 101

8

Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art" 129

9

A Canadian Tragi-Comedy 157 PART T H R E E

THE E V O L U T I O N OF A STYLE

(1966-90)

10

Humanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs 187

11

Centennialism 221

12

The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada 247

13

The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie 279

14

A "Magical Spot" 313

15

Potentialities

343

EPILOGUE

"The Spiritual Foundations of Our National Life"? 367

Notes 399 Bibliography 441 Index 455

VI

CONTENTS

Preface

The National Gallery of Canada is an institution about whose past a very few people know a lot, some people know a little, and most people even in Canada know next to nothing, though they pay for the Gallery through their taxes. When I moved to Ottawa in late 1987 I still belonged to the middle group, despite having written about contemporary art in Toronto during the 19705. But only months after this, in May 1988, the National Gallery underwent a transformation, opening for the first time in its own building: a crystalline edifice designed by Moshe Safdie that was to the Gallery's previous quarters in an office block what Cinderella's carriage was to the pumpkin. Overlooking the Ottawa River, and sited between the Parliament Buildings and the city's Roman Catholic basilica, the new National Gallery was instantly a prominent and even remarkable presence in a city whose usual business is administration, the quieter and less conspicuous the better. Nor was this prominence diminished by a series of art-related controversies that soon broke out around the relationship of modern and contemporary art to the new building. The first of these, in 1990, was the Gallery's purchase for $1.76 million of Voice of Fire, an immense abstract painting by the American artist Barnett Newman, which consisted of two vertical bands of blue stripes and one of orange. The second and third controversies, both in 1991, involved the Gallery's display of highly improbable objects under the name of art: a dress made from flank steak by the Montreal artist Jana Sterbak, and thirty-five outdoor sheds made from scrap lumber by the Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata. The vigour of these controversies was actually such as to prompt me, after a break of about ten years, to start writing about contemporary art again. And such, I must suppose, were the articles themselves as to prompt a Gallery jury in 1996 to give me a year-long fellowship towards research on contemporary Canadian art in relation to the new building. With the fellowship came a small office in the Gallery's archives, which are on the second floor behind the library, which in turn is up two flights of stairs at the end of the long wide corridor called the Concourse. Thus admitted to this inner sanctum, I was on a daily basis almost surrounded by the records of the century-old institution that had moved into the shell provided by Safdie's building.

I soon began to look into these records, because I felt my project might benefit from a better understanding of the institution's past, which I was surprised to learn had never been extensively explored. In this way, I came to realize that behind the new building's spectacular forms there was a rich and - in keeping with Canadian habits of indifference to such matters - largely unexcavated record. The more I unearthed, the more this neglect seemed both incongruous and unjust, not only because of the Gallery's importance as a publicly funded institution, but because the record itself involved such intelligently eccentric people, such improbable events, and such extraordinary works of art. This process of discovery benefited immensely from my unrestricted access to the Gallery's clipping, exhibition, and photo files, because I was thereby enabled to explore freely via primary sources, drawing inferences and following leads as they appeared. Most intriguingly, these seemed to suggest that there might be patterns in the Gallery's institutional past which resonated closely with the forms of the building where I was working: a building that in its many evocations of religious architecture was so out of keeping with trends in postmodern design as to be almost a freak among recent museums. As I investigated these parallels, the more fascinating and even uncanny they became, not least because Safdie himself, when I corresponded with him, denied any awareness of their existence. Gradually, then, my focus on contemporary art in relation to the building was displaced by a project that seemed logically prior: to understand how the building had evolved from the institution, and what meanings this evolved relationship might carry within it on an ongoing basis. For only then, I realized, would I have any sense of the potential dynamic between contemporary art and this newly overarching entity called the National Gallery. The project's challenge, then, became one of not only reading more carefully the patterns that I had discerned within the building itself, but of looking more systematically into the institution's past, to see whether my initial sense of comparable pattern there was justified. What this came to entail was my writing of a version of that history which I had anticipated finding on the Gallery's library shelves when I took up the fellowship, but that wasn't there. I emphasize "version" because each of those few people familiar with the National Gallery's past is likely to feel that the book slights some patterns within this past to the benefit of others. I with some eagerness concede this, and invite such critics to the work of highlighting their own favourite parts and even versions of institutional history, because as I have often said, the Gallery's archival record is rich enough that this book's every chapter contains the potential for a whole new book. What I must make clear from the outset, however, is that my own approach developed out of an attempt to test the initial intuition of continuity of pattern between institutional past and architectural present, and out of a desire to understand what this correlation - assuming it existed - might mean in terms of the roles played by a National Gallery in Canada. The book is in three parts. The first,"Magnetic Space," introduces the reader to the post-ipSS National Gallery in Ottawa, via a simulated visit both to the vicinity of the Gallery and to the obligatory access route that Safdie provided as the building's most VIII

PREFACE

distinctive feature. The second part, "The Field Before, 1910-65," explores an institutional development that built, sometimes uncannily, towards this design, from the arrival of the first director, Eric Brown, in 1910, to the arrival of the fourth, Jean Sutherland Boggs, in 1966. The third part, "The Evolution of a Style," traces the shifting dynamics that would make first for Boggs's immense influence as director; then for her marginalization by the National Museums of Canada; and eventually for her oblique reinstatement by Pierre Trudeau, as head of the crown corporation in charge of a building program. The examination of this program will also include, with the benefit of a richer understanding of the Gallery's past, a closer analysis of the terms of Safdie's building. Ironically, given my initial mandate, the sheer scale of the project has precluded much focus on the events and controversies of the decade that followed the building's opening. For the interested reader, I suggest the essay "Kawamata's Sheds," which was published in my book Navigating without a Compass (Oberon, 2000) and which explores the controversy and its implications in a detail that would have been impossible here. What the current book offers as an alternative is an epilogue that speaks to the future, and especially to the role that contemporary art might, with the benefit of historical perspective, play at the National Gallery. The spatial terms of Safdie's building were frozen in glass, steel, and concrete in 1988. But in its very presence, the building offers and will continue to offer a physical crucible for ongoing exploration of the relationship between art and the project of the Canadian nationstate, as this has been, is, and will be filtered through the crucial symbolic hinge of a National Gallery.

PREFACE

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Acknowledgments

This book has drawn on the assistance of many people. Above all, I want to thank Shelagh Marie McLeod, who has been integral to its evolution. Among past and present staff at the National Gallery, the following were of help: Bonnie Bates; Jean Sutherland Boggs; Karlis Bouse; Cyndie Campbell; Alexandre Castonguay; Yves Dagenais; Audrey Doyle; Claude Dupuis; Barbara Dytnerska; Sarolta Gyoker; Martha Hanna; Charles Hill; Charles Hupe; Martha King; Martha Langford; Denise Leclerc; David Monkhouse; Marc-Antoine Morel; Diana Nemiroff; Michael Pantazzi; Judith Parker; Janice Seline; Gyde Shepherd; Brydon Smith; Beate Stock; Pierre Theberge, Shirley Thomson; Peter Trepanier; Maija Vilcins; Murray Waddington; Brenda Wallace; Michael Williams; and Morgan Wood. My appreciation also goes to the anonymous volunteers who maintained the National Gallery's clippings files after 1910, and to the Gallery's security staff, who with good humour accommodated "the mad monk in the cathedral of art" and his many late evenings in the archives. The following people were of assistance in the publication of articles that helped develop the manuscript: Richard Rhodes (Canadian Art); Chantal Pontbriand and Jim Drobnick (Parachute); Joyce Mason (C Magazine); Mela Constantinidi (Ottawa Art Gallery); Meeka Walsh (Border Crossings). I would like to cite also: Peter Larisey (Regis College, University of Toronto), who read two early chapters; Ruth Phillips and Jerry Pethick for their company as Research Fellows; Richard Alway and Moshe Safdie for their replies to my inquiries; Marc Mayer and Donald Kuspit for letters of recommendation to the fellowship program; John Flood and Don LePan for early grant recommendations to the Ontario Arts Council's Writers' Reserve program; Clara Hargittay and Robert Houle for conversation; the anonymous peer-review readers for their helpful suggestions; and Tod Marder of Rutgers University for his expertise on the Scala Regia. In regard to McGill-Queen's University Press and the preparation of the book itself, I want to thank Aurele Parisien, acquisitions editor, for his indispensable support and suggestions; Curtis Fahey for his sensitive copy editing and general enthusiasm for the project; Joan McGilvray, coordinating editor, for her encouragement and patience; and Caret Markvoort for her care in design. My

special thanks go also to Sheila Grant, not only for her patient replies to my questions about her late husband George Grant, but for the unsolicited gift of her husband's copy of On Being Canadian, inscribed to him by Vincent Massey for his work on the royal commission of 1951. This gesture touched me deeply. In regard to funding, I thank the National Gallery of Canada for its 1996-97 Research Fellowship in Contemporary Canadian Art ($15,000 awarded through the Canadian Centre for the Visual Arts), which, besides validating the inquiry in its initial terms, provided sustained access to the Gallery's archives. The project was then furthered by a $12,000 Works-in-Progress Grant from the Literature Office of the Ontario Arts Council; a $3,000 grant from the Visual Arts Office of the Ontario Arts Council; and a $5,500 Project Grant from the Regional Municipality of OttawaCarleton. Publication of the book itself has been assisted by a grant to the publisher from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by $5,000 from the National Gallery, on the basis of a request from the publisher for assistance. Regrettably, the Canada Council did not provide authorial funding for this project at any time, and the Department of Canadian Heritage turned down a request for funds toward picture research. I must therefore note that, in the absence of other funding in Canada for an independent inquiry such as this one, I was allowed the time to complete it only through a modest bequest from my father, Dennis Craven Wood Ord, who died while the manuscript was being revised. On account of this assistance, and because he will not get to see the finished book, it is dedicated to his memory.

XII

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA

If our energies were wholly directed to making a city, a building, a place, the rediscovery of the Garden of Eden, we would not need to indulge in frivolities. - Moshe Safdie Architect of a National Gallery building, 1982 His icebergs are strange monuments, with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. -Jehanne Bietry Salinger, on the Arctic paintings of La wren Harris, 1931

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PART ONE

Magnetic Space

above: The National Gallery of Canada, as designed by Moshe Safdie and seen from the south, circa 1990. (Robert Pillion, National Gallery of Canada) below. Le Basilique cathedrale de Notre Dame d'Ottawa, just to the east, in 2001. In the foreground, where the Canadian, provincial, and territorial flags flew in 1990, is the Canadian Peacekeeping Monument completed in 1992. (Douglas Ord)

i

From Outside

Approached from downtown Ottawa, and seen against the background of the Gatineau Hills in Quebec, the National Gallery of Canada suggests a glittering and immense cathedral. Among its features, establishing its presence on the horizon, is an elongated glass-faced wall, which is supported by external concrete pylons in groups of four. At its eastern extremity, this wall dilates into a low crystalline cupola, whose surfaces are also of glass. At the western end, the glass cupola is repeated on a larger scale and in three angled tiers that rise majestically above the rest of the building. The overall shape suggests the profile of a Gothic cathedral as seen from the side, just as the concrete pylons suggest the external role played in such cathedrals by flying buttresses. But in this case, the suggestion seems to go beyond simple comparison, by knitting the building into a wider visual field. Across Sussex Drive from the Gallery's entrance through the lower cupola is an actual cathedral: le Basilique cathedrale de Notre Dame d'Ottawa, which serves as the regional seat of the Roman Catholic Church. Dating from 1858, the Basilique cathedrale suggests, in its own form, the twelfth-century Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Chartres in France. The National Gallery pushes this pattern of imitation one big step further, not only mimicking the profile and western thrust of the Basilique cathedrale but dwarfing it, even as it seems to allow for an openness to the outside world that the basilica's stone walls prevent. The Gallery can also be approached from the north and east, via bridge across the Ottawa River from Quebec, or along the "Mile of History" from the prime minister s and governor general's residences to the Houses of Parliament. From both these routes, the building s most distinguishing feature is the three-tiered western cupola. This is not least because the Gallery presents its glossiest face to the city in the south, and gives to those viewing it from these other directions a panorama made up mostly of pink granite walls and banks of windows. Yet the sheer blandness of these walls serves only to emphasize the glass cupola, which from the lower shoreline across the river actually looks, in the elevated distance, like the battlement of a pale blue crystalline castle, of the sort found in fairy tales. And this fairy-tale battlement,

The Great Hall of the National Gallery from the Ottawa River. (Malak Karsh)

in turn, bears direct resemblance also, in its silhouette, to another solid landmark on the Ottawa skyline. Across a bay of the Ottawa River is the nineteenth-century Parliamentary Library, which was the only part of the nation's first Parliament Buildings to survive a fire in 1916. From a distance, the Library's neo-Gothic detail is absorbed into the bulk of its own three-tiered form, whose proportions harmonize exactly with those of the Gallery's larger cupola. The resemblance is especially striking from the official "ceremonial route" to the east, which is followed by dignitaries as they travel from the state residences of the governor general and prime minister to Parliament. From this perspective, symmetry is also established with a third point of reference: the Peace Tower, which rises at the centre of the second parliamentary complex completed in 1920. For the visitor who approaches the National Gallery along this route there is a sustained moment, difficult to ignore, when the cupola of the National Gallery seems to flank the Peace Tower from the left in exactly the same way, and at the same height, as the Parliamentary Library flanks it on the right. These alignments of outdoor visual fields in Ottawa date from the reopening of the National Gallery in 1988, in a building designed by Moshe Safdie. Among their

6

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ARCHITECTURE

achievements is that they appear to give to art a status and public presence which it never before had in the capital city of Canada but which its promoters had long claimed it deserved. Via architectural homology, and via the arrangement of outdoor space, art is implicitly identified with both the saving glories of religion and with the role of written knowledge as a guarantor of the democracy which, in Canada, is symbolized most eloquently in the Peace Tower. This is just the sort of role for art which was urged by the Gallery's first director, Eric Brown, throughout his long tenure from 1910 to 1939. Writing in his annual report to Parliament in 1929, Brown declared that "there is no greater need and there can be few higher ideals than the inculcation of a national interest in the various forms of the fine arts... The sense of Canadian nationality is growing and crystallizing rapidly and her interest in and patronage of the fine arts must not be allowed to lag behind, for art is a unifying and refining force which can be made to serve this native sense of nationality in many and invaluable ways ... It can add fitness and order and suitability to everything it touches throughout the entire round of experience."1 Obviously, many of the terms used by Brown in this report have changed in meaning since 1929, "fine arts" and "native sense of nationality" among them. For Eric Brown knew nothing of either abstract expressionism or the concept of aboriginal land claims. Rather, his sense of Canada was as firmly anchored in its status within the British Empire as his sense of art was anchored in painting as representation. Yet if the term "round" as used in this context has also long been superceded by other terms, Brown's choice of it - as of the word "crystallizing" - proved oddly prophetic, in regard to the building that would come to house the Gallery in the 19805. Through both its physical placement and its use of homologous forms, Safdie's version of a National Gallery provides the crucial link in the creation of a sort of "round" across the northern rim of central Ottawa, along the Ottawa River. This is a round not so much of experience, as of public monuments, for - as seen especially from Major's Hill Park just to the south - the Gallery's motifs seem to connect, and provide a transition along a curve, between the Basilique cathedrale to the east and the Parliament Buildings to the west. The significance of this "round" is not simply a matter of stones and mortar. Viewed sequentially in this way, from right to left, the three building complexes suggest the precipitation into architecture of core Canadian values that have long been connected. The most enduring phrase of the 1867 British North America Act, which established "one Dominion under the name of Canada," has proved to be the description of Parliaments power to "make Laws for the Peace, Order and good Government of Canada."2 This threefold articulation of value, conceived within the terms of a unitary nation state, clearly drew secularized authority from the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. But it was also framed in deliberate contrast to the three-fold promotion of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," which are presented as rights in the American Declaration of Independence. If the Parliament Buildings, then, can be read as the intended site of Good Government, and the Basilique cathedrale as the earthly site of "the Peace that passeth all understanding," then the

From Outside

7

The architectural "round" of monumental icons from Major's Hill Park, seen from west to east. (All photographs by Douglas Ord)

Parliament Buildings with Peace Tower (left) and Parliamentary Library (right).

The National Gallery of Canada, shown so as to emphasize the homology between the Great Hall and the Parliamentary Library.

The easterly Entrance Pavilion of the National Gallery, with the Basilique Cathedrale and Peacekeeping Monument.

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inference can be readily drawn that the National Gallery, as the middle term that links and blends these two, deserves to be read as the site of some kind of Order. Yet this, too, was what Brown anticipated, in the middle term of his own three-part depiction of art's social role: "It can add fitness and order and suitability to everything it touches throughout the entire round of experience." What, though, might be the nature of such an "order"? And for that matter: can the meaning of this word, too, as used in 1929 about the social role of art possibly be the same or even similar seven decades later? The meaning of the word "Peace," for example, arguably has changed, losing many of its religious connotations and becoming secularized. Curiously, though, this shift in meaning has also been integrated into the architectural round that includes the National Gallery, in that, since 1992, the Basilique cathedrale as the presumed site of spiritual peace has been supplemented by a monument to the overseas work of Canadian peacekeeping forces after the Suez Crisis of 1956.3 Fronting on the National Gallery and the Cathedral, the Peacekeeping Monument, with its bronze statues of soldiers in rigid postures, exemplifies a style of memorial that, prior to the cataclysms of the twentieth century, was most associated with the convulsive heroism of war rather than with the patient cultivation of peace. But these are soldiers depicted mainly with binoculars and radio equipment, and their evolved relationship with "the peace that passeth all understanding" is emphasized by the proximity of other works of figurative sculpture, all religiously derived: a statue of Ottawa's first archbishop; the figures of Mary and the Christ Child in gold at the Basilica's summit; and - appropriately to the scale of war in the twentieth century - a darkened bronze statue of an angel trumpeting in the Apocalypse. The complex paradox of the Peacekeeping Monument's presence, then, besides paying homage to Canadian soldiers, signifies the absorption of a wider range of experience, and a more layered concept of peace, to an agenda of social good which itself underwent mutation in the twentieth century. To develop the question a little further, then: how might the desired social good that was framed in the BNA Act in terms of "order," and that was subsequently related to art by Eric Brown, be advanced, addressed, or even potentially challenged by the building designed during the 19805 by Moshe Safdie? Here the question begins to grate against a crucial architectural circumstance that did not exist during the first eleven years after the building's opening but that in October 1999 became prominent. If the Canadian "Peace, Order and good Government" was shaped in contrast to the American "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," so was this relationship of influence implicitly reversed with the opening of a new United States Embassy building just to the south of the National Gallery. As designed by the American architect David Childs, the new Embassy was actually built on higher ground than the National Gallery. It was also aligned along a north-south axis, and therefore at a right angle to the east-west thrust of the National Gallery and to the arc formed by its relationship to the Basilique cathedrale and Parliament Buildings. Nevertheless, its shape and scale were remarkably similar to those of the National Gallery, with the inclusion even of a large central cupola in opaque grey and two smaller glass cupolas on either end. From Outside

9

The Embassy of the United States of America from Major's Hill Park (Douglas Ord)

The long, narrow Embassy building clearly provided a site for the official, as distinct from the commercial projection into Canada of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." But as a result of its directional alignment, it also rises to the south of the National Gallery like the prow of an immense battleship, even as its bulk breaks the sight line from Ottawa's Byward Market toward the Parliament Buildings and substitutes its own western face as the view from Parliament Hill toward the east. This western face, while glazed, is not transparent, as is the southern face of the National Gallery. Rather, as formed from darkened, reflective glass, it seems to look back at Parliament Hill like an immense, unblinking eye, beneath the opaque grey central cupola. The very design of this building, which is visually impenetrable and heavily defended, even as it hints at an agenda of surveillance, perhaps reflects how the United States's own investment in "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" had, by the end of the twentieth century, changed to suit its status as the only global superpower. Thrusting aggressively as it does toward the cluster of Canadian icons that curve to its north from east to west, however, it shapes a visual field of contrast, if not outright antagonism, between this traditional American investment and the Canadian agenda of "Peace, Order, and good Government." And to dwell on the middle terms again for a moment: a building so closed to the outside, and suggesting a preoccupation with "security," bespeaks a notion of "Liberty" that may be as far from the Jeffersonian ideal as the National Gallery's pairing - via Eric Brown - of "art" and "Order" may be from the BNA Act's own ideal of Order.

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Just as Canada itself, then, via the North American Free Trade Agreement, existed by 1999 in more intimate relationship than ever with the United States, so this architectural alignment gave to the interdependence a concentrated symbolic visual form. Ironically, there is even a miniature border line between the two buildings, in that the Peacekeeping Monument provides an alleyway of simulated ruins, through which runs a stylized "Green Line" such as, in former war zones, often separates the antagonists who are monitored by peacekeepers. Given public rhetoric of enhanced cooperation between the two countries, this is paradoxical. Yet if the buildings themselves carry in their designs hints of tension between national slogans and national practices, so too is there an immediate visual tension in their alignment. The added irony is that, notwithstanding the global prestige of the United States and the even higher elevation of the Embassy, this visual field of similarly scaled and shaped buildings is such that the glazed, open facade and cupolas of Canada's National Gallery most draw the eyes, taking on a peculiar delicacy compared to the Embassy's heavy dark mass. Of course, it is only appropriate that, in the Canadian capital, the icons of Canadian nationhood not be eclipsed by those of another country. But the further paradox is that the clearest tension of proximity is not between the Embassy and the Houses of Parliament but between it and the other recent building that houses Canada's national art collection. The suggestion again is that art is doing special duty in Ottawa, via the National Gallery building, in having called forth so prominent a visual counterpoint in the official United States presence. To layer yet a further dimension into the question concerning "art" and "order," then: why has art assumed such a duty, and how did this come to happen, via a National Gallery building that may itself give form to Eric Brown's 1929 equation of art with "order"? That a grand leap in time is implied here is not coincidental. Paradoxically also, given the scale of investment in the 19805, successive Canadian governments - those of Mackenzie King, R.B. Bennett, Louis St Laurent, John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, and even, during the first thirteen years of his rule, Pierre Trudeau - were consistent in suspending any practical working through, or organic evolution of Brown's equation. They did so by refusing to allow for one of his central requirements, if art was in his view going to fulfil its national potential. In 1929 the claims about this potential were followed by a warning that veiled a plea. "To neglect art for more material things, even of greater seeming eminence," Brown wrote, "to postpone the proper housing of its treasures and to ignore its immense influence for good is neither intelligent nor in the best national interest." The hinge around which government indifference seemed most egregiously to turn for Brown was precisely the issue of "proper housing." Even as he strove, according to his own scale of value, to fulfil the Gallery's mandate of assembling a comprehensive collection of Canadian art, and a representative collection of world art, the National Gallery itself remained an institutional nomad, without a building that furthered either of these goals. Brown himself oversaw its move in 1912 from rooms above a government fisheries exhibit to a wing of the newly built and pseudomedieval Victoria Memorial Museum, where it competed for space with dinosaur

From Outside

n

fossils and - for four years after the parliamentary fire of 1916 - with members of Parliament. But there his hopes stalled. "We have our dream castle, too," he said, with obvious longing, when the Gallery re-opened in the Victoria Museum in 1921. "A great national gallery somewhere, overlooking the Ottawa River."4 Yet the best he had been able to manage, after Parliament's removal to its own new buildings, was a separate entrance, a firewall between the art and the dinosaurs, and expansion from three partial floors to four. Despite this eloquence and this longing, the concern about "proper housing" would preoccupy Eric Brown until his death in 1939 while still director. Nor would his half-dozen successors over the next four decades fare better. The National Gallery - for want of government resolve to invest in a custom-made building underwent only one more move before 1988. Again, it was to quarters deemed from the outset to be "temporary," and not even constructed with the display of art as their primary aim. From the four cramped floors in the Victoria Museum, the Gallery travelled, in 1960, to eight floors of an office block which had been designed to house the offices of civil servants. This, too, was a makeshift, cobbled together from general agreement on the need for more room but also from the St Laurent government's refusal to fund the winning entry in a competition it had sponsored in 1952. As a result, art was subordinated, in its public presence, to the style of "order" which had long prevailed in Ottawa as a national capital: that of the civil service. The niche did not prove viable. While the civil service expanded relentlessly over the next two decades, the Lome Building - as the office block was whimsically called after the Gallery's nineteenth-century founder the Marquis of Lome - was so neglected that it began to fall apart. By 1980, it had outlived its usefulness even as a "temporary" home for the Gallery, and was - despite a multi-million-dollar "facelift" in 1976 - being widely denounced as a "national disgrace."5 Pipes were bound with rags to prevent their clanging; condensation was dabbed from canvases on winter mornings; asbestos fibres dropped from the ceilings; less than 2 per cent of the collections could be shown at a time; and the only working washrooms were in the basement. These were the circumstances that finally prompted a prime minister to act. Pierre Trudeau had come to office in 1968 amid hopes that he would, among other things, build on his personal interest in the arts and on his stated commitment to them as "an essential grace in the life of civilized people."6 These hopes had then been so disappointed, in the midst of Trudeau's constitutional and economic initiatives, that eight years later Sandra Gwyn could claim that, in over four hundred public speeches since taking office, he had not again mentioned the arts.7 In 1982, however, he announced that with the constitution patriated, he was turning toward "the creating of a nation" and was giving priority to the arts "as an enrichment of Canadian identity."8 Both the timing and the rhetoric were likely shaped by a number of factors: Trudeau's own pending retirement from politics; the example being set by his fellow leader in la Francophonie, Fra^ois Mitterrand, who had just embarked on a series ofgrands projets for Paris; and a widespread, even frenetic pattern of museum-

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A simplified map of central Ottawa and southern Hull, showing sites that figure in the text. The heavily outlined circle indicates the vantage point from which "the architectural round" is viewed. The numbers refer to: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

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14

Canadian Houses of Parliament and Parliamentary Library National Gallery of Canada Basilique cathedrale de Notre Dame d'Ottawa Canadian Museum of Civilization Embassy of the United States of America Chateau Laurier Hotel and Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography The Lome Building, site of the National Gallery from 1960 to 1988 Victoria Memorial Museum, site of the National Gallery from 1912 to 1960 Site chosen for a new National Gallery by the Board of the National Museums of Canada, 1974 The Supreme Court of Canada Chaudiere Falls on the Ottawa River Nepean Point with statue of Samuel de Champlain by Hamilton McCarthy Cartier Square, the anticipated site of a new National Gallery during the 19505 and 19605 The Rideau Canal

building elsewhere, arguably as overcompensation for the radical experiments of contemporary art during the 19/os.9 But the groundwork for this more limited view of the arts "as an enrichment of Canadian identity" had also already been established, along with an uneasy relationship with the arts community itself, via an Ottawa-based bureaucracy called the National Museums of Canada (NMC). Created under Trudeau's predecessor Lester Pearson, the NMC had legally absorbed the National Gallery in April 1968 - the month Trudeau became prime minister - in a grand initiative to sustain the centennial momentum of 1967. It had then been allowed, under Trudeau, to expand throughout the 19708, diverting funds from a central National Gallery toward regional museums, along with such projects as a "Discovery Train" which carried what the NMC called "the cultural patrimony" throughout the country. In 1982, facing criticism that the National Gallery was housed in a building "designed to destroy its art," the government reversed the decentralizing momentum of this strategy, even as the doctrine of art in the service of "Canadian identity" persisted.10 The shift was signalled by the minister of communications, Francis Fox, in February 1982, when he declared the government's commitment to complete a new

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National Gallery and a new "Museum of Man" within five years. There was in this declaration more than an echo of the views which had been expressed on art by Eric Brown but which for expedience had been eschewed by governments. Both the National Gallery and the Museum of Man, Fox said, "have become symbols of our national pride ... When you go to the National Gallery of Canada or the National Museum of Man, you will be partaking of an invaluable public resource, which will tell you in both historical and aesthetic terms where we have been in the past, where we are now, and where we will be in the future. In proud new homes with better facilities... the National Gallery and the National Museum of Man will be in a much better position to play these vital national roles."11 Given the state of the Lome Building, Fox's claim that the National Gallery had become a symbol of "our national pride" could have formed the basis for a comedy routine. But that this was a very different era from Eric Brown's, and with over fifty years of artistic development to be incorporated into a new building, did not seem to mute the Trudeau government's eagerness to revive, in its final months, Brown's claim that the "proper housing" of the national art collection was integral to art's role as "a unifying and refining force, which can be made to serve [the] native sense of nationality in many and invaluable ways." The press release was tailored to more democratic times, in that it did not label art a "refining force" as well as a "unifying" one. But in a way it went further, developing Brown's claim that art could "add fitness and order and suitability to everything it touches" into a role for art - presumably in conjunction with the Museum of Man's ethnographic displays - as both map and oracle, revealing "where we have been in the past, where we are now, and where we will be in the future." This gave a weight to art comparable to that given it by Eric Brown, even as the repeated use of the pronoun "we" implied an overcompensation based less on confidence than on insecurity. For the government was making this investment in art's "unifying" role under circumstances in which the status of "national unity" itself had become if anything more vexed than in Brown's time. This was not least because, while Brown had been able to assume the country's anchorage in the scheme of the British Empire and its allegedly "civilizing" mission, the Trudeau era which began in 1968 was much less secure in its continuities. It was punctuated by upheaval in Quebec: the October Crisis of 1970, which led to the suspension of civil liberties for all Canadians; the election of the first openly separatist government in 1976; a failed referendum on sovereignty in 1980; and Quebec's refusal in 1982 to sign the constitution which was to have given a unified Canada full independence. There were also - amid the very uncertainties created by both a repatriated constitution and a new Charter of Rights and Freedoms - other implicitly centrifugal factors. In 1967 the Liberal government of Lester Pearson had also disposed of immigration quotas on non-Europeans. As admirable as this change might have been from a human rights perspective, it was already being reflected, by 1982, in debates over shared heritage in Canadian cities. In more extreme fashion, the Trudeau government's own 1969 White Paper on "Indian policy" had actually backfired on its promoters. Having bent the long-standing official goal of assimilating

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"Indians" toward a suggestion that they ought to be treated like any other "minority" in a multicultural society, the Liberals succeeded only in fostering a backlash among peoples who began instead to refer to themselves as First Nations and to explore legal redress for entrenched abuses. Meanwhile, American films, magazines, television programs, and books continued as they had for decades to saturate Canadian society, flowing north across the border as though it did not exist. By 1982, then, Fox's mantra-like repetition of the word "we" could itself be read in terms of wishful thinking, pertaining as it did to a vast state not only split between French and English but facing confusion in the inheritance of common values, the rhetoric of First Nations toward self-government, the persistent din of American popular culture, and the unknown territory of full legal independence from Great Britain. The machinery put in place by Trudeau suggested, however, that the government's counter-rhetoric about art's importance should be taken seriously. The announcement came with an order-in-council that simply bypassed parliamentary debate to establish an independent crown corporation that would oversee the museums' construction and that would receive $185 million, spread over five years, toward both. Just as important, Trudeau appointed as this corporation's head, with responsibility only to himself and his cabinet, one of the few people who had the experience and drive to carry such projects through: the National Gallery's former director, Jean Sutherland Boggs. During her decade in office, from 1966 to 1976, Boggs had lobbied every bit as hard for a building as Eric Brown had. If in this she had failed, among her achievements as the first female director had been the sustained introduction of American modern art, which she had balanced by writing a concise history of the Gallery's collections. Nevertheless, she had also endured the Gallery's subordination to the National Museums of Canada, which under the banners of official "decentralization and democratization" had - with apparently unconscious irony increasingly syphoned authority away from her, as the director of a subsidiary "museum," and toward its own secretary-general, taking control in the process of Gallery publicity, security, staffing, and education. It had been over the issue of a new building, too, that Boggs herself had finally resigned in 1976, calling the NMC'S chosen site - over which she had been allowed no say - "a wind tunnel." Ironically, this choice of site, along with a full-scale architectural competition sponsored by the government, had also come to nothing when - as in 1952 - the fiscally conscious Liberals had backed away from funding the winning entry. Given this record - and having been succeeded at the National Gallery by three very unhappy directors in less than six years - Boggs was disposed neither to patience nor to procedural niceties. Implicit in her hiring, and in the new corporation's independence, was a government vote of non-confidence in the NMC and the Department of Public Works, which usually handled such projects. She then built on this shift of confidence, as well as on Trudeau's personal support, to "fasttrack" a limited competition for both museums, to select the sites and to award the contracts. This process was controversial, with protests from the public, the political opposition, and professional architects about "secrecy" and Draconian methods.

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The National Gallery of Canada from above. (John Sargent, National Gallery of Canada) 1 Entrance pavilion 2 Colonnade ramp 3 Great Hall 4 Concourse 5 Temporary Exhibitions Hall on the ground floor; prints, drawings, and photographs on the upper floor 6 Galleries: historical and modern Canadian on the ground floor; historical and modern European and American, and historical Asian, on the upper floor; Inuit in the basement

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Galleries: International and Canadian contemporary Curatorial wing Taiga Garden by Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, modelled on Terre Sauvage by A.Y. Jackson Canadian War Museum Basilique cathedrale de Notre Dame d'Ottawa Nepean Point Ottawa River

Boggs remained undaunted. With the Gallery project awarded to the Jerusalembased architect Moshe Safdie, and the Museum of Man project to the Canadian Metis architect Douglas Cardinal, excavations started on both sites within months, before plans were even fully drawn up. As will be seen, the very existence of a National Gallery building would be in many ways a function of Jean Boggs s will, subtle influence, and - at times - even manipulative ruthlessness. And while subsequent events did not, perhaps, entirely justify these means, they proved them prescient. Trudeau retired in 1984, and his successor John Turner was quickly defeated by Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservative Party, on a platform of fiscal responsibility. Within a year, after the new

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government had conducted a flurry of efficiency studies, Boggs herself was dismissed, the Canada Museums Construction Corporation was dissolved, and both museum projects were assigned to the Department of Public Works. Her manoeuvrings, however, had paid off. The buildings were by this time embarrassingly prominent on the Ottawa and Hull skylines and could not be mothballed. Grudgingly, and with intermittent infusions of further cash, the Mulroney government continued to fund them. The result was that in May 1988, only a year behind its original schedule and at a cost of $162 million in public funds, the National Gallery opened for the first time not simply in its own building but in a building whose sheer grandeur seemed to exalt art out of all proportion to its previous subdued presence in the National Capital. Moreover, even as the new government had resisted the museum buildings, its scrutiny of federal agencies had by this time led to a crucial decision, which ironically dovetailed with the building's completion. After committee hearings in 1986, the new minister of communications, Flora MacDonald, announced, in mid-1987, the phased dissolution of the National Museums of Canada, which she described as "too heavy, inefficient, costly and almost unworkable." In consequence, the National Gallery, shortly after being absorbed into a new building, also reacquired its own act of parliament, and the institutional independence that had been denied it since 1968. Thus did art become an integral part of an architectural "round" that was established along the northern rim of Ottawa and that seemed, in some sense, to give material form to the Canadian ideals of "Peace, Order, and good Government." Yet there would prove to be something just a bit askew in this apparent exaltation of art in the Canadian capital: a sense of "order" not necessarily in keeping with the fifty years of development in art itself that also lay between Eric Browns hopes about a "dream castle" and the realization of an actual building through the efforts of Trudeau, Boggs, and Safdie. A sense of this paradox can best be introduced by means of a simulated visit to the building itself. For, just as from the outside the new National Gallery hints at equating art with both religion and knowledge, so from the inside it develops this equation further, on a monumental and overarching scale. Nevertheless, this development entails a degree of slippage, which reveals itself in the path that, since the building's opening, the visitor has had to follow from the moment of entry to that of first encounter with a work of art.

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The Colonnade ramp, as seen from the Entrance Pavilion. (Malak Karsh)

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You unburden yourself of all your weights at the checkroom. And then you ascend. - Moshe Safdie

A visit to the National Gallery of Canada begins at the glass-walled Entrance Pavilion on Sussex Drive, directly across from the Basilique cathedrale. Passing through the main glass doors, the visitor is faced with a long, straight ramp, roughly four metres wide, which slopes gradually upward toward the west and whose floor is of squared pink granite. In a promotional book commissioned by the Gallery, the writer Witold Rybczynski has declared that this is "surely the longest ramp in recent architecture," with dimensions "based" by Moshe Safdie "on those of the ramp leading to the Scala Regia in the Vatican."1 As will be seen, Safdie himself has contested this representation, saying that, while "you'll read that the promenade was inspired by the Scala Regia," "that's not true." Instead, he claimed in a 1988 interview that he and Jean Sutherland Boggs had visited the seventeenth-century Vatican ramp designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini to see whether his own already extant design for a Colonnade ramp "would work."2 But the muddle of this disputed "inspiration" itself suggests the obscurity of the Vatican reference as primary. For Bernini's "Corridoio" in the papal palace, though it gives ceremonial access to the pope, is not open to the public and is un-likely to have been walked by many Gallery visitors.3 And the visitor who has done some travelling, and has some experience of still older architectures, may recognize, looking upward from the base of the ramp, a prodigality of other references in its length, its linearity, and its steady rise toward a distant and somewhat mysterious summit. For in all of these aspects, the ramp suggests also, at a shallower angle, the ramp-like stairways built into the temple pyramids of both the cities of ancient Mesopotamia and the pre-Toltec, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica. But even more striking is its almost uncanny repetition - in slope, scale, and length alike - of the actual ramp which leads to the fifteenth-century BCE mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, Egypt's first queen, at Deir el-Bahri on the upper Nile.

The motif of a long, straight ascent toward a symmetrical tiered summit holding sacred mysteries: the sixth century BCE Etemenanki, or House of the Fundamentals of Heaven and Earth. This Babylonian ziggurat was dedicated to the god Marduk and traditionally identified with the Tower of Babel named in the Book of Genesis. It is depicted in a model by W. Andrae and G. Martiny, on display in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. (Douglas Ord)

Ceremonial ramps and colonnades at the mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahri Egypt, circa 1500 BCE (Huguette Hamers, courtesy of Huguette Hamers and Eric Vandeleene)

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This is a set of references that may be a little disconcerting to the visitor concerned about the role played by art - and about the sense of "order" that may be fostered by art - within a democratic nation-state. For all of these allusions - including that offered by Bernini's Vatican ramp - pertain to the sacral architectures of predemocratic, authoritarian, hierarchical, and even theocratic societies. And if all of these different earlier ramps were core components of the sacral structures into which they were built, all were arguably also designed - within the frameworks of different cosmologies - to cultivate in the visitor who slowly mounted them a mood of awe, and of reverence towards the zone of special holiness which would greet them at the summit: the high priest's temple, the pope's throne, the queens tomb. The architect himself has acknowledged that such allusiveness to religious ritual was deliberate. In a 1989 interview, Safdie said: "It struck me that you should really go through some kind of procession to make your way into something as important as the National Gallery ... You find yourself ascending. There is excitement to the ascent. To me it often has a religious feeling to it: Jacob's ladder, Jacob s dream. Ascent offers - I don't want to say purification, but there's both an intellectual and emotional uplifting ... You unburden yourself of all your weights at the checkroom. And then you ascend. It's a ritual, a ceremony. And I think it excites people."4 So casual a reference by Safdie to "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream" adds a crucial, if historically dubious, moment in early Judaism to the list of possible associations with the ramp. This mythic moment was the one in which, according to the Book of Genesis, God appeared to Jacob at the dream-ladder's summit and told him that "the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth; and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed."5 This legitimating reference would seem, again, to be quite the weight of analogy for the National Gallery of Canada to assume. Yet just as Safdie also, when interviewed, implicitly equated the summit of the Gallery's Colonnade ramp with heaven itself, to which "Jacob's ladder" mounts in "Jacob's dream," so with this reference to Judaism's own misty "dreaming" phase did he sidestep the ramp's allusiveness with the architectures of authoritarian and even state religions. The question, however, may well be asked: do visitors really feel "unburdened" of anything other than their coats at the checkroom? The architect clearly, in introducing the language of religious experience, wanted to think so, and wanted further to invite such visitors to "ascend" and to enter into "a ritual, a ceremony." These, too, are generic religious terms. And all specific "rituals," all specific "ceremonies," have content of some sort. Soft-focus references to "Jacobs ladder, Jacob's dream" notwithstanding, then, what is the content of the "ritual," the "ceremony" into which the architect of the National Gallery of Canada was asking visitors to enter? Initially, this is hard to say, for the ramp's slope cultivates mainly a sense of generic awe amid this mixture of allusions, even as it enforces a stately pace on "ascent" toward a tall rectangle of light at its summit. What does seem clear is that the "ritual," along the length of ramp that the visitor can see, has little or nothing to do with

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The nave of the twelfth-century Gothic cathedral at Amiens, France. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada)

art, as this term came to be understood in the twentieth century. To the right, the veneer of an otherwise blank wall consists of large rectangular sheets of cut pink granite. The visitor who knows something of Safdie's career might be excused for recognizing another sacral reference, in hints of Jerusalem's overall style of cut-stone architecture, and specifically of the Western Wall, Judaism's own most sacred site on the ancient Mount Moriah or Temple Mount, for whose vicinity the architect developed a "master plan" for renovation in one of his best-known projects. High above, a vaulted glass and steel ceiling extends the entire length of the ramp. Though it opens onto neutral sky, and oversees not a flat floor but a slope, this ceiling in its height, and in the narrowness of the passageway it covers, again recalls the European Gothic and especially the central nave that provides the axis of the Gothic cathedral. Yet unlike in a cathedral, the ceiling is supported by tall concrete columns, squared and regularly spaced. These suggest not only why this part of the Gallery is called the Colonnade but also a further exercise in pre-modern sacral mix-and-match, drawn in this case from ancient Egypt, where such colonnades were part of the tomb and temple complexes at Luxor, Karnak, and Giza as well as at Deir al-Bahri. Only the visual field that opens to the ramp's left adds a dimension of immediate content to this experience that has thus far been visually reductive and generic. There the visitor sees not another stone wall - on which, given the Gothic references, might be mounted icons of biblical narratives - but rather, between the columns, the other side of the glass-walled south facade. Directly to the south is the bulky, dark profile of the United States Embassy, while in the distance, toward the ramp's summit, can be seen the silhouette of the Canadian Parliament Buildings against the sky. 22

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An early photograph of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander's Taiga Garden, with the Basilique cathe"drale in the background, and before construction of the Peacekeeping Monument and United States Embassy to the south. (Charles Hupe", National Gallery of Canada)

Both of these will remain a presence throughout the ascent of the ramp, but the Embassy, being closer to Sussex Drive, will recede in prominence, even as the ramp gradually rises in the general direction of the Houses of Parliament. Accompanying this process, and just beyond the glass wall so it is closer than either of these building complexes, is a sculpted landscape. Because the columns break up the view, the form of the landscape is not quite clear. A guidebook, however, reveals that this is the Gallery's Taiga Garden, modelled by the Vancouver landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander after a painting called Terre Sauvage. Here, then, is the National Gallery's first art reference, albeit an oblique one that has been interpreted beyond its initial frame. This process of interpretation suggests the machineries of artistic postmodernism. Yet the reference itself provides the first hint also of a different kind of conflation between the artistic and the sacral. As a painting, Terre Sauvage was created in 1913 by one of the pre-eminent icons of Canadian art history, A.Y. Jackson, who would seven years later be a founding member of the Group of Seven. In 1936 it was bought by Eric Brown directly from the artist for the National Gallery. For anyone familiar with the painting, it is clear that Oberlander has interpreted freely, given that the foliage depicted in Terre Sauvage is mainly black spruce rather than the lush pine of the Garden, and the landform the granite of the Canadian Shield rather than the Garden's limestone. Yet Oberlander's license is perhaps less important, within this context, than the historical fact that by mid-century the Group of Seven had themselves, as painters who allegedly "discovered" the Canadian landscape for art, been invested with quasisacral descriptive language. As assessed, for example, by Charles Comfort, the From Inside

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Gallery's director from 1960 to 1965 in a 1951 study for the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, the Group of Seven "released a spirit of national consciousness, which has been beneficial in the widest sense."6 Comfort was far from alone in asserting a relationship between the Group of Seven and "a spirit of national consciousness." Instead, he was as much as summing up sentiments registered with even greater passion by one of the figures central to the development of Canadian art in the twentieth century. For as chairman of this commission, Vincent Massey became the primary shaper of Canadian arts policy for the next fifty years. And Massey had already, in 1948, described the Group's "mission of interpretation" in the language of religious myth: "We, of course, know the facts, how a group of gifted artists a generation or so ago turned their backs on Europe ... and surrendered themselves to their own environment, striving to uncover its secret. The inevitable happened. The Canadian landscape took possession of them. They abandoned the methods and technique which were alien to Canada, and recorded its beauty faithfully in the clear lights, bold lines and strong colours which belong to it. They had to struggle against strong opposition, these pioneers ... but opposition is better than indifference. It produces an argument, and the pioneers won their case and achieved recognition."7 And such recognition! For Massey could go on to say, via the royal commission report that came informally to bear his name, that "Canadian painting, through its honesty and its artistic value, has become above all the other arts the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit."8 These references begin to hint at a background for the conflations which the visitor is about to encounter in Safdie s version of the National Gallery. The conflations themselves unfold as a process that carries the visitor alongside the Taiga Garden and - on account of the ramp's slope - slowly higher above it. Just as the sounds of traffic and commerce have already been excluded by the thick glass walls, so the visitor, with this continued movement up the ramp, also leaves behind the city's bustling market district. Clearly, the ramp provides a zone of transition, from an outdoor visual field ruled by private commerce and the movement of cars to one that includes views not only of the Taiga Garden but of the Parliament Buildings, high on their rocky outcrop beyond the terminus of the Rideau Canal, where it enters the Ottawa River. Nor does the sense of being surrounded by re-formed fragments from the religious past - and of being inducted into a simulated ritual of purification - diminish toward the ramp's summit. Throughout the entire "ascent," a narrow, high rectangle of light has seemed to beckon from this summit. Once reached, the rectangle becomes a threshold, beneath a narrow but high open portal that brings the ramp to an end. As with the Colonnade, this portal is framed in a concrete version of the squared post-and-lintel style that prevailed in the preGraeco-Roman world. And its reductive grandeur recalls both the use of such oversized doorways, framed in blocks and lintel, toward the sacralization of monarchy in ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Persia, and - from the mistier and more mysterious past - the dolmen form which was used in the sanctuary and tomb architectures of preRoman Europe. 24

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All of these uses of the megalithic portal were tied to ritual, even as the ceremonials of ancient Britanny and England were very different from those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, given the latters' identification of absolute monarchy with godhead and earthly hierarchy with divine order. But the placement of so allusive a motif at the summit of a ramp which itself - as Safdie noted - evokes a sense of religious ascent, is especially charged, in that it again blends generalized sacral motifs from different traditions to simulate a generic ritual "threshold" experience: the significance, that is, of the portal or archway in providing a threshold not simply in physical space but between the profane world and the sacred. This generic dimension was given a name by the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in the early twentieth century, through an analysis of initiation rites in different cultures. These rites, van Gennep wrote in 1908, invariably make use of what he called a "liminal zone," as a "symbolic and spatial area of transition" where the initiate "wavers between two worlds" and which is "more or less pronounced in all the ceremonies which accompany the passage from one social and magico-religious position to another."9 A "limen" in Latin is a threshold. Accordingly, the liminal phase in ritual is the phase in which the everyday is left behind, and the participant, after gradually being rendered receptive, crosses into a domain of exposure to supersensible or transcendent influences: a "new world" as van Gennep called it. For Christians, this may be the presence of God in the Eucharist, which is celebrated after passage through the nave of the cathedral; or an audience with the pope, who is reached at the top of the Scala Regia. For the Egyptians, it was the zone between this life and the afterlife which was constituted by the pharaoh's tomb and which itself was reached via a zone of passage, as in the post-and-lintel colonnade of the temple of Khephren or the ceremonial ramp of Hatshepsut. And for the wandering Jacob via his dream, it was a heaven into which he could not himself enter but whence came the voice of God, both to legitimate his occupation of the land on which he slept and to bless his seed. To recall again Safdie's own terminology to describe this process: "You unburden yourself of all your weights at the checkroom. And then you ascend. It's a ritual, a ceremony. And I think it excites people." In suggesting a link between the "excitement" of "ritual" and the experience of entering an art museum, Moshe Safdie was obviously not unique, or even original. Rather the equation has been made for more than two centuries, especially in western Europe and the United States, and there exists around it both an architectural tradition and a literature of promotion and criticism. But if, as the American critic Carol Duncan has suggested, the equation has been especially vigorous since Immanuel Kant isolated aesthetic judgment as a kind of faculty toward the end of the eighteenth century, Safdie's National Gallery building provides a peculiar departure within that tradition.10 This is because the template for a working through of the equation has most often been, in architecture, the temple form inherited from classical Greece and adapted for modernity by forms of neoclassicism. Examples abound of nineteenth- and even twentieth-century art museums fronted by stylized Doric, Corinthian, or Ionian columns: the Glyptothek in Munich (1830) and the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1876; see page 70); the National Gallery and the Tate From Inside

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Gallery in London England (1838 and 1897); and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1941). All of these instances - and especially in those museums that claimed a "national" stature and affiliation - carried with them a complex web of implicit links. These included the cross-referencing of a civilized appreciation for art with the ancient Greek pinakotheke, which housed paintings honouring the gods; and of the post-Enlightenment nation-state with the ascendancy of democratic government which, according to long tradition, began in the Athens of the Parthenon. In the same interview where he spoke of "ascent," however, Safdie deliberately sought to devalue and even ridicule this Greek template. "When you think of entering a Greek temple," he told the Ottawa writer Dan Turner, "it really must have been an oppressive, miserable event... When you look in, you realize that there was no light there. Probably one or two candles, or oil lamps or something. And the statue of the goddess or the god. It really was like entering a cave, and confronting the god. The Gothic experience was a totally different religious experience. God was everywhere. But in the Parthenon, God was in one spot, facing you, right there in what was essentially a cave."11 Curiously enough, throughout the period of his involvement with the National Gallery from 1982 to 1988, Safdie was overseeing work on an another project being built in a literal cave. This was the Yad Vashem Children's Holocaust Memorial near Jerusalem, whose own ramp does not ascend but rather descends into an underground mirrored chamber, lit by reflected candles. Safdie did not mention this in the interview, and the logic of so negative a depiction of "a Greek temple" was left unresolved. What is instead perhaps most intriguing about these comments is his emphasis on the experienced reality of God's presence in both styles of architecture, whether "everywhere" in the Gothic cathedral or "in one spot, facing you" in the Greek temple. This claim - even if offered rhetorically - would seem to give a hint not only of why Safdie turned away from allusions to classical Greek architecture in designing the National Gallery of Canada, but of why he still clung - unlike the vast majority of modern and postmodern architects - to a vocabulary of religious experience. Among the most consistent features of art museum design since the Second World War has been a turning away from any reliance on the instant authority of sacral as well as of classical reference. Indeed, this scheme of reference has been widely and deliberately repudiated, on the assumption that the goal of exhibiting art can itself charge a space with public value, so that more traditionally "authoritative" back-up is no longer necessary. Among the more prominent instances of architecture taking its own cues from the momentum of twentieth-century art are Frank Lloyd Wrights spiralling, centre-hollow Guggenheim Museum in New York (1958); Renzo Pirano and Richard Rogers's industrially inside-out Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977); James Stirling and Michael Wilford's eclectically postmodern Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany (1984; see page 315); and Frank Gehry's titanium-clad, and jaggedly curvi-linear Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao Spain (1997). Safdie's design for the National Gallery of Canada veers radically away from this pattern. But its departure does not stop with an obligatory entrance route that calls

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forth sacral references different from those of a Greek temple. For the route itself is structured, even beyond the threshold at the ramp's summit, in a way that continues to challenge the building's primary investment in art. Obviously, a visitor might imagine that, having climbed a straight, narrow ramp that is "surely the longest in recent architecture," he or she merits an encounter, in this National Gallery, with objects or installations that belong in some sense to the category "art." But if the summit threshold itself is - despite Safdie's reference to "Jacob's dream" of an inaccessible heaven - crossed easily enough, what does the visitor find in that domain of light which has beckoned throughout "the ascent"? In material terms, this domain consists of the open space beneath the three-tiered glass and steel cupola that can be seen from outside on the building's western extreme. Seen from the summit of the ramp, this cupola becomes the immense glass rotunda of the Gallery's Great Hall. Within it are none of the culminations that the ramp form suggests from its earlier precedents: neither Jacob's "heaven," nor the pope that Bernini promised, nor the mummified body of Queen Hatshepsut, nor the altar of a Gothic cathedral. But neither, in the first dozen years after the new building's opening, was there likely to be any art. Yet in so thwarting expectation, the vast expanse of glassed-in space is far from an anti-climax. It, too, spins a pattern of generic association with the sacral. The most obvious analogy is the similar use of the open dome in both the Orthodox Christian church and - as another of Safdie's paradoxical enthusiasms - the Islamic mosque, whose most spectacular form has served both religions in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Unlike both mosque and church, the Great Hall of the National Gallery has glass walls, and so is - like the ramp that leads to it - visually open toward the outside world. But the interior of the Great Hall, in its reliance on what Safdie called "the geometry of octagons," especially suggests Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock (see page 35), below whose own octagonal form Safdie worked for many years on his design for renovating the Western Wall precinct, and above which, on a hillside, he designed his own home. The Dome of the Rock, too, has mystical connotations, in that as part of Islam's third most sacred site, the Noble Sanctuary or al-Haram ash-Sharif, it was built around the rock from which post-Qur'anic legend says the Prophet Muhammad experienced his own ascent (Mi'raj) into seven levels of heaven, to receive revelation directly from God, thus surpassing in grandeur even Jacob's dream.12 During the new Gallery's first dozen years of operation, this Islamic reference was especially cultivated by the Great Hall's emptiness. For throughout most of this period, its harmonized physical "round" was unlikely to be broken up by the presence of actual art of any kind. Instead, its vast area offered only the modest presence of a small cafe along the west side's glass wall, along with stationary security guards and whatever visitors happened to be present at a given moment. Amid the absence of other stimuli, the visitor's eyes are most likely drawn toward the windows, which in the Great Hall rise in patterns of elongated rectangles that are defined by narrow supports. Among the quirks of the threshold itself, however, is that it involves the

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The interior of the Great Hall of the National Gallery, at the summit of the Colonnade ramp and looking west, with the converging "geometries" of the ceilings above. Visible beyond the windows at centre are the Peace Tower of the Parliament Buildings and the Parliamentary Library. Visible at the lower right is the Supreme Court of Canada. (Fiona Spalding-Smith, RCA, National Gallery of Canada)

passage from an ascending floor to a horizontal one. Ascent of the ramp has already fostered in the visitor a habit of looking up, and the Great Hall's emptiness builds on this, toward yet another sense of dome-like open space whose sacral reference points are not Islamic. For what the visitor whose eyes are drawn upward sees, from a floorbound perspective that suddenly seems quite humble, is a harmonized, soaring geometry of angled glass ceilings. This array of glass begins at the second tier, with facets formed from equilateral triangles and rectangles that are framed and joined by steel struts. Each big equilateral triangle is subdivided into sixteen small ones, just as each big rectangle is subdivided into eight or twelve small ones. In play with these, on sunny days, is also an orchestrated panoply of isosceles triangles, made of white fabric, that admit the shadows of the steel geometries beyond them. These isosceles triangles all converge upward, with their sharp, white apexes, toward subsidiary centres in the lower tier and toward a single centre in the upper one that is at once both cruciform and octagonal. At its very centre, providing a single summit for the entire hall, is a small dark circle that seems to radiate outwards in eight sharp points. The entire arrangement of the Great Hall's multiple ceilings draws the eye towards this summit, and the visitor who has already noted the Gothic references of the Colonnade maybe reminded also of the cruciform geometries that characterize the intersected, vaulted ceilings of nave and transept in Gothic cathedrals. But contem28

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plation of the summit is quickly dizzying and sends the gaze back downwards into less physically demanding zones, though in such a way as to link these zones with this summit's symmetries. What, then, does the visitor see beyond the immense glass walls themselves, in accompaniment to these converging harmonies? Directly to the west is the silent vastness of the Ottawa River, which seems from this angle to flow directly toward the Gallery, reflecting the colour of the sky or - in the winter - pure white. A simple shifting of the eyes to the left adds to this panorama a much more eloquent - but likewise silent - framing of the Parliament Buildings and the Parliamentary Library, silhouetted high on their own immense rock across the Rideau Canal, with the Canadian flag fluttering even on a windless day from the top of the Peace Tower. In the centre distance, beneath its copper roof, is the Supreme Court of Canada, and beyond it, the National Library and Archives. Integral to both the authority and the irony of this panorama is that, in its sequenced iconography of national achievement, it so casually spans the invisible faultline between mainly English Canada to the river s south and west and mainly French Canada to its north and east. For both are framed by a succession of rectangular glass panels that ignore this distinction, even as they form part of the pattern which builds to a single point of convergence at the Great Hall's summit. Nevertheless, the view does betray, just a little, the degree of historical imbalance between Ontario and Quebec, for its next phase is neither a Supreme Court nor a National Library. Instead, the reminder is of the entire area's past dependence on logging, via the warehouses and generating station of the E.B. Eddy Forest Products company, whose block-like buildings, as assembled piecemeal over more than a century, actually straddle the river. Yet in their very unpretentiousness, these buildings hide a mystery: the much abused waterfalls of the Chaudiere, whose own tiered limestone sequences were covered over and harnessed to turbines in the late nineteenth century but which before this had spun multiple rainbows on sunny days and been compared to Niagara in terms of beauty. The visitor will no longer see these, because they were rendered invisible in the drive to turn the forests of the upper Ottawa valley into saleable timber. What the visitor will see instead are the Trudeau government s two main contributions to a similarly scaled iconography of nationhood on the Quebec side of the river. The more banal of these takes the form of tall office towers just beyond the Chaudiere, built for departments of the civil service in the 19705. The other, by way of extreme contrast, is the building whose construction was twinned with that of the National Gallery: the Museum of Civilization, until 1986 the Museum of Man, as designed by the Metis architect Douglas Cardinal. Set at almost water level beside the river, where it opens into a wide bay below the former waterfall, the Museum of Civilization seems to replicate in pale brown the curvilinear forms of the Gatineau Hills beyond it and of the undulating limestone shoreline in front of it. In so doing, it suggests an integration less with "site" than with place, even as it seems to incorporate the formal playfulness that is so integral to most postmodern architecture, but that is so strikingly absent from the converging rectilinearity and weight of sacral reference in Safdie's National Gallery building. From Inside

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The Canadian Museum of Civilization, designed by Douglas Cardinal, from the Ontario side of the Ottawa River.

Yet this rectilinearity and weight of reference have still not been mitigated by the visibility of any art. Where, then, is it? The visitor might, by this time, also be excused wondering whether, in its sheer absence from this splendid panorama and these converging harmonies, art is - in Eric Brown's phrase - being "made to serve [the] native sense of nationality" a bit too vigorously. For what the buildings visible from the Great Hall seem to signify, in association with the mood produced by the journey to this vantage point, is a sacralization linked not so much with art which, with the exception of the derivative Taiga Garden, has stayed invisible - as with the unified Canadian nation-state itself, whose cause Vincent Massey also described in 1948 as "supreme" and "like the quest for the Holy Grail."13 It is the monumental iconography of this cause that fills the field of vision and is framed sequentially - if inaccessibly and silently - for the gaze of the viewer by the glass panels of the Great Hall. Even the Taiga Garden, considered in overall context, plays toward this celebration, through both its name and its controlled arrangement, implying the success of the Canadian state at transforming a Terre Sauvage - a wild and untamed land - into a pacified Garden to be enjoyed by all. This is the panorama, as overarched by the harmonious structure of the Great Hall itself, that seems most to give a hint of the objectives built into the National Gallery's architecture, independently of its relationship to art. The area around the Gallery already contains a disproportionate number of Canadian institutional icons and monuments, which have long provided both a symbolic and a political centre to an immense and geographically disparate country. These include the Parliament Buildings, the Supreme Court, the National Library and Archives, the Royal 3O

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Canadian Mint, the War Museum, and the Peacekeeping Monument, with the prime minister's and governor general's residences just a short distance farther along Sussex Drive. Framed by the windows of the Great Hall, and preceded for the visitor by both the Colonnade ramp and the pillar-and-lintel threshold, much of this physical concentration is aestheticized in a way that provides a focal point also for a new conflation: one that blends the symbolic and institutional iconography of the Canadian nation-state with the generic structures, rituals, and experiences of religion. For with this visual conflation has indeed gone an experiential process, in which every visitor who "ascends" the Colonnade ramp participates. In its simplicity, this is a transition which the visitor has shared - regardless of differences in ambient technologies and specific beliefs - with past pilgrims to all those sacral architectures that the motifs evoke. By these means, then, is the effort made to cultivate a similarly generic emotional state of reverence and awe in the minds of Gallery visitors. Such a state, despite the Gallery's blurring of sectarian boundaries, would be familiar to the pilgrims of earlier eras, in their relationship to sacral sites and monuments. But it is one profoundly foreign to the distracted state of mind fostered by the busyness of contemporary streets and technologies, in their general resistance to honouring one form of activity, one set of symbols, over any other. Obviously, there is also a sense in which, through its harmonious blending of motifs from so many religious traditions, within the context of the iconography of Canadian nationhood, the National Gallery also makes visible the Canadian claim made most often by the Liberal Party - to have created a state both post-sectarian and multicultural. Similarly, the very process of getting into the Gallery may subtly cultivate a reverence for just that claim. But what has any of this got to do with art, or for that matter with the actual history of the institution that has been absorbed along with its own relationship to art - into Safdie's building? For all of these are as much as invisible throughout this process, which over a period of time shapes the perceptual set of each and every visitor, bending it toward considerations of the sacral, of converging harmonies, and of national monuments, all amid prompts to awe and reverence. Nevertheless, there is, built into the structure of the Great Hall itself, an implicit resonance both with the history of the Gallery as an institution and with a peculiar pattern in Canadian art history during the twentieth century. That the architect himself has claimed to be unaware of this resonance makes its reappearance via the Great Hall's harmonies all the more remarkable, and even uncanny. Because this pattern did so much to shape the history of the National Gallery as an institution, however, it may also serve as a lever toward clarifying the largely hidden relationship of the building to the art it contains, and to the institution that it absorbed.

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A view of the interior Concourse of the National Gallery from the Great Hall, with the stairway leading to the Curatorial Wing in the distance. (Malak Karsh)

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A new vision is coming into art in Canada ... forming a home-made vortex that steadily grows and intensifies, broadens and ascends. - Lawren Harris, "Revelation of Art in Canada," 7926

From the Great Hall, the visitor has the option of proceeding through another immense post-and-lintel doorway to a wide corridor called the Concourse, which is significantly darker than the Great Hall and Colonnade ramp even though it is skylit from far above. The area of this Concourse provides, at last, access to the National Gallery's collections and temporary art exhibits. On the left side of this doorway is the smaller entrance to the Special Exhibitions Hall, and on the right a staircase and the still smaller entrance to the Canadian collections. The Concourse itself is defined on the left by a high wall faced in rectangular panels of granite, and on the right by another upwardly sloping ramp - narrower and shorter than the Colonnade ramp, with shallow steps and a stone-faced bannister - that leads to the collections on an upper storey. Apart from a concession to frivolity in the form of a few small fluorescent-blue air vents, the wall in its blankness and rectangular stone facing again suggests the Western Wall in Jerusalem, with the ramp in this case aligned in similar proportions to the ascending path - adjacent in Jerusalem to the Wall - by which Muslims reach the raised platform of the Haram ash-Sharif, which contains the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. After the light-filled symmetrical invitation of the Great Hall, this enclosed Concourse - with its own off-centre ramp that mounts still higher - may seem a stark and even intimidating anti-climax, not least because there is likely still to be no art. Nor is this impression mitigated by the long corridor's conclusion in a single set of stairs, at whose summit is a closed door. This door, too, bears some resemblance to the simple green door by which Muslim visitors, at the end of their own ascending path, skirt the Western Wall in Jerusalem and reach the Haram ash-Sharif. In the case of the Gallery, however, this door is locked to the public, and leads to the

restricted curatorial wing where work the art professionals who - given the multitude of sacral references in the building already - suggest the Gallery's equivalent of a priestly order. And indeed this door, as set in a vast blue wall devoid of all decoration, also suggests the sacred temple doorways that, in Mesoamerican pyramid architecture, tend to be situated at the stepped ramp's summit. The difference is that, with the door to the Curatorial Wing, the effect is diminished just a bit by both the prior intervention of the Great Hall and the presence of narrower stairways on either side, which rise at right angles to the main lower staircase. Precisely because they are at right angles, however, they cannot be seen from the Concourse, leaving the impression of the doorway itself as a remote summit. A less obvious doorway off the right side of the Concourse provides further access to the Gallery's art collections, while one on the left opens onto the restaurant. The conventional route would now be to offer a guided tour also of the National Gallery's accumulated art works, and of the rooms that hold them. This, however, has been done already in a 1988 National Gallery of Canada Guide by Suzanne Lacasse which, for its part, does not so much as mention the long, symmetrical, and gradually ascending access route in its 140 pages. Instead, all reference to this route resides in the foreword, written by the Gallery's then-director Shirley Thomson, who declares the then-new building to be not only "magnificent" and "spectacular architecture" which the visitor is invited to "admire" but also "airy, welcoming, and easily accessible."1 So droll an assessment of a Colonnade ramp and Great Hall described by the architect himself in terms of "procession," "ascent," "ritual," and even "Jacob's ladder" seems to verge on prescriptive distortion, as though the visitor is being implicitly asked not to reflect on the kind of experience that has been built into a long, slow, uphill climb unrelieved by art and opening into the vistas of the Great Hall. But to suspend critical scrutiny of this experience, for more conventional focus on the Gallery's inner rooms and their contents, will now not only repeat Lacasse's guidebook but will also yield no insights into the implications of the building's uniqueness, which has already shown itself in the prominence of an access route that is so spectacular yet devoid of art; into the route's symmetries, which so distinguish it from most late-twentieth-century museum architecture; and into the building's role among the monumental icons of the Canadian nation-state in the national capital. And, oddly enough, neither might this be the best route toward exploring the building's relationship to the Gallery's history not simply as a collection but as an institution. Instead, there may at this point be some value in taking advantage of a written text's capacity to make freer leaps in space and time than the human body is allowed, by venturing in imagination back outside again, to reconsider the access route from outside and especially the building's most dominant feature on the skylines of both Ottawa and Hull. This is the three-tiered cupola of the Great Hall, whose shape is most readily linked to that of the Parliamentary Library, located just behind the House of Commons. Clearly visible across Enclosure Bay, the neo-Gothic stonework, copper roof, and "chapter house" form of the Library were acknowledged by Safdie as having provided terms of "dialogue" for the cupola's form.2 But the Great Hall also dif34

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The National Gallery from the northern shore of the Ottawa River, near the Museum of Civilization. (Malak Karsh)

The remarkably homologous panorama provided by the Temple Mount and al-Haram ash-Sharif in the Old City of Jerusalem, which Moshe Safdie's personal residence overlooks. In the central foreground is Judaism's most sacred site, the Western Wall, which readily cross-references with both the high wall of the National Gallery's Concourse and the Gallery's own blank external "western wall" in cut stone. In the central background is the seventh-century Dome of the Rock, Islam's third most sacred site, whose role in the Old City's skyline is closely paralleled by Great Hall's cupola as seen from the Ottawa River. In the right foreground is an ascending ramped pathway that suggests both the Colonnade and Concourse ramps of the National Gallery and that is used by Muslims to reach the platform of the Haram ash-Sharif and Dome of the Rock. The minaret to the left even plays a role in the panorama comparable to the role played in the Gallery photograph by the spires of the Basilique cath&Jrale de Notre Dame. (Courtesy Moshe Safdie and Associates) Inviting in Lawren Harris

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fers from the Parliamentary Library in its lack of detail when viewed from outside, in the smooth surfaces of its crystalline facets and in its pale blue colour. The tiered, faceted blankness, which is almost a facelessness, suggests other ancient sources that again cross-reference with the Colonnade ramp: the third millenium BCE stepped pyramid of Zoser in Egypt, which is an early instance of the equation of geometrical precision with an afterlife, and which itself came with an associated colonnade; the similarly tiered, impersonal ziggurats, or "temple pyramids" of Mesopotamian city states in the third millennium BCE, where only the gods and rulers who communed at their summits were recognized as individuals; and the later appearance of a similar form in Mesoamerica, as in the tiered, 2ooo-year-old sacred Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, Mexico. But both the general shape of the Great Hall's cupola, and its prominence on the skyline, also suggest another Middle Eastern source, only slightly more recent, in the role played precisely in Jerusalem's own skyline by the cupola of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock, above the Western Wall. These Middle Eastern references are certainly understandable, given Safdie's work in Jerusalem during the dozen years before he received the Gallery commission. Intersecting with these, however, is a more recent and much more local set of aesthetic parallels which the Great Hall's shape, colour, and materials clearly evoke. For what the soaring crystalline shape also recalls - with its pale blue-green tint, its angled lines, and its pellucidity - is the series of stylized, deliberately mystical paintings of mountains and icebergs that were done by another of the founding members, and the driving force of the Group of Seven, Lawren Harris, during the 19208 and early 19305. These paintings have themselves become readily recognized icons of Canadian art history. Several - among them Maligne Lake, Jasper Park (1924), and North Shore Baffin Island #s I and II (1930 and 1931) - are in the collection of the National Gallery. Perhaps appropriately, however, the paintings whose forms most closely anticipate those of the Gallery are in collections throughout Canada. This is especially the case in Mount Robson from Berg Lake (1929), Mountains and Lake (1929), and Icebergs, Davis Strait (1930). The last of these works is particularly germane, for in all three of its main forms can be seen - in reverse alignment - an uncanny approximation to the main forms that make up the southern face of Safdie's building: on the right, the soaring, faceted mass of a large iceberg, stylized in pale green, blue, and yellow; in the middle, a pale yellow slab of ice tilting up toward the large iceberg, in a way analogous to the rise of the Colonnade ramp towards the Great Hall; and on the left, a smaller faceted iceberg form in dark blue, whose relationship to the large iceberg suggests the scale of the Gallery's Entrance Pavilion in relation also to the Great Hall. And, indeed, the parallel between the Great Hall's own crystalline soaring form, and the form of the larger iceberg in Harris's painting impressed itself with special clarity when, in January 1998, the Arctic itself in effect moved south in what came to be known as the Great Ice Storm, encasing the entire area around the Gallery in a garment of ice and giving the Great Hall itself the appearance of an enormous looming iceberg. But the hint of homology holds also for the period when Harris moved, during the mid-i93os, away from stylized representation and into rigourous abstraction. The motif of soaring, precisely defined 36

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Icebergs, Davis Strait by Lawren Harris (1930, oil on canvas 121.9 x T5 2 -4 cm.). (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, gift of Mr and Mrs H. Spencer Clark. By permission of the family of Lawren S. Harris)

The Great Hall of the National Gallery at the height of the Great Ice Storm of January 1998. (Douglas Ord)

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form rendered in pale blue, for example, can also be seen in Winter Comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone (Semi-Abstract No. 3) and Riven Earth (Composition No. 8), both painted after Harris left Canada for the United States in 1934. To give these homologies some historical context: the years 1920-35 not only bracketed several different phases in Harris's development as a painter; they also formed the period during which the National Gallery itself was as much as defined in its public profile by Eric Browns championing of the Group's way of painting Canadian landscape, despite hostility from both conservative artists of the Royal Canadian Academy and many laypeople. As described in 1930 by M.O. Hammond of the Globe and Mail, "the leadership of [the] movement" lay "mainly in the mild mannered Lawren Harris. He seems the antithesis of a revolutionary, yet he focuses the ambitions of this group of adventurers who would place Canadian art on a new footing."3 Harris did not understate the case in providing this "leadership." His paintings were the most visually distinctive of those produced by any member of the Group of Seven, in the extent to which he stylized Canadian landscape. He also as much as bankrolled the Group, using his inherited wealth to underwrite the Studio Building in Toronto where many of them worked and to pay for their train trips north. And just as significant, he provided a justifying rhetoric for the Group, via his almost messianic depiction of "the artist's" role in Canada, especially in regard to what he called "the North." "The Canadian artist serves the spirit of his land and people," Harris wrote in an essay called "Creative Art and Canada," published in 1928. "He is aware of the spiritual flow from the replenishing North and believes that this should ever shed clarity into the growing race of America ... He believes in the power and the glory, for the North to him is a single, simple vision of high things and can, through its transmuting power, shape our souls into its own spiritual expressiveness. He believes that this will create a new sense and use of design, a new feeling for space and formal relationships ... He feels that without such vision life would be mere mimicry, and he believes that, in every age and place, hidden in every true artist who has not succumbed to the perpetual doldrums, is a virgin ideal not unlike what has just been expressed."4 Harris even projected the alleged power of this vision beyond the Canadian border. "It may be," he wrote, "that the very glory of our life is in giving expression to this that comes to us pure in ideas, thoughts, character and attitude, through deeds and the arts for the larger part of the forming race to the south as well as to ourselves." For "the masses" in the United States, he alleged, "crowd a heavy psychic blanket over nearly all the land," which might well be lifted via "the Canadian character that is born of the spirit of the north." That Lawren Harris was both the most dynamic, and the most controversial member of the Group of Seven is often overlooked in hagiographies - such as those by Massey and Comfort - that present them not only as acting in the service of Canadian unity and identity but as constituting a unified force themselves. In this sense, there is understandable irony in the National Gallery's singling out Jackson, rather than Harris, as exemplary of the Group and worthy - via the Taiga Garden of a monument intended, as Cornelia Oberlander put it, to "introduce" the visitor to 38

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Lawren Harris circa 1920. (M.O. Hammond, National Gallery of Canada)

Canadian landscape art.5 For Jackson, in the homespun gruffness of his personal manner, in his origins in English-speaking Quebec, and in a painting style that reached a modest degree of stylization and then changed little in the next four decades, was perhaps what the hagiographers would have liked the entire Group to be, as agents of equally homespun and enduring Canadian national unity. Nevertheless, it is Harris's work, as the most stylistically audacious of any member of the Group, that the building suggests through its cupola, in a way that opens richly, though perhaps uneasily, into both Canadian art history and the history of the Gallery as an institution. "Lawren Harris is a seeker," Eric Brown wrote in 1919, the year before the Group of Seven was officially formed, and after he had already been buying Harris's paintings for half a dozen years.6 A.Y. Jackson used even stronger language, writing retrospectively of his first meeting with Harris in 1913 that "to Lawren Harris art was almost a mission. He believed that a country that ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving. He deplored our neglect of the artist in Canada, and believed that we, a young, vigorous people, should put the same spirit of adventure into the cultivation of the arts."7 Yet despite the rhetorical emphasis on the word "Canada" in Jackson's reminiscence, and on "the Canadian artist" in Harris's own credo, Harris's status as "a seeker" and his sense of "mission" were shaped by influences that emphatically were not Canadian. And - again ironically - an entry into these influences is provided precisely by the paintings that bear so striking a resemblance to the National Gallery's Great Hall. They date from what might be called Lawren Harris's middle period. His early years as an artist were devoted less to Canadian landscape than to the dilapidated houses of an impoverished Toronto neighbourhood called The Ward. Harris didn't live there; instead, as an heir to the Massey-Harris agricultural machinery fortune, he, as a comfortable visitor, applied the lessons he had learned while studying art in Berlin, at his family's expense, from 1904 to 1907. Gradually, however, he moved away from depicting buildings towards what he called "the still dignity, the high solemnity" of "nature" defined by landscape, "as against the less worthy qualities in Inviting in Lawren Harris

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human nature."8 This movement found company in other painters who were similarly interested: J.E.H. MacDonald, with whom Harris first encountered Scandinavian landscape painting on a 1913 visit to Buffalo; Jackson, whose Edge of the Maple Wood Harris himself bought that same year, as exemplary of an approach sensitive to the harshness of central Canadian light; and Tom Thomson, who combined a visionary's sense of framing with an intimate knowledge of Algonquin Park. Yet Harris's development as a painter was also accompanied by a change that, at first glance, had little to do with art. This was his determined conversion, after Tom Thomson mysteriously died on Canoe Lake and his brother was killed in action in 1917, to the spiritual doctrine called theosophy, and to its view of "the life of any one individual as having had an endless past - as it has an endless future before it."9 The painting that most suggests the Great Hall, Colonnade ramp, and Entrance pavilion of the National Gallery belongs to the period after Harris converted to theosophy but when he was still trying to filter the allegedly "universal" truths of the movement through the "particularity" of Canadian nature. During this period - and after a pre-ipi/ phase when his landscapes became almost cloyingly decorative - his use of line became cleaner, his use of form more reductively geometrical, and, perhaps above all, his use of represented light more suffused with a kind of (presumptively) spiritualized purity. Throughout the 19205, his palette also became cooler, emphasizing blues, pale greens, and shades of grey and dropping the warmer colours which had persisted in his landscapes of forests in the early 19205, even as the images themselves had become more stylized. These changes corresponded with trips to Lake Superior, Jasper Park, Alberta, and eventually, in the early 19305, the far north. And the farther north Harris ventured, the more his paintings seemed to be emptied also of the softening effects of atmospheric water vapour on shapes and colours: in acquiring a clear blueish tinge, the light became cold as well as pure. This is the momentum in Harris's career as a painter that is hinted at in the reductive, pale blue geometries of the National Gallery's Great Hall as seen from outside: a momentum that, culminating in his trips to the far north with Jackson in 1930 and 1931, made for Icebergs, Davis Strait. It was a momentum shaped as much by his commitment to theosophy as by his mystical depiction of "the North" in terms of a "single simple vision of high things" and source of "spiritual flow." For besides presenting a complete metaphysical schema for the immortality of the soul, and for its purification over many lifetimes, theosophy also claimed a spiritually significant and purifying role for geometrical form, for colour, and, by implication, for art. A practical program for this was developed especially by the movement's second generation of writers, after its founding in New York City, during the 18705, by the Russian emigre Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. In her many books - which she claimed had been dictated to her by her "higher and luminous Self, that thinks and writes for me" - Madame Blavatsky presented the role of geometrical form mainly in terms of inspiring symbolism, as drawn from her reading of occult texts.10 The triangle, for example, "played a prominent part in the religious symbolism of every great nation; for everywhere it represented the three great principles - spirit, force, and matter."11 Her successors and sometime rivals 4O

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Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, in their 1901 book Thought-Forms, then carried the role of both geometrical forms and colours beyond symbolism into an allegedly improving practice, by inferring a similarity between the action of electromagnetic waves on the "physical plane" and the "luminous but invisible vibrations" of "the soul" on "the astral plane." The texts of theosophy are especially striking for these sorts of leaps, which are presented with an assertiveness that itself seems to foreclose on the unknown, even as it dares the reader to disagree. In the writings of Blavatsky, and Besant/Leadbeater, descriptions of "astral monads" and "cosmic planes" make them sound as accessible as apples and oranges. The self-assurance was belied somewhat by the schisms that ruptured the movement itself, especially after Madame Blavatsky's death in 1891. But in keeping with this style, Besant and Leadbeater declared that a "thought-form" is "a living entity of intense activity animated by the one idea that generated it," and claimed that, as both "a radiating vibration and a floating form," it could make for "changes of colour in the cloud-like ovoid, or aura, that encompasses all living beings."12 In theosophical theory, this potential was alleged to be very important, in that "generated" "thought form" and "encompassing" "aura" were tied chromatically to the spiritual state of the persons involved. And most such "thought-forms," Besant and Leadbeater wrote, are indeed muddied by what they called "the desire-body," "which is of the denser matter of the astral plane, and is dull in hue, browns and dirty greens and reds playing a great part in it." Yet "if made of the finer kinds of matter," they claimed, the thought-form "will be of great power and energy, and may be used as a most potent agent when directed by a strong and steady will... A man thinking keenly upon some high subject pours out from himself vibrations which tend to stir up thought at a similar level in others ... They naturally act with special vigour upon those minds already habituated to vibrations of similar character; yet they have some effect on every mental body upon which they impinge, so that their tendency is to awaken the power of higher thought... It is thus evident that every man who thinks along high lines is doing missionary work, even though he may be ... unconscious of it."13 Lawren Harris, as a painter of Canadian landscape, was far from "unconscious" of "doing missionary work" and of trying to provide through his art - as Besant wrote - "a stimulus to the noble, a curb on the base."14 "The genuine, creative artist," he wrote in another of his own manifestos, with a zeal that recalled his Methodist forebears, "pioneers for the soul of a people."15 Besant and Leadbeater had already intimated how such "missionary work" could take place in art. There were, they wrote, three different kinds of "thought-forms": "that which takes the image of the thinker; that which takes the image of some material object; and that which takes a form entirely its own." Within the second category were artworks, which - they alleged - act on their audience according to the same "principles" as "underlie the production of thought-forms" generally. These principles, presented as usual with complete assurance, are that "Quality of thought determines colour"; "Nature of thought determines form"; and "Definiteness of thought determines clearness of outline." "The painter," they wrote, "who forms a conception of his future picture Inviting in Lawren Harris

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builds it up out the matter of his mental body, and then projects it into space in front of him, keeps it before his mind's eye, and copies it."16 The implication was that the "thought-form" thus "generated" would not only reflect the aura colour of the "man who thinks along high lines" but also improve the aura of those encountering it. Especially valuable in such a project would be the purer, paler, and "more luminous" shades of green, yellow, and blue, which - according to Besant and Leadbeater "show" respectively "the divine power of sympathy," "the highest and most unselfish use of intellectual power," and "self-renunciation and union with the divine."17 With his own use of "colour," "form," and "clearness of outline," Lawren Harris developed, through his gifts as a painter, the second category of "thought-forms" far beyond the visual examples given by Besant and Leadbeater. In doing so, he was also far from a slavish disciple, in that he imported stylistic elements and a "special subject" that were derived from his own tradition and circumstances. This was the theme of "the North" as "a single, simple vision of high things" that "can, through its transmuting power, shape our souls into its own spiritual expressiveness." Throughout the later 19208, Harris, as the main spokesman of the Group of Seven, insisted that the Canadian people would be greatly served through the giving of form to what he called "universal" values, via stylized images of "the particular" and, specifically, of landscapes drawn from what he called "the replenishing North."18 And in the clearly defined forms, precise lines, and rarefied colour schemes of his paintings throughout this period can be seen the adaptation of Besant's and Leadbeater's theory of thought-forms and of its allegedly improving practice. In this project, Lawren Harris also followed theosophy in his belief that such work could be done only through the agency of "a few individuals." But he extrapolated from theosophy's definition of such individuals as spiritually advanced, to focus instead on artists. For it was they, he wrote, who would be "capable of concentrating the diffuse spiritual force into new works,"19 which would contain both "the record of the joyous adventure of the creative spirit in us toward a higher world" and "the winnowed result of the experience of a people."20 As objects, according to Harris, such works "give life to [that people's] own particular attitude which depends upon the interplay of its time, its place on earth and its capacity" such that it can then "become aware of the universal spirit that informs all great manifestations and all noble living."21 Harris thus came to see in artists - and specifically in "a few individual" artists - the source of "spiritual" leadership for the entire nation. He also gave a generic name to the style of "new works" that he believed would be best suited to carry out this mission: a "spiritual realism" through which "a Canadian people" might receive "the spiritual flow," the "clarity," and the "replenishing power" of "the great North."22 Perhaps Harris's most focused annunciation of these goals was in an essay called "Revelation of Art in Canada," which appeared in the Canadian Theosophistin 1926. There he wrote: Any change of outlook, increase of vision and deepening of conviction in a people shows itself first through some form of art, art being both a clarifying and objectifying process. With us 42

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in Canada painting is the only art that so far has achieved a clear, native expression and so the forming distinctive attitude, the creative direction of our people, and their higher aspirations are to be detected in it. Indeed a new vision is coming into art in Canada ... forming a homemade vortex that steadily grows and intensifies, broadens and ascends, and is destined to draw into itself the creative and responsive growing power of many of our people. It touches into life all that is inherent, and leaves the acquired in the back-waters, away from its flowing... For it has in it a call from the clear, replenishing, virgin north that must resound in the greater freer depths of the soul.

These words on the role of art in Canada were written four years before Harris actually went to the high Arctic, and sketched, then painted, Icebergs, Davis Strait, whose angled forms and pale hues not only suggest - according to theosophical theory - "high spirituality," but strangely anticipate the forms and colours of Safdie's angled cupolas for the National Gallery. Nor is this the only instance of anticipation. In heralding a "new vision" for art in Canada, Harris announced a "home-made vortex that steadily grows and intensifies, broadens and ascends, and is destined to draw into itself the creative and responsive growing power of many of our people." Such a "vortex," he went on, "participates in a rhythm of light, a swift ecstasy, a blessed severity, that leaves behind the heavy drag of alien possessions and thus attains moments of release from transitory earthly bonds." How would Moshe Safdie, some sixty years later, describe the process by which visitors must climb a ramp to the interior of the very cupola that, from outside, is so suggestive of Icebergs, Davis Strait7. "Ascent offers - I don't want to say purification, but there's both an intellectual and emotional uplifting," he declared. "You unburden yourself of all your weights at the checkroom. And then you ascend" The very colours of the unequally sized forms in Icebergs, Davis Strait, visually linked at their base by the image of a tilted ice floe, even anticipated this theme of "intellectual and emotional uplifting," allegedly inscribed within the National Gallery via the ramp between the smaller street-level Entrance Pavilion and the larger Great Hall. The smaller iceberg form - analogous to the smaller glazed Entrance Pavilion - was rendered by Harris in darker, and therefore, according to theosophical theory, less spiritually developed blue, while the larger form - analogous to the Great Hall at the ramp's summit - is in the paler shades of yellow, green, and blue that are identified with "high spirituality." What makes this multilayered parallelism the more uncanny is that Safdie himself has claimed complete ignorance regarding such antecedents. "I am not aware," he wrote in a letter of 29 June 1997, "that my design was influenced by Brown's or Harris' agendas or by Harris' approach to landscape painting. Are there such influences? I'd be interested in learning about them."24 Is the similarity of crusading concern and of visual forms simply a matter of coincidence, then? Perhaps not. For at the very least, there is a pattern of sources which informs the paintings, the architecture, and even Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, and which, in doing so, may provide a crucial hinge toward understanding.

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The multiple ceilings of the Great Hall, containing a converging array of what Safdie called "Platonic geometries." (Fiona Spalding-Smith, RCA, National Gallery of Canada)

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Inviting in Plato on Grace and Gracelessness

For in all these there is grace or gracelessness. - Plato, Republic

In the 1989 interview that produced his comment about "ascending" via the Colonnade ramp, Moshe Safdie spoke also of how he had come to design the Great Hall. He did so in reply to Dan Turner's suggestion that, because of "the Great Hall's affinity to the Parliamentary Library," he might have been appropriating past styles for theatrical effect, a practice for which he had often criticized architectural postmodernism. Somewhat testily, Safdie answered: Postmodernism uses somebody else's language. At its worst it doesn't even understand the language so it's not even using the language, it's just borrowing fixed images from it. The Great Hall didn't come into being through this kind of process. I'd been involved with the geometry of octagons for ten or fifteen years. When I came to design the Great Hall I decided it should be a round space. Yes, that was a clear dialogue with the library. But my vision for the Great Hall was crystalline and transparent, whereas the library is Gothic and solid. When I get into crystalline forms the language, the syntax, is mine. A very powerful relationship with the library was certainly implicit. But the crystalline space was meant to be different: totally dynamic in terms of what you see and experience ... You associate crystals with repetitive geometries, with mathematics. But I decided that instead of making them regular forms I'd elongate them, and I'd stretch them, going beyond the pyramid and into the more conical. With a certain understanding of the relationships between the two buildings I used a language that has nothing to do with the Gothic soul of the library. It has to do with steel structures, and concrete, and transparency, and Platonic geometries.1 In fact, even "the language, the syntax" of "crystalline forms" were only dubiously Safdie s own. As was pointed out by Larry Richards when the Gallery opened in 1988, such forms hearken back to the Utopian German architect Bruno Taut in the 19208 and to the network he established among like-minded thinkers through the

Glaserne Kette (Crystal Chain) of exchanged letters.2 In an article for Canadian Art, Richards observed that Taut had in 1919 designed a set of children's building blocks made of coloured glass, and that some of the pictures of their arrangement "look like Safdie's work." Just as striking in their parallels are drawings made by Taut and his Glaserne Kette colleagues Wenzel Hablik, Wassili Luckhardt, and Hans Scharoun, which suggest both the exterior and the interior of Safdie's Great Hall.3 But according to a study by Christian Thomsen, the Glaserne Kette architects were also, like Lawren Harris, fascinated with the spiritual potential of mountains and with their similarities to crystals: "In these wonderfully lyrical renderings, crystalline configurations spread over entire mountain valleys and chains ... Crystal was thought to have powers of healing and regeneration, and also stood for innocence, purity, peace of mind, closeness to nature, and the ability to start one's life anew ... The emphasis lay on buildings designed to further community spirit." According to Thomsen, too, with the National Gallery building Safdie "translated into reality what Hablik, Scharoun, and Taut dreamed of in their crystalline designs."4 In view of this rich tradition, it is indeed surprising that Safdie laid claim so aggressively to the "the language, the syntax" of "crystalline forms" as his own. But the Glaserne Kette, too, in cross-referencing easily with Harris's interests, had inspirational sources to which Safdie also alluded in explaining the Great Hall's design. For alongside "steel structures and concrete and transparency" as contributing factors, he referred to "Platonic geometries." This term carries heavy baggage, of which Safdie himself - again - was perhaps not entirely aware. And its use adds a major strand to the network of associations that complement the visual parallels between the Great Hall and Harris's paintings. For references to Plato also informed theosophy, and through theosophy, Harris's approach to art. According to Madame Blavatsky, "the Platonic philosophy" alone was able to offer a "middle ground" between the present and what she called "the 'Secret Doctrines' of the ancient universal religion." "Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind," she wrote, "Plato taught that the nous, spirit, or rational soul of man, being generated by the Divine Father,' possessed a nature kindred or even homogeneous with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities."5 And what was more, "the greatest philosopher of the pre-Christian era mirrored faithfully in his works the spiritualism of the Vedic philosophers who lived thousands of years before himself, and its metaphysical expression ... So surviving the shock of time, what can this wisdom be but divine and eternal."6 Whether a close reading of Plato justified these inferences seemed little to concern Madame Blavatsky; instead, it has often been alleged that she never so much as looked at his actual writings and instead relied on popular interpretations. Following Blavatsky, however, Lawren Harris, too, tied his investment in a "virgin ideal" to a notion of art itself as "the record of the joyous adventure of the creative spirit in us toward a higher world." And this, he wrote in 1926, is "a world in which all ideas, thoughts and forms are pure and beautiful and completely clear: the world Plato held to be perfect and eternal."7 Even his claim that "the genuine, creative artist pioneers for the soul of a people" was tied to "an inner standard" that - he claimed 46

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"was central to the philosophy of Plato." This was that "abstract ideas" of "perfect justice, perfect equality, perfect proportion, order, truth, love and beauty... are inherent in the soul of man" and "constitute together the inner power and standard by which the artist works. This standard, indeed, forms the very basis of his creative activity, and it is universal."8 Just how to filter these "universal" and "abstract ideas" through the "particular" terms of the Canadian "North," as "a single, simple vision of high things," was the challenge that Lawren Harris set himself in his stylized paintings of northern landforms. He did not seem especially concerned that the question of how eternal and immutable forms might actually commune with the flux of the everyday was one of the enduring philosophical conundra left by Plato. What instead is intriguing about all these references - Safdie's and Blavatsky's as well as Harris's - is that in each them the name "Plato" is dropped as though the philosopher's works, which take the form of two dozen closely argued dialogues, can be distilled, by general agreement, into a few sound bites. These are then, in turn, presented in a way that serves, and perhaps bolsters the prestige of, a wider case. At the very least, such usage ignores the fact that Plato himself, in his middle dialogues, rigorously questioned and even doubted the terms of that "inner standard" which Harris confidently attributed to him. But of more immediate importance is the possibility that, owing to the subtleties of the dialogues themselves, the very citation of Plato as an authority may come with hidden strings. And in the overall attempt to make sense of Safdie's National Gallery building, within the context of both its surrounding human landscape and the Gallery's history as an institution, this possibility deserves a look. The Platonic dialogues date from the fourth century BC. So central have they been as a foundation of thought that Alfred North Whitehead wrote in the early twentieth century that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to them. Safdie's reference to "Platonic geometries" is a footnote specifically to Plato's claims of a relationship between "geometries" and truth, which are to be found in the Republic and in the late dialogue Timaeus. In the latter, Plato provided a "foundation myth" for the origins of the universe, with what came to be called "Platonic geometries" explaining the four basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water. According to Plato, these are all, at their fundamental level, combinations of (mostly equilateral) triangles, with the most stable element, earth, taking a "cubic" form, and the least stable, fire, a "pyramidal" form. These aspects of the Timaeus indeed cross-reference with both Safdie's comment on "Platonic geometries" and Madame Blavatsky's on the symbolism of triangles. But the details of this theory of atomic structure are less relevant here than Plato's next comment. "God has everywhere," he has his spokesman Timaeus say to Socrates, "exactly perfected and harmonized the ratios of their numbers, motions, and other properties in due proportion, as far as necessity allowed or gave consent." The creator God of the Timaeus, then, is a sort of divine architect, who "out of disorder ... brought order, considering that this was in every way better," and who for pattern "looked to the eternal... which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable ... [For] God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad so far as this was attainable."9 Inviting in Plato on Grace and Cracelessness

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This description of the Platonic "demiurge" seems also to anticipate Safdie's account of how - in seeking to produce "one of the nicest feelings in the world" in the Great Hall - he "decided" to "elongate" and "stretch" "repetitive geometries" toward realizing his "vision." But the theory of "Platonic geometries" was not simply descriptive of what Plato claimed were the "eternal truths" of geometry, as well as the underlying structure of the world. It was also - as Blavatsky's theosophy would be prescriptive, through his further claim that the study of these "truths" would benefit the wholeness of both the individual soul and the collective state. In Book vn of the Republic, for example, Plato has his characters Socrates and Glaucon consider geometry, described as "the knowledge of the eternally existent," in terms of its value as compulsory study for the ideal republic's rulers or "guardians." This, Socrates claims, is because "it strongly directs the soul upward and compels it to discourse about pure numbers." The study of geometry, then, they decide, "would tend to draw the soul to truth, and would be productive of a philosophical attitude of mind, directing upward the faculties that are now wrongly turned earthward."10 This view of "truth," and this prescriptive view of geometry in relation to truth, indeed derived from the theory of supersensible forms developed by Plato in his early dialogues, through the literary remaking of his teacher Socrates. According to this theory, any noun of category - justice, truth, beauty, love, as well as more prosaic cases such as the exemplary "couch" in Republic x - is modelled on an eternal and immutable form.11 Phenomena experienced through the senses are alleged to share in these forms through imperfect imitation. But - according to Plato - only the faculty of reason can give access to them in their purity. For all its enduring influence, Plato was never able to prove this theory, but rather simply asserted it, or sought to illustrate it, via such well-known allegories as that of the cave in the Republic. But the domain in which it seemed to be most easily demonstrated was that of geometry and mathematics, where number relations are immutable and do not vary with the experience of the seeker after truth. In parallel with this theory of forms, and again prefiguring theosophy, Plato also developed a theory of the human soul as created by God to have a "never ceasing and rational life enduring throughout all time" and to be "the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject."12 This "rational soul" - he claimed - had a mission, and could be purified through contemplation of that same realm of "fixity, purity, and truth" which could be grasped only through reason.13 What "is apprehended by intelligence and reason," he wrote, "is always in the same state, but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason is always in a process of becoming and perishing, and never really is."14 The soul's highest goal, then, is the contemplation of this realm of unchanging ideas, of which the truths of geometry offer the clearest model and in which the highest idea is that of "the good." "This faculty of knowledge," he wrote, "must be turned around from the world of becoming, together with the entire soul... until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being. And this, we say, is the good, do we not?"15

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The Great Hall's summit from directly underneath. (Charles Hup£, National Gallery of Canada)

Given that Plato identified this "contemplation of essence" with an "upward" direction, there was obviously in Safdie's design for the Great Hall an echo also of this pattern, through the direction of visitors' eyes "upward" at the summit of the Colonnade ramp, toward a static harmony of "geometries" that rise toward a single centre. But the use of the term "visitors" here - like Safdie's use of the generic "you" in his description of "ascent" - suggests a further affinity with Plato's style. In writing about "the soul" as he did, Plato was not writing only about his own soul but about all souls. That is to say: he identified "the absolute good" to be "the perfect thing that everyone desires" and "loves" and so was - he believed - offering a prescription toward the betterment of all human beings.16 In the Republic, he carried this prescription into politics, envisioning a state governed not by leaders chosen democratically by "the many" but through those who, as "guardians," had been trained to contemplation of "the good" as "the conjunction of three: beauty, proportion, and truth... as one."17 For Plato considered "the rule of the many" to be the

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"weakest in every way" among forms of government, and "the democratic element" in the soul to be a prompt to "insolence and anarchy and prodigality and shamelessness."18 These prescriptions for both the soul and the state had repercussions in regard to "art." Not only did Plato distinguish between the everyday world of "becoming" and the realm of eternal Ideas accessible only through reason, he also identified the latter with truth and the former with illusion. When the soul, he wrote, "is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent, it apprehends and knows them, and appears to possess reason. But when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason."19 Among the most distracting of all illusions found in "that region which is mingled with darkness," however, are - according to Plato - the objects generally described by the term "art." For as considered especially through painting, these consist of an "imitation" of "appearance as it appears," rather than "of reality as it is."20 "The majority of arts," he claimed via Socrates in Philebus,"as also those who are busied therewith, are in the first place concerned with opinions, and pursue their energetic studies in the realm of opinion."21 Plato, then, was not neutral in assessing the relationship of art to both the individual soul and the state. But if "the majority of arts" are "concerned with opinions," he nevertheless urged that some kinds of art could serve to train the soul, through the eye, to look toward "harmonies" as suggestive of "fixity, purity, truth, and what we have called perfect clarity."22 Such arts, he claimed, could also be of value toward the training of the "guardians" in his ideal - and non-democratic - republic. For in all the arts, he wrote in an important passage, there is grace or gracelessness. And gracelessness and evil rhythm and disharmony are akin to evil speaking and the evil temper, but the opposite are the symbols and the kin of the opposites, the sober and good disposition ... Is it, then, only the poets that we must supervise and compel to embody in their poems the semblance of the good character, or else not write poetry among us? Or must we keep watch over the other craftsmen, and forbid them to represent the evil disposition, the licentious, the illiberal, the graceless, either in the likeness of living creatures or in buildings, or in any other product of their art, on penalty, if unable to obey, of being forbidden to practice their art among us, that our guardians may not be bred among symbols of evil... and build up a huge mass of evil in their own souls. But we must look for those craftsmen who, by the happy gift of nature, are capable of following the trail of true beauty and grace, that our young men, dwelling as it were in a salubrious region, may receive benefit from all things about them.23

In this passage, Plato made a case for censorship in the arts that is among Western civilization's earliest, as well as among its most eloquent and sophisticated. Through the voice of Socrates, he asserted a fundamental disjunction between "grace or gracelessness" and on this basis presented two sets of equations as simply true. These equations are, first, that "gracelessness and evil rhythm and disharmony are akin to 5O

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evil speaking and the evil temper"; and, secondly, that "the opposite" - which is to say grace, "good rhythm," and harmony - "are the symbols and kin of the opposites, the sober and good disposition." Plato was, then, attributing a causative role to art in the cultivation of good character in his republic's potential guardians, such that "the influence that emanates from works of beauty may waft itself to eye or ear like a breeze that brings from wholesome places health, and so from earliest childhood insensibly guide them to likeness, to friendship, to harmony with beautiful reason."24 This assignment of a spiritually improving role to art anticipated theosophical theories about "thought-forms" and Lawren Harris's application of these theories to his own painting and to the improving role of "the Canadian artist." But it would also, some decades after Harris's manifesto, find its way into the rhetoric of the political figure who would play a crucial role in advancing the cause of a new building for the National Gallery. In describing the arts, shortly after becoming prime minister, as "an essential grace in the life of civilized people," Pierre Trudeau seemed himself to be alluding to this Platonic view of art. And indeed, when in 1969 he officially opened the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, he referred to this very passage in an aside, claiming that, according to Plato, legislators govern more wisely when in the presence of beauty.25 He did not, however, cite the other part that follows from it, and that entails the calculated exclusion of "art" which does not "follow... the trail of true beauty and grace." Yet, in immediate spatial terms, this seems exactly to be what is implied by the Great Hall's emptiness, which the visitor to the National Gallery encounters at the summit of the Colonnade ramp. For this emptiness itself opens out beneath a "salubrious region" which, with its orchestrated geometries, "keeps watch" not only above the Great Hall but above its spectacular, ordered framing of the icons of Canadian nationhood. So grand and encompassing a version of "Platonic geometries" may also hint, then, at the kind of "order" that the National Gallery brings to this iconography. For even as it houses a national institution with its own history, and with a stake in both art and a state which have evolved in time and place, the building's access route proclaims - as Lawren Harris did in his paintings of northern landforms, and as Safdie implied the Great Hall should when he cited "Platonic geometries" - a stake in an sense of order ostensibly beyond time, beyond place, beyond history. Nor was this out of keeping with Trudeau's own long-standing affinity for Plato. Speaking of his youth, he said while prime minister: "I don't know if it was general in those days, but I didn't have all that high a regard for contingencies, for the everyday life as a Mackenzie King was administering it... I had in those days a very high disdain for what was going on today and tomorrow ... and I was much more interested in Plato and Aquinas than I was in a discussion of yesterday's budget.26 Obviously, there were aspects of Trudeau's final years in power - including his use of orders-in-council to establish the Gallery building project - that suggested the reappearance of this "high disdain for what was going on today and tomorrow." Yet if this project would itself introduce visual reminders of "Platonic geometries" into the landscape of the nation's capital, Trudeau, Safdie, and even Lawren Harris were all, in tying Canadian art to the heritage of Plato, only following in the path of another Inviting in Plato on Grace and Gracelessness

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man who had deeply embedded this heritage in the National Gallery's record as an institution. This is a record which, while being in immediate terms overwhelmed by the visual scale of Safdie's building, is also as much as conjured forth uncannily by the building's style. For behind Eric Brown's 1929 claim that art "can add fitness and order and suitability to everything it touches" lay his own deep devotion to a doctrine shaped in part by Plato's metaphysics and incorporating aspects of the same valenced dualism. And as with Plato and Lawren Harris, this commitment carried implications for the alleged improving and national role of some kinds of art to the exclusion of others. How this pattern shaped the history of the National Gallery between 1910, when Brown became the Gallery's first full-time curator, and 1988, when Safdie's building opened, makes for a story whose currents are so outside the mainstream of public discourse in Canada as perhaps to explain why it has for so long gone ignored. But given the prominence of Safdie's version of the National Gallery in Ottawa, and the suggestion it makes of a relationship between art and some kind of order, this is a story that merits telling, beginning with the arrival in 1909 of a ship in Montreal, bearing an unlikely passenger.

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The Field Before (1910-65)

Eric Brown and Florence Maud Brown, circa 1920. (National Gallery of Canada)

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Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

The art of all ages has concerned itself with things considered supremely beautiful and therefore good, that is, capable of inspiring good. - Eric Brown, in a letter to the Ottawa Citizen, 1921 At last, there came Mary Baker Eddy out of a life of purity and hope into the great light of Christian Science. - Eric Brown, in a testimonial in the Christian Science Sentinel, 7921

When Eric Brown arrived in Canada from Britain in 1909, he was, at thirty-two, a not-so-young man with very few prospects in either place. Tall, stooped, and almost birdlike, with thin fair hair, he was not at all the sort of immigrant that Canada was courting with the offer of hard work in a mine or on a prairie farm. Instead, he had just made the discovery, through a failed attempt at farming in Lincolnshire, that he was, as he later put it, "more interested in the colour of a cow with the sun on it, than in its pedigree."1 Why, then, did he come to Canada? For he also - unlike other young gentlemen who came out to the colonies - landed in Montreal without contacts of any kind among the ruling elite. Nor was he even of such "good family" as might have recommended him, in that his father had been only a local councillor in the dirty Midlands mining city of Nottingham. At first glance, Brown was little more than one of the British Empire s deniable offspring: a sensitive young man who had been encouraged by his father to read the literary classics, and by his older brother, Arnesby, an Edwardian landscape painter, to nurture a love of art. Yet the rigidly stratified society that had cocooned this development could find no place for him as an adult. Prior to the Lincolnshire farming venture, Brown had helped a cousin run a cotton plantation in the West Indies, and he had left only when the cousin got married and there was no longer any room for him in the house. He arrived in Montreal on nothing more than the vaguely offered invitation, from a local art

dealer while both of them were visiting Arnesby, to pay a visit if he ever happened to be in Canada. How was it, then, that despite these uninspiring beginnings, Eric Brown was within a year of his arrival in Montreal, offered the curatorship of the National Art Gallery of Canada? How was it that he became its first director two years later and then went on to direct it for the next twenty-seven years, until he died while still in office in 1939? And how was it that Kenneth Clark, then director of Britain's National Gallery, would come to write of him in an obituary: "Eric Brown was known to all lovers of art in the English-speaking world as one of the most sensitive and distinguished of all gallery directors. He understood painting as an artist, but he retained the detachment of a critic. His was, in fact, a supremely civilized mind in which great enthusiasm was concealed by irony, humour, and tolerance. It was rare good fortune that the National Gallery of Canada in its early stages should be directed by a man of such distinction, and so avoid the amassing of mediocre work which is the usual fate of growing galleries."2 The trajectory that carried Eric Brown, former cotton planter and failed Lincolnshire farmer in 1909, to an assessment as "one of the most sensitive and distinguished of all gallery directors" by 1939 is central to an understanding of how the National Gallery of Canada developed toward the building designed by Moshe Safdie. Nor is this simply a matter of Brown's having carried the Gallery from an obscure depository for "diploma works" by members of the Royal Canadian Academy to - as Clark implied - one of the more interesting smaller art collections in North America. Rather, there is a relevant subtext to this trajectory, and possibly even a different kind of "concealment," from that described by Clark in terms of a "great enthusiasm ... concealed by irony, humour, and tolerance." Clark's obituary can in this sense itself be read as dense with irony, though whether this was intended by the writer cannot be known. For his depiction of Brown in terms of "a supremely civilized mind" was at best only part of the story, and perhaps even gave a skewed sense of the "great enthusiasm" that Brown brought to the role of director. The casual reader would, of course, infer that this "enthusiasm" pertained just to art. To establish the paradox, however, in the bluntest of terms: the "supremely civilized mind" described by Clark was underlain in private by a sectarian commitment whose qualities have seldom if ever been described as "supremely civilized." Instead, this commitment itself involved a notion of "mind" that seemed to mock the very value of such modifiers. This was because, throughout his adult life, Eric Brown was a committed practitioner of, and even proselytizer for, Christian Science, a mainly American religious movement which had been founded by Mary Baker Eddy in Boston during the 18708. And if "mind" indeed played a central role in Christian Science, the distinction made by Mrs Eddy was not between the "uncivilized" and the "civilized." Rather, the alleged difference central to her "church" was between "the unerring and eternal Mind" of God and mere "mortal mind," with its allegedly erroneous belief in the existence of "matter." Eric Brown himself left behind two testimonials that suggest the extent of his own "enthusiasm" for Christian Science. In 1921, when he had been director of the 56

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National Gallery of Canada for nine years, he wrote that the goal of Christian Science - as of life itself - was to "understand God and to do God's work by means of that understanding."3 This would be achieved, he wrote, through man's heeding the "infallible" Mrs Eddy's decree that "Mind is the master of the corporeal senses, and can conquer sickness, sin, and death." Brown quoted Mrs Eddy: "Exercise this God-given authority. Take possession of your body and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man." "So now," Brown himself went on, "we have the comforting assurance which anyone can prove in a small or great degree, that man is here and now guided, guarded, and governed by that one infinite divine Principle which is God, conscious and capable good."4 And lest there be any ambiguity, he wrote in his other testimonial that "the Leader of the Christian Science movement, Mrs Eddy, has provided for every emergency and left no gate unguarded... Thought is being spiritualized, the pleasures and pains of matter are becoming less and less important. We ... gain a glimpse of the tremendous value of so ordering our thought that we can dismiss from it whatever is discordant as soon as we have uncovered and completely denied it, confident that the unerring action of Truth will obliterate and destroy it. We are gaining confidence."5 Just possibly, this is not the sort of rhetoric Kenneth Clark was thinking of when he memorialized Eric Brown's "enthusiasm" and "supremely civilized mind." Indeed, he may not have been aware of it at all, for there is evidence that an effort was made, at some time during the twentieth century, to "obliterate" the apparently "discordant" - or perhaps embarrassing - record of these texts themselves. The testimonials "Man's Capacity" and "Pushing Onward" both appeared in 1921, in the Christian Science Sentinel and the Christian Science Journal respectively. These are sectarian sister publications to the more widely known and secular Christian Science Monitor, and are, like it, retained in bound volumes in the Christian Science Reading Rooms that are found in most cities. An attempt to trace the articles through the Reading Room in Ottawa, where Brown lived and directed the National Gallery, led to the discovery that the pages containing both testimonials had been torn from their publications. An effort to trace them through the Reading Rooms in Montreal and Toronto made for the same discovery: the precise pages containing "Man's Capacity" and "Pushing Onward" had been torn out and were missing. So that the only place eventually able to provide copies was the library of the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston Massachusetts, beyond the borders of Canada. What should be made of this? Were the pages torn out in each place by a fellow "enthusiast" who was so excited by Browns words that he or she wanted to keep them? Possibly. Or possibly not. But the more important dilemma, to which this small mystery points, is posed by the realization that the "mind" which speaks through these testimonials is not so much "supremely civilized" as that of a true believer, and even, plausibly, of a fanatic. "God's capacity is man's capacity, limitless and infinite," Brown wrote. "Mortal mind clings desperately to its lies. They are its only stronghold; otherwise, with the Bible in its hand the world would have learned Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

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its lesson long ago."6 What was this lesson? "As Mrs Eddy writes [in] Science and Health" Brown went on, 'Moses advanced a nation to the worship of God in Spirit instead of matter, and illustrated the grand human capacities of being bestowed by immortal Mind.' So men governed nations, healed the sick, fed the hungry, all by the understanding of man's spiritual dominion over every form of matter when governed by God, and the people marveled at their wonderful works - and forgot." According to Brown, the next spiritual phase had been provided by Jesus Christ, whose "ministry," while "one triumphant vindication of man's capacity to understand Life as God, infinite good," still offered only "glimpses of the truth" and did not "explain it." "At last," he wrote, "there came Mary Baker Eddy out of a life of purity and hope into the great light of Christian Science. A man's capacity to know God aright and to overcome every claim of mortal law was known again on earth, the lives and works of Jesus and the prophets and apostles were made plain and the Bible possessed a key which would unlock its treasures forevermore."7 These words were written by the man who directed the National Gallery of Canada for twenty-nine years: nearly twice as long as his Christian Scientist successor, H.O. McCurry, and nearly three times longer than any other director in its history. They were also written by a man who - paradoxically under the circumstances - had immigrated to Canada not from Mrs Eddy's United States but from Britain. And yet - thirdly - they were written by a man who, if Kenneth Clark is to be believed, "understood painting as an artist" even as "he retained the detachment of a critic." Brown even - again according to Clark - saved the National Gallery itself from "the amassing of mediocre work which is the usual fate of growing galleries." This would seem, in terms of Brown's Christian Science, an especially odd achievement, given Mrs Eddy's disdain for "matter," and given that art, in most of its forms, has a material aspect. How, then, was this sequence of paradoxes reconciled, so as to make for Brown's long-standing guidance of, and influence on, the National Gallery of Canada? A cogent answer can be arrived at only through a brief look at Christian Science itself, and at its peculiar adaptability to American life - as well as to a particular Canadian institution - at the turn of the twentieth century. "THOUGHT is BEING S P I R I T U A L I Z E D ..." As a movement, Christian Science had been founded in Massachusetts by Mrs Eddy in 1879, based on her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures of 1875. Oddly enough, these dates bracket precisely the 1877 publication of Isis Unveiled by theosophy s Madame Blavatsky in New York City. That both these women, working out of the American northeast, were able, during subsequent decades, to develop large followings suggests an accuracy to Madame Blavatsky's own reading of the times. For her, "the picture of the hour" was of a "bewildered public" caught between "the two conflicting Titans" of Science and Christian Theology, and "fast losing all belief in man's personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of a mere animal existence."8 Both women, in proposing alternatives, claimed to be inspired by some higher power. According to Madame Blavatsky, she was taking dictation from her "higher and luminous Self, that thinks and writes for 58

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me," while according to Mrs Eddy, she was "only a scribe echoing the harmonies of heaven in divine metaphysics."9 These parallel claims suggest that the two movements did indeed have more in common than female founders writing on America's eastern seaboard. With, in each case, the ascription of insight to a supra-human source, both women implicitly derogated the everyday perceived world and the usual terms of individuality as less than fully real. For behind these, they claimed from New York and Boston respectively, was a spiritual "principle" that is identifiable with The Real. Theosophists, wrote Madame Blavatsky, "believe in a Universal Divine Principle, the root of ALL, from which all proceeds, and within which all shall be absorbed at the end of the great cycle of Being."10 Mrs Eddy, just to the north, sounded similar. "Spirit is divine Principle," she declared, "and divine Principle is Love and Love is Mind, and Mind is not both good and bad, for God is Mind; therefore there is in reality one Mind only, because there is one God."11 So great an investment in "divine Principle" did not, in either of these movements, leave much room for the notion of autonomous, rational individuals that evolved in western Europe during the Enlightenment and that served as the basis for liberal democracy. Wrote Madame Blavatsky: "We believe that every human being is the bearer or Vehicle, of an Ego coeval with every other Ego; because all Egos are of the same essence and belong to the primeval emanation from one universal divine Ego. Plato calls the latter the logos... and we, the manifested divine principle."12 Mrs Eddy, for her part, asked: "What is the Ego, whence its origin and what its destiny?" Then answering her own question, she declared: "The Ego-Man is the reflection of the Ego-God; the Ego-man is the image and likeness of perfect Mind, Spirit, divine Principle."13 In emphasizing "divine Principle" in this way, and in presenting human "Ego" as "emanation" or "reflection," both sects implicitly downplayed the distinctiveness, value, and integrity of individual experience, just as they downplayed a personal God. In doing so, they, too, echoed Plato's tendency to speak in terms of a generic "soul" that aspires toward "the Good," and his claim, through Socrates in the Euthyphro, that the nature of justice and "the holy" transcends the whims of anthropomorphic gods, never mind of human beings.14 Conceptually, theosophy was more sophisticated than Christian Science, in that the well-travelled Madame Blavatsky drew from Hindu, Zoroastrian, Confucian, and Buddhist scriptures, as well as from the works of Plato, in presenting an alleged Ur-doctrine that allowed eventual salvation for everyone through a process of repeated rebirth. Christian Science, however - while more narrowly based in a Judaeo-Christian model of revealed truth - offered a much more immediate appeal, by means of a "rule" and method of healing that promised worldly benefits. According to Mrs Eddy, if only "divine Mind" is "real," then not only "matter" is an "illusion": so too is disease the result of an individual's unwholesome anchorage in "mortal mind." "Failing to recover health through adherence to physiology and hygiene," she wrote, "the despairing invalid often drops them, and in his extremity and only as a last resort, turns to God. The invalid's faith in the divine Mind is less than in drugs, air, and exercise, or he would have resorted to Mind first... But when Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

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Mind at last asserts its mastery over sin, disease, and death, then is man found to be harmonious and immortal... Disease being a belief, a latent illusion of mortal mind, the sensation would not appear if the error or belief was met and destroyed by truth."15 The mechanics of such destruction of disease as "latent illusion" seemed in practice often to involve the sincere believer s reading Mrs Eddy's "textbook," with its mantra-like repetitions concerning the reality of Divine Mind and the unreality of matter and mortal mind. Later editions of Science and Health included testimonials to this effect, and one example can stand for many. "C.H." of Portland, Oregon, described how, after spraining an ankle, "I took my copy of Science and Health and began reading. Very soon I became so absorbed in the book I forgot all about my ankle; it went entirely out of my thought, for I had a glimpse of all God's creation as spiritual, and for the time being I lost sight of my material selfhood. After two hours I laid the book down and walked into another room. When next I thought of my ankle, I found it was not hurting me. The swelling had gone down, the black and blue appearance had vanished, and it was perfectly well. It was healed while I was 'absent from the body' and'present with the Lord.' This experience was worth a great deal to me, for it showed how the healing is done."16 The ascription of transformative power to the act of reading was not unique to Mrs Eddy. Earlier in the same century, in Germany, G.W.E Hegel had claimed - with more sophistication - that through reading his Phanomenologie des Geistes the "particular individual" could mount "a ladder" into the "pure ether of Absolute Spirit."17 But even Hegel did not claim, with his complex dialectic and schematized stages of consciousness, that reading his book would banish physical illness. Mrs Eddy, separated by an ocean from the European dialogue between theology and philosophy, made just this claim, to her mainly American audience, about Science and Health. Yet oddly enough, for the future of art in Canada, one of her most avid readers proved to be not in the United States at all, but in England. For both Eric Brown's testimonials and a short biography published by his widow, Maud, in 1964 suggest that it was precisely this stronger claim by Mrs Eddy which brought him to his intense faith in Christian Science. According to Maud Brown, "a long illness resulting from an accident on the football field ruled out all thought of college" for the young Eric Brown.18 She was not specific as to the illness, but presumably it was serious, in that the one connection Eric Brown did enjoy was that his father had been one of the founders of Nottingham University and so surely - had Eric been able to attend - could have pulled some strings. What Maud did make clear was that "during his slow period of convalescence Eric had found great help in studying Christian Science, and had introduced me to that religion [which] became a stay and bulwark for both of us throughout our lives."19 In the testimonial "Pushing Onward," Brown himself elaborated: Christian Science was brought to my notice for the first time by a member of my family who had heard about it from a friend. Being sick and despondent I eagerly jumped at it and the only fear was that it would prove too good to be true. Shortly afterwards "Science and Health 6O

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with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs Eddy was borrowed and anxiously read, but the disappointment was keen because the book seemed to me to be incomprehensible and to deal with vague hypotheses altogether outside of human experience. In spite of the disappointment, however, which resulted in the study being discontinued for a time, the desire to read the book again and to understand it never left me, and the next time the textbook became available sufficient of it was grasped and put into practice to remove any doubt that here was the pearl of great price that all the world needed and which many were actually looking for.20

Brown's use of the phrase "put into practice" as well as his reference to being "healed" does indeed suggest that he found in Mrs Eddy's book a relief from his "illness." His own phraseology also merits exploration, because it will give a sense of how Eric Brown transferred his "enthusiasm" for Christian Science into that "enthusiasm" for art, and for the National Gallery of Canada, which was so lauded by Kenneth Clark. "The next time the textbook became available," Brown wrote, "sufficient of it was grasped and put into practice to remove any doubt that here was the pearl of great price that all the world needed." This passage would seem to describe, in Christian Science terms, Brown's conversion experience. His use of the impersonal passive voice, rather than of the first-person singular pronoun, in recounting this crucial moment is significant. For it suggests his sense of having successfully left behind an "I" that he had earlier described as "sick and despondent," and of having come into harmony with Divine Mind, according to Mrs Eddy's prescription that "the Ego-Man is the reflection of the Ego-God; the Ego-man is the image and likeness of perfect Mind, Spirit, divine Principle." In the next paragraph, however, Brown adopted the collective "we" in describing the next phase of Christian Science process: involvement in a world whose materiality was denied by Mrs Eddy but which nevertheless sustained a Christian Science community. "And so in an infinite variety of ways," he wrote, "we start on the road that leads upward. Perhaps our first problem is quickly solved and we are healed. Sickness is replaced with abounding health, bankruptcy with affluence, the depressing sense of a distant and corporeal God with a glimpse of the one infinite and omnipresent Mind and His idea, man." "Sickness," then, was equated by Brown with both "bankruptcy" and "the depressing sense of a distant and corporeal God," while "abounding health" was linked with "affluence" and with "a glimpse of the one infinite and omnipresent Mind and His idea, man." This parallelism suggests the terms by which, in practice, Eric Brown was able to reconcile his commitment to Christian Science with an interest in material art, and even in a material art that began, with the Renaissance in Europe, to focus on "man" rather than on visual repetitions of Christian texts. For why, if "Spirit" is all-important for the Christian Scientist, would affluence to focus on the middle terms - be preferable over bankruptcy? The answer has to do in part with Mrs Eddy's own admission into Christian Science of the Calvinist tendency, so central to the righteous dynamism of New England, to read worldly success through hard work and self-denial as a sign of divine favour. But just as Hegel did not expect people to be physically healed through reading his Phenomenology, Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

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so even Calvinists did not go so far as to say that matter itself was an illusion. Again, Mrs Eddy was not bound by logical rigour. In early editions of her "textbook," she did not so much as admit the existence of "matter," claiming that "all is infinite Mind ... for God is All-in-all."21 Then, in later editions of Science and Health, she revised this to insist that "the flesh and Spirit can no more unite in action than good can coincide with evil. It is not wise to ... expect to work equally with Spirit and matter, Truth and error."22 A reader versed in theology might have questioned so casual a shift from monism - "God is All-in-all" - to valenced dualism: "flesh and Spirit," "good" and "evil." But Mrs Eddy's enthusiasts were not so picky and even followed her into a still later identification of evil with "malicious animal magnetism," which she claimed took the form of rays directed toward her by her enemies.23 Whatever the Calvinist influence, then - and Mrs Eddy did claim descent from "the Puritan standard of undefiled religion" in New Hampshire - there was also the question not merely of her logic but of her stability.24 Among her sharpest critics in the United States was the novelist Mark Twain, who at the turn of the century feared that a Christian Scientist would occupy the White House by the 19408. "Mrs Eddy," he wrote in one of his milder comments, "would not be Mrs Eddy if she should ever chance to be consistent about anything two days running."25 Twain was especially scathing on her position regarding money. "From end to end of the Christian Science literature," he observed in 1907, "not a single (material) thing is conceded to be real, except the Dollar. But all through and through its advertisements that reality is eagerly and persistently recognized."26 Nor was Twain alone among thoughtful Americans in this criticism. The novelist Willa Gather, working with Georgine Milmine, wrote in a 1909 biography that "in relation to their physical existence and surroundings, Mrs Eddy and all Christian Scientists live exactly as other people do; and while they write and teach that physical conditions should be ignored, and the seeming life of the material world denied, they daily recognize their own mortality, and have a very lively sense of worldly thrift and prosperity... Indeed, as one of the inducements offered to purchasers of the first edition of Science and Health, [she] advertised it as a book that 'affords opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can accumulate a fortune.'"27 Gather noted, too, that this inconsistency not only made Christian Science attractive amid the freewheeling capitalism of the United States but added to its popularity among the relatively ignorant pioneer population of the American west. The great irony, however, is that if Twain's fears about the White House went unrealized, there was another institution far to the north which was infiltrated long before 1940. And adding to the irony was the fact that the infiltration did not come directly from Mrs Eddy's United States. Rather, it came from the unlikely flank of England and would involve not money, as the medium through which "harmony" with the material world would be cultivated, but instead - with English discretion - art. For it was from England that Eric Brown carried Mrs Eddy's book with him to Montreal, where he landed, thence to Toronto, where he conducted a canvass of new members for the Art Gallery there, and finally to Ottawa, where he became the curator of the National Gallery in 1910. 62

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A closer look at the stages of this journey, which took place in parallel with Brown's view of spiritually "pushing onward," may provide its own key to how the National Gallery itself evolved during the first half of the twentieth century. Maud Brown, writing in 1964, recalled their decision to emigrate in this way: "Soon after we were engaged Eric went to stay with his brother Arnesby at St. Ives. Here he met RR. Heaton, the head of Scott and Son, the Montreal picture dealers, and was invited to visit him if he ever came to Canada. A little later and probably somewhat to Heaton's surprise the invitation was accepted: for us quite seriously it came as an answer to prayer."28 The significance of this comment should not be underrated, within the context of the Browns' Christian Science. Mrs Eddy's view of prayer was that, while "it cannot change the Science of being, it tends to bring us into harmony with it... We have only to avail ourselves of God's rule in order to receive His blessing, which enables us to work out our own salvation."29 And this process of "work[ing] out our own salvation" involved precisely, as Brown himself put it, "the perception that an infinitely greater task than being willing or even anxious to be healed awaits us, and that is the task of learning the new truth for ourselves, of ordering a new life, and of taking up a daily cross." In "Pushing Onward," Eric Brown suggested in general terms how such a process of being brought "into harmony" and of "ordering a new life" had evolved for him: I... can vividly remember the shock of first hearing that Christian Science was a religion to be lived and a truth to be learned and practiced as well as a glorious method of healing ... So we begin to see that there is daily work to be done, a ceaseless watch to be kept on thought, word and deed, and a material sense of self to be denied. We accomplish it feebly at first, but ever more clearly by means of those infallible guides which Mrs Eddy has prepared for us ... Some time or other, however, all of us come to places where opportunities outside all previous experience present themselves and a thousand nameless fears assail us and strive to prevent us from improving the opportunities. We are not sure where they may lead. We excuse ourselves by saying that we do not doubt God, we doubt our own understanding of Him, forgetting that to doubt the availability of God's idea is necessarily to doubt God, who is the infinite source of that idea. But God is never absent and is infinitely loving ... Divine Principle, infinitely patient, leads us again and again to the same opportunities. It maybe that we do not recognize them for the same, it may be that we come to them by altogether different paths, but if we are faithful and sincere, we shall gain strength and confidence from our failures and we shall take the step at last into a greater freedom, and our means for doing good will be proportionately increased.30

"Our means for doing good will be proportionately increased." In this testimonial can be recognized a template both for Eric Brown's own sense of ordained mission in regard to a National Gallery in Canada and for Maud Browns later account of the process by which her husband came to be director of the Gallery, and gradually grew into this role. "From the time Eric first landed in Canada in 1909," she wrote in 1964, "things went well with us."31 So well that these "things" lend themselves also to his 1921 comment that "some time or other ... all of us come to places where opportuniEric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

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Sir Edmund Walker, chairman of the National Gallery's Board of Trustees from 1909 to 1924. Walker was also head of the Canadian Bank of Commerce and of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Ontario Museum when he hired Eric Brown, a fellow Christian Scientist, in 1910. (National Archives of Canada)

ties outside all previous experience present themselves" and so provide both "the availability of God's idea" and "the road that leads upward." For shortly after arriving in Montreal, Brown did indeed meet two men, both of them fellow Christian Scientists who had already worked out a comfortable relationship with the material world as it existed in Canada, and both of whom appreciated his sensitivity to art. One of these Christian Scientists was Wyly Grier, a well-known landscape and portrait painter, who, as president of the Ontario Society of Artists, introduced Brown to art circles in Toronto and would five years later introduce him to the wilderness of Algonquin Park, where Tom Thomson painted.32 Of greater immediate importance, however, was Byron Edmund Walker, who combined an enthusiasm for Mrs Eddy with the advantage of being chairman of both the Canadian Bank of Commerce and - after 1909, the year of Brown's arrival - the National Gallery's Advisory Arts Council. After meeting Brown in Montreal, Walker initially asked him to conduct a canvass for new members of the Art Association in Toronto. Then, on its successful completion in 1910, he offered Brown the curatorship of the upper storey in the government Fisheries Building in Ottawa, which held the still only semi-official National Gallery of Canada. Having been established in 1880 by the then governor general, the Marquis of Lome, the Gallery had been somewhat neglected for most of its first three decades and was a lesser sibling, in terms of attendance, to the government Fish Hatchery in the building's basement and the official Fisheries Exhibit on the ground floor. But this situation, largely through the efforts of Walker and Brown, was about to change. Thus was a clear sequence of beneficial events established for Eric Brown, in the wake of the invitation that - from his and Maud's perspective - had come "as an answer to prayer." Nor was this the only important set of "things" that fell into place for him at this time, giving his nascent relationship with Canada a boost. He had met Maud Sturton in England, via the engagement of her sister to one of his older brothers. Fifty-five years later, Maud would describe herself as having fallen quickly

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in love with Eric, who was ten years older than she. Shortly after his own emigration, she followed him to Toronto, defying her solicitor father who viewed him as having "no work and no prospects." Besides being extremely intelligent, socially adept, and physically attractive, Maud had the formal education that Eric lacked: four years at Newnham College, Cambridge, before the university gave degrees to women, and a year of teacher's college in London. Eric Brown himself would eventually admit that "she is really a much better lecturer than I am," and that "millionaires ... have found her more interesting."33 Yet she was, in the style of the era, self-effacing. The two were married in Toronto on Christmas morning 1910, shortly after Eric's appointment as curator, and Maud then proceeded to play a quietly consultative and supportive role, in the background of her husband's career, for the next three decades. Once appointed to the National Gallery, Eric Brown was enough of a diplomat that he did not mix Christian Science testimonials with his writings on art. Nevertheless, many of the comments that he made about art and about the Gallery itself throughout his tenure have about them an insistence that recalls the tone of these testimonials. They suggest that, on a level of commitment interwoven with his commitment to Christian Science, he viewed his work at the Gallery with a sense of mission, as his own ordained "road that leads upward," to which he had been brought under "God's rule" and "blessing." For if he and Maud viewed the invitation to visit Canada "as an answer to prayer," the offer of a role at the Gallery, coming as it did from a fellow Christian Scientist, would seem to have provided, in their opinion, the "opportunities" to which Brown had been led by "divine Principle" and therefore his own proper "means for doing good." Among the vehicles Brown had for articulating his views on the Gallery's role were the annual reports that were sent to Parliament by the Board of Trustees but that he wrote himself. These are rife with hints that he came to see the Gallery as a vehicle for - to recall Mrs Eddy - making "the way ... brighter 'unto the perfect day,'" for the entire nation to which "the availability of God's idea" had brought him. In the 1924-25 report, for example, Brown referred to art as "one of the most vital forces for good in the world." In that of 1923-24, he described it as potentially "an incalculable blessing to the education and prosperity of the country?' and in that of 1931-32, he called it a means of "lifting ...thought to the contemplation of the greater truths and blessings of existence."34 He identified art with "the expression of what is good and true," and "what is good" in art with - in a way that directly suggested Christian Science - "what might be called the spiritual idea" which will endure.35 "The art of all ages," he wrote in a 1921 letter to the Ottawa Citizen, "has concerned itself with things considered supremely beautiful and therefore good, that is, capable of inspiring good."36 This last decree suggests that Brown was also folding Plato's claim that "beauty is the cause of good" into the art-based mission to which he felt he had been brought by "the availability of God's idea."37 And taken together, these equations suggest his sustained hope that - in terms of spiritual health and improvement - a visit to the National Gallery might play for Canadians something of the salutary role that, allegedly, the reading of Mrs Eddy's book had played for him.

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"OPPORTUNITIES OUTSIDE ALL PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE" What, though, was this institution - the National Art Gallery of Canada - into which Eric Brown, Christian Scientist, was introduced by Byron Edmund Walker, Christian Scientist, in 1910? And how did Brown, once there, set about his mission, as fired by the belief that art is among "the blessings to life?"38 An answer to the first question, which will play toward the second, might be: a place ripe with potential but freighted when he arrived with an indifferent overseeing bureaucracy, a negligible budget, and a record of neglect. Having been founded in 1880 by Queen Victoria's nephew by marriage, the Marquis of Lome when he was governor general, it had begun as a projection of English gentility into a town barely twenty years a capital by royal decree and still mainly a logging centre carved out of wilderness. Thirty years later, it still had a status only semi-official, even as, throughout this period, it had served as an adjunct to the more formally enacted Royal Canadian Academy. In consequence, when Brown took it over, the collection consisted mainly of works - to quote the brief record of 1898 - "presented to the gallery by the Royal Canadian Academy, in accordance with the [Academy's] Act of Incorporation requiring diploma pictures to be deposited in the National Gallery."39 With few exceptions - notably Lucius O'Brien's Sunrise on the Saguenay - these depositions were mainly paintings that honoured an academic realism brought from Europe and practised all the more avidly by artists surrounded by a wilderness perceived as foreign: sentimental scenes, landscapes tinged with nostalgic longing, and portraits of figures important to the projection of empire, such as the Marquis of Lome himself. Nor was the Gallery's housing any more distinctive. Having "opened" in Ottawa's Clarendon Hotel, it shared from 1882 to 1888 a former workshop on Parliament Hill with the Supreme Court and was then moved to the second floor of Victoria Hall on O'Connor Street, above the government Fisheries Exhibit. According to Maud Brown, the assumption in the Department of Public Works, which administered the Gallery, was that the Fish Hatchery in the basement and the Fisheries Exhibit on the ground floor would draw in visitors to see the paintings.40 This seems to have been the case, in that when the fisheries exhibit closed during 1893-94 the number of visitors to the Gallery dropped from 16,717 to 13,366.41 Throughout this period, from 1882 to 1906, the National Gallery was run by parttime curators from the Chief Architect's Office in the Department of Public Works: obscure figures named John W.H. Watts, from 1882 to 1896, and L. Fennings Taylor, from 1897 to 1906. After the initial burst of deposits, as well as of gifts arranged by the Marquis of Lome and his wife, the Princess Louise, the collection grew at an average of only three or four works per year, with the occasional supplement of a government purchase: Cornelius Krieghoff's The Studio, for example, bought in 1902 for $700, and - as the beginning of an international collection - Ignatius Sanchez by Thomas Gainsborough in 19O6.42 The appropriations were small, dropping as low as $500 in 1901-02, when a single painting - Habitant Ploughing by Charles Huot was acquired, and when Taylor, the part-time curator, was already decrying "the crowded condition of the Gallery" and pleading for some other method of heating than "by stoves."43 66

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The Government Fisheries Building, O'Connor Street, Ottawa, circa 1909. The National Gallery occupied the second floor when Eric Brown was appointed curator in 1910. (Emile Lacas, National Gallery of Canada)

The years just before Brown's appointment, however, brought hints of change, as a few wealthy collectors in Montreal and Toronto also achieved their own critical mass of influence, as the art museums in these cities began to grow, and as large public museums in New York, Boston, and Chicago, founded at roughly the same time as the National Gallery, underwent exemplary expansion.44 Pressure on the Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier came from several directions at once: the Department of Public Works itself, the Royal Canadian Academy, and Byron Edmund Walker, who was then a Liberal MP. In response, Laurier in 1907 created, through an order-in-council, a three-man Advisory Arts Council for the Gallery, to "be composed of gentlemen who have shown their interest in and appreciation and understanding of art as evidenced by their public connection with art associations and their private patronage of art."45 The anchorage of the Gallery in a paradigm of privilege was emphasized not only by the use of the word "gentlemen" but also by the fact that these gentlemen would receive no remuneration. Initially, the council was chaired by Sir George Drummond of Montreal, with Walker of Toronto and Arthur Boyer of Montreal as members. A sense of its impact is conveyed by the sudden rise in Gallery acquisitions: from four paintings in the fiscal year 1906-07, to twenty-seven in igoS-og.46 But the major change took place when, with Drummond's death, Walker was appointed chair. Besides being a Christian Scientist, an MP in Laurier s government, and chairman of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Walker was a philanthropist who chaired the University of Toronto's Board of Governors for thirteen years and helped establish the Royal Ontario Museum. Maud Brown, who clearly idolized him, wrote half a century later Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

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that"! can see him now, standing with his back to the fire, a tall majestic figure, alert and radiant, with far-seeing kindly blue eyes, ample grey beard, and well-cut clothes."47 Walker's next move, however, introduced a theme that would recur throughout the century, in the form of an ambiguous relationship between Gallery authority and the elected government of the day.48 No sooner did he accede to the advisory council's chair than he in 1910 left the Liberal Party and joined the Conservatives, over Laurier's willingness to lower trade barriers with the United States. The Laurier government was electorally defeated on the issue the following year. As a result, Walker was branded a traitor by the Liberals, even as he was endeared to the new Conservative government of Robert Borden. With Borden's ear, Walker was able to effect the National Gallery's first major expansion, through an enlarged budget and the hiring of a full-time curator: his fellow Christian Scientist Eric Brown, at a salary of $100 per month.49 Walker then also used his influence to arrange for the transfer of the National Gallery itself from its rooms above the Fisheries Exhibit to the east wing of the newly built Victoria Memorial Museum in 1911. Even at the time, this move was seen as an expedient, given that the Museum, with its regularly spaced windows, had not been designed for the display of paintings, and given also that, within two months of the Gallery's establishment there in early 1912, Brown announced that the "premises are already as fully occupied as is desirable and will soon be entirely overcrowded."50 "The council hope," he wrote,"that the necessity of erecting a building for the sole purpose of the National Gallery will shortly be recognized." Yet there was, in the course of this move, an absence that should have alerted Brown as to how low on the government's list of priorities such recognition would be. Despite both his and Walker's pleas for a ceremonial opening of the new location, this was several times postponed owing to the governor general's being unavailable. Finally, after two years, it was cancelled. "The idea of a formal opening," Brown wrote in the 1913 annual report, with unintentional deadpan humour, "has now been relinquished until the National Gallery opens the doors of its permanent home."51 Still, if they did not get the ceremony they wanted, what Walker and Brown did do was convince the Borden government to give the Gallery its own parliamentary act of incorporation in 1913: an achievement that Brown described as "by far the most important event in the history of the National Gallery since its inception."52 According to Maud Brown, her husband drafted the "ideas" for the act himself, though she also noted - in a way that reveals her own sense of the Christian Science "road" - that in many of Eric Brown's discussions with Walker "one could not tell where a new idea originated. It unfolded spontaneously in an atmosphere of harmony and delight in their enterprises."53 With this particular unfolding, the Gallery became for the first time a legally recognized entity, freed after thirty-three years from control by the Department of Public Works and close reliance on the Royal Canadian Academy, whose attempt to stake a permanent place in the Gallery's governance Walker thwarted. Ongoing oversight was assigned instead to a Board of Trustees, which would be appointed by the governor general on the advice of cabinet. 68

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In practice, this board remained for a time the members of the Advisory Arts Council, but provision was made for their increase from three to five. And crucially, the act decreed that "the objects and powers of the Board shall be the development, maintenance, care and management of the National Gallery and generally the encouragement and cultivation of correct artistic taste and Canadian public interest in the fine arts."54 Toward the establishment of such "correct ... taste" and "public interest," the National Gallery was also voted, for the first time, an independent operating budget large enough - at $100,000 - to enable significant purchases of non-Canadian works of art. Brown and Walker did not waste time, and by 1914-15 had added paintings by Francesco Goya, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and JeanFran^ois Millet, as well as over one hundred and fifty drawings, prints, and etchings, including works by Albrecht Durer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Honore Daumier, Jacob van Ruysdael, and Claude Lorraine, which obviously could be acquired more cheaply than paintings. The choice of paintings suggested Browns and Walker's receptivity to French plein air Impressionism, if not to the more extreme experiments that had welcomed in the century in Europe. Yet such are the ironies of the Gallery's history that, almost immediately, the First World War enforced the new budget's rapid reduction: to $25,000 in 1915-16 and to as low as $8,000 for all Gallery expenses by 1920. After this, however, it began slowly to climb again, such that Eric Brown's work would throughout this period involve his developing, with Walker, the acquisitions pattern which in turn would shape the Gallery's evolution. This had two main parts, which Brown summarized in 1922. "The functions of a National Gallery of Art in a country such as Canada," he wrote, "are twofold. One is to build up a collection of the standards of all art, ancient and modern, by which modern standards may be judged and sound artistic education obtained. The second... is to do everything possible for the art of its own country, by purchasing it, exhibiting it and bringing its importance as a national asset and an influence for good before the people generally, and by ... cultivating in them correct artistic taste."55 In this statement of aims can be seen Brown's integration of his own sectarian sense of mission - the development of "an influence for good" - with the more conventional goals - "cultivation of correct artistic taste" - that were laid out in the act of Parliament. Nor was the assembly of a normative and "correct" historical collection precluded by having these goals side by side. Brown had clearly brought with him from England a familiarity, likely acquired through his brother Arnesby as well as through his private studies, with the European model for such a collection. This was hardly a static paradigm, in that its terms had been steadily evolving since the Middle Ages. But two events in particular had provided clear case studies in public ownership on which Brown could draw. In 1793 the Palais du Louvre and its immense royal collection had been transformed by the National Convention into a ready-made grand facility theoretically accessible to all French citizens. Then in 1824 - and partly in response to the French example - the Parliament of Great Britain had legislated the creation of a National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, built around the collection of John Julius Angerstein, the founder of Lloyds of London. Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

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The Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, designed by Friedrich August Stuler and Heinrich Strack, and completed in 1876. As an example of Europe's nineteenth-century linkage of art with both nationalism and the temples of classical Greece, this was also the version of a national gallery encountered by Lawren Harris during his youthful stay in Berlin, when the collection consisted of nineteenth-century German painting and some French Impressionism. The equestrian statue depicts King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. (Douglas Ord)

The nineteenth century had seen the spread of these models throughout much of Europe, with that of the Louvre given a boost by Napoleon's own self-proclaimed mission of bearing the Revolution's achievements to the countries he conquered. French-inspired public museums were thereby fostered in such cities as Madrid, Milan, and Amsterdam. After Napoleon's fall, these next played easily, as shrines to an alleged national "spirit," toward the rise of independent states after the reimposition of monarchical order at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the widespread national revolts of 1830-48. The Louvre was also influential in providing what Carol Duncan has called a "narrative iconographic program" for how these publicly accessible collections should be displayed.56 That is to say, works were organized according to national schools, so as to show - according to the Revolutionary administrators of the Louvre - "the progress of art and the degrees of perfection to which it was brought by all those peoples who have successfully cultivated it."57 This scale of "perfection" assumed that the French Enlightenment belonged at the very summit. But central to it also were both the concept of national "genius" and a grading of civilizations, "with Egypt, Greece, and Rome leading to a centrally placed Renaissance."58 As this scheme had in Europe played well toward the development of nation states during the nineteenth century, so its legacy could be seen both in Eric Brown's 7O

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The entrance to the National Gallery of Canada in the east wing of the Victoria Memorial Museum, designed by David Ewart in 1905, and home of the Gallery from 1912 to 1960. (National Gallery of Canada)

decree that "art is a unifying and refining force which can be made to serve [the] native sense of nationality" and in his goal to "build up a collection of the standards of all art ... by which modern standards may be judged." Almost immediately, he introduced a version of it to the National Gallery, as transplanted to the Victoria Museum. In the short term, he had to be content on his budget with a modest version: the display of "excellently coloured reproductions of the world's most famous paintings" and of "a representative collection of casts of ancient, mediaeval, and modern sculpture."59 But the report of 1911-12 conveys a sense of Browns ambitions, in that he bestowed names on the museum's alcoves, which had been built into one wall to hold "examples of the schools of art for the study of connoisseurs." Those on the ground floor became the "Court of the Parthenon," "Hall of the Busts," and "Court of the Madonnas," while those on the next floor were christened the "Court of the Cathedrals," "Hall of the Torso," and "Hall of the Virgins." The statues that filled these "Courts" and "Halls" were described in Brown's reports via their original "marble" or "bronze"; nowhere did he sully the program of acquisitions with the humble word "plaster."60 Such was Brown's zeal that by 1915 he could boast an annual attendance of 63,352, up from 11,939 in 1910, when the three-page annual report had announced his appointment and linked it to the goal of providing "a Mecca for Canadian lovers of art and a delightful place of recreation for the general public." The difference may Eric Brown: A Gatherer of Visions

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have been due in part to his replacement of a guest book with turnstiles that recorded each visitor. But his innovations showed his desire to reach not only "connoisseurs" and "lovers of art" but "the general public." These included an illustrated catalogue with "biographical notes on all the artists represented"; labels on pictures in English and French; and even easels "for those who wish to copy the pictures."61 Nevertheless, the goal of a "collection of the standards of all art, ancient and modern" required original works, and these were - according to the model to which Brown subscribed - available mainly in Europe. The operating budget gradually rose again during the 19205, from $40,000 in 1921-22 to $50,000 in 1922-23, and finally reached the pre-war level of $100,000 in 1923-24, putting such acquisitions back within the Gallery's reach. Yet even as Brown was poised, for the first time in almost a decade, to make significant purchases in Europe for the Gallery's "road that leads upward," he suffered another setback, when the figure who for even longer had been his own sponsor died. Besides handling the Gallery's liaison with Parliament, Sir Edmund Walker had often benefited it through his knowledge of art, especially that of the late Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance.62 In the absence of Walker, who was replaced by Dr Francis Shepherd as chairman of the trustees, Brown turned to advisers in England: Charles Ricketts, a painter and Edwardian aesthete, from 1924 to 1931, and W.G. Constable, the assistant director of the National Gallery in London, thereafter. Once the Gallery's budget was restored, he and Maud also made yearly trips there. According to Constable, Brown "had an excellent nose for a good picture, while his friendliness and his integrity won him respect and liking in the art market, so that, during a few weeks' stay in England, he would see most of what the market had to show... At this point his museum friends would be brought into consultation, mainly concerning problems of authenticity, condition, and price; and so armed he would make the final decision."63 Through these ties with England, then, Brown slowly assembled, over his three decades at the National Gallery, a collection that held samples of European painting from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. On a limited budget, he could only, as he put it, pursue "the good things without great names in place of the great things with great names": for example, in 1926, The Infant Jesus and St. John with a Lamb, by Bernardino Luini, whom Brown called "one of the most able and artistic followers of the Leonardo da Vinci School and tradition," whose work would bring this "manner of painting as close as possible to the student of art."64 With Brown, however, the term "good" did not pertain only to aesthetics, given his identification of art "with things considered supremely beautiful and therefore good, that is, capable of inspiring good." And under his guidance, the historical collection also grew, as would be pointed out by Jean Sutherland Boggs in 1971, via a preponderance "of religious works - none of them physically harrowing." Among these, Boggs would note, were "Job, a Virgin and Child, a Rest on the Flight into Egypt, a Head of Christ, Christ Blessing the Children, a Betrayal of Christ?65 In not giving the names of the painters who treated these themes, Boggs was, with just a trace of condescension, offering the conventional aesthetic assessment that 72

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Eric Brown's sense of space: the installation of European paintings in the National Gallery circa 1930. (National Gallery of Canada)

subject matter is of less importance in art than the way it is rendered, with some artists exploring their medium more effectively than others. But Brown, in folding aesthetics into ethics according to his sense of Christian Science mission, was casting his net more widely, and more didactically. And in any case, Boggs might also have added the more conventionally prestigious Adam and Eve, by Tintoretto, acquired in 1926; Christ Child and St. John, by Sandro Botticelli (1928); and Christ with the Cross, by Peter Paul Rubens (1929). Nor was Brown tied inflexibly to the depiction of religious themes. With the aid of Ricketts, he added a multitude of thoroughly secular European portraits and landscapes, including works by Titian, J.M.W. Turner, Bartel Beham, and Solomon van Ruysdael. These he classified, according to established European convention, by national "school": Italian, English, German, and Dutch respectively. But the portraits too - of which Brown acquired many - recalled his 1921 testimonial equation of "health" with "a glimpse of the one infinite and omnipresent Mind and His idea, man." In building up the National Gallery's historical collection in this way, Brown was himself as much a follower of established European practice as Bernardino Luini was among the "followers of the Leonardo da Vinci School and tradition." For in no way did any of the pre-twentieth century work challenge this practice, or for that matter Brown's own declared investment in "the canons of form, colour and plane which the world up to now has held dear."66 What distinguished this effort was what Constable called his "excellent nose for a good picture," making for the sustained achievement that Kenneth Clark especially honoured in his 1939 obituary. Yet it was also Brown's more conventional achievement, and certainly not the one that would most apply and test the terms of his metaphysical allegiances.

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The Jack Pine by Tom Thomson (1916-17, oil on canvas, 127.9 x 139.8). Acquired by Eric Brown for the National Gallery in 1918. (National Gallery of Canada)

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Brown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism"

No country can be a great nation until it has a great art. - Eric Brown, "The National Art Callery of Canada," 1912 The Canadian artist serves the spirit of his land and people. - Lawren Harris, "Creative Art and Canada," 1928

In June 1914, only months before the opening shots of the First World War, the twenty-nine-year-old Lawren Harris mounted a public attack on Eric Browns running of the National Gallery. "How the artist is assisted or the public educated," Harris wrote in a letter to the Toronto Globe, "by a national gallery at Ottawa full of second-rate foreign pictures is not evident. Though several hundred thousand dollars have been expended on it, it might burn down today without hurting any artist's reputation."1 What prompted this assessment was Brown's arrival back from England, with some fifteen paintings by British Academicians whose purchase was approved by the board and which he hoped would spur public interest.2 Harris, by contrast, having returned to Canada after study in Berlin a few years earlier, was by 1914 exhorting his countrymen toward "fresher, more vigorous, and original work" in painting that would "rise above the ... sentimental art (so-called) of the Victorian era." The goal, he had declared in 1911, would be to introduce "a true Canadian note, not so much in choice of subject as in the spirit of the thing done."3 Brown's letters of the time show that he was deeply affronted and even hurt by Harris's attack, perhaps not least because he had already, in 1912, bought Harris's own large painting The Drive. As the first work by a future member of the Group of Seven to enter the Gallery, The Drive depicts workmen with pikes preparing logs in the Humber River, against the background of a partly treed hillside. Though realistic in style, it also, via swaths of light and shadow, shows great sensitivity to the harshness of northern sunlight. Viewed retrospectively, it in this way prefigured Harris's later work. Brown did not enjoy the benefit of such hindsight and had obviously responded to it - in those days before curators had to give written justifi-

The Drive by Lawren Harris (1912, oil on canvas, 90.7 x 137.6 cm.). Acquired by Eric Brown for the National Gallery in 1912, and the first painting by a future member of the Croup of Seven to enter the collection. (National Gallery of Canada, by permission of the family of Lawren S. Harris)

cations - with what Constable called his "excellent nose for a good picture." Brown had bought The Drive in the year it was painted, for $400, thereby vitiating in advance Harris's claim that the Gallery was "full of second-rate foreign pictures." "I wonder," he wrote to Sir Edmund Walker after this rebuke, "if you have seen the enclosed letter expressing the views of Lawren Harris and his clique on the subject of the National Gallery. I feel as always most tempted to answer it but knowing that it is written purposely with no better motive than to offend and without constructive suggestion of any kind, perhaps it is wiser to refrain."4 Brown's ascription to Harris of "no better motive than to offend" may at this time have been fed, in the background, by antagonism between their respective approaches to "divine Principle," in which they were both still feeling their way. For despite the many parallels between Christian Science and theosophy, Mrs Eddy and Madame Blavatsky had each viewed the other with loathing. Writing in 1885 of Christian Science and other forms of "mental healing," Madame Blavatsky had declared "there is nothing 'spiritual' or 'divine' in ANY of these manifestations."5 In 1891 Mrs Eddy had countered by proclaiming that "theosophy is no more allied to Christian Science than the odor of the upas-tree is to the sweet breath of springtide."6 Even a generation later, in Canada, this personal hostility between founding mothers likely made for automatic suspicion among their respective adherents. And, while Harris's suspicion may have been tempered both by the greater sophistication

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of theosophy and by the fact that his own mother was a Christian Scientist, Browns could only have been increased by the vehemence of the "infallible" Mrs Eddy's attack on theosophy specifically. Yet, in writing "as always" about "Lawren Harris and his clique," Brown was likely alluding also to another of Harris's efforts, in these months prior to war in Europe, to infiltrate his views about Canadian art into the National Gallery. The previous autumn, Harris had convinced nineteen other artists, as well as Dr James MacCallum, to share in the purchase of a small painting by his friend A.Y. Jackson, Autumn in Picardy, that had been shown in Toronto. Having just convinced Jackson himself to stay in Canada, as part of the nucleus for a new approach to painting, Harris was undoubtedly trying to assure him of the worth of this decision. But then, with the painting acquired, he had, without consulting either Eric Brown or most of the subscribers, advised the newspapers that the painting was being given to the National Gallery as a gift, so that Jackson could be "represented" there. Brown, meanwhile, had only just bought a larger painting by Jackson, Sand Dunes at Cucq, whose brushwork and sensitivity to light is far more delicate than that of Autumn in Picardy, which at that time was described as a sketch. He protested to his then-friend, the established landscape painter Wyly Grier, that Harris was - as he put it - "forcing our judgment in the matter," and reported to Walker that many of the unwitting subscribers felt "inveigled."7 His source was Grier, who was one such contributor, and who as a fellow Christian Scientist had been best man at the Browns' wedding three years earlier. "While it is true that I subscribed to the fund for this purchase," Grier wrote to Brown, "I had no idea until that preposterous article appeared in the paper, that any such monstrous suggestion had been made in relation to this microscopic sketch."8 The tone of Grier's letter, too, suggests how high feelings were running in the small world of Canadian art in late 1913 and early 1914. Grier's viciousness would persist, and his letter only prefigured a hostility to Harris's and Jackson's styles of painting that he would sustain for the next twenty years, including as president of the Royal Canadian Academy during the 19305. Brown, however, by extreme contrast, changed his opinion completely within the year, so that by mid-1915 he was making the extraordinary announcement, in the Gallery's Annual Report, that "the earlier Canadian artists who were trained entirely in Europe and who were encouraged by Canadians ... to paint European pictures or at best see Canada through European eyes, are passing. A younger generation is coming to the fore, trained partly in Canada, believing in and understanding Canada. These artists are painting their own country and realizing its splendours and its character with an outburst of colour and enthusiasm which bids fair to carry all before it... Many are convinced that they are looking into the dawn of a new art era in Canada which will glorify their country and help its people towards a better understanding of one of the greatest refining influences in the national life."9 Obviously, during this period, not only Eric Brown but the world itself changed, with the first great battles of the World War taking place, strangely enough, in the

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very part of northern France, and at the very time of year, that Jackson had depicted in Autumn in Picardy. That these also involved the Britain whence Brown had come, and the Germany where Harris had studied, perhaps made the skirmishing over a "sketch" seem silly, and it was quietly accepted by the Gallery, though officially accessioned only many years later.10 Yet neither these factors nor the mediation efforts of Sir Edmund Walker, who visited Harris's and Jackson's studio, explain the extent of Brown's change of heart between June 1914, when he wrote so disparagingly of "Lawren Harris and his clique," and the summer of 1915, when he not only numbered himself among the "convinced" but developed the typology itself. Around this time, too, however, Eric and Maud Brown received their own introduction to the version of Canada that was being depicted by "the clique" when they first encountered the wilds of Algonquin Park just west of Ottawa. That it was their then-friend Wyly Grier who effected this encounter added a twist of irony that was extreme. But after this initial trip there with Grier, Eric and Maud Brown went back again and again on canoe trips, sometimes with others and sometimes by themselves. In her 1964 biography, Maud offered Eric's own description, which had been published in the Christian Science Monitor, of the final evening of one such trip. It is undated but can be read as signifying a kind and intensity of experience that came into the Browns' lives with these exposures to Canadian "nature." "As we washed the supper dishes and got our hands clean for the night," Brown wrote, "the heavens put on such a show for us by way of good-byes as we had never seen before and never have since ... The aurora was blazing from every point of the compass. Red, blue, green and yellow streamers flamed and flickered, waxed and waned from the horizon to the zenith and back again. We lay down in our tracks, with our heads on a log, and watched entranced. It was unbelievably remote and infinitely grand in its changing colour, shape and movement. Words could do no justice, so we said nothing but occasionally pointed when the coruscations were especially brilliant. Our cup was as full as it would hold, and, when at last the flames died down and the stars returned to their duty, there seemed nothing more that nature could do for us."11 "Our cup was as full as it would hold, and ... there seemed nothing more that nature could do for us." What so eloquent an account of the "northern lights" suggests is that during this period, Brown himself experienced something of what Harris would describe in the 19208 as "the call" of the "replenishing North." Yet Brown did not experience this alone, or in terms of the pale, "spiritual" colours that would, for Harris, culminate in the pale, crystalline forms of Icebergs, Davis Strait, as a symbol drawn from his own closest approach to the alleged source of "flow." Rather, if Brown's Christian Science was in ways less sophisticated than theosophy, at least it was not bound by a theory of colours that, as established by Besant and Leadbeater, linked some shades and intensities to "the desire-body" and others to "higher thought." And similarly, whether his and Mauds mutual love was physically chastened by their commitment to Mrs Eddy or not, Brown's description, like Maud's citation of it fifty years later, bespeaks a deep, shared warmth. Together, they experienced a night-sky epiphany, in which all colours freely mingled from all directions, uninhibited by preconceived theory: "Red, blue, green and yellow streamers 78

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Moonlight, Early Evening by Tom Thomson (circa 1913-14, oil on canvas, 52.9 x 77.1 cm.). Acquired by Eric Brown for the National Gallery in 1915. (National Gallery of Canada)

flamed and flickered, waxed and waned from the horizon to the zenith and back again. We lay down in our tracks, with our heads on a log, and watched entranced." In these words can be read shaping terms for the achievement which would make Eric Brown most respected and, in some quarters, most reviled over the next quarter-century in Canada. This was his support for, and identification of the National Gallery with, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, beginning five years before the Group was formed in Toronto in 1920 and two years before Thomson's mysterious death in that same Algonquin Park. The very titles of the paintings bought by Brown in 1914-15 from the "younger generation" suggests the extent to which he saw in them translations into image of the kind of experience which had rendered "our cup ... as full as it would hold" but about which he also said "words could do no justice." The paintings were: Winter Morning, by Lawren Harris; The Shining River, Spring, by the group's only Christian Scientist, J.E.H. Macdonald; The Road through the Bush, by Arthur Lismer; Red Maple, by A.Y. Jackson; and - perhaps most evocatively, given the Browns' experience - Moonlight, Early Evening, by Tom Thomson. This last painting, more nakedly intense and stylistically audacious than the others, even shows a night sky organized, in pale pinks, greens, and yellows, around the centrepoint of a bright half-moon: perhaps an implicit reassurance to the Browns that the "red, blue, green and yellow streamers" that had "flamed and flickered, waxed and waned" were yet organized around a central and luminous "divine Principle" that spoke through "nature." Brown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism"

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Maud also gave a sense, in her biography, of how both of them felt about this style of work, via an account of an undated visit they made to the painters' studios. "As so often happened," she wrote,"! went along with him, and as we went from one studio to another and saw the stacks of small sketches each had brought back with him, our astonishment and delight grew beyond belief. This was something different, something exciting! Eric waited with the keenest interest to see the large canvases that would ensue from such promising material."12 Maud's own emphasis, however, on the transmutation of outdoor experience into "promising material" and then into "large canvases" carried with it the adjustment of this experience to a number of frames that were not just physical. One of these was obviously the model of art which prevailed at the time and which decreed, for example, that the small plein air paintings done by Thomson on slabs of birch wood, and left to dry at his campsites in Algonquin Park, would be rated by Eric Brown as "mere sketches" and of far less worth than the studio paintings that he completed while almost forcibly housed in a shack in Toronto's Rosedale Ravine.13 But Brown also brought to bear on the collection of such paintings the frames supplied by the National Gallery itself as an evolving institution; by the Canadian nation-state that superintended the Gallery; and by his investment in Christian Science, which shaped his sense of mission. How he juggled language to credit all of these, along with the raw intensity of his and Maud's experience and the paintings of "Mr. Harris and his friends," as he began to call them, did not just play an integral role in the Group of Seven's success during the 19205 and 19308. It also set a pattern of exclusions as well as inclusions at the National Gallery that would prevail over the next forty years and provide a case study of dialogue between transformative experience and metaphysical system, in which the construction of an out-group seemed indispensable. As early as 1912, Brown had begun to adapt his sense of being "guided, guarded, and governed by that one infinite divine Principle which is God" to an advocacy of the Canadian nation-state, as well as to the National Gallery. "No country," he wrote then, in an epigram he repeated so often that he called it his "sermon," "can be a great nation until it has a great art."14 This was a clear if simplified adaptation of the claim famously made by the Victorian critic John Ruskin that "great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art... Of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last."15 Unlike Ruskin, who was writing from the heart of a mature British Empire, Brown had to emphasize the "until." By 1915, however, he obviously felt he had found the seeds of such an art, tying it to verb forms that implied even stronger investment in Canada. "A younger generation is coming to the fore," he wrote, "believing in and understanding Canada... Many are convinced that they are looking into the dawn of a new art era in Canada which will glorify their country." Much as Lawren Harris was starting to do in Toronto, then, via theosophy, Brown moved towards his own blend of faith in an allegedly unified and transcendent "divine Principle," with an investment not only in art but in his adopted country, which, according to Maud, they "loved." Brown clearly was thrilled with Canada,

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writing of its "heritage of greatness absolutely irrepressible" in terms that transposed onto a political entity his depiction of "the aurora" as "blazing from every point of the compass." "Travel east or west, north or south, it does not matter, the land changes from forest to meadow and from illimitable prairie to mountain and valley, from ocean to ocean, and from tropical summers to polish winters - and still you are under the one dominion and within the one boundary."16 So excited did Brown get about the "dominion" in this passage that the typescript even shows he first wrote, instead of "from tropical summers to polish winters," the words "from the tropics to the poles." The change was made in longhand later. As suited these descriptions, Brown was also acutely conscious of being present when - as he put it - "a national spirit is being slowly born,"17 and conveniently unconscious of the paradoxes that lurked behind both his and Harris's view of their work as an advancement of "divine Principle" in and through Canada. At the very least, the metaphysical frameworks via which they claimed a relationship between transcendent universals and Canadian particulars had in both cases originated in the United States, anticipating a later "international" abstraction that just happened to be centred in New York. More immediately, though, the Canada whose "splendours and... character" the new painters were "realizing... with an outburst of colour and enthusiasm" was not defined visually by the Ottawa that housed the National Gallery, or by any other pattern of human settlement. Rather, the "younger generation" were bringing what Brown called their "training ... in commercial design" to a central Ontario landscape whose naked play of light actually served to disguise that this was "nature" with a not quite savory past.18 As is obvious in retrospect, the appearance of a wilderness outside time was a function of the severance in historical time of the area's indigenous peoples from their own relationship to this landscape, via their displacement to the invisibility of reserves. This was a policy more quietly effected in Canada than in parts of the British Empire that had begun with larger aboriginal populations. But it was also one which by 1914 had left an immense, humanly emptied, and therefore apparently - to recall Harris - "virgin" territory that was ripe to be colonized in a different way, through an aestheticization of the surveyor's penchant for dividing the earth into symmetrical rectangles which could bought and sold. For Brown, the younger artists' "training" in "commercial design" qualified them especially to "reveal" "nature's marvellous design"; it did not seem to occur to him at all that this training itself made for an imposed filter on such "nature."19 In the process of being configured via paint on canvas, however, these landscapes could also be turned, for Brown as for Harris, to the service of a three-part adaptation, in sectarian and national terms, of the mystery of the Christian Trinity as God-in-three-persons. Within Brown's schema, the alleged oneness of "divine Principle" would superintend and be filtered through the alleged oneness of Canadian "national spirit," the alleged oneness of the political "dominion," and the alleged oneness of what he called Canadian "nature's wonderland of beauty." This focus on oneness closed a figurative door behind the peoples who had occupied these landscapes for thousands of years, with

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the removal of any trace, in representation, of human interplay with that "multitude of spirits" which - as succinctly put in a British Museum study - "the Northeastern peoples believed... inhabited the plants and animals, rocks and rivers, wind, rain and stars, and all other natural phenomena."20 In the foreground of this transformation, and adapting his own direct experience of these "phenomena" to more familiar terms, Eric Brown asserted in 1917 that "the most subtle changes and improvements of the national spirit are immediately imaged forward by means of art, which comes freely and spontaneously to every seeker after good."21 Again, he was adapting Ruskin, who had claimed that art accurately reflects "the general gift and common sympathy of the race" and "is always instinctive," so that "the honesty or pretence of it are therefore open to the day." But in his own extraordinary statement, made in the midst of the First World War, Brown injected an ethical dimension such as Ruskin had preferred to avoid, identifying the artist with the "seeker after good." He thereby managed to fold together "art," "good," "national spirit," and - via the terms "freely and spontaneously" - both a sense of "nature" as process and Mrs Eddy's sense of being brought "into harmony" through the acceptance "of God's rule." Yet, if the "younger generation" of landscape painters did not in their work challenge this notion of art as coming "freely and spontaneously to every seeker after good," Canadian nature itself, as formerly the alleged locus of a "multitude of spirits," did not always cooperate as a vehicle toward "good" through art. For Brown, like Lawren Harris, was deeply troubled by the death of Tom Thomson in the midst of this very "nature." "Nature took him by the hands," Brown wrote in 1922. "He went out into the wilderness, nothing doubting, as all prophets have done before him. He began to see what was there, what others were beginning to see the world over, nature's marvelous design and what he saw was what he painted or some of it, some little of it, alas! And nature never let him go, she does not choose her prophets idly."22 The typescript of this text that remains shows that Brown struggled with the language he should use about Thomson. For even as he crossed out the entire sentence, "If artistic genius has come to Canada, it has certainly [this word initially added by hand and underlined] come in the person of Tom Thomson," so he also crossed out the words, from the longer passage just quoted, "as all prophets have done before him." Why did Brown cross out these lines as well as alter the sentence, about Thomson's The Jack Pine, from "But the mastery of it, the poetry of it and the genius of it!" to only "But the mastery of it is supreme"? The downplaying of Thomson's "genius" undoubtedly had to do with diplomacy. For by 1921, after the formal establishment of the Group of Seven, Brown was publicly saying, with discretion, that "there is no justification for the charge that he was the genius and the rest the school, because there is such a development going on that... the achievement is higher with every exhibition."23 By this time, too, Brown was willing to concede that Lawren Harris, as the founder of the Group, "is a seeker ... and his buoyancy admirably typifies the new spirit of Canadian landscape painting ... [He] improvises on nature with glorious colours and very definite, if surprising designs. But his sketches reveal

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him as a deep student of nature, and one of the painters who never fails to give you a satisfactory reason for the hope that is in him."24 Brown's ambivalent use of the word "prophet" in regard to Thomson, however, and his change in describing The Jack Pine, to emphasize not "genius" but "mastery" as "supreme," suggest a deeper problem. Throughout his tenure at the National Gallery, Brown was faced with the challenge of making both his experience and his artistic program fit his prior commitment to Christian Science and his parallel claim that "art has a purpose and a mission greater than that which it now holds; its purpose is spiritual and its mission the good of humanity."25 How he resolved this challenge was mapped most succinctly in a polemical essay called "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree" which dates from around 1919 and which Brown seems discreetly to have left unpublished. Yet in its very lack of adaptation to available venues, it makes clear the personal struggle that informed not only his public statements but his acquisitions policy for the Gallery in regard to modern art. "Whatever else art can be," he wrote in this essay, "it can be nothing greater than a revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty. Art cannot be creation, creation has always been there and always will be and it is for the artist to see it more beautifully, more perfect in design, form and colour than other people do and to give it [to] them for their betterment ... The artistic tree like all the other trees is known by its fruits and only by its fruits, and by the blessings it imparts it will be judged."26 The essay's very title, in mixing art with morality, echoed Mrs Eddy's (and for that matter Madame Blavatsky's) frequent reference to the biblical admonishment "By their fruits ye shall know them." More significantly still, the essay almost precisely repeated Mrs Eddy's own views about "creation." "There can be but one creator, who has created all," she declared in Science and Health.11 Whatever seems to be a new creation, is but the discovery of some distant idea of Truth; else it is a new multiplication or self-division of mortal thought... The multiplication of a human and mortal sense of persons and things is not creation. A sensual thought, like an atom of dust thrown into the face of spiritual immensity, is dense blindness instead of a scientific eternal consciousness of creation."27 This passage makes clear Mrs Eddy's own investment in a pre-existent and quasi-Platonic "distant idea of Truth," to be discovered or revealed, but not created. That which "seems to be a new creation," she wrote, is either - as with Plato - "the discovery of some distant idea of Truth" or "a new multiplication or self-division of mortal thought," which according to Christian Science is the source of error. Eric Brown's polemic, then, in its parallelism, can be read as bringing this investment to the realm of art. Distinguishing between "creation" and "revelation," he declared that "art cannot be creation," for "creation has always been there and always will be." The artist's legitimate role, therefore, is "to see it more beautifully, more perfect in design, form and colour than other people do and to give it [to] them for their betterment." Brown identified this "creation" with "natures wonderland of beauty," regarding which the artist could provide a "revelation." He expected the artist, then, to provide deeper insight not into human but into God's "creation": "the

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discovery" - as Mrs Eddy put it - "of some distant idea of Truth." Brown himself played toward linking "nature" not just with "creation" but with "some distant idea of truth" in his own description of the northern lights as "unbelievably remote and infinitely grand." Even his use of the term "unbelievably" came - as did Maud's comment about the studio visits that "our astonishment and delight grew beyond belief" - with a Christian Science subtext. The term "belief" was most often used by Mrs Eddy pejoratively, as in her description of "disease" as "a belief, a latent illusion of mortal mind." So for Eric to say that the aurora was "unbelievably remote," and for Maud to claim that "the younger painters'" work prompted "astonishment and delight... beyond belief," was for both of them not simply a way of equating these phenomena with one another. It was also a way of implying, via the meaning given to "belief" in Christian Science, that the phenomena themselves went beyond the "errors" fostered by "mortal mind," into the realm of Divine "creation" and "revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty." The terms of involvement in a material world whose very existence was denied by Christian Science were again for Brown - as for Mrs Eddy - thereby smoothed over. Conflating "nature's marvellous design" with God's "creation," he could declare that he had recognized this "revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty" in the "younger generation's" "temperate and rational advance along the lines of more brilliant colour and stronger design which is influencing the whole of contemporary painting today."28 For it was they, Brown insisted, who revealed "the wonders of creation and the marvellous possibilities of colour, form and design to interpret them."29 And yet Tom Thomson, who, according to Brown, had "gone further along the road than anyone else," had also died mysteriously amid this very "wonderland," whose "marvellous design" he was allegedly discerning. Did this indeed make him like "all prophets" who had "gone before him," including even the "infallible" Mrs Eddy, who lived to be almost ninety? And how could a "nature" that "does not choose her prophets idly" and "never let him go" be identifiable only with a "wonderland of beauty"? These were the awkward questions, and with this essay on Thomson, Brown chose not to take them on, once they had suggested themselves in a draft. Instead, he crossed them out. By this means he applied to his own writing his testimonial assessment of Christian Science: "We ... gain a glimpse of the tremendous value of so ordering our thought that we can dismiss from it whatever is discordant as soon as we have uncovered and completely denied it, confident that the unerring action of Truth will obliterate and destroy it." His mutilation of his own words on The Jack Pine - from "the mastery of it, the poetry of it and the genius of it!" to "the mastery of it is supreme" - can even be read as implying the next phase of this denial. The term "mastery" evokes Mrs Eddy's decree that "when Mind at last asserts its mastery over sin, disease, and death, then is man found to be harmonious and immortal." Insofar as Brown was able to identify art's "revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty" with God's "creation," and thereby with "Divine Mind," the painting itself could be identified - in isolation from Thomson's actual experience and fate - with that mental "mastery" which implied both "harmony" and "immortality." 84

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The events that followed during the 19205 then proved such that Brown would not need to wrestle in isolation with the conundra left by this awkward draft, because the movement of the "younger generation" that he supported quickly became, through their art, so expansive. In May 1920 seven of them based in Toronto held their first exhibition as the Group of Seven. Joining Harris, Jackson, MacDonald, and Lismer were Fred Varley, Frank Carmichael, and Frank Johnston. But the Group's spokesman, and the driving force behind their having so defined themselves, was Harris. Not only did he design the Group's logo, he also wrote the catalogue's brief foreword. "The group of seven artists whose pictures are here exhibited," he announced in the style of his later manifestos, "have for several years held a like vision concerning art in Canada. They are all imbued with the idea that an Art must grow and flower in the land before the country will be a real home for its people ... This art will differ from the Art of the past, and from the present day Art, of any people ... [and] sincerely interprets the spirit of a nation's growth ... The greatness of a country depends upon three things: 'its Words, its Deeds, and its Art.'"20 The extent to which Harris was by this time meshing his own agenda with Brown's as well as with Ruskin's should be obvious, given that Brown's "sermon" - "No country can be a great nation until it has a great art" - dated from 1912. For his part, Brown did more than just continue to buy the paintings of the Group of Seven for the National Gallery. In turning away from too close scrutiny of what he in 1921 presumed to call "the spirit of Canadian nature," he moved aggressively outward in his support of the group, displaying their works at the British Empire Exhibitions in Wembley England in 1924 and 1925, and at the Musee du Jeu de Palme in Paris in i92j.31 This aestheticized reversal of Europe's own imperial expansion, which by the 19205 had been smashed by the First World War, formed a turning point for art in Canada, and Brown's effort on its behalf was immense. Not only did he skilfully organize the juries that chose the paintings, against the opposition of more traditional landscape and portrait painters of the Royal Canadian Academy, he also wrote the catalogue essays and - at Wembley in 1924 - arranged the rooms to keep the hostile sides apart, and hung the works himself. "Canada is to have her first opportunity this year," he wrote, "of measuring her art against the other British Dominions [and] ... will show that she possesses an indigenous and vigorous school of painting ... moulded by the tremendously intense character of her country and colour of her seasons, and one which is freeing itself from the trammels though not the ideals of the European and British traditions."32 Given that "the trammels" of "the European and British traditions" had just culminated in the most terrible war in history, Canadian paintings that showed a landscape apparently untouched by devastation, yet filtered through aesthetic "ideals" that still came from Europe, proved welcome in Britain and France. While the Academicians' works were seen as "tame performances," those by Harris, Jackson, MacDonald, Varley, Lismer, and especially "that remarkable personality the late Mr. Tom Thomson" were heralded in 1924 at Wembley as "the most personal work from the Dominions"; "a vigorous and original art"; and "the most vital group of paintings produced since the war-indeed this century." Thomson's The Jack Pine was even Brown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism"

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described in The Times as "the most striking work at Wembley."33 The reception was similar the following year, and when the French Ministry of Fine Art asked the National Gallery to provide Canadian art for an exhibition in Paris in 1927, it asked also for a retrospective of Thomson's paintings. Curiously enough, the reviewer for Le Figaro Artistique was almost as rapturous regarding these when they were displayed in the Musee du Jeu de Palme as Brown himself had been in his private and much crossed-out draft: "Thomson never fumbles ... His painting is strong and without subterfuge, the painting of a man immensely concerned with the nature he depicts. He is conscious that it lacks tenderness; but he knows no fear and treads with the full confidence of knowledge."34 Proximate to Browns reprinting of these words in the 1927-28 Annual Report is a photograph of the columned entrance to the Jeu de Palme in Paris, bedecked with French flags and, above the door, a sign reading"EXPOSiTiON D'ART CANADIEN." But the section of the report where the reviews appeared also contains prominent images of several of the Gallery's acquisitions during the year. The frontispiece is The Repentant Magdalen, by Paolo Veronese. Nearest to the reviews is a portrait of an extraordinarily mean and suspicious looking man, titled A Merchant and described as being from the "French School of Fouquet, 15th century." Placed with peculiar poignancy just prior to the reviews, however, is a reproduction of the small Christ Child and St. John, by Sandro Botticelli, whom Brown described as "one of the supreme artists of the Florentine Renaissance and greatest painters of all time."35 In this painting, St John is depicted as a little boy leaning sadly on the shoulder of Christ, who is also depicted as a shirtless boy. St Johns eyes are downcast. The Christ Child is looking off to the right, with an expression in his eyes that could be described the way Le Figaro's reviewer described Tom Thomson: "He knows no fear and treads with the full confidence of knowledge." Whether Brown in some sense saw himself in the role of the sad St John in this picture, which he placed so strategi-cally, is, of course, a matter of speculation. "l W I L L L E T F U T U R I S M S T A N D A S T H E T Y P E O F T H E I S M S

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Eric Brown was a complex, and perhaps even tormented, man, charged with integrating into his vision of a National Gallery in Canada artistic events unprecedented in the country's history. Yet he also maintained his commitment to Christian Science, which had given him his "conviction" - a word he also applied to Thomson's painting - that he was on "the road that leads upward" and had found, in his appointment at the National Gallery, his own "ordained means for doing good." In this very sense, the struggle that informed his many crossings out of his own words in his text on Thomson informed his relationship with art, and especially with the European art of his time. And underlying this struggle was the dualistic resolve to which Brown gave especially stark terms in a passage in his 1921 testimonial that bears repetition. "We gain a glimpse," Brown wrote there, "of the tremendous value of so ordering our thought that we can dismiss from it whatever is discordant as soon as we have uncovered and completely denied it, confident that the unerring action of Truth will obliterate and destroy it." The central clue to what Brown meant 86

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by "discordant" in regard to art was then provided in his other private polemic, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree." "Whatever else art can be," he wrote, "it can be nothing greater than a revelation of nature s wonderland of beauty. Art cannot be creation, creation has always been there and always will be and it is for the artist to see it more beautifully, more perfect in design, form and colour than other people do and to give it them for their betterment."36 In short, for Eric Brown, "the artist" had no business in presuming to "create," for according to the woman he called "infallible," "there can be but one creator, who has created all. Whatever seems to be a new creation, is but the discovery of some distant idea of Truth; else it is a new multiplication or self-division of mortal thought." Where, though, did this assessment, for Eric Brown, leave artists who did see their work in terms of "creation"? Paul Gauguin, for example, had written, as advice for artists: "Don't copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction; draw this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it and think more of the creation which will result. This is the only way of mounting toward God - doing as our Divine Master does, create!"37 Brown did not approve of such presumption. Instead, in "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," he singled out Gauguin as "a confessed immoralist," who "because he could see no beauty of form or character, seized on mere colour and pattern and tried to carry them like a banner of genius over the trenches of law and order." In his South Sea paintings, Brown wrote, Gauguin "saw nothing but flaming colour and bestiality."38 Yet such was Brown's own complexity and ambivalence that in the archival typescript of "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree" this entire paragraph on Gauguin - recalling his struggle with Tom Thomson's "genius" - is crossed out with a large "x." And when in 1926 he replied in an exchange of letters in the Ottawa Journal to the charge, by a Mr E.G. Grant, that the "attempted futurist methods" of the Group of Seven were "the result of distorted imagination" that did not "justify the spending of the country's money," he seemed to contradict his earlier text entirely.39 Partly, his argument was that "the greatest artists are explorers, showing us what we have not seen for ourselves. Even if they disturb us at first, we gradually come to understand them and to see more than we saw before."40 If this was consistent with his earlier comments on "a revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty," Brown also made a condescending show of his sophistication by noting that "Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne ... execrated and denounced ten years ago as public menaces, are today generally accepted as having made one of the most valuable contributions to the art of modern times." Did this imply, then, that Brown had undergone, between his writing of "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree" around 1919-20, and the writing of this letter in 1926, a change of heart comparable to the one he had undergone regarding the "younger" Canadian painters in 1914? The answer would seem to be an emphatic No, given that the most appropriate fruit of such a change would have been - as with the Canadians Brown's acquisition of works by these very artists, at some point after the Gallery's budget began to climb again during the 19205. This did not happen. Exactly one work - or set of works - by any of these three artists entered the National Gallery Brown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism"

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during Eric Brown's tenure, which lasted until 1939. This was a folio of ten black and white woodcut prints which he bought in 1925 and whose blocks dated from Gauguin's later life in Tahiti, after his renunciation of both European society and a representational style of painting. But crucially, these prints, too, came with a moralistic subtext that was consistent with Brown's earlier comments. Conveniently, they were devoid of the "flaming colour" that - while offensive to Brown - was crucial to Gauguin. But more important, as a neo-primitive depiction of a Polynesian story cycle, in which "nature" was - as with the aboriginal peoples of Canada - infused with "spirits," it did not come with any reference to "divine Principle" or to "God" at all. Nor was it even neutral. Instead, it came with a print prominently titled "The Devil Speaks." Thus did Brown - as by a kind of vaccination - introduce to the Gallery an ongoing reminder of the Luciferian subtext to Gauguin's presumption of "doing as our Divine Master does, create!" And as though by compensation, he not only purchased Paolo Veronese's immense sixteenth-century Christ with Angels in the same year but reproduced it in the annual report, in the midst of positive reviews of Canadian landscape painting from the second Wembley exhibition. Apart from this modest and morally charged purchase, no works by Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, or Vincent van Gogh entered the collection of the National Gallery before 1940, while they were - as A.Y. Jackson later caustically put it - affordable. And if this was Brown's reaction to the Post-Impressionists and Symbolists, he was even more negative in regard to the emergent experimental art of Europe, which by the 19208 acknowledged no spiritually transcendent organizing principle at all and no longer referred - as Gauguin had - to "our Divine Master." Even before the First World War, Cubists had been preoccupied with the instability of perception; during and after it, Surrealists and Dadaists pursued a shock value based on absurd juxtaposition; and in Italy, the Futurists developed a proto-fascist interest in machines and dynamism. For Brown, these movements could be described collectively, and on this his opinion did not even give the appearance of change."! will let futurism stand as the type of the 'isms," he wrote in "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," "because most people have at least heard of it by this time even if they have very little idea what it means. Actually of course it is quite out of date and dadaism and tactilism and so forth hold the artistic fort, and as fast as one banner wears out another goes flapping to the masthead, each more outlandish than the last. But almost anything incomprehensible does to call a law-breaker by and after all that is what he is and nothing more, and he smells as sweet - or as sour - as a futurist as anything else."41 If this evocation of the sense of smell recalled Mrs Eddy on theosophy, Brown's use of the term "'isms" as pejorative adapted her dismissal of "theology ... mesmerism, and every other 'ology and 'ism under the sun" as forms of "error."42 Accordingly, though he could concede that "art, like all thinking, is passing through an uncomfortable transition from obedience to traditional authority, to realization of individual responsibility," he still insisted that such "responsibility" involved artists' acceptance that "training and order are Art's as well as Heaven's first law."43 "Earthquakes are as likely to upheave undesirables as to swallow them up," he wrote in another of his position papers, called "Explanations.""There is going to be a much 88

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freer art as a result, but it will not be art divorced from law and order or beauty, as most of the anarchists seem to hope, and the traditionalists to fear. Nature will not become chaotic, she will become more pure and plentiful in form, colour and design, and artists will see her so and tell the world. All the paints of Picasso and the brushes of Cezanne will never make peanut heads and elephantine torsos symmetrical and lovely, and when all is said and done, it is loveliness of colour, proportion and character that every healthy minded person wants to enjoy."44 In his choice of the "healthy minded person" as a norm, Brown again showed the influence of Christian Science, and its emphasis on a healthy mind for well-being in general. When he applied this rhetoric to art, however, he recalled the metaphysical source that lay behind such dualisms as Mrs Eddy's. Focusing on the importance of "loveliness of colour, proportion and character," Brown as much as paraphrased Plato's counsel that artists should follow "the trail of true beauty and grace" toward the production of a "salubrious region," whose visitors might "receive benefit from all things about them." As with Plato, too, such emphasis implied deliberate exclusions. To reprise Plato's phraseology: in distinguishing between "grace and gracelessness" in the arts, he urged that the rulers of his ideal Republic should "keep watch over the ... craftsmen, and forbid them to represent the evil disposition, the licentious, the illiberal, the graceless... on penalty, if unable to obey, of being forbidden to practice their art among us, that our guardians may not be bred among symbols of evil... and build up a huge mass of evil in their own souls." Eric Brown gave his own version of this judgment when, in his testimonial, he wrote of "the tremendous value of so ordering our thought that we can dismiss from it whatever is discordant as soon as we have uncovered and completely denied it." Nor did he differ greatly from Plato in implying through his actions that the term "discordant" applied to the artist who, in presuming to "create" rather than "discover" or "reveal," was also presuming upon the role of God. The difference was that Brown's position at the National Gallery gave him a practical edge over Plato, who could only describe his ideal Republic and who failed dismally when he actually involved himself in politics as an adviser to the Tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius.45 Brown, by contrast, was able to carry over this mental project of "ordering our thought" to the physical project of ordering the National Gallery of Canada for the twenty-nine years he was its director. Integral to this project was the strategy of "dismissing" from the Gallery - as he had dismissed from his text on Tom Thomson - everything that he considered "discordant" as soon as he had "uncovered" it. Of her own enemies, Mrs Eddy had written that "Spirit ... rebukes sin of every kind and establishes the claims of God."46 Eric Brown, in aestheticizing the rebuke, was just as florid, declaring that "not even comparative ignorance and indifference in the shape of the man in the street sees a tree or a human figure as hideous or disproportionate. For the artist to do so and to have the impudence to record it is simply a sign of his own degeneracy."47 In his 1926 letter to the Ottawa Journal, in which he made a show of sophistication about the Post-Impressionists, Brown seemed also to soften this program of uncovering and denial. "The impression made upon the artist's mind by the colors, Brown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism"

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forms, and forces of nature," he wrote, "are interesting him more than the reproduction of sections of landscape such as the camera gives ...And if this way is somewhat different to that of a generation ago... the remedy is obviously to try and understand the new point of view instead of trying to destroy it... To try and keep abreast of the times, to understand what the times are producing for us, is more valuable than the calling of many meetings to protest against whatever disturbs the peace of orthodoxy."48 Ironically, however, even as 1914 had been the year when, in Canada, Eric Brown had been "convinced" of the importance of "the younger" landscape painters, it was also the year that had as much as frozen his wider sense of historical "times." For by the 1920$, despite the lingering "impression" of a timeless "nature" in Canada, "the times" had driven a deep rupture between Canada and the very Europe from which the tradition of framed "impressionist" painting had come. In writing disdainfully after the First World War of "dadaism," "tactilism," and "futurism" as "banners" "flapping to the masthead," Brown himself gave the impression that he was observing these from a distance, and from a safe harbour. He sustained the nautical metaphor, writing of such post-war European experimentation that "there has been vast progress in the past fifty years, but the idea that you can suddenly pull your ship to pieces beneath your feet and sail home at twice the speed in the raft you have built out of it is really rather comic."49 What seemed entirely beyond him was the possibility that, if there had been a "pulling to pieces," it had been less than voluntary for artists. Instead, it had involved the shipwreck, after four years of brutal warfare, not only of the European project of world domination but in Europe itself - of the very idea of a stable "home" where either ship or raft might seek refuge. That Brown had only the remotest sense of this convulsion is suggested by a bizarre comment he made near the end of the war. Complaining about the general neglect of art that was taking place, he asked - grotesquely, given the nature of trench combat by 1917 - "What will the soldiers say when they come back, knowing more about art than when they went - knowing more about good generally than when they went! They may notice the lack of the good things of art."50 In keeping with this perspective on "the Great War" Brown did not include among "the good things of art" those paintings that conveyed the fragmentation and collapse of value which the war produced. As part of the War Memorials program set up by Lord Beaverbrook, and that employed - with Jackson and Varley - such artists as Paul Nash, Wyndham Lewis, Augustus John, and David Milne to document the war overseas, Brown initiated an effort to represent the home front. But in this, his assessments could verge on the ludicrous. "All Canada," he wrote, "has heard about her lumbermen cutting immemorial timber in Windsor Park, and Canada to come will undoubtedly look with more interest on Gerald Moira's masterly picture of it than they will on a No-Man's Land nocturne.51 The "nocturne" in question was probably Nash's stylistically aggressive Void, which depicted the devastation of trench warfare as a riot of sharp angles and unpeopled landscape. This image of dehumanized battle deeply affronted Brown's belief in art "as the expression of what is good and true" and "a revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty." The implica-

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Void by Paul Nash (1918, oil on canvas, 71.4 x 91.7 cm.). Transferred to the National Gallery from the Canadian War Memorials in 1921. This was the kind of war art that Eric Brown identified with "futurism." (National Gallery of Canada)

tion was that any ruptures suggested by the movement of history were not welcome. Even David Milne's reductive but fairly tame watercolours of wartime ruins in France were dismissed by Brown as little better than "plans," and likely contributed to Milne's lukewarm reception at the National Gallery for over thirty years.52 Sharing with Brown a lack of direct experience of the war, however, was Lawren Harris, whose faith in a metaphysically true but hidden order, which allegedly could be revealed through art, was never challenged by the cataclysm of the trenches. Left unchallenged also was his assumption that art attuned to the nuances of "northern" place would be especially revealing in this way. If anything, the acting out of this assumption took on a dimension of reactive hysteria as in many of the Group of Seven's post-war canvases, all evidence of history, of human presence even, were purged from representations of - in Harris's view - spiritually cleansing nature. These images anticipated his theosophically tinged promotion, in the 19205, of the importance of "a few individuals" who might, through art, shape "the Canadian character that is born of the spirit of the north," which "comes to us pure in ideas, thoughts, character and attitude." And Brown, concerned with fortifying "healthymindedness" through art, became the gatherer and the guardian of these images,

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drawing them into the orbit of his own sectarian agenda and finding a home for them, even if this home would remain, for the next sixty years, provisionally housed. Eric Brown's equation of "futurism" with "degeneracy," however, had still wider implications for the politics of art at the National Gallery, in that he was not averse to playing through this equation to popular fears of a different sort. During a 1921 tour of western Canada with Maud, he persistently promoted the "sanity" of the Group of Seven's approach to modernism by equating "futurists" with "Bolshevists in art." "We must not confound this modern tendency with futurism," he declared in Winnipeg, Regina, and Vancouver. "Any movement tending to distort art and art's creations, has as much relation to true art as Bolshevism has to true government and candidly it is a sign of degeneracy."53 Granted, by the early 19205 in western Europe, the term "cultural Bolshevism" had become - as Henry Grosshans has pointed out a cliche "used to describe anything offensive to personal taste."54 And granted, too, polemics tying "cultural degeneration" to non-realistic forms of art were already circulating, especially in post-World War One Germany, as spin-offs of the sweeping theories of Oswald Spengler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But, that said, Eric Brown's choice of time and place for translating into Canadian public terms his own polemic in "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree" was especially volatile and even reactionary. Fears among his likely middle-class, anglo-Canadian audiences had been raised not only by the Russian Revolution of 1917 - what he elsewhere called "the horrors of Leninism outraging law and life and everything else" - but also by the sixweek Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, in which workers' pursuit of better conditions through One Big Union had also been linked by the press in inflammatory terms with Bolshevism. Brown, then, seemed willing to court approval for the Group of Seven by adapting to art a style of demonization that had made exactly two years earlier for paramilitary special constables after the regular police joined strikers, for the suppression of public protest, and for secret deportations of "foreign agitators".55 The notions of "degeneracy" and of "Bolshevism" in art have, of course, taken on a different level of menace since they were used in Nazi Germany to proscribe all art which did not conform to idealized representations of race and history. It is important, therefore, to remember that Brown was using them a dozen years before the Nazis came to power in Germany, and sixteen years before their Entartete Kunst exhibit, which, as mounted in Munich and Berlin in 1937, aimed "to expose the common roots of political anarchy and cultural anarchy, and to unmask degenerate art as art-Bolshevism."56 Nor would it be fair to infer that because Entartete Kunst presented works by Wassily Kandinsky, George Grosz, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Otto Dix as "degenerate," and because these were also artists whose works never entered the National Gallery during the Brown era, there was a strong resemblance of ideo-logy. The Nazis, honouring an openly anti-Semitic and hate-filled agenda, confiscated, proscribed, and ridiculed the works which offended them. Brown, by contrast honouring what Mrs Eddy called "the wholesome chastisements of Love," was able simply to exclude or, as he put it in his testimonial, dismiss and deny.57 He also did so in the awareness that a Canadian public which resisted the Group of

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Seven would never countenance their National Gallery's purchase of a Cubist painting by Picasso.58 Nevertheless a second look at some of Brown's phrasings in light of these later events may not be misplaced, especially given that Adolf Hitler himself was by 1924 using the term "futurist" as an epithet, with a reference in Mein Kampfto "futuristic and cubistic representations" as "spiritual lunacy."59 Nor is this the only point of rhetorical meeting. Like Eric Brown, Adolf Hitler was fond, both before and after becoming Germany's Fiihrer in 1933, of making pronouncements about what art should be. In 1937, for example, he declared that "whether it is a matter of architecture or of music, of sculpture or of painting, one fundamental principle must never be lost sight of: every true art must give its products the stamp of beauty, for the ideal for all of us must lie in the cultivation of the healthy. Only the healthy is right and natural; and so everything right and natural is beautiful. It is our task to find the will to true beauty, and not let ourselves be led astray by the chatter, half silly, half impudent, of decadent literati who try to decry as trash the natural and so the beautiful, and to put forward the unhealthy and unsound as interesting, remarkable, and therefore worthy of consideration."60 This passage contains striking homologies with Brown's polemics of the early 19205, via similar positive and negative equations in regard to art and its presumed social role. Both men were explicit in linking a positive role for art with "nature," "beauty," and "the cultivation of the healthy." For to recall Brown in "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," art "can be nothing greater than a revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty" for "it is loveliness of colour, proportion and character that every healthy minded person wants to enjoy." The parallel also holds for the negative equation, which Hitler formed around "the chatter, half silly, half impudent, of decadent literati" who "put forward the unhealthy and unsound as interesting, remarkable, and therefore worthy of consideration."According to Brown, "not even comparative ignorance and indifference in the shape of the man in the street sees a tree or a human figure as hideous or disproportionate. For the artist to do so and to have the impudence to record it is simply a sign of his own degeneracy." Hitler, too, was as angry about the artists themselves as about the "literati." In his 1937 speech dedicating the House of German Art, he warned that "there really are men who see the present day figures of our people only as degenerate cretins - men who are determined to perceive, or as they would say, to experience meadows as blue, skies as green, and clouds as sulphur yellow." Hitler then went on, however, to declare that "in the name of the German people, I mean to forbid these pitiable unfortunates, who clearly suffer from visual disorders, from attempting to force the results of their defective vision onto their fellow human beings as reality, or, indeed, from serving it up as 'art.'"61 Eric Brown, in 19205 Canada, did not need to be so openly interventionist; nor is it imaginable that he would have resorted under any circumstances to such violence as the Nazis practised. But in one of the instances of quiet crossover between the terms of National Gallery policy and his commitment to the "infallible guides" provided by the woman

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he called "the Leader of the Christian Science movement," there were indeed hints of ultimate aggression in regard to the "discordant." To recall again his testimonial "Pushing Onward," he wrote there "of the tremendous value of so ordering our thought that we can dismiss from it whatever is discordant as soon as we have uncovered and completely denied it, confident that the unerring action of Truth will obliterate and destroy it." For Brown in this passage, as for Hitler in wider practice, the word "Truth" took on the connotations of a weapon of righteous war. Brown did not entirely escape being linked with ascendant European fascism during his career, though the link was made in an unlikely way, and from an unlikely quarter. In 1926, 1927, and 1932, the National Gallery was the target of sustained polemics by artists of the Royal Canadian Academy, who felt that their work was being slighted to the benefit of the Group of Seven and that Brown was abusing his authority to select the Canadian art shown outside the country. During these attacks, which eventually involved a petition by the aggrieved artists to the Conservative government of R.B. Bennett, and a counter-petition by the not-soaggrieved, Brown was described by one Academician as "the art dictator of Canada." His accuser was probably Wyly Grier, by this time a former friend, whom Brown during the Jackson sketch imbroglio of 1914 had called "the only wise head of the tribe" and who by 1934 was president of the Royal Canadian Academy. The antagonism was then extrapolated by the Toronto Star, which reported it, into "a struggle of representative art government against a Mussolini."62 This description of Brown was clearly intended - to a degree - to be tongue-incheek, and was quickly retracted by the newspaper.63 The reed-thin, monocled director of the National Gallery, after all, bore little physical resemblance to the strutting fascist who shortly before had marched on Rome and then established a dictatorship aimed at restoring national greatness to Italy. Yet there was a hint of accuracy, too, in the comparison. Brown himself - like both Mussolini and Hitler identified national greatness in the arts with national greatness per se, and if there was a single aphorism tied to his first decade and a half as director, it was his "sermon" that "no nation can be truly great until it has a great art." Moreover, if individuals could be "degenerate," so, in his opinion, could nations: as "the national spirit of any country is more clearly discernible in its art than in any other activity," so - he wrote - "art has nothing to fear from war and oppression; a degenerate national spirit alone can afflict it."64 Granted, these words were written in the midst of the First World War. But it remains the case that, conforming to Mrs Eddy's insistence that "the discords of corporeal sense must yield to the harmony of spiritual sense," Eric Brown simply excluded radically modernist and exploratory artworks - the kind of art Hitler excoriated as "degenerate" - from the collection of the National Gallery for as long as he was Director.65 And in this sense, as well as in his linkage of "nature ""beauty," and "health" with "the canons of form, colour, and plane which the world up to now has held dear," he much more resembled Hitler than he did Mussolini, who actually accepted the homage offered by the radical Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti.

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Throughout these twenty-nine years under Eric Brown, then, the Gallery acquired a minuscule number of works that might be described as inquisitively modern: a 1931 lithograph by Maurice Utrillo, a few watercolours and drypoints by David Milne, and a drawing each by Paul Nash, Edouard Vuillard, and - perhaps most amazingly - Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. So that while Brown could certainly be credited with establishing the National Gallery as a viable and independent institution, his legacy was also one of excluding those works of art that did not conform to his metaphysical principles and to his implicit adaptation of Plato's goal of a "salubrious region," where people might "receive benefit from all things about them." In a description of her husband's beliefs, his widow Maud even implicitly recalled Plato's criticism of most art as mired in "opinion." "There was an earnest desire," she wrote,"to base his decisions on something more fundamental than human opinions. As he saw it, growth, whether of an individual or an institution should be a natural unfoldment, a part of that inherent Tightness of purpose which, when unopposed, operates spontaneously and inevitably all the way from the growth of a seed and the song of a bird to the circling of a planet round its sun ... Religion to him was something to be lived, to guide your decisions, to mould your life."66 The imagery of nature in this description well suited Brown's commitment to "the apostles of the decorative landscape" and of "nature's wonderland of beauty," just as it reprised his investment in an alleged moral continuity among divinely created "nature," some kinds of art, and the Canadian nation-state. Nevertheless, the leading European art movements of the time were driven precisely by a breakdown in confidence that such "inherent Tightness of purpose" even exists, and by the disillusionment that had been left by four years of warfare on European soil among nations long viewed, amid their pursuit of empires, as the most advanced in history. These were the movements that - regardless of their importance to the history of art in the twentieth century, or their insight into their time - Eric Brown decided should be left out. Inadvertently, and with the unintended irony that so invests the Gallery's history, Brown left behind a clear image to describe this pattern in his directorship. Replying in 1926 to the Ottawa resident who attacked the "attempted futurist methods" of the Group of Seven, he condescendingly cited Canute, the legendary king who tried to turn back the ocean's waves by decree. "Like the man in the street the world over," Brown wrote of E.G. Grant, "he stands for the 'status quo.' 'What I understand and have been brought up on, let that be truth and the whole truth,' and like King Canute he sits on the shores of art, or anything else, and says,'Thus far and no farther' until the waves of the new idea roll over him and can no longer be denied."67 Yet just as Brown could also appeal to "the comparative ignorance" of "the man in the street" to denounce the "degeneracy" of the "futurists" when it served his purpose, so might he also have been embarrassed at the ease with the King Canute label could have been applied to him. The difference was that he had the advantage of an actual ocean - the Atlantic - to still those distant aesthetic "waves" which might threaten a national art based on "nature's wonderland of beauty," and a notion of art itself as an agent of "the spiritual idea." So that if, for example, he and Maud could

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eagerly admit the paintings of Emily Carr to the "temperate and rational advance"of the Group of Seven, after seeing them on a trip west in 1927, his commitment to what he called the "moderns," as distinct from the "extremists," made for a principled exclusion of artistic developments in Europe after 1914. "A BUREAU OF STANDARDS" When Eric Brown died suddenly in 1939, at the relatively early age of sixty-two, his long-time assistant and fellow Christian Scientist H.O McCurry was actually in the process of negotiating for the Gallery's first painting by Cezanne: the extremely tame Portrait de Gustave Boyer from the artist's middle period. The directorship then as much as devolved to McCurry by default. As a career civil servant who had been born in Ottawa, and whose first distinction had been in classifying trade statistics for the Customs Department, he had been sent to the Gallery by the Department of Public Works in 1919 to oversee accounts. He had then become Brown's close friend and loyal lieutenant, keeping the Gallery "humping as usual" during his mentor's absences and signing his letters to the Browns, "Best love to you both. Will be jolly glad to see you back."68 But if McCurry was adept at helping to carry through another man's vision, he had little of his own and would be described in 1946, after seven years as director, as "close to a popular magazine's presentation of the average man," with a "character ... the antithesis of flamboyant," and "an unmarred circumspect career" that "could model for a Civil Service textbook."69 As though to confirm this assessment, McCurry s policy statements throughout his sixteen-year directorship did little more than echo Brown, whom he described retrospectively as the "pilot who had the courage, the energy, and the ability to set a true course and, with the help of the Trustees, to keep ... the course."70 McCurry's notion of this "course" seemed largely to come from Brown's 1914 statement that "an art gallery should be the place where the national and international standards of art are kept, and just as we may go to the standard weights and measures to check up on our own, so we may go to the art gallery to check up our ideas and opinions upon art."71 As befitting his early work as a statistician, McCurry as much as repeated this four decades later. The National Gallery, he said in 1946, could be "likened to a bureau of standards," serving as it did as "a base of good taste for all people."72 In fairness to McCurry, he was throughout these years bound by cuts in the Gallery's operating budget and by the reduction of its acquisitions budget to zero during the early years of the Second World War. With the end of the war, he did loosen Brown's preoccupation with "healthy mindedness" just a little, saying that art could give "a keener perception of beauty and life, and awaken the dormant consciousness to the enjoyment of a more abundant life."73 He also, with the restoration of a purchase budget, opted to credit not Brown's private opinions about PostImpressionists as "law-breakers," which had kept him from adding their works to the Gallery's collection, but rather his 1926 pronouncement that "Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne ... are today generally accepted as having made one of the most valuable contributions to the art of modern times." With this implicit sanction, McCurry 96

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Brown's successor, H.O. McCurry (hands clasped), with Andre Bieler, organizer of the Kingston Conference of Canadian Artists in 1941, at the house of H.S. Southam in Ottawa on the third day of the conference, 29 June 1941. McCurry's own off-centre placement in this photograph, along with the sheets on the floor and the shrouds on the furniture, convey a subtle sense of the recessiveness of the National Gallery itself during his tenure. (National Archives of Canada)

took shrewd advantage of both post-war chaos in Europe and the wartime sequestration at the Gallery of paintings owned by the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard. He thereby acquired so many works by all of these painters, that Jean Sutherland Boggs, in her history of the collection, described the years of his tenure from 1939 to 1955 as "Great Years of Collecting."74 Nevertheless, the bulk of McCurry s achievements as the Gallery's second-longest serving director involved - like his initial arrival and relationship with Brown either fortuitous circumstance or the leadership of others. He involved the National Gallery in the June 1941 Conference of Canadian Artists in Kingston, but this was mainly - as McCurry himself put it - "conceived in the active and fertile mind" of Andre Bieler, the head of the Department of Fine Arts at Queen's University. This conference even provided occasion for McCurry to give his own assessment of his public profile. "You all know I am sure," he said in his speech at the opening session on 26 June,"just how nervous a government official is when he is put on the spot and expected to say something - to commit himself! The only greater shock you could give him is to expect him to do something." What McCurry did do was involve the Gallery also in the wartime distribution of Canadian art prints in Europe. But this, too, was propelled by a combination of requests from service canteens, A. Y. Jackson's suggestion of silk-screening as a method, and the example bequeathed by Lord Beaverbrook's War Artist program from the First World War, which had been overBrown, "National Spirit," and "Futurism"

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seen by Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker before McCurry's arrival.75 Even the pattern of purchases after the Second World War was informed by McCurry's adept application of Canadian funds that had been frozen in Europe toward the purchase of paintings in cash-strapped economies. Most exemplary of his use of circumstance was his lobbying of Parliament for funds toward the acquisition of paintings from the Prince of Liechtenstein's collection in the early 19508, after word had discreetly circulated that they might be available. McCurry's effectiveness was as an organizer and consolidator in all of these situations; nor was his leverage hindered by the fact that his wife was the niece of the Confederation poet Archibald Lampman and related by marriage to Mackenzie King. By 1955, though, when McCurry retired after sixteen years in office, the Gallery had done little more than venture cautiously - though more systematically - into acquiring works by Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.76 Boggs would describe four of these as "a mild Monet seascape, two pleasant Pissarros, a gentle Cezanne painted at Auvers," and there would be little more audacity than this.77 As director for sixteen years after the passing of his mentor, McCurry added materially to the concept that had been provided by Brown between 1910 and 1939, without appreciably questioning, never mind challenging, its assumptions. Instead, he actually oversaw an adaptation of Brown's program of exclusions that was especially disadvantageous to the National Gallery's relationship to post-war contemporary art. This program was, throughout McCurry's tenure, less a matter of stated policy than of simple inaction, fostered by a retreat from developments that did not make sense at all within the paradigm that McCurry had inherited from Brown as the "pilot" who had set "a true course." But it had immense consequences for the future of the National Gallery. During and after the Second World War, art's centre of gravity moved inexorably from Europe to the United States, and especially to New York City, in parallel with the flight of many of Europe's most experimental artists from Adolf Hitler's suppression of "degenerate art." Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Josef Albers, and Marcel Duchamp all brought their own relationship to art to the United States, and persevered in their work once there. But they also, through both teaching and example, introduced a younger generation of American artists to that European ferment of ideas which had made for the very "futurism" that Eric Brown had so abhorred and that bluntly dispensed with such metaphysical frameworks as had been offered by Christianity. With the geographical shift that began in 1933, such European experiments as surrealism (Ernst, Dali, and Tanguy), geometrical abstraction (Mondrian, Leger, and Albers), expressionism (Grosz, Chagall, and Beckmann), and Dada (Duchamp) took root in the United States and began to mutate, via such Americans as Joseph Stella, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and a multitude of others. And their prominence, in turn, was furthered by the American appetite for novelty, by New York's immense concentration of liquid capital, by the United States s ascendancy as a global power after the war, and by a critical milieu fostered above all by the insight and eloquence of Clement Greenberg. 98

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Amid the sleepy pace of Ottawa, however, H.O. McCurry - backed by a Board of Trustees chaired for most of this period by his fellow Christian Scientist Harry Southam - paid no more attention to these new American artists than he did to their European mentors. The repetitive record of exhibitions throughout his sixteen-year tenure - with multiple appearances by the Royal Canadian Academy, by the Canadian Group of Painters, by the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, and by Lawren Harris - includes no reference to any of these developments, even after the post-war restoration of the National Gallery's budget. McCurry left no record of impassioned polemics, such as Brown did, to suggest that their exclusion was part of a program based on an intensely held and personal vision of what art should be. Instead, it represented as much a path of least resistance, a result of his own style of Christian Science wholesomeness and sedateness woven into the Liberal old-boy network that had formed around Mackenzie King. Providing via his own public persona a civil service-compatible model for art, McCurry had no interest in disrupting this network, any more than he had in disrupting the established terms of the Gallery itself, which had made for his own slow rise to the directorship, in the shadow of Eric Brown and of Brown's sense of Christian Science mission. But if Brown had - on the basis of his beliefs - excluded the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne, as well as of those artists he described as "futurists," McCurry quietly extended the terms of this ban to cover the works of the next two generations of experimental artists, even as he cautiously admitted works by these three post-Impressionists, according to Brown's revised assessment of 1926. And just as significant, he also gave to the ban new geographical coordinates which ensured the National Gallery's utter marginalization from the major trends in art at midcentury, as these were emerging, freed of the weight of fixed metaphysical frameworks, in the United States. What this forty-four year rule by Christian Scientist directors did, then, was introduce into the developing history of the National Gallery a sense of mission that conflated the national interest with "spiritual" improvement via art, and, following from this, a pattern of exclusions based on principles that were as much metaphysical as aesthetic. Eric Brown's watchwords remained the Gallery's watchwords: not only that "no country can be a great nation until it has a great art," but also that "there is no surer sign of the spiritual growth of nations than the condition of their art."78

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Vincent Massey during the period of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. (Capital Press Service, National Gallery of Canada)

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Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

Canadian painting, through its honesty and its artistic value, has become above all the other arts the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit. - Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 7957 A national gallery ... is an agency of central government, devoted to those cultural activities described as the visual arts, in their relation to public spiritual welfare. - Charles Comfort, Royal Commission Study on Painting in Canada, 7957

The National Gallery's transfer in 1912 from the Fisheries Building to the east wing of the Victoria Memorial Museum was never intended to be permanent. The building itself had been designed by its architect David Ewart to house the seventy-yearold Geological Survey, which was diversifying into the basis for a National Museum, with zoological, botanical, and - following the imperial taxonomies of the time ethnographic material joining the rock specimens gathered by Sir William Logan during the nineteenth century. Through the auspices of Sir Edmund Walker, the National Gallery was a late addition, and to accommodate its collection many of the museum's windows had to be covered over. Even more inconveniently, the entire ground floor was occupied by the Survey's palaeontology collection. What this meant in practice was that, if visitors to the Gallery no longer had to climb stairs past a fisheries exhibit, they instead had to navigate an entire floor of dinosaur fossils. Still, while access to the Gallery remained in this sense a hostage of official emphasis on science over art, the act of incorporation the following year at least implied that the institution was being taken seriously by the Borden government. Then the gremlin of irony grinned again. Before plans of any kind could be developed for a new building, the World War broke out, enforcing a shoestring budget. A year and a half later, the situation got even worse, when the Houses of Parliament

burned to the ground in February 1916. Eric Brown was given three days to put the Gallery's collection into storage, so that the paintings, like the dinosaurs, could make room for MPS and senators. This arrangement prevailed for the next four years. Yet the complex pattern of irony was such that, in forcing Brown to improvise, the removal of the collection fostered one of his signal achievements: a version of the National Gallery that seemed not to need a building at all. In responding to both the fire and the parliamentary takeover, he made the best of disaster - or of this new opportunity "outside all previous experience" - by breaking up the collection and sending its contents on tours throughout the country by railroad. This was a visionary move, in that by means of it the Gallery's holdings ceased to be static objects for the benefit of Ottawa's residents and visitors only. Instead, they entered into a circulatory network that carried them to libraries, schools, universities, and rudimentary galleries across Canada. Within the broader sweep of Canadian history, Brown thereby added an art component to the railroads' own construction over the furtrading routes which had opened the country to European settlement. In the process, he both furthered his goal of educating the public to the value of art as "one of the most vital forces for good in the world" and established a model for the Gallery's national loans and extension program, which would remain a part of its services throughout the century. Nevertheless, this program did little toward the provision of the "beautiful and worthy National Art Gallery" which he had foreseen in 1912 after the move to the Museum, and regarding which he appealed to Parliament throughout his directorship. The tone and substance of one of these appeals can stand for many. Within a year of the Museum's reopening, Brown used the 1922-23 annual report to point out its failings: "At home in Ottawa with the present premises of the National Gallery greatly overcrowded and very seriously unsuited to the proper display of fine art, either from the aspect of historical separation and educational arrangement, or even from that of physical preservation ... the Board of Trustees is anxiously looking toward the day when the building of a National Gallery will be begun ... The dignity of the present as well as the hope for the future demand that the fine arts in the capital of the Dominion be expressed in a building that is worthy of them and will provide room for their growth."1 Despite the urgency of this appeal, others like it would continue to be issued with the predictability of a Baroque ballet de cour from the 19205 to the 19505, with interruptions only during the Depression of the 19308 and the first three years of the Second World War. And though they achieved little in practical terms, the comic dimension of these appeals should not go unremarked. Most years, after publication of the report, editorialists across the country executed their own obligatory movements in the dance, drawing public attention to the trustees' complaints and outdoing each other in denouncing quarters that - according to the Toronto Globe in 1927 - "cruelly handicapped" the Gallery and - according to the Montreal Star in 1928 - "cribbed, cabined, and confined" it.2 Artists, too, got involved, with language that was appropriately inventive. According to Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven, interviewed in 1929, the Victoria Museum was a "pitiful ramshackle." Wyly Grier, for 1O2

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once agreeing with him, added that it "looks as though it might fall down and bury its own pictures." Given that the museum's own main tower had had to be removed in 1915, lest it collapse the building's foundations, this rhetoric was not so outrageous as it sounded. Even the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald made a contribution, pointedly noting on a 1929 visit to Ottawa the lack of "suitable accommodation" for art.3 As its own obligatory part in the ritual, the government of the day throughout the 19205 and 19305 replied with promises of action. But in this phase of the dance lay the National Gallery's dilemma. Within four months of the Gallery's being reopened in the Victoria Museum in 1921, the Liberal Party won a general election for the first time since 1911, defeating Robert Borden's successor, Arthur Meighen. The new prime minister was Mackenzie King, who had served as minister of labour in Laurier's last government. Like many Liberals, King viewed Sir Edmund Walker as a traitor for his defection to Borden's Conservatives in 1910 and for his role in Laurier's electoral defeat the next year. Given that in 1921 Walker was still chairman of the National Gallery's Board of Trustees, the political circumstances that had helped the Gallery on account of his support for Borden were instantly reversed. King had no interest in supporting any project of which Walker was a part: quite the opposite. Nor had he much interest at all in art. Whatever his wider political skills, King bore the privately circulated nickname of "Babbitt Rex," after the small-town philistine in Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt.4 Notoriously, he saw his government's relationship with the National Gallery as a means mainly of helping his own friends, as well as of punishing Walker. Within a year of forming the government, King was suggesting that the Gallery buy a painting by his friend Carl Ahrens, and by January 1923 he had achieved this aim by appointing to the expanded five-member board three men sympathetic to it.5 Beyond such matters at these, King was opposed to much state investment in art. He also, to Brown's special disadvantage, found the paintings of the Group of Seven "frightful," writing in 1934 that in those of Tom Thomson and Lawren Harris "decayed trees" were doing "duty as works of art."6 King would remain prime minister until 1948, apart from exile as opposition leader from 1930 to 1935. During the first three years of his government, he played coy with Walker on the matter of a building, even while foreshortening the Gallery's concerns into matters of personal nepotism. The culminating instance of this dynamic took place in 1924, even as Eric Brown was frantically hanging pictures for the first Wembley exhibition in England. Back in Ottawa, both Walker and Brown's assistant, H.O. McCurry, were faced with another of King's "interventions," this one to the effect that, were they to buy for the Gallery a landscape by his friend John Russell, the Gallery's appropriation might be increased. In the midst of this particular tease, however, Sir Edmund got pneumonia and died. And if this meant that the personal focus of King's resentment left the scene, it also meant that Brown himself lost not only his personal patron of 1910 but his strongest ally in speaking for the Gallery's interests.7 King's manoeuvrings - which were at bottom prevarications - would prove decisive for nearly three decades. In 1928 they took the form of a suggestion that private Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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benefactors should front the money for a new building, as the financier Andrew Mellon was intimating he would do for a National Gallery in Washington, D.C., after collecting old masters while Treasury secretary.8 "The collection," King declared in the context of his own proposal, "is a national possession, a very valuable possession, and one which as speedily as possible should be properly housed."9 By this time, there were even possible benefactors close at hand, on the Board of Trustees. One of these was Vincent Massey, who, like Lawren Harris, had inherited part of the Massey-Harris agricultural machinery fortune and who joined the board in 1925. The other was Harry S. Southam, the publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, and - like Brown, McCurry, and Walker - a Christian Scientist, who became the board's chairman in 1928. Neither Massey's nor Southam's wealth was on the scale of Mellon's. In 1930, however, Massey offered funds from his family's philanthropic foundation toward a Gallery building, if the federal government would supply the land. King, apparently forgetting his own suggestion, pled the pressures of the economic depression and ignored him.10 Harry Southam then tried. In 1937 - the year after Mellon made good, at age eightyone, with the offer of his collection, land, and a building in Washington - Southam paid privately for a study on the development of Confederation Square, just south of Parliament. Plans drawn up by the Toronto architects Mathers and Haldenby included drawings for a neo-classical Supreme Court and National Gallery, to face one another across Elgin Street near the uncompleted War Memorial.11 But King incongruously given the Depression - had a brand new answer. In 1936, while visiting the Paris Exposition, he had met the French landscape architect Jacques Greber, who had designed urban plans for Lille, Marseilles, and Abbeville, as well as the fortifications of Paris itself. A few months after Southam's proposal, and in honour of his mentor Laurier's hope of turning Ottawa into "the Washington of the north," King set a course that would ensure the subordination of the National Gallery to a wider urban agenda for the next forty years. He had already, in 1927, formed the Federal District Commission, which concentrated planning for the "Parliamentary Precinct" with the federal government. Playing Louis Napoleon to his own French Haussmann, he then commissioned Greber to develop a scheme for the entire city, which was to include a building for the National Gallery.12 Owing to the Second World War, Greber did not complete his plan until 1949, thereby adding to the comedy of King's 1929 promise, made diplomatically during Ramsay MacDonald's visit, to provide a building "if you will give us enough time."13 " S H O C K TROOPS I N T H E E F F O R T O F I N T E R P R E T A T I O N " Meanwhile, the period of the 19405, under the directorship of H.O. McCurry, was one of both conceptual and architectural quiescence at the National Gallery, even as, far beyond its walls, the world experienced the convulsions of the Second World War. Within the middle distance, however, there were changes taking place in the Canadian art world regarding the alleged goals of art itself, and especially of Canadian art, that would have long-term implications. Specifically, Brown's and Harris's

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association of "spirit" with art and Canadian nationalism underwent mutation, which carried it away from explicit grounding in a vision of "good" that was allegedly divinely inspired. The initial context for this change was provided by the Great Depression and the Second World War, both of which made for the eclipse among artists of such visionary nationalist rhetoric as Harris especially had espoused. As an intrusion into Canada of widespread economic hardship, the Depression shaped the emergence among younger artists of both a gritty social realism and a concern with the unembellished portraiture of ordinary people which contrasted sharply with the Group of Sevens stylized focus on unpeopled "nature." Overlapping with the Depression beyond Canada's borders, the rise and collapse of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 also cast a stark light on the dangers of clothing a nation-state in the rhetoric of "a single, simple vision" which emphasized - as Harris had in 1928 - a "growing race." Nevertheless, a weaker version of the rhetoric persisted, and precisely through the voice of Lawren Harris. By 1941, he was back in Canada after a six-year stay in the United States and had toned down both the theosophical aspects of his rhetoric, and his mysticism about the "North," so as to emphasize, via a letter from Vancouver to the Conference of Canadian Artists in Kingston, the importance of artists toward "the growth of a more highly socialized democracy."14 Three years later, through persistent lobbying, he became the second president of the Federation of Canadian Artists, which had emerged from the conference as "the nation-wide and inclusive organization" he had called for "to serve the cultural needs of the Canadian public." It was then that, from this new bully pulpit, Harris reintroduced a language of "spirit" stripped of overt theosophy. In what he called his "Presidential Letter Number i" Harris wrote, in his usual declarative style, that "this country cannot be pulled together by politics, by economics, by any one religion, but it can be greatly aided toward a unity of spirit by and through creative life and activity in the arts. This is so because the living spirit of the arts transcends our differences of economic ideas, our political bias, our religious affiliations, our racial differences and our sectional prejudices. Otherwise that spirit would have little if any meaning."15 Behind this changed terminology, Harris remained as committed to theosophy as ever, so that the question could legitimately be asked as to what and how much "meaning" the term "spirit" would retain for those not so committed. Indeed these exhortations, coming from the aging scion of one of the country's wealthiest families, were not universally welcomed even in the Federation of Canadian Artists, many of whose members had just experienced a decade of extreme financial hardship. Nevertheless, his concept of "a unity of spirit" based on an alleged "living spirit of the arts" did get a sympathetic hearing among other influential Canadians who, though not artists themselves, claimed both a stake and a say in art's future, and who by the late 19408 were increasingly anxious. The final years of the Second World War brought immense technological change, which was accompanied by the rise to global eminence of the United States. In Canada, after the war, this change and this eminence showed themselves not least via technologies of media which - unlike

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those of rail communication - emphasized precisely what Sir Edmund Walker had feared in voting against trade reciprocity with the United States in 1910: a geographically friendly north-south axis rather than an imposed east-west one. By mid-century, that is, Harris's 1928 dream of a "spiritual flow" from "the great North" which would travel south through Canada and its art to "purify" the United States had proved misplaced. Harris himself, after his trip to the Arctic in the early 19305, had indeed moved south, first to New Hampshire, and then to the heat of New Mexico, where he had practised a geometrical abstraction devoid of reference to place. Ironically, he had returned to "the North" as represented by Canada only when his family-based source of funds was frozen there at the start of the Second World War. And even then, he had sought out the balminess of Vancouver. Meanwhile, more mystically prosaic currents, in the form of radio waves and money, were also flowing north from the United States. The design of radio had everything to do with transnational principles of engineering, and nothing to do with art such as had been practised by the Group of Seven. Nor did the appeal of American films and magazines build on the presence in Canada of such art; instead, and as engines of profit, they, like radio, sought common denominators among the widest audience, without regard for borders. The culture of art in Canada paralleled this situation of an emergent "popular culture" in its own lack of immunity to a different kind of northward flow: that of capital. The source was more specific, in that funds came largely from the New York-based Carnegie Corporation which had been established by the steel baron Andrew Carnegie in 1911, toward redistributing "surplus wealth." The corporation sponsored Canadian ventures as diverse as the Miers-Markham report on the general condition of Canadian museums in 1932; a chair of art history for the University of Toronto in 1935; purchases for the National Gallery itself during the 19308; and even the 1941 Kingston Conference that led to the Federation of Canadian Artists. Eric Brown and H.O. McCurry sat on the committee that advised the corporation as to worthy recipients of funds, while Vincent Massey and H.S. Southam served as the committee's adjunct patrons, even as they were trustees of the National Gallery.16 And, curiously, the Gallery under their authority dealt with this dependence in an especially self-defeating way, with the informal extension, throughout McCurry's tenure, of Browns ban on "futurism" to apply to purchases of contemporary American art.17 Yet morally satisfying as this exclusion might have seemed to the Gallery's board, it had limits as a worthwhile stratagem which events were bound to expose. By the late 19405, New York had become the world engine for developments in "advanced" art, owing in part to the settlement in the city during the war of many of Europe's leading artists and teachers, and in part to an American ascendancy that was as much economic as military. In excluding art produced there, the National Gallery in consequence almost ensured its marginalization from the unsettled but globalizing dynamism of the period. Moreover, if the Gallery's board could vote to exclude art produced in the United States, Canadian society did not enjoy the option of excluding the cloned imagery of popular culture in the same way. By mid-century, this flow from the south had made for an even more unnerving prospect: the arrival of 1O6

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television which, if unregulated, could flood the Canadian public domain with images, stories, and sounds from the United States. Amid this sense of pending menace, Mackenzie King, after nearly three decades in office, retired as prime minister. His replacement by the already elderly, but far more tractable, Louis St Laurent offered, paradoxically, at least the appearance of a new beginning, such that several cabinet ministers - foremost among them Brooke Claxton and Jack Pickersgill - were able to propose a stocktaking of Canada's own cultural capital and potential. St Laurent concurred and in 1949 appointed a royal commission, whose mandate was to provide "a general survey of the arts, letters and sciences in Canada, to appraise present accomplishments and to forecast future progress," with the "the needs and desires of the citizen" in mind.18 Behind this goal was a more basic question, which was tabled at an early meeting before the commission began its cross-country hearings: "Could Canadian culture survive as an entity in view of the increasingly strong influences tending to unify the culture of North America?"19 The commission itself was to consist not of artists and writers but of three academics and a businessman, who were selected by its chairman in consultation with the government.20 This appointed chairman was Vincent Massey, and it was at this time that the small group which had long spoken in favour of art's spiritually improving and national value, and of the National Gallery's importance as what Brown had called "a radiating centre," was assured an influence on politicians.21 The departure of King helped Massey especially to move into the foreground. When the commission was formed, he was already chair of the National Gallery's board, on which he had served since 1925. Yet the impression of sustained influence was belied by a central fact of his diplomatic career. Although Massey, like King, was a Liberal, King had disliked his urbanity and seen in him a potential rival; in consequence, he had largely kept Massey in foreign postings. Among the results was the paradox that, even as he remained on the Gallery's board in Ottawa, Massey served more prominently, while Canadian high commissioner to Britain during the Second World War, as chairman of the British National Gallery's Board of Trustees in London.22 Just how closely knit the art partisans in Canada were, however, is suggested by the fact that Massey's wealth came from his own family's share of the fortune which had helped Lawren Harris chart an independent course for his painting and underwrite the Studio Building in Toronto for the Group of Seven. Massey had done something similar with Hart House at the University of Toronto, which he had designed and built during the 19208 "as an informal centre for education in the arts and politics."23 As a diplomat, he had also assembled an art collection which, if lacking in audacity, was modern enough to include the works of David Milne, Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, and - of course - the Group of Seven. This involvement made of him the major private patron of the visual arts in Canada, as well as, after the gift of eighty-eight modern English paintings in 1946, the National Gallery's major private donor. Massey shared with Harris, then, the irony of turning toward the arts a family fortune based on agricultural machinery, without the tie to heavy industry and finance that often existed among patrons in the United States. If these condiVincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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tions also helped to foster a more cautious, and even magisterially feudal, style of patronage, Massey would nevertheless, through his leadership of the Royal Commission, come to stand beside Harris as a pivotal figure in the evolution of Canadian public policy toward the arts. For Massey, too, was an outspoken nationalist, though in terms less visibly sectarian than those espoused by Harris in the 19205. He presented his own approach when in 1948, recently returned from England, he published a book called On Being Canadian. In it, he sought to map a post-war course for Canada that would keep it within the British Commonwealth, and shape its place among "right-minded nations," by cultivating "a new unity with its bounds as wide as humanity itself."24 Even as he paid lip-service to a long-term goal of "true internationalism," however, Massey also quoted the nineteenth-century Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini, in saying that "nationality is sacred to me because I see in it the instrument of labour for the good and progress of all men."25 With this epigram, Massey advertised his own agenda: "Nationality" was "sacred" not because of its special role as a "particular" filter for such transcendent "universals" as inhere in "divine Principle" - as was the case for Harris and Eric Brown - but because of its alleged status as "the instrument for the good and progress of all men." What was implied in this statement was a secularizing of the universalist language of Brown and Harris, but according to broadly humanistic and liberal principles rather than allegedly transcendent ones. Yet, even in the absence of any metaphysical framework - such as Harris had found in theosophy and Brown in Christian Science - Massey was still falling back on sacral language to describe "nationality" and, by implication, Canadian nationality. In what way, though, was this "sacred"? And - in the absence of the metaphysics - on what basis? Among the book's chapters on trade, national unity, relations with the United States, and so on, there was only one on the arts. But its title, "The Interpreters," signalled the importance Massey gave them. "If life in Canada has a pattern of its own" he asked, "to whom can we look to explain the design? The artist and the writer have a special role of interpretation."26 This claim, too, carried echoes of Brown's and Harris's pronouncements of the 19208, in its tendency to read an alleged hidden "pattern" in national terms. And like them, Massey suggested an improving role for art, though in doing so he seemed to show the influence more of the nineteenth-century British social critic Matthew Arnold than of sectarian metaphysical presumption. "What," he asked soberly, "can we say about the relation of art to the ordinary man? That it quickens his perceptions, broadens his mental horizon, stimulates his imagination; that it can make him a better citizen."27 Massey's tendency to give tidy, secular answers to his own questions about the arts in general, however, frayed just a little when he got to Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. For as a well-known patron of the visual arts, he could not only claim a degree of expertise, he also could barely suppress his own awe. Paying homage to them as the "shock troops in the effort of interpretation," he also gave his own version of the quest upon which they had embarked: "We, of course, know the facts, how a group of gifted artists a generation or so ago turned their backs on Europe quite deliberately - and surrendered themselves to their own environment, striving 1O8

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to uncover its secret. The inevitable happened. The Canadian landscape took possession of them. They abandoned the methods and technique which were alien to Canada, and recorded its beauty faithfully in the clear lights, bold lines and strong colours which belong to it. They had to struggle against strong opposition, these pioneers, among their colleagues and the general public as well, but opposition is better than indifference. It produces an argument, and the pioneers won their case and achieved recognition."28 In the wake of the Second World War and the defeat of Nazism, Massey was also careful, in most of his book, to avoid the vocabulary of quasi-mystical nationalism which had crept into the manifestos of Harris and even Brown during the 19205. The general absence of such language, therefore, makes the term "shock troops" stand out the more, in that its resonance was with the violent glamour of warfare, just as its original use was by the German army. And if there had been one term glorified in Germany as central to National Socialist dynamism, it was the word "Kampf" or "struggle:" "They had to struggle against strong opposition, these pioneers ..." In Massey's citation of "the facts," too, these words were complemented - as "struggle" and "shock troops" had been in Germany - by others that urged the value of mystical passivity in the presence of suprapersonal forces. The "gifted artists," he claimed, "surrendered themselves to their environment"; and "the inevitable" then happened when it "took possession of them." There was even a claim of exclusionary authenticity: "They abandoned the methods and technique which were alien to Canada, and recorded its beauty faithfully" This language clearly recalled the Lawren Harris not of 1944 but of 1928, who had written of how "the North," as "a single, simple vision of high things," could "through its transmuting power, shape our souls into its own spiritual expressiveness." And it suggests that Massey himself, as a collector of paintings by Thomson and the Group of Seven, had been far from immune to the Group's mythologization, to which Harris had contributed through his manifestos. This passage is of great importance, because it suggests Massey's own investment in art - and in Thomson's and the Group's art especially - as the basis for a quasi-sacral rhetoric that was unhinged from sectarian anchors and applied directly to "Canada." That is to say: he retained Brown's and Harris's investment in Canada, and in art as of special importance to it, while dispensing with the metaphysics that had been of such personal value to them and that had given an allegedly transcendent worth to the entire enterprise. In effect, then, the paintings of the "gifted artists," as the visible precipitates of their "surrender ... to their environment," their "struggle," and their "faithful... recording" of a "landscape," were invested with a quasi-sacral and even fetishistic quality in themselves. As though to calm this precariously irrational investment in nationalism through art, Massey concluded the passage with the sobriety that prevails in most of his book: "But opposition is better than indifference. It produces an argument, and the pioneers won their case and achieved recognition." Despite the appearance of legalistic closure, however, the shiny-eyed quality of the rest of the passage stands out. And it does so in such a way as to complement - significantly in terms of the future of the National Gallery - another not quite rational influence in Massey's sense of an Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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apt role for Canada at mid-century. For notwithstanding both his vocal nationalism and the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which made Canada an autonomous Dominion within the Commonwealth, he was also a notorious anglophile in his love of ceremony and his reverence for the monarchy. His biographer, Claude Bissell, provides an anecdote that gives a rich sense of Massey's investment in these. At the 1937 coronation of King George vi,"the dominion high commissioners carried standards in the procession, and Vincent gloried in this minor role ... 'I wish to goodness,' he wrote, 'that some of my countrymen wouldn't have an almost religious antipathy to knee-breeches.' As for him, he had an almost religious veneration for them. Alice [Massey's wife] quoted proudly from a letter they had received after the coronation in which it was observed that in the procession Vincent Massey 'looked like a medieval stained glass window.'"29 Few descriptions evoke so well the sense that Massey was, in his personal style, fascinated with an equally mediaeval model of noblesse oblige. And appropriately, within the context of this veneration, he was also committed to the high church ritual of Anglicanism. Just as Harris had drawn on the vocabulary of theosophy for his nationalist rhetoric, then, and Brown on that of Christian Science, so did Massey transpose the rhetoric - though not the substance - of this ritual onto the challenge of building the Canadian nation-state. For in parallel with his panegyric on art, this associative process yielded "A Canadian Credo" whose cadences read suspiciously like the Apostles' Creed, in the Book of Common Prayer. "I believe in Canada," Massey wrote in On Being Canadian, "with pride in her past, belief in her present and faith in her future. I believe in the quality of Canadian life, and in the character of Canadian institutions. I believe in the Commonwealth of Nations within whose bounds we have found freedom, and outside which our national life would lose its independent being ... I believe that Canada is one, and that if our minds dwell on those things which its parts have in common, we can find the unity of the whole."30

This credo of commitment to Canada presents itself as a vehicle of belief whose resolve was on a par with Eric Brown's insistence that Christian Science "was the pearl of great price that all the world needed," and Lawren Harris's that "the spiritual flow from the replenishing North ... should ever shed clarity into the growing race of America." It even carries echoes, in the phrase "if our minds dwell on those things which its parts have in common," of the "mind cure" associated with Mrs Eddy. And like Harris and Brown, too, in regard to the oneness of "divine Principle," and Harris in the 19405 on "the living spirit of the arts," Massey emphasized the value of "the unity of the whole" over multiplicity. The difference was that, unlike Brown's and Harris's "divine Principle," "the whole" on which Massey urged minds to dwell was neither eternal nor supersensible. Rather it recalled Brown's own description of the "younger generation" of painters themselves in 1915, as "believing in ... Canada." In this sense, then, Massey transposed into quasi-religious exhortation the sentiment

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that Brown himself had ascribed to these painters and had also embraced with his 1922 claim that "Canada is a heritage of greatness irrepressible." For Massey, then, it seemed to be the concept of Canada per se - as subtended by its link with England, as predicated by the chapters in On Being Canadian, and as given supra-rational spice by the paintings of the "gifted artists" - that offered an inspiring, unifying principle, such as Harris and Brown had found in a unified "divine Principle" which, for them, oversaw the Canadian situation and was filtered through it. Why, though, did "Canada" - as an historical entity consisting of a land mass, population, and set of laws - seem to Massey in 1948 to both merit and require a credo of the sort that in religion usually applies to things unseen? For how far he carried his use of religious language is illustrated also by his claim that the idea of national unity "to us must be supreme, for in Canada the pursuit of unity is like the quest of the Holy Grail."31 Perhaps an answer has to do only partly with the fragility of a nation-state recently risen from colony status. For given the extent of change during the 19405, so neat a use of the Apostles' Creed, as a syntactic shell for nationalist content, may have seemed both plausible and attractive, as a retrenchment against the post-war present by the intellectual elite of old Upper Canada, of which Massey was a part. The Royal Commission documents provide a source for the credibility of this case, in that while the five-person commission travelled the country hearing briefs from arts groups, it also arranged for studies by - as Massey put it - "certain Canadian authorities in the various subjects which we were instructed to review."32 Among the chosen were Malcolm Wallace, principal of University College, Toronto; George Grant, chair of the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University; and Charles Comfort, professor of art at the University of Toronto. Their studies, on the humanities, philosophy, and painting in Canada, were published as part of a separate volume after the report was tabled, and provide a snapshot of the profound transition of value which was to shape not simply the report but the National Gallery, Canadian arts policy, and even Canadian democracy itself over the next five decades. This shift was described by Wallace in terms of an "astonishing change" which had occurred in Canada during the previous fifty years. So eloquent was this description that it merits quotation at length. "Formal religion," he wrote, now makes its appeal to an increasingly smaller proportion of people; church attendance and Bible-reading are outmoded for great numbers. Only to a negligible proportion of young people today is the Bible known at all... In our revolutionary era there are few changes of taste and belief more significant than this. Young men and women have lost the stable frame of reference which formerly enabled them to place and evaluate their own experiences. They find themselves adrift in their immature years in a world where nothing may be taken as established, where there are no generally accepted norms of conduct or ideals toward attaining which one should strive. The resulting confusion of mind is increased when the student finds a similar confusion, a similar lack of stability, in the contemporary world of international and economic relations, in artistic and moral standards.33

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These comments suggest a public state of uncertainty very different from the mental states of belief that Eric Brown and Lawren Harris had brought to the project of art in Canada a few decades earlier. Clearly, they reflect the percolating effects of the Second World War as the greatest conflict in human history, even as they suggest, more obliquely, a mood of confused eagerness, amid innovations that made for convenience, while also undermining a "stable frame of reference." Yet this assessment also bore uncanny resemblance to one made nearly a century before, by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In a passage similar in tone, Nietzsche had observed in the early i88os that "the belief in the utter immorality of nature, and in the absence of all purpose and sense are the psychologically necessary attitudes when the belief in God and in an essentially moral order of things is no longer tenable ... Disintegration - that is to say uncertainty - is peculiar to this age: nothing stands on solid ground or on a solid faith. People live for the morrow, because the day after tomorrow is doubtful. All our road is slippery and dangerous, while the ice which still bears us grows unconscionably thin."34 The parallel between Wallace's and Nietzsche's words suggests that, by the early 19508, a Canadian society that had been built around "the stable frame of reference" given by the church in a largely rural society was at last entering the urban modernity which had shaped western Europe since the mid-i8oos. Nietzsche had also analysed the momentum behind this "uncertainty." "The belief in God and in an essentially moral order of things" was "no longer tenable," he claimed, because a materially beneficial scientific method had also undermined the capacity for religious faith. This method was itself an outcome of Christianity's standards of moral truth: "the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience ... sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price."35 Scientific "cleanliness" demands doubt in any hypothesis until it is proved experimentally. And a society that trains its young people toward such scepticism might therefore expect to foster an incapacity to accept religious "truths" on faith alone. Nietzsche embedded these insights in a memorable phrase: "God is dead." And in the crucible of his thought had indeed been born a view of art very different from Eric Brown's. Art, for Nietzsche, was "the great stimulus to life," integral to what he called the "restoration" of "the courage of... natural instincts."36 "Art raises its head where creeds relax," he wrote in 1878. "It takes over many feelings and moods engendered by religion, lays them to its heart, and itself becomes deeper, more full of soul, so that it is capable of transmitting exultation and enthusiasm, which it previously was not able to do."37 In these words can be read the anticipation of that stake in art which was made, after 1910, by both Brown and Harris, as transitional figures and still in conjunction with metaphysical frameworks. Nietzsche, however, had a philosophical descendant, who had already proved influential in the twentieth century and would paradoxically do so in Canada through another of Massey s "authorities." It was this descendant who would speak most, through his reading of Nietzsche, to the corrosion of those metaphysical investments that had shaped the National Gallery's early history. "The terms 'God' and 'Christian God' in Nietzsche's thinking," wrote Martin Heidegger in 1943, "are used to designate the suprasensory world in general. God is 112

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the name for the realm of Ideas and ideals. This realm of the suprasensory has been considered since Plato ... to be the true and genuinely real world. In contrast to it the sensory world is only the world down here, the changeable and therefore the merely apparent, unreal world ... [But] if God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above all its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself. That is why there stands this question: Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?"38 With this passage, Heidegger spoke to the felt need for some sort of replacement for that metaphysical "realm of ideas and Ideals" which had been conceptualized by Plato in his dialogues, Christianized especially through St Augustine, and undermined by the rise of experimental science in a way that would make eventually for Wallace's assessment of mid-century Canada. Yet if this was how Heidegger developed Nietzsche's description of Platonism as a "higher swindle,"39 the Second World War had made for deep shock at the implications of this "infinite nothing." The slave-labour camps, gas chambers, and industrial-scale crematoria of the Nazi empire all pointed to the ease with which right-wing ideologues had - in the vacuum of contemporary "nihilism" - bent advanced technology and the theory of an Overman who creates new values toward a quasi-mystical racial idolatry. Even Heidegger himself had been banned from post-war teaching, because of his own brief adaptation, in 1933, of Nietzsche's transvaluing "will to power" and of the Overman "who grounds Being anew"40 into support for the notorious "Fiihrer principle" which had invested Hitler with the right to speak for an entire "people."41 Yet, despite this involvement, Heidegger continued to be influential, and not least in regard to art. The record that has been worked over by his admirers and detractors alike suggests that his self-subordination lasted only for about a year.42 Largely withdrawing from public life, he then turned his thought toward technology, on which the German, American, and Soviet war machines all relied. "What is distinctive about modern technology," he wrote in 1942, "is that it is no longer a mere 'means' at all, and no longer merely stands in the service of something else, but that it is unfolding a kind of domination of its own ... The machine that belongs to such technology is different from a 'tool,' for technology itself is self-subsistent."43 This view of technology as itself a "metaphysic" that "grounds an age" would be one of Heidegger's legacies to the latter half of the twentieth century.44 And significantly for the Royal Commission, it would acquire a Canadian interpreter in Massey's nephew George Grant, who contributed the study on philosophy. During the war, Heidegger had also developed the view that the United States, in its "ahistoricality" and lack of limits, was the driving engine of technological nihilism.45 Grant implicitly shared this view, and in his essay he claimed that Canada faced great danger in being seduced by an exaltation of "scientific technique," such as he saw taking place south of the border.46 But he also argued for a deeply conservative course that rejected "the death of God." Canadian society could resist this technological nihilism, he insisted, only through renewed anchorage in philosophy as "the analysis of the traditions of our society and the judgment of those traditions Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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against our varying intuitions of the Perfection of God."47 This claim - with its echoes of Plato - would entrench Grant as his generations guardian of that metaphysical Platonism which had been explicit in Harris's theosophy and implicit in Brown's Christian Science. For Grant could sound not unlike Madame Blavatsky herself in writing that "only in realizing how close the intellectual life of Canada has come to losing the wisdom of a pre-scientific age will the strength and vitality be found to work towards the rediscovery of such wisdom."48 Within Canada, Grant's conviction provided new terms for Eric Brown's claim that "great art is not the product of degeneracy either national or individual,"49 and for Plato's claim that "all men ... who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon God."50 "It is a great illusion," Grant wrote, "that scepticism breeds thought and that doubt is the producer of art. The sceptic fails in that courage which alone can buttress the tiring discipline of being rational... The practice of philosophy (and for that matter all the arts of civilization) will depend on a prior condition - namely the intensity and concentration of our faith in God. Without such faith it will be vain to expect any great flowering of our culture in general."51 This very style recalled the manifestos of Brown and Harris, and behind them, Plato's generalizations about "the soul" and "the Good." Like Brown and Harris, too, Grant had come to his confidence in this suprasensory order through an experience beyond explanation: in his case, a sense of profound peace after rescue work during the Blitz in England.52 And his seeing in Canadian conservatism not just the basis for difference from the United States but a shelter for the legacy of Plato helped to uphold a tie between transcendent truth and Canadian nationalism, even as it lodged the legacy not in the art of a new generation but, more quietly and even dormantly, in a university philosophy department. Yet there remained for Grant a troubled engagement with Heidegger as the thinker who had diagnosed the era's technological malaise but whose views on art diverged profoundly from his own. Heidegger would likely have read, in Grant's commitment to "the perfection of God," "an evasive turning away into the ahistorical," which would "bring about nothing... other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment."53 Instead, Heidegger came to see, in technology's very domination, an imperative for art to move through this "historical moment," into a "questioning" different from the "ordering" that technology demands but that is called forth through it.54 This notion of art as questioning, and as "a distinctive way in which truth comes into being," lent itself not to the "discovery" of pre-existent pattern - as per the Christian Science-inspired priorities of Eric Brown - but to the development of meaning through process.55 And internationally, it was this view, in multiple variants, that would come to hold an open promise for contemporary art's significance, especially after 1960. In Canada, however, the Royal Commission was more concerned with Grant's association of a menacing technological nihilism with the United States. Nor was it immune to conservative nostalgia. "In this new world of television, of radio and of documentary films," the commissioners would write in one of their more evocative

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passages, "it will be unfortunate if we hear no more our choir and our organist in valiant and diligent practice of the Messiah, making together a gracious music that reaches us faintly but with great sweetness across the quiet of an early night."56 The further phase, then, in the transformation of a justifying rhetoric for art would be for another of Massey's "authorities" to soften Grant's framework of reassurance so as to align - without similar acuity - the term "spirit," as inherited from Brown and Harris, with an agenda of aesthetic and political conservatism, and to do so in way that would shortly have major consequences for the National Gallery. "NATIONAL UNITY THROUGH PUBLIC S P I R I T U A L WELFARE" When asked to write on "Painting" in Canada, Charles Comfort was a professor of art history at the University of Toronto. But he was also a painter and had received in his own opinion - his main artistic boost as a young man from the first Group of Seven show at the Art Gallery of Toronto in ipio.57 Comfort had then built a career on this exposure. Having grown up poor in Winnipeg and, like A.Y. Jackson, worked while a boy for a commercial art firm, he had moved to Toronto to align himself with the Group. This move had brought success within an influential context: his first large oil painting, Prairie Road, had conveyed a sense of western Canadian landscape and, having entered the 1925 Ontario Society of Artists exhibit on Lawren Harris' recommendation, been bought by Massey's Hart House. After study in New York, Comfort had then joined the Canadian Group that succeeded the Group of Seven, and in 1936 he moved to Harris's Studio Building; his neighbour there was Jackson, with whom he went on painting trips. Some of Comfort's work, especially during the 19305, had introduced an edge of social commentary to the then-established representations of Canada as primarily "nature": his Lake Superior Village of 1937, for example, with its stark black shapes of miners' huts, obliquely criticized Harris's austere paintings of Lake Superior as especially endowed for "spiritual realism," even as it drew on Harris's own versions of such buildings in Nova Scotia. Comfort had also, during the Second World War, served as an official war artist and painted the Canadian army's advance through Italy and the Netherlands. Nevertheless, he was by 1949 very comfortably ensconced in Toronto. And in his study for the Royal Commission can be read both the accession to semi-officialdom of Harris's and Brown's views on the "spiritual" role of art in Canada and their dissociation from underlying subtexts of theosophy and Christian Science. In place of these exoticisms, Comfort offered the commission a numbingly linear version of Canadian art history, which nevertheless maintained a place for the key word "spirit." "The visual arts in Canada," he wrote, "have been known to reflect the spirit of this country since the third quarter of the seventeenth century. In a virgin country, such as Canada when first settled, the modes of expression were naturally closely derivative of those practised in the parent countries ...As time passed these derivative modes became modified and adapted to the environmental situation." Comfort did not elaborate on what he meant by "have been known to reflect the spirit of this country." But he clearly liked the concept, and added that

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"art, to be 'Canadian in the only sense worth talking about is the creative expression of the artist, creating out of his own experience in his own environment, reflecting the spirit of both, which may be national and yet be universal in the most profound sense."58 As was the custom, this account ignored the awkward fact that the land mass of Canada was not humanly "virgin" when settled by Europeans. The focus on "reflection," however, was perhaps appropriate, because this slurry of terms seemed mainly to reflect the views of Lawren Harris, with the difference that Comfort's notion of Canadian "spirit" was much reduced in grandeur. "The spirit of a people," Comfort wrote, "finds formulation in those unique qualities of national character which results from heredity and environment ...Within this total milieu develops the characterful Canadian spirit, essentially northern, displaying much that is characteristic of northern peoples, individualistic, conservative, loyal, independent, virile and industrious; the Canadian, in whom are mobilized the special form of his respect for his Creator, his ideals, his conflicts, his insights, his triumphs and frustrations."59 This piling up of attributes went on when Comfort got to the Group of Seven's contribution, but with the mixing in - and mixing up - of metaphors as well. "They arrived on the scene," he announced, "at that climactic moment when the rising tide of national spirit in a young land cried out for objectification in a new and vigorous way. The sap was rising with an awareness of our national growth, [and they] released a spirit of national consciousness, which has been beneficial in the widest sense."60 This thesaurus-like approach to describing "national spirit" suggests that Comfort himself was not at ease about the health of this alleged entity which had so often been invoked. And indeed, he advised the commission that "greater stimulus must be offered to ensure standards and production in the visual arts in the interests of national consciousness and unity."61 How much "stimulus" might safely be applied could for him be learned from a simple test. "The whole matter of state concern with the arts," he wrote, "assumes that they are activities of more than private and individual importance. To the extent that this assumption may be inconsistent with fundamental democratic principles must be the limit to which it may be indulged... If the enlightened modern state will concern itself with the arts as an agency for promoting national unity through public spiritual welfare, there would appear little justification for concern, and no conflict with the principles of democratic freedom."62 To follow through on Comfort's actual depiction of "the characterful Canadian spirit," then: what he seemed to be doing in this passage was making a case for state intervention in the arts, as a means of helping Canadians to become more "individualistic, conservative, loyal, independent, virile and industrious," all in the interest of "national unity." Obviously, this is a reductio ad absurdum, but the very possibility of its being inferred from Comfort's argument suggests the dire state that the rhetoric of "Canadian spirit" in relation to art had reached by 1951. And yet there was, within the style of this rhetoric, an ominous note. For Comfort, art was to be - in the apparent absence of any convincing transcendent "principle" such as had driven

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Brown and Harris - an "agency for promoting national unity through public spiritual welfare." But behind this "agency" would be "the enlightened modern state" as the primary agent of "concern," and with the term "spiritual" linked also to "the freedom of the individual and the true spiritual democracy which has always characterized western culture."63 What, though, were the "fundamental democratic principles" which Comfort said should provide "the limit" of art's absorption into such a project? Were these the "principles" of Jeffersonian liberal democracy, as had evolved in the United States to emphasize "liberty," or of Edmund Burkes democratic conservatism, which had been adapted in Canada to emphasize public "order"? Comfort, perhaps playing down the differences to suit a Cold War alliance, did not seem to care and asserted that, whatever these "principles" were, they were a function of "the true spiritual democracy which has always characterized western culture." Again: the conquered aboriginal peoples of North America might have questioned this "always," but they did not enjoy a public voice. Yet even without it, there remained the question of what exactly "public spiritual welfare" itself might be, in a state whose democratic machinery was becoming more remote and mediated, even as Canadian society became more technological and more dependent on the United States. Comfort did not probe these issues. Left unsifted in its implications, then, the word "spirit" as he deployed it in this influential context served as more than just a murky, if reassuring, holdover from an earlier religious era. The year before the report was issued in Ottawa, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss published a paper which gave a post-religious analysis of how such charged, seductive words continue to circulate even after the social context that originated them has passed. Extrapolating from the Polynesian term mana, he claimed that they function as "floating signifiers," carrying "an indeterminate value of signification, in itself empty of meaning, and therefore open to receiving any meaning at all."64 What implicit meaning, then, had Comfort injected into his claim that "the enlightened modern state" should "concern itself with the arts as an agency for promoting national unity through public spiritual welfare"? A troubling answer was suggested in the way he extended the notion of an "agency," as applied to the arts, to recommendations for the National Gallery. "Traditionally," Comfort wrote, "a national gallery is a repository of painting, prints and sculpture, representative of both national accomplishment and of the heritage subscribed to. Actually, a national gallery is more than that. It is an agency of central government, devoted to those cultural activities described as the visual arts, in their relation to public spiritual welfare ... Not only would an expansion of services increase the immediate usefulness of the National Gallery, but they [sic] would supply the basic cultural needs of the country, contributing to a regenerated Canadianism."65 Paradoxically, Comfort also urged that the National Gallery be removed from the jurisdiction of the Department of Public Works and "set up as an autonomous body, responsible directly to the Secretary of State." But so direct a relationship with government could - depending on the parties involved - work both ways. And, certainly, a view of the National Gallery as "an agency of central govern Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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ment" was fundamentally foreign to the tradition of stubborn independence which had been established by Sir Edmund Walker and Eric Brown. This assessment by Comfort, and the very fact that he gave it, would soon shape a troubling phase in the Gallery's history, which would begin in 1960 and extend, with exotic mutations, for the next three decades. Contributing also to this phase would be his claim that, "in the midst of modern diversity," the Gallery should, as an "agency" of "public spiritual welfare," exercise a "guardianship of tradition and heritage." In shaping an agenda of exclusions around such terms, Comfort echoed not only Eric Brown but the Plato who argued for art's role, in the ideal Republic, precisely toward the training of "guardians." Comfort's version was to urge the retention of "a rational modernity, where imagery is employed and ordered with wider communicative intentions," as against more recent "tendencies ... toward the expression of driving inner impulses, and the cryptic utterances of semiconscious moods."66 In disavowing such "tendencies," Comfort was referring not to the European "futurism" which Brown had excluded from the Gallery, or only to the American Abstract Expressionism which the Board of Trustees would not buy. There was a source of "cryptic utterances" closer to Ottawa, in a part of Canada which hitherto had been marginal to the National Gallery's evolution. In 1948 - the year of Massey's On Being Canadian - the painter Paul-Emile Borduas had self-published a manifesto called Refus Global, in a Quebec ruled jointly by Maurice Duplessis and the Roman Catholic Church, according to norms almost feudal in their authoritarianism. Erupting from a society whose rulers viewed themselves - according to Duplessis - as "the guardians of Christian civilization in North America," Refus Global went even further in rejecting convention than did the European Surrealism and Dadaism that Brown had mocked. "Refus definitivement avec toutes les habitudes de la societe, se desolidariser de son esprit utilitaire," Borduas had written in one of his more concentrated passages. "Refus de servir, d'etre utilisables pour de telles fins. Refus de toute INTENTION, arme nefaste de la RAISON. A bas de toutes deux, au second rang! PLACE A LA MAGIE! PLACE AUX MYSTERES OBJECTIFS! PLACE A L'AMOUR!"67

This was not a view of art committed to "national unity through public spiritual welfare." But neither did the chromatically aggressive and informe abstract painting of Borduas and the Automatistes of Montreal allow for any favouring of, or reference to, things specifically Canadian. Instead, the sheer energy of these works seemed to threaten even the conventional frame as an organizing principle that contained them. Borduas himself had by 1951 lost his teaching position, and therefore his livelihood, because of the manifesto. Unmentioned in the Royal Commission's report, he would within two years move to New York and then Paris, and would not again live in Canada. Nevertheless, with such rhetoric already circulating, and emphasizing not pre-existent "truths" but uninhibited energy flows and unresolved, formative meaning, Comfort as a spokesman for "rational modernity" was on the defensive. Like Brown in support of the Group of Seven, he sought to mark a zone of artistic propriety that deserved support. Unlike Brown, however, Comfort retained the word "spiritual" without the metaphysical framework that tied the word itself and the art Il8

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Paul-Emile Borduas's Les Parachutes vegetaux (1947, 81.8 x 109.7 cm- °il on canvas, National Gallery of Canada). Acquired under McCurry in 1948, just after publication in Quebec of Refus global and mainly through the efforts of Donald Buchanan and Robert Hubbard. (©Estate of Paul-Emile Borduas / SODRAC [Montreal] 2002)

to which it ostensibly pertained to a set of transcendent principles such as those of Christian Science and theosophy. What seemed to be left for Comfort was a hodgepodge based on habit and on the adjectives of civic virtue - "individualistic, conservative, loyal" and so on - that he tied to "the characterful Canadian spirit." Comfort's views would not rate such comment but for some extenuating factors. Foremost among them is that - as the National Gallery's fourth director from 1960 to 1965 - he would bring these views to a position of authority within the Gallery itself. But in both reaching this position and occupying it, he would figure also in three controversies which accompanied the major shift of aesthetic paradigms in its history. The first of these was also the ugliest ever to involve the Gallery, and implicated Comfort in an uncanny working through of his claim that a national gallery should be "an agency of central government." The latter two - which to an extent arose from the first - simply made of the Gallery an international laughing stock. But before these scandals, there was also the dovetailing of his views with Massey's through the 1951 Royal Commission report. Of their shared Toronto milieu of the 19205 and 19305, Comfort would later say that "the community was small enough for artists, musicians, writers, and university professors to form an integral group of friends who worked together and played together ... a never-ending source of enrichment and development."68 And for this "community" in late middle age, the commission's report would be their chance, at last, to bring their evolved mixture of modernism and nationalism into the realm of official policy. Although written after two years of cross-country hearings, the report on questions of art proved similar to Massey's book, with some leavening from Comfort. This was understandable in part because, though there were five commissioners, the report was mainly authored by Massey's Saskatchewan ally Hilda Neatby, who was a history professor and devout Presbyterian but who knew little of visual art.69 Given Massey's role as art collector and National Gallery trustee, it is likely safe to infer that Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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the sections on painting and the Gallery were written by him. The report recalled Grant and Comfort in noting that Canada was "a country which boasts of freedom based on law and inspired by Christian principles."70 But following Massey's book especially, it also mixed the language of "Christian principles" with a version of Canadian art, in a way that helped fill in the floating term "spirit," which Comfort had left so foreshortened. It did so by proposing a bulwark of aestheticized and spiritualized nationalism, described by the Commission, too, as "Canadianism," against the "passive pleasures" of new technologies and, implicitly, that crisis of value cited by Wallace. Noting that, with the increase of leisure, "the work of artists, writers and musicians is now of importance to a far larger number of people than ever before," the report focused especially on the "spiritual" value of visual art. Echoing Massey's book and Comfort's study, it called the Group of Seven "the first truly Canadian school of painting" and claimed that "Canadian painting, through its honesty and its artistic value, has become above all the other arts the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit. Canadian painting has become one of the elements of our national unity, and it has the particular advantage of being able to express its message unimpeded by the barriers ... of language ... All those who came before us recognized the importance of Canadian painting both as an art and as an expression of Canadianism."71 These words indeed recalled Comfort's claim that an expanded National Gallery would contribute "to a regenerated Canadianism." But in them, too, "Canadian painting" itself is presented both as "the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit" and as "an expression of Canadianism." The parallelism is important, because it implies an even further shrinkage of the crucial - but by this time awkward - term "spirit" into a function of national feeling and national art. Shifting from a substantive which takes the adjective "Canadian" as a modifier, "spirit" is implicitly absorbed into a "Canadiam'sm" which as an objective - and object of belief in itself - recalls the terms of Massey's credo. That is to say: for both Massey and Comfort, there seemed no longer to be any metaphysical framework - such as had existed for Brown, Harris, and Grant - which could bestow transcendent meaning upon the word "spirit" apart from its affiliation with Canadian nationalism, their lip service to Christianity notwithstanding. At the same time, though, Canadian "paintings" were still expected to be special vehicles for higher principle: not the "divine Principle" of Brown and Harris, but the nationallybounded "spirit" of "Canadianism." And it was here, amid this newly opened territory of "spirit" anchored only in a still vague and undeveloped "Canadianism," that Massey's 1948 encomiums on the Group of Seven - the language of "surrender," "striving," "uncovering," "secret," "inevitable," "took possession," "alien" - began to take on new potential. For neither, in the new world of the arts that Massey proposed, would "Canadianism" be anchored to terms as pedestrian as Comfort's "conservative, loyal, independent." Instead, Massey conveniently misquoted Comfort's study. Of "world trends" toward "abstraction," Comfort wrote that "the assumption that any influence not peculiarly Canadian is inimical to the development of a genuinely Canadian 12O

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culture is fundamentally wrong."72 But the report states that "the author of one of our special studies ... remarks that international influences have not been inimical to a vigorous Canadianism."73 This fudging furthered one of the report's exercises in self-deception, that - with the absence of any mention of Borduas - played out on paper but would not stand up to time, and least of all at the National Gallery. Writing of Canadian painters' movement "away from romantic naturalism to the abstract painting which is international in vogue," the report quoted the "disinterested appreciation" of the Group of Seven's Arthur Lismer, to support the claim that such painters "are coming back to society and through their work ... associating the arts more closely with Canadian life." Such paintings, according to Lismer as quoted, "are designed to express a new Canadian spirit and are not merely a consequence of looking at the Canadian landscape."74 Precisely how non-referential abstraction linked "the arts more closely with Canadian life" - as distinct from the "American life" which was driving Abstract Expressionism - was not made clear. Instead, it seemed that the commission might be failing to distinguish between work that was "distinctively Canadian" because - as with the Group of Seven - it melded experiments of style with representation of place; and work that they wanted to believe was "distinctive because Canadian," in the sense that the art had been made in Canada. Yet much of the abstract art starting to appear in Canada in the early 19505 had little to distinguish it - in either style or subject matter - from abstract art being produced elsewhere in the industrialized world, and especially in the United States, apart from the fact that the artist held Canadian citizenship and was based in Canada. Whether this in itself would be sufficient to establish terms for a "new Canadian spirit" - as for "a vigorous Canadianism" - was in 1951 a moot question. Yet the report continued to insist, in one of its most quoted passages, that "the work with which we have been entrusted is concerned with nothing less than the spiritual foundations of our national life. Canadian achievement in every field depends mainly on the quality of the Canadian mind and spirit. This quality is determined by what Canadians think, and think about; by the books they read, the pictures they see and the programmes they hear. These things, whether we call them arts and letters or use other words to describe them, we believe to lie at the roots of our life as a nation. They are also the foundations of our national unity."75 This was a direct echo of Eric Brown's claim, in 1917, that "the national spirit of any country is more clearly discernible in its art than in any other activity, even its government." Brown, however, had gone on to say that "while forms of government change slowly and require the upheaval of the great mass of people to move them ... the most subtle changes and improvements of the national spirit are immediately imaged forth by means of art which comes freely and spontaneously to every seeker after good." Brown, that is, retained a standard of "good" which, as metaphysical, was extraneous to art and nationhood, but which, with the optimism he brought from the nineteenth century, he assumed would be "imaged forth ... spontaneously" in both. The Massey era, though it clung to the language, lacked this confidence, not only "that man is here and now guided, guarded, and governed by that one infinite divine Principle which is God," but even in the capacity of art to come "freely and Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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spontaneously." Accordingly, the report was rife with unresolved incongruities, not least in regard to the "painting" which the report alleged had "become above all the other arts the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit." "The Canadian public needs more Canadian painters and more Canadian paintings," it declared, as though sheer cumulative volume might reveal and entrench that elusive "new Canadian spirit" for - perhaps even in - all Canadians/6 Yet, having proclaimed this "need," the report had to note that "at present, unfortunately, the public appreciation [of Canadian art] is so limited that the Art Gallery of Toronto, having begun the experiment of publishing each year a large scale reproduction of the work of one Canadian painter, was forced to discontinue the venture for want of public interest and financial support."77 This was the discrepancy the report sought to correct by recommending the creation of a whole new government machinery, so as to ensure that the arts, as "the spiritual foundations of our national life," received both adequate support and adequate promotion among "the public," whose "appreciation" was still so lacking. Integral to this machinery should be, the report stated, a "Canada Council for the Arts," which would relieve the National Gallery of having to subsidize artists through purchase of their work. Instead, by funding work before it was completed, this council would actually foster the production of "more Canadian paintings," which then could - ostensibly anyway - feed both alleged public "need" and the building of "spiritual foundations," as though the two were congruent. Thus was laid the groundwork also for a new style of arts administration in Canada: no longer the inquisitive, self-sacrificing, and widely dispersed volunteers, whose briefs the Massey Commission had heard across the country and who had co-existed with the Carnegie Corporation's larger role for decades. Instead, the new bureaucracy - small at first, but steadily expansive over the next four decades - would be composed of people whose own pay cheques would depend at least in part on their making and sustaining the very case that the Royal Commission was making. And in its bluntest terms, this was, first, that "the Canadian public needs more Canadian painters and more Canadian paintings," and, second, that such paintings themselves, along with other funded artforms, would be distinctive enough not only to "express a new Canadian spirit," as Arthur Lismer put it, but to serve - in the language of the report itself - as "an expression of Canadianism." Within the framework of this machinery, too, the commission called for greater investment in the National Gallery as the primary site for the collection, display, and circulation of the "spiritual foundations," if no longer for the primary patronage of "Canadian painters." Such a site would need appropriate quarters, and the report as much as repeated Gallery annual reports in its attack on the Victoria Museum. "The present building," it stated, "is inconveniently situated, ill-arranged, and badly lighted ... it is overcrowded, and the temporary partitions together with the highly flammable materials used in the basement workshops form a serious fire hazard ... At present barely a third of the Gallery collections can be hung at one time."78 The report then made eleven recommendations toward what it called "the great and necessary work" of the National Gallery. Among the Gallery's goals, it declared, must 122

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be not just "acquisition" and "exhibition" but - consistently with the program of reaching "the public" - "active education and demonstration."79 Accordingly, it called for expansion of virtually every Gallery program: publications, reproductions, traveling exhibitions, and educational services, all "with a view to meeting the public need," as defined, of course, within and by the report itself. It urged that "staff, funds, and facilities" be enlarged; that the Gallery receive a new act guaranteeing its independence from the Department of Public Works and direct access to Treasury Board by its director; that the advisory role of an enlarged Board of Trustees be strengthened; and, not last, not least, that a custom-designed building be provided as soon as possible. "AN O V E R G R O W N S A N D W I C H SET UP ON PICKS"

The significance of the Royal Commission's report, as of Massey's own prestige by this time, is suggested by the haste with the St Laurent government moved to implement at least some of these recommendations. The National Gallery, especially, looked as though it was going to do very well. While the Canada Council for the Arts would take another six years to get under way, the Gallery received a new act of Parliament the same year, in 1951. Under this act, and as had been urged by Comfort, it was transferred to the jurisdiction of the minister of citizenship and immigration. Purchase accounts were made more flexible, and the director and Board of Trustees got more authority to negotiate with Treasury Board for acquisitions. But if paintings were indeed to be the material vehicles for the evolution of "Canadian spirit," they would need a protective shell appropriate to this stature. Toward this goal, the timing seemed especially good. The year the report was issued, with its sweeping recommendations, Jacques Greber's bird's-eye model for the national capital was also formally adopted, with plans to situate a new National Gallery southeast of the Houses of Parliament in Cartier Square. What was more, the post-war economic boom was feeding a widespread sense of expansiveness, and of confidence in technology, such as informed the St Laurent government's immense St Lawrence Seaway project just south of Ottawa, which would allow ocean-going ships to reach the Great Lakes. Nor did Louis St Laurent have King's reputation for turning temporizing itself into a lesser art form. Even as Vincent Massey himself became the first Canadian-born governor general in 1952, the St Laurent government announced a nationwide open competition for a Gallery building. The sense of triumphalism would prove short-lived. Instead, there followed the opening act in a thoroughly comic scaling back of the grandeur of the Royal Commission's quest "in the service of "Canadianism," once it began to bump against the actual circumstances of Canadian life in the early 19508. The initial atmospherics came early, in the form of the very competition for a National Gallery building, which was put into the care not of the Gallery itself but of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Almost immediately, the Institute gave its own implicit vote of no confidence in Canadians - even professionally trained ones - as capable of choosing a shell for the "expression of Canadian spirit." Instead, it announced a jury consisting of an American museum director, Alfred H. Barr of the Museum of Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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Modern Art in New York; a Finnish-born "architect of international repute" Eero Saarinen, who had lived in the United States since the age of thirteen; and a lone Canadian: John Bland, director of the School of Architecture at McGill University. This preponderance of American perspective was clearly the work of that gremlin of irony again, given that, throughout this entire period, the National Gallery of Canada itself was under H.O. McCurry refusing to purchase contemporary American art of any kind. Very likely, however, the jury itself was not so much as aware of this odd lacuna, as it went about its earnest business of sorting proposals from 104 Canadian architectural firms. These it narrowed first to six, who were asked to elaborate on their ideas, and then to three, who were asked to submit designs. In mid-1954, less than a year before McCurry's scheduled retirement, these successive exercises in submission ended with the announcement that a design by Blankstein, Greene, Russell and Associates, from Winnipeg, had been declared the winner. What, though, did "winner" mean? For the choice instantly foregrounded one of the main unresolved conundra that had lurked within the Commission's report, via the assumption that "abstract art" would be just as effective as the Group of Seven had been at expressing "Canadian spirit." "The winning model" was described in the National Gallery's 1953-54 annual report as "a simple rectangular building set upon a colonnade and standing on an impressive stone terrace" which "showed, in the jury's opinion, an extraordinary sense of unity and classic calm achieved by contemporary architectural means." This description seemed consistent enough with the Royal Commission's concerns, except for the one potential hiccup that the "unity" referred to was not preceded by the word "national." Did this matter? The annual report went on: "The scale of the structure gives a sense of power and dignity. The jury was of the opinion that the building as envisaged would weather the changing tastes of the times and be a real contribution to the architecture of the capital."80 The dilemma posed by the design, however, was that it would, if built, "contribute" in much the same way that, say, Walter Gropius' Harvard Graduate Centre had been a contribution to the architecture of Boston in 1950, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House to the architecture of Piano, Illinois in 1951. This was because in its low-slung, block-like form, the Blankstein-Greene-Russell design was clearly a cookie-cutter offspring of international modernism, as this had been carried from Germany to the United States especially by Gropius and Mies, after the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933. Nor were there grounds for surprise in this choice, for Saarinen, as an architect, had been openly influenced by Mies, just as Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, had been a backer of the Bauhaus since the early 19308 and a boon to its members when they reached the United States. Clearly, the lone Canadian on the jury, John Bland of McGill University, had been in heavy company. What, though, would be "Canadian" about this building, as a proposed fructifying vessel for "Canadian spirit" and "Canadianism"? The "international modern" style of architecture, as it had evolved during the 19408 in the United States, was mainly, to quote the critic Kathleen James, a "combination of German intellectual rigor and 124

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The Blankstein, Greene, Russell design for the National Gallery that was approved by the St Laurent government in 1954 but denounced by the public as resembling "a sandwich set up on picks" and eventually scrapped. (Government Photo Centre, National Gallery of Canada)

American know-how."81 Like Werner von Braun's space rocket program, also imported from Germany, it had by the early 19508 achieved "enormous success" in a United States whose corporations, in their surge to global dominance, were opting for precisely such no-nonsense office buildings. The importation of ideas from Europe was in the process of becoming an American export industry: in parallel with an "international modernism" in painting that just happened to be based in New York, undecorated, block-like buildings, built from structural steel and concrete, were the international mode for architecture, making for the complete eclipse of local reference points and distinctiveness. Honouring this trend, the BlanksteinGreene-Russell design seemed to have nothing distinctively "Canadian" about it at all. Instead, it exemplified the spatial "neutrality" which was also - courtesy in part to Barr's Museum of Modern Art - becoming an article of faith in the international art world, via the use of "white cubes" for works that could themselves be moved quickly by airplane from place to place, and even from country to country. Where this neutrality did prove appropriate was in its reading of the problem of site, for any notion that the building had been closely coordinated with an actual locale - as was suggested in the Gallery's annual report - verged on fantasy. The Greber plan had run into a hitch, in that the Department of National Defence still maintained "temporary" office buildings on Cartier Square and was indisposed to an immediate move. As an alternative - and in violation of the overall plan - a site on the Ottawa River near the prime minister's residence had been proposed by cabinet to the competition's finalists, along with a budget of $5,000,000. No sooner had the winner been announced, however, than this proposal was rejected by the mayor of Ottawa, Charlotte Whitton, who insisted that the Greber plan be honoured and the Gallery be housed in Cartier Square. Faced with this opposition, the government retreated, reserving twelve months both to award a contract to the architects and to finalize a location. Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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So leisurely a pace proved costly, in that it gave images of the proposed building time to circulate, and public reaction a chance to surface. Some of the comment - as might be expected at any time, for any proposal about a National Gallery - cited adverse economic conditions. But the vast bulk of letter-writers from Montreal to Manitoba had unflattering comments on the building itself. Not so impressed by warmed-over Miesian Bauhaus as the jury had been, or by the less-is-more aesthetic that came with the package, the vox populi was also not bound by High Modernism's disparagement of similes in the interest of formal "purity." Instead, letters to newspapers denounced the design as suggesting a stable, a barn, a chicken hatchery, a warehouse, "an overgrown sandwich set up on picks," and "an ugly tasteless box... suitable for an automobile storehouse or an industrial factory."82 The record suggests that, amid this riot of free association, there was almost no positive reaction from the Canadian public to the proposal, which was supposed to be speaking both to this public's "need" for art and to an ascendant "Canadianism." Given that the decision was being made in Ottawa, however, it should be no surprise either that the 1954 competition foundered less on public reaction than on the political infighting that soon escalated about a site. The minister responsible for the Gallery, as well as for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, was Jack Pickersgill, an influential holdover from the King era, as well as one of the originators of the Royal Commission. Backed by the Gallery's trustees, Pickersgill manoeuvred toward expropriation of an even more volatile site overlooking Parliament Hill and the Ottawa River for the new building.83 This was Major's Hill Park, which held the neglected ruins of the house belonging to Ottawa's founder, Colonel John By, but which since the mid-i8oos had also been the city's central green space. Pickersgill offered the carrot that, if the park could be used, construction would start within a year. But Charlotte Whitton, using the prestige of the Greber plan, joined with the National Capital Planning Committee (NCPC) toward keeping Major's Hill as parkland and reserving Cartier Square for the Gallery. Her view was that, if Pickersgill could change the plan to put the National Gallery in a place that he preferred, then she could change the plan to put a new city hall in Confederation Square near Parliament, as she preferred. For a time, it looked as though the entire Greber plan might founder on account of the National Gallery. Pickersgill, however, was in the weak position of challenging a plan approved by his own government. He backed off, though with the parting shot that, while the Gallery could have been under way quickly on Major's Hill, use of Cartier Square would delay it for at least ten years, until the Department of National Defence was able to move. Yet Mayor Whitton, and with her both the NCPC and the older Federal Development Commission, were adamant. The outcome was compromise, but of the sort that had seen the Gallery "temporarily" installed in the Victoria Museum in 1912. It was agreed by all that the Museum was inadequate and that the collection's safety was a matter of urgency. Therefore, the Gallery should have a new temporary building. The trade-off was tersely announced in February 1955, just before McCurry retired: "Agreement was reached this morning by the National Capital Planning Committee and the Trustees of the National Gallery of 126

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Canada that the gallery be housed in a new government building fronting on Elgin Street between Albert and Slater until Cartier Square becomes available ... The new building ... will be designed in such a way that it will be suitable for a Federal office building after the erection of the permanent gallery building on Cartier Square."84 Despite the Royal Commissions report, then, and its investment in the Gallery as a fructifying vessel for "Canadianism," the project of a building to house this role was soon overtaken - as it had always been under Mackenzie King - by factors that lay beyond Massey's horizons and did not respect them. The first of these was the decision by a jury of "experts" to honour the transnational aesthetic of architectural modernism, in their choice of a design that lacked symbolic reference or national distinctiveness of any kind. Curiously enough, the vox populi, in its apparent sense of a Canadian idiom that had little to do with high art, proved more discerning of this problem than did the experts, and discouraged a building that, within thirty years, would have been indistinguishable from a multitude of office blocks, government facilities, and even schools that fed off the same vocabulary. But the second factor - which trumped the first - was the project's resubordination to a grand design which antedated the report and had been produced by a French urban planner. As a result, the compromise settled on - housing of the Gallery in an office block intended ultimately for civil servants - entailed subordination of a different kind. For the time being, art's presence in the Canadian capital would be woven into the grey scale of precisely that civil-service style which had given the city its reputation as especially drab. This interweaving would prove stubborn and subtle, in that the office block soon looked as though it would be the Gallery's home not just "temporarily" but for the foreseeable future. Pickersgill, perhaps slightly bitter, revised his estimate of a tenyear delay on Cartier Square to fifteen years and then, more ominously, to "a long time." By 1958, he was saying in Parliament that "in my opinion this building will be the permanent gallery for the lifetime of everyone in this chamber."85 Meanwhile, the competition's winning plan for a "simple rectangular building which will weather the changing tastes of time" - or for "an overgrown sandwich set up on picks" - was scaled down drastically, according to the more familiar Canadian tradition of compromise. The firm of Blankstein-Greene-Russell was effectively bought off by being allowed to design the Gallery-that-would-become-an-office-block. Yet there did remain the possibility that - given the versatility of international modernism, in architecture and art alike - the adaptation would be salutary. Pickersgill - making the best of the general mess, after taking advice from Mathers and Haldenby as the architect of the new National Library - seemed to imply so, when he reported to Parliament that paintings could indeed "be seen to advantage in an office building of modern design." All that was required, he said, seeming briefly to forget that he was talking about "the spiritual foundations of our national life," was "that the ceilings would have to be somewhat higher, than in a building used for office purposes only."86 The next twenty-seven years would be allotted toward the testing of this reply, even as, more immediately, the contradictions implicit in the Royal Commission report would begin to play out in a different, and very much nastier, way. Vincent Massey and the Transformation of Rhetoric

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Alan Jarvis, the National Gallery's third director, on 3 May 1955, shortly after his appointment by the Liberal government of Louis St Laurent and his arrival back in Canada after fourteen years in England. (National Archives of Canada)

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Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

Nothing was further from our minds than the thought of suggesting standards in taste from some cultural stratosphere. - Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 7951 To be frivolous, a pine tree somewhere was vital to a Canadian painting. That period is done with now. -Alanjarvis, Director of the National Gallery, 1956

In 1955 H.O. McCurry retired after sixteen years as director of the National Gallery. When he left, he took credit for having carried through - as the annual report of 1953-54 put it - "the most outstanding single event in the history of the collection."1 This was the Gallery's purchase of "five important paintings from the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein." These had discreetly come onto the market owing to the tiny principality's impoverishment after the Second World War. As so often in his relationship with Eric Brown, McCurry had responded well to a situation not of his making. In this case, he had used his connections with the Liberal Party to lobby the St Laurent government toward its loose commitment of up to $2 million so that this opportunity might be exploited.2 As a result, the Gallery had by 1954 added two lots of Renaissance paintings to its collection and was in the process of obtaining a third. Given that among the artists represented, for the $1.5 million already spent, were Filippino Lippi, Rembrandt, and Simone Martini, as well as the lesser known Hans Memling and Bartel Beham, these acquisitions seemed sure to enhance the Gallery's prestige. They had, the annual report stated, "lifted the National Gallery of Canada from the stature of an interesting smaller collection into the company of the world's more important collections." This language was perhaps excessive, even as it implicitly disparaged the achievement of McCurry's predecessor. For McCurry was still, basically, giving material substance to the overall concept developed by Brown. Moreover, behind this rhe-

toric, McCurry had been largely unsuccessful in raising the Gallery's profile in Canadian society, or in making it seem accessible. So vulnerable was he from this angle that, on the eve of his retirement, the New York Times' Canadian edition felt at ease in being explicitly disparaging about his legacy. Under McCurry, the Times wrote in an unattributed article, the National Gallery was "a crusty, dark and forbidding institution," and downright "tomb-like ... The dedicated few who chose to venture inside roamed through gloomy galleries under the cold eyes of suspicious guards ... The gallery's good collection of lesser-known works of top Europeans was almost hidden from view by a policy of monotonous concentration on its excellent collection of Canadian works."3 This assessment, in stark contrast to the hyperbole of the annual report, seemed distinctly unkind. Granted, McCurry had almost slavishly memorialized Eric Brown's promotion of the Group of Seven, so that the place might well have seemed, to a casual visitor, to be frozen in time. And granted also that the record of exhibitions during his tenure appears in retrospect almost numbingly uninspired: repeating sequences of Canadian watercolours, children's and folk art, design displays, predictable Old Masters, and - of course - the continued production of the Canadian Group of Painters who had succeeded the Group of Seven.4 Yet it was not McCurry s fault that the painting of the 19305 and 19405 had, amid economic depression and the rise of social realism, failed to maintain the sense of naturebased originality of the 19208. Nor was it his fault that, for six years of his tenure, the world was at war, such that the Gallery's acquisitions budget dropped literally to zero between 1941 and early 1944 and remained at $15,000 for two years after that.5 And finally, it was not his doing either that, in the wake of these intrusions of wider history, the National Gallery itself was still, in 1954, housed in the same wing of the same dark building from which Brown had striven to free it. Instead, McCurry had not only exploited wartime dislocation to add to the Gallery's collection of modern European painting in ways that Brown had resisted, and to establish the Liechtenstein arrangement; he had also achieved - to a point and with outside help - what Brown had failed to do. Via the Royal Commission report, the National Gallery was going to get a new building, though naming it after the Marquis of Lome, the Gallery's informal founder in 1880, would hardly conceal the fact that the officeblock-to-be would remain just that. Why, though, was the New York Times' depiction of the National Gallery under McCurry so harsh? The answer perhaps had to do with why the article itself written, in that it also introduced McCurry's successor, the man who in May of 1955 would become the Gallery's third director. This man was Alan Hepburn Jarvis, and his four-year tenure would introduce a scale of performance that dimmed public memory of McCurry and Brown, even as it also made - paradoxically, given its brevity - for both a crucial transition in the Gallery's development and the saddest denouement in its history. Jarvis brought a grand theatricality to the National Gallery, and paradoxes of character that seemed to ask for a tragic drama to be built around them. Sadly for him, events in Canada would conspire in such an outcome. Yet Jarvis's own contribution to this momentum was foreshadowed in the very ar13O

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tide that introduced him. The New York Times sought to play down McCurry's achievement so as to emphasize Jarvis's glamour. To this end, Jarvis offered his own tactless sound bite, which seemed to vitiate entirely the rhetoric of McCurry's achievement. "You can," he told the American newspaper of record, "stump almost anyone in Canada by asking'What is the National Gallery?'" "THE HANDSOMEST MAN i HAVE EVER SEEN" Alan Jarvis took over direction of the Gallery determined to change this state of alleged invisibility. In the simplest of physical terms, nature itself seemed to have predestined him for such a role. According to Sir Kenneth Clark, then the director of Great Britain's National Gallery, Jarvis was "the handsomest man I have ever seen."6 And his physiognomy, with its suggestion of both Gregory Peck and Gary Grant, was indeed such that he had twice declined invitations to Hollywood screen tests. But Jarvis's appeal was not simply a matter of his face. When he arrived in Ottawa, at the age of thirty-eight, he also brought with him a dashing record and cosmopolitan complexity that were almost as far removed as could be imagined from McCurry's tea-totalling Christian Science. Adding to the drama of these was the fact that his own beginnings, like those of both McCurry and Brown, had been humble. Jarvis had been born in Brantford, Ontario. His father, an optometrist, had died when he was very young, and he had been raised by his mother. But he had then excelled at the University of Toronto, and, having graduated with a major in psychology and philosophy, had won a Rhodes Scholarship to study aesthetics at Oxford. This, however, had been in 1938, and the question can fairly be asked what his later achievements had been, on the basis of which he was offered the directorship of the National Gallery of Canada. Here the record becomes more murky. He had not completed his studies at Oxford but rather had, after repatriation to Canada at the start of the Second World War, taken a brief fellowship in New York City and then returned to Britain. There, during the later war years, he had become the private secretary to Sir Stafford Cripps, the British minister for aircraft production. After the war, he had continued to work for Cripps, who had become the head of the Design Council of Great Britain. Then, having produced a film on design, he had switched to working for private companies in the film industry, in the process becoming acquainted with such figures as Noel Coward, Peter Ustinov, and Laurence Olivier. He had also written a very short book on aesthetics, and had, since his student days, worked off and on as a portrait sculptor. Perhaps most incongruously, though, he was at the time of his appointment the administrator of a settlement house for boys in the London slums. According to a later article by Peter Newman, this work had followed Jarvis's conversion, in 1951, to "a doctrinaire faith" in Anglicanism. With this conversion, he had "suddenly severed his film connections, [given] his valet notice, and moved out of his plush west-end apartment into a whitewashed flat in a Chelsea barracks."7 Nowhere in this record was there any hint that Art Jarvis had ever so much as worked in an art museum, never mind directed one. Nor had he actually lived in Canada in fourteen years. And if so diverse a background could have suggested a Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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Vincent Massey in more conspicuously imperial mode, after his appointment as the first Canadian-born governor general, when he was influential in the selection of Alan Jarvis as the National Gallery's third director. (National Archives of Canada)

gifted polymath, it could just as easily have described an intellectual grasshopper, and an unstable one at that. Where, then, had the appointment come from, and why was it made? There would seem to have been a number of factors, all of which played toward a change of paradigm at the National Gallery. Foremost among them was the obvious mood for change that had been created by the death of Mackenzie King, who had for three decades shaped Ottawa as prime minister. This was supplemented by more tangible factors: the recently issued report of the Royal Commission; the new commodity-driven economy of the 19505; the widespread move toward modernist abstraction in art, and so toward greater sophistication; and the prospect, at last, of a new, modern building for the National Gallery itself. Nor was the figure of Vincent Massey irrelevant. With the moral authority of having chaired the Royal Commission, the National Gallery's Board of Trustees in Ottawa, and the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery in Britain, he had also, in 1952, gained further stature through his appointment as the first Canadian-born governor general. All of these attributes - along with his Liberal Party credentials, newly burnished with the passing of King - made him a lobbyist par excellence, especially in regard to the equally ubiquitous Jack Pickersgill, who, besides having helped set up the Royal Commission, was by 1954 the minister in St Laurent's government who would appoint a director. Given the extent to which the report had honoured "Canadian works," and Canadian paintings in particular, as pre-eminent vehicles for the development of 132

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Canadian "spirit," and given also the alleged role of the Gallery in nurturing this "spirit," there was clearly an imperative that the directorship be passed with McCurry's retirement to another Canadian. But here the paradox of Massey's own anglophilia became decisive. Behind him was a less obvious but deeply influential lobbyist, in the director of the British National Gallery, with whom Massey had worked throughout the Second World War. This was Sir Kenneth Clark, who had also assessed Eric Brown's contribution to the Gallery in an obituary for The Times of London just before the war. It was Clark's opinion, fifteen years later, that the only man "brilliant" enough to direct the National Gallery of Canada would be the cosmopolitan Canadian Alan Jarvis, whom Clark knew socially and who conveniently was living in that society which Massey himself revered. The case for Jarvis was not weakened either by the fact that a choice of new director from within the Gallery - as had taken place in 1939 - would have implied continuity with the pre-Royal Commission past that was by 1954 unwelcome almost on principle. Just as the collection was expanding with the Liechtenstein and postwar purchases, so new potential had been opened up by the commission's suggestions and by the prospect of a different building. The irony was that, for all his softness of vision, McCurry had known his limitations and had in 1947 himself involved two new figures. These were Robert Hubbard, hired as the first curator of Canadian art, and Donald Buchanan, who became founding head of a National Industrial Design Centre, set up by McCurry based on a plan sketched by Eric Brown. Both men introduced credentials long discouraged by the Gallery's sectarian underpinnings. Hubbard had been one of the first graduates of McMaster University's art history program and had done a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, with a focus on the early art of Quebec. He therefore brought an eye conditioned not by sectarian preference but by training in the Kunstgeschichte tradition developed in nineteenth-century Germany.8 Buchanan had worked with the National Film Board during the war and had been editing the magazine Canadian Art since 1944. Having written with enthusiasm about abstraction and on the intense "spiritual value" of Paul-Emile Borduas's painting, he collaborated with Hubbard to acquire the Gallery's first Borduas abstraction.9 This was Les Parachutes vegetaux, bought only months after the Refus Global was published in 1948 and even as Borduas himself was being ostracized in Duplessis's Quebec (see page 119).10 Buchanan and Hubbard were both, as Canadians familiar with the National Gallery, available as potential directors. But Hubbard, while a competent scholar, was in public anything but charismatic, and was freighted with a writing style that could best be called leaden. His doctorate was also from an American university, at a time when Brown's checklist of exclusions had mutated, courtesy of the Board of Trustees, to cover contemporary American art, ostensibly because Canadians could see it in the United States.11 Buchanan might have been a different matter. Born into a prairie newspaper family, he had been affiliated with the Gallery since the latter years of Eric Brown. Yet he was free enough of sectarian baggage that - while he retained the term "spiritual" - he could look sympathetically on the dynamism of abstraction, even as he strove to bring aesthetic principles to commercial design. He Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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wrote well and with insight, had travelled widely, and was perhaps more cognizant than anyone in the country of the Canadian art scene by virtue of his editorship of Canadian Art. With all of these qualities, he seemed to offer both the advantages of continuity and the possibility of significant change.12 Nevertheless he was - according to those who knew him - a shy man, and was hard of hearing. And given that the National Gallery had, through both Brown's and McCurry's efforts, reached a critical mass of accumulated artworks, without a machinery of publicity that could make them more widely known, these qualities seemed especially to undermine him. Almost waiting in the wings, then, was Alan Jarvis, who with his charm and looks was guaranteed to give the National Gallery the higher public profile that its material accomplishments seemed to demand. According to a 1975 CBC radio documentary on Jarvis, Kenneth Clark's suggestion was made during a transatlantic airplane flight.13 This was apt, in that the subsequent selection process proved to be an entirely top-down affair, with Massey at its centre in lobbying Pickersgill. But the physical altitude at which this suggestion was made also cast in an ironic light another of the pronouncements made by the Royal Commission that Massey had chaired. In the report's Introduction, the commission had disavowed any plan "to 'educate' the public" by "declaring what was good for them to see or hear." "Nothing was further from our minds," they wrote, "than the thought of suggesting standards in taste from some cultural stratosphere."14 These were fine words, which seemed to acknowledge the post-war ascendancy of popular culture even as they seemed to retreat from any claim of access to that "inherent Tightness of purpose" which according to Maud Brown - her husband had sought to honour via his special relationship to "Divine Mind." Yet Massey himself carried a jumbled baggage of such investments, in that for him the term "spirit" - as used by Brown and Harris to refer to supersensible order in a Canadian context - had contracted into references to a "Canadianz'sra" unhinged from such ties, apart, perhaps, from those which still inhered in the paintings of the Group of Seven. For they, according to Massey, had been taken "possession of" by "their own environment," to which they had "surrendered." Nevertheless, Massey had invested also in a personal cosmopolitanism that he identified both with the British Commonwealth and with a Bloomsbury-style aestheticism which, if it was looking tired by the 19505, still found champions in the likes of Clark. This inner conflict, too, was suggested in the commission's report. "Our hope," it stated, "is that there will be a widening opportunity for the Canadian public to enjoy works of genuine merit in all fields, but this must be a matter of their own free choice. We believe, however, that the appetite grows by eating. The best must be made available to those who wish it."15 Stated in this way - with a "but" and a "however" in successive sentences - the commission's hope begged the question of who would decide what was "best" without implicitly maintaining and suggesting "standards in taste." It also ignored the conundrum of how an interest in "the best" could be reconciled with "Canadianism." The softness of the rhetoric - as of the concept "best," insofar as the art of the 19508 was concerned - was easy to ignore on paper. But it would soon be played out, as ugly drama, through a surrogate. For insofar as the Gallery and its role 134

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in Canadian society were concerned, Alan Jarvis would prove, for the four years of his directorship, to be precisely the voice from the "cultural stratosphere," "suggest[ing] standards" that Massey and his colleagues had disavowed. Arriving back in Canada in May 1955, not just with the intention to live there for the first time since 1940 but with the mandate offered by Pickersgill to take charge of the National Gallery, Jarvis was flamboyant from the beginning. As reported by the New York Times, he declined the offer of a secure position in the civil service to go along with his title as director. Instead, he told Pickersgill that "I might run the gallery into the ground within a year, but you wouldn't be able to get rid of me."16 The gesture only thinly disguised Jarvis's confidence that no one would want to get rid of him, anointed as he was by Clark and Massey and backed by the reputation that he brought from England. His return to Canada in this way had a mythic aspect, recalling Arthurian and Mosaic motifs of the young prince raised in exile and then returning home to assume his destined role as saviour. Two years later, Peter Newman would write of him that "he has the bearing of a prince very much aware of his royal heritage," while Jarvis himself would refer, not entirely in jest, to his arrival as "my coronation."17 This hardly sounded like a man who had been living almost penitentially in "a whitewashed flat in a Chelsea barracks" and working in a settlement house for slumdwelling boys. In so remaking himself again when he got to Canada, Jarvis presented a different picture indeed from Eric Brown, who had also come from England but with a Christian Science zeal that he did not forsake in his work on a still fragile institution. Nevertheless, if Jarvis did not seem to carry over that religious sentiment which had prompted his move to the "barracks," he did bring - with his energy, looks, and connections - advantages that suited this new phase of Gallery development and the media-dominated era which was opening up in the 19505. Among his accomplishments, he could as a professional portrait sculptor boast hands-on expertise in a medium that the Gallery under Brown and McCurry had neglected. His book also stood him in good stead, in that he had written passionately of the need to foster "live personal taste and sounder judgment": just the goals the Massey commission had set in reminding Canadians that "the appetite grows by eating."18 Moreover, both his work on Stafford Cripps's Design Council and his stated hope in his 1947 book to make "machine technology serve man's deepest and most real needs" seemed poised to advance the Gallery's own Industrial Design Centre, which was run by Buchanan.19 Nor did Jarvis miss the chance to show his diplomatic skills, in that he soon made Buchanan his associate director, thus ensuring the loyalty of a man who might have resented his arrival. Vested with Jarvis's confidence, Buchanan expanded the Centre from an auxiliary enterprise that tracked mainstream developments in technology to one that built on Jarvis's own enthusiasm for understanding "the real potential of machine production." Jarvis was equally tactful in applying the expertise of Robert Hubbard. Through a rapid expansion of the Gallery's publication program, he put Hubbard to work in the writing of the first scholarly catalogue of the collection and arranged for its publication through the University of Toronto Press. Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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Under Alan Jarvis, the National Gallery quickly became a very different sort of institution from the allegedly "crusty, dark, and forbidding" place it had been under H.O. McCurry. Enjoying the post-Royal Commission confidence of the government, and given the latitude to expand the Gallery's staff and activities, he responded by putting Buchanan in charge of developing a permanent Canadian pavilion for the Venice Biennale, and by hiring, among others, Dr Nathan Stolow, who held a PHD in conservation from the University of London, to establish a new department devoted to research into artists' materials and care of paintings.20 Jarvis also had to meet the challenge of adapting the National Gallery, as it existed in the Victoria Museum, to the office block that would be called "the Lome Building," and of adapting the office block, as best he could, to the requirements of a National Gallery. Declaring with his own utmost optimism that "modern architecture should be flexible," Jarvis involved himself closely in the arrangement of the building s interior. He maintained this involvement throughout his tenure, down to such details as the installation of track lighting, the unheard-of establishment of an in-house restaurant, and the design of a wide staircase leading from the ground floor to the actual galleries.21 Where Jarvis proved especially adept, however, was in using his connections to expand the Gallery's stock of modern painting and sculpture at very reasonable cost, something that Eric Brown had proved incapable of doing because of his sectarian allegiances. The director from 1966 to 1976, Jean Sutherland Boggs, was almost breathless in retrospective praise of his purchases, in her short history of the collection published in 1971. After citing a list of Canadian acquisitions, she focused especially on the area of Jarvis's expertise: Of the non-Canadian purchases initiated in the Jarvis years, the most distinguished arose out of Jarvis's interest in modern sculpture. In 1955, the Gallery had very little beyond three Epstein bronzes and the Maillol acquired from the Vbllard heirs. From the estate of Curt Valentin, the brilliant New York dealer, Jarvis bought (for the unbelievably small sum of ($8500) a marble Arp of 1938, a Lipschitz limestone of 1917, a Despiau bronze of 1918, a Matisse head of 1927, and a small Gerhard Marcks, as well as two drawings by Klee and Picasso. From Nathan in Zurich, he acquired a superb early cast of Rodin's The Age of Bronze, in Paris a small Giacometti head, and from an English collector Henry Moore's Reclining Woman. He bought from the sculptors themselves a Zadkine bronze and Rock Drill by Epstein. The acquisition of all these works ... which were purchased for pennies, was Jarvis's great contribution to the collection.22

Yet in making this "contribution" as he did, Alan Jarvis did not just add significantly to "the collection" and energize the Gallery as an institution. He also brought a profound change of paradigm. The extent of this change can be illustrated through his own account of a purchase that, in the 1957-58 annual report, he described as the "most important ... of the year": Pablo Picasso's Le Gueridon (The Pedestal Table). Given Eric Brown's dismissal of Picasso as a painter of "peanut heads," this assessment encapsulates the difference in perspective that Jarvis introduced. He described 136

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Pablo Picasso, Le Gufridon (1919,115.3 x 73 cm. oil on canvas). Acquired for the National Gallery in 1957 by Alan Jarvis and considered by him to be the most important accession of the year. (©Estate of Pablo Picasso [Paris]/ SODRAC [Montreal] 2002)

Le Gueridon as follows: "An outstanding painting from the height of Picasso's Cubist period... it was painted in 1919 ... and represents the climax of the great development of his work which began in 1908. Picasso, as is well known, broke new ground in painting by 'breaking up' the objects in a picture (here a table top, the sea, and a beach seen through a balcony window) into their component individual planes and shapes. The resulting 'analysis' of pictorial forms provides a striking parallel to the sceptical and analytical attitude of the twentieth century mind towards all things material and physical. It is this insight into the essential character of his age that makes Picasso (in spite of some disturbing elements in his art) the leading painter of our times."23 The actual painting Le Gueridon does not immediately suggest any of the objects Jarvis claimed it represented; instead, as an assymetrical, looming, and even monstrous form, it looks - within its perfectly symmetrical frame - somewhat menacing. Certainly, as an acquisition, it repudiated Brown's case that "when all is said and done, it is loveliness of colour, proportion and character that every healthy minded person wants to enjoy". Jarvis might have added, though, that the century's "sceptical and analytical attitude" extended more widely still to all things "spiritual." And his description ofLe Gueridon itself bears analysis, as exemplary of the different criteria he brought to the assessment of acquisitions, compared to the "standards" of Brown and McCurry. Picasso, he wrote, "broke new ground in painting by'breaking Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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up' the objects in a picture ... into their component individual planes and shapes." This account cites a double "breaking," both of "new ground" and of represented objects. Yet, Jarvis claimed, this was a "breaking" that nonetheless provided "an insight into the essential character of [Picasso's] age." And it was this kind of insight that, according to Jarvis, "makes Picasso (in spite of some disturbing elements in his art) the leading painter of our times." Absent from this assessment is any notion of art as a revelation or discovery not only of beauty but of transcendent or God-given order, such as Brown had said art should be. Brown, of course, had excoriated and excluded such works as Le Gueridon, insisting that "all the paints of Picasso ... will never make peanut heads and elephantine torsos symmetrical and lovely." Jarvis, by contrast, was interested in art neither as a stimulant to "healthy-mindedness" nor as a "revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty." Rather, in emphasizing Picasso's role in breaking "new ground," he adapted the American critic Clement Greenberg's claim that the importance of the "avant-garde" in art was "to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence."24 This seemed to present "movement" - or the breaking of "new ground" - as an end in itself. Similarly, Jarvis emphasized the importance of Picasso's having given insight not into "beauty" as it accorded with transcendent order but rather into "the essential character of his age." This was an aggressively historicized view of art that clung to no basis in transcendent standards, never mind in an allegedly eternal order of "truths." And yet, embedded within this assessment, there was one standard that, for Jarvis, did seem beyond challenge, so that it assumed the status of a presupposition. "Currents of style are unpredictable," he wrote in introducing Le Gueridon, "and no one is unaffected by changes in taste; but the concept of quality is a relatively constant factor. If works of art are chosen with an eye for quality, they may go out of favour after a time, but they will always be the best of their kind." In making this statement, Jarvis also showed the influence of Greenberg, whose role as an arbiter of American taste was then at its zenith and who in 1954 had insisted bluntly that "what counts first and last in art is whether it is good or bad. Everything else is secondary."25 Like Greenberg in regard to "good," Jarvis was not - as Eric Brown had - investing the word "best" with an ethical dimension. Instead, his saying that what made Picasso "the leading painter of our times" was his "insight into the essential character of his age" suggested at least an echo of Heidegger's view that art should be a "creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection" that reveals the terms of "the historical moment."26 "THE C H I E F B Y - P R O D U C T O F T H I S S H O U L D B E I N C R E A S E D D E L I G H T " Yet behind this style of promoting change and despite the absence of "transcendent" concerns, what is clear is that Jarvis was also - as befitted his selection by Clark and Massey - the bearer of more complex standards through his experience in England. In 1947 he had published The Things We See - Inside and Out with Penguin in London. And though, at sixty-four pages, most of them with photographs, the book is 138

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short, it provides rich insights into the assumptions about art and design that he introduced to the National Gallery and left behind via purchases and programs. Like Albert Camus's character Meursault, in the novel L'Etranger of the same post-war era, Jarvis seemed deliberately to turn away - as others in Europe were doing - from the messiness of cultural memory. Unlike Meursault, however, who commits murder in his drive toward simplicity of mind, Jarvis sought to convey both optimism and a concern with pleasure, even - or perhaps especially - in the wake of the most devastating warfare the world had seen. "The purpose of this series," he wrote of his book and those it would introduce, "is to increase our understanding of the world around us by linking visual with intellectual understanding. The chief by-product of this should be increased delight. Because, day in, day out, we see so much, and because so much of what we see is familiar, our sense of awareness of our environment and our faculty of discrimination become blunted ... The result, in our personal lives, is the sad loss of hourly and daily pleasure and enjoyment of the world in which we live; its multitude of shapes, textures, colours, contours, patterns, its lights, shades and substances."27 In underwriting this concern with "delight" and with the establishment of a link between visual and intellectual understanding, Jarvis introduced his book with a quotation that itself signalled the shift of paradigm that he would bring to the National Gallery. Even George Grant, in his appeal to the past for standards, could refer to "the classical tradition" as though this were a unified entity. But Jarvis, in his opening epigram, did not quote the Plato who for Grant - as for Harris and implicitly for Brown - provided the model of "an eternal order," against which the visible world can be judged. Instead, he cited Plato's dissenting student Aristotle, whose more worldly distillation of experience into categories did not depend on such investment. "Perhaps the chief source of delight for mankind," Jarvis wrote, "is the sense of sight. As Aristotle says, 'This, most of all senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things'... The capacity for distinguishing the differences between things is discrimination and was, for Aristotle, the mark of the educated man."28 Just as the "discriminating" and "educated man" seemed to offer for Jarvis a personal model, so, too, would emphasis on "delightful" differences among visible phenomena prove crucial to his approach to art, without reference to some transcendent standard by which their value could be assessed. But Jarvis, working at that time out of his experience in Stafford Cripps's Ministry of Aircraft Production, brought yet another angle to his concern with aesthetics. By 1947, in England, the "shapes, colours, contours, patterns" that so interested him resembled increasingly those of a kaleidoscope, as an invasion of post-war consumer goods and American-inspired advertising was superimposed on the legacy of wartime anxiety, deprivation, and trauma. Jarvis did not probe at the deeper implications of this clash of worlds. Instead, his interest in the potentially "delightful" relationship between sight and environment extended freely to the ascendant technology that would so concern George Grant and - in a less sophisticated way - Vincent Massey two years later. According to Jarvis, "machine technology, properly ordered to serve man's deepest Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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and most real needs, can mean the creation of a congenial, gay and efficient environment for the great mass of people. It could bring about a cultural as well as an economic democracy; but it will not do so until we, the consumers understand the real potential of machine production and... exercise live personal taste and sounder judgment."29 Jarvis, then, saw his own role in terms of fostering such "live personal taste and sounder judgment" in his audience, in regard both to art and to everyday environment. Declaring that "beauty is one of the most obvious human needs, after love and shelter," he wrote that "there are two standards by which we can judge for ourselves: the balanced diet, and the ability to appreciate a wide variety of things." Toward developing a sense of these standards, which he identified with "mature taste," he urged that "the enjoyment of the things we see needs practice, work and effort, as with music or soccer or anything else that gives pleasure."30 But integral to this effort as a practical tool was, according to Jarvis, a particular technology. For the camera, he wrote, could contribute greatly "in helping us to see ... Whatever the objects, the camera can teach us new ways of seeing and open our eyes to an endless range of fresh experiences."31 This emphasis on "fresh experiences," as compared to "the realm of Ideas and ideals" that for Plato was "the true and genuinely real world," was also consistent with Jarvis's resort to the more worldly Aristotle. Paradoxically, however, his eagerness to apply such standards of "mature taste" to matters of design as well as to art masked a fundamental conservatism, which in turn was shaped by a cultural memory which proved selective when it did emerge. Especially in regard to modern architecture, he railed in his book against "incongruities," "muddle-headed values," "chaos," and "vulgarity," as compared to "the coherent and confident style of the i8th century." "Domestic architecture," he wrote, "reached its highest point in the i8th century, and in England. The Georgian styles achieved the final perfection of the great tradition of the architecture of humanism in buildings which ... were adapted to their site, in harmony with the landscape, and made to the measure of man himself. The country house, with its modicum of land, provided, for part of society at least, a perfectly congenial environment."32 In view of claims like these, Jarvis's hope seemed to be that, through education of the faculty of sight, and application of standards left by the eighteenth century, "man" would be able to take control of and order the unruly world being introduced by "machine technology." But they also leave the impression that, for him, the empty category "man" was itself - even in these conditions - best filled in by that model shaped by the "perfectly congenial environment" of the Georgian country house: namely, the eighteenth-century English gentleman. This, for Jarvis, seemed to provide a sort of transposable human ideal: moderate in appetites, discriminating in faculties, and appreciative of the "delights" of life. Nor can the inference be avoided that - in 1947 at any rate - he believed himself to be endowed to emulate this ideal, even in the twentieth century. Jarvis's tendency to simplify complex issues is suggested by the fact that he was urging - almost ludicrously in retrospect - his brand of practical aestheticism on a British public still recovering from the Blitz and facing 140

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the collapse of an empire, chronic rationing, and the stubborn residues of class bias. But if he was naive, or insensitive, or both regarding the plight of his adopted nation, Jarvis was also not especially probing in his thought. Instead, the very terms of his enthusiasm for the camera - that it helps the photographer to "see ... things with a new intensity and concentration on their real texture and appearance" - suggested his pending blind spot. For the camera also isolates "things" from their overall field, clarifying surface texture and surface appearance, possibly to the neglect of insight into less obvious connections among phenomena. The Canada to which Jarvis returned in May 1955 was not beset by obvious extremity, as post-war Britain was, and may to him have looked like a more open field in which to try out his ideas. Nevertheless, there were several areas in which his focus on surface to the exclusion of context - or on "the things we see" to the neglect of those we don't - would quickly congeal into thin ice indeed, so as to produce an ever more perilous base on which his work at the National Gallery proceeded. One such potential weakness was his fondness for the pedagogical pose of an eighteenthcentury Englishman, for which there was little room in a Canada turning away, in the 19508, from dependence on England. A second had to do with the implied rupture that his arrival would make in the trajectory of the National Gallery itself, as an institution which had hitherto invested not in Aristotle's empahasis on "experience" but - through Brown's Christian Science and Harris's theosophy especially - in Plato's "realm of Ideas and Ideals." And a third had to do, more subtly, with his confidence in technology as a neutral tool which could be "properly ordered to serve man's deepest and most real needs." "Machines," Jarvis wrote in The Things We See, "produce what man wants them to produce."33 This was the conventional view of technology, which assumed the existence of a "profoundly human"agency able to effect such ordering unchanged, even as its eyes were opened to "an endless range of fresh experiences." In this assessment, Jarvis paid no attention to Heidegger's and Grant's more suspicious reading of technology as a shaping "metaphysic," which has evolved in conjunction with changing frameworks of human perception and experience. Nor did he seem to remember that Canada - unlike Britain - was an enormous country knitted together and shaped by technologies of communication, which might pose their own risks if approached too casually. Subtending all of these predispositions on Jarvis's part, moreover, were significant absences. For nowhere in his rhetoric was there any mention of the term "spirit," as it had been used by Massey and Comfort for the Royal Commission or earlier by Brown and Harris. Given Jarvis's dramatic conversion to Anglicanism while in England, this seems paradoxical. But the lack of reference to religious affiliation - or to "spiritual" subtexts - after his return to Canada indeed suggests that this event may have been more drama than conversion. And still less was there, for Jarvis, any linkage of this term "spirit" to a national entity - namely Canada - as had been done by Brown and Harris according to their metaphysical agendas, and by Massey and Comfort in their investment of "Canadianism" with metaphysical qualities. Instead - and as his book anticipated - Jarvis would prove not only indifferent, but even hostile, to any schema that would rate "delight-producing phenomena" from outside Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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or above. In consequence, there hovered the question - unexamined by Massey in his enthusiasm for Jarvis - of whether such an aesthetic would lend itself to any subordination of delight-producing art to "Canadianism." As if these potential blind spots were not enough, though, there was one further danger that lurked in Jarvis's return to Canada from London and that was suggested in Kenneth Clark's further comment, expressed later in his autobiography, that Jarvis's "face was his misfortune."34 Clark was not referring to problems posed by Jarvis's attractiveness to influential women. Instead - and in an era when homosexuality was still officially a crime - Alan Jarvis was both gay and extremely goodlooking. Prior to the Second World War, this had actually stood him in good stead with what there was of a "modern" Canadian art world, in that he had been the lover of Douglas Duncan, a wealthy, eccentric bookbinder in Toronto who, after travels in Europe with Jarvis, had set himself up as a patron to "modern" artists. But while Duncan and his sister Frances had also lobbied Pickersgill on Jarvis's behalf, the relationship between the two men had cooled by the early 19505. Moreover, Duncan was in Toronto, not Ottawa. And as the political and symbolic centre of a country based on conservative principles, Ottawa neither was nor advertised itself as a place that welcomed "deviance." Instead, 19505 Ottawa was a national stage for display of the propriety long expected in Canadian public life, in both French and English. Nor had the need for affirmation of this propriety been diminished either by the extremes of the Second World War or by the destabilizing bustle of new technologies. In its determined provincialism, Ottawa could hardly have been more unlike a London whose sophistication included long-standing acceptance of private clubs for gay men. Nor would the absence of such venues only have meant, for Jarvis, a narrowed range of evening pastimes. For even as he had developed a public persona based largely on charm, wit, and insight, he had also moved for years in a semishadow world of contacts and connections that deliberately shunned publicity and did not leave written records. That this world, too, was more highly developed in England than it was in Canada at the time perhaps could go without saying, given that English all-male "public schools" had for generations fostered homosexual attachments among privileged boys. These then carried over, via mutually recognized codes, and via networks of private clubs, into the professional relationships of adulthood. Clark's comment on Jarvis's face was one such coded comment. And it is more than likely that, especially in England, some of his career moves were fostered less by sheer ability than by his capacity to cultivate useful relationships in a very private but influential subculture. Sadly for him, this subculture would prove not nearly so well developed, nor so successfully protective of its habitues, in Canada. Having arrived in Ottawa, Jarvis seems to have read its pressures quickly and to have adapted his persona ruthlessly, even cynically, in the interest of his new career. Within two months, he bought a house in the old-money district of Rockcliffe Park. Then, in July 1955, he married a recently widowed woman he had known since childhood. In becoming - according to the usual idiom - Mrs Alan Jarvis, "the former" Betty Devlin bestowed on Jarvis a veneer of heterosexual legitimacy. She also brought three children from her previous marriage, whose presence could assist his 142

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assumption of an aptly patriarchal authority. The marriage - as might have been anticipated, given the social role it played - took place in the chapel of Massey's Hart House, on the University of Toronto campus.35 In being staged there, it seemed to recall less the pious Alan Jarvis who had renounced his West End London apartment for a whitewashed barracks than the Jarvis who had studied at the same university two decades earlier. For according to his fellow student G.H. Southam, Jarvis had been, as an undergraduate, "a witty, slightly cynical god-like figure, that floated fourteen inches above everyone else on the campus."36 There is no evidence that, in so publicly remaking himself, Jarvis ever revealed his sexual preferences to his new wife or that the marriage itself was an expedient. As such, however, it did not provide the warmth and security of a home base in Ottawa, close to the Gallery itself, that had been enjoyed by Brown and McCurry. Instead, it may have helped shaped a pattern that quickly developed alongside Jarvis's work within the Victoria Museum. Less than two months after his marriage and putting to use the technology of which he spoke so highly, he embarked on a schedule of crosscountry speaking engagements. Such travels by a Gallery director had not been seen since Brown's trips to western Canada in the 19205. But unlike Maud Brown, who almost always travelled with her husband and was welcomed by him, Betty Jarvis perhaps conveniently for Jarvis - had her children to look after. With the exception of an initial joint trip to the east coast, which left behind a photograph of the two looking stony-faced while posing with New Brunswick artists, she seems not to have accompanied him. "I consider Ottawa thoroughly secondary to the country as a whole," Jarvis announced with flourish in January 1956. "My chief ambition is to bring the National Gallery to every part of Canada."37 And so he did, giving no fewer than one hundred and sixty public talks - the majority away from Ottawa - in his first year as director. Yet if this ambition built on Eric Brown's tours, and on the extension program he established during Parliament's occupation of the Victoria Museum from 1916 to 1921, there were other differences beyond the lack of a strong relationship in the background. One of these was that Brown had crossed the country on the single route available by train. Jarvis, by contrast, had available much more flexible technologies of speed, in the form of airplane and automobile, as well as train, that let him flit easily from city to city. He was articulate and photogenic, charming and urbane, and what was more, knew he was all of these. He also adopted a tone of almost evangelical authority and zeal, publicly dubbing himself "the Billy Graham of Canadian art."38 The reference to the American evangelist was dense with irony, for, like his wedding in the chapel of Hart House, it did not imply dissemination of the religious belief which, apparently, had led to the "Chelsea barracks." Instead and perhaps reflecting Jarvis's ambivalent yearnings to be popular and widely known - it seemed mainly intended to convey that what Graham was to religion, Jarvis would be to art in Canada. What the tagline hinted at also, however, was the extent to which American influence was seeping even into Jarvis's English models, with Canada apparently the place where - in his opinion - these two currents could blend constructively. The speech Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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that Jarvis delivered at each of his stops seemed to exemplify this hope. Called "Is Art Necessary?" it fed off a pun by the ubiquitous Kenneth Clark, on the American author James Thurber's book 7s Sex Necessary? What Thurber said about sex, Clark had claimed, applied to art: that it should be faced frequently and fearlessly. In his speech, Jarvis did not bother saying that the pun had come from Kenneth Clark, of whom most of his audiences would not have heard anyway.39 But a sense of the moral climate in Canada itself during this period is conveyed by the fact that the Canadian Press wire service, in reporting the speech, quoted only the claim that "art should be faced frequently and fearlessly," without so much as mentioning the reference to sex. This moral unease hints, in turn, at the scale of the challenge that Jarvis himself faced. The mid-1950s was also a period when - with the global ascendancy of the United States - artists throughout "the Free World" were turning away from local traditions to respond to the dynamism of American abstract painting. Like the speed and instability that had called such painting forth, this tendency in art made laypeople nervous, lacking grounding as it did not only in transcendent values but even in recognizable imagery. There had been little such art in Canada since Lawren Harris had arranged for works by Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, and others to be shown at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1927 and had interested the young Bertram Brooker in Kandinsky's theosophical writings at the same time.40 But even as, throughout the 19408 and into the 19508, the ageing Harris had persevered in an abstraction based on theosophy, in the United States the dominant abstract expressionism was by no means so formally bound: quite the opposite. A sense of its different priorities was conveyed in a short text called "The Sublime Is Now," published in 1948 by Barnett Newman as the most polemical of the new painters. This had been a manifesto analogous to Borduas's Refus Global of the same year, though it came from a different context. "We are creating images," Newman wrote, "whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props ... that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history."41 There was, in this manifesto's style, a self-assurance that recalled the place given to art by both Brown and Harris, within their metaphysical frameworks. Newmans claim that "the image we produce... can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history" even resembled Brown's 1921 testimonial that, in Christian Science, "we have the comforting assurance which anyone can prove in a small or great degree, that man is here and now guided, guarded, and governed by that one infinite divine Principle which is God." Yet, despite these similarities of tone, this was clearly just the sort of art which would have horrified Eric Brown, with its presumption not just that the artist "creates" but that the term "reve144

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lation" could apply to "making out of ourselves, out of our own feelings" rather than to "nature's wonderland of beauty" as "created" by God. Implicit in Newman's announcement that "we are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory... that have been the devices of Western European painting" was an American declaration of artistic independence. And so, too, in his saying that "instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making out of ourselves, out of our own feelings," there was the artistic equivalent of Horatio Alger, as the American ideal of "the selfmade man." Clearly, it was no coincidence that this commitment to "free" artistic creation out of "feelings" accompanied not only the widespread erosion of traditional belief but also the American economic and military might that gave its own sense of security, and underwrote New York's rise as the world's new art centre. Yet in the wake of such volatile language, and with the American art world being flooded by non-imagistic painting, Alan Jarvis was faced not simply with a Canada whose newspapers disallowed their readers his one-word reference to "sex." He had also inherited from McCurry a National Gallery which had not bought modern American art at all, even as Canada's younger English-speaking painters were obviously and understandably looking south for their inspiration rather than back toward a ruined Europe. So that if in Quebec, Borduas'"purely personal spiritualism" - as Donald Buchanan put it gave local guidance to the next generation of Automatistes, in English Canada, younger artists were already making an almost ritual pilgrimage to New York.42 Among the first to go had been William Ronald, who after a stay there in 1952 had begun to paint aggressive informe abstractions. Owing largely to his energy when he returned to Toronto, the loose group called Painters Eleven came together there in 1953.43 Ronald himself even saw - though mainly out of desperation in English Canada's largest city - the compatibility between non-nationalistic commerce and the new abstraction, by arranging for a display the same year of his own and his friends' paintings in the Simpson's department store, where he had worked on window displays. Abstracts at Home showcased art beside contemporary home furnishings. And unlike with the first show of the similarly named Group of Seven in 1920, there was no self-conscious focus at all on "Canada" by these painters.44 The National Gallery's informal exclusion of American art was still in place when Jarvis set off on his inaugural transCanada trip as director in September 1955. Obviously, he was not so cramped as Brown had been by metaphysics, and as McCurry had been by inertia, and he quickly began, with a purchase budget of $130,000, to buy the work of young Canadian abstractionists, if not that of the Americans whose lead they followed. During his first year, seventy-seven paintings by Canadian artists entered the collection, as against an average of fewer than twenty per year for the previous decade.45 These included eighteen landscapes and still lifes by David Milne, of whom Jarvis had been a partisan since the 19308 but who had died two years earlier. Jarvis's taste was also catholic enough to include the high realism of Alex Colville and the imagistic experiments of Paraskeva Clark. But the bulk of contemporary accessions were abstract. Along with works by Borduas and Ronald, he added paintings by the latter's Toronto colleagues Harold Town, Kazuo Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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William Ronald, The River (1956, 166.2 cm. x 213.7 cm. oil on canvas). Purchased by Alan jarvis for the National Gallery in 1957. (National Gallery of Canada. Courtesy of Helen Ronald)

Nakamura, and Tom Hodgson, by the Regina-based Roy Kiyooka, and by Jack Shadbolt, Donald Jarvis, Takao Tanabe, and B.C. Binning of Vancouver. Nor did Alan Jarvis stop at bringing this framed avalanche of colour by Canadian artists to the National Gallery. Rather, he also became/or the Canadian public, in his tour of September to December 1955, the charming face, voice, and persona that these paintings, as empty of recognizable images, clearly lacked. The importance of the role that Jarvis played in providing for Canadians not just any face, but a spectacularly handsome one to this faceless style of painting should not be underestimated. For example, here is how the Ottawa Journal reported his description, to the Ottawa Women's Canadian Club in September 1955, of how fifty paintings had been chosen for the Canadian program of a UNESCO exhibition in Europe: "Many abstract paintings will be in the show, and perhaps the Canadian public will be outraged by this modern art," Mr. Jarvis said. "But," he added, "the people in Europe want to see what is new in Canada, not the paintings they have seen before." "This leaves us open to criticism but we hope to have the sympathy of an audience such as you when we appear to kick over the traces," he said with a smile.46

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as written by a reporter named Shirley Gillespie, even began with the quoted line, by "a woman to a friend as they returned home," "My, that new man at the National Gallery is a live wire." Yet the irony of Jarvis's approach to "abstraction" was that - even as the National Gallery declined to buy the American art that was inspiring Canadian painters - so was he, in parallel with them, quietly relying on a style of assessment that had come from an American critic. In this sense, at least, he was covertly continuous with Brown and Harris, whose metaphysical backup for a self-assured tone on Canadian art had come from texts written on the American eastern seaboard by Mrs Eddy and Madame Blavatsky. For Jarvis, the model was New York's Clement Greenberg, who if less metaphysical than these two ladies, was no less self-assured. By the mid-1950s, Greenberg was relentlessly eloquent and prolific. He was also convinced that "the best art of our day tends ... to be abstract," and was determined to let Europe especially know that the United States was bringing to this art "new Vision.'"47 Crucially, though, he also sought to temper the abstract expressionists' rhetorical pretensions, declaring them "half-baked and revivalist" and going so far as to dismiss them as "pseudo-exposition, pseudo-history, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology, and - worst of all - pseudo-poetry."48 Greenberg was committed to the "avant-garde" tradition of an art that allegedly "purifies" itself through an exploration of the terms of its "medium."49 But he also, as an alternative source of "standards," claimed descent from Immanuel Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment, with its arguments for "the judgment of taste" as independent and as linked to "pleasure without interest."50 And in keeping with the alleged disinterestedness of this judgment, he also developed a remarkably bloodless model for the relationship of critic and audience to the sort of art Newman and his colleagues were producing "out of our own feelings." "Art, in my view," Greenberg wrote "explains to us what we already feel" and so "relieves us of the pressure of feeling."51 Alan Jarvis no more credited Greenberg by name in his Canadian tour than he did Kenneth Clark, nor was he a slavish disciple. But he did find refuge in Greenberg's cool, yet magisterially authoritative style, as well as in Greenberg's pronouncements. In the article "Abstract and Representational," for example, published in November !954> Greenberg had written of public suspicion about abstract art that "this dissatisfaction may be due mainly to our tardiness in getting used to a new language of painting."52 Jarvis adapted this to suit his responsibility not - as Greenberg had put it in 1939 - to "the rich and the cultivated" but to a Canadian public that was ostensibly served by the National Gallery, even as it had just grown accustomed to the Group of Seven.53 "Artists are becoming less and less concerned with merely depicting photographic scenes," he said in Montreal in 1955, recalling Eric Brown's style of reply in 1926 to public scepticism about the Group. But he then as much as paraphrased Greenberg's text of a year earlier. "They are using their new patterns and techniques to show us themselves and their own impressions. I can understand what they are saying because I have exposed my eyes to these new images. To me it's a familiar language. But I think it's extremely rude for some people to say it's all nonsense when they haven't taken the time to understand."54 Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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Greenberg, however, as the critic who in 1961 would be called the "brigadier general" among abstract artists, left no doubt that he was "used to a new language of painting."55 Accordingly, he could write not only that "what counts first and last in art is whether it is good or bad," but also that "nineteen out of twenty abstract paintings or pieces of sculpture are bad."56 Jarvis seized on this style of assessment, too, as he made his way west across Canada in late 1955, repeatedly declaring a "policy" that "we will buy as many works by our own artists as measure up to international standards."57 He did not mention either that these "standards" had, for abstract art, been mainly set in New York, but he did leave behind a succession of pithy quotes which suggest his curious attempt, as a stratospheric populist, to initiate the Canadian public into the same style of criticism. "There are a lot of pseudo-Borduas," he announced in London, Ontario, after he had left Montreal, "just as there have been many pseudo-Picassos. They are extremely empty and boring and I don't blame the public when it objects to this sort of thing."58 Similarly, at a University of Manitoba symposium in Winnipeg, he told an audience that "an artist who tries to express something and fails is producing gobbledegook and it has become fashionable to accept this. We must encourage the artist who is genuinely trying to experiment, but we must complain about the cliche ...With a good deal of modem painting it is time someone said the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Much of it is as empty and shallow as it looks."59 Alongside these comments about "derivative" abstraction, Jarvis claimed, while in the west, that "the artistic achievement" there was "far better than in the east," and that "there are more first-class artists to the square mile in British Columbia than any place I've been."60 Nevertheless, his ongoing remarks about abstraction as "what is new in Canada" breathe a subtext of fatigue: in how many galleries and studios across the country, after all, had he seen canvases that repeated the by this time famous riffs of New York abstract expressionists, whose works, paradoxically, were still not available at the National Gallery? "It puts me in an embarrassing position," he said in Calgary. "There one is, defending abstract art as such whereas all one wants to do is defend the few good abstract painters."61 Yet central to Jarvis's dilemma was that many of "the few good abstract painters" lived in New York, and he was neither looking at nor assessing their work, which by this time was circulating widely in photographed reproduction. He did not publicly raise the odd situation he had inherited at the National Gallery, whereby this work in particular had been left out of the collection. Nor did he ask whether its continued exclusion might risk Canadian abstract art's becoming there - even as it "measure[d] up to international standards" set in New York - not a distinctively Canadian alternative to art produced in the United States but merely a substitute for it. Instead of taking on these tough questions, he perhaps understandably turned to easy advantage the face that Kenneth Clark would declare was his "misfortune," reassuringly presenting himself, at stop after stop, not simply as the charming personification of the National Gallery but as the authoritative sifter of the "empty" from the "good." So that even as he promoted - as he had in his book - the importance of education in how to "see," and of "informed public opinion" as "one of the best things to keep the National Gallery on 148

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its toes," he did so out of the paradigm of his own "eye for quality" as the arbiter to which his audiences could safely look amid the changes of the 1950S.62 So activist a public approach to art had not been seen since the Browns' tours of the 19205. But Jarvis was also implicitly going further than Eric Brown ever had. This was because the atmospherics surrounding his tours - the proselytizing zeal, the comparison with Billy Graham, the claim of a special "eye for quality," the charisma, even the descent from the skies via airplane - suggest that the cosmopolitan Alan Jarvis, as he penetrated ever farther into the wintry landscapes of western Canada, was presuming not just to give his own face to the faceless phenomenon of abstract art. They suggest that the man who had been described, when an undergraduate, as a "witty, slightly cynical god-like figure," was morphing - perhaps by way of overcompensation amid a landscape so different from that of London, England - into a figure almost Christ-like, dropping to earth in selected places to dispense the Word on Art. "Nothing was further from our minds," the Royal Commission had declared in 1951, "than the thought of suggesting standards in taste from some cultural stratosphere." Jarvis's inaugural tour invested this declaration with outrageous irony, even as it gave a bizarre twist to the Gallery's own long connection with Christian Science. For in presuming to become, in effect, the Art Word made Flesh, Jarvis suggested - even without a metaphysical system - that an institution steeped for decades in the authority of metaphysical investment would not so easily shed such baggage. Yet neither would Jarvis ever, in the course of his tenure, take up the challenge of changing Gallery policy to allow for the purchase of American abstract art, in a way that the Canadian versions of such art might be displayed in direct comparison, facilitating an answer to the question of whether there was indeed anything distinctively "Canadian" in Canadian abstraction. Instead, he was present at the Board of Trustees meeting on 23 and 24 May 1956 when, only a few months after his tour, the informal practice of excluding contemporary American art was made into formal policy. The minutes are unhelpful as to who said what, but the decision was firm and made in the context of a report on gaps in the collection by that same W.G. Constable who had assessed it for Eric Brown in 1931. "The question of a collection of contemporary United States painting was discussed," the minutes read, "and it was agreed that while a collection was desirable, it was not recommended unless we could have a large and representative collection. It was pointed out the large American museums have good collections of United States painting as this was their own particular field. It was also noted that there are very few Canadian paintings in the United States galleries and museums."63 Given mid-1950s differences in scale and dynamism, the notion of an AmericanCanadian reciprocality in modern art was by this time comical, so that this last remark hints of sour-grapes, even as it recalls Lawren Harris's 1928 hope that "the spiritual flow from the replenishing North" would, through the Canadian artist, "shed clarity into the growing race of America." But perhaps, in this very echo, its appearance in the record was no coincidence. For among the eight board members present at this crucial meeting was the septuagenarian Harris himself, as far and away the most illustrious and venerable of the Gallery's trustees. Did the sheer Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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weight of Harris's authority make for an influence that, in this case, was not broad and implicit but rather direct and tightly focused? Whatever the answer, there were few other instances in the Gallery's history where a board decision made for such long-term impact, in that, as a result of it, just a single work by a contemporary American artist would enter the National Gallery's collection in the following decade: a watercolour by Sam Francis.64 Nor does there appear to be any evidence that Jarvis himself strove to change this policy with the zeal he used to promote his "standards" outside Ottawa. Instead, there are hints that he was willing to prepare for and collude in it. For in rejecting the "suggestion that the National Gallery be strictly a Canadian show case," Jarvis had already declared, in December 1955, that "European art is necessary as a rule stick to guide Canadian artists. Similarly it would be as wrong as teaching nothing but Canadian history in schools. Canadian art must be judged by the same rigorous standards as set on the world at large."65 The analogy itself was flawed, for to teach European history in schools is not to suggest that it serve as "rule stick" to Canadians. But the choice of Europe "as a rule stick" perhaps signalled Jarvis s own ambivalence about the art world's post-war shift of centre, toward a New York whose own "standards" were being set by an especially high-handed critic, whom he often echoed without attribution. Moreover, by hearkening back in time in this way, he was also insulating himself at a once-remove from challenges to "standards" that had been made transatlantically already, by artforms that blurred the boundaries between high and low culture, and between art object and commodity: by artforms, that is, which questioned the category "art." A peculiar lapse in The Things We See: Inside and Out had prefigured this tendency toward what was again, at bottom, aesthetic conservatism. In the book's section on "Shape and Form," Jarvis had compared photographs of the female torso as simplified in a dressmaker's model and as modelled by a classical Greek sculptor. "One is ugly and meaningless," he wrote, "the other beautiful and meaningful."66 As with Eric Brown's dissociation from the radical currents of the early century, this assertion that the dressmaker's dummy was "ugly and meaningless" suggested an odd indifference to shifting criteria in twentieth century art. By 1947, the year of the book's publication, Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades" - in the form of a signed urinal and a stool-mounted bicycle wheel, to name only two - were already thirty years old. They were also known - though in limited circles - as having challenged the fixed distinction between the "meaningless" and "meaningful" that Jarvis promoted, as well as the expectations that viewers brought to art objects and their contexts. The dressmaker's model that he chose as an example could itself have been one of the "readymades." But instead of suggesting how, as a mass-produced object that bespeaks anonymity, it might shape both an art and an art context equal to the society which produced it - and therefore change "standards" - he opted simply for dismissal. Of course, few of Jarvis's listeners on his Canadian tour would have heard of Duchamp and his ready-mades, any more than Brown's audiences had heard of the Picasso whom he accused of painting "peanut-heads." Nevertheless, by 1955, Duchamp himself was living in New York, and the transatlantic ferment that had 150

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begun with the pre-war flight of European artists from fascism had already consigned Europe's role as a separate "rule stick" for contemporary art to the past. Jarvis's sleight-of-hand with this reference to Europe, however, only anticipated the more significant move of a few months later. Was the trick implied in the formal exclusion of contemporary American art deliberate, coincidental, or a not-quiteconscious outcome of collective anxiety? The Massey commission, in 1951, had declared that "Canadian painting, through its honesty and its artistic value, has become above all the other arts the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit." It had also approvingly quoted Arthur Lismer s claim that Canadian variants on "the abstract painting which is international in vogue" were "designed to express a new Canadian spirit." The question must be asked as to whether the National Gallery's own denial of immediate terms for comparison, through a refusal to buy American art in the same style, was also a means of avoiding the challenge, and of discouraging an informed decision by Canadians themselves, as to whether there was, indeed, anything "distinctively Canadian" about this work at all. "GO B A C K TO Y O U R N E E D L E P O I N T

..."

The irony, then, was that under the most conspicuously cosmopolitan director in its history, the National Gallery became the equivalent of a national customs post for art, excluding those forms that might pose the greatest challenge to the alleged uniqueness of the home-grown product. In colluding toward the establishment of this aesthetic cordon sanitaire even as he promoted Canadian "abstraction" however, Alan Jarvis was on thinner ice than Eric Brown had been in his exclusion of "futurism" from the National Gallery, even as he had clashed with the Royal Canadian Academy over the Group of Seven. Partly, this was because Canadian artists themselves were not so coy about admitting American influence: nine of the Painters Eleven would even pay Clement Greenberg's fare to Toronto, in 1957, so he could comment on their work, while Barnett Newman would be invited to teach at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan in 1959.6/ But Jarvis's immediate problem was not with the artists, who actually stood to benefit from the National Gallery's exclusion, on a limited budget, of American art that resembled their own. Rather, it was with the Canadian public that he had ambivalently courted in his cross-country tour. For if he had been insensitive in his book about the trauma that the Second World War, had inflicted on his British audience, he seemed equally insensitive about the influence that his own flamboyant personality had on shaping, intimidating, and perhaps even silencing - to his face - his audiences in Canada. Arguably, the technologies on which he relied to carry him quickly from place to place only added to this insensitivity, in that they allowed him to perform while not obliging him to sustain any intimacy with his audiences. But as early as 1956, the sensibility shaped by these technologies of speed was itself betrayed by a different kind of technology over which Jarvis had claimed "man" could and should enjoy mastery. Back in Ottawa after his tour of Canada, he gave an interview to Weekend Magazine which was within days transmitted to the places that Jarvis himself had visited. Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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Initially, his comments had mainly to do with art itself and implied a thoughtfulness within the context of both his trip and his earlier book. "There is a widespread mistakenness that art must be beautiful," he said "But much of the great art of the past and the present is about unpleasant things. One of Rembrandt's greatest paintings is an ox's carcass, flayed and obliterated. Yet it is regarded as one of the greatest paintings of all time. Art is not beauty. It should move you, even upset you, bringing anger or tears. Instead, many people expect from art something comforting, cosy and pretty."68 This prescription that art "should move you, even upset you, bringing anger or tears" broke clearly with Brown's view that "whatever else art can be, it can be nothing greater than a revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty." It even implied development from Jarvis's own earlier equation between the "beautiful" and the "meaningful," as well as from Greenberg's claim that art "relieves us of the pressure of feeling." Nevertheless, Jarvis was by this time also a public figure, and his claim that "many people expect from art something comforting, cosy and pretty" hinted that he might indeed be about to generalize about the actual Canadians with whom he had come into contact. And sure enough, he began to cite more specific impressions from across the country, which had perhaps been kept at bay by his prepared text, his congenial persona, and even the presence of an audience. With these comments, he managed to sound stratospheric, without sounding either populist or conciliatory, so that, as the self-assured arbiter of taste that he clearly wanted to be, he projected contempt. There was, he said, "a general poverty in the Maritimes of social and cultural life," while in Toronto and Montreal "cultural interest" was largely a matter of "social affectation" and "snobbery," such that "the rich" had in each place provided "a pocket-grade museum." Saint John, New Brunswick, he went on, "is probably one of the ugliest cities in the world," while Saskatchewan's new Provincial Museum "was the silliest creation I have ever laid eyes on - a modern pomposity. It is a contemporary mockery of what was fatuous enough when they built the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts." His most extreme comment was reserved for "liberated housewives" who aspired to paint. "They are doing tiny, piddling, fiddling little things," he said. "They are not really painting. They are doing needlepoint. One should charitably say to them, 'Look, stop it. Go back to your needlepoint or relax and play bridge.'" Given that Jarvis's audiences had been - if the photographic record is indicative largely composed of "housewives," whose "sympathy" he had himself sought with his "smile" and with the hint that the National Gallery was going to "appear to kick over the traces," this remark was worse than undiplomatic. It could be and was read as a betrayal. The "liberated housewives" comment prompted negative editorials, in which Jarvis was called in Toronto, sarcastically, "a man of courage," and urged in Coburg to "apply some of that intelligence you are said to possess." Nor did his architectural assessments fare better. The mayor of Halifax denounced him as "an artistic ignoramus who obviously painted his verbal scene while blindfolded," while the Halifax Chronicle-Herald said, perhaps most ominously, that Jarvis's assessment was

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"deeply disturbing" and "shakes the faith of many Maritimers in those who are assigned to head up our national institutions." The Saskatchewan museum, too, had its defenders. Premier Tommy Douglas replied that "most modern paintings look like scrambled eggs and if Mr. Jarvis wants the building to look like that I think I'd prefer the museum the way it is." Perhaps most curiously, the provincial treasurer, C.M. Fines, claimed that "Governor General Vincent Massey had said the museum was one of the most beautiful he'd seen."69 Such an implied difference of opinion with his former sponsor suggests the extent to which Jarvis was courting estrangement not just from the Canadian public but from his potential protectors. Not only was he tactlessly doing what the Royal Commission under Massey had said it would not do, "suggesting standards in taste from some cultural stratosphere"; his reading of recent Canadian art history was to say the least - drastically different from the norm which had been handed down by Brown and Harris, and even by Massey and Comfort. "In the wake of the Group of Seven," he said, also in 1956," we had quite a spell of the spurious. To be frivolous, a pine tree somewhere was vital to a Canadian painting. That period is done with now. Only honest art forms will be tolerated by the Canadian public. The time is long past to plead 'Canada is a young country.'"70 With remarks such as this, Jarvis's cultivation of "the Canadian public" shaded into sheer invention. The "pine tree" was obviously Tom Thomsons The Jack Pine, the inspirational icon for the Group of Seven that had been painted the year the artist died in 1917, and that Eric Brown, calling it "the apogee of Thomson's art," had bought for the National Gallery the next year. And if it had it served as the basis for Brown's own tortured meditation on Thomson's "genius," it had also since become a touchstone for the "revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty," among a "Canadian public" that was ambivalently becoming more urban. As though to emphasize his point, however, Jarvis closed the Gallery's third floor "Tom Thomson room" to allow for ten new employees, even as in other rooms he pursued "honest art forms" that could not be cross-referenced with similar forms in the United States. If this was a cultivation of "Canadian spirit" or "Canadianism" through "Canadian painting," it was cultivation only half-heartedly and by default, and Jarvis even went so far, in his defence of "international standards," as to say during his 1955 tour that "when I am asked how much ... we spend on Canadian art, I would always like to say none."71 What Jarvis meant was that "Canadian art" should not be judged by different, more indulgent standards than any other art. But the declaration itself had a tone of patronizing condescension. The further irony in all of this was that Vincent Massey himself had for years, behind the screen of his nationalist rhetoric, been affecting the pose of an eighteenth-century English country gentleman as an ideal. Sheltered by his family's wealth, he maintained a pseudoEnglish country house near Port Hope throughout Jarvis's tenure. Jarvis had no such protection, yet went before the Canadian people as the walking, talking bearer of a stratospheric pose, after his vanity had been indulged through the very offer of the directorship. Once so exposed he became, amid the changing currents of Canadian

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politics, an ungrounded lightning rod for the discharge of tensions that, throughout the decade, had been building up behind the scenes. In offending "liberated housewives," Jarvis was alienating an art-appreciative constituency that was already in a tiny minority. Behind them, silently anxious about the speed and scale of change in the 19505, were the enfranchised millions about whom Jarvis seemed to know - and care - nothing. A sequence of images, involving the very technology that Jarvis believed could be made to "serve man's needs," succinctly illustrates the precipice that he soon approached. In 1957-58 he worked with the CBC on a television series called - like his book - The Things We See. Filmed in black and white, the thirteen half-hour episodes were hosted by Jarvis himself and made, on the whole, for another of his admirable attempts to broaden art's audience. The goal in the series, he announced in the opening episode, was to acquaint Canadians with the difference between "just looking around and really seeing."72 But informing this goal was also Jarvis's irrepressible hedonism, as conveyed by a figure who, on camera, looked like Gregory Peck, with a slight English accent. "The role of the artist is not so much to uplift us," he said in the final episode, "as to give us the joy of seeing our world with fresh eyes. Learning to see the way artists see does really give one an enormous amount of fun."73 How this link between art and "fun" pertained to his statement a year earlier that art "should move you, even upset you, bringing anger or tears" Jarvis did not make clear. Instead, it hinted at his own seduction by television's fondness for catchy sound bites. He also put to quick use the period's love affair with gadgets, and especially with snapshot photography, with a reference to artists themselves as "people with built-in viewfinders." Notwithstanding Jarvis's enthusiasm for machines, however, one of the series' most revealing moments was a result of early television's incorporation of blunders, stemming from the cost of retakes using 16 mm. film. Like Eric Brown's much crossed-out manuscript on Tom Thomson, this moment exposes unresolved complexity when the goal was to present a smooth surface. Holding up a camera in the very first episode, the ghostly image of Alan Jarvis develops the analogy to the visual framing that is done by artists. "When you look through this viewfinder," he says, "you're making a picture. We've all had the experience of doing this either well or badly. You know the kind of amateur snapshot that cuts off the top of somebody's head. You lose the whole point of the picture you thought you were taking."74 Jarvis was obviously trying, in this sequence, to be accessible. Yet, despite this nod to populism in the making of art, something very strange happened to his face as he spoke these words, and was recorded on film. Just before he says the word "amateur," his photographed features - for a fraction of a second - undergo contortion. The benefit of slow-motion replay shows that, in the brief period of his speaking this word, the mouth and eyes of the urbane commentator have twisted into a grimace of contempt that verges on hatred, before reverting to congeniality. This momentary tic - unforgettable once stretched into its sequence of frames - might be of little consequence, did it not provide a visual clue to what would soon become the tragedy of Alan Jarvis in his directorship of the National Gallery, and to the contradictions 154

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The complex layers of Alan Jarvis: a short sequence from the first episode of his television series The Things We See, done for the CBC in 1958, in which his facial expression changes as he says the word "amateurs." (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/National Gallery of Canada)

that informed the Gallery's own development during the 19505 in conjunction with this tragedy. In his public persona, Jarvis was charismatic, intelligent, and eager to reach a wide audience, as well as international in his leanings. Nevertheless, there was also a private condescension that, whether toward "liberated housewives" or "amateurs," would very soon put him on a collision course with the marriage between art and a democratic nation-state, that the Royal Commission had hoped to foster in the interest of Canadian "identity."75 Alan Jarvis as "the Billy Graham of Canadian Art"

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The Lome Building, Elgin Street, Ottawa. Completed in 1960, it was the National Gallery's home for the next twenty-eight years and reflected the adaptation of "international modernist" style to suit the priorities of the civil service in Ottawa. (National Gallery of Canada)

9

A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

Both of these men have been dealing with the National Gallery for over 25 years, and they have naturally assumed that if the Director asks them to negotiate for a picture, that he has full Government support. - Letter from Alan Jarvis to the Honourable E.D. Fulton, 12 May 1958 The Chrysler affair was a pathetic tale of ignorance, official lies and irresponsibility... Gallery Director Charles Comfort's flip defense of the Chrysler fakes - "It's the best publicity the Gallery ever had"- placed this important national institution in the same category as a freak show. - Paul Duval, Toronto Telegram, 1962

With his emphasis on a unitary standard of "quality," Alan Jarvis was not simply showing the influence of Clement Greenberg's style of judging art. More implicitly, he was also honouring the subtext in Greenberg's project that aestheticized and legitimated the post-war flow of American capital by discouraging the nurturing of "national" cultures. Yet, almost in spite of himself, Jarvis hinted publicly at the shadow side of this legitimation. In March 1956 the Ottawa Citizen wrote that "Mr. Jarvis wants to make the National Gallery one of the worlds great collections, instead of something 'small but interesting.' To acquire such treasures as older nations have, sizeable sums must at times be paid."1 This language of "treasures" and "great collections" reflected the expansive, progress-oriented rhetoric of the time, which was tied to such megaprojects as the building of the St Lawrence Seaway only eighty kilometres to the south. But it also hints that, amid an alleged scepticism which was ascribed by Jarvis to Picasso and the century generally, there remained a very real will to expansion and accumulation that was filling the vacuum left by the retreat of traditional Judaeo-Christian values during the 19508.

"l A M L O O K E D U P O N W I T H T R E M E N D O U S E N V Y "

In a 1957 version of the speech that he carried with him across the country, Jarvis alluded to his own ambitions for the Gallery in a way that did not just seem to buy into this ascendancy but that recalled something much more ancient and ominous. This was the classical Greek concept of hubris, or overreaching pride, that lurked within his emulation less of Billy Graham than of a stratospheric Art Savior figure. Speaking in the incongruous but sheltered context of the Royal Military College in Kingston, he declared of the Gallery itself that "we are very rich and therefore we are not only the most generous patron of Canadian painting but we are the most powerful." Of the Gallery's relationship to Parliament he said that "I have had, or my trustees have had, $1,370,000 to spend on ... buying pictures, in the period since the 2nd of May 1955 when I came back from London. If that doesn't sound like an astonishing amount of money, I will make it sound more astonishing in a moment... I can go to the government, as I did last Spring, and say that I want $855,000 with which to buy four pictures, all quite small ones too, and get it through the House of Commons." Finally, of his own stature, he declared that"! am one of the most envied gallery directors in the whole world. When I go to conventions in Venice, or Switzerland, or Washington, I am looked upon with tremendous envy."2 With such statements as these, the stage was set for the unfolding of a drama that was not very "modern" at all, but that - amid a context where technological expansion was on collision course with many Canadians' hopes for stability - itself reached back to Greek tragedy. Both Jarvis's boastfulness and his provocations, as well as such replies as the label of "artistic ignoramus" given him by the mayor of Halifax, might have counted for little had the Liberals who appointed him stayed in power. In 1957, however, after twenty-two years of Liberal rule, the Progressive Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker formed a minority government, which in April of 1958 became a sweeping majority. Diefenbaker's Conservatives - many of them like their leader from rural Canada - had no use for Jarvis's urbane wit, or for his rumoured homosexuality, or for his stated preference to buy "the best" for the Gallery, regardless of whether or not it was Canadian. Diefenbaker himself had, while in opposition, subsumed art within his Canada-first rhetoric and criticized Jarvis's internationalism. "With all due regard to the benefits that flow from viewing art for art's sake and pictures that are painted outside our country," he said in Parliament on 22 March 1956, "I feel that first and foremost the national gallery in the capital city should be one to encourage, develop and expand Canadian art."3 It is at least possible that the trustees' decision of two months later, formally to exclude contemporary American art from the collection, was a gesture of concession to this point of view. Nevertheless, Jarvis seems quickly to have forgotten the rebukes that followed upon his Weekend Magazine interview. "The Canadian public is overwhelmingly in favour of art," he declared in New Brunswick in late April 1957, less than two months before the first Conservative victory. "We have now come to the age of culture." Nor was he content with simply announcing that this "age" had arrived, for he went on to repudiate directly Diefenbaker's priorities. "It would be a disaster if we were told we had to spend a certain amount on Canadian art each year," he was 158

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quoted as saying. "We would have to buy second rate paintings, which would be contempt for the Canadian artist."4 Jarvis was indeed inching toward disaster, but not of the kind he anticipated. The election of Diefenbaker's minority government should surely have alerted him to the possibility that Canada might not have arrived so soon at "the age of culture." It might even have offered the hint that - given such governments' instability - the minority might soon become a majority. Yet instead of heeding this warning, Alan Jarvis seemed most intent upon showing that, for all his concern with "the things we see," his own alleged eye for aesthetic "quality" was blind to questions of wider context, and especially to those of Canadian electoral politics. The great irony was that the confidence in his "mature taste," which Jarvis believed enabled him to recognize "quality," and which also informed his public highhandedness, was what soon let him down most badly. He had himself been responsible for wrapping up the third Liechtenstein transaction, which involved paintings by JeanBaptiste-Simeon Chardin, Peter Paul Rubens, and Simone Martini for $885,000. This was the expenditure to which he referred - along with, in passing, the parliamentary vote that had been needed to obtain them - in his speech at the Royal Military College. The funds, however, had been negotiated by McCurry, with a Liberal cabinet willing, if not eager, to seize the moment offered by the breakup of the collection. For, undoubtedly, the conventional aesthetic merits of the Liechtenstein paintings surpassed those of the "good things without great names" which Eric Brown in the 19205 said most of his purchases had to be on a limited budget. It was in attempting not simply to carry on this inherited project but to expand it, that Alan Jarvis got caught in a trap that closed on him from several sides. As director, he wanted to leave the stamp of his own "eye for quality" as much on the Gallery's collection of Old Masters as on its contemporary collection. And even as the political sea change was occurring around him, he began negotiations outside the Liechtenstein collection for a fourth set of European purchases. Throughout 1957, he was courted by Dr Hans Schaeffer of New York, on behalf of Baron Gerhard von Pollnitz of Bavaria, who owned - Schaeffer claimed - a "truly great and magnificent" painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "which only came to light recently."5 Landscape with Christ Appearing to the Apostles was presented as the earliest Bruegel to bear a dated signature.6 That the provenance was unknown for its alleged first century, between 1553 and 1679, seemed to trouble neither Jarvis nor his chief curator, Robert Hubbard, nor the curator of prints and drawings, Kathleen Fenwick, who, hired by Eric Brown, had been contributing her expertise since 1928. Nor did the fact that even the limited comment on it questioned whether Bruegel could have painted the figures.7 Jarvis had often spoken of the difficulty of prying "quality" paintings out of tourism-conscious European countries. Most Bruegels were already in state collections, and the Gallery was weak in sixteenth-century Dutch painting. Moreover, Schaeffer said, "a private Swiss collector" was "competing for the purchase of the painting," even as von Pollnitz had stated his preference that the painting go to the National Gallery "for Canadian dollars to invest in Canada."8 Jarvis was at the same time negotiating with the dealer Geoffrey Agnew of New York for another painting from the Liechtenstein collection, a Madonna of the A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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Annunciation by the fourteenth-century Italian monk Lorenzo Monaco. In doing so, he acted upon his belief that there remained $441,000 from the allocation made by the Liberals for the Liechtenstein paintings. Circumstances were then muddied, after Diefenbaker's minority victory, by the entry of a new - and acting - minister of immigration and citizenship, E.D. Fulton, who was himself facing the challenge of his first portfolio, as well as of being part of the first Conservative government since the early 19305. And neither, it would seem, did Jarvis or the trustees examine the precise mechanics of how earlier payments for Liechtenstein paintings had been approved not simply through the Liberal cabinet, but through parliamentary votes as recommended by cabinet and as passed by a Liberal-dominated House of Commons. The decision to pursue purchase of the alleged Bruegel painting was taken at a meeting of the Gallery's Board of Trustees on 29 January 1958. As a result, Fulton was asked by the board to forward a memorandum to cabinet, asking whether the $441,000 allegedly left from "the sum of $2,000,000 appropriated for the purchase of paintings from the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein ... could be applied to the purchase of works of comparable quality and importance."9 The minister was also "asked to make a submission to the Treasury Board requesting permission for the Trustees to negotiate for the purchase of this painting forthwith." Before decisions could be made, however, the 1958 election was called, and Jarvis had to inform both "Hans" and "Geoffrey" that the purchases would have to wait until the outcome was known on the first of April. The chumminess of Jarvis's letters to the dealers hints at the gulf between the two worlds he was trying to straddle at the National Gallery: on the one hand, the international art world stratosphere, whose few prestigious occupants made a snobbery out of the ease with which they converted even devotional artworks into large sums of money; and on the other, a Canada that had just elected a man who prided himself on his "prairie populism," his nationalism, and his homespun values. That Jarvis - still, perhaps, on some level the middle-class boy from Brantford - desperately wanted to keep his ties with the former, even as he used these to embellish his relationship with the latter, is suggested by the almost unctuous intimacy of his correspondence. "My dear Geoffrey," he wrote to Agnew in February 1958, after the dropping of writs for the election. "As you will have gathered from my cable, the situation here is quite simple, namely nothing is being decided until after the first of April, and I am afraid, therefore we must simply risk losing the Monaco. The Trustees are perfectly aware of the importance of this picture, and we would very much like to obtain it but we are, alas, powerless for the time being." At the same time, he wrote to "Hans," assuring him that "we are still most anxious to try to obtain [the Bruegel painting] when the political situation clears up."10 Jarvis's reference to "the political situation" as though it were merely an awkward blemish that would "clear up" gives a sense of how oblivious he was to the perils that had been created for his institution by a change of government away from the party that had been in office for over two decades. For this "situation" was anything but "quite simple," just as Jarvis's concluding flourish that "we are, alas, powerless for the time being" would prove to be true in ways he did not imagine. Initially, the sweep16O

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ing electoral victory of Diefenbaker's Conservatives was greeted "with great satisfaction" by the dealers, especially Schaeffer, because a majority government implied decisiveness. And shortly after the election, in mid-April, Fulton indeed advised Jarvis and the board that he was "willing to re-submit their request for authorization to negotiate for the purchase of the Pieter Bruegel painting."11 Jarvis, speaking for the board, then conveyed "the following resolution" to Fulton: "It was proposed by Mr. John MacAulay, QC... that in resubmitting the request for authorization to negotiate for the purchase of the Bruegel... Cabinet be asked if the Bruegel can be bought for $350,000 or less, could the Trustees enter into further negotiation with the Prince of Liechtenstein, through Messrs. Agnew of London, for the purchase of a painting by Lorenzo Monaco at a price not to exceed $95,000. At these prices both paintings would come within the sum remaining in the Liechtenstein account."12 Again speaking as the voice of the trustees, Jarvis added that the Monaco was "the only painting" that the prince had "been willing to sell during the past two years," while the Gallery had "been very lucky in convincing the Baron to wait and this is now a matter of great urgency." The events that followed merit close scrutiny, because they were the focused yet obscure hinge around which Jarvis's rapid fall - and with this the temporary collapse of his paradigm - soon turned, at the meeting point of art and political democracy. On the same day, 18 April, Jarvis phoned Schaeffer, sounding - as Schaeffer put it in his written reply of i May - "very optimistic about the possible purchase and financing of the Bruegel painting."13 In this letter, Schaeffer told Jarvis that he had "accordingly instructed Baron Pollnitz with the intention that he should not press another sale." But he also expressed concern at not having heard from Jarvis since the i8th, and was "wondering how the matter is progressing." Alluding to Jarvis's plan to visit Europe by sea in May, and his own plan to be away for the months second half, he emphasized his need to know "how matters stand." The problem was that, on the crucial question of available funds, neither Jarvis nor Fulton fully knew how matters stood. Jarvis believed that $441,000 remained in the "Liechtenstein account," with the basis for this belief residing in a cabinet memorandum of 7 October 1953, worked out between H.O. McCurry, as Gallery director, and the Liberal government's minister of citizenship and immigration, Walter Harris.14 In this document, the Liberal cabinet indeed had offered its "firm commitment" to buy paintings from the Liechtenstein collection, and had recommended a parliamentary appropriation to a maximum of $2 million to this end.15 This "firm commitment," however, had been diluted during the next half-decade. The instalment for the first lot of paintings from the Liechtenstein collection $275,000 for works by Rembrandt and Filippino Lippi in 1952 - had been cobbled together by Walter Harris, H.O. McCurry, and R.B. Bryce of the Treasury Board, to allow the Gallery $250,000 under a blanket category of "Miscellaneous and Unforeseen Expenses," so that the purchase itself did not need a parliamentary vote. This could not be repeated, and the Liberal-dominated Parliament did indeed vote the amounts for the second and third purchases, as supplementary estimates at the end of the applicable fiscal years: $365,000 for works by Hans Memling, and several A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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less well-known painters in 1954 and the $885,000 for paintings by Chardin, Rubens, and Martini in 1956. These votes had been required notwithstanding the memorandum of 1953. So, in fact, the appearance of smoothly unfolding Liechtenstein purchases had been a function of both the close relationship between H.O. McCurry and two Liberal cabinet ministers and the simple existence of a Liberal-dominated Parliament. But if such old-boy continuities could always be counted on also in the international art world, in a multi-party political system they could not. Nor had they even existed, in terms of comparable largesse, before Mackenzie King's retirement in 1948. Jarvis, having been away from Canada for fourteen years before becoming director in 1955, had not been privy to these subtleties. And even as his personal style disinclined him to seek the advice of those who had, so was he also not content, in seeking to leave his stamp on the Gallery's collection, to stay within the range of the alleged "Liechtenstein account." For what he seemed especially not to grasp was that, in going outside the Liechtenstein collection for the more expensive Bruegel painting, he was also making his own position vastly weaker, in that this painting was not even loosely covered by the memorandum of 1953. Its purchase, therefore, could not have automatically been included within the "Liechtenstein account," had this existed formally. But the "account" did not exist formally, even for the Monaco painting; rather, the entire purchase process had in its previous form been a tidy function of the long-term Liberal Parliament.16 The careful language of the initial memorandum sent to Fulton by the trustees through Jarvis seemed to recognize these contingencies, in that what was asked for from cabinet was "authorization to negotiate" for the painting, rather than authorization to buy it. Jarvis and the trustees were not the only ones who failed to recognize the potential problem, in that the cabinet, too, when giving the trustees permission "to negotiate" on the basis on this memorandum, let the phrase "the Liechtenstein account" pass unchallenged. Nevertheless, as the point-man in the proposed purchase, Jarvis seems to have been stunningly blind to the general signals being sent by the Conservative government. Nor were these any longer just talk, in the style of Diefenbaker s remarks in Parliament about Canadian art and the National Gallery. In its year of minority rule, the new government had reduced the grant to the Gallery's purchase account from $130,000 to $100,000; this reduction was then sustained during the year that followed. Granted that Jarvis was being pressured - in the best of taste - by Agnew and Schaeffer, who both claimed that other buyers wanted their paintings. But he had also conveyed the impression himself that a majority government would make for decisive action, and may have felt that his credibility with the dealers - as with the international network to which they belonged - was at risk. Yet the blunt fact was that the election of the Conservatives actually did introduce a clear difference between dynamics within Canada, and those of the international art world, after such differences had been papered over, especially during the early 19505, by more urbane cabinet ministers among the long-governing Liberals. This gestating difference burst into the open in the first week of May 1958. A subsequent letter from Jarvis to Fulton claims that Fulton telephoned Jarvis on Friday, 2 162

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May, and provided the "authorization to negotiate." Amid this linguistic soup, the lines of communication got badly scrambled: so much so that the best evidence of the confusion's extent is provided by Jarvis's own attempt at a self-exculpatory letter to Fulton on 12 May: Immediately following your telephone conversation of Friday, the 2nd, informing me that Cabinet had agreed to our purchasing the Breughel and, if the Breughel could be obtained for $350,000, the Lorenzo Monaco, I got in touch with Hans Schaeffer of New York ... asking him to see if the Baron would sell the painting for $350,000, telling Schaeffer that payment would be made as soon as possible after Parliament re-assembled on May 12. Schaeffer wired me on Monday, May 5, telling me that his client had agreed to the price and I then immediately contacted Agnew in London, telling them that we would like to buy the Monaco if the price would not exceed $95,000. In both cases I thought I had made it clear that we were still at the stage of negotiating, and Mr. Veit was quite correct in assuring you on Tuesday that he understood no commitments had been made, as I was in assuring you of the same thing on Thursday morning. However, following our meeting on Thursday, I contacted both Agnew and Schaeffer to find that each dealer had gone ahead and committed themselves.17

Jarvis's own account of what happened was clearly self-contradictory rather than self-exculpatory. "I got in touch with Hans Schaeffer," he wrote, "telling [him] that payment would be made as soon as possible after Parliament re-assembled on May 12... I then immediately contacted Agnew... telling them that we would like to buy the Monaco if the price would not exceed $95,000." These sounded like words of commitment. Nevertheless, he claimed in his very next line that "in both cases I thought I had made it clear that we were still at the stage of negotiating" and that "no commitments had been made." Jarvis was at this point hedging desperately because, by Wednesday, 7 May, Fulton had been advised by Diefenbaker that the cabinet would not, and possibly even could not, authorize the actual purchase of the paintings. The letter suggests that certainly Jarvis, probably Fulton, and possibly even the Diefenbaker cabinet had on 2 May still been unclear about the latitude allowed the Gallery: indeed, from the tone of the letter, Jarvis seems to have had the almost bizarre impression that approval by Parliament was no more than a formality. He even claimed Fulton had informed him "that cabinet had agreed to our purchasing the Breughel," when in fact the trustees' own memo to cabinet had requested only authority to negotiate for the painting. What Fulton actually said to Jarvis on 2 May cannot be proved one way or the other, because the conversation took place by phone. The bottom line, however, was that even the cabinet was not authorized to tell the Gallery simply to go ahead with the purchase, because "the Liechtenstein fund" had never actually been set aside as such; even the earlier purchases had been channelled through Parliamentary approval; and the Bruegel would not have been covered by the fund even if it had been set aside. Diefenbaker himself would seem to have realized this, in the midst of the pressures of establishing his new government, between Friday, 2 May and A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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Wednesday, 7 May. The statement of facts by the Department of Justice claimed that cabinet had indeed "approved" the trustees' resubmission on 18 April 1958 of a request for "permission to negotiate," as well as a proposal that "in re-submitting the request for authorization to negotiate for the purchase of the Breughel... Cabinet be asked if the Breughel can be bought for $350,000 or less, could the Trustees enter into further negotiation with the Prince of Liechtenstein, through Messrs. Agnew of London, for the purchase of a painting by Lorenzo Monaco at a price not to exceed $95,ooo."18 But this was as far as the government was prepared to allow the process went. Again, the confusion seemed in part to be a matter of different linguistic conventions, between two different worlds. For the businessmen and rural politicians who accompanied Diefenbaker to Ottawa - as for Diefenbaker himself as a prairie lawyer - the language of negotiation was clearly the language of negotiation, and not the language of purchase. In the high-stakes international art world, however - as Jarvis emphasized - the simple authority to negotiate with such players implied the existence of authority to purchase. Caught between these worlds, Jarvis equivocated in his letter to Fulton, claiming on the one hand he had told Schaeffer "that payment would be made" but then saying that "no commitments had been made." He also as much as blamed both dealers, saying that it was they who "had gone ahead and committed themselves," but then exonerated them two lines later, claiming that "both of these men have been dealing with the National Gallery for over 25 years and they have naturally assumed that if the Director asks them to negotiate for a picture that he has full Government support." At the very least, the fact that not one but both dealers committed themselves implies that Jarvis in his conversations with them was not so equivocal as he later claimed. In the final paragraph of his letter, Jarvis himself voiced exasperation at the ambiguity of the Gallery's status with the government: "The situation, it seems to me, points up with perfect clarity what the Trustees have been saying for the past years, that they will never be able successfully to negotiate for the purchase of any important works of art if they do not have the same kind of assurance they had in the past that substantial funds have been earmarked for the National Gallery purchases, for it was only on this basis that the National Gallery was able to acquire the great Liechtenstein masterpieces which have so enhanced our collection."19 With this statement, however, Jarvis was as freely reinventing "the past" as he had freely reinvented "the Canadian public" with his claim, in 1956, that "only honest art forms will be tolerated by the Canadian public" and that such art forms no longer included "a pine tree somewhere." The Gallery had long had an annual budget for purchases, which had varied with economic conditions and the government in power. This had then been augmented by the 1951 National Gallery Act, which had set up two separate Gallery accounts. One of these was a special operating account, to which were credited donations and bequests; the other was a purchase account, to which was credited the annual parliamentary appropriation. Both of these accounts could be carried over from year to year. The crucial point is that neither held the funds for the

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Liechtenstein purchases, because these funds, in terms of actual dollars, had never been set aside. Fulton's directive to Jarvis on 7 May, that he was not to buy the paintings at that time, was the pin that finally burst Jarvis's ambitions. It was given almost casually, when Jarvis approached him with the question of when the money would be available. But Fulton had also, in the five days since the phone conversation of 2 May, consulted both with cabinet and - perhaps more significant - with Diefenbaker himself, who understood parliamentary procedure far better than Jarvis did and had already made clear his interest in a National Gallery that focused, for far less money, on Canadian works. At the very least, it would have been clear to Diefenbaker that the Liberal "commitment" of 1953 would not be binding on the Bruegel. But he was also aware - as Jarvis seems not to have been - that the money would need to be voted by a Parliament that his own party dominated. The directive from Fulton was firm, and set in motion a desperate attempt by Jarvis to undo the "offers." In the case of Lorenzo Monaco's Madonna of the Annunciation, however, Agnew had already bought it himself for resale to the Gallery. More serious still, given the larger amount, was von Pollnitz's quick insistence that he had already committed the (unpaid) funds for Bruegel's Landscape with Christ Appearing to the Apostles.20 With less and less room to move, Jarvis then proposed to Fulton that the government should follow through with the commitment and then discreetly resell the paintings.21 But even as Jarvis formed the belief that Fulton would support him in this manoeuvre, the Diefenbaker government outflanked him, in a way that suggested there might indeed be personal malice. On 12 May 1958 - the very date of Jarvis's explanatory letter - Fulton himself was replaced as minister of citizenship and immigration by Ellen Fairclough, thus depriving Jarvis of the one figure in the government with whom he had formed a working relationship. Fairclough, for her part, was Canada's first female cabinet minister and may well have been made to feel that she had to prove her toughness.22 She was also, like Diefenbaker, from rural Canada, and brought to her job little or no understanding of art. Jarvis played his own part by showing little or no understanding of politics, and no interest in taking up its study. Either he did not appreciate the gravity of this shifting situation or was trying simply to flee it, in that he did not change his earlier plans and sailed for England the same day. Before he left, he sent - with no basis for doing so - a letter to von Pollnitz reassuring him that there would probably "be no great delay" in payment after supplementary estimates came before Parliament around 15 June. He then added, almost breezily, "I... will be at sea for one week, during which time I will not know what action the Government is taking."23 The replacement of Fulton by Fairclough suggests that, by mid-May, Diefenbaker had determined that Jarvis should go and that the means were available to get rid of him. When Jarvis returned in early July, Fairclough refused his resale proposal, and also refused even to bring the option of buying the paintings to a vote in the Commons. She also repudiated another attempt by the Gallery's board, at the same time, to bring the issue to cabinet. Instead, and amid increasingly loud threats of law-

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suits from both Agnew and von Pollnitz, the government opted for linguistic conventions that were more familiar, and referred the matter to the nation's legal department. The deputy attorney general, W.R. Jackett, accommodated with an opinion of great dexterity. While acknowledging that Jarvis had indeed committed the Gallery contractually to purchase the paintings, he focused on the question of whether Jarvis, acting alone, had had the authority to so bind the institution that he directed. His conclusion was that Jarvis had not, because: "a) the Board of Trustees did not, by any corporate act, authorize the purchase; b) the approval of Treasury Board required by the Government Contracts Regulations made under the Financial Administration Act had not been given; and c) no certificate was obtained from the Comptroller of the Treasury as required by ss. (i) of s. 30 of the Financial Administration Act."24 Insofar as it involved the Gallery's board, this opinion was disingenuous hairsplitting, for Jarvis had had the board's full support in approaching Fulton, in April 1958, toward the purchases. Nevertheless, had Jarvis approached the Treasury Board, rather than simply Fulton himself, in the way that was technically required for such a purchase, he might well have been dissuaded from his quick commitments. For the government's view would indeed have been - according to Fairclough - that "the financial administration act specifically requires that there be an appropriation provided by Parliament for the purpose before a contract can be made."25 Again this implied a clash between the protocols of two very different worlds: worlds that McCurry - for all his lack of charisma - had been able to bridge via the Liberal old boy network to which he was closely connected by marriage. Jarvis, by contrast, first descended from the stratosphere, then sought to regain it, and was caught somewhere in between. Nor did he find any friends who would offer him a parachute. The same Hans Schaeffer who had so actively courted him on behalf of Baron von Pollnitz, and who had imparted a sense of urgency with his hints that the Baron had other clients, had warned in June that, even were he able to resell the Bruegel, the National Gallery stood to lose "its reputation in the art world, should the strange background of this deal become known."26 Similarly, Thos. Agnew & Sons' solicitors in Ottawa insisted to Fairclough that their clients' "confidence has been completely destroyed and they feel that they have been treated in a most dishonourable manner."27 And it was Alan Jarvis, the solicitors claimed, who would be held "personally liable for breach of warranty of authority." The embarrassment for Canada in the international art world was indeed considerable, given that the "deal" was not so much disguised as repudiated. Jackett's opinion, however, enabled the Canadian government, too, to place the blame with Alan Jarvis. The government also outflanked the Gallery's Board of Trustees, which had supported his initiative and which even - giving the lie to Jackett's claims pressed the government again in July to go through with the deal. Not only did Diefenbaker - through Fairclough - refuse, but Fairclough herself pressured the board's chairman, Charles P. Fell, to sign letters to Geoffrey Agnew and Baron von Pollnitz formally repudiating the purchases. Fell also refused, and instead presented to Fairclough the boards unanimous opinion that the purchase should proceed.28 l66

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Jarvis, meanwhile, hung on over the winter, working more quietly toward the Gallery's move from the Victoria Museum to the Lome Building, planned for early 1960, and taking his own counter-measures in the court of informed public opinion. "WE DO NOT L I V E IN A PRETTY A G E "

In October 1958, the Canadian edition of Time Magazine published a full-page "message" from Alan Jarvis, as part of an ad for the magazine itself, whose logo appeared at the bottom of the page. Photographed looking extremely serious, Jarvis wrote in defence of art that "at this moment, men and women of arts and letters are setting down, for us to see and understand, the record of the present age. Very often this record is not pretty to look at or pleasant to hear. We do not live in a pretty age; the arts of today mirror, in violence and confusion, the confusion and violence of the age that is producing them. But in our zeal to praise and promote scientific achievement, let us not take on a philistine philosophy... Technology with all its tricks will never replace art. The scientist and statesman build an epoch. The artist interprets it to all his fellow-men who take time to stop, look, and listen. It is our duty to pay attention and be informed."29 If this "message" served as an early infomercial on behalf of Time Magazine itself, it also suggested that in the midst of his adversity, and like the tragic hero of classical Greek and Shakespearean drama that he was starting to resemble, Jarvis was maturing to a deeper insight. In writing of the seductions posed by "technology with all its tricks," he seemed to be coming to the belated realization that perhaps "machines" do not so much "produce what man wants them to produce," as he had claimed in 1947. By this time, he had behind him the record of his cross-country trips by air that had shaped his experience of "the Canadian public" and his own public representation. But the stratospheric sleight of hand had not worked. As a man, Jarvis was trapped in a situation where that same "public" had, through the electoral process, exploded his glib assessments of it, and - rather than welcoming "the age of culture" - "taken on" precisely what he would have called "a philistine philosophy." As the elected prime minister, Diefenbaker espoused a Canada-first arts policy that emphasized the "national" part of the "National Gallery," and repudiated Jarvis's investment in a transnational and ostensibly timeless standard of "quality." Yet that Diefenbaker at least had a point was exemplified in Jarvis's choice of venue for his defence of art: the "Canadian edition" of a magazine whose homogenized "international" writing style just happened to be based - like "international" modernism - in New York, and that Jarvis validated by lending his name to a subtle ad for the magazine itself. The wintertime hiatus soon translated into a tightening of screws that seemed to be directed at Jarvis himself. In the spring of 1959, the government slashed the Gallery's acquisitions budget from $100,000 to $25,000, and so ensured that it would be able to buy little other than Canadian art.30 Even more serious for Jarvis's personal future, however, was the face-saving legal compromise finally agreed on by the government and the agents for the paintings that Jarvis had "bought." Without gaining materially in the arrangement, the government averted a lawsuit by Thomas A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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Agnew and Sons by paying $7,000 to cover expenses.31 It also endured months of vituperative letters and telegrams from Baron von Pollnitz. But central to the governments face-saving manoeuvres was the legal opinion that it was Jarvis himself who had overstepped his authority. In a deal worked out with Fairclough, Jarvis was allowed to say publicly that he wanted "to be relieved of the burdens of administration, in order to concentrate on other areas in the field of Canadian art."32 But in fact Fairclough, acting on instructions from Diefenbaker, had insisted on his resignation, effective 30 September 1959.33 Jarvis, then, had himself as much as given the government levers by which to get rid of him, via his confidence that he could - despite electoral change - count on large sums of money for "quite small" European pictures, whose "quality" he could recognize. The further irony about the Bruegel was that - despite Schaeffer's reports of another offer - it remained in the von Pollnitz family until 1975, when it was sold privately. In 1981 its overall authenticity was questioned by a well-known Bruegel scholar, and it failed to sell at auction two years later. By 1995, it was - despite its eloquent organization of pictorial space - being cautiously left off some listings of the painter's work.34 Jarvis was at least spared this news, if not other humiliations. Forced out only four months before the opening of the Lome Building, on whose details he had worked since his arrival, he was not even mentioned in the speeches that were given at the inaugural exhibition. This gesture seemed especially mean and was protested as such, in a petition signed by all but one of the Gallery's staff given that Jarvis had personally arranged for the presence of many Old Master paintings through his contacts. A sympathetic Canadian art community quickly offered other him options, just as it shunned the official Lome Building opening party for a smaller one at Jarvis's home. But the editorship of Canadian Art magazine, the directorship of the Canadian Conference for the Arts, and a syndicated newspaper column did not make up for the loss of the prestigious bully pulpit that the Gallery directorship had given him. Nor did his declaration that he would return to his career as a portrait sculptor, which had made him - despite the conventionality of his work - the first director to be also a practising artist. Instead, the pattern of Jarvis's life indeed began to resemble a tragic denouement. By the early 19605, he had sunk into severe alcoholism, and his marriage of expediency had disintegrated. In December 1972, living alone in a Toronto room that had been provided by a friend, he died at the age of fifty-seven of a combination of cirrhosis of the liver, arthritis, and heart disease. Thus did the flawed, complex, and slightly larger than life figure of Alan Jarvis part company with the National Gallery. That the Gallery came to be, in the course of this passage, the proscenium arch for a tragedy of classical proportions was in keeping with the dimensions of his personality. But in providing the context for such theatre, the Gallery also unwittingly spoke far beyond its walls, to the terms of unsettling change within Canadian society. Jarvis's confidence in the machine, and in the possibility of its control by "man," was exemplary of the era to which he belonged. Yet it left him open to betrayal by aspects of the machine that he could not control, in terms of the subtle changes being wrought on human experience. The sustained l68

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pattern of this betrayal involved Jarvis's formation of opinions about Canadians via his glamorous cross-country descents from the sky. But the most tightly focused instance involved the sequence of The Things We See which, via the fatal combination of an unblinking photographic eye and the absence of retakes, exposed the underlying arrogance that he had tried to launder out of his public persona. Within this overall pattern of unfolding tragedy, the very nature of the paintings that made for Jarvis's undoing inscribed the usual subtext of comic irony. This deserves mention in retrospect, because of its implications in the Gallery's change of paradigm. Both of the paintings had explicitly Christian religious themes: The Madonna of the Annunciation, by Lorenzo Monaco; and Landscape with Christ Appearing to the Apostles, (allegedly) by Pieter Bruegel. By the mid-twentieth century, however, these paintings' religious significations had been eclipsed, for the paintings' owners and dealers, as for Jarvis himself, by the question of their aesthetic "quality?' and by the financial and prestige value that followed thereon. This break between the alleged spiritual value of the paintings' content and their aesthetic, financial, and prestige value as objects signified yet another style of rupture for the National Gallery itself, between its Christian Science past and the secular present for which Jarvis presumed to speak. Eric Brown, certainly - and with him H.O. McCurry, Sir Edmund Walker, and likely even H.S. Southam - would not, as Christian Scientists, have seen the need for, or even countenanced such a break, given Brown's passionate investment in the "spontaneous" improving role of art and in an ethical as well as aesthetic dimension to the word "good" as applied to paintings. Amid Browns paradoxical extension of Christian Science values to art, as from within his own sense of ordained mission, there was no need for a split among spiritual, aesthetic, financial, and prestige values, in that a single object could - and should - sustain all four, as dimensions of its overall "quality." But, as carried through by Jarvis in regard to the Monaco and Bruegel paintings, the eclipse of "spiritual" value went beyond his indifference to the paintings' alleged "improving" contents, in favour of these other values. Like the paintings' status as sacral objects, alleged Christian virtues played no part in the negotiations for the paintings-as-commodities, and were not presented by Jarvis as playing a part in the paintings' future value to Canada. But this, too, rebounded on him, in that such virtues did not play any part either, in the form of generosity or mercy, in what then happened to him at the hands of the Diefenbaker government. In turning away from the ascription of this kind of social value to the paintings, and in pursuing them only as "treasures" invested with aesthetic "quality," Jarvis was therefore also - with unselfconscious irony - carrying through beyond the frame the "breaking" role that he had ascribed to Picasso's work within its frame. Nor was the irony diminished by Jarvis's ascription of a "timeless" dimension to this concept of aestheticized "quality," as though this trumped Brown's consideration of artworks in terms of several other dimensions, including the moral and the national. In this sense, too, Jarvis got caught, as a high-profile figure, in the more subtle implications of his own smooth rhetoric. The perceived menace posed by such an agenda of "breaking," both within and outside the frame, was in 1957 translated by the electorate A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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of Canada into a Conservative government which spoke to a concept of "quality" that was not just aesthetic but that pertained to a more traditional way of life. Its mandate was, implicitly, to mend what was being broken by the technological momentum of the 19505. This government then turned on an Alan Jarvis for whom arguing for art in terms of such values was completely foreign. Instead, Jarvis's own notion of "quality," for all its appearance of being untainted by historical messiness, trailed behind it the transformation of paintings themselves into expensive and prestigious commodities. And it was due to their status as such that the Diefenbaker government both rejected them and broke him. None of this was considered at the time. Instead - and as might have been expected given the magnitude of the convulsion - Jarvis's departure was followed by something of the silence that accompanies the passage of a great storm. This, too, was ironic because, in February 1960, only months after his resignation, the National Gallery at last officially entered its own new "temporary" building, on which he had worked throughout his tenure. Adding to the texture of irony was the fact that, after Jarvis's departure, it was precisely Donald Buchanan who - after being overlooked with Jarvis's appointment - took over direction of the Gallery's transfer. This did not help his prospects. The very humility and loyalty that had enabled him to support Jarvis in 1955 worked against him, in that, for the Diefenbaker government, they by 1959 tied him to Jarvis. And the government, by this time, wanted a Gallery that was not only committed to building its collection of Canadian art but also content with being docile. Accordingly, the cabinet reached backward for a new director, and hired Charles Comfort, who throughout the decade had been teaching at the University of Toronto and was by 1960 president of the Gallery's old antagonist, the Royal Canadian Academy. "A CLOUD OF S I L E N C E HAS D E S C E N D E D "

The rotund, stolid, and goateed Comfort, by this time in his sixties, was a striking contrast temperamentally and in appearance to Jarvis, with even his name seeming to signal a change in the Gallery's role. Especially germane to the situation of art under Diefenbaker, however, was the study he had done on "Painting" for the Massey commission ten years earlier. This still lingered as a clear indication of his allegiances not just to Canadian art as a vehicle of "Canadian spirit" but also to a "rational modernity" which might serve as a bulwark against "the expression of driving inner impulses, and the cryptic utterances of semiconscious moods." For Diefenbaker's rural conservatives, buffeted by Jarvis's support of an international abstraction they did not understand, this was no small strength. But perhaps what endeared Comfort most to the Diefenbaker Conservatives was his baldly stated claim, in his study, that a National Gallery should be "an agency of central government." Comfort himself declared, at the first board meeting he attended, that he had seen "acceptance of the position as a moral obligation."35 Thus was reintroduced, from the beginning of his tenure, a subtext of morality that hearkened back to the tone of his study on "Painting." But alongside it was also the persistent subtext of irony, which only changed its register. Comfort's "moral" determination would prove to be 170

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John Diefenbaker greeting the National Gallery's new director Charles Comfort at the opening of the Lome Building on 18 February 1960. (Capital Press Service, National Gallery of Canada)

so perversely out of keeping with the wider currents of the early 19605 that it would actually set a new stage: this time for a period of unintended farce, after the wrenching tragedy of Alan Jarvis. The comedy would, however, be slow in coming. Instead - and despite its new, more central location - the Gallery simply ceased for a time to be a prominent presence. The Lome Building s anonymous dilution of the "international modernist" style in office architecture itself mocked the Diefenbaker government's desire to favour Canadian art. But neither did it stand out in a downtown Ottawa increasingly composed of such office blocks, and so actually played toward the Gallery's retreat from public view. Then, in October 1960, eight months after the building's opening, the institution suffered another blow with the resignation of Donald Buchanan. While Jarvis had had the diplomacy to make Buchanan feel indispensable, and had promoted him to associate director, Comfort made no such effort. Instead, he oversaw the Gallery's withdrawal from involvement with the Design Centre which Buchanan had overseen for a decade but which in January 1961 was transferred to the Department of Trade and Commerce. By the penultimate year of Jarvis's directorship, the Design Centre had come to provide nearly a third of the Gallery's circulating and Ottawa exhibitions; Comfort opted to turn away entirely from this experiment in collaboration between the fine and practical arts, which had actually been advocated as early as the 19205 by Eric Brown.36 With Buchanan went Norman Hay, who had been director of the National Industrial Design Council, as well as Research Curator J. Nieuwstraten, the Gallery's liaison officer with Quebec artists and its public-information officer. Comfort's tenure would continue to be hounded by staff resignations: an outcome that could perhaps have been expected, given the petition denouncing a ceremonial opening of A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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Charles Comfort's sense of space: the National Gallery prints and drawings room in the early 19605. The lighting seems more appropriate to a train station. But it clearly served Comfort's notion of the National Gallery as "an agency of central government" that would contribute to "public spiritual welfare" through art. (Bill Lingard-Photo Features, National Gallery of Canada)

the Lome Building that had omitted Jarvis's name in any of the speeches. After Buchanan's departure, Robert Fulford - admittedly a supporter of both him and Jarvis - described the atmosphere at the Gallery in terms that directly recalled the New York Times's 1955 comments on the legacy of H.O. McCurry: "Since the opening of the gallery's new Lome building ... and since the arrival of Charles Comfort, a cloud of silence has descended on gallery activities, to the point where even the most innocuous query brings from the director's office a hostile 'no comment'... Apparently it is now entering a period in which its role will be that of a minor bureau of the government... Last Saturday at 11 a.m. I strolled through the National Gallery ... Astonishingly, the building was deserted, though the streets outside were crammed with tourists. At several points there seemed to be three guards for every visitor, and for awhile I had the impression that an entire platoon had been assigned to watch me alone. There were less [sic] visitors than on a summer weekday at the Art Gallery of Toronto."37 Given that the Times report on McCurry s Gallery as "crusty, dark and forbidding" had come at the end of a sixteen-year tenure, when McCurry had still been making do with the Victoria Museum, this seemed an especially harsh assessment of a tenure only a few months old, and sporting a brand new building. But Fulford also criticized the Gallery for failing to make any move toward honouring Paul-Emile Borduas, who had died in the very month that the Lome Building had opened. This role had then by default gone to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 172

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In fact, the archives show that - notwithstanding Buchanans departure and Comfort's uninspiring public style - the Gallery did continue to buy contemporary Canadian painting, including Borduas's immense haunting monochrome 3+4+1 in 1962. Borduas himself was honoured with a posthumous retrospective in the same year, while his surviving Automatiste colleague Jean-Paul Riopelle was given one the next. During this period, too, Kathleen Fenwick, the highly competent curator of prints and drawings hired by Eric Brown, began the Gallery's collection of Inuit prints. Nor did the prohibition on purchases of contemporary American art keep Comfort from mounting major travelling exhibitions from the Museum of Modern Art in 1963 and from the Guggenheim Museum in 1964. He also, in 1963, introduced the National Gallery Bulletin as a vehicle to provide the public with scholarly articles "in the field of the fine arts which are of special aesthetic and historical importance to us in Canada," and in 1965 appointed a curator of Canadian art: Jean-Rene Ostiguy, who had been hired by Jarvis as an information officer in 1955. In making this curator a francophone, Comfort redressed a curatorial lacuna that had existed since the Gallery's beginnings, just as with the Bulletin he established a twice-yearly venue for print representation of the Gallery's work. Nevertheless, an overview of exhibitions and purchases during the period suggests that Comfort did not turn his vastly larger acquisitions budget - from $25,000 in the last year of Jarvis's tenure to $150,000 in his own - toward any kind of audacity. Even the exhibitions assembled in New York retained a focus on the Abstract Expressionism that was already in decline there. Overall, the record suggests a clear lack of the edge that Jarvis had brought to the Gallery, and instead, in keeping with Comfort's role as a conservative consolidator, a sort of static sedateness, a rotundity even, that seemed to echo Comfort's own physiognomy.38 Sorely lacking, then, throughout the early 19608, was any public sense of vision for the Gallery's future, as well as any sense of dialogue with developments outside the country. The terms of the crisis of vision were sketched in the section of the 1964-65 Annual Report where Comfort, following a pattern established by Eric Brown, gave his own summing up, and implicitly conveyed his directorial style and agenda. "The remarkable growth of the Gallery's whole program in the past decade," he wrote, "has made it increasingly difficult to do justice to the multifarious activities of this vital national institution and its staff. For this reason an attempt has been made to reduce this account of the fiscal year 1964-65, as far as possible with a cultural enterprise such as ours, to statistics and tables. In spite of the austerity of this approach, the facts themselves speak eloquently of a year of accomplishment."39 Reduced to "statistics and tables," "the facts" did not speak eloquently at all. Instead, Comfort's reports recall those of an army quartermaster: so many works of art acquired, so many sent into circulation, so many staff positions added or - with striking frequency - left empty after resignations. Adding to the analogy was the extent to which he devoted rooms in the Lome Building to the Gallery's war art, after hiring a curator of war art in 1960: understandable gestures given his participation in the program during the Second World War and the centrality of the world wars to twentieth-century history. But these wars' relationship to the century's art history went A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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unexamined. Instead, most of the war art itself was stylistically based in that "rational modernity" for which Comfort had called in his study on painting but which was being superceded by styles born not least out of the wars' brutal dislocations. What "the facts" seemed to speak of most was Comfort's willingness to make the National Gallery, if not quite an active "agency of central government," then a quiet one, devoid of audacity compatible with changes in the Gallery's scale, the momentum of the surrounding world, and the contemporary art which strove to make sense of that world. Symbolic of this backward-looking agenda was the claim made in the 1965-66 annual report that "perhaps the most distinctive product of Dr. Comfort's administration was the formation of the National Conservation Research Laboratory as a separate entity within the National Gallery." This claim in itself was curious, in that not Comfort but Jarvis had established the basis for this Laboratory through his hiring of Nathan Stolow. But while the Laboratory might prove valuable in preserving the art of the past for the present, and even that of the present for the future, it emphatically did not, as "the most distinctive product" of Comfort's tenure, speak to the art of the present, in the present.40 Where the Gallery's lack of touch with this present gestated most ominously was in the continued ban on the purchase of contemporary American art, which translated also into an absence of any first-hand engagement with this art other than through pre-packaged "shows." The ban was sustained via the weak justification that those who wanted to see American art could travel to the United States. But the visual perils of such insularity were made laughably clear when, in May 1961, the United States came instead to Ottawa, in the grand contemporary style of John R Kennedy's Camelot. While Kennedy conferred with Diefenbaker, his wife Jacqueline visited the National Gallery with Diefenbaker's wife, Olive, and Thomas Maher, who had replaced C.R Fell as chair of the Gallery's trustees after the Jarvis debacle. That the president and prime minister did not get along is a matter of historical record. But the photographic legacy of the Gallery tour suggests a dislocation that was close to festering. Jackie wore an unembellished bright red suit and matching hat, which famously set off a fashion craze in Canada, even as she also looked as though she had fortified herself with one too many martinis. The photograph shows her, a little glassy-eyed, exchanging appraising looks with Diefenbaker's minister of citizenship and immigration, Ellen Fairclough, who less than two years earlier had demanded Jarvis's resignation. Fairclough has backed almost into the 1945 painting On the Beach by the Quebec artist Alfred Pellan; her expression is one of strained insecurity, perhaps because Jackie's gaze is mainly on her own hat, which resembles the remains of a birthday cake. Comfort stands between them, looking as though he would have found painting the battlefields of Italy less harrowing. This photograph's hidden comedy is only enhanced by Comfort's and Fairclough's positioning, which hides from Jacqueline Kennedy's view the stylized contents of Pellan's painting: an oversized male face leering at the provocatively posed bodies of naked women. But, if the Canadians thereby managed to spare Jackie any reminders of her husband's less public habits, the Gallery's own fixed-in-amber relationship with the country from which she came cracked in a much more drastic way a year 174

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The National Gallery as a time-warp: Jacqueline Kennedy gets a tour, while her husband confers elsewhere with John Diefenbaker. From the left: Thomas Maher, chairman of the Gallery's board; Jackie; Olive Diefenbaker; Charles Comfort; and Ellen Fairclough, the minister of citizenship and immigration who had asked for and received Alan Jarvis's resignation. (National Gallery of Canada)

later, via a scandal which, had the government been trying to make the Gallery controversial, would have been a great success. For unlike virtually all of those before and after, it was picked up by the international press, making the name not only of the Gallery itself a laughing stock around the world but that of the elderly Comfort himself, who deserved to be remembered for better things. The scandal involved Comfort's decision to show a collection of modern paintings that belonged to the American automotive heir Walter P. Chrysler, even though - according to evidence that quickly surfaced - he had been warned in advance that Chrysler had bought a great many fakes. There were in this episode - to recall the motifs of literary tragedy that entered the Jarvis story - elements of both hubris and nemesis. But to credit Karl Marx's comment in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: in this case the motifs conspired to ensure that the tragedy of Jarvis would be replayed as farce. The exhibition itself - aptly titled The Controversial Century: 1850-1950 - opened in Ottawa on 27 September 1962. Comfort's introduction in the catalogue carried the same tone of self-assured authority that he had shown in the "Painting" essay of 1951. "Canadians are very much aware," he wrote, "of the fact that Mr. Chrysler's private collection of paintings is one of the most distinguished ... in the United States of America. There was no hesitation in our accepting this generous and challenging offer, and the present exhibition ... has resulted in a most instructive and pleasurable experience for the curators involved ... It is my opinion that it will contribute much A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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to international understanding and amity."41 Alas for Comfort, his opinion in this case did not count for much, because what the exhibition contributed to instead, among other things, was a fourteen-page feature article in the New York-based Life Magazine, just over a month after it opened. "The gossip that has been haunting the art world," the article began, "has now erupted into an international scandal. The scandal involves a gigantic cache of fakes which the celebrated collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr. recently put on exhibition at Canada's National Gallery in Ottawa. Of the 187 Chrysler paintings displayed, nearly half are flagrant phonies masquerading as works by such masters as Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gogh, Degas. Some of the fakes are deliberate forgeries. Others are bad-to-mediocre works on which someone has put false signatures. All have been repudiated by experts."42 As an exhibition, The Controversial Century probably occupied a zone less deserving of the utter opprobrium heaped upon it by Life Magazine, but certainly unworthy of the praise uncritically given it by Comfort. The New York Times's art critic, John Canaday, for example, claimed that "for the most part, The Controversial Century is still an excellent show," offering fully legitimated works by Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, and Manet. It was also, he wrote, "the only exhibition I have ever seen that puts revolutionary painters of the ipth and 2Oth centuries in context with the academicians of their day."43 Even Canaday, however, had a stake in the show's credibility by the time it reached Ottawa, in that he had in June seen it at Chrysler's private museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and had called it "an excellent show for any locality," without a hint that there might be problems of attribution in many of its contents.44 A change of opinion had then been forced on him, through the quiet advice of a New York lawyer named Ralph Colin, who had also seen the exhibition in Massachusetts. Colin was legal counsel for the Association of American Art Dealers, which had been formed the previous year to maintain ethical standards in an overheated art market. Having carefully considered the show, Colin was uneasy with Chrysler's personal style of describing his paintings. For works that had an authenticated provenance, Chrysler was exhaustive in his offering of forty or more lines of careful records in his catalogue. But for many other works, which were allegedly by Manet, Derain, Van Gogh, Degas, Cezanne, and Seurat, Chrysler offered no more provenance than the words "Hartert Galleries, New York" and "Harry B. Yotnakparian, New York." Colin's subsequent investigations revealed that many of these paintings had no provenance at all, or were listed as having been purchased from European galleries that did not exist. Closer scrutiny of the paintings themselves by European experts then began to reveal the problems picked up by Life Magazine in early November: that many of Chrysler's paintings were either "deliberate forgeries" or "bad-to-mediocre works on which someone has put false signatures."45 Somewhat incredibly under the circumstances, the National Gallery of Canada had allowed Chrysler the latitude not just to select the paintings as a package deal but to design the catalogue for Ottawa.46 This provided clear evidence of the problems noticed by Colin, in that exhaustive half-page descriptions of the provenance of legitimate paintings alternated almost randomly with the "Harry B. Yotnakparian" 176

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one-liners.47 Nor was the collections credibility enhanced when Mr Yotnakparian, contacted in New York, admitted that he had "simply let Chrysler make whatever attribution he wanted to, on the assumption that a collector of such experience would surely know what he was doing."48 But that Chrysler emphatically didn't know what he was doing is hinted at by the catalogue, whose contents indeed include reproductions of nudes allegedly by Degas and Matisse, and of portraits allegedly by Van Gogh, all of whose sheer coarseness might have made for a few good jokes at an amateur art show or perhaps by Eric Brown himself, who might have found amusing this result in an exhibition of some of the very artists he had dismissed as "law-breakers." There were those, however, who did not find the legal aspect amusing. Shortly after publication of the Life Magazine article, both the Bureau of Customs and the Internal Revenue Service in the United States announced that they were monitoring the situation. The district attorney in New York County then also announced an investigation of possible fraud in the sale of the paintings.49 Back in Canada, meanwhile, in the same mid-October week, the director of the National Gallery's Exhibition Extension Service, Richard Simmins, resigned, amid rumours that Gallery staff were "up in arms" about the exhibition and about Comfort's alleged monopoly on the decision to mount it.50 Simmins's resignation suggested that there might be more than simply ineptitude in play at the National Gallery. The terms of this "more" were revealed a few days later, when Colin also announced in New York that he had in the summer gone "through museum channels" to inform Comfort of his belief "that almost half of the paintings were questionable."51 Comfort, for his part, had hitherto denied awareness of even the possibility that Chryslers collection might hold fakes. Instead, from the outset of the controversy, he had claimed that he had never held "the slightest suspicion" about the paintings' authenticity, and that he had not been warned. "Nothing of this nature has ever been brought to my attention," he was quoted as saying.52 Colin's claims were then corroborated through the questioning in Parliament of Richard Bell, the Conservative minister responsible for the Gallery, by Judy LaMarsh, an opposition Liberal MP. Obliged to answer LaMarsh's questions, Bell's parliamentary secretary, Richard McGee, admitted that Comfort had indeed been contacted on 22 August by Evan Turner, the director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, as Colin's go-between. Turner, McGee said, had warned Comfort that there was "some doubt about the authenticity of some of the paintings." He also admitted that the only Gallery official to have inspected the paintings in advance had been William Dale, the assistant director, who had come to the Gallery under McCurry and been promoted by Comfort, and who had also advised Comfort that the paintings were "uneven."53 Comfort was caught in a public lie.54 Nevertheless, he opted to brazen through, having already told Time Magazine that "we expect we will have even bigger crowds. This is the best publicity we could possibly use."55 He thus invited the added charge of profiting from fraud and of treating both art and the public with contempt. According to Paul Duval, this "flip defense of the Chrysler fakes" placed the National Gallery "in the same category as a freak show."56 A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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In one of the more densely ironic reversals in the Gallery's history, then, the director who had been hired by a Conservative Government to render the Gallery non-controversial, and to promote "public spiritual welfare" through a Canada-first agenda in art, brought the Gallery into disrepute through too-cozy acceptance of an American collector's version of the past, as ineptly assembled through an inherited corporate fortune. In this case, the style of irony was not the Gallery's alone, in that it plagued the Diefenbaker era as a whole, via a nationalist rhetoric that did not slow accelerating dependency on the United States. Comfort's legacy, however, would include one more blunder, which would only further expose the Gallery's unresolved relationship with contemporary American art, as distinct from the European modernist art shown by Chrysler. Especially would it suggest that the exclusion inherited from the previous decade was becoming unsustainable. For, along with American capital and military power, this art was irreversibly altering "standards" around the world, even as in the 19608 it was still not being added to permanent display by the National Gallery. The test came in 1965, toward the end of Comfort's tenure, when a Toronto gallery owner, Jerrold Morris, sought to show a survey in his own gallery of the work of the New York Pop artist Andy Warhol. Warhol had already for years been subverting the very category "art" as having an existence independent of the mass-produced popular culture which was among the United States's most widely welcomed post-war exports. With his repetitive images of Campbell's Soup cans - silkscreened, framed, and offered for sale as art - Warhol repudiated any criteria that claimed semantic boundaries between art and popular culture, art and mass production, art and commodity capitalism. Yet, even as these boundaries were in practice crumbling before Pop Art's voraciousness, Canadian import laws gave Comfort a chance, through his position at the National Gallery, to establish the Canadian boundary itself as a last defensible bastion of the "rational modernity" he had championed in 1951. According to the Canadian Tariff Act, photographs of works of sculpture crossing the border had to be submitted beforehand to the National Gallery. This was so the works themselves might be certified as sculpture, by allegedly legitimate authority, and so enter Canada without payment of the 20 per cent duty on commercial value charged on ordinary merchandise. Among the photographs sent by the Morris Gallery for Comfort's scrutiny were those of eighty imitation Brillo soap-pad and Campbell's Soup boxes, which Warhol had produced in wood and silkscreened and which were given a declared value of $300 each. Under these circumstances, Comfort was being resorted to not simply as an "authority" on painting, by a Royal Commission about to make recommendations on arts policy. He was being resorted to, in legally binding terms, as the authority on sculpture. And as such, he flatly refused to issue a certificate allowing that the boxes were sculpture. They were, he allowed, "aesthetic objects." But "sculpture," he insisted, "must be in metal or stone, or other materials in black and white, as opposed to the painted wooden boxes of Warhol." "He might tell me a telephone book is a sculpture," Comfort said of Morris. "It's a matter of classification, of semantics. One draws a line."57

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Andy Warhol, Brillo (1964, plywood boxes with serigraph and acrylic, 43.2 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm. each). Charles Comfort, as Canada Customs' official arbiter concerning art, decided in 1965 that these were not sculpture and so would be subject to import duty. They were purchased by the National Gallery in 1967, after Jean Sutherland Boggs became director, via the discretionary fund that she allotted to Brydon Smith as the first curator of contemporary art. (©Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts [New York]/5ODRAC [Montreal] 2002)

There was still further comic irony, then, that the man who - in the interest of attendance and profit - had not acknowledged the line in 1962 between authenticated modernist paintings and widely challenged attributions, insisted in 1965 on enforcing a precise exclusionary line on contemporary art. The dilemma was only partly that Warhol himself - unlike Canadian Customs - refused to draw such lines. For he had also, in echoing American commodity capitalism's own lack of respect for limits, based his artistic career on violating such lines as they had previously existed, including in the writings of Clement Greenberg. As early as 1939, Greenberg had argued for a clear line between "avant-garde" art and "kitsch." He also continued to insist, into the 19605, that Warhol was producing "Novelty Art." Warhol paid no attention to Greenberg either. Instead - and echoing American popular culture itself in the vigour of its global appeal - Warhol's art through its seductive surfaces called for as free circulation of images and categories as of capital. In doing this, Warhol built on the legacy of Duchamp s "ready-mades," according to whose logic anything

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could be legitimated as art so long as it was called such, and displayed in a context that would honour it as such. But he was also adding a further twist, introducing even American corporate brand names into an art world whose usual taglines had only to do with the honoured names of individual artists, among whom, of course, Warhol had soon begun to count his own. The difficulty in Canada, however, was that the Duchampian legacy on which he was building had not yet been acknowledged at the National Gallery to exist, any more by Alan Jarvis than by Charles Comfort, even as the Gallery itself had been given the authority to make semantic judgments regarding art. The result of this specific alignment between the Gallery's director and the Customs Department on a "matter of classification" was that Morris could not get out of paying the duty and had to send the imitation soup and soap-pad boxes back to the United States without showing them. After doing so, he made public a letter about the National Gallery's - and by implication Canadian - policies in regard to the larger art world. "In refusing a certificate for Warhol's works," he wrote, "they have set up a situation which exactly duplicates the Brancusi scandal of the 19208 when a U.S. customs inspector refused to allow the ... sculptor's Bird in Flight into the country, and assessed it as a hunk of metal by weight... The National Gallery will have to recognize new art forms or make itself the laughing stock of the whole art world."58 At this point, Canadian electoral politics again came into play, but in reverse of the 1957 pattern that had trapped Alan Jarvis. In the federal election of 1963, the Liberals under Lester Pearson defeated Diefenbaker's Conservatives, who by then had alienated much of their voter base. The prospect of a National Gallery that was "the laughing stock of the whole art world" was not one that the new government, as led by a well-travelled former diplomat, cared to indulge. Comfort was allowed to serve out his term and quietly retire in mid-1965, but not before the new finance minister, Walter Gordon, had pointedly introduced an amendment to the Tariff Act in his 1965 budget. The amendment substituted, for a judgment of aesthetic value, the simple ascription of monetary value as the identifying factor for sculpture. "The duty-free item for original sculptures," it read, "is amended by substituting a minimum value of $75 for the requirement that the sculpture be certified as being of a cultural nature."59 The implicit shift of value - from investment in an authoritative Canadian "eye for legitimacy" to assessment of an art object's status via its art-market dollar value - went largely unobserved, just as the passing of the Diefenbaker government itself, with its small-town rhetoric of nationalism, went largely unlamented. There was, however, one notable exception that, if it did not address this specific case, spoke to the issues it exemplified. In 1965 George Grant published a short book called Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Like his essay "Philosophy" for the Massey commission, it resisted prevailing opinion, which had come to see Diefenbaker as driven by ambition and his government as having been an embarrassment, especially in comparison to the glamour of John F. Kennedy in Washington. Yet for Grant, "the Canadian peoples" choice of Diefenbaker in 1957 had been their "last gasp of nationalism," while his government, "as a bewildered attempt to find policies that were adequate to its noble cause" had been "the strident swanl8o

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song of that hope."60 Grant did not downplay Diefenbaker's failings, and analysed how the oxymoronic policy of free-enterprise nationalism, coupled with alienation of the civil service, intellectuals, and French Canada, had all conspired toward his defeat. Nevertheless, he claimed that "lamenting for Canada is inevitably associated with the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His inability to govern is linked with the inability of this country to be sovereign." In Grant's view, the Pearson government was simply opening the door to "a continental ruling class" that, through its commitment to technology and liberalism, was ushering in a "universal and homogeneous state." Such a state, Grant feared, would, behind a rhetoric of individual "liberty" and an obsessive focus on "technique," be a "tyranny."61 The relationship of art to this assessment went unexamined. But implicit within it were further ironies, one of them sad. For insofar as art and the National Gallery were concerned, a less obvious tragedy, with its own classical dimensions, befell Alan Jarvis, within the larger context of what Grant called "the tragedy of Diefenbaker." That the Conservative government was itself far from neutral in shaping this personal tragedy, against a background of alleged national tragedy, only added to the web of irony. For Jarvis, despite his defence of modern art, had not been an obvious emissary of what Grant called the "empire" to the south. Instead, his "standards" seemed most to have been shaped by his years in Britain: Europe "as a rule stick to guide Canadian artists." Nor did he so much as challenge the trustees' ban on purchases of contemporary American art. Diefenbaker, in targeting Jarvis as the main obstacle to "Canadian art's" advancement at the National Gallery, missed these signals, just as he also did not grasp that Canadian artists themselves, in - as Jarvis put it - "setting down ... the record of the present age," were being drawn increasingly to a dynamism from the south. Yet behind Jarvis's own stated commitment to European "standards" and his ties to Britain through Vincent Massey and Kenneth Clark were hints that he, too, had served as a largely unwitting point-man for values in art that were ascendant in the United States. Striving to bring the Canadian public "up to speed" about abstract painting, he had almost precisely echoed the American critic Clement Greenberg, who since the Second World War had been promoting "patient experience" in the cultivation of a "practised eye," toward assessing the internal relations of abstract artworks.62 And like Greenberg, too - though with greater ease - Jarvis had avoided taking on the harder issues of contemporary art that were emerging in the United States, amid an overproduction of abstract art, and the nagging influence, among artists themselves, of Marcel Duchamp. Both Greenberg and Jarvis, too, sought refuge in the allegedly irreducible status of "the judgment of taste," though they used a slightly different vocabulary. Jarvis, however, was aided by his responsibility to a Board of Trustees and to a Canadian public that had difficulty enough with abstract painting, never mind with how a signed urinal could be considered "art." These more subtle affinities with currents in the United States hint, then, that if there were obvious parallels between the fall of Alan Jarvis, as an elegant gay man in Canada, and the fall in England of Oscar Wilde half a century earlier, there was an equally pertinent parallel with a quintessentially American tragic hero, in the form A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Jarvis's friend Norman Hay retrospectively described him with affection as "the biggest phony" he had ever met. Nor was this description simply a matter of his expedient marriage. The quasi-upper-crust British accent had been acquired. And if Jarvis had come from a respectable middleclass family in Brantford, there was not - as he liked to hint there was - a connection with the Toronto Jarvises who in the early nineteenth century had shaped a nepotistic "family compact" in Upper Canada.63 Instead, and like Gatsby in his doomed attempt to make himself into a package so impressive that the beautiful Daisy would leave her stolid, rich, unfaithful husband for him, Jarvis strove to make himself into a publicly irresistible work of art: the personification of the National Gallery as interesting. For it was he who sought to convince the Canadian public - through his charm and eloquence, rather than the Gallery's own - that Canada was indeed no longer a "young country" and was worthy of both "honest art forms" and his own "mature taste." Among those Jarvis did convince, with the irony so integral to the Gallery's history, was the aging Lawren Harris, who during his tenure, and from his position as a Gallery trustee, declared that "Jarvis has altered the character of the Gallery. He has a most decided flair for the best."64 The Canadian public, not unlike Fitzgerald's Daisy, saw matters differently, and - in the short term anyway - chose the stolid John Diefenbaker, who made short work of Alan Jarvis. And with this climax, Jarvis's affinity with Aristotle's focus on this world, rather than with Plato's focus on a higher, unchanging world that had so shaped the Gallery's early history, was drawn into Aristotle's own larger package. There was no room in Plato's metaphysics for the concept of a tragic hero: instead, Plato disparaged the "tragic life" as the "goatish life," unworthy of depiction in his ideal Republic, and even subversive of the guardians' training for "excellence."65 Aristotle, by contrast, developed in his Poetics a rich typology of the tragic hero, and of tragedy as narrative, toward the arousal of a sense of "universal" pity and fear concerning human fallibility. Perhaps the most uncanny irony, then, of the directorship of a man who began his only book with a quote from Aristotle, and sought on television to equate art with "fun," is that he came to epitomize, through his actions at the National Gallery, the Aristotelian tragic hero. For "such a person," Aristotle wrote, "is someone not preeminent in virtue and justice" but who "belongs to the class of those who enjoy great renown and prosperity." Yet integral to tragedy's value as "catharsis," Aristotle wrote, is that this person "falls into adversity not through evil and depravity, but through some kind of error."66 Canadian society, with its preference for discretion and compromise, has never inclined toward admitting the larger-than-life scale of such figures, especially when their downfall might suggest factors other than weakness of character. And, indeed, the record of Alan Jarvis was as much as obliterated after his death. Most of the episodes of The Things We See physically vanished, after their single broadcast, during the summer of 1958, at four o'clock on weekday afternoons. And it was only by chance that they were rediscovered nearly forty years later. In much the same vein, the Gallery's only copy of a portrait of Jarvis by Yousuf Karsh was discovered by accident, misfiled in the Gallery's archives, and there is no record of it in Karsh s own l82

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files, as handled by his New York agent.67 Some idea of the intense feelings Jarvis generated, however, is conveyed by the fact that, as mounted on heavy cardboard, this print showed fracture lines both vertically and horizontally, suggesting that someone had deliberately smashed it on the edge of a desk. Even literature gave short shrift to Jarvis. For if his stay at the National Gallery actually made for a literary depiction, this involved his being flattened into a walk-on character in Robertson Davies s novel What's Bred in the Bone.68 As the dashing director of the National Gallery, "Alwyn Ross" in the novel bungles negotiations for a painting, is forced to resign, and commits suicide. But if Ross was obviously based on Jarvis, the character as drawn by Davies is two-dimensional, within a plot whose main protagonist was based on Jarvis's sometime lover Douglas Duncan. The "light-hearted" Ross, Davies wrote, "knew only that he often got what he wanted by enchanting those whose lives had been poor in enchantment." If this described one aspect of Alan Jarvis, the phrase "knew only" suggests the degree to which Davies, in the interest of his linear plot and perhaps for other reasons, simply shut down more difficult questions. And yet these linger. For was the trajectory that carried Jarvis to so dismal a personal end formed only out of his own flaws of character? Or did it involve also a focused working through of contradictions that lurked unresolved within a mix of wider factors? Among these factors were, plausibly, the technology that Jarvis so eagerly embraced, even as he turned away from any metaphysical framework; the Massey commission report as a prescriptive document whose main author was sheltered by wealth from his own contradictions; a National Gallery which was emerging from decades of directorial commitment to Christian Science, even as around it both art and society were changing profoundly; and a Canadian society that was itself torn in a love-hate relationship with the United States. What these factors suggest is that, as in classical Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, the protagonist - in this case Jarvis - became the victim not only of his own hubris but of the accumulated tensions and contradictions of his time and place. The next stage in the Gallery's history, however, was no more concerned than Davies was with sorting through the tragic scale of Jarvis's passage. As the legislation on "sculpture" implied, the Liberal government of Lester Pearson was concerned with moving on. Accordingly, what seemed to grow most out of its implicit repudiation of the Comfort era was that aspect of Jarvis's tenure which had been inchoate: the flirtations with the United States that he had built into both his persona and his discourse, even as he claimed ties with Britain, and even as contemporary American art was excluded from the collection. For the next major development at the National Gallery, after Comfort's embarrassing last-ditch defence of the Canadian border, would entail the unresisted arrival, even the welcome, of "internationalism" with an American bent. Ten months after his retirement, amid public questioning as to whether the National Gallery still served any purpose, Judy LaMarsh, as the new secretary of state, announced the appointment of a director who, though Canadian, had pursued her graduate degrees in art history at Harvard and was teaching in St Louis at the time. A Canadian Tragi-Comedy

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The arrival of Jean Sutherland Boggs as the National Gallery's first female director signalled the end of an official ban on the admission of contemporary American art to the collection, even as its dynamism had already slipped into the Gallery's public representation through Alan Jarvis. Yet, although this seemed to herald, too, the eclipse of the "spiritual" and "national" admixtures which - apart from Jarvis's premature offensive - had informed the Gallery since 1910, the following two decades would, in their tumult, make for strange surprises, and for even stranger alliances. Many of these would involve "Miss Boggs." For in her, the National Gallery would also, as what she called a "centripetal" institution, receive its pre-eminent champion, defender, occasional martyr, guide, and legacy-builder for the remainder of the twentieth century.

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PART T H R E E

The Evolution of a Style (1966-90)

Dr jean Sutherland Boggs at the time of her appointment as the National Gallery's fifth director in 1966. (John Evans Photography/ National Gallery of Canada)

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For Picasso [the unconscious] provided disturbing evidence of man's struggle for freedom and for identity against forces, inside and outside himself, he does not understand; it is the enemy which he was to describe himself attacking. -Jean Sutherland Boggs, Listening to Pictures, 1966 Anything that is used as art must be defined as art. - Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture 3," 7967

Between 1965, when Charles Comfort retired, and 1982, when the Trudeau government announced a new building, the world beyond the National Gallery's walls underwent extreme, if often subtle, upheaval. Among the factors in this transformation were the spread of cybernetic technologies; the end of an economic boom driven by cheap oil; the slow defeat of the United States in Vietnam; increasingly multicultural immigration patterns in Canada; and the growing political empowerment of women. Changes in art took place in dialogue with this upheaval, and were in turn reflected - often with some time lag - in the practices of the National Gallery of Canada. Initially, though, the appointment in May 1966 of Jean Sutherland Boggs as the Gallery's first woman director seemed to signal receptivity on the part of Trustees and government alike to the global momentum of the 19608. And just as significantly, it seemed also to signal the decisive eclipse of both the Harris-Brown linkage of art with transcendent "spiritual" values and the Massey-Comfort coalescence of "spirit" into "Canadianism." "CONFIDENT, COURAGEOUS, AND FREE ..."

"Miss Boggs" began her tenure being described in the press as "the best looking director the National Gallery ever had," and with photographic coverage that confirmed she was definitely in the running with Alan Jarvis for this distinction.1

The sheer glamour of her arrival belied the fact that - having been brought to Judy LaMarsh's attention by Marvin Gelber, a Toronto MP who would later chair the board at the Art Gallery of Ontario - she initially had turned the job down. Once convinced by LaMarsh, however, that there would be "legislation to improve the structures and function of the National Gallery," she, like Jarvis after McCurry, signalled a clear break with the era when - as Moncrieff Williamson put it - "even the elevator operators seemed too listless to get off their stools."2 After interviewing her, the Toronto Telegram's art critic, Barrie Hale, tried to put words to her dynamism: "I will confine myself to her face, in which appear: energy, swiftness, beauty, intelligence, humour, awareness, assurance, accommodation, determination - and I could go on free-associating for hours. What comes through most strongly, though, I would guess is the beauty. It is a pretty face, but made more so by the intelligence that moves behind its eyes: the two - beauty and intelligence - constantly reanimate each other through the other important feature - energy."3 This description indeed surpassed, in its eloquent lushness, that of Kenneth Clark on Jarvis, even as Boggs's words in her initial interviews clearly recalled those of her once-removed predecessor. For, whatever its role in her public persona, she followed the Jarvis of 1958 in downplaying "beauty" as a criterion of artistic value. Paintings, she said, "are not mere decoration. They are basic human questions considered in terms of works of art."4 If the disparagement of "mere decoration" hinted that she was herself not about to conform to early 19605 models of femininity, her linkage of paintings with "basic human questions" recalled Jarvis's insistence that art "should move you, even upset you." She also as much as repeated him in stating her goals for the National Gallery. She wanted it to become, she said, "a thoroughly first rate institution by international standards," as though such "standards," especially in regard to contemporary art, were both clearly discernible and readily agreed on.5 "Miss Boggs," however - who insisted on the "Miss" lest, as Dr Jean Boggs, she be mistaken for a man "in a bilingual country" - brought along some resources that Jarvis had lacked, even as, unlike both him and Comfort, she laid no claim to being an artist herself. "I started out as a painter when I was an adolescent," she told the Globe and Maz7,"but decided I was a bad one."6 Her own mother would elaborate on this notion of "bad" two years later, in saying that Jean had "thought she wasn't tops as an artist and she likes to be tops."7 This supercession of her artistic capabilities being made, then, Boggs had already gone some distance toward being "tops" at a different kind of art-related work. Born in Peru of Canadian parents in 1922, and raised mainly in Cobourg, Ontario, she had worked her way into the University of Toronto at age sixteen, studied art history there under Comfort, and worked in art education with Arthur Lismer at the Art Association of Montreal. She had then left Canada, not for Britain, as Jarvis had done, but to take a Master's degree and PHD in art history at Radcliffe College, Harvard. Her career had maintained this pattern of movement between Canada and the United States: from junior academic positions in the latter to the curatorship of the Art Gallery of Toronto from 1962 to 1964 and appointment as Steinberg Professor of the History of Art at George Washington

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University in St Louis. It was there that she was working when she was offered the directorship. Distinguishing her from Jarvis, then, along with this open affiliation with the United States, were a consistently strong academic background, and what her former boss at the Art Gallery of Toronto, William Withrow, called an "international reputation" as an art historian.8 Her 1953 doctorate had focused on The Group Portraits of Degas, and had in 1962 expanded into a study of Portraits by Degas, published by the University of California, at whose Riverside campus she had taught for eight years. As chief curator at the Art Gallery of Toronto from 1962 to 1964, she had also organized - in nine months and along with retrospectives on Canaletto and Delacroix - a major exhibition called Picasso and Man. This had included 270 of the artist's figure studies from throughout his career, among them the pivotal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, loaned by New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the art world of the early 1960s, this exhibition had been a personal coup. But it also prefigured Boggs's view of paintings as "basic human questions considered in terms of works of art," and suggested her principled anchorage in that form of humanism which - ironically enough - favoured the generic noun "man." A quick glance at this exhibition, and at her related activities of the time, will offer an early road map to Jean Boggs's long-term priorities for the National Gallery. The exhibition was, she wrote in the catalogue, dedicated "to Picasso's preoccupation with man throughout his career."9 What this implied was that - despite the artist's protean shifts of style - the concept "man" could endure as an baseline reference point, to which the forms of his art could be added as predicates. The concept was filled in further through a series of talks Boggs did for CBC Radio early in 1966, called Listening to Pictures, while still in St Louis. In them, she claimed that if Picasso could say "painting is not done to decorate apartments" but is rather "an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy," this enemy was in her opinion the "strange, ominous and inexplicable world" of the unconscious.10 The interpretation seemed strained, in that Picasso's remark dated from 1945 and concerned the question of his commitment against fascism. Yet it was, for Boggs, the unconscious which for Picasso gave "disturbing evidence of man's struggle for freedom and for identity against forces, inside and outside himself, he does not understand." Such a reading, with its focus on the "freedom" and "identity" of "man," recalled the existential humanist phase of Jean-Paul Sartre, with its emphasis on consciousness, and the concern with "man" that preoccupied such 1950s intellectuals as Paul Tillich, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Andre Malraux. Boggs gave her own spin to this tradition, providing via Picasso a sketch of the qualities she valued, and suggesting, as she did so, an inner complement to the traits described by Hale. Her description of Picasso's sculpture of his own arm hinted at the values that she held dear, both in regard to "man" and by implication in regard to herself, as a woman in a milieu hitherto ruled by men. "Picasso, "she wrote, "seems to have created a symbol, after having come to some understanding of the world and himself, of the way he can live with some assurance within it. He does not demand but is firm, he is

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responsive but steady, rugged but disciplined, realistic but imaginative. And above all he is confident, courageous and free."11 If these terms suggest Hemingway as easily as Picasso, they in doing so point to another of Boggs's affinities. Her focus on Picasso and Degas might have suggested a commitment to the Eurocentric "standards" that had so shaped Jarvis's "eye for quality." Her career, though, had made her more than comfortable with the post-war shift in art's epicentre. Having criss-crossed the Canada-U.S. border for two decades, she declared that she would "fill gaps" in the Gallery's collection of American art and so end the trustees' ban on contemporary American art that Jarvis had accepted.12 "We should not be bound by nationalism," she said at her press conference. If one of the Gallery's goals was to build "the finest collection of Canadian art anywhere," it would nevertheless buy only "the very best" and so "challenge" artists in Canada.13 "The Canadian artist reflects what is happening elsewhere in any country," she said. "There is no national art at this moment because we all move around so much and are all connected."14 Boggs's goal was undoubtedly furthered by the fact that, in 1963, Lawren Harris had finally retired from the board, taking with him the stature of a nationalist voice that had influenced the Gallery for half a century. Her comment that "there is no national art at this moment" provided an even stronger version of Jarvis's 1955 announcement that the Gallery would "buy as many works by our own artists as measure up to international standards."15 But it also echoed the 1945 claim by the American abstractionist Barnett Newman that "there is no art of nations, only of people."16 By cultivating such resonances, Boggs - though she stressed "continuity" - was as much as repudiating Comfort's goal of "represent[ing] many aspects of Canadian art" in his acquisitions and - more distantly - the Massey commission's linkage of painting with "Canadian spirit" and "Canadianism."17 This oscillation back toward "international standards" was, after the embarrassments of the Comfort era, perhaps inevitable. Yet, if the term "any country" suggested that Boggs was receptive to an "internationalism" of equal opportunity, this was qualified with the same focus that had informed the rise of an "international" modernism after the Second World War which just happened to be based in the United States. "New York is a major art centre" she added, "and to a large extent we are affected by those trends and are part of it."18 How Boggs herself had been affected was hinted at in Listening to Pictures, which considered twentieth-century modernism in painting without so much as mentioning a Canadian artwork and ended with American Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Of the painters Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, she said that "both make their works seem an act of spontaneous generation - the result of some force functioning through their unconscious. They seem oracles who speak with paint."19 This reference to implicitly heroic "oracles" recalled Harris's view of the artist as "pioneer [ing] for the soul of a people." It did so, however, without reference either to an ostensibly transcendent framework such as he had found in theosophy or to the "particularity" of the Canadian nation and "people." Instead it was American artists

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whom she described as strong enough to give form to a "force functioning through their unconscious," thereby harnessing "the enemy" which she alleged had disturbed the European Picasso. Later that year, at the 35th Couchiching Conference held to assess Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society," Boggs emphasized the United States s importance in a way that verged on being her own style of prescription. American art, she said, "is vigorous, it is original, it is new, and above all it is aggressively optimistic."20 In her writings and speeches, then, Jean Boggs provided a string of clues about her priorities. The Couchiching Conference, however, made for an odd intersection, which shadowed these clues like a querulous conscience. At it, she shared a stage with George Grant, by then professor of divinity at McMaster University in Hamilton, for a colloquium called "Science and the Arts in the Great Society." Boggs spoke mainly about differences in patronage between the United States and Canada, with that of the former based on private money and that of the latter on public. But she also quoted the "resonant words" of John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated three years before: "If sometimes ... our great artists have been most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate the artist, make him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda. It is a form of truth."21 This was a strong claim to make for art, which actually recalled Heidegger's case that art, as "questioning," is "the setting-into-work of truth."22 Yet, in so quoting Kennedy, Boggs did not question his casually imperial running together of the terms "our country" - meaning the United States - and "our civilization," into a singular "future." Instead, she as much as accepted it by claiming that such a view should inform Canada's commitment to the arts. Her goal, she said, would be to foster the "kind of society which will acknowledge the artist, recognize him and support him, not necessarily directly, but by producing a climate of opinion ... through publications, exhibitions, television, and radio which will make people interested and excited by what the artist has to say."23 Boggs's confidence in presidential rhetoric preceded Grant to the podium. But in their readings of the United States, the two could have been speaking from different planets, about different suns. For Boggs, having just come from St Louis in the afterglow of Kennedy's Camelot, the United States offered a beacon of tolerance for artistic freedom. For Grant, it was both "the greatest empire in world history" and the engine of a "technological society" which, by the mid-1960s, he had indeed decided verged on "tyranny." The problem, he said, lay in the belief that "a society of free and equal men" could develop out of the "control of human and non-human nature" through science. "To support distrust of these principles," he urged his audience to consider "the quality of life which is arising in the great megalopoloi; what life is like in the bureaucracies of the public and private corporations; the ruthlessness of the society to those who cannot succeed by the standards of prestige and acquisition ...

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the pursuit of titivation and shock in its artistic and sexual life ... It could be pointed out, also, that this society seems increasingly violent and masterful in its dealings with the rest of the world." This last comment was made within the context of the Vietnam War, whose brutality was by then being televised each evening. Ironically echoing another aspect of Heidegger - his wartime critique of the"ahistoricality" and "self-devastation" of "Americanism" - Grant then returned to their shared concern with technology as more than a tool. If the relationship between a science of "mastery" and the goal of "a society of free and equal men" formed the "first principle of the Great Society," he claimed also that this "proposition embodies the religion of this society. Religion means what men bow down to, and the great public religion of this society is the bowing down to technology."24 Yet, despite their different views of the United States, there did seem to be an unacknowledged zone of convergence between Grant and Boggs, which, again, showed the widespread, percolating influence of Martin Heidegger in the 1960s. "I would tentatively suggest," Grant said "that the virtue most necessary for this era is what I would call openness. This quality is the exact opposite of control or mastery. Mastery tries to shape the objects and people around us into a form which suits us. Openness tries to know what things are in themselves, not to impose our categories on them ... To be open in an age of tyrannical control will above all require courage."25 If this emphasis on "openness" was soon to make of Grant himself an inspirational figure for dissenting Canadian students in the late 1960s, it also closely recalled Heidegger's claim that, "in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual."26 And in so doing, it crossreferenced easily with Boggs's quotation from John R Kennedy that "society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him," and her corollary that society should respect "the artist's right to disagree, to be a dissenter."27 How this conjunction of terms translated into practice offers a lens for approaching the relationship between the National Gallery of Canada and contemporary art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in such a way as also to anticipate the building of the 1980s. It was no coincidence that, in these implied cross-references, both Boggs and Kennedy were mapping the artist's role in terms provided by the United States. For, despite Grant's blanket hostility to "the empire," the term "openness" also easily included changes that were taking place there not on television, or in corporations, but in an expanding network of humble urban galleries. This was because, by the mid-1960s, Clement Greenberg was being turned on his head by younger artists, who were teasing out the wider implications of his views. It had been Greenberg's claim, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, that the "major art" of the period would explore the defining terms of a given medium. He even offered his own foreshortened notion of "openness" that was bound by this claim, addressing only the erasure of such "painterly" qualities as "value contrasts" from the canvas's "open" surface. By the mid-1960s, however, this investment in "the flatness of the picture plane" had led to the refined sterility of what Greenberg called "post-painterly abstraction," and what his own critics viewed as a cul-de-sac for the critic once described as "the brigadier general" of abstract painting.28 192

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A new generation of artists, meanwhile, were deciding that the category "art" itself was as legitimate a target of questioning as the category "medium." For them, "openness" pertained not so much to the "invisible" - whether in Grant's notion of God, or the Abstract Expressionists' presumed precipitation of transcendence into paint - as simply to the visible: to basic phenomena which, in the rush to technology, tended to be overlooked or used instrumentally. In this project, they were indeed putting into practice Alan Jarvis's injunctions about the need to "really see," though without, of course, being aware of Jarvis himself or his mission. But they were also, in considering the nature of "art" itself, pushing well past Jarvis. This was because, in the United States of the 1960s, "openness" came also to apply to art as focused not on the internal relations of a painting or sculpture - as was the case for Picasso's Cubist aesthetics and for the "formalism" of Greenberg - as on how "the object" existed in interplay with its context. "THE OBJECT IS BUT ONE OF THE TERMS IN THE NEW ESTHETIC ..."

As a different approach to art, this concern with context was given a name in 1967 by the New York critic Barbara Rose. "Didactic art," she wrote in the American magazine Artforum, is art whose "real purpose is to teach, to elucidate, or to edify." She saw in such art a twofold "destructive and/or constructive" function: "It serves to question the validity of old canons and to offer fresh possibilities for exploration. Every good work of art does this, but didactic art is distinguished by the deliberate manner in which it focuses attention on esthetic issues ... An example of such constructive didactic art was Robert Morris' plywood show at the Green Gallery in 1964."29 This "show" had consisted of large plywood boxes painted grey: objects that established, as Morris put it, a simple "Gestalt," and so presumably activated, in their sheer impenetrability, questions of space and viewer presence. Called by the writer Pepe Karmel, "the most extreme, the most uncompromising" and "the most minimal of the Minimalists," Morris was soon to play a role, through one of his works, at the National Gallery.30 His polemics, therefore, can also stand as exemplary. "The better new work," he wrote for Artforum in autumn 1966, "takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer's field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the newer esthetic ... Every internal relationship ... reduces the public, external quality of the object and tends to eliminate the viewer to the degree that these details pull him into an intimate relation with the work and out of the space in which the object exists."31 Such art also - as Rose pointed out - reflected the influence of Duchamp's "readymades," which in their repudiation of "taste" had been prompts to a shift in art's focus from "the beautiful object" to exposure of the relationship among object, context, and viewer. They had been prompts, that is, to a questioning of categories widely taken for granted, without reference to "transcendent" standards. But, if "didactic art" developed Duchamp's ambition to "transcend taste," Rose also suggested the risk it ran. The main value of such work, she wrote, was less as "art" than as "dialogue." And because of this, "we must conclude that didactic art in its purer forms is made only for artists and critics, and not for the public. It is made, in other words, for Humanism, "Openness," and jean Sutherland Boggs

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internal consumption within the art world."32 The concern, then, was that formalism's focus on relations within a painting might mutate, via "didactic art's" focus on contextual issues, into a focus on relations "within the art world." Yet Rose's was not the only way of seeing a "didactic art" that also questioned the role of criticism. A year later Jack Burnham suggested - again in Artforum - that it heralded an artistic "paradigm shift" toward what he called "systems esthetics." "A polarity is presently developing," he wrote, "between the finite, unique work of high art, i.e. painting or sculpture, and conceptions which can loosely be called 'unobjects,' these being either environments or artifacts which resist prevailing critical analysis ... Increasingly'products' - either in art or life - become irrelevant and a different set of needs arise: these revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, [and] understanding the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships ... The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people, and between people and the components of their environment."33 Clearly, for Burnham, an art engaged with context had wider social implications than for Rose. The very term "context" radiated outward, to engulf not simply the gallery room in which an artwork was shown, or even the "art system" of which the gallery was a part, but questions of "the biological livability of the earth" and "the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships."34 This critical difference anticipated the difference opening up even then between a gallery-based Minimalism and Conceptualism, and such phenomena as Earth Art, which could involve the movement of rocks and earth in remote places, and a deliberately aggressive performance art that directly challenged the presence and motives of art's audience. Examples of the former were Michael Heizer's immense excavations in the American southwest and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Nevada. Examples of the latter were legion, ranging from Vito Acconci's muttered abuse while hidden inside a gallery to Chris Burden's documentation of himself being shot. What all of these approaches assumed, however, was an eclipse of allusiveness to the dilemmas of "man" within the artwork, such as Boggs had documented in her Picasso exhibition. Morris put this bluntly when he called for an end to sculpture which was "terminally diseased with figurative allusion."35 That Morris, Burnham, and Rose all published in Artforum was not incidental either. Begun in San Francisco in 1962 as "a medium for free exchange of critical opinion," Artforum was by the mid-1960s bearing witness to and even accelerating the break-up of a modernism ruled by Greenberg's comforting, implicitly neoPlatonist principle that "aesthetic value is one not many."36 His own claim in 1939 had been that the "avant-garde's" role was "to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence."37 The irony, though, was that by 1967 the American art world was reaping the full fruit of this prescription for self-reinforcing movement. Greenberg affected righteous astonishment that its outcome seemed to be that "the far-out is what has paid off best in avant-garde art in the long run."38 This assessment carried its own 194

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subtext of sour grapes, given that, for him, the extent of change implied also the demise of his own efforts to uphold, in his status as "the practised eye," a model of the "centre" by which the "far-out" could be assessed.39 For just as self-reinforcing movement itself was by that time ineluctable and diversified, among the goals of such artists as Morris in foregrounding context was subversion of the formalist critic's presumption of "detachment." The dynamics in play were not made any simpler either by informational overheating. As described by Artforurns editor, Philip Leider, also in 1967: "Information is now provided to artists and art public in unprecedented profusion. Works are illustrated in the international art magazines within days after they are created; catalogues pour from galleries and museums around the world; almost no exhibition ... fails to visit at least one or two other museums."40 This profusion also helped explain the appeal of a reductive, "degree zero" Minimalism that seemed to give leverage to art in subverting the very terms of "the art system." But crucial to the role of a national gallery in Canada at the time was that the informational flow itself had no regard for boundaries. Within Canada, the debates in Artforum added a new dimension to a vector which was still - as it had been before the Massey commission - mainly south to north. But there was also, to some extent, an oscillating flow of those Canadian artists who - like Boggs herself - had proved able to operate in that rarefied domain described by Leider in 1964 as one of "rapacious" intelligence.41 Among these were Michael Snow, Les Levine, Robert Murray and (as half of N.E. Thing Co.) Iain Baxter, all of whom showed in New York. Levine was even singled out by Burnham as "methodologically... the most consistent exponent of a systems esthetic," for his "environments of vacuum-formed modular plastic," through which visitors could move. Levine s Clean Machine, Burnham wrote, "has no ideal vantage points, no 'pieces' to recognize, as are implicit in formalist art. One is processed as in driving through the Holland Tunnel."42 Leider had also claimed that, amid such flows and shifts of critical standards, "the job of the museum ... becomes, not to pour this tide of information back upon the public in the same disordered state in which it came, but to impose upon it some kind of order of quality, to sift from within it that which is worthy."43 The extent of his own uncertainty was implied by his language: though he retained the word "quality," it came in the phrase "some kind of order of quality." But what kind? This was the challenge that Jean Boggs inherited at the National Gallery in regard to contemporary art. And, although she was more than receptive to the United States's importance, her own views were already starting - amid the decade's "openness" and pace - to sound dated. In January 1966, before returning to Canada, she had written an editorial for Canadian Art. In it, she gave an Americanized, catchy, but curiously patronizing analysis of the two main trends she saw mid-decade. "Who is the artist of the 1960s?" she asked. "He is either the philosopher, expansively contemplating the meaning of the stars, or the city-mouse (and ideally his city is New York) recording the effects of our mass-produced, automation-threatened civilization ... Landscape and still-life painting no longer thrive, and traditional mythology hardly exists outside the work of the contemporary old masters (Picasso, Miro, Chagall...). Humanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs

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Whichever he is, the star-gazer or the city-dweller, our contemporary artist thinks and expresses himself symbolically; and his symbols are drawn from contemporary life."44 As Boggs herself had gone to one of the "best" American universities, so she seemed to imply that artists, to be taken seriously, should go to the "ideally" suited city of New York to work. But she also - besides being bound by the era's convention of the masculine pronoun - presumed to an understanding of the mental states of these artists, and especially of those she described as "city mice." She wrote of "the star-gazer" from the perspective of the viewer: "He makes us feel free. We are liberated from any sense of our inert, heavy, aging selves when we stand before the films of colour in the large canvases of Noland, Louis, Bush or Kelly, or look up at a mobile from Calder." But "the city-dweller," she claimed by contrast, "is a preacher (if often a funny one); his sermons are full of a sense of anxiety, of doom, of obsolescence, and of mortality. And as the works of Warhol, Snow or Rosenquist occur to us, we can add his fears of vacuity, vulgarity, artificiality, repetitiveness, and the seductive beauty of twentieth century Marilyn Monroes." This promotion of "the star-gazer" - or the painterly abstractionist - as an agent of bodily "liberation" for the viewer was itself counter to Minimalisms goal of making the viewer more, not less, aware of immediate space. But Boggs's reading of Warhol also carried a loaded subtext that resisted the more extreme implications of his work. She was hardly the first critic to write of Pop iconography using categories of mental states inherited from humanism, as though the cool silkscreen repetitions of electrocution chambers and car crashes revealed Warhol the artist "symbolically" as the bearer of both Inwardness and Angst. In doing so, however, she was simply not entertaining - at least in this editorial - the scarier possibility. This was that the repetitions did not stop at signalling, and even inviting, the collapse of boundaries between high and low art, "creativity" and mass reproduction. They might also rather than bespeaking "fear" - be inviting movement beyond all categories of inwardness and "depth" experience, cultivating only the seduction of surface amid a technologically accelerated displacement of "the human." Boggs, though, seemed to cling to the notion of the "philosopher" painter as a bulwark against such possibility. In Listening to Pictures it arose again, in a contrast she drew between the work of Henri Matisse and that of the German Expressionist Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner. The former, she said, "reveals a confidence in the validity of the artist's immediate vision." But Kirchner's tortured Artist and Model of 1907 "is more speculative and more disturbing ... Even more brutally than Picasso, he wanted to come to grips with the meaning of life ... Ours is the century of the speculative, probing painter - the century of the painter-philosopher."45 By implication, then, the philosopher for Boggs is one who strives "to come to grips with the meaning of life." This was a loose usage of the term that recalled Barnett Newman's claim that "the art of the future will... be an art that is abstract yet full of feeling, capable of expressing the most abstruse philosophical thought."46 And ironically - given their other differences - this was also a notion of "the philosopher" which came closer to

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George Grant's program in his Royal Commission essay than it did to contemporary developments in philosophy as a discipline. In paying their own attention to philosophy, however, American Minimalists were uninterested in the model of "the painter-philosopher" in search of "the meaning of life." Instead, they plugged more easily into the approach which had for decades prevailed in English-speaking universities and which was shaped by Ludwig Wittgenstein's two phases, both of which informed the anti-humanism of much 1960s art. To consider these very briefly: in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921, Wittgenstein had sought a prepositional language that would adequately map "the world" as "the totality" of "atomic facts" that exist in "logical space." In doing so, he claimed that "we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things ... I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space."47 This was an analysis that played toward Morris's investigations of minimal objects and visual fields, as toward Burnham's promotion of a "systems esthetic." But it also offered little comfort for those seeking "the meaning of life" through art. Instead, Wittgenstein's search for a prepositional language led to the radically mystical claim that "the solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time ... Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem."48 These statements were stubbornly anti-metaphysical. And in them could be read the basis for, in art, the sheer reductive "is-ness" of Morris's wooden boxes, Donald Judd's machined metal ones, and Carl Andre's wood beams and piles of bricks. Wittgenstein's career, however, also had a more speculative later phase that readily informed explorations of the category "art" such as had evolved from Duchamp's dialogue with "aesthetics." If in the Tractatus Wittgenstein repudiated metaphysics, he in the posthumous Philosophical Investigations conceded, after a long silence, the stubborn opacity of language itself. Scaling back his claims, Wittgenstein wrote instead that "a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."49 He then asked his readers to "imagine" different kinds of "language games" that might yield insights into the principles of language and its "everyday use." This style of inquiry, too which proceeds via thought experiments that begin with "If ...," or "Imagine ..." lent itself to the kind of in situ installations that came to be the preferred "game"of Conceptual Art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And so, too, did his epigram "the meaning is the use" lend itself to adaptation by Robert Morris in regard to the category "art." "New conditions under which things must exist are already here," Morris wrote pontifically in Artforum in 1967. "In grasping and using the nature of made things the new three-dimensional art has broken the tedious ring of 'artiness' circumscribing each new phase of art since the Renaissance. It is still art. Anything that is used as art must be defined as art."50 Initially, Jean Sutherland Boggs seemed thoroughly open to these new possibilities. In Listening to Pictures she had the humility to admit that "to end any talk on contemporary art must be to end inconclusively if at all honestly... What lies ahead

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is a mystery only the artist can unravel for us. Our responsibility is sympathy and tolerance."51 Then in apparent regard for this approach, she in February 1967 hired the twenty-nine-year-old Brydon Smith as the Gallery's first curator of contemporary art. Boggs knew Smith from the Art Gallery of Toronto - soon to be the Art Gallery of Ontario - where she had overseen his work on a Mondrian retrospective before she left for St Louis. Educated at McMaster University in science, Smith had begun by reviewing art for the university newspaper and, finding that this was his passion, had turned to art history at the University of Toronto. As a curator, he had gained a reputation as a champion of the American artforms which had been excluded from the National Gallery's collection, such that in Toronto his cause scandaleuse had been the 1967 purchase of the Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's Giant Hamburger, made from painted sailcloth stuffed with foam rubber. The gesture had made for both protest and wide publicity. Shortly afterward, the AGO'S board had balked at a Mondrian painting whose price Smith had negotiated at - he thought a bargain. When Boggs offered him the post at the National Gallery, therefore, he was receptive. But he brought a condition. Within a purchase budget of $25,000 he insisted on an annual cache of $2,500, which he could use to make acquisitions without accountability to the Gallery's board or even to the director. Boggs agreed, and Smith announced that his first such purchase would be eight of the Warhol Brillo Boxes which had been disallowed "sculpture" status by Charles Comfort two years before and so excluded from the country.52 This gesture, and Jean Boggs's acquiescence, carried great weight for the National Gallery. What was implicit in Boggs's talks, and in Smiths hiring and initial purchase, was a dissolution of borders: of the Canadian border as a hindrance to the passage of ideas and artworks, and of aesthetic borders themselves as exclusionary of particular kinds of objects as "art." And while the discretionary fund was a mere tenth of Smith's annual purchase budget - which in turn was a thirtieth of the Gallery's purchase budget - it gave him unprecedented independence, even as the reputation he brought from Toronto gave him an unprecedented profile for a curator. This would soon be enhanced further when he embarked on a cross-country tour reminiscent of Brown's, Jarvis's, and Boggs's own after she became director. During it, he made clear his interest in radical trends in American art. "The whole museum concept," Smith announced in Vancouver, "is one we have to get rid of - at least the concept of buying and exhibiting paintings only. There will still be people who enjoy and expect this and that's fine. But it seems to me that one needs attached to a museum, or as a satellite, something which I've lately called a Centre for Living Art."53 A sense of what he was implying was conveyed by one of the anomalous events whose organization he oversaw at the Art Gallery of Toronto. This was a "total environment" called Slipcover that had in 1965 been built in the gallery by the Irishborn Canadian Les Levine, whom Burnham would cite as exemplifying "systems esthetics." As labyrinths of mylar and plastic, Slipcover inflated and collapsed around visitors as though it were breathing, while lights and sound effects subverted the usual contemplation of objets d'art.

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Boggs herself, meanwhile, soon added her own technological approach to art objects and - significantly - art-related events. The 1967-68 annual report, which was the first that she oversaw, was also the first to include as extensive a photographic record of events as of the Gallery's acquisitions. In part, this was due to developments in photography, which permitted easier informal documentation. Yet SLR flash cameras had been available in the 1950s, and even Alan Jarvis - for all his personal vanity - had eschewed inclusion in the annual reports of pictures of his travels and openings. Boggs, however, had the advantage of a period whose artists, in their own interpretation of "openness," were playing with yet another legacy of Duchamp's sardonic foregrounding of wider context. This was the exploration, in both Europe and North America, of ephemeral events as art, whose primary record - if record there was to be at all - would be photographic. Remarkably, with her own move toward documentation, "Miss Boggs" as much as domesticated the ambiguous and still developing dynamic of such events which had evolved under the name of "Happenings" in the United States and Fluxus and Aktionismus in Europe. She did so by changing the basic terms of the events themselves, which - as carried out, for example, by Alan Kaprow in New York, Yves Klein in Paris, and Joseph Beuys in Germany - tended to have no consciously prefigured "purpose" that might limit their meaning in advance. Instead, they most often proceeded intuitively according to juxtapositions, often bizarre, that produced their meaning as they unfolded. Boggs, however, as she would henceforth do with many things, subordinated the very concept of "an event" to the perceived interests of the National Gallery. In this case, the visual recording of Gallery events, which would continue while she was director, conveyed her conviction also that the interests of the "art community" - which included artists, dealers, art bureaucrats and, presumably, a wider public - could be harmonized, as though this were one big family, under the auspices and the roof of the National Gallery. Appropriately enough, "Miss Boggs" often represented herself at such events, and was photographed, as a kind of sociable art object, wearing dresses printed in Op-Art geometrical patterns. But as had been signalled through her writings, for Jean Boggs this "art community" would contain a major new invitee. Already, by the mid-1960s, American media and Pop Art were themselves feeding jointly off the energy of Happenings to foster a cult of spectacle and celebrity. And in this sense, the new style of visual record for the National Gallery could be read in terms of an Americanization of Gallery style. This process found particular focus in both a scheduling choice and a set of images within the larger record. In January 1968, the Gallery hosted the first exhibition planned after Boggs's arrival. Organized by Smith, it involved the work not of a Canadian or European but of the American Pop artist James Rosenquist, of whom Smith wrote that "contemporary art should tell us something about our environment and ourselves. Most of us are living consciously or unconsciously in the distant past, or dreaming about the future. Very few people enjoy their present environment. One aim of the contemporary artist is to make us aware of the richness and variety of our immediate surroundings."54 Both Smith's words and the prominence given

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Symbolizing a major shift in Gallery policy, the New York gallery owner Leo Castelli oversees a handshake between the New York Pop artist James Rosenquist and Brydon Smith, the National Gallery's first curator of contemporary art, at the opening of Rosenquist's exhibition in January 1968 and in front of Rosenquist's sculpture Capillary Action II. (John Evans, National Gallery of Canada)

Rosenquist conveyed the hint that, in a National Gallery run by Boggs, notions of "present environment" and "immediate surroundings" were not going to be shaped by an invisible Canadian border. The 1967-68 report displayed photographs of two of Smith's acquisitions: Rosenquist's Capillary Action II and Number 29, the only painting done by Jackson Pollock on glass. But even more effective in signalling change was an image of Smith and Rosenquist, both of them with their eyes closed, being guided toward grasping one another's hands by Rosenquist's New York dealer Leo Castelli. Clearly, the National Gallery's long boycott of contemporary American art was poised to end. "THE CENTRIPETAL NATURE OF THE MUSEUM"

Yet, if this was how Boggs announced the Gallery's adaptation to the art world of the mid-1960s, she also brought with her the terms of a proposed retrenchment. Capillary Action II and Number 29 were not given top billing in the 1967-68 annual report. Instead, this went to the image of a small painting, called The Tribute Money, that was reproduced on the cover. With it was a note stating proudly that this work by Rembrandt van Rijn had been "bought with a special appropriation from Parliament in 1967." The note neither revealed the amount paid - $350,000 - nor mentioned that the Parliament which approved it was again ruled by the Liberal Party which had 2OO

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voted large sums for the Liechtenstein purchases in the 1950s. But the acquisition itself seemed to hint that John Diefenbaker's ghost would no longer be haunting the National Gallery, bearing in one hand a tablet reading "Suspicion of Things European" and in the other a tablet reading "Emphasis on Things Canadian."55 Indeed, for a while after Boggs' arrival, the new secretary of state, Judy LaMarsh publicly considered the Gallery's buying, with a similar appropriation, a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra di Bend, whose asking price would be at least $6 million. From whom would the Gallery be purchasing this painting? The answer suggests, perhaps, the intensity of some Liberals' desire to pretend that Alan Jarvis's messy downfall had never happened. For Ginevra, had it been bought, would have come to the National Gallery from the Liechtenstein collection, which was still, in the mid-1960s, shedding paintings. Six million dollars proved too much even for Lester Pearson, and Ginevra would eventually make its way to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The loss did not much trouble Miss Boggs, however, in that the idea had not been hers to begin with; instead, she was content with the signal being sent with The Tribute Money. Once again, the National Gallery was paying its own "tribute money" toward acquiring European paintings, and not only - to recall Jarvis - "as a rule stick to guide Canadian artists" or to fill "gaps" in the collection. While Boggs could tell an audience that "Paintings ... are basic human questions considered in terms of works of art," she could also be more hard-headed. Making her own cross-country tour in late 1966, she noted that exchanges among museums of pre-modern art were becoming "more and more difficult." For the National Gallery to continue to "have access to the treasures of other nations," therefore, it should - she said in terms also reminiscent of Jarvis - "buy quality now." She might even have been quoting from his "Art Means Business" speech when she declared "in order to borrow one must be able to lend. We must work at increasing our borrowing power."56 The category "art," then, was indeed proving versatile, in that - according to Miss Boggs - paintings could be both "basic human questions considered in terms of works of art" and a means of "increasing our borrowing power." And obviously, The Tribute Money by Rembrandt would bring with it these benefits, as well as, perhaps, the hint that "increased borrowing power" was itself becoming, in the commodified world of the 1960s, itself a "basic human question." Among the eventual ironies of Jean Boggs s tenure was that this painting of which she was so proud in 1967 proved of little eventual benefit to the Gallery's "borrowing power," whatever it might convey about "human questions." Sixteen years later, amid protests from the Gallery staff, a panel of mainly Dutch experts, using sophisticated dating techniques, would throw doubt on its attribution to Rembrandt and suggest that it was done by Willem de Poorter, one of his close followers. The debate focusing as it had to on the minutiae of tree-ring dating techniques, the practices of seventeenth-century artists' workshops, and interpretation of the paintings' figures as "uncommonly expressive" - would prove fundamentally unresolvable. But it would still necessitate qualification in the painting's public labelling, and so qualify also its stature as the sort of "treasure" which had begun to drive the National Humanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs

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Gallery's acquisition program during the period of the Liechtenstein purchases. Obviously, comparison with the fiasco of the Jarvis "Bruegel," if not with the more extreme case of the Chrysler exhibition, suggests itself, with the difference that, in 1967, the National Gallery under Jean Boggs did invest in this style of "quality" precarious as it might prove - as an ostensible basis for international stature.57 But if the most obvious analogy was with the Liechtenstein period, this vision of the Gallery also cross-referenced easily back to Eric Brown's hope that it would become "a radiating centre of art knowledge of all kinds." Boggs's frame of reference lacked Brown's metaphysical coordinates. Yet there was one thing which they might strongly have agreed was indispensable to such a centre. During the 1920s, writing from the Victoria Museum, Brown configured his concern for the "proper housing" of the National Gallery in terms of "a national monument to the arts."58 And forty years later, faced with the Lome Building for such acquisitions as The Tribute Money, Boggs implicitly resurrected this conflation. "There is something to be said," she announced in Montreal in June 1967, "for the very hallowed atmosphere within a museum which separates it from the community... I am convinced... that we should try to capture that museum aura, that museum spell - a world apart in time and space from the community that surrounds it ... That particular museum flavour, which arouses a sympathetic response to the art of the past as well as to the present... and which even seems to cast a spell which makes other civilizations more accessible, can only be created within the walls of a museum, and is an intrinsic part of the centripetal nature of the museum as an institution."59 Boggs must have known when she made this appeal that it resisted the major currents of the 1960s, as well as Smiths claim that "the whole museum concept is one we have to get rid of." Nor was this simply a matter of her seeming to suggest a "context" that would be beyond interrogation. For the status of "aura" had also been challenged in one of the most widely read essays on art in the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," published in 1936. There Benjamin had defined "aura" not in terms of "the cloud-like ovoid... that encompasses all living beings," as the theosophists had, but, less mystically, in terms of "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be."60 He had tied this "aura" to both the "uniqueness" of the "original" work of art and art's origins in "cult" and "ritual," which put more value on an object's being "hidden" than on its being "exhibited." But, if secular modernism had developed the "exhibition value" of original art, Benjamin claimed that "mechanical reproduction" stood to "emancipate the work of art" from this vestige of its "parasitical dependence on ritual." He considered this "emancipation" to be at work especially in the reproducibility of film and claimed that "when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever."61 As a left-wing, "progressive" thinker, Benjamin welcomed this disappearance, as better suited to art's being used to "mobilize the masses" via the very state of "distraction" in which they lived. "To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura," he wrote, "is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means 2O2

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of reproduction."62 Jean Boggs's goal seemed just the opposite: to create that special "shell," whose own "aura" would resist such "prying" so as to protect works of art as "unique objects" and restore the element of reverential "distance." Accordingly, Benjamin would likely have viewed Boggs's desire to reinstate "aura," less in the individual artwork than in the privileged container of the museum, as profoundly reactionary: a deliberate reaching backward to restore a "cultic" relation that partially hides the work even while investing in its "exhibition value." Yet this was indeed Boggs's stated goal. And as the overseer of a building designed to house civil servants, she did not feel she had been given great material to work with. Early in her tenure also, she publicly catalogued the Lome Building's drawbacks: "ceilings which are too low; white linoleum floors which are too glaring; fluorescent lighting which is ... too cold. The walls in true office building fashion are of steel, which was covered with fabric ... On the second floor, we need glass on a great many pictures to protect them from the changes in air that sweep up the staircase a previous director, Alan Jarvis, installed so imaginatively. Space became so restricted that in May 1967 some of the offices and the library were moved to four floors in the National Building a block and a half away."63 As early as 1968, then, she began to consult with her staff as to the preferred form of a new building which, within months of her appointment as director, she had said should "be a work of art in itself." By 1971, these consultations had yielded a thirteen-page "talking paper" which for the first time mapped the terms of such a building. Boggs put herself in the position of a visitor, or perhaps in part assessed the desires of an ideal visitor in terms of her own. "There is an optimum size for a museum," she wrote, "beyond which the visitor faces fatigue and boredom." A new building, therefore, should "be constructed for that optimum size" and toward "the provision of space scaled and designed to give the visitor the greatest delight in looking at original works of art." Nor should the building "seem too oppressively monumental or monolithic," but "fit rather agreeably into the Ottawa landscape." And part of it "should be visible from outside, as is true on the ground floor in the present Lome Building ... It should be possible to have some of the Gallery's activities visible in glass from the street and to have these planned so that security for the collection would not suffer."64 In this list of "shoulds" and "should nots" can be read the seeds of the building that would in the 1980s be designed by Moshe Safdie, under Boggs's supervision as head of the Canada Museum Construction Corporation. But this would be a decade and a half in the future. Meanwhile, Boggs could also say that strategies for adapting the Lome Building toward her goal of "museum aura" were proving "incredibly ingenious and amazingly attractive." The record of exhibitions organized under Charles Comfort suggests that, throughout his tenure, Alan Jarvis's innovations in directional lighting were played down, in conformity with the nakedly lit "white cube" model that was emerging in the early 1960s. Under Boggs, however, and in keeping with conventions already in use in European and especially American museums, exhibitions of pre-modern art became careful exercises in the shaping of ambience, via subdued and directional lighting, of colour-coordinated rooms, and of carefully juxtaposed hangings. This emphasis on both theatricality and intimacy created Humanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs

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within the limits of the Lome Building the sort of "spell" to which she alluded in her talk. This was especially the case with the display of medieval sculpture bought by the Gallery in France in 1972, and with such exhibitions of traditional art as Art and the Courts (1972), Fontainebleau (1973), and Silver in New France (1974).

Nevertheless, Boggs's comment about "museum aura," made in a speech at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in early June 1967, came almost exactly two months after Brydon Smith was quoted in Vancouver as saying that "the whole museum concept is one we have to get rid of." And it was indeed Smith who was more in tune with the anti-institutional movement of art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which no more lent itself to the uninterrogated cultivation of "museum aura" than it did to Boggs's humanistic notion of "the philosopher." Instead, Jack Burnham, in his article on "systems esthetics," also claimed that the "interdisciplinary basis" of such art was "a legitimate extension of McLuhan's comment that 'Pop art was an announcement that the entire environment was ready to become a work of art.'" That Burnham cited the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan without troubling to provide his first name showed that the high-speed flow of information was also moving from north to south. Smith, however, was faced with transposing the distinctly antiinstitutional bias of such art into the museum context provided by the National Gallery, as well as with convincing both his immediate superior and the taxpaying public which funded the Gallery that there was a point to doing so. The discretionary fund was crucial to this project, and during the second year of its existence Smith purchased a work that both the Canadian public and the director herself would find difficult. This was Robert Morris's Untitled - 254 pieces offelt 3 A in. thick, which Smith bought from the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Untitled developed an exploration of what the artist called "anti-form," which he had begun in the summer of 1967. It came with a set of instructions for display as well as with the "254 pieces of felt," which were randomly cut. These read: 1. Mix up the pieces thoroughly and heap on thefloorwith no special arrangement of the pieces. 2. The wall may be used within special limits. A row of nails, two feet or 16-in. (stud width) no higher than 3 ft. Six, eight or 10 ft. total length of row. Then the pieces of felt can be heaped on thefloorand some up on the nails.65 The "work," then, was basically an exercise in spatially contained randomness. In keeping with the growing prominence of explanatory texts, Morris had also assessed the historical development of "anti-form" for Artforum in mid-1968. Tracing "the visibility of process in art" to "the saving of ... unfinished work in the High Renaissance," Morris claimed that he was going "beyond the personalism of the hand to the more direct revelation of matter itself... Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied... Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms... is a positive assertion. It is part of the work's refusal to continue estheticizing the form."66

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Robert Morris, Unfitted - 254 pieces of felt 34 in. thick, purchased for the National Gallery by Brydon Smith in 1968. (National Gallery of Canada)

The clinical style of Morris's prose was in keeping with his case for "anti-form" as a politically progressive depersonalization of the artist's relationship to material and a downgrading of individual intention. In accordance with this alleged momentum - as well as with the artist's precise instructions - the work was without apparent irony randomly heaped on the floor of Smith's contemporary art room in the National Gallery and drooped over the nails in the wall. Thus presented, it also offered a case study of Jack Burnham's "systems esthetic." In his article, Burnham had cited Morris generally, and the anti-form phase specifically, as exemplary of the kind of art in which "the idea of process takes precedence over end results."67 In precipitating a concept into an alleged "unobject," however, Unfitted also did duty as a "didactic" artwork: a theoretical position - to quote Rose - "condensed into a single object, which stands for the entire argument." According to these criteria, Untitled could even in retrospect be viewed as what Rose called a "prime object," the first in a series. This was not least because in an essay of the following year, Annette Michelson - soon to become a founder of the influential journal October - would describe Morris's "anti-form" projects in terms of an aesthetics of "transgression." In doing so, she implicitly honoured them as prefiguring the deliberately iconoclastic styles of art which would increasingly challenge norms of "decency" in the 1970s and 1980s.68 But if "didactic work" - as Rose insisted - had "value not as art but as dialogue," then it would follow that such work could have public value only if a public was willing to enter into the dialogue it suggested. And such seemed not to be the case in regard to the broad Canadian public that the National Gallery was ostensibly serving, ostensibly toward - if the 1951 Royal Commission was to be believed - provid-

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ing "the spiritual foundations of our national life." Untitled - 254 pieces of felt 3A in. thick shared a fourth-floor room in the Lome Building with Warhol's Brillo, Rosenquist's painting and installation, and Pollock's painting on glass, as well as other American works Smith had purchased. A Toronto Star article of December 1968 introduced a visit to the work by Smith himself in terms of his careful inspection of its folds "because angry gallery visitors often throw garbage into it." Smith was unapologetic. "I really love the Morris felt piece," he was quoted as saying. "It's changed a lot of my perceptions ... One morning I noticed that behind our house someone had thrown out a lot of old tar paper. It looked beautiful to me because I could appreciate the variations in the accidental form of the objects and the subtlety of the range of colours. It's a funny thing. People ultimately get a richer experience from seeing works they hate ... That work of art knocks people into consciousness. They see a lot of things they'd never looked at before."69 Whether Smith was aware, as he searched the folds of felt for garbage, of how closely he was paraphrasing Alan Jarvis's distinction between "just looking around" and "really seeing" was not clear. But, as with Jarvis's talks on abstraction, the idiom of his trying to justify the Morris purchase to Canadians had to differ profoundly from that of the American magazines he read to keep informed about contemporary art. He even managed, by describing how the work had helped him notice the "beautiful" tar paper behind his house, to aestheticize an "un-object" that Morris had described in terms of an anti-aesthetic. Such art-world distinctions likely did not interest the readers of the Toronto Star. Smith's having to adapt his vocabulary to reach them, however, did more than point to differences between the Canadian and American contexts. It suggested also the precariousness of his trying to transpose the most "advanced" American gestures to a National Gallery whose "collection" - as Boggs would put it in 1969 - "may be unique in the world in being the tax-payers' acquisition and not based upon a royal or great private collection."70 Explanations, therefore - even in Diefenbaker s absence - had to be provided in a way that these "taxpayers" could understand, and maybe even appreciate. The experimental artists of the United States - able to represent themselves as on the leading edge of global developments, and fuelled by the confidence of the immense economy that surrounded them - had no such duty. Nevertheless, if there was one moment in recent times that seemed to admit the possibility of Canadians themselves investing in "openness," it was provided by the Liberal Party's choice, in early April 1968, of the Montreal lawyer, political activist, and bon vivant Pierre Elliott Trudeau as its new leader to succeed Lester Pearson. As minister of justice under Pearson, Trudeau had already overseen a loosening of the laws on homosexuality and abortion, while leaving the pithy quote that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." When he became prime minister on 20 April, it was amid a wave of "Trudeaumania" that built in part on the novelty and apparent promise of his own charm; in part on the energy of the previous year's centennial celebrations; and in part on a wave of change that marked the hormonal coming of age of the Baby Boom as an immense population bulge. But amid a background of student riots in France and the United States, and new levels of violence 2O6

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Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and jean Sutherland Boggs at the opening of the National Gallery exhibition Jacob Jordaens Tapestries, on

29 November 1968. The transformations of the period were not only in the nature of art, given that, in April of the same year, "Trudeaumania" had helped make Trudeau the leader of the Liberal Party and then prime minister. He and Boggs had known one another at Harvard University in 1945, when both had been graduate students in their twenties. (Studio C. Marcil, National Gallery of Canada)

in the Vietnam War, the National Gallery seemed especially poised to benefit via the new prime minister, for Jean Sutherland Boggs's acquaintance with him had far antedated that of the Canadian public. She had first met Trudeau at Harvard University in 1945, when both of them had been graduate students. He had been twenty-five, and she in her very early twenties.71 And, indeed, a photograph of the two of them sitting together, in late November 1968 at a Gallery exhibition opening of immense Baroque tapesties by the Flemish artist Jacob Jordaens, suggests that theirs was already a complex and nuanced relationship. Yet, paradoxically, the National Gallery as directed by Jean Boggs did not benefit under the successive governments of Pierre Trudeau, any more than her anticipated vision of "hallowed atmosphere" and "museum aura" were respected by many contemporary artists. Instead, 1968 opened a period of stress that would actually culminate in Boggs's resignation in 1976, while Trudeau was still prime minister. Nor would this stress be due only to artists suspicious of "museum aura" and eager to question context, for the offensive against the Gallery would also come from within the government. But the governmental side would - with one possible exception be a slowly evolving process, whereas the extremes of artistic subversion appeared more quickly, within a period of months in 1969, and in such a way as to build toward a kind of manifesto for the future from Boggs herself. Ironically, the priHumanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs

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mary agent from within the Gallery would not be Brydon Smith, even as the event itself, breaking into the triumphalism of Boggs's early tenure, would bring to bear Smith's claim that "people ultimately get a richer experience from seeing works they hate." Instead, the role of unwitting provocateur went to a younger man who, hired as an assistant curator of Canadian art just before Boggs's arrival, became the Gallery's first acting curator of contemporary Canadian art in 1968, and promptly introduced what was arguably the most subversively resonant "exhibition" in the National Gallery's history. "WE'RE ANTI-CAPITAL BIG A ART"

Pierre Theberge entered the history of the National Gallery of Canada as a seeming anomaly. From rural Quebec, he barely spoke a word of English when, a month before Jean Boggs's arrival as director, he was hired by the acting director William Dale as assistant curator of Canadian art. Yet, in a significant sense, Theberge's arrival was only anomalous within the National Gallery's own record. Having been founded by an English governor general, it had from the start drawn its directors, and even most of its staff, from either England itself, as with Eric Brown, or from English Canada, as with the directors who followed him. This pattern was far more unbalanced than that of the Canadian government in that Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Louis St Laurent had been francophone prime ministers from Quebec. And among Charles Comfort's achievements, during his often justly criticized directorship, was the appointment of a curator of Canadian art from that area whose record of European settlement antedated Ottawa's, and for that matter most of English-speaking Canada's. In hiring Theberge just before his own departure, then, Dale was carrying forward the legacy of the man under whom he had served as deputy director, adding another francophone to work with Jean-Rene Ostiguy, whom Comfort had promoted the previous year. In the course of the following two years, Theberge took on, in practice, the portfolio of contemporary Canadian art. Vested with Boggs's and Ostiguy's confidence, and with Brydon Smith's expertise on cross-border currents close at hand, he not only learned to speak English but cultivated close relationships with many young Canadian artists, whose work he both showed and recommended for purchase by the Gallery. Perhaps most prominent among these was the anomalous London Ontario painter Greg Curnoe who, while an outspoken Canadian nationalist, both literally and figuratively illustrated the national dilemma by working in a style strongly shaped by American Pop Art. Curnoe's work could be controversial: in March 1968 Boggs herself headed a Department of Transport panel that declared "entirely unsuitable" his commissioned mural at Montreal's Dorval airport, after the RCMP noted its "anti-American verses ... about Vietnam" and its depiction of Louis Riel,"American draft dodger" Cassius Clay,"and other assorted objectionables."72 Yet the record suggests that Curnoe and Theberge were close: for the Gallery's 11 May 1967 Canadian centennial party, for example, a sequence of images shows Curnoe in the Lome Building's basement, designing the Gallery centennial cake with orange and green icing, and with Theberge in the background, laughing. 2O8

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The extreme violation of what Jean Sutherland Boggs called "museum aura" and "hallowed atmosphere." N.E. Thing Co.'s transformation of the Lome Building's ground floor into a suite of offices, June 1969. (National Gallery of Canada)

By 1968, Theberge was the Gallery's first acting curator of contemporary Canadian art, showing and purchasing - at lower prices than Smith paid - works that as much as documented the period's cross-border flows. Early 1969 reprised these and via shows from Montreal and London, Ontario, led to the Gallery's acquisition of self-contained works by Curnoe, Guido Molinari, and Michael Snow, which showed the influences of Pop, Hard-edged Abstraction, and Conceptualism respectively. Theberge then, perhaps without knowing just what was in store, arranged for an exhibition that may well have been pivotal to the Gallery's subsequent history, and that, as shaped by 1920s European Dada - Brown's "futurism" - made for the most radical "environment" ever installed in the Lome Building. This was the transformation - with associated "happenings" - of the building's ground floor into a simulated office suite/department store by Iain and Ingrid Baxter's neo-Dadaist N.E. Thing Co. in June and July 1969. Prior to this installation, Iain Baxter had already brought his style of iconoclasm to galleries in both Canada and the United States and was coordinator of visual arts at one of the most politically charged Canadian campuses of the 1960s, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In their descriptions of the N.E. Thing Co., the Baxters appropriated and parodied the corporate rhetoric of the 1960s, of research, production, and expansion. Recalling Smith on Morris - and more distantly the Alan Jarvis of The Things We See - they considered their job to be one of helping people see the world around them. "As a company vitally involved with sensitivity information," they wrote in the exhibition's photographic handbook, "N.E. Thing Co. offers this display to the many millions of people who see. It is the visual unknown that challenges the N.E. Thing researchers ... These probings of the why and how of visual Humanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs

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things and their combinations are efforts to discover distinct properties or effects and the means of putting them into operation. This, the research contribution to the N.E. Thing Co.'s progress, grows from imagination, intuitive daring, and persistence as well as technical competence."73 As with the Dadaists, N.E. Thing Co.'s exercises in seeing had a subversive edge, hinting at the absurdity of many commodities while encouraging an audience to look at phenomena usually considered background. But as Ingrid Baxter herself put it, "we're trying to break down barriers. We're anti-capital big A Art, with its high prices and sacredness."74 In making this declaration, she was perhaps unaware of Boggs's public investment precisely in the concept of "museum aura" and in art itself as a means of increasing "borrowing power." N.E. Thing Co.'s installation at the National Gallery, though, proved especially brutal in this "breaking down" process, because it encouraged visitors to "see" the building that housed the Gallery, and in the terms for which the Lome Building had ultimately been designed. For in being named a temporary site for the Gallery, the Lome Building had from its inception been intended to serve eventually as offices for civil servants. The Baxters foregrounded this status by emptying the Gallery's first floor of more conventional art and adding partitions to simulate what the Vancouver critic Charlotte Townsend described as "the offices of a prosperous company." She reported Ingrid Baxter's descriptions of visitor response: "Some people went outside again to check that they had come into the right building; some ignored the ground-floor offices thinking they were part of the administration and took the elevator up to look at framed canvases on walls. Some, having walked... past mahogany desks equipped with secretaries, went to the receptionist complaining that they hadn't 'seen' anything. She would tell them that that was because they hadn't 'looked' and to try again ... There was everything from the outrage of the official who wrote in the visitor's book,'This is a disgrace. There must be an inquiry,' to disbelief and incredulity."75 Ironically, the Baxters' transformation of the ground floor resembled an exhibition called Canadian Design in Retrospect 1949-1959 that had been mounted in i960 just after the building's opening, by Donald Buchanan's Industrial Design Centre. For it, too, had featured desks, typewriters, and office furniture. As a spur applied toward dialogue between the "fine" and "practical" arts, however, the Design Centre had been shut down under Comfort, and left that way under Boggs. Given the nature of the Lome Building, the absence of such a bridge created an immense opening for parody, in an edifice whose ultimate purpose had nothing to do with art, never mind with "museum aura." Boggs already faced a challenge in adapting the building to her own terms, in that, as an office block, it played to the anti-humanist anonymity of "international modernism" in architecture. N.E. Thing Co. simply recognized this potential, and, rather than resisting it, followed through on it. But the restructuring of the shell also had implications for the art it contained. As described by Ingrid Baxter, "the president and vice-president spent most of their time explaining and demonstrating their premises and products and discovered that the concept of vsi (Visual Sensitivity Information) was easy for people to grasp. 'Much easier than art.

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If it could be spread around more you'd get rid of a lot of the hang-ups that 'art' creates [and] demystify the artistic process.'" Obviously, such an attempt "to demystify the artistic process" and subvert art's "sacredness" took direct aim at Jean Boggs's goal of cultivating "the very hallowed atmosphere within a museum which separates it from the community?' and did so where she was most vulnerable. The subversion was stunningly simple, in that the Baxters merely added one more term to the Lome Building's masquerade, and in doing so reversed it: the building became an office block playing at being an art gallery playing at being an office block. In so making the building into what it inherently was and - at some point - would functionally become, however, N.E. Thing Co. not only subverted but smashed the "aura" that Boggs claimed should surround the museum, and the categorical separation that she claimed should exist between it and the outside world. In doing so, they introduced into the space of the National Gallery precisely that aggressive hostility to art's "cultic" status that Benjamin had seen in the Dadaist's "studied degradation of their material" during the 1920s. "What they intended and achieved," Benjamin had said of the Dadaists, "was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations."76 But few if any of the Dadaists could have claimed this destructive achievement in regard to an entire museum, and especially in regard to one whose director was deliberately striving to cultivate such "distance" through "the very hallowed atmosphere within a museum which separates it from the community." Coming on the cusp of the student revolts of the late 1960s, 1969 was indeed a banner year for art that did not conform to Jean Boggs's goals for the National Gallery. Soon after N.E. Thing Co.'s appropriation of the Lome Building's ground floor, the fourth floor was taken over by a retrospective exhibition, arranged by Smith, called fluorescent light etc. by Dan Flavin. Flavin was an American artist who for half a dozen years had been appropriating the office technology of fluorescent lighting tubes and, through different alignments and colours, building minimal environments bathed in static light. Initially "committed" to seminary training by his father, Flavin had undergone a long period of development, and was a stunning counter-example to Jarvis's implicitly conservative claim - made during the 1950s about Picasso - that the best abstract artists first learned to draw well. For once he arrived at what he called his "indoor routine of placing strips of fluorescent light," Flavin proved adept at creating abstract luminosities that reorganized the visual dynamics of whatever room they were in. But they also showed the reductive influence of his seminary training. Of his "icons," Flavin wrote that "they are dumb anonymous and inglorious. They are as mute and undistinguished as the run of our architecture."77 The irrepressible Jack Burnham visited Ottawa for the exhibition and wrote about it in a richly illustrated eight-page article in Artforum: the first time the National Gallery had got such attention. Burnham had special praise for Smith's organization of the retrospective, saying that he doubted whether "another museum will readily duplicate its care and completeness ... There is virtually not one electric cord

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or connection in sight... The effect is incredibly clean."78 This excitement, however, also veered into a zone of whose volatility Burnham was likely not aware. "The National Gallery of Canada is a renovated office building in the Miesian tradition of exposed steel frame and massive glass fenestration," he wrote. "Its low-ceilinged interior spaces are stark and unpretentious, a perfect complement to Flavin's strengths." To Flavin's strengths, maybe. But this, too, was not an assessment from the contemporary art world that was likely to advance the director's own goal of a new building which, as "a work of art in itself," would cultivate "that museum aura, that museum spell." For the problem was that Flavin's work, though made from what he called hardware store fixtures, had the capacity through light to transform any environment the Lome Building included - into not a captivating yet containing backdrop for "high art," such as Boggs sought with exhibitions like Art and the Courts, but rather a zone of spatial purity that could be anywhere. In his article on the retrospective, Burnham ingenuously mapped the threat posed by such a zone to the sort of "museum aura" that Boggs hoped to cultivate. "Flavin's best rooms," he wrote, "place us in a situation where all normal activity is inappropriate or irrelevant. For instance, I watched the reaction of a guard when children sat down on the floor in Alternating Pink and Yellow (to Joseph Halmy). He told them to get up because 'that isn't allowed in here.' Well, the problem is that the room is not suited to gallery behavior, such as focused contemplation or adjusting to a point of view. The children had the only reasonable approach, namely that they were going to become a part of the work by forgetting about it." In a catalogue preface for the show - which included a fluorescent "icon" dedicated to her - Boggs dodged such issues by welcoming the Gallery's involvement in contemporary art generally. "The National Gallery has always been interested in the contemporary art of Canada," she wrote. "It has been only recently, however, that... it has given any systematic attention to contemporary art elsewhere. It has done this for two reasons. One is to prevent the Gallery being too parochial in judging Canadian art. The other arises from the sense of loss in realizing what the Gallery missed in not buying the work of the great twentieth century masters, like Picasso, Matisse or Mondrian, when that work was contemporary, and from that sense of frustration at facing the cost of acquiring those same works now."79 This assessment contained a subtext of rancour at Eric Brown, without saying why Brown made the choices he did. But it also conveyed Boggs's own style of conservatism, by retaining an anchorage in the portable, internally complex art object bequeathed by modernism as well as in the "disinterested" aesthetic "judgment" pioneered by Kant and modernized by Greenberg. In doing so, it disguised her unease with the assaults implicit or explicit - that were being made on the integrity not only of such objects, but on the museum as their apt container, by the work of artists like Morris, N.E. Thing Co., and Flavin. A photograph of Boggs's reaction to one of Flavin's fluorescently transformed rooms, however, is less circumspect, and shows her in the company of Barnett Newman, Flavin himself, and Brydon Smith - with an expression in her left eye that suggests alarm. And if Brown, in backing the "temperate and 212

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Jean Boggs considers Dan Flavin'sfluorescentlight, etc. in September 1969 with, from left, Barnett Newman, Dan Flavin, and Brydon Smith. The expression on Boggs's face, after a summer that had included N.E. Thing Co.'s transformation of the Lome Building's ground floor into "a disturbingly accurate imitation of a suite of offices and a showroom," suggests that she was reaching the limit of her patience with contemporary art. This would be confirmed in her speech at McMaster University two months later. (National Gallery of Canada)

rational advance" of the Group of Seven, excluded art which he felt subverted the "training and order" that "are Art's as well as Heaven's first law," so Boggs, too, was soon to make her own attack on art that did not honour her sense of propriety. She waited until she was away from the Gallery to do so publicly. Then, in November 1969, just after the Flavin exhibition closed, she gave a convocation address at McMaster University in Hamilton, in whose religion department, oddly enough, George Grant was teaching. She began by restating her loyalties in a way that hearkened to her focus in the early 1960s. "Picasso's work," she said, "probably determined the way I look at art and, to some extent, at life. I expect art to express tensions, violence, brutality, partly as a catharsis but also as a reminder of the world in which we live. But I expect these to be given form and contained within the frame of a painting, drawing or print, or placed upon a pedestal. If you know contemporary art, you will realize how deep a canyon this places between it and me."80 Boggs did not mention, in this speech, the extent to which Picasso's own neat framing of "violence" and "brutality" in his work both co-existed with and hid from public view for decades his actual brutality to the people around him. Instead, she was bluntly reasserting the importance of meaning as derived from the internal relations of an Humanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs

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Pierre Trudeau introduces the just-turned-twenty-one Margaret Sinclair to Canada, at the National Gallery Association Ball on 31 October 1969. Clearly by sheer coincidence, the only reveller in the photograph dressed for Hallowe'en is wearing a Napoleon costume. (United Press International)

artwork, rather than from its interaction with context. And she was also asserting crucially for the National Gallery's future - the importance of an overriding symmetry that is imposed - for example, on the assymetrical aggression of Picasso's Le Gueridon that had been bought by Jarvis - via a regular frame that contains these attributes as potentially destabilizing and imposes its own order on them. Boggs's development of this valenced imagery, however - her expectation of art that it "express tensions, violence, brutality," but that it do so "within the frame"; the existence of a "deep canyon" between her and contemporary art - was so uncharacteristically harsh as to invite closer scrutiny within its own wider, though equally immediate, context. For while her attack would focus on the N.E. Thing Co. and Flavin exhibitions, and even to a lesser extent on the Pop art bought by Smith, these were not the only recent events at the National Gallery that had arguably strained the bounds of "contemporary art," especially as this had become associated with events that could be photo-documented. Boggs delivered the McMaster speech on 21 November 1969. But just three weeks earlier, on the night of 31 October - Hallowe'en 214

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- her old friend Pierre Trudeau had made his own special use of the Lome Building version of the National Gallery. As prime minister, he had chosen it as the site where, at the age offifty,he would make spectacularly public his relationship with Margaret Sinclair, who had turned twenty-one the month before and whom he had met while vacationing in Paul Gauguin's old haunt, Tahiti. The secrecy preceding this event had been extreme, such that the Canadian public knew nothing of the relationship, before Trudeau appeared with Margaret at the National Gallery Association's costume ball. And with typical flourish, he had there unveiled her to the world as, in effect, a velvet-clad human objet d'art that was implicitly in his own possession. This event had been dense with ambiguity. In springing his big surprise in this way, Trudeau sent the implied message that, among potential Canadian contexts, the National Gallery was clearly the institution sophisticated enough to accommodate both his relationship with Margaret and its public announcement. Nevertheless, the occasion itself had folded both art and the Gallery's art-based context into further exalting his own stature as the most glamorous political leader in the nation's history. Margarets freshness, vivacity, and sheer visual appeal that night had easily trumped the more conventional artworks in the National Gallery's collection, as well as everyone else in the building, for at twenty-one and clearly in love with the prime minister, she was radiantly photogenic. And so, too, had her "coming out" spectacularly trumped the merely art-associated openings that Boggs had been photodocumenting as events since her own arrival in 1966. So, if Trudeau had again linked the National Gallery with excitement and glamour, he had also used it to political and perhaps even insensitively personal ends. Was it sheer coincidence, then, that only three weeks after Trudeau's appearance at the National Gallery with Margaret, Jean Boggs gave one of the most anomalous and aggressive speeches of her career, lashing out at contemporary art even as she made clear that - while she expected art to express, frame, and contain "tensions, violence, brutality" - she also had little use for art which violated the convention of a cultivated distance. What she then said in her speech merits quotation at length, because it not only implied a broad attack on contemporary art - Smith's ventures into American Pop through Warhol and Rosenquist, as much as the N.E. Thing Co. and Flavin installations - but also anticipated her future approach to "museum" architecture. Both N.E. Thing Co. and Flavin, she said completely recreated the spaces given to them. Iain Baxter turned the groundfloorinto a disturbingly accurate imitation of a suite of offices and a showroom, and produced a haphazard series of happenings or events during the exhibition... This seems to be the art of the present - an art concerned with the creation of total (and I use the word reluctantly) new environments ... Even when it is as refined as Flavin's, it can nevertheless consume the proportions of the room disturbingly ... Artists now create their own worlds as a comment upon the world outside (like Baxter's) or as an escape from it... The nature of the escape is obviously significant (and even Baxter's works contain some of it). I was standing one day in our downstairs gallery of largely contemporary works and was struck by the almost cloying prettiness of it ... Even Rosenquist's polemic For the American Negro is, in colour and form, so much sugarHumanism, "Openness," and Jean Sutherland Boggs 215

candied icing. Even Warhol's Brillo Boxes do nothing after all to distort or brutalize the original forms. Morris's 254 untitled pieces of grey felt was not there, but if it had been, it could have been the most effective expression of the passive, yielding character of this art. It is far from the statement of Picasso ... "No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy." The prettiness disturbs someone of my generation. We are also probably more bothered than we realize by the lack of a frame or pedestal, by the lack of a sense of gravity (how many pictures are hung upside down?), by the lack of a core ... To those of us raised on analytical cubism, the new art can seem heretical.81 Boggs did not say which "enemy" she was referring to this time. But the comprehensive nature of her attack suggested that she had herself lost something of her own "sense of gravity." The very use of the term "heretical," of course, recalled an earlier era in Gallery history which had included Eric Brown's denunciations of "futurism" as "degenerate." The difference was that, for Boggs, the frame or pedestal itself seemed to offer the ordering principle which Brown had sought beyond these, in a "divine Principle" that allegedly decreed what was "good." Boggs was not bound by such concerns: according to her, Picasso could permissibly "express" not only "violence" and "brutality" in his paintings, but could even - as in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - present the human form in ways that implied an assault on humanist notions of individual dignity. Nevertheless, if these gestures were "contained within the frame of a painting," or "placed upon a pedestal," the viewer would be able to maintain that contemplative distance which was guaranteed precisely by the frame's or pedestal's neat limits, by its symmetrical containment of the work's internal dynamics, and by the continuity that these established with art tradition. What Boggs did not seem eager to admit was that the 1960s had introduced significant and unavoidable discontinuities into this tradition. That she wrote of Morris's work especially as "passive" and "yielding" showed willful indifference to the record of the artist whose inquiries into form and space had, when translated into plywood boxes, established a degree-zero for sculpture in the early 1960s. The bulk of Morris's work prior to the felt pieces had in fact been hard - plywood boxes, aluminum I-beams - and designed to explore such post-frame, post-pedestal questions as how form activates the space around it and how the viewer becomes part of a sculptural field. Boggs, then, was resisting the possibility that, in acting as guarantor for a kind of detached experience, the physical frame or pedestal, too, was vulnerable to the momentum of contemporary art, and so inherently unstable. Picasso's Cubist period had contributed to this momentum by ushering in art's withdrawal from representation and opening the way to such informe depictions of "energy" as took place in the United States with Abstract Expressionism and in Canada with Borduas, Ronald, and other abstract painters. And such works in their own sheer intensity had then pushed relentlessly from the inside at the frame's limits, eventually exploding them. Boggs seemed by November 1969, however, to have reached her own limit of tolerance for the apparently unlimited "openness" and "dissent" of some contemporary 2l6

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art: an openness of category that did not respect the line she wanted to draw between artwork and spectator via the frame, and between ordinary space and the "hallowed" space of the museum as both a container and a containment of art. This was also a line which asked of artists that they continue to make self-contained, enduring objects that could - unlike N.E. Thing Co.'s "installation" - be collected. For Boggs, in these talks, sought also to establish the privileged status of "the collection" itself, which - even as she alleged the lack of a "core" in much contemporary art - she declared in the same year "is at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish."82 In different ways, all of the works she cited negatively seemed to mock one or more of these priorities: high modern seriousness, her belief that art is "an exploration of the meaning of life," her investment in "museum aura," and the central value of "the collection" as composed of enduring, mostly frameable objects.83 And it was at this point that Jean Boggs, too, though less obviously than had Eric Brown, and without the same metaphysical framework, began to sound like a spokesperson for Plato's distinction, in the Republic, between "grace" and "gracelessness" in the arts. That this speech was given at Grant's McMaster only added to the unintended irony. For in it, Boggs challenged the artforms that were emerging from the country whose spokesperson she had been at Couchiching. Yet, faced with these challenges, she still did not let go of American authority. Instead she called on what was, by then, a notoriously conservative version of New York both to legitimate her concerns about the Lome Building, and to shame the government. In the 1972-73 Annual Review, she included her own essay called "Art and Meaning at the National Gallery of Canada," in which she reiterated that, for her, "meaning rather than beauty justifies a preoccupation with works of art." Nestled within this, though, was a comment by the New York Times's critic John Canaday: the man whose rapturous review of the Chrysler exhibition in Provincetown had legitimated it and whose recantation when advised of the fakes had fed the public scandal. Usefully, Canaday had been scandalized also after seeing Art and the Courts at the Lome Building. "The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa," he wrote "is housed just now ... in an eight-storey block-like structure that has exactly the air of an office building outside and of a converted office building inside, which is not surprising after you learn that a converted office building is exactly what it is. My first visit to these curious quarters last week ...was not quite a success... In spite of the high quality of what I saw, there was a flattening sensation, a feeling of going through an exhibition called "Business Collects"... It was a relief to learn, later, that no one interested in the National Gallery ... accepts the building as anything but a stop-gap for an institution that deserves the best. With their eyes on the centenary year of 1980, gallery officials and patrons hope to reconvert the building to its original function and get into a proper one."84

In fact, this could not have been Canaday s "first visit to these curious quarters" because he had gone there in 1962 to reassess Chrysler's paintings. But perhaps like everyone involved with that fiasco, he had preferred to forget its very existence. Agreeably, he offered High Art's answer to the Lome Building; to the effrontery of Burnham's suggestion that the building was a fertile site for contemporary art; and to N.E. Thing Co.'s still more radical dragooning of the building itself as a coHumanism, "Openness," and jean Sutherland Boggs 217

Jean Sutherland Boggs's sense of space: the cultivation of a "hallowed atmosphere" for the National Gallery via Art and the Courts, 1972. In the foreground is a medieval statue of the Virgin Mary. The crooked air vent and loose ceiling tiles above the statue emphasize the incompatibility of these goals with the Lome Building. (National Gallery of Canada)

conspirator in contemporary art. That Boggs had to look to Canaday for an ally in her struggle for a "proper" building, however, and repudiate writers like Burnham in doing so, was an indication of how conservative her style of humanism had become in relation to artistic developments of the 1960s and 1970s. For it was Canaday who in 1961 had also dismissed the entire contemporary American art scene as consisting of "cheats, greedy lackeys, and senseless dupes." This had prompted both a protest to the New York Times signed by forty-nine figures prominent in this "scene" and an article by Barnett Newman, who noted that Canaday had said "he would favour the bad examples of realistic painting over those that are abstract precisely because they were realistic."85 This same period of 1972-73 would also include Boggs's own main counteroffensive against the trends exemplified by N.E. Thing Co. and in favour of "hallowed atmosphere" and "museum aura." She had already re-organized the Gallery to provide, via lighting and the single "High Gallery" on the second floor, what she called a "more sympathetic environment" for the historical collection, after the "effect of unexpected magnificence" that, she claimed, had been achieved there with the exhibition of Jacob Jordaens's Baroque tapestries in 1968.86 She then built on this direction via the lavishly installed exhibitions Art and the Courts (1972) and Fontainebleau (1973), which represented not just the art but the general cultural styles of two different periods. Both hearkened backward in European time to the age of absolutism: the former to the Rayonnant Gothic of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France and England; and the latter to the French Renaissance of 1528-1610, when the monarchy was consolidated during and after the Wars of 2l8

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Religion between Catholics and Protestants. But these were both formative periods - in different ways - of that idea of "Man" which emerged in the West in the protective embrace of the Christian church. And in these investments lay the beginnings of a paradox that, in Boggs's relationship to the National Gallery, would come to fruition a decade later in her choice of Moshe Safdie as its architect. Boggs had already shown, through her writings, a fascination with the special grandeur of "man" in a universe where neither she nor the artists she admired acknowledged the existence of a patriarchal deity. What she also seemed to resist, though, was the possibility that this very elevation of "man" might - like the frame in art - be an historical moment, poised between the breakdown of Christianity with its emphasis on the individual soul and the emergence of what Grant and Heidegger called "the metaphysic" of technology. Her dilemma was, to an extent, with the very sustainability of the category "man," in the absence of that metaphysical and religious framework in which it had taken shape. "Art"- at least as practised by Degas and Picasso, and as enshrined in a frame or on a pedestal within "museum aura" - seemed to provide an alternative anchor, a force for stabilization. In this sense, she resembled Vincent Massey, whose investment in "Canadianism" and the static icons of the Group of Seven served a similar purpose, against the destabilizing influence of the United States and its technologies. But neither did art, for her, play this role only as an agency of investigation: her language at times recalled also Eric Brown's understanding of art as an agency of revelation, albeit secular. Of Morris's felt, for example, she wrote that "the role of chance" in it "disturbs most of us who hope that there is some plan to existence."87 For all her investment in Picasso, art for Boggs had to do with an investment in "discovering" such a plan as a basis for "meaning," so that in this sense, too, there was continuity between her and Brown. The radical art of the 1960s, by contrast, seemed to be produced in blithe indifference to the very need for such a plan, as though the existential yearnings that such need addressed had simply been superceded as irrelevant. Nevertheless, there was by 1972 another current in play at the National Gallery, one that had been foreshadowed by the St Laurent government's willingness to house the Gallery in an office block; by N.E. Thing Co.'s makeover of it to look like the corporate entity that the Lome Building suggested; and even by Alan Jarvis's 1956 announcement that he considered "Ottawa thoroughly secondary to the country as a whole." In her struggle with this current, Jean Boggs had to look for allies where she could find them, because they were not in the government which had hired her or in the successor government of Pierre Trudeau. For artists' concern in the 1960s with "systems" was itself a critical reflection of a larger pattern, whose impact on the National Gallery was such that, by the early 1970s, Boggs was actually being menaced less by an artistic disregard of limits from below than by a bureaucratic disregard of art's independence from above. The irony on this occasion was dual. For just as this bureaucratic disregard itself hearkened back to an era of monarchical authority, so did Boggs herself not seem to realize contemporary art's potential to comment on, and perhaps even subvert, the imposed system with which she had to deal. Humanism, "Openness," and jean Sutherland Boggs

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The International Fine Arts Exhibition at Expo 67: the National Gallery's contribution to the theme of "Man and His World." (Sam Tata, National Gallery of Canada)

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Museums can no longer depend on the fact exhibited. It must be dramatized, explained, made relevant. - Frederick Gutheim, The National Museum of Canada: Program Planning and Location, 7966 As the throb picked up, the redhead went wild. Within minutes, she was the party's star attraction. She was doing a frantic impromptu topless dance ... It was last night's "psychedelic" party in honor of Sculpture '67 - the National Gallery's show which opened yesterday in Nathan Phillips Square. - Toronto Daily Star, June 1967

In 1967 Canada was officially one hundred years old, and George Grant's claim that electing the Diefenbaker government had been the "the Canadian people's last gasp of nationalism" was belied by multitudes of children singing the syllables CA-NADA, in stadiums from sea to sea. Yet behind the fanfare lurked ominous patterns, which suggested this national fervor might come with a price, not least for the National Gallery. "THE ONLY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION IN THE CITY OF T O R O N T O "

The Gallery's own centennial projects were threefold and were set in motion before Jean Boggs's arrival, under the direction of Donald Buchanan, who was brought back on special arrangement by the acting director, William Dale. Buchanan's authority, however, was curtailed both more sadly and with greater finality than it had been when he was twice passed over in the search for a director and then ignored by Charles Comfort. On a winter night late in 1966, he left his car on a dark, snowbound street in Ottawa and walked away from it into the path of another car. Whether he did so as a result of his hearing deficit was never clear. But thus was lost the man who could conceivably - but for Massey's and then Diefenbaker's interven-

tions from above - have served as a bridge between the era of Christian Scientists at the National Gallery and that of secular modernity, without either the tumult of Jarvis s tenure or the firm lid of Comfort's. Buchanan's death deeply unsettled preparations for the centennial but did not derail them. The Gallery proceeded with plans that the curator of prints and drawings, Kathleen Fenwick, should oversee an International Fine Arts Exhibition at the World's Fair in Montreal. When the exhibition opened, in the spring of 1967, it displayed nearly two hundred works from lenders around the world. The range of these - from Sumerian, Japanese, Greek, and African statuary to paintings by Picasso, Borduas, and Pollock - was unprecedented for Canada and fostered a sense of global connectedness. Yet, as impressive as the artworks were, there was a taxonomic excess that suggested - in an age of technological pressure -the overcompensation produced by anxiety. The exhibition's title, Man and His World, recalled Jean Boggs s own humanistic concern with "man" in her show Picasso and Man in 1964. Just three years later, rhetorical bombast clearly shaped by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Catholic evolutionism carried this concern to the edge of comedy. According to the Fair's commissioner general, Pierre Dupuy, "art is the sublime manifestation of Man - his part in divinity."1 Robert Elie, in his catalogue introduction, went even further. "Man is at the center of a limitless universe whose perfect unity the artist reveals," he wrote. "Art is a struggle, one of the fiercest in which man is engaged."2 In keeping with this style of eloquence - and with the claim that "man is fundamentally the same throughout the world and through centuries of time" - the exhibition was arranged in ten categories. Among these were Man and Work, Man and Love, Man and His Conflicts, Man the Visionary, Man and the Infinite, and so on. This was Boggs's style of humanism transformed into globalizing spectacle: a celebration of the sovereignty of Man which might provide a popular bulwark not only against the racial ideologies of the 1930s and 1940s but also against the technological and anti-humanist momentum of the 1960s. As such, it conveniently ignored, in microcosm, the automobile, which had turned the man appointed to organize the exhibition itself into a roadside statistic. More broadly, it also ignored the critiques being mounted by theoretical Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and information theory, all of which were implying that "man" was less the master than the construct of intersecting systems that had little respect for "the individual" and for individual intentions. The "show," as itself a carefully organized system, offered reassurance and was understandably a crowd pleaser, with over a million and a half visitors in its six-month run. The Gallery's second centennial contribution was an historical survey called Three Hundred Years of Canadian Art, which added a national complement to the humanistic internationalism of Man and His World. Shown at the Lome Building during the summer, it contained nearly four hundred works which were later regrouped to travel throughout the country. Billed as the largest and the most inclusive such exhibition ever held, Three Hundred Years contained not only paintings and sculptures but pieces of furniture and works in silver from the seventeenth

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century to the 1960s. Assessments of this extravaganza - as of the one at Expo - were often skewed by nationalistic fervour, which seemed throughout the year to make for a softening of critical minds. One of the few commentaries that retained a sense of proportion appeared in the unlikely venue of Executive magazine. Canadian art, Robin Neesham wrote, was enjoying an "orgy of self-congratulatory appraisal" during the centennial year, which disguised the fact that "nobody beyond these borders gives a hoot" about it.3 The catalogue essay on contemporary Canadian art by the curator of Canadian art, Jean-Rene Ostiguy, seemed through its omissions to confirm this assessment, for it was almost without reference to any place other than Canada, or to any artist other than Canadian. Ostiguy also - like the organizers of Man and His World - simply ignored art that did not honour the traditions of the frameable canvas or the freestanding sculpture. Of Ostiguy s choices, Neesham claimed that "he has very little idea of what's happening." Newspaper editors seemed implicitly to agree, focusing their coverage less on the exhibition itself than on the opening party which, though held in the Gallery's basement, clearly seemed for all its concealment to express the energy of the times better than did the art. Reports relished fashions that for Ottawa were exotic, with women in "canary coloured stockings or flowery paper shifts."4 A twenty-onesquare-foot centennial birthday cake with orange icing was supplied by the London, Ontario, artist Greg Curnoe, who appeared in a canary-yellow suit with chartreuse shirt and blue tie. The cake was cut by a sword-wielding Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh, in a coonskin cap and chiffon tent dress. But playing to the comment about an "orgy of self-congratulatory appraisal" was the motto Curnoe had inscribed on the cake in green icing: 3 0 0 YRS OF CANA DIAN ART I THINK I LOVE YOU! BUT I WANT TO KNOW FOR SURE! 3 0 0 YRS OF CANA DIAN ART. HOLD ME TIGHT! I NEED YOU5

This motto, as borrowed from a song not by a Canadian but by a British rock group, The Troggs, was dense with Curnoe's own sense of irony, as an artist who also borrowed freely from American Pop themes while proclaiming himself a nationalist. The ambiguity seemed not to trouble the celebrants, who were perhaps distracted by LaMarsh's own adaptation of Wild Thing, via her costume. The fate that befell the Gallery's third contribution to the centennial, however, gave a hint of complexities which could be obscured only temporarily by rhetorical overkill at Man and His World and by terminal cuteness in Ottawa, sculpture '67 was an extensive show of contemporary sculpture, which was paid for by the National

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Centennial moderation: Judy LaMarsh cuts Greg Curnoe's centennial birthday cake in the basement of the National Gallery, 11 May 1967, to celebrate the opening of Three Hundred Years of Canadian Art. In the background is Pierre Theberge, who entered the National Gallery as an assistant curator in 1965 and would become its approximately ninth director in 1998. To the right is Jean Sutherland Boggs, keeping up appearances with the woman she came privately to feel had "betrayed" her into the hands of the National Museums of Canada. (John Evans Photography/ National Gallery of Canada)

Gallery and installed in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square, outside the new City Hall designed by Viljo Revell. It consisted of sixty-eight works by fifty-four artists and was described in the Gallery's 1967-68 annual report as "the only centennial celebration in the City of Toronto." It was also organized neither by Jean Boggs nor by any of the Gallery's curators. Rather in April 1966, a month before Boggs's arrival as director, the then-ubiquitous Dale gave the project to Dorothy Cameron, a Toronto art consultant and former gallery owner who was herself controversial. Two years earlier she had been convicted of obscenity charges for drawings shown in her gallery as part of a show called Eros '65; by coincidence, her unsuccessful appeal was heard by the Supreme Court the very day sculpture '67 opened in Toronto. Cameron had been described by her friend Alan Jarvis as "a life force" and "fierce advocate of excellence" but also as "an unguided missile" and "a space-age contessa."6 As an organizer she claimed to bring "no preconceptions, no prejudice toward any art trend or style, no pretension to regionalism" in the challenge of finding out "what was happening now in Canadian sculpture." Her goal, she said,was"to select ...using

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the criterion of quality alone." Nevertheless, in so implying that "quality" exists as an irreducible attribute of worthwhile works of art, Cameron both showed the influence of her friend Jarvis and ran some of the risks he had incurred in making similar claims about his own "eye for quality" in the 1950s. These risks began to show in an unanticipated discovery she made during two cross-country trips to visit artists' studios. Despite proclamations about the centrality of "Man" that were being made in Montreal, she found that "far fewer sculptors (a handful only) were bringing fresh insight to the human form or concern to the humanist tradition. [Instead] the majority of Canadian sculptors, from New Brunswick to British Columbia (like the majority on this planet) were involved ... with the exploration of new forms, new spatial concepts and new materials, with the technological transformations of a world-wide plastic coated electrical revolution."7 Finding this trend, Cameron urged artists to test on outdoor scale the ideas that were reinventing sculpture in the mid1960s: sculpture as itself a technological system which involved the viewer; sculpture as site-specific, or as interactive with the context given by architectural form. Among the invited artists were several who were already working in this way internationally: Les Levine, Iain Baxter, and Michael Snow. As a conventional exhibition designed to be looked at, sculpture '67 was spectacularly unsuccessful. Within a week of its opening on 1 June, many of the works began to show the effects both of visitors' eager touch and of a few alleged acts of vandalism. One sculpture, Patricia Fulford's black-and-white abstract Totemic Structure #1 was toppled over and broken, while another, Robert Downing's likewise abstract Red & White Box was removed by the artist after he was not allowed to place it in a more easily policed area. Nevertheless, Tony Emery, writing in the Victoria Times, called it "the most exciting display of sculpture that this country has ever seen, or ... is likely to see for some time."8 Barrie Hale, in the Telegram, called the show "an enormous popular success ... As an act of museum education, of extending the museum function into the marketplace ... it is nothing short of a triumph ... The throngs are there, fascinated, you feel, despite themselves. Even the scuffing and scarring is an indication of some kind of new involvement with art on the part of the general public."9 This charged ambiguity was largely a result of the tension within the show itself, between what Cameron called traditional "monumental" works, designed to be contemplated visually, and "environmental" works which presented sculpture as "something that surrounds a person, belongs to his life and habitat, perhaps can be participated in by him."10 Despite Cameron's claim that her selection criterion was that old standby "quality," then, the actual outcome of the exhibition made for a case study of how the term's meaning had fractured in the 1960s, owing not least to an enhanced sense among artists themselves - as suggested by Duchamp - of the role played by context in how art "works." Some "sculptures" actually invited audience participation: Levine's All Star Cast, for example, which consisted of transparent polystyrene bubbles and tunnels. The visitor could walk through these and touch them, but in doing so became a part of the work when viewed from outside. Nor did Levine him-

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The two big squares of Michael Cooke's Bright Suns, purchased from sculpture '67 by the National Gallery but allegedly damaged by tap-dancing children before Jean Boggs closed the outdoor exhibition prematurely in July 1967. (National Gallery of Canada)

self play down differences. 'Tin against art as a monument," he said, "against art at all if it separates. It should be a question of an all star cast; people are the stars of the show."11 In one case, they were paying "stars," in that the flashing lights, bubbling waters, and electronic noises of Michael Hayden's Hydraulic Sculpture were activated by the visitor's depositing a quarter: it was, Robert Fulford, said, "history's first slot-machine sculpture."12 Overseeing all of this, and encouraging a general atmosphere of carnival was N.E. Thing Co.'s Cirrus Cloud, a hundred-foot-long cloud shape made from inflated coloured polyvinyl that - with an attached red sun - hovered over the City Hall pool, in which floated a polyvinyl Pool Flower. Exhibits such as these hardly cultivated quiet contemplation in visitors. Yet this was what other works in the show seemed to call for: Robert Murray's Cumbria, for example, which consisted of immense slabs of painted Cor-Ten steel, or Michael Cooke's Bright Suns, two equally immense square boxes made from laminated wood and aluminum, painted bright yellow and red, and with square holes cut through their centres. A report in the Toronto Star elaborated on the exhibitions mood of volatile ambiguity, sculpture '67, Helen Worthington wrote, was "having more im-

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pact on the citizens of this city than any other previous exhibition of art" and was "drawing people to the core of the city like a magnet." Nevertheless, Michael Cooke's Bright Suns was being "spoiled by children tap-dancing on it."13 Nor were matters helped by Toronto's new mayor, William Dennison, who had been elected partly because of popular anger over a Henry Moore sculpture, The Archer, bought by his predecessor Philip Givens and also placed in Nathan Phillips Square. Dennison insisted that sculpture '67 be arranged around the square's edges, leaving the centre open for concerts but making the works difficult to monitor. Arriving in May 1966, Jean Sutherland Boggs had inherited both the scheduling of sculpture '67 and Dorothy Cameron as its curator. And initially, once the exhibition's concept began in practice to fracture, she was accommodating, adding both extra security staff and $8,000 to a budget of $80,000. This - along with free assistance from a group of Yorkville hippies called the Diggers - stopped the vandalism. But the Gallery had on 8 June also bought Cooke's Bright Suns, along with two other abstract works designed to be looked at: Aphrodite Yawns by Arthur Handy and Hommage a Samuel Beckett by Guido Molinari. And these, along with other works, continued to record on their surfaces the involvement of visitors - especially children - who were understandably unable to shut off in the presence of some sculptures the impulse to touch that was encouraged by others. Finally, on 28 June, Boggs declared that she had had enough and announced that the exhibition would close in mid-July, seven weeks early. Her comments were as peremptory as the announcement itself. "Six weeks," she said, "is long enough for an exhibition. I wish we'd planned on that in the first place."14 Brydon Smith, as the Gallery's new curator of contemporary art, backed Boggs, despite his advocacy a few months earlier of "a Centre for Living Art." "1,000 hands, day after day," he said apologetically, "take their toll." Dorothy Cameron was not so agreeable. Declaring the need to "fight for the continued life of Sculpture '67," she sent a special-delivery letter to Boggs, carbon-copied to Judy LaMarsh, that was dated pointedly 1 July 1967: the very day when all Canadians were supposed to be united in celebrating the greatest holiday in the country's history, the centennial of Confederation. But Cameron seemed determined to expose the fractures that, on this day, were threatening not only a unified standard of "quality" but a project on which she had worked for months. Citing "phone calls of incredulous shock and disappointment from New York and everywhere in this country" over Boggs's announcement, she insisted that sculpture '67 had been "a breakthrough and a landmark." "Most seriously and from my heart, I beg you to reconsider," she wrote, because "cutting it off so abruptly" would deal "a serious blow to the prestige of outdoor sculpture in this country" and "to the morale of artists in relation to the National Gallery," just as it would also discourage "other museums who might have been inspired to follow suit." She proposed several alternatives, including a scaled-down version of the exhibition, and even a poll of the artists to determine which of them might yet, regardless of risks, be "still desirous of public exposure for the seven crucial weeks at the height

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of the tourist season now taken from them."15 Boggs remained unmoved, and Cameron then began to speak to the press, including to her contacts outside the country, again at precisely the time when Canada was being presented to the world as a model of sophistication, harmony, and inclusivity. "A large number of the people who came here weren't used to seeing sculpture," she told the New York Times, "and they fondled and touched it. Most of the damage ... was caused by a joyous desire to have contact with the work."16 Toronto editorialists agreed, focusing on the exhibition's appeal to children. "Probably no cultural show in the city's history," wrote the Star, "has attracted so many children, who have been delighted at what for many has been their first trip to such an exhibit."17 Given the alleged centennial focus on the youth of Canada, such criticisms hinted at the tension between Boggs s more traditional view of art and the popularizing pressures of the late 1960s. But behind the scenes, the messiness did not stop with fingermarks. The National Gallery's "new administration," Fulford commented in artscanada, a.k.a. Canadian Art, had come to regard sculpture '67 "not as a treasure but as a nuisance."18 This attitude had translated into an alleged "blowup" between Boggs and Cameron, whose "temperamental" differences were scrutinized by the press. Boggs was described as "tough, logical, charming, hard-edged, in a box, a person who's given up revealing herself," while Cameron was presented as "totally vulnerable, always crying, with no male in her, a person who allows her emotions to foul things up, but who has a grace and spontaneity in her that redeems the rest."19 This was not so flattering a portrait of Boggs as had been widely given after her appointment, and it suggested that behind her charismatic dynamism might reside a very complicated, stubborn, and even ruthless human being indeed. The "succes manque" of sculpture '67 has been worth dwelling on for several reasons.20 First, it made for a spilling over into Canadian public space of the tensions that were in the mid-1960s fracturing both contemporary art and the criteria used to judge it. Secondly, it also provided an early illustration of Jean Boggs's concern that museum space be rendered in some way "hallowed," "cut off from the surrounding community," and of how she might, if pushed, deal with challenges to this bifurcation. But perhaps its major prefiguring lay in the dilemma of shared authority, which Boggs did not handle well though she came out on top, and which would soon - via antagonists as "tough" as she was - translate into a more serious challenge at the National Gallery. For a shadow lurked behind both the centennial celebrations and "the orgy of self-congratulatory appraisal" which had shown itself so differently at Ottawa and Toronto. This was because the Pearson government was faced, behind the scenes, with the possibility that the subsidized excitement - which often did take shape as swarms of children chanting CA-NA-DA on cue rather than climbing on sculptures - might prove unsustainable, or even uncontrollable. sculpture '67 left its lessons in this sense, too, through its own version of the National Gallery's basement party that opened Three Hundred Years of Canadian Art. If even the latter - with LaMarsh in a coonskin cap - had to be hidden from view in Ottawa, the Toronto equivalent suggested that the acid-fed energies of the 1960s might be only tenuously held within the terms of national excitement. Under the 228

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Centennial excess: Scenes from the opening party for the National Gallery's contribution to the Centennial in Toronto, sculpture '6y, held in Michael Hayden's studio in Toronto on 2 June 1967. (Barry Philp)

headline "1600 at wild bash to salute sculpture," the Toronto Star described the opening events held in Michael Hayden's loft on Adelaide Street: At the height of the most spectacular party ever held in Toronto: A redhead - her dress open to the navel - began to writhe in a room painted with large fluorescent swirls and draped in silvery plastic sheet, aluminum foil and tinsel. Two highpowered spotlights near the ceiling came on and started a rhythmic series of blinding flashes. Four man-sized loud speakers began to throb with sharp blasts of electronic sound. As the throb picked up, the redhead went wild. Within minutes, she was the party's star attraction. She was doing a frantic impromptu topless dance. Three young men began to dance around her, while tearing tinsel and foil off the walls and ceiling, rubbing it into their hair and stuffing it into their mouths. It was last night's "psychedelic" party in honor of Sculpture '67 - the National Gallery's show which opened yesterday in Nathan Phillips Square.21 Such, then, was the range of activity that - temporarily - sheltered under both the National Gallery's sponsorship and the thematics of the centennial. But even as "the redhead went wild" in "psychedelic" Toronto, the Liberal government of an ageing Centennialism

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Lester Pearson was in Ottawa initiating movement of a different kind. This would involve a new system, one designed to harness the flows of energy which had been put into play by the centennial, so as to ensure that its successes would continue to foster a sense of national culture. The system's goal would be to anchor "Canadian society" not in the ostensible transcendence of religion, or in the universal humanism of "Man," or for that matter in the Dionysian frenzy of LSD, but rather in an iconography of permanent national celebration. Among the levers towards establishing this system was the National Museums of Canada Act, introduced in Parliament in April 1967, just before Expo began. The act was designed to build on the popularization of "museum-going" which, it was correctly anticipated, would result from the World's Fair. Its core provision was that four "national museums" in Ottawa be amalgamated under a single administrative authority, which was to be a crown corporation. Three of these museums had hitherto kept a low profile: the Museums of Natural Sciences and of Man, which were still in the Victoria Building vacated by the Gallery in i960, and the fledgling Museum of Science and Technology. The fourth had not previously even been viewed as a museum, but as the independent National Gallery of Canada. "ONE

OF THE LARGER OF THE SMALLER NATIONS"

The government's plan had several models in the consolidating enterprises of the 1960s. Among these were the umbrella Smithsonian Institute in Washington and even the British Coal Board. But it had been most explicitly developed in a study commissioned by the secretary of state in Ottawa and submitted in November 1966 by Frederick Gutheim. A consultant on urban affairs, Gutheim was based - curiously, given his mandate - in Washington D.C., with offices near Capitol Hill. The assignment of so central a planning role to an American recalled the status held in pre-Massey commission Canada by the Carnegie Corporation. It also, on the level of administration, paralleled the role increasingly played by American art in relation to the National Gallery. Gutheim's study, however, provided an instrumental flip-side to the critical concern with systems which was driving much of this art. And so resolved was the government of the day in its own pursuit of System that no one seemed even to notice the central, perverse paradox of Gutheim's commission. For, as an American who worked in Washington, he was being asked by a Canadian government, in the lead-up to the Canadian centennial, to recommend how museums in Canada could better serve the sense of independent nationhood. This was not quite in the style of the Massey commission's claim that "the Canadian public needs more Canadian painters and more Canadian paintings." Instead, the Pearson government seemed determined - grade school chants of CANA-DA notwithstanding - to prove George Grant's claim that Canada was indeed becoming "a northern extension of the continental economy." Gutheim's analysis was as patronizing as the government deserved after having appointed him. Calling Canada "one of the larger of the smaller nations and one of the most advanced of the developing nations," he suggested that the "severe identity crisis" the country was

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"passing through" might be improved by "a more profound understanding of the facts of Canadian geography and her resources; and [of] the facts of Canadian history and civilization."22 "Perhaps the demand that the nation should make upon its national museums," he wrote, "is to study and explain these things and offer its [sic] findings to the whole Canadian people."23 The ambiguous lack of parallelism, however, between the plural "national museums" and the singular possessive pronoun "its" as applied to the findings of these museums hinted at a fundamental tension in Gutheim's report, which carried over to the proposed legislation. This was because the report was written initially on the National Museum (singular), which in 1966 consisted of the two branches still housed in the Victoria Building: the Museums of Natural Sciences and of Man. Nevertheless, it suggested policies that covered the activities of national museums (plural). Gutheim's strategy for resolving this ambiguity was to propose amalgamating "the national museums" under a single authority. Surveying Canada, he observed that "only three museums have achieved large size and national prominence, all located in the province of Ontario: the National Gallery of Canada, the National Museum of Canada, and the Royal Ontario Museum."24 That two of these were located in the national capital "contribute [s] to the strength of Ottawa as a museum centre, with ... values in building museum attendance, strengthening museum training activities and in other ways ...At present no central authority is responsible for these developments, and such consideration would be both timely and appropriate."25 Adding to the timeliness, Gutheim suggested, was "the moment of introspection provided by the Centennial of 1967," which "will have a powerful effect upon the future of Canadian institutions."26 About the National Gallery, which he included in the new category of "The National Museums of Canada," Gutheim displayed stunning ignorance of precisely that Canadian history to whose study the "museums" would supposedly contribute. The National Gallery, he claimed, "although gubernatorially inspired commenced as a private institution, and owes much of its development to an independent board of trustees."27 Apart from the fact that "gubernatorial" is an American political term, Gutheim's analysis might have surprised Sir Edmund Walker and Eric Brown, both of whom wrestled with the Gallery's subordination in its early years to the Department of Public Works. Gutheim then urged prompt action toward a permanent Gallery building on Cartier Square, as the Greber plan required. But far from affirming the independence of the Gallery itself, or of art as a form of enquiry, he also urged that such a building be part of a "National Museum site," with "broadcasting studios, offices and transmitters" that would serve the other museums, as well as "the Canadian Arts Centre" and "the Festival of Canada." Gallery staff, though, he suggested, "should have no appehensions about a 'stacked building.' The Denver Art Gallery's new addition is a recent illustration of how... problems can be solved in a multi-story structure."28 Gutheim's report contained virtually all the rudiments of the proposed National Museums of Canada Act, which, when introduced in Parliament during the lead-up

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Jean Sutherland Boggs's preferred site for the National Gallery in Cartier Square, as proposed in the Greber plan of 1948. This would have made the National Gallery a sort of sister institution to the National Arts Centre, which opened in May 1969. The photograph was made in 1974, the same year the site was repudiated by the board of the National Museums of Canada. (National Gallery of Canada, Hans-L. Blohm) 1 2 3 4 5 6

Houses of Parliament Lome Building housing the National Gallery National Arts Centre Wartime Defence Department buildings on Cartier Square Proposed National Museums of Canada site for the National Gallery Rideau Canal

to Expo, got little public notice. But with this act, the Pearson government as much as ignored a report on "Cultural Policy" by a Canadian, Gordon Sheppard, which had also been commissioned by the secretary of state and submitted seven months before Gutheim's, in May 1966. Sheppard had written with understated wit and elegance about the Gallery, comparing it to Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting of a nude Venus that was in the collection and that had been embellished with a fig leaf after its creation in the sixteenth century. "From above her sympathetic, elongated body," Sheppard wrote of Cranach's Venus,

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she looks at the spectator with a measure of wise suspicion, as if wondering of the effect of her nudity on a public possibly hostile, lustful, critical, or bored. She reminds one of a portrait of the National Gallery today. The Gallery is emerging from a difficult period of budget cutbacks and professional opprobrium after the Chrysler Exhibition, of less than powerful leadership, and of more than enough criticism of its administration and policies... The Gallery, then, is a little like the Venus without her clothes, beautiful withal, but perhaps more publicly presentable, less attackable, if dressed in the clearest policies, the finest administration, and the most elegant leadership.29 The usual pattern of unintended irony was such as to make Sheppard's choice of this painting just as apt for its suggestion of quieter subtexts in the Gallery's past as for its metaphorical relevance to the present. For the painting had, only a few decades earlier, passed through the collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring as a coveted German precursor to the neo-classical nudes preferred by Adolf Hitler himself as an anti-modernist. It had then been widely filmed undergoing its own relationship to the United States, when in 1945 it was "liberated" by United States troops, before being restored to its rightful pre-war Amsterdam owner, from whom Goring had pried it in a forced sale in 1940. Its acquisition by the Gallery in 1952, by means of blocked Canadian currency in the cash-strapped Netherlands, had then been one of the post-war triumphs of H.O. McCurry, who in this instance had himself learned the American lesson that the marketplace provides more subtle forms of leverage than the use of force. But Sheppard used the metaphor to good effect, in urging that the National Gallery Act be strengthened to render the Gallery more, not less, independent, so that it might "set the highest national standards in art gallery work and service."30 He also urged that, eventually, both a Gallery of Modern Art and a Portrait Gallery be established as offshoots of the National Gallery. It was likely in conjunction with this report that Judy LaMarsh gave Jean Boggs the impression, when she was recruited, that there would be new "legislation to improve the structures and function of the National Gallery."31 Nevertheless, even Sheppard's report, too, recalled Jarvis in suggesting that, in regard to regional galleries, the National Gallery "see itself not as a superior gallery but as the first among equals ... all the galleries together forming a 'national gallery' which is trying to bring to Canadians the finest experience of art possible."32 With this suggestion, Sheppard even went so far as to use the word "system." And it was for a strong version of this concept, as shaped not by Sheppard's report but by Gutheim's, that the Liberal government opted, with no emphasis at all on "the finest experience of art possible." The means used were drastic: in 1967 the National Gallery was simply absorbed, through legislation, into a new umbrella system of "national museums." And in keeping with these means, the language of the National Museums Act was brutally blunt: "The National Museums of Canada established by this Act is hereby declared to be the successor to the National Gallery of Canada, and all property, rights, obligations and liabilities of the National Gallery of Canada existing immediately before the day on which this Act comes into force shall be deemed the property, rights, obligations

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and liabilities of the National Museums of Canada on and from that day."33 At the same time, the National Gallery of Canada Act, which had been the fruit of the Royal Commission of 1951, was officially repealed. The National Museums Act was presented in Parliament mainly as an efficiency measure that would free museum directors of entanglement in administration, and as such passed with little debate in December 1967. When it came into force on April Fools' Day 1968, however, the National Gallery ceased to exist as a legal entity, and the previous sixty years' struggle for independence, which had begun with the Advisory Arts Council of 1907, was overridden. Instead, the National Gallery joined the Museum of Man, the Museum of Natural Sciences, and the newly minted Museum of Science and Technology as one of the four component branches of "The National Museums of Canada" (NMC). Coincidentally, in the same month the post-centennial phenomenon of Trudeaumania crested, propelling Pierre Trudeau to the leadership of the Liberal Party and establishing a political era that would last, but for one small blip, for the next sixteen years. The legislative style, too, seemed to hint at the arrogance that George Grant had alleged was built into the technocratic "continentalism" that he identified with the Liberals. As a subsidiary within the NMC, the Gallery lost the right to issue independent annual reports and financial statements, the authority to negotiate directly with the Treasury Board for special purchases, and the right to shape its overall policy.34 Jean Boggs herself, as director, lost precisely the deputy minister status which had been guaranteed her by LaMarsh. This had been especially celebrated because she had been the first woman to hold it. But it had also guaranteed her access both to the cabinet minister responsible for the Gallery and to Treasury Board, as well as the right to appear before Commons and Senate committees as the Gallery's spokesperson. It was later reported by creditable sources that Boggs had felt "a bit betrayed by Judy LaMarsh."35 Nor did she miss the fact that, as the largest and - as Gutheim put it - most "rapidly evolving" of the amalgamated museums, the Gallery would suffer most acutely in such a levelling. "I think that for ourselves there is no gain in the act," she told the Senate Standing Committee on Finance in May 1967, in her last appearance before it as an arms-length director. "The gain is for the other museums ... The advantages for them under the new act, we possess already."36 The extent of difference among the Gallery and the other three museums was underscored by its being, of the four, the only one with its own existing act of incorporation, which had to be repealed. It was also the only one whose "credit balances" - in the form of its purchase account and special operating account - were explicitly transferred to "the National Museums Purchase Account and the National Museums Special Account... in the Consolidated Revenue Fund."37 The chairman of the Gallery's Board of Trustees, Jean Raymond, had likewise protested in a letter to the prime minister that the act would "dilute the authority of the director and of the National Gallery itself," making it "a department in a highly bureaucratic organization."38 But Gutheim had anticipated such resistance. Despite crediting the role played by "an independent board of trustees" in the Gallery's

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development, he urged that "steps to coordinate museum operations and direct them more firmly in paths of the national interest" would be "incompatible with the continuation of independent boards of trustees."39 Accordingly, the National Museums Act provided for an umbrella board that would oversee all four museums under the authority of a secretary-general, with rump advisory or oddly named "visiting committees" maintaining liaison with each one. In the case of the National Gallery, the introduction of such a "visiting committee" in place of its own board of trustees only emphasized this shift in administrative leverage. Moreover, among the powers given to the NMC board was that of "prescribing the duties of, and delegating any of its duties to, the director of each museum."40 As spelled out by the act, the goals of both the NMC and its constituent "national museums" would be "to demonstrate the products of nature and the works of man, with special but not exclusive reference to Canada, so as to promote interest therein throughout Canada and to demonstrate knowledge thereof."41 The similarity to Gutheim's recommendation was striking. But this was not a reference to "the works of man" which was likely to endear itself either to Jean Boggs's style of humanism or to any notion of art as an independent form of inquiry; rather, the corporation moved quickly to implement two more of Gutheim's recommendations. One of these concerned "museum practice." "Museums can no longer depend on the fact exhibited" Gutheim wrote. "It must be dramatized, explained, made relevant... Once embarked upon the educational path, with all its artifice, the museum finds itself increasingly in competition not simply with the illustration on the printed page, but with the film, television, the color reproduction, the tape recording and the rest of the ubiquitous world of images in which we live. It must submit to comparison with the costly displays of world's fairs, and the resources of modern advertising art, to say nothing of the resources of modern education."42 There was, however, something crucial not about "modern advertising art" but about art itself as a form of independent inquiry that was clearly being ignored with this amalgamation, "in the national interest," of four different institutions. This was that art - and especially contemporary art - did not involve the exhibition of "fact" at all. Instead, both the art of the "city mouse," as Boggs had described it in her Canadian Art editorial, and those styles of art that were increasingly challenging context, were themselves providing critical interpretation of- among other things the allegedly "ubiquitous world of images in which we live." This had also been Alan Jarvis's point in his Time Magazine "message" of 1958, and even Vincent Massey's in his book of 1948: that - to quote Jarvis - "the artist interprets." But in urging that "fact... must be dramatized, explained, made relevant," even as "the museum" itself "must submit to comparison with ... the resources of modern advertising art," Gutheim was not simply assuming that "fact" itself was somehow neutral, even as he played down this interpretative, and potentially critical role for contemporary art. He was hinting - perhaps as much out of arrogant ignorance as anything else - that such art should be as uncritically and passively amenable to absorption into "the ubiquitous world of images" as were the rocks and fossils in the Museum of Natural

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Sciences. He thus implicitly assigned a status to this "ubiquitous world" that put it beyond criticism, and especially criticism by art itself. Instead, art and artists were obviously expected to submit also to their own new status as cogs "in the national interest," which itself was placed implicitly outside criticism. The more sinister side of these proposals is suggested by Gutheim's explicit statement that he wanted to apply a "social engineering" approach to Ottawa. For contemporary art was already beginning to prove itself as one of the few effective and visually compelling means of questioning, challenging, and even subverting such - as George Grant had put it at Couchiching - "control of human and non-human nature" through science.43 These were roles that Gutheim's notion of the "relevant" museum seemed unlikely to accommodate, in its proposed subordination of art to "the national interest." Nor was he inclined to respect the museums' - or the National Gallery's - existing professional staff in the process of establishing "relevance." "Canada's own experience and objectives must be given a clearer and larger formulation in the Museum planning process," he wrote. It does not appear that the present Museum staff can sufficiently detach itself from day to day operating experiences to undertake this planning work, although they should be central figures in it. It should be the responsibility of a specially organized museum planning and development unit... [The unit] should provide this service for all of the national museums natural history, human history, science, art and specialized branches of aviation, military, planetarium, conservatory and others that may be authorized. The unit has also the responsibility for the overall view of the museums, and should fill a gap left by the present specialization of museum directors. The planning unit should command immediate public confidence in its operations as well as the professional respect of the museums. It needs therefore an executive director of high competence and experience.44 Gutheim's use of the collective singular pronoun "itself" in the claim that "it does not appear that the present Museum staff can sufficiently detach itself..." conveys the contempt both for individuals and for historically evolved practices that was implied in this sweeping assessment, which, oddly enough, was coming from the very city where the Vietnam War was being centrally "managed" by Robert MacNamara's own Pentagon planning unit at the same time. The difference was that Canadian politicians, unlike North Vietnamese ones, actually invited a Washington-based American to pass judgment on "Canada's own experience and objectives," so as to determine how these might be "given ... formulation in the Museum planning process," regardless of the opinions of actual Canadians. For the establishment of such a "specially organized... unit" was indeed deemed integral, by the Pearson government, to the National Museums of Canada and to its program of gradually absorbing many of the functions of "its" four constituent bodies. Under the new act, moreover, Gutheim's proposed "executive director" became the secretary-general of the NMC, inheriting the mantle of deputy minister with its access to cabinet, to Treasury Board, and to parliamentary committees. And with almost uncanny pre-

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cision, it would be these principles that would guide the NMC'S evolution and consolidation of power over the next two decades, until the corporation was dissolved in 1990. The goal of celebrating the Canadian nation-state as a self-justifying and quasimetaphysical answer to questions of "identity" hearkened back, of course, to Vincent Massey's "Canadian Credo" in On Being Canadian, and to his claim that the idea of national unity "to us must be supreme, for in Canada the pursuit of unity is like the quest of the Holy Grail."45 And so, too, did Gutheim's emphasis on "Canada's own experience and objectives" seem to fill in the Royal Commissions exaltation of a content-challenged "Canadianism" in the Royal Commission report of 1951. But the re-outfitting of this goal via the NMC, SO as supposedly to provide such content via museums, contained in its method a fundamental flaw which went beyond the disrespect shown to art as an investigative enterprise. This flaw was anticipated by the fact that the method toward this goal was being largely formulated by an American "consultant on urban affairs," who himself was not speaking out of Canadian experience.46 Instead, Gutheim's influence implicitly but decisively downplayed differences between Canadians and Americans and institutionalized the managerial techniques that he had brought with him from his everyday work in the United States. These techniques had nothing distinctively Canadian about them, even as they allegedly served Canadian "national identity." By way of germane example, Gutheim's advocacy of "a specially organized museum planning and development unit" showed utter indifference and even contempt for the terms of the National Gallery's own historical evolution within a Canadian context. For its entire incremental and textured development to that point had never relied on such a "unit." This high-handedness extended also to the National Museums Act's emphasizing the similarities among the areas to be covered by the four museums: human history, natural history, science and technology, and art. Not only did the act ignore such profound distinctions as the role played by testable hypotheses and notions of progress in science but not in art, and by interpretation of context in contemporary art but not in science; all four zones also were to be read according to a putative national role. And all four were to be subjected to the assumption that they could be administered by one bureaucracy, operating according to one set of administrative but also implicitly taxonomic categories, which were as adaptable to a Canadian as to an American situation. Insofar as the Gutheim study helped shape the National Museums of Canada that absorbed the National Gallery, it brought the usual surcharge of irony, and not just in the sense that the Liberal government sought to foster a post-centennial "national culture" by taking advice from Washington. For in bringing with it a transnational style of management, the NMC would provide a non-critical, administrative image of developments that had already taken place in the visual arts themselves, given that most Canadian abstraction had little about it that was distinctively "Canadian," apart from the citizenship of its practitioners. In this sense, the homogenizing bureaucracy of the NMC followed the path blazed already by an

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"international" modernism that - as Boggs had herself noted - was based in New York as an "ideal city." But in carrying this conspicuously American sense of "internationalism" into a sweeping plan for the top-down management of all major Canadian museums, and of the National Gallery as a housing for all kinds of art, this bureaucracy seemed, again, to legitimate George Grants warnings about "a continental ruling class" as purveyors of "technique" and a "common culture."47 For such machinery only furthered what he called the tendency to a universal, homogeneous technocracy, whose commitment to an historically conditioned "national" culture could be no more than nominal. Grant's prescience was only accented by the government's justification of the NMC in terms of alleged enhancement of efficiency. The assumption - again popular during the 1960s - was that bureaucracy could, like technology itself, be a neutral tool in the hands of "Man," who could stand outside it, and remain uninfluenced by it. Time was to prove both the folly of this assumption, and its disingenuousness, as the allegedly administrative bureaucracy became within five years much more than a neutral aid to efficiency, or even an arm of government policy, and instead became what the Globe and Mail would in 1976 call an "empire" unto itself. "LES

FEMMES Q U I ONT PENETRE . . . "

The existence of the Gutheim blueprint, in the hands of the secretary of state before the act's passage, supports suggestions that LaMarsh was not acting in good faith either in her dealings with Jean Boggs or in her representation of the act itself to Parliament. LaMarsh's claim, in the House of Commons in 1967, was that the secretarygeneral's role would be simply "to bring all the administration into one place," so as to "free the director of the Gallery and directors of the museums to devote their full time to the professional development of their museum."48 The public emphasis, then, was on efficiency, not on the proposed appropriation "in the national interest" of matters of "research, innovation and development" by a "specially organized museum planning and development unit" that belonged to the central authority. What this meant in practice, however, was that Boggs was in 1968 faced with the equivalent of war on a second front, in regard to her desire both to maintain art as a special kind of investigation into "basic human questions" and to establish the Gallery itself as "a great centre." On one of these fronts, she would be dealing with avant-garde artists for whom these questions themselves lacked meaning, or for whom museums drew artificial distinctions between art and life. On the other, she would face for the next eight years an expanding bureaucracy for which the "meaning" of both art and life had already been established as the clarification and service of "the national interest," and for which the National Gallery was but one part of a "national museums" system. The transformation did not happen instantly. Instead - and despite the initial legal changes - the NMC remained for its first four years a fairly unobtrusive presence and even benefited the National Gallery by bringing with it an enhanced acquisitions budget. From $500,000 in Boggs's first year, this jumped to $1.05 million in 1968-69,

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and then to $1.5 million by 1972-73.49 Nor did the corporation conspicuously interfere in exhibitions or in the purchases to which these funds were applied. Rather Boggs herself still approved purchases under $15,000, while those under $100,000 were passed by the Gallery's visiting committee. Even with those over $100,000, which went before the NMC'S own board for approval, the advice of the visiting committee was given - as Boggs herself put it - "the most serious consideration." The National Gallery's exhibitions also gained from Boggs's continued investment in curatorial infrastructure, via Jean Trudel in early Canadian art; Dennis Reid in Canadian art; and Pierre Theberge in contemporary Canadian art. In 1970 Theberge also became her curatorial administrator, serving as secretary to the "visiting committee" of the NMC and coordinating acquisitions.50 Meanwhile, under Charles MacKenzie as the NMC'S first secretary-general, a base of operations for the new umbrella entity was established in the Century Building on Ottawa's Lisgar Street, only a few blocks from the Gallery. There, committee work began on a long-term formal policy for the National Museums. That Boggs was aware of how this might affect the National Gallery was implied in a public talk as early as January 1969. "I was unwise enough to miss a meeting on the policy of the National Museums," she said, "and was horrified to read in its minutes afterwards that a member of the Board had stated that the National Gallery could carry out its role if it never added another single painting. Aside from the fact that like all organisms which do not continue to grow, the collection would die ... we would not provide the incentive to keep a staff alive and interested and we would not have the means ... to give the service we should for the rest of Canada. The collection is, I repeat, at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish."51 Accordingly, she in this same talk added the equivalent of her own wish list for "the collection," which included such possibilities as "a portrait by Frans Hals which would cost about $5oo,ooo,""a Fragonard which could be $6oo,ooo,""a Cezanne still life to round out our five fine Cezannes which could easily be $1,000,ooo,""a Tahitian Gauguin which would be the same sum," "a Fauve Matisse which could be $150,000," "a Cubist Braque or Picasso which, for a major one, would be $600,000 now," "a Picasso of the 1930s, which would be $300,000 for an important one," "a Mondrian for $300,000," and "a Kandinsky for $100,000. This talk was given by Jean Boggs when the government of Pierre Trudeau was less than a year old, and indeed within two months of his enthusiastic appearance at the Jacob Jordaens opening in November 1968. And what with Trudeau's own reputation as a lover of the arts, Boggs may well have felt that - with the attendant increase in the acqusitions budget - there was a sound basis for anticipating government favour toward expansion of the Gallery's historical collection. The terms of a pending tug of war, however, between the National Gallery and the new NMC bureaucracy were also given public profile beginning in 1969, when two separate and very different public assessments were provided of the Gallery's activities. One of these was in the newly named Annual Review, which was the Gallery's old Annual Report minus the accounts and which was still overseen by Boggs herself. The other

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was in the annual report of the National Museums of Canada, which did contain the accounts but for all four of the "National Museums."The NMC'S first report consisted of no more than a few typed sheets which described its search for appropriate quarters. But the second, while still issued in typescript, presented descriptive profiles of the four museums. Claiming that "the focus of the National Gallery's activities for 1969-70 was outside Ottawa itself," the report presented the Gallery mainly as a function of its extension work across the country.52 This assessment was decidedly blinkered, given that 1969 had included both Flavins fluorescent light etc. and N.E. Thing Co.'s conversion - deeply troubling for Jean Boggs herself but also richly prescient - of the Lome Building into a corporate office block. What the report did do was present the NMC'S pending network of cross-Canada museums in the best of terms while downplaying the National Gallery as an institution. Doing the same thing more implicitly was the report's terse mention of a number of resignations and a "staff freeze" at the National Gallery. Nor did the report connect the dots in these citations. For the hiring freeze within the Gallery was not accompanied by one at the NMC. Instead, in a separate section, the report noted that, within the NMC itself, "considerable success has been achieved during the year in recruiting highly qualified staff for key positions." Among these was a director of education and extension who was appointed in August to oversee these activities for all four museums, a week after the resignation of the National Gallery's own senior education officer.53 Such claims of influence over the National Gallery were carried even further in 1970-71. "The consequences of a third year of retrenchment," declared the NMC'S report of that year, "were apparent in the National Gallery's almost total absorption in Canadian art. Although the Gallery has always been a strongly Canadian institution with a particular concern for national art, it has nevertheless also played a significant role in opening up horizons beyond the borders of Canada and into the past. In 1970-71 its role in bringing art of other countries and other times to Canada was essentially limited to the acquisition of two paintings, one work of sculpture, one drawing, one print and one exhibition in Ottawa."54 If the Gallery's "almost total absorption in Canadian art" could be read as an outcome of both "retrenchment" and a cut in the purchase budget from $1.2 million to $750,000, it could also be read as furthering the NMC'S nation-building agenda and the authority of the NMC itself. Within the same mould was the report's terse announcement that the NMC - in accordance with its mandate under the National Museums Act - was consolidating its control over the sale and to some extent the production of published materials.55 Though this was also the year when Frances Barwick, the sister of Douglas Duncan, gave 134 paintings - including many by David Milne - to the Gallery, the report, perhaps not surprisingly, added that "in spite of the activities of the Gallery during the year, the strain was apparent upon the staff of the reduction in establishment, appropriations, and even in space which has been the Gallery's lot in the last three years."56 By contrast, the Gallery's annual reviews of the period, which were written mainly by Boggs herself, focused on the exhibitions mounted in what she still thought of as "the centre" in Ottawa. As with the reports she had done prior to the consolidation

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of the NMC, these reviews, too, contained lavish photographic coverage of openings and installations. They also supplemented the traditional reporting of each exhibition, purchase, and gift with careful breakdowns according to curatorial responsibility. Among her goals, Boggs wrote, was the provision of a high level of scholarly excellence and "self-consciousness." Such emphasis was obviously due in part to the damage already done to the Gallery's reputation by the Chrysler affair, which she herself had called "embarrassing."57 But curatorial scholarship also helped give arthistorical anchorage and credibility to an institution which had lost the right to view such scholarship as existing apart from either the "scientific and historical" methods of the other national museums or the "national interest." "This year seems to mark a demonstrably new stage in the National Gallery's study of Canadian art," she wrote in the review of 1970-71. "Our scholarship has become even more rigorous, traditional and self-analytical."58 Once the terms of this struggle are factored in, the sustained photographic coverage of Gallery events in the annual reviews can be read in terms of both overcompensation for the Gallery's waning control over its own affairs and Boggs's commitment to documenting its human dimension, as against the overarching bureaucracy of the NMC. And similarly, many of her strategies of this period can be read as much in terms of resistance to the gradually building momentum of the NMC as to what she called the "anti-historicist" tendencies of some contemporary art.59 She would shortly emphasize this view of the collection, not only as "at the core of everything we attempt" but as an "organism" which had evolved and had to continue evolving, by writing an historical overview of its development which she published with the Oxford University Press in 1971. With characteristic tact, Boggs, in sixty-nine pages of text, barely mentioned her concerns about the homogenizing pressures of the NMC. But in focusing on the "poignancy and nobility" of the Gallery's evolution under adverse circumstances, and the "heroic achievements" of earlier directors in building the collection, she drew attention to its distinctiveness as a collection of artworks, whose parameters were shaped by the continuities and patterns of art history rather than by broadly administrative and national concerns such as the parliamentary act alleged were held in common by the "national museums." After pointing out the historical gaps in the Gallery's accessions, she concluded pointedly with the "hope that the National Gallery of Canada's is a young collection still."60 Within this context, some of her comments on exhibitions shaded into a style of guerrilla warfare against this bureaucracy that was constantly - and legally - expanding its reach. The Gallery's first retrospective of the work of a contemporary Canadian female artist, Joyce Wieland, provided a case in point in 1972. As organized by Theberge, Wieland's True Patriot Love seemed in keeping with the NMC'S Canada-first, feel-good agenda. Wieland herself described it in terms of her having asked "people to do craft things ... about what we have in common in Canada," so as "to feel the beauty of everything and be as positive, as positive as possible."61 Yet this should, she said, be done without irony or humour, "because we have to get to the very essential thing now, the land, and how we feel about it," so that Canada could

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"be preserved as a nationalist's park." Boggs was more oblique, using the occasion for an essay on "Women at the National Gallery" to hint at her feelings about the allmale bureaucracy of the NMC. "In French, the gender of Gallery is feminine," she wrote, "unlike the masculine of the word for Museum. Perhaps the women who enter this gallery - as the artists, the collectors, the visitors ... subversively in the works of art; and as its guards, editors, librarians, clerks, scholars, elevator operators, secretaries, administrators - keep it alive as a flexible, imaginative, spontaneous, unpredictable, and very modern institution."62 While Wieland sought to disallow irony, the French translation of this text was charged with it, through the use of the verb "penetrer" for "enter," so as to create a double entendre and radical reversal of sexual convention: "Les femmes qui ont penetre dans la Galerie nationale du Canada." Yet for all of Boggs's resistance, there was within this developing relationship between the Gallery and the NMC a different kind of reversal that made for a different kind of constructive irony, and that stemmed from closer ties with the Museum of Man. The Gallery's record on aboriginal exhibitions and acquisitions was still, by 1970, dismal. Apart from a few displays of "Eskimo art," it had shown no such work since the anthropologist Marius Barbeau had prevailed upon Eric Brown to show Canadian west coast native art in 1928.63 That exhibition, too, had been done in cooperation with the National Museum, then in a separate wing of the Victoria Museum, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Since then, the Gallery had concentrated almost entirely on a model of art history derived from - as Alan Jarvis put it - "the rule stick" given by Europe. Nor did Boggs's incorporation of contemporary American art into such a "rule stick" change this focus, notwithstanding the acknowledged debt of many abstractionists and even her beloved Picasso to "primitive art." What did effect a change was precisely the National Gallery's implicit demotion from a "pure" art museum. With considerable if unintended irony, the imposed "national" focus brought in its own wake strains around the edges of admissible art. If many of these strains would in the next decade prove to be toward a "democratization" that would favour forms of "folk art," one of them offered, in 1970, a thin wedge toward a different kind of inclusion. In its new role as a subsidiary of the NMC, the National Gallery collaborated with les Amis du Musee de l'Homme in Paris, the National Museum of Man, and the Department of External Affairs on an exhibition called Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art.64 The Gallery's role was passive, in that it did not provide any personnel toward organizing the exhibition but only showed it from November 1969 to January 1970, after it had been in Paris. Nor did Masterpieces include works by contemporary aboriginal artists: these would take nearly twenty more years to reach the National Gallery. Nevertheless, Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art was a paradox rife with potential: an exhibition whose premises were reactionary but which opened in spite of itself toward a different future. It consisted mainly of aboriginal sacred objects, 186 in total, that had made their way to museums from "Indian bands" across Canada. Though left with their "tribal" affiliations, these were assessed in aesthetic

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terms, such that the "Commissioner General," Marcel Evrard, could write that "the ideal was... an exhibition which would group masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo art borrowed from Canadian museum collections."65 The tendency to objectify "Indians" as though they had no voices, and to regard them in their "purity" as inaccessibly past and exotic, was suggested in Evrard's reference to "the understandable reluctance of museums to part with their most ancient and fragile pieces." The implication, of course, was that there were no "Indians" who were entitled to these objects, and that only museums could claim care and ownership. But even as it accepted the disinheritance of living "Indians" from their "heritage," the exhibition obscured this agenda with an urbane investment in the universalizing humanism of Expo, as though this were the only legitimate way of being in the world. "What the objects convey in terms of the universality of mankind," Evrard wrote in tortured prose, "is accessible to a contemporary sensibility because it has become aware of the multiplicity of the arts. That they reveal preoccupations perceptible only to those for whom they were created, a people so removed from our civilization and concepts that no study can analyze the contents without profoundly falsifying the meaning cannot be denied: there remains for the contemporary observer the way of the senses, the privileged path to understanding."66 Yet if "the way of the senses" - or "the aesthetic" - was for Evrard "the privileged path of understanding," he was introducing into the record of the National Gallery objects whose pure "art" status was as interpenetrated by concerns of "spirit" as the history of the Gallery itself had been. This was "spirit" of a different sort from the unified "divine Principle" of Brown and Harris and the metaphysically tinged "Canadianism" of Comfort and the Royal Commission. Far antedating both, it spoke to relationships with place that might have made all these men - with their investments in a "Canada" shaped by nineteenth-century ideology - just a little nervous. "The call of the unknown and the supernatural vibrates in these objects," Evrard's French colleague Christian Zervos wrote with flourish for the catalogue. "Each time we succeed in deciphering the language, we perceive the part played by the shaman in putting defined natural forms at the service of his concepts of magic ... and in leading believers along esoteric paths, by overturning and often distorting reality in order to transform it and give it a new meaning for them ... In giving shape to a fragment of wood, a piece of bone, copper or cloth, materials in themselves insigni-ficant, he lifts them out of their common mould and gives them a second life, thereby intimately joining together the raw material and the artist's vibrant sensibility in which his originality (of whose sudden release he is unaware) is most profoundly preserved."67 Zervos, like his colleague, left the clear impression that he could recognize both "reality" and its "distortions" and was in touch with the former. With residually imperial confidence, he insisted that "to assess" the "total validity" of such objects it was "necessary to detach oneself from ... scientific method." This was not, he wrote, for the sake of understanding what he called their "secret power" and "original strength," which he decreed had "declined." Rather, it was to affirm "the most pre-

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cious elements" of their "aesthetic value" and to fold "the shaman" into "the artist's vibrant sensibility," via a reading of the objects themselves in terms of "his originality (of whose sudden release he is unaware) "The exhibition, then, imposed its own European art-based categories - "originality," "aesthetic value" - on this "collection" of amulets, "soul-catchers," drums, secret society masks, and totems that had hitherto been mapped via the taxonomies of anthropology. Nevertheless, the very appearance at the National Gallery of such objects, as produced not only by "Eskimos" and "West Coast Indians" but also by the Iroquoian, Siouan, and Algonkian peoples east of the Rockies, gave a hint of a more inclusive future: one that might move away from the view that the "rule stick" had to come from Europe, or even from United States. That this wedge was supplied through the Gallery's collaboration, under NMC authority, with its lesser sibling the Museum of Man, suggested that there might indeed be benefit in the challenge to its own long-standing investment in one category as superordinate: namely, "art" itself, as shaped by historically conditioned and strictly Eurocentric "standards." Jean Boggs's response to this incongruity, however - as to the meddling of the NMC generally - was to mount, during the next three years, several exhibitions that were aggressively Eurocentric, and even openly imperial in the style of their focus on the past. Of the origins of the most successful, Art and the Courts, she told Chatelaine in 1972 that "in the patriotic fervour of 1966 I was asked to think about an exhibition that would represent aspects of Canada's two founding cultures. I had other ideas but I suddenly realized that Canadian universities, both Anglophone and Francophone, were enormously attracted by the Middle Ages."68 If Boggs's casual reference to "Canada's two founding cultures" only further reflected her time's indifference to aboriginal heritage, her ingenuity at adapting the "national interest" gave rise to one of the exhibitions that she felt best honoured "international standards." Art and the Courts ran from April to July 1972 and presented the legacy - in manuscripts, statuary, vestments, and sacred objects - of France and England between 1259 and 1328. As assembled by Peter Brieger of the University of Toronto and Philippe Verdier of the Universite de Montreal, it evoked not so much courtly life as the piety, grandeur, and anxiety of the "rayonnant" Gothic period, which preceded the arrival of the Black Plague in Europe. No other exhibition so thoroughly developed Boggs's sense of museum space as "hallowed," with carefully painted walls, spodighting, and glass display cases that emphasized the aura of sanctity surrounding the objects. Of this exhibition, she wrote that "our eyes, accustomed to the brutal impact of the twentieth-century urban world, were focused with unaccustomed intensity upon a bird worked into an embroidered cope, or the flowers on a tiny enamel reliquary, or the vines painted on the border of a manuscript page."69 The opportunity to focus on medieval miniatures perhaps itself came as a relief for Boggs, beset as she was by artists who did not respect her sense of the museum as "hallowed" and by bureaucrats intent upon managing art "in the national interest." The new irony was that this careful evocation of feudal societies - whose class distinctions and elitism went unmuted by their piety - preceded not a literal plague, but

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what for Boggs was certainly a figurative one. This was the policy offensive which the NMC had been preparing for the previous four years and whose terms were laid out, in the spring of 1972, by Secretary of State Gerard Pelletier, as the "National Museums Policy." And its attack on what was left of the National Gallery's independent focus on art was systematic in a way that even Boggs herself likely did not anticipate.

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Jean Sutherland Boggs with the secretary-general of the National Museums of Canada Bernard Ostry, circa 1974. (National Gallery of Canada)

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I want for the Gallery the finest collection anywhere ... a great centre built around a knowledge of art; lively and meaningful exhibitions not only at the gallery but in circulation throughout the country, and eventually to be housed in a new building which will be a work of art in itself. -Jean Sutherland Boggs,July 1966, after her appointment as director Above all, one needs a Director who will co-operate with the Visiting Committee and the Board of Trustees to ensure the structure works in the interest of the Canadian public and Canadian artists. - Bernard Ostry, secretary-general of the National Museums of Canada, after Boggs's resignation as director in 1976

"DECENTRALIZATION A N D DEMOCRATIZATION"

When published in 1972, the National Museums Policy both justified the government's four-year investment in the NMC and established a blueprint for its continued expansion. The policy's catchphrase goals, which were to guide the NMC for the next two decades, were announced to be "decentralization and democratization." Elaborated in the prose style of the bureaucracy, these meant that the NMC'S objective would be "to better distribute those cultural resources which are obtainable through Canadian museums, both national and regional, to the end that the greatest possible number of Canadians be exposed to our national heritage." The means toward mobilizing "national heritage" in this way would be the formation, across Canada, of a network of "Associate Museums," much of whose circulating content would come from the four established "National Museums." The policy assumed that most of these "Associates" would develop, through new subsidy, from existing

institutions. But it also allowed for the funding of new "Exhibition Centres" in places that would be "otherwise deprived of such an opportunity," and even for travelling "Museumobiles" that would carry "didactic displays ... to outlying towns and villages."1 Within this framework, the policy also set in motion other developments, among them an Emergency Purchase Fund, which would rescue "objects of great significance as national heritage" from "foreign buyers"; a Canadian Conservation Institute, based in Ottawa with regional branches, to ensure that so much "movement" of the "national heritage" would not wear it out; and a computerized National Inventory of museum collections. So deliberate an investment in "national heritage," and in regional museums for its distribution, seemed to an extent the logical outcome of the Massey commission's investment in "Canadianism" and in art as its primary vehicle, as a kind of substitute metaphysics. A project on this scale, however, was clearly not going to happen spontaneously. Instead, the policy took for granted that "decentralization and democratization" would need a lot of money, a paradoxically centralized management, and a bigger administration for the NMC itself. Accordingly, the NMC s annual reports throughout the 1970s can be read as documenting - within the general context of an expanding civil service - the step-by-step evolution of a mega-bureaucracy that soon took on its own momentum. The report of 1972-73, covering the period just after the new policy was issued, gave a clear case study of how this would happen. After noting that the National Museums of Canada had been made responsible by cabinet "for eleven of the twelve elements of this important new government policy," the report described the NMC board's response: "To assist in carrying out these responsibilities, the Board of Trustees created by By-law a Consultative Committee on National Museum Policy, chaired by the Vice-Chairman of the Board ... To provide support services for the Consultative Committee on National Museum Policy, a Secretariat was established within the head office of the Corporation ... [The Secretariat] quickly assembled a small staff of project officers, whose primary task was to analyze the applications made by museums and related institutions throughout Canada, to assemble supporting data and to prepare briefing information for consideration by the Consultative Committee."2 That this multiplication established new power bases within the NMC itself with each new committee, secretariat, and staff did not seem to trouble the government, perhaps not least because the Trudeau-era civil service was rife with such expansions. Nor did the busy-beehive atmospherics enter public awareness so as to make for awkward questions. Instead, the next four years saw the "Planning Secretariat's" mandate grow even further, but in such a way as to put a new twist on the flaw of homogenization that would haunt the NMC. The secretariats role, the NMC annual report of 1976-77 declared, was "to stimulate creative initiatives, to assess critical policy issues facing the Canadian museum community, to coordinate the planning process, to assist managers in their policy development, to undertake evaluations of ongoing programmes, and to research the possibilities for future museum activities."3 The NMC'S managers did not seem to grasp that, just as there might be differ248

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ences between a National Gallery and a Museum of Natural Sciences, so might there be a ceiling on the "stimulation of creative initiatives," if oversight of this was given to the very bureaucrats assigned "to coordinate the planning process." Instead, the assumption seemed to be that all activities pertaining to "museums," including the "creative initiatives" that nurture works of art, could be overseen by - and implicitly subordinated to - the same procedural principles as ostensibly implemented "in the national interest." The very language of the National Museums Policy implied a new kind of demotion for art, then, from a form of inquiry to the status of a "cultural resource," amid a range of other such "resources" from spinning wheels to fossils, which were all absorbed into the category of "national heritage." The implication was that these new overarching categories - as the most recent means toward Massey's "Canadianism" and its "holy grail" of "unity" - would themselves be beyond question, along with the bureaucracy that administered them. Yet even as the NMC began to spin both selfjustifying power bases and a quotidian corporate style that suited the technologies of the 1970s, any notion that concern for "national heritage" would carry with it respect for Canadian history as this applied to the very institutions absorbed by the NMC was soon dashed by the rhetoric that came from the corporation. This was exemplified in the 1973-74 NMC annual report, according to which the new policy would ensure that "instead of being hidden away in the equivalent of basements and attics, the national treasures were to be dusted off and set out for display to the people who owned them."4 Such disparagement of the museological past recalled the New York Times's depiction of the National Gallery itself, prior to Alan Jarvis s arrival, as "crusty, dark, and forbidding." In that case, there had been an obvious agenda of welcoming a cosmopolitan new director. In this new case, a centralized Canadian bureaucracy was implicitly disparaging the entire textured history of the National Gallery, as the oldest of the four "national museums" that it had taken over. Such contempt did not bode well, either for the Gallery as an institution or even for the concept of "national heritage," which was in this case turned toward cheapening aspects of Canadian history that seemed at odds with the corporation's objectives and with its bureaucrats' sense of their own importance. But the terminology of the NMC'S expansion also did special violence to the independence of art as a form of "questioning." The bureaucracy's style, which quickly began to rely on the flow charts, jargon, and command structures that were integral to corporate entities throughout the developed world in the 1970s, was invisibly superordinate to the entire system, and so beyond art's challenge. The implicit message to Canadian artists was that, if they knew what was good for them, in terms of funding and inclusion of their work in the national collections, they too would not question this overarching scale of value. Rather, they would accept it, and so benefit from their enhanced status as Canadian artists within the new frame. In this sense, the NMC would contain the National Gallery and its art, even more comprehensively than the Gallery contained its collections. These developments only emphasized the prescience brought to the Gallery in 1969 by N.E. Thing Co., who had opened to question the implicitly corporate context in which art was being "shown." For the implied The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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absorption of art itself into the National Museums Policy put a firm lid indeed on the explorations of wider context that had been introduced by Minimalism to the category "art." With its mandate entrenched as policy, and programmed to unfold according to a pre-planned logic, the National Museums Corporation began in 1973 to lobby for its own permanent housing, complaining that its offices were spread around "twentyseven government-owned and rented buildings in the National Capital Region."5 It also claimed entitlement to an expanding budget, staff, and infrastructure from the parent government. Having begun with $8.2 million in 1968-69, the NMC'S overall budget rose steadily over the next ten years, reaching $36.15 million in 1974-75 a n d $66.2 million by 1978-79. Included in these amounts were the budgets of the four "National Museums." Included also, after 1972, was an average of $7.5 million annually as "contributions" to Associate Museums and Exhibition Centres whose programming was deemed to have the proper "relationship ... to the National Museum Policy."6 Inevitably, this funding pattern entailed shifts in institutional leverage. And as the decade progressed, the National Gallery's budget - which had averaged about $2.5 million in the three years before the NMC'S establishment in 1968 - dropped constantly in proportion to the NMC'S overall budget. For the NMC to secure its authority over the National Gallery, however, would require one more crucial step. Prior to 1972, under Charles MacKenzie as the first secretary-general, the corporation had been devoted mainly to policy development. Once the National Museums Policy was in place, its own logic called for a secretarygeneral who could carry it though, against anticipated resistance from the directors of the "National Museums." MacKenzie was by this time a liability, in that, with "administrative efficiency" the NMC'S official raison d'etre, there was particular embarrassment over the acting auditor general's statement in lune 1973 that "the conditions of the records and internal control has deteriorated to such an extent that I am unable to express an opinion on the validity of either the accounts or financial statements of the Corporation for the year ended March 31."7 The major shift took place in December 1973, with the appointment, by Secretary of State Hugh Faulkner, of the former assistant under-secretary of state, Bernard Ostry, as secretary-general. Ostry would later claim that, when he arrived, almost every department of the NMC was "in a mess."8 As described by Robert Fulford in Saturday Night, however, he himself had "been everywhere and seen everything and he'd dealt with more than his share of contentious intellectuals. Ostry in his youth was ... the author of a briefly famous book on Mackenzie King, and a personal assistant to Krishna Menon ... India's man at the United Nations. In Ottawa [he] had been a CBC administrator and a senior official in the department of the Secretary of State. He was marvellously well connected in the government."9 In terms of promotional glamour, this passage read like press reports about Alan Jarvis in the mid-1950s and Jean Boggs herself in the mid-1960s. Fulford might have added that the glamour extended to the lavish parties given "at their grand house in Hull" by Ostry and his wife, Sylvia, who in the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs had the status given Ostry himself when he became secretary25O

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general: that of deputy minister.10 Nor did the echo of Jarvis end with glamour, in that Ostry, too, had lived in London from the late 1940s until 1959, doing graduate work in diplomatic history and later teaching at the London School of Economics.11 Unlike Jarvis, though, who was working in a London settlement house when appointed, and seemed to welcome his "coronation," Ostry - as described by Fulford - "had his price." "He wanted to re-order the museums," Fulford wrote, and "put in place all the systems that a well-organized government man loves. He wanted centralized accounting and centralized personnel policies. He wanted a publishing program with some sense to it, rather than the scattered and wasteful one the museums had been using for years ... He wanted the museums to plan their spending far in advance, the way the Treasury Board likes, and to establish their priorities ... He wanted to run a smooth well-oiled shop."12 In publicly giving a context to these goals, Ostry could still, after taking office, sound like Eric Brown, Lawren Harris, and Vincent Massey in urging the importance of "cultural activities." "Museums all over the world," he said in a 1976 interview, "suffer from the same difficulties: an incapacity on the part of political and social leaders to perceive the role culture plays in a country's life. Some still regard the roles of galleries and museums as fringes, frills and they are the first things to be cut to save money. But cultural activities are at the root of our value system ...What museums are for [is] to provide a perspective of history so we can judge ourselves today."13 Nevertheless, the substance of such statements has to do with how they are turned into practice. Ostry arrived with a mandate from Faulkner toward implementing the full range of powers given the NMC under the National Museums Act, in the interest of the new policy. He faced four likely points of resistance, in the "National Museums" that stood to lose influence and funding as the "Associate Museums" gained. Given the assignment, then, perhaps there should be little surprise that, for Ostry as secretary-general, the promotion of culture soon took on a distinctly Machiavellian cast. Ostry's ideas of "what museums are for" translated into a new approach in which he was aided by two appointments that he sought through the secretary of state. These were of George Ignatieff as chairman of the NMC'S Board of Trustees, and Andre Bachand, as vice-chairman of the board, and chair of the consultative committee on National Museums Policy. Ostry publicly allowed that his strategic goal was thereby to create, with - as he put it - "the full support" of the prime minister and cabinet, a triumvirate among whom "nobody could drive any wedge."14 Once this was done, he could begin to gather to the secretary-general and the NMC board the powers that he saw were allotted to them by the 1968 Act but that had gone unused during the building of an infrastructure and policy. The method of this consolidation was dramatic and is best described through Ostry's own words, regarding the Board meeting of 13 February 1974: At thefirstmeeting of the board with me in early '74> the [secretary of state] came along and delivered a moving statement about the importance he attached to the National Museums of Canada. He indicated that the Board should get moving and begin doing all the things it had The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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been set up to do six years earlier. He made it clear that the new appointees had his full support and would have it in the future, and that he was pulling his ... officials out of the board immediately, as a clear indication of his confidence in the new administration. He indicated some of his priorities and left, taking his staff and departmental people with him. The new chairman conducted a few minutes' business and then asked the four national directors if they would mind leaving for the balance of the day because the board wanted to meet without them for a portion of the three day meeting. This request was very hard on the directors, who had been present at every board meeting since the beginning of'68. From the start, however, the chairman felt that it had to be made perfectly clear that the board was going to use its time any way it wanted to, even if this involved having discussions where directors of the Museums were not present. It was felt that if the board couldn't establish that principle, there was no way it would ever be able to discuss what was going on inside a specific museum or the effectiveness of a particular director - quite obviously because other directors would be present as witnesses of another director's work, and this could involve some unpleasantness and embarrassment. The directors accepted the reality of this philosophy and left the meeting.15

The NMC board meeting of February 1974 was tantamount to a legal boardroom coup, on the part of Ostry, Ignatieff, and Bachand, underwritten by Faulkner's authority as secretary of state. Among the directors asked to leave was, of course, Jean Boggs. And the extent to which it was "hard" on her might be inferred from her publicly expressed anxieties in 1969 about having missed one such meeting, only to learn afterward that a trustee had suggested the National Gallery need not acquire any more paintings. In this new situation, the anxiety would prove justified. Although what transpired at the meeting would not be made public until two years later, it was in her absence that the board mooted proposals for a new Gallery building, and for a location other than Cartier Square, over which neither she nor anyone else at the Gallery would have any say. With the directors of the "National Museums" thus contained, the triumvirate of Ostry, Ignatieff, and Bachand could start to realize the potential of the National Museums Policy, as a platform toward what Ostry called "a sort of railroad across Canada, so that we could move the patrimony across the country."16 This entailed, through the distribution of $12 million in the first two years, the fostering of "Associate Museums" in larger cities and of "Exhibition Centres" in smaller ones. To an extent, the program echoed both Eric Brown's ad hoc circulating Gallery of 1916-1920, and Alan Jarvis's 1955 hope of making "travelling art exhibitions ... available to those galleries in other cities that can provide the necessary care, safeguard, and accommodation."17 But crucially, neither Brown nor Jarvis had subsumed the category "art" within the category of "the patrimony." The NMC, by contrast, quickly integrated into policy a report done in 1970 by Dr Tuzo Wilson on "proposals that should guide the development of the National Museums." Wilson's report called not only for the NMC itself to "grow during the next decade into a strong well-housed complex in the national capital region," but indicated that "the 'boundaries' that exist among the four museums ... will tend to become less well252

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defined in the future." The tendency toward blurred definition was formalized in a term the board also decided it "should strongly support... with the development and marketing of the idea to begin immediately." This was "the intermuseum concept" proposed by Professor Kiyoshi Izumi, for "a museum of Canada based on a holistic concept representative of Canada, its geography, history, politics, achievements in science, medicine, and so on."18 There was some ambiguity in this commitment to "holism," in that the NMC board allowed that the National Gallery would continue to be "complete, selfcontained and extensive" even as it resolved in March and June 1974 "to strengthen the management, administration, and financial controls of the Corporation." In practice, this ambiguity entailed a meeting at which Jean Boggs was told formally by the auditor general that "in future he would maintain contact with the SecretaryGeneral of the NMC ... in dealing with the Corporation's financial business." It also entailed the board's finessing power more subtly, by giving Ostry himself "the responsibility to undertake a comprehensive review of the goals, priorities and bylaws of the Corporation."19 Out of this came an enlargement of his own office, and a still greater centralization of authority, even as the NMC proclaimed "decentralization" and even as its annual reports conceded an excess of expenditure over revenue that almost equalled its entire budget. During his three-and-a-half-year tenure, Ostry spun around himself as secretary-general a ring of satellite departments - for programmes, planning and administration, services, national policy, and communications - each run by an assistant secretary-general.20 Staffing these new departments then made, again as per the Gutheim report, for a centralization of personnel. As Boggs had predicted in 1967, the National Gallery had the most to lose in this process, and, beginning in 1974, she faced a steady syphoning off of "person years": corporate jargon for relentless bureaucratic encroachment on Gallery control of education, publicity, publishing, and security.21 The public rhetoric of the NMC did not focus on such shifts. Instead, under Ostry, Ignatieff, and Bachand, it presented the NMC'S "decentralizing" role in terms that recalled not only Massey on the arts' role in national unity but even Harris's manifestos. The difference was that, unlike Massey and Harris, the NMC proclaimed that "the people" themselves were behind its sense of mission. "For the National Museums of Canada 1973-74 was a year of increasing popular demand for museum services," Ignatieff wrote in the annual report. "Museum professionals were aware of a heightened urgency as they went about their normal work of acquiring, analyzing and conserving scholarly, scientific and cultural collections and making them accessible to citizens. In response to the national mood, the Museums devoted much of their effort to bringing their treasures to the people, whose heritage they are. The policy of decentralization and democratization, seeking the best possible distribution of cultural resources... succeeded in exposing increasing numbers of Canadians to the visible facts of their heritage."22 This self-dramatizing tone soon came to infuse most NMC public documents, representing the corporation as engaged in an urgent, even heroic mission to bring to "the people" - as a unitary entity - their "heritage" - as another such entity - at The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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their own request. The encompassing rhetoric also recalled Gutheim's unitary description of "museum staff" in terms of the pronoun "itself." The NMC'S skewed notion of "the people," however, and its exaggeration of demand for its services were quietly exposed by the auditor general in the same report that held Ignatieff s account. "The sales of $105,710 at cost to divisions of the Corporation referred to in Note 2 to the National Museums Special Account," he wrote, "are not, in my opinion 'sales to the public'... This results in sales and cost of goods sold (publication costs) being overstated by that amount."23 Similarly, he noted that "grants and contributions include $7,464,640 for contributions which in most cases were made in advance of need ... However, the agreements of the Corporation with the recipients have made no provision for the making of such advances and they must therefore be regarded as not having been made with the proper authority."24 These comments would not be worth citing but for the self-mythologizing rhetoric of the NMC'S administration, and for Ostry's own claim that "the NMC didn't go out looking for 'associates.'"25 For what they suggest is that the corporation was both padding the "public" which it claimed was making a "demand" for its services and, through cash advances, cultivating - rather than responding to - "need" in the institutions it was supposedly serving. But if the NMC melodramatized its own importance, and even suggested more enthusiasm among "the people of Canada" than there was, it also misrepresented the sense of "heightened urgency" experienced by the "museum professional" who ran the National Gallery. Caught in the equivalent of a state of siege, in which her vision for the National Gallery as "a great centre" was being relentlessly chipped away even as she lost her negotiating status as a deputy minister, Jean Boggs was reduced to sniping at an opponent who had the backing of her former sponsor, the secretary of state. In an Ottawa speech, even before the National Museums Policy was announced, she quoted an unnamed "professor at a Canadian university" to complain that "a moment's reflection should be enough to convince anyone that works of art, which are always physically very fragile, can simply be worn out by frequent moving and handling. Obviously any decision to increase the circulation of the National Gallery's collections would be a decision to accelerate their destruction." No one, she said - or "quoted" - should "take seriously the suggestion of a kind of lending library of art masterpieces, or ... that we should put the National Collection in a ceaselessly circulating transcontinental art train."26 Yet this was precisely part of the NMC'S agenda, beginning with a "Museumobile" which, in the form of a forty-five-foot tractor trailer, toured the Maritimes in 1973. By 1976, Ostry, with the backing of the secretary of state, had expanded this into three convoys of several vehicles, named "Canada North, Canada West, and Atlantic Canada" and carrying multimedia shows on Canadian history through outlying regions.27 These then in turn begat, as Ostry's personal project, the phenomenon that perhaps came most to be identified with the NMC: a "Discovery Train," which began to criss-cross the country in July 1978, carrying displays from all four "national museums." Called by Ignatieff "the largest mobile museum in the world," the Discovery Train carried its own charge of comic irony. The fifteen cars, as bought 254 T H E N A T I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F C A N A D A

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by nine provincial governments for the NMC'S use, had been part of the United States Freedom Train, which in 1976 had observed the American bicentennial in the same way.28 Their status as American hand-me-downs, however, did not prevent Ignatieff s claiming that the train would carry "the story of Canada's varied environment and heritage to millions of Canadians each year." Once again, the legacy of the railroad was invoked as a nation-builder, though long after the railroads themselves had ceased to serve as such. The assumption seemed instead to be that a sense of "national heritage" would be generated the way a magneto spins electric current: through stage-managed displays kept in constant motion inside Canada, by bureaucrats who claimed to know not many stories but "the story of Canada's varied environment and heritage." Jean Sutherland Boggs, meanwhile, complaining in the 1973 annual review about how Gallery finances were managed by the NMC even as personnel were under the secretary of state, could think of no better term to describe herself than "the bureaucracy-bound senior administrative officer of the National Gallery."29 But even as she felt herself being "bound" in Ottawa, she in June 1973 received affirmation of her abilities from outside Canada, with her election as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors at its annual meeting in Detroit. Just as this was a position to which Eric Brown had been elected exactly fifty years before, as director of an independent National Gallery, so was it also a vote of confidence in Boggs precisely from the directors of art museums throughout not only Canada but all of North America. T H E B O A R D HAS B E G U N TO T H I N K I N CORPORATE T E R M S "

The tensions between Boggs and the NMC came to a head in 1974, owing to new initiatives by the triumvirate. As part of an administrative restructuring, they proposed "an integrated publishing and communications policy for the Museums," including the National Gallery.30 These Boggs had tried to maintain as bulwarks against what she reportedly thought of as a watering down of standards by the "democratization and decentralization" policy. She was also unhappy with changes that had seen the National Gallery budget increasing at a markedly lower rate -17 per cent - than those of other institutions, at 58 per cent, due to the NMC'S policy of both improving the other three "national museums" and distributing funds throughout the country in order to develop what Ostry called the cultural "railroad."31 What this meant in a period of high inflation, she claimed, was that the Gallery's program budget was actually 15 per cent less than it had been five years earlier.32 But the critical issue revolved around the demand by the NMC 'S board that Boggs support their proposed site for a permanent Gallery building or resign. In a 1971 "talking paper" prepared in consultation not with the NMC but with her staff, Boggs had noted that there was still "general agreement... that the best site for the Gallery would be" Cartier Square, which was just south on Elgin Street from the Lome Building. It was also still vacant, and separated by a park from the newly opened National Arts Centre. "This site has been of historic interest to the National Gallery," Boggs wrote. "There was even a Cabinet decision in 1967 that this would be its location. Since it is so near the present building we can assume that we would have The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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the same high attendance we do now." In this paper she had also insisted - counter to the Gutheim study - that "there has never been any suggestion that the Gallery must be a part of a museum complex."33 The "talking paper" was then refined in a study prepared for Boggs herself in December 1973, again without NMC participation, by Abraham Rogatnick of the University of British Columbia. Rogatnick urged that, as constructed on Cartier Square, a new National Gallery could be connected to the Arts Centre, and could also - as Boggs wanted - incorporate indoor garden and rest areas to reduce "museum fatigue," as well as a large library, auditoriums, and a storage area accessible to the public. When Rogatnick's report was released, Secretary of State Hugh Faulkner was reported to have described Cartier Square as "an excellent location for the Gallery," and to be preparing the proposal for cabinet.34 But such was not to be the decision of the NMC'S Board of Trustees. The shift was hinted at when, in January 1974, rumours circulated that the cabinet was considering moving the Gallery to Hull, as it had done already with the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, the Department of the Environment, and the Research Institute for Animal Diseases.35 That Trudeau himself confirmed a basis to these rumours seemed to indicate the low esteem in which art was held by the government, in that such a move would not simply subordinate it further to the federal goal of integrating Hull into the National Capital Regions "cultural stream."36 The proposed location, accessible from Ottawa only by bus or freeway, would involve a literal stream as well, for it was on the shore of Brewery Creek, a "backwater" of the Ottawa River that had once - according to the Globe and Mail - fed mills and a brewery but that ran "through scrub land" and was "highly polluted."37 Public reaction to this proposal was extreme, and included a motion by the Ottawa City Council rejecting it, and even a letter to the Ottawa Citizen from Maud Brown, by then in her eighties. "As well might the Louvre be moved from Paris to St. Cloud," she wrote pointedly, "or the British National Gallery be taken out of Trafalgar Square and set down in Shoreditch."38 Jean Boggs herself was quoted as saying that "as far as I am concerned, Cartier Square is the only site."39 The ease with which the government dropped the Brewery Creek proposal hinted that it may have been a feint from the start: the mooting of a terrible option, so as to make a bad one look better. In the part of the 21 March 1974 meeting from which Boggs was "excused," the NMC'S board resolved that the site for a new National Gallery would be an area that, like Cartier Square, still held "temporary" wartime buildings. But their choice was to the west of the Parliament Buildings on Wellington Street, between the National Library and Supreme Court. The plan to squeeze the Gallery into frontage with these icons on either side seemed especially to imply the Boards indifference - odd, given its rhetoric of serving "the people" - to the Gallery's long-standing goal of widening the audience for art. The block-like Library, which also housed the National Archives, attracted mainly specialized researchers rather than the curious public such as directors from Eric Brown on had hoped to lure. Nor would the clientele of the Supreme Court be less restricted. Across the road and to the east were relentlessly anonymous government offices, while to the west lay the wasteland of LeBreton Flats, an area cleared of low-income housing 256

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The National Museums of Canada's proposed site for a new National Gallery, between the National Library and the Supreme Court. (Hans-L Blohm, National Gallery of Canada) 1 Supreme Court of Canada 2 Proposed site of the National Gallery of Canada, containing temporary wartime buildings 3 National Library of Canada 4 Ottawa River

in the 1950s and hosting only a planned transit-way for public buses. The board's plan was for the Gallery to open out behind the Library and the Court, incorporating into its structure the largest heating plant in North America and a steep drop to the Ottawa River. The board anticipated also that it would be linked to the downtown core via a riverside pedestrian walkway, and that it "would form part of a cultural mall to be developed before 1980."40 According to Ostry, the NMC board was only responding with this choice to an earlier "determination" by yet another Ottawa bureaucracy - the National Capital Commission - that the city's "centre of gravity" should shift toward the west.41 Given both the Greber plan and the struggle that had already taken place to secure the Gallery's site in Cartier Square, this decision seemed almost gratuitously highhanded and indifferent to history. There was, however, one provisional plum offered to Boggs in the arrangement. When Secretary of State Hugh Faulkner announced The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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the new site in December 1974, he also declared, in a press release, that "the building should be completed in time for the National Gallery to open its new doors to the public during its centennial year of 1980."42 This was a target that Boggs herself had been promoting for several years, and so initially she was ready to settle on a secondbest choice of site given such a timetable. "It is marvelous," she was quoted as saying, "to have the new building definite."43 By this time, Boggs undoubtedly wanted to be enthusiastic about something. Yet she should, perhaps, have been in Ottawa long enough to have read the small print. In this case, Faulkner's press release did not commit firmly to a date of 1980 for a building. Instead, it declared only that "the new building should be completed" by then, adding that "the programme" for a new Gallery, and for a complex in Hull to house the Museum of Science and Technology and the Museum of Man, would "be developed in accordance with the fiscal climate." This meant that there would need to be "sufficient flexibility to phase it comfortably within the government's goal for completion within ten years." "Ten years" would mean not 1980, but 1984. And this indeed proved the decisive clause. Amid an austerity drive in 1975-76, Faulkner quietly backed away from the commitment to complete a Gallery building by the centennial, citing the timing as inappropriate.44 This postponement - occurring even as the government went ahead with new office space in Hull for five thousand civil servants - proved to be the final humiliation for Jean Boggs. In May 1976, after turning down the directorship of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she announced that she would in the summer be going to Harvard as a full professor.45 She was, as usual, discreet, and denied personal friction with Bernard Ostry. But she did say that the NMC'S trustees "almost in desperation, need to link with one thing, and it's usually the corporations's goals. The board has begun to think in corporate terms rather than to think of the individual museum's needs."46 Jean Boggs had never - despite occasional criticism of her imperial style - made the missteps that Alan Jarvis had with Canadian public opinion.47 In consequence, her departure back to the United States was represented in the mainstream media as well as in the art press in terms of an intolerable loss for Canada. Perhaps the most prescient tribute came in a Globe and Mail editorial. "In Ottawa," it read, "where the esthetic yearnings of senior bureaucrats often run to fake suede on the office walls, the National Gallery has managed to remain a place congenial to the human spirit. This quality is not physical. The gallery has been pinched for pennies and the building that houses it is an upended shoe-box ... What the gallery has is an atmosphere. It feels as if it were run for real people by real people who have managed, in the midst of the neo-precious paternalism of the Secretary of State's cultural compound, to keep alive such subversive qualities as real brains, real guts and real passion. And for that, most of the credit belongs to Director Jean Boggs."48 This tribute repeated the word "real"fivetimes, all in conjunction with a project "congenial to the human spirit." The by then neglected word "spirit" - which Boggs did not use - thus reappeared, within the context of desirability. It did so without the accompanying adjective "Canadian," so dear to Massey and Comfort and in a manner more friendly to Boggs's own project of humanism. The editorial also tied this term "human spirit" to 258

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The design by John Parkin and Associates for a National Gallery building to suit the Wellington Street site that was proposed by the National Museums of Canada. The design was declared the winner of a government-sponsored competition in 1977 but was never implemented. (National Gallery of Canada)

the claim that the gallery had "atmosphere," which Boggs had been passionate in cultivating. This passage hinted at the conjunctions that might need to be made if the Gallery was ever going to resist what the editorial also called "the ooze of bureaucratic mediocrity" and the building of "an empire based on the proposition that Canadian culture must be a hot-house growth." There followed a year of public confusion at the National Gallery and of quiet consolidation by the NMC. Despite the shift from 1980 as a target date, the government forged ahead with an architectural competition - described in the Globe and Mail as "the most rigourous and complicated in Canadian history" - to develop the Wellington Street site for a Gallery building. Widely criticized by architects as being too closed, and as favouring those firms that could afford to compete, this would cost over $350,ooo.49 Ostry meanwhile - even as he, too, denied friction with Boggs - said publicly that her complaints had been exaggerated. Using her record at the Gallery against her, he hinted that anyone with this list of achievements could not have been hobbled by bureaucracy. He also bragged of the role that he and the NMC'S board had played in "this time" keeping hopes for a new building "from falling on stony ground." "We convinced," he said, "the Secretary of State, the President of the Treasury Board, the Minister of Finance, the Minister responsible for Public Works and the National Capital Commission, and with their support The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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were able to obtain Cabinet approval in a period of extreme financial restraint ... My personal view is that had the Gallery been on its own, it simply would not have been able to compete successfully for these resources at this particular time in its history."50 Such public gloating was soon to be revealed as presumptuous in the extreme. In March 1977, two announcements were made by the new secretary of state, John Roberts. Thefirstwas that a winning "concept" had been selected in the competition: Parkin Architects and Planners' series of twenty-four interlocked cubes that would open out behind the Library and Archives, spill down a cliff face to the Ottawa River, and include a chrome-plated smokestack for the heating plant. But, at the same time, Roberts almost perversely extended the warning about a timetable, stating that in a period of fiscal restraint there was "no automatic commitment to proceed" with a building that would cost more than $90 million.51 Given the inflections of bureaucratese, this implied not simply the project's delay past 1980 but, potentially, its being shelved. The backtracking was also an implicit slap at the prestige being claimed by Ostry for the NMC. And as such, it was quickly followed by an all-out attack from a quarter that, presumably, Ostry thought he had dealt with. Within a month of the announcement, and from her prestigious position at Harvard, Jean Boggs dropped the mask of discretion which she had long held in public, and launched her counteroffensive. Its informed vehemence reversed the element of surprise that had been used against her in the boardroom coup of 1974, and gave the coup de grace to the entire project. Boggs's chosen venue was an article for the Ottawa Citizen. Both the safety of the collection and the public s right to see it, she wrote, demanded that "new, safe and agreeable housing ... be found for the National Gallery." Noting that "with the blessings of the board for years [she] had supported the Cartier Square site," she then blew the lid off the meeting where she had been humiliated: "In March 1974, the board's decision about the site was reversed at an in-camera meeting. Before being excused from that meeting I had ... been given a chance to air my objections, but without any previous warning that such a critical decision would take place. At the next board meeting I was also given a chance to state my objections to the board more systematically - but only the day after ... a demand that I support the Wellington Street site or resign."52 Boggs then made public her objections to the proposed site: that it was "a wind tunnel and particularly disagreeable for pedestrians on a wintry day"; that it was "lined with government buildings which - with the exception of the Parliament Buildings - have none of the animation of streets with shops and restaurants"; that the frontage was so "narrow" it would be invisible to passing cars; that the ground was so "uneven and irregular" that building there would be "difficult and expensive"; and that the overall location would be hard to monitor. This attack by the director who - it was widely known - had resigned on principle after ten years' work was hardly guaranteed to spur commitment to an already controversial project. But it also exposed the NMC'S version of a National Gallery that would be physically as well as institutionally almost invisible. Though the idea would linger for the next four years, it was dead in the water. 26O

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Hsio-Yen Shih, the NMC's surprise appointment as director in 1977. Shih liked to call herself "the only genuine Mandarin in Ottawa" and began with apparently limitless patience. (National Gallery of Canada)

"THE ONLY GENUINE MANDARIN IN OTTAWA."

While this latest architectural fiasco was slipping into its denouement, the board of the National Museums of Canada was also faced with finding a successor to the redoubtable "Miss Boggs." Even the formation of a search committee proved fraught with tension. Headed by Ignatieff, and with Ostry as its secretary, it contained Bachand as well as one other member of the NMC'S board and three members the Gallery's visiting committee. The Gallery itself was invited to provide as its representative the chief curator Robert Hubbard, who had been a scholarly but unassuming presence there for nearly thirty years.53 Faced with what looked like another finesse by the NMC, the Gallery's staff petitioned that two more of their members be included, so as to ensure scrutiny of the candidates' art-historical credentials. Then, after this was granted, one of these representatives, Curator of Canadian Art Dennis Reid, said publicly that the criteria should be based on the assumption that Boggs herself was "the ideal director."54 There were some fifty candidates for what Robert Fulford called "one of the crucial cultural appointments of the decade."55 The committee's recommendation, which passed favourably through both the NMC board and the cabinet, was announced in December 1976, eight months after Boggs's resignation. It proved to be someone completely overlooked by press speculation: the Chinese-born curator of Far Eastern studies at the Royal Ontario Museum, HsioYen Shih. The decision was advertised as having been unanimous, among the NMC trustees present at a meeting in early December; what was played down was that at least one member, J.R. Longstaffe, had simply stayed away, commenting that Shih "might turn out. The choice might also be controversial."56 Shih (pronounced "shuh") turned out to be an old friend of Jean Sutherland Boggs, who had recommended her on the basis of her scholarship.57 Like Boggs, she was unmarried, and, at forty-three, she was a year younger than Boggs had been upon her own appointment as director. Their academic backgrounds were also The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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similar, in that Shih had taken two advanced degrees in art history at American universities. But while Boggs had done her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, Shih had studied at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. There was also a major difference in focus: Boggs s doctoral thesis had been on Edgar Degas, whereas Shih's, from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania had been on Early Chinese Pictorial Art, after a master's thesis at the University of Chicago on Ming Dynasty woodblock illustration. She had come to Canada in 1961, working for the next fifteen years at the Royal Ontario Museum and as a professor of East Asian studies at the University of Toronto. A former ROM colleague, the curator of the European department, Heri Hickl-Szabo, described her as "at the present time in the field of art and archaeology ... the most prominent scholar in Canada."58 But the obvious question was: What kind of art? For while she had run a department of Far Eastern studies, she had clearly never directed a museum, never mind one that handled contemporary as well as historical art. Nevertheless, "a source" close to the selection process told Bob Cohen of Southam News that "by sheer intellect and range and depth she simply overpowered the field on all fronts. She has a specialty but could talk about the world art scene in a way that just knocked everybody over. She came to the committee as a complete stranger ... She just made an incredible impression on some pretty hard-nosed people."59 Which people these were the "source" did not say, but, according to Ostry, "the committee and the government recognized that she is an expert and extraordinarily sensitive of the general subject of art," while Ignatieff declared her "intelligent, cultivated, imaginative and determined to achieve the goals of the National Museums and particularly of the Gallery. What more could we want?"60 Shih had also taught both Dennis Reid and Brydon Smith at the University of Toronto, and even brought the symbolic advantage of having become a Canadian citizen in the increasingly mythologized year of 1967.61 "Canada is only beginning to develop its own sense of culture," she told Cohen after her appointment, in a way that seemed to play toward these atmospherics. "The gallery has to give everybody a chance to show what they contribute to Canada." According to Cohen's report, her opinion was that this "chance" should especially include "the quality and reach of Indian and Eskimo work." Daring to speak for contemporary Canadian artists, Greg Curnoe welcomed Shih, saying not only that she arrived "with no debts or commitments to any group of people" but - in regard to her area of specialization - that "if we're going to be more cosmopolitan and international, that's where you want the expertise." Ostry, too, pointed out that the general absence of Far Eastern art at the Gallery constituted a "hole" that Shih might be able to fill.62 Yet the "group of people" who played an ongoing part in the Canadian art world could not help but be aware that the appointment had bypassed figures with arguably stronger credentials, such as Luke Rombout of the Vancouver Art Gallery, William Withrow of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and David Silcox, the director of cultural affairs in Toronto. The diminutive Shih - who was described as being "so tiny she's almost unnoticeable in a crowd" was indisposed to placate doubters through the signifiers of feminine attractiveness 262

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that had helped Jean Boggs, with enticing ambiguity, to seduce the press after her own appointment. Instead, Shih was feisty from the outset, declaring that "there are always people who object to women being given top jobs and who would like to think of Canada as being white and WASP." She told inquisitive reporters that she "happened to go to very good schools" and had "very good training in art history and very good administrative experience," noting that her first teaching job at Bryn Mawr had involved Western art history.63 "In any case," she said, "Dr. Boggs was a specialist in 19th century French art, and she could hardly be accused of ignorance of other areas of art."64 Yet, for all this defensiveness, Shih also sent ambiguous signals about the appointment that did not quite add up. Asked by Michael Prentice of the Ottawa Journal why she thought she got "the gallery job," she answered "I don't know. I wasn't on the selection committee." Then she added: "I've never had to apply for a job. I've always been asked to apply because of my qualifications. I was quite happy doing what I was doing."65 This comment did not mesh easily with the claim that she had come "to the committee as a complete stranger." Later in 1977, she implied in even stronger terms that she had not so much approached as been approached. "I was chugging along happily in Toronto," she said, "but when the search committee of the National Gallery called and said I had been suggested as director, I didn't think I should inquire why. After all, my family was in public service in China for centuries ... If you're a grownup, whatever you do there are responsibilities."66 This "whatever you do" style of stoicism suggested that the new director was not bringing with her the partisan intensity that had made Jean Boggs's subordination to the priorities of the NMC so rocky. Instead, Shih's public statements hinted that she was at ease with the agenda of a more horizontally dispersed and less specialized notion of art, such as had been called for in the 1972 Museums Policy. "Canadian content is extremely varied," she told Canadian Artists' Representation, "and everything that reflects Canada historically will be this varied. I plan to make sure that this cultural variation and all aspects of our rich cultural heritage are represented in the gallery collection."67 Her commitment to "democratization" was likewise implied by her goal of speaking to "the creativity within each person."68 She even said that if an artist had proven popular the Gallery "would certainly show his work," despite her own opinion.69 This seemed a far cry indeed from Boggs's Jarvis-like insistence - even after her resignation - that Canadians "do not want pap in the arts. They want the best that can be had, regardless of whether it is Canadian or foreign, ancient or modern."70 But Shih also laid subtle claim to bridging all of these domains through a frame of reference shaped, as she told journalists, by the scale of Chinese history; this prompted in turn the optimistic comment, in an Ottawa Journal editorial, that "an authority on early Chinese pictorial art is not going to be taken in by mere fads, or the excesses of the current nationalistic climate."71 Shortly after taking office, she provided the press with her signature motto, which would prove durably witty in a bureaucratized capital; she was, she said, "the only genuine Mandarin in Ottawa." She also felt, she insisted, no urgency about a new building. "What is twenty-five years to a Chinese?" she said in September 1977, after Roberts's announcement that The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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construction might be postponed. "We're talking about a building that may last hundreds of years. Why should I be impatient?" Nor did she seem daunted by the NMC. "I know what I'm getting into," she said. "Bureaucracy began in China. There's strength in the cumbersomeness of machinery."72 Shih, then, presented herself as an individual who had emerged from traditions more historically entwined with bureaucratic systems and less grounded than the West in individualism. She was explicit about this in an interview given in French to Ottawa's Le Droit: "Ici, en Amerique du Nord, l'individualisme triomphe. On prend souvent seul ses propres decisions, attitude que j'explique par la mentalite judeochretienne qu'on retrouve ici. En Orient, les gens ne vivent pas selon les memes conceptions. Car l'individualisme importe moins: les gens vivent selon une attitude plus altruiste."73 If this approach did not speak well for continued investment in the sovereignty of "Man," it seemed, in terms of the system being built by the NMC, to be a distinct advantage. But Shih's appointment also lent itself to being read, more admirably, as an attempt to shift the National Gallery's Eurocentric and perceived elitist biases to a more popular base in an increasingly multicultural society. Unlike Boggs's attempts to sustain "museum aura," this shift was even loosely in keeping with the anti-institutional drive of much contemporary art in the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, the parallel with "systems esthetics" as developed in Minimalism had a further application in regard to the "system" being developed by the NMC. For if these movements in art made no concession to popularization or to a wider public, so the NMC - despite its claims of serving "the people" - showed little respect for such a public, in both the remoteness of its own bureaucracy and the patronizing tone of its tracts. Under Shih's directorship, which was in its early stages far more tractable than Boggs's had been, publicity fell increasingly under NMC control, with art folded into the vocabulary of "cultural resources" and "national heritage." This soon entailed advertising that suggested a relentlessly upbeat nationalistic parade, in which each of the "museums" supplied a decorated float. Examples of the "It's Happening at the National Museums" advertising campaign were legion, but one will suggest its style of - as the ads put it - "helping bring museums to people" via the "intermuseum concept.""See the new National Gallery model" a two-page promotion urged potential visitors in April 1977, a month after John Roberts had announced that there was "no automatic commitment to proceed" on the Parkin design. The second page urged visitors to "Join the search for early man" at the National Museum of Man, via "a reconstruction of a 5,000 year old West Coast Village," which included "fifteen tons of shell and sand from the original site." Museum-goers could also "Come where learning is fun" at the National Museum of Science and Technology, which was described as offering "twenty-two exciting fun filled learning areas." They could even "Meet the horrible lizard" in "the Dinosaur Court" of the National Museum of Natural Sciences. "Travel back 75 million years," the ad read. "It doesn't take long when you enter Dinosaur Court."74 The hint to visitors seemed in each case to be that any brain cells not disposed toward the NMC'S idea of "fun" should be left at the checkroom. But, given that in 1920 Eric Brown had striven at the Victoria Museum 264

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to get the Gallery its own entrance, so that visitors would not need to walk past dinosaur exhibits to reach the art, these new conflations added a symbolic coup de grace to the undoing of sixty years' work toward independence. Nor was the NMC'S program of "dumbing down" the only potentially awkward situation that greeted Shih as the new director. No sooner had she taken office in February 1977 than she had to deal with both the secretary of state's backpedaling over the building she later would claim she had been quietly promised and the prospect of major budget cuts as part of a Liberal austerity drive. As part of her welcome, Ostry laid on a widely criticized smoked salmon and champagne reception in his offices overlooking the city, and helped engineer a one-time near doubling of the Gallery's acquisition fund for the year, to $2.8 million. But she was then as much as left to her own devices. Having seen Boggs out and Shih in, Ostry had himself been repudiated on a new building by both the government and Boggs herself. He also faced the prospect that, given the austerity drive, his desired goal of an NMC annual budget of $84 million by 1981 was no longer realistic.75 Quietly, Ostry shifted to a project on which he was asked to work by the prime minister, and which perhaps itself promised to be more "fun filled": the organization of the first annual Canada Day celebrations on 1 July 1977. Then, having achieved this, he announced that he would be taking a paid sabbatical for the rest of the year, from what he had only months before called "the best job in the country." Shortly afterwards, in December, it was announced that he would again shift sideways within the civil service and join the ministry of communications as deputy minister/6 Ostry's departure was certainly not lamented by anyone involved with the National Gallery, including Shih herself, who was increasingly aware of being caught between the NMC'S Board of Trustees, which Ostry freely admitted in 1976 was "establishing broad policy guidelines for the National Museums"; a government bent on austerity; and a curatorial staff who, as assembled by Jean Boggs, still did not entirely trust her judgment and whom she in turn did not fully trust.77 A year into her tenure, Shih was also no longer so passively sanguine on the issue of a building. Despite exterior refacings and reroofings that had cost nearly $3 million between 1971 and 1976, and that had been intended to stop leaks and dampness, the Lome Building was still allowing water to condense on paintings. Moreover, the bulk of the Gallery's collection was by this time in storage, where - Shih wrote - conditions were such that "almost 75 per cent" of the objects would "require some degree of restoration."78 And as if all of this were not enough, Shih also inherited the Iate-i97os version of the challenges posed to Boggs by contemporary art, which by then the Gallery was showing, for the most part, in a nearby rented building. If Boggs had had to deal with some artists' iconoclastic lack of respect for art's traditional frames, Shih, by contrast, faced contemporary art's retrenchment in a different kind of framing that was not so much physical as simply exclusionary of the uninitiated. By the late 1970s, that is, Barbara Rose's claim that "didactic art" was largely a matter of dialogue within the art world was being not only realized but institutionalized, as many "didactic artists" took up teaching positions in the absence of sales. The Minimalist experiments of the mid-1960s, which for years had enjoyed The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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the prestige of being "leading edge," began to harden into art-school dogma, as students were encouraged to question not so much the over-all social context of their work as a range of "art-context" problems bequeathed them by their teachers. This inwardly spiralling neo-scholasticism made for some of the most tendentious writing ever done on art, by critics and artists themselves, as text became integral to giving significance to objects that, left on their own, might pass unnoticed. But this approach, and the sense of discursive order implicit in it, were especially compatible with an "art system" that, with its own internal networks of promotion, was becoming professionalized and academicized, even as it excluded not just representational painting but all painting as reactionary. Yet the problem for a publicly funded National Gallery was that most members of the general public, when they thought of art at all, still stubbornly thought of it in terms of painting. The gap of incompehension that had begun to open in regard to abstraction in the 1950s, therefore, seemed guaranteed to get only wider, especially given the NMC'S own momentum toward a style of public discourse that did not admit complexity of any kind. Exemplary of the challenge that Shih faced was an exhibition that opened at the Gallery in the autumn of 1977. Called Another Dimension, it featured the "sculptures" of four contemporary Canadian artists: Michael Snow, Ian Carr-Harris, Norman White, and Murray Favro, and was organized by Pierre Theberge's assistant curator of contemporary Canadian art, Mayo Graham. Another Dimension had been approved shortly before Boggs's resignation, but been developed under Shih.79 According to Graham, the "other dimension" introduced in the sixteen works was that of motion, but she also presented them as direct descendants of Marcel Duchamp's fascination with useless machines.80 Among the works by Snow were De la, the rotating camera mount from his wellknown film La Region Centrale; his film Two Sides to Every Story, which, via a suspended screen, "projected the'front' and'back' filmic views of the same event"; and Hearing Aid, four tape recorders that provided the sound of a metronome from different points in a room. Among Favro's works were several "machines": a wooden windmill, a wooden airplane, and a Perpetual Motion Machine supposedly run by rubber bands, but that didn't work. White showed glowing electronic circuit boards and Carr-Harris slide and film projectors mounted on heavy, custom-made "Empire-style" furniture. In its favour, Another Dimension introduced to the Gallery that style of technologically inquisitive art which was being widely practised by young artists in the late 1970s, through performance, video, and sculptural objects that developed Minimalism's sense of context. The exhibition also included public performances by the Nihilist Spasm Band, the Contemporary Canadian Music Collective, and the Artists' Jazz Band, all of which espoused styles of atonal music which, while unlikely to attract the general public, suggested many artists' struggle to give meaningful form to the aurally as well as visually destabilized fields of contemporary life. Within the Gallery's own history, these works recalled the kinetic and "environmental" experiments of sculpture l6j, and - though much less aggressively and comprehensively - N.E. Thing Co.'s transformation of the Lome Building in 1969. But in its lack 266

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Michael Snow and Hsio-Yen Shih with his Hearing Aid, a combination of tape recorders and a metronome that he prepared especially for Another Dimension in 1977. Shih soon made it clear that she was uncomfortable with what she called "the wall between the artists and the public." (Susan Campbell, National Gallery of Canada)

of such engagement with specific context lay some of Another Dimension's weakness, leaving it open to charges of being - according to Georges Bogardi in the Montreal Star - little more than either "high voltage nagging," or - as he wrote of Carr-Harris specifically - "enigmatic to the point of coyness."81 That there was a prescriptive and even implicitly condescending element to this work was indeed suggested in the "artists' statements" that appeared - as was becoming the norm with aesthetically schooled contemporary art - in the catalogue. For example, of the metronome-tape recorder piece that he did for Another Dimension, Snow wrote: "Hearing Aid is about visual and aural and temporal space. It is like a linear thing where you join the dots, and you find the source of the sound. At first you can't recognize the sound because it is completely new, so you track it down."82 This tone of upbeat exhortation was typical of the artists' comments. The implication seemed to be, with this universalized "you," that everyone - or perhaps everyone worth considering - would be thrilled and even honoured to enter into this "jointhe-dots" puzzle, and "track down" the "source" of Hearing Aid's "sound." Or, for that matter, to stand fascinated before Favro s "perpetual motion" water wheel that didn't work. Or to contemplate the deliberately boring slides and films on Carr-Harris's projectors. Or to gaze at the flickering lights of White's Kaleidoscope/ Calliope, which he described in terms of a "constantly quad-symmetrical ...visual output," "tied into a syncopation that has a constant, if not completely predictable, texture."83 The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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Everyone was not thrilled. Instead, attendance at the National Gallery as a public institution continued to drop, from 277,000 in 1976 to 268,000 in 1977, with a certain baseline having been provided by the figure of 480,000 in 1970.84 Especially embarrassing was a survey done by the Council for Business and the Arts in Canada in 1978, which showed that the National Gallery, with a budget of $5.1 million, had only 3,000 more visitors in 1977 than did the McMichael Canadian Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, with a budget of $530,000.85 But the McMichael's mandate was mainly the showing of paintings: the stylized landscapes of the Group of Seven and related artists. The question, then, was becoming one of whether the National Gallery could sustain such oblique investigations as were represented in Another Dimension. This was not least because - as Kathleen Walker of the Ottawa Citizen put it that same autumn, about the prospects for a new building - "no politician could ever justify spending $85 million on 250,000 people."86 Yet part of the problem with this "show" was perhaps its sheer diffidence. The artists were not honouring the usual conventions of art as these were understood by a wider public. But neither were they carrying this disregard into overtly provocative investigations which might have caught the attention of and challenged such a public. Another Dimension was in this sense exemplary of the anemia that was creeping into the contemporary art of the late 1970s. If several of the artists claimed to be engaging with the "space" in which their work was installed, this notion of space was decidedly neutral. Not one of them actively questioned the immediate context in which the work was being shown: namely, a National Gallery that had become a corporate subsidiary and that was presenting their work as a "cultural resource" and function of "national heritage." Rather than interrogating a context of encompassing system, they seemed willing simply to cooperate to their own career advantage, and work within it. Again, the comparison with the N.E. Thing Co.'s transformation of the National Gallery in 1969 was unflattering. Neither the artists nor the art nor the curator dared to provoke, in a way that might have made for controversy and drawn a wider public into debate. Instead - as with much of the peer-juried, arts council subsidized work of the period, which accepted the terms of the system in which it operated - the artists provided what one critic called a variant on "Mannerism," and another "an audio-visual playground," though one in which the "play" left out far more people than it included.87 By the autumn of 1978, Shih was declaring that she was "worried" about contemporary art. "Although artists come from every class of society here," she said in a talk at the Windsor Art Gallery, "the wall between the artists and the public has never been greater."88 The Gallery's curators, however, had been assembled by Jean Boggs largely for their commitment to scholarship: according to Kathleen Walker, one of them told her bluntly that "I just want to be left alone to do research and organize my exhibitions."89 Nor were some of Shih's own public suggestions helpful. At one point, as quoted by CBC reporter Elizabeth Gray, she urged that Canadian artists should "be more like Chinese artists, content to draw and paint in their spare time for no remuneration," and "concerned less with whether people ever get to see their art than with the sheer joy of doing it."90 While this played toward the heritage of "altruism" 268

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she had claimed she was bringing from the Far East, it seemed an odd perspective for the director of a public Gallery, especially given other reports that Secretary of State John Roberts had indeed said he would consider a new building "only when attendance figures justified this."91 The tension and ambiguity could not stay behind the scenes indefinitely, and boiled over in the summer of 1978 into reports of "screaming fights" between Shih and Brydon Smith. For it was Smith who was still most identified with - as Robert Fulford put it - "the kind of difficult and sometimes boring avant-garde art that Shih regards with suspicion, and many people suspect of driving away the customers."92 Ironically, given this report, it was not Smith who left; rather, he was promoted to assistant director in charge of collections and research, as well as of curatorial staff, the Gallery's library, and its conservation department. In 1978, however, Shih froze the budget for Pierre Theberge's proposed centennial exhibition of international contemporary art, because - as described by Adele Freedman in the Globe and Mail - "she thought her organizers were lolling on the Left Bank instead of working."93 Within several months during 1979, virtually all of the Boggs-era curators who specialized in Canadian art resigned: Jean Trudel, Dennis Reid, Pierre Theberge, and Mayo Graham. Publicly, Shih announced that she would prefer to be running a quiet country inn.94 "A MORE DEMOCRATIC APPROACH"

Yet amid this tumult, Shih did ensure that her own vision of art would enter not only the schedule of exhibitions but the collection. As might have been expected at the time of her appointment, this vision would have little to do with contemporary art. Rather, it would involve moving the Gallery away from what she called the "great man concept of the collective history of art" toward "a more democratic approach to the total creative record of man."95 What this meant especially, for her, was broadening the Gallery's representation of non-Western and decorative art. Her approach was initially modest: the display, for example, shortly after her arrival, of fifteenthto seventeenth-century Chinese painting that she chose from the Gallery's tiny collection, juxtaposed with contemporary Chinese Peasant Painting from Hu County, Shensi Province, which was being circulated by the Communist People's Republic. Then, in 1979, she organized an exhibition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese scroll paintings, chosen from the collection of the Japanese ambassador to Canada, Michiaki Suma. Between these displays, she also oversaw 25 African Sculptures, organized by Jacqueline Fry of the University of Ottawa, mostly from the collection of Murray and Barbara Frum in Toronto. None of these exhibitions dwelt on the potentially ugly historical subtexts that might lie behind the consolidation of such objects into the act of "display": the fissure opened by Mao's Cultural Revolution between the Confucian past and the Communist present in China, for example; or the brutality of Sino-Japanese relations during the 1930s and 1940s; or the attempted reduction of African sacred objects to strictly aesthetic terms, as had been done with Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art. Instead, they provided Gallery visitors with rudimentary exposure to The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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Statue of the Buddhist goddess of compassion Tara, acquired for the National Gallery by Hsio-Yen Shih as part of the Max Tanenbaum gift in 1979. One ofShih's major contributions toward changing the Eurocentric paradigm of the National Gallery, this statue was a model of representational art, spirituality, and eroticism very different from the inheritance of the West. (Central Tibet, 14th century; 38.7 cm. tall) (National Gallery of Canada)

cultures that, prior to 1967, had played little part in Canada but that by 1980 were providing immigrants at an increasing rate. This pattern built toward what would prove to be one of the signal legacies of Shih's tenure: an exhibition called The Sensuous Immortals, which consisted of 176 pieces of Hindu and Buddhist sculpture from south and southeast Asia. Advertised as focusing through "images of the deities" on "the beauty of the human body, represented in sensuous and often erotic poses," the works spanned the second century BC to the eighteenth century AD. 9 6 The exhibition was shown at the Gallery in early 1979, after having been organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from a private collection. Shih said that she had been working for four years to ensure its display in Canada. "This represents as truly an international style in the East," she said, "as does the Gothic in Western culture."97 And, obviously, with its images of full-figured, semi-naked "deities," projecting an air of serene at-homeness in their sexualized bodies, it also offered a different perspective on religion and the body from the radically dualistic Christian Science model that had governed the Gallery's history to the mid-1950s. Shih's goal with these exhibitions was clearly to educate through the sense of sight, in a way that had little to do with the self-contained trajectory of contemporary art in North America during the 1970s. Nor was she content with ensuring that these different paradigms, which pertained as much to religion as to art, simply passed through the National Gallery via a single "show." In 1978 she persuaded Max Tanenbaum, the Toronto chairman of York Steel Construction, to buy for the Gallery's cen27O

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tennial part of the last major collection of Indian, Tibetan, and Nepalese religious art which was likely to come onto the market. This had been brought together by Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck in New York, and large chunks of it had already gone to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Art in Richmond, Virginia. The remainder was in danger of being broken up, and Shih convinced Tanenbaum - whose son Joseph had earlier in 1978 shown his collection of nineteenth-century French paintings at the Gallery - to buy nearly four hundred pieces for $1.5 million. Shih again served as the spokesperson for a changing vision of both the country and, by implication, the National Gallery itself when she announced the acquisition. "Canada has a great many people of Asiatic origin in its ethnic makeup," she said, "and it is right that we should have as strong a representation of their tradition as it is possible to get. This collection is exactly that."98 What Shih did not mention was that this was also "a collection" that could as easily have made its way into the Far Eastern department of the Royal Ontario Museum. In this very sense, though, it hearkened back to the early overlap between the two institutions that was implied in Sir Edmund Walker's philanthropy regarding both, even as it broadened the National Gallery's base to respect post-1967 changes in immigration law which dispensed with preferential treatment for Europeans. For why, under such circumstances, should the artistic heritage of Europeans, in its close relationship with the rise, flowering, and decline of European Christianity, be given preferential treatment? Yet one clear paradox remained in the midst of this change of paradigm, and was made the more stark by Shih's having expressed the hope after her appointment that the Gallery would speak to "the quality and reach of Indian and Eskimo work." This was the almost complete continued absence - apart from Inuit works - of aboriginal Canadian art, both traditional and contemporary, from the Gallery. Oddly enough, Shih did not address the issue further, other than to criticize, early in her tenure, the increasing "sterility" of Inuit art as sculptors responded to a southern commercial market. It was also her hope, she said, to inform "the Inuits of their cultural heritage in Asia."99 But apart from this oblique observation, the issue of aboriginal art at the Gallery went undeveloped throughout her tenure, even as the National Museum of Man assembled its own collection of contemporary native art under the guidance of Robert Houle, a Saulteaux artist. Aboriginal art seemed indeed to form a peculiar conundrum for the "intermuseum concept" being developed by the NMC, and for the National Gallery from its own position within that concept. At the very least, it held the potential of probing at sore spots in Canadian history that might not mesh politely with the "It's Happening" float parade at the "National Museums." Nor were all of these sore spots distant in time, given that the residential-schools system, through which tens of thousands of aboriginal children were removed from their families and traditions under a policy of assimilation, had endured until the early 1970s. Houle himself was an alumnus of this system, and in 1979 he publicly stated his frustration at an NMC policy that consigned the acquisition of contemporary aboriginal art to the Museum of Man, which was still housed in the old Victoria building. In Houle's opinion, this practice was "like a stopper on an individual to fully develop," owing to the Museum's The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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own historical entanglement in the patronizing taxonomies of ethnography and anthropology rather than in the conventions of art history.100 But if Houle claimed that enforced continuity with these taxonomies was thwarting his fellow artists' sense of personal development, even as they were struggling in symbolic terms to bridge profoundly different worlds, the practice itself hinted at a political purpose. The Museum of Man, under Marius Barbeau, had evolved not only in the same building and during the same time frame as the National Gallery under Eric Brown, but within the wider policy context of assimilation as overseen by the Department of Indian Affairs. The flip side of this policy was the useful casting of aboriginal difference in terms of an exotic but irrecoverable tribal past that had status as a museum curiosity, but little more. Barbeau, as an inwardly driven anthropologist, played almost in spite of himself toward this bifurcation, and in doing so he had as seminal an influence on the Museum of Man as Brown had on the National Gallery. His own challenge had been not to establish a basically European model for art in a unified Canada, but rather - as he saw it - to preserve the "heritage" of a multitude of societies and language groups that seemed fated to disappear, before the relentless drive toward just this unity. For as described by the top civil servant in charge of "Indian Affairs" from 1913 to 1932, during this same period, the policy goal was to "protect and educate the Indians and to thus contribute towards their civilization in order that they may eventually be merged in the general body of citizenship."101 This deputy superintendent general, who when he was not negotiating treaties and overseeing the residential-schools system doubled as the Confederation poet Duncan Campbell Scott, regarded assimilation as both necessary and inevitable. If the enabling policy of the Department of Indian Affairs, he wrote in 1921, "in anyway conflicts with the aspirations of Indians whose faces are set against ultimate destiny, it can only be regretted."102 This was the context in which Barbeau built up the Museum of Man while Brown was building up the National Gallery: a context in which it was simply assumed of "the dusky folk" that - as Scott put it in one of his poems - their "vaunted prowess all is gone, / Gone like a moose-track in the April snow."103 Understandably, young aboriginal artists of the late 1970s did not want to be bound to a taxonomic system and physical context that had evolved around this assumption and so encouraged the identification of contemporary aboriginal art with the category of exotic but subjugated "Indians." Nevertheless, in terms of the goals of the NMC, the maintenance of this link had the political value of undercutting the possibility that contemporary "First Nations" art might not only work to the credit of specific artists but also - if recognized - help forge a link between mature art and mature activism, prying at unexplored gaps between First Nations and an allegedly unified Canada. For as Ostry himself had said, with unacknowledged paradox, in laying out the NMC'S Canada-first subtext in 1977: "Decentralization means essentially thinking and acting nationally."104 Shih's goal of bringing "the quality and reach of Indian and Eskimo work" to the National Gallery simply wilted amid both this agenda and the many other pressures she faced, so that, throughout her tenure, the Gallery still did not add a single exam272

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pie of contemporary work by non-Inuit aboriginal artists to the collection. Nor was there even any display of such work. Nevertheless, the NMC itself was already, with the usual unintended irony, shaping the possibility that "decentralization" might also mean something different from what Ostry said it should. During the 1970s, the NMC prided itself on securing the return to Canada of aspects of "the Canadian cultural heritage" that had previously been shipped abroad. Often this "heritage" included artifacts once deemed sacred by aboriginal peoples. For example, the 1976-77 annual report announced the "repatriation" of "a Micmac's chief's costume, the Hooper Collection of North American Indian artifacts, and the Walsh Collection of Ojibwa work." Much of this material would, Ignatieff wrote, "be placed on long-term loan with various Canadian museums," as had happened with "five sets of an exhibition of Inuit prehistory" sent to the Northwest Territories "for use in schools and community projects."105 Given the NMC penchant for subsuming difference within sweeping categories, the ease with which its bureaucrats inferred that such objects would be viewed as part of a unitary "Canadian heritage" was understandable. But in retrospect, what seems more likely is that such "repatriations" and circulating displays of sacred objects, once freed from being part of an encompassing, centralized collection, added instead to aboriginal peoples' sense of themselves not as belonging to the unitary category of "Indians" but as members of distinctive "First Nations," with distinctive histories interwoven with place. The National Gallery, however, remained at a remove from such momentum, even as it admitted explorations of art and sacrality - The Sensuous Immortals, for example - that came from vastly farther away in space and time. And this remove, in turn, lent a further twist of irony to the major gift that did come its way in the late 1970s: a large collection of pre-twentieth-century silver which had been assembled by the Montreal jeweller Henry Birks after 1933. Consisting of some twelve thousand pieces, the collection contained works that dated to eighteenth-century New France and was mainly ecclesiastical in origin. The donation was controversial, because many people in Quebec felt that the silver was part of a Quebecois rather than a Canadian "patrimony," and should stay in Montreal. But in honouring both its own centennial as a business and that of the National Gallery, the Birks family emphasized that it was donating the silver precisely because the Gallery was part of "a network of museums ... tied into the National Museums Corporation" and so "could make the collection available to any museum in Canada."106 The Birks gift seemed, therefore, even as it depleted la patrimoine quebecoise in favour of the Canadian patrimony, to add glue to the National Gallery's own integration in the NMC system, as the custodian of what in this case looked suspiciously like a literal "national treasure." Through both its size and ambiguous craft-nature, the silver signalled a further shift in the Gallery's focus, from a dynamic relationship with contemporary art toward museum status. The gift was even sufficiently compelling for the NMC'S board that, during the very period when the Gallery's curators of Canadian art were resigning, and the government was enforcing a 4 per cent cut in personnel, so that the Gallery was left without an archivist and a chief librarian, thought was given to hiring a full-time curator for the silver collection. The First Triumvirate: The National Museums of Canada

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All of these incongruities contributed to Hsio-Yen Shih's increasingly public disaffection with the National Museums system, with budget austerities that were enforced by government policy, and with continued syphoning of Gallery departments toward the NMC. In 1978 this syphoning was given renewed focus by Pierre Trudeau's appointment of a career civil servant, Ian Christie Clark, who officially replaced Ostry, ending the NMC'S own year-long hiatus under an acting secretary general, Jennifer McQueen. Clark had for five years been the driving force behind the Liberal government's Cultural Property Export and Import Act, which - as passed in 1977 - prevented the export and sought the recovery of objects deemed "national treasures."107 Having also been the first chairman of the Canadian Cultural Properties Export Review Board, Clark was dedicated to the protection of what he, too, called "Canada's cultural patrimony." And if he was less brash than Ostry, he was just as committed to the machinery Ostry had assembled, toward the continued development of the National Museums "railway" as a means of circulating this "patrimony" and continued centralization of services by the NMC. Within the NMC umbrella, the situation at the National Gallery soon after Clark's arrival became especially desperate. In 1979 the new and short-lived Conservative government of Joe Clark proposed slashing the annual acquisitions budget by twothirds, to $0.5 million. Shih had already complained that - with a $1.5 million budget that had barely changed in a decade - the Gallery had not been able to buy a "major work of art" in two years.108 So deep a cut would prevent significant purchases of any kind in a heated market, even as the decrease in operating budget meant fewer exhibitions. The timing was also humiliating, given that 1980 was the Gallery's centennial year and - far from Jean Boggs s goal of a new building for the occasion - funds were not even allocated for celebrations. Instead, the government turned around on her Shih's comment when she was hired that "we only want to offer what people want."109 "The present government," she said in December 1979, "has indicated to us that if the people of Canada feel that it is desirable to have a new gallery then they would listen to the will of the people. And what is needed, apparently, is people from all over the country to write to the Secretary of State and say 'Yes, we think it's worthwhile having a National Gallery.'"110 Shih used the rest of this interview to detail how curators had been making holes in the Lome Building's ceilings and running bucket lines to keep water leaks from damaging paintings. Meanwhile, the machinery set in motion by Ostry continued to expand under Ian Christie Clark, making for the April 1979 creation of a Policy, Planning and Evaluation Group that was designed to oversee developments in all of these areas for the "national museums.111 At the same time, finance and administration, communications and general services were further consolidated in the office of a comptroller. This model for the NMC'S continued evolution was almost entirely corporate, and among the proposals mooted was that the four directors of the museums should become vice-presidents within the corporation. Here, then, was the culmination of that homogenizing momentum which had been implicit in the NMC'S self-replicating management structure to begin with. Both the National Gallery and its relation-

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ship to art were to be completely absorbed into, and subordinated to, a corporate bureaucracy of "national heritage." Yet such were the NMC'S priorities that, even as this consolidation was taking place, the catalogue for 25 African Sculptures was not ready until eleven days before the exhibition closed, while for The Sensuous Immortals there was no catalogue at all, because there were no funds even to reproduce the one provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.112 If the National Gallery's own self-representation was teetering on oblivion, however, the same could not be said of the NMC'S. Instead, its self-serving triumphalism was given form in an anonymously written booklet called Places of Discovery: Highlights from the First Five Years of the National Museums Policy (1972-1977). This text merits quotation at length as exemplary of the corporation's paradoxical contempt for the past, for the institutions, and for the very "people" that, presumably, it had been designed to serve. "Before 1967," the booklet read, most Canadians thought of museums (if they thought about them at all) as dim and dusty places full of ancient bric-a-brac ... Like the attic of an old house, they were places to visit on rainy Sundays. Only scholars and art snobs found them attractive in summer. And anyway, museums were among the things that were done better in Europe. The astounding success of Expo 67 changed all that. In the glittering pavilions and displays of many nations, Canadians were amazed to see that the achievements of our own society and the unique character of our country were second to none ... Nothing could have been less like a musty attic than Expo. It was beautiful in its total effect and in all its details, exciting as a funfair, a midway of invention and delight, leaving an afterglow in memory that changed our minds about our own possibilities. Canadians began to express pride in themselves and a curiosity to learn more about their roots ... They immediately began to demand more and better museums, not just in Ottawa but across the nation.113 Such claims showed great disrespect to the memories of such figures as Walker, Brown, and Jarvis, all of whose efforts on behalf of the National Gallery had antedated Expo. Even more ominously, though, the overt anti-intellectualism of an appeal to "most Canadians" on the basis of their difference from "scholars and art snobs" suggested that the agenda of "decentralization and democratization" was producing its own list of enemies: namely, those who might be capable of thinking about and criticizing "the system" but who could also be singled out for ridicule. And conversely, even as "most Canadians" were being appealed to in this way, they were also being spoken for and assigned a unitary range of legitimate responses - as, for example, to an Expo alleged to be "beautiful in its total effect and in all its details" - that discouraged difference. That the appeal itself was being made by anonymous writers working for privileged bureaucrats bespoke both condescension and deep dishonesty. Nor were these limited to the NMC'S representation of itself. In 1979 the NMC published a pamphlet on the National Gallery called Ten Decades of Service. "The 1970s," it declared, "saw the Gallery organize and circulate in Canada

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Hsio-Yen Shih cuts the National Gallery's own centennial birthday cake for children at an open house in March 1980. The Gallery's centennial was a great anti-climax, and Hsio-Yen Shih resigned at the end of the year. (Tom Gait, National Gallery of Canada)

and abroad ever-larger and ever-more-important exhibitions from its own and other collections and acquire and maintain an international reputation hitherto denied it."114 The extent of dissimulation in this assessment recalled the case made by Josef Goebbels for the efficacy of the big lie. This was perhaps appropriate, given that the NMC, in its style of encompassing promotion, had become the closest thing to a Ministry of Propaganda that the nation-state of Canada had ever seen. Ten Decades did not trouble to mention that the primary agent of the Gallery's "international reputation" had resigned in bitterness three years earlier. Nor did it mention that the bulk of Jean Boggs's team of curators had also already resigned or were about to do so, and would not, because of budget cuts, be replaced. And neither did it mention that Boggs's successor, Yen Shih, had explicitly said, in 1978, that the National Gallery's reputation had so declined during the 1970s as to place it in "the second rank" of museums.115 But Shih herself would not be a problem for the NMC much longer either. By 1980, she too had reached, at last, the limit of her celebrated patience and would observe the Gallery's centennial year by resigning loudly at the end of it. The "centennial celebrations" enjoyed the dignity of an exhibition organized by Charles Hill, To Found a National Gallery, that traced the Gallery's little-known relationship with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts from both of their origins in 276

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i88o to Eric Brown's appointment as director in 1912. Apart from this, however, they were a farce: an open-house and low-budget birthday party in the Lome Building's lobby, at which the most prominent figures were staff members in Mickey Mouse and Goofy costumes. Shih expected the Liberals, upon their re-election in 1980, to restore the Gallery's acquisitions budget, which had already been frozen at $1.5 million for seven of eight inflation-ridden years. They did not. Nor would the new minister responsible for the Gallery, Francis Fox, be forthright about whether or when they were going to do so. Shih had been coping also with a 30 per cent reduction in her operations budget over the previous two years, even as she had watched the NMC'S administration costs climb to four-fifths of the Gallery's total budget.116 Her resignation included a public venting of accumulated anger that pointed to the attrition wrought by her day-to-day entanglement in the NMC'S bureaucracy. "Alphabet soup is falling out of my ears," she said in a news conference that became a cri de coeur. "All sorts of new terms. 'Human resource planning' is the latest... [And] the paper! The paper! We are spending a tremendous amount of money controlling rather than creating ... The government doesn't care about the gallery. Why should I kill myself every day for it?"117 By making public the incompatibility between "controlling" and "creating," Shih succinctly went for the heart of a bureaucracy that had sought to homogenize both under its own authority. But the missile had little effect. Instead, with her resignation, there followed a period even more topsy-turvy than that which had followed the departure of Jean Boggs. Initially, Shih's assistant director for public programmes, Michael Bell, was appointed interim director on April Fools' Day 1981. He then rubbed salt into the Gallery's wounds by resigning a few months later to take over the McMichael Canadian Collection in Kleinburg: that same low-budget museum whose attendance figures had in 1978 so embarrassed the National Gallery. Interim directorship then passed to Joseph Martin, a decent but self-effacing diplomat whom Boggs had hired in 1970 and who had played the same role before Shih's hiring. But even as the Gallery appeared, as an institution, to be in terminal drift, with its budget, its programs, its building, its curatorial structure, and its leadership all in shambles, new factors came into play. These would soon alter the fundamental logic of an entity which, for nearly six decades, had been shaped in its nature and public profile by the personality of its current director, until falling into the jaws of a bureaucratic behemoth.

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Pierre Trudeau congratulates Jean Sutherland Boggs on her appointment as head of the not-yet-named Canada Museums Construction Corporation, 18 February 1982. At left is the minister of communications, Francis Fox, who had just announced the allocation of $185 million, by order-in-council, toward the construction of a National Gallery and a National Museum of Man within five years. (National Gallery of Canada)

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I am convinced ... that we should try to capture that museum aura, that museum spell - a world apart in time and space from the community that surrounds it. -Jean Sutherland Boggs, "The Museum's Role in the Community," 1967

Practically nothing that has been done in the name of art during my lifetime has had any significance for my understanding of the universe: It is not a factor in how I conceive buildings. -Moshe Safdie, Form and Purpose, 1982

In the autumn of 1966, just after her appointment as director, Jean Boggs told an interviewer that she thought of her involvement with the National Gallery "as a Life Work."1 Ten years later, in the unlikely circumstances of her resignation, she seemed to restate this commitment, when she wrote that she was "ready to withdraw temporarily from the fray" about a Gallery building.2 The implications of the adverb "temporarily" would take another five years, until February 1982, to be revealed. By then Boggs was director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, having moved there from Harvard in 1979 and having also helped her new museum with its own building program. Meanwhile, back in Ottawa, the condition of the museums overseen by the National Museums of Canada had continued to deteriorate, amid the Trudeau government's focus on constitutional and energy issues. Nor had the NMC'S search committee, by early 1982, found a permanent director for the National Gallery; instead, the acting director, Joseph Martin, was saying publicly that the staff felt "slighted and deceived."3 Among the grounds for resentment had been a reduction of curatorial budget - including salaries - from $975,000 to $875,000 in 1980-81.4 But such was the state of the building itself that the staff were also resorting, in desperation, to giving media tours. These showed, even after the multimillion dollar "facelift" of 1976, a leaking roof, dysfunctional washrooms, pipes bound with rags to

prevent their clanging, and blank spaces left on walls, where paintings had been removed to protect them from condensation. The tours were obviously cathartic for the curators involved. More importantly, they also generated press coverage that embarrassed the Trudeau government, via headlines such as "OUR NATIONAL DISGRACE" in the Globe and Mail, "Toward genteel irrelevance" in the Ottawa Citizen, and "Irreplaceable art at risk in shabby National Gallery" in the London Free Press. The third of these articles was especially evocative, in that it focused on the very paintings which, since Eric Brown's time, had been evolving into what its author Doug Bale called "symbols of Canada to Canadians everywhere." "The most celebrated Group of Seven paintings," Bale wrote indignantly after his guided tour, "hang in rooms where ice forms inch-thick inside the windows, and condensation drips from the ceilings."5 This clearly was not the kind of flow from the great North that Lawren Harris had hoped for in regard to his own paintings and those of his friends. Nevertheless, as visibly congealed nearby them, it had the curators' desired effect on visiting reporters. Criticism of the physical state of the National Gallery had, of course, been a journalistic staple since the 1920s. Early 1982, however, offered an unlikely opening towards a practical response. After thirteen years as prime minister, Pierre Trudeau was nearing the end of his political career. Yet, although he had been welcomed into office in 1968 as a kind of "philosopher-king" Trudeau was by this time widely viewed as having been a major disappointment on "culture," and as having especially abused an arts community that he had been expected to honour as "an essential grace in the life of a civilized people."6 Instead, he had come to be seen - by many artists, arts administrators, and writers - as the political master of a great "dumbing down," owing especially to the heavy hand of the National Museums of Canada. Trudeau himself had not been responsible for the NMC: that honour remained with the government of Lester Pearson. But he had served as minister of justice under Pearson, and it was he who, as prime minister, had overseen the NMC'S relentless expansion according to an act of Parliament that had come into force the very month he had taken over the government in April 1968. An especially pointed skewering of Trudeau's legacy to the arts was done by Alan Fotheringham, but his comments exemplified the mood of the broadsheet press by the early 1980s. "All blessings flow from the top," he wrote in January 1982, "and one cannot escape the conclusion, for all the public forecasting on what a wealthy, educated, cultured prime minister would mean to the more delicate sensibilities of the nation, that Pierre Trudeau has no more sincere interests in the arts than did, say, the Prairie-bound John Diefenbaker or the ghost-ridden Mackenzie King... His reputation as an effete who appreciates fine wine and an office decorated in gold suede is a personal affectation: his Ottawa has become a less exciting place intellectually and artistically since he arrived. Instead of the Renaissance on the Rideau, we have in 1982 Bob and Doug McKenzie, spiritual descendants of the Trudeau parsimony."7 Fotheringham's hint seemed to be that, had the Massey-era tie between the arts and "Canadianism" been better funded, Canadians might have been spared the televised antics of the beer-swilling McKenzie brothers. While this was debatable, the effects 28O

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of "the Trudeau parsimony" on the "national museums" under the NMC were not. For according to Betty Lee in the Globe and Mail, the situation was such that, "unless Ottawa [moved] fast, much of Canada's heritage [was] in danger of being lost."8 That such a comment could be credibly made in the midst of the NMC'S overblown rhetoric purporting to serve this very "national heritage" added yet again to the subtext of unintended irony. But so strong a public outcry did offer Trudeau a chance to act, as well as a last chance to be linked with the arts other than through a legacy of tight-fisted, kitsch displays that were also allegedly in the service of "national heritage." According to Richard Alway, who was then chairman of the Gallery's visiting committee, Trudeau "saw that this was one of those occasions where he could have a permanent long-lasting impact on the life of the country," through the creation of a new National Gallery and a new "National Museum of Man."9 A less diplomatic view, and one espoused by many journalists, was that faced with this question of his long-term record - Trudeau also realized there could be no more prestigious memorial in Ottawa to Canada's second-longest serving prime minister, than the building of the very edifice which Mackenzie King, as the holder of the record, had refused to fund. Nor was pressure from Canadian journalists, and from the state of the museums themselves the only factor in circulation. Only months before, in September 1981, Trudeau's friend Francois Mitterrand had declared, as president of France, that he "could not have a great policy for France without great architecture." Accordingly, he had announced a series of "grands projets" that included completion of the Musee d'Orsay in the former Gare d'Orsay; expansion of the Louvre to include I.M. Pei's glass pyramid in the Cour Napoleon; and construction of three new major edifices in and near Paris: the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Arche de la Defense, and an opera house in Place de la Bastille.10 Though Mitterrand was criticized by the political opposition in France for his "Louis xiv complex," his announcement could hardly have come at a better time for influencing a decision by Trudeau. Moreover, Paris was not the only place in which new museums were being built. From the mid-1970s especially, there had been a veritable frenzy of museum building and expansion in the cities of western Europe and the United States. To some extent, this was an inevitable outcome of modernism's success at establishing art as - to recall Marcel Evrard - "the privileged path to understanding" in an increasingly post-religious industrialized world. For the material prompts along this path not only demanded housing equal to this exalted status but had also been produced in such numbers during the 1950s and 1960s as to have widely outgrown the available display space. Yet arguably, too, this momentum toward the museum itself as spectacle was also an ironic and unanticipated outcome of Duchampian anti-institutionalism in art, such as had become widespread in the simplified gestural artforms of the 1970s. For pitted against the aggressive hunger of a media-saturated society for novelty, art itself - the gestural tradition of Duchamp as much as the traditions of Picasso and Matisse - seemed increasingly to need a safe place: a place where the category "art," in its various facets, could be recognized as important, and a place where these facets could be quietly contemplated. And widely in western Europe and the United States, there were people who were both conThe New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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vinced of this, and influential enough in their societies, to be able to bring resources to bear on museum construction. The extent of this building mania is suggested by the fact that one of the major firms involved in it, James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates of England, received commissions for five such projects between 1975 and 1980, in Koln, Diisseldorf, Stuttgart, London, and - for Harvard University - Boston. The English architecture critic Charles Jencks even wrote, in his widely read book The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture, that "the Museum has now become the most significant building type of the eighties, the most suitable place for architectural expression and symbolism."11 Back in Ottawa, meanwhile, the cosmopolitan Pierre Trudeau faced the prospect that, if he did not act, his own 1976 promise during the Parkin fiasco that "the proposed National Gallery will become a major landmark in the Nation's Capital" would sound as hollow to future generations as the "ghost-ridden Mackenzie King'"s promise to build a Gallery "if you will give us enough time."12 The evidence suggests that, in the remote, imperial style of his later years in office, Trudeau himself made the decision to proceed in the fall of 1981, and - as reported by Richard Gwyn - "personally over-ruled a cabinet decision to postpone construction ... as part of the general program of restraint." Echoing the French political opposition on Mitterrand, Gwyn went so far as to suggest that Trudeau, freed from any concern about fighting another election, had assumed the mantle of a "benign dictator" in his pursuit of a "cultural monument."13 But this gesture seemed also to recall Trudeau s own description of himself from his student days. "I had, in those very early days, a very high disdain for what was going on today and tomorrow," he had told his biographer George Radwanski a few years earlier. "I was much more interested in Plato and Aquinas than I was in a discussion of yesterday's budget."14 By 1982, as prime minister, Trudeau could once more afford such "disdain" and interests because he had no longer to be concerned about any budgets. But there is also a tantalizing question, a potential subtext that lingers from the sheer visual intensity of two images that remain from the late 1960s: one showing Pierre Trudeau whispering into the ear of Jean Sutherland Boggs at a National Gallery opening in November 1968 (page 207), and the other of Pierre Trudeau dancing, before an audience, with a twenty-one-year-old Margaret Sinclair less than a year later, at the same National Gallery (page 214). At the very least, Trudeau by 1982 had his own set of memories regarding the Lome Building. What these memories precisely were, and how they interwove with one another, only he - and perhaps not even he - could say. But by 1982 also, the relationship that he had introduced to the world in the Lome Building, and that had developed into his and Margaret's marriage in 1971, was very publicly in tatters. Moreover, it had collapsed in a way as spectacular, though not so flattering or desirable, as her introduction at the National Gallery Association Ball had been. For the 1977 break-up had been accompanied by a flurry of revelations about their private lives together and more recently apart: revelations that, as filtered mainly through Margaret, were immensely embarrassing and even bizarre. But clearly, the hitherto unexamined role played by the National Gallery in the Lome Building had a dimension of the bizarre about it too, going back 282

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not only to the Hallowe'en Ball of October 1969 but also to that image fraught with innuendo of a year before: Trudeau and Boggs seated beneath a tapestry in which a muscular male knee seems to thrust from behind her head like a phallus, even as the corsage above her breast, and the folds of drapery behind Trudeau's head, are densely feminine. Was Trudeau whispering only about the tapestries? This photograph, by Studio C. Marcil in Ottawa, is an extraordinary visual document, itself a work of art that asserts what might well be called an "aura" of mystery between the two key figures in initiating and carrying through the project of a building for the National Gallery, as well as for the Museum of Civilization. But there is also the second photograph, from United Press International, of a radiantly beautiful but clearly distracted twenty-one-year-old Margaret Sinclair, brought to Miss Boggs's National Gallery by a fifty-one-year-old prime minister who seemed most intent upon doing a public fertility dance around her, even as they were watched by a man in a Napoleon suit. The mind reels a little at the complexity of the emotional fields, which as surely invite the explorations of psychological drama as the tale of Alan Jarvis invites the explorations of tragic drama. There is even the possibility that, by 1982, Pierre Trudeau's own tissue of memory about the Lome Building had begun to reprise another episode in the Gallery's history, but one with perversely comic potential. The Trudeau marriage came apart so publicly that it drew international attention, especially after Margaret began frequenting Studio 54 in New York and keeping company with one of the most semantically promiscuous artists in history, Andy Warhol. Both the degree of public unravelling, after an impressive launch, and the hovering presence of the vulture-like Warhol, ready to inflate the dollar value of any phenomenon that he could silkscreen and label art, recalled the tribulations not of the National Gallery's most glamorous director, Alan Jarvis, but of its most unintentionally comic, Charles Comfort. For just as Paul Duval's description of the Chrysler episode as "a freak show" seemed equally to suggest what the tabloids made of "Pierre and Maggie," so did Warhol, nearly twenty years after the Brillo episode, retain his functional contempt for boundaries of any kind. But if Pierre Trudeau, for his part, bore the weight of associating the Lome Building National Gallery with the seeds of his very own version of the Chrysler Exhibition, he just possibly also, by this time, was aware that there might be constructively more in common between him and the "tough, logical, charming, hard-edged" woman beside whom he had settled himself at the Jacob Jordaens exhibition in 1968 than between him and the "flower child" whom he had unveiled in 1969. And whatever did or did not happen in 1945, whatever did or did not happen in 1968, between these two highly intelligent, complex, and driven people, something very definitely did happen in 1982, when Pierre Trudeau made up his mind to act. With the gathered authority of a prime minister who had been in office - save for Joe Clark's short interregnum - since 1968, he wielded the lever of orders-in-council so as to bypass Parliament completely. This tactic forestalled the possibility of opposition delays. But it also, more quietly, shut out the dense bureaucracy of the Liberals' own creature, the National Museums of Canada, whose "decentralization" program had so eviscerated the National Gallery and in the process created its own power The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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bases in Ottawa. The blockages posed by these were simply outflanked through this new strategy, as was also any taint of commitment either to the Parkin concept of 1976-77 or to the site for which it had been developed on Wellington Street. Put in place instead was an arrangement whose terms would soon suggest - with the extremity of overcompensation - a whole new style for the deployment of power that would be anticipated by a crucial press conference. Frank Howard of the Ottawa Citizen left an evocative account of this style, as he encountered it in the Parliament Building's West Block, on 18 February 1982. "Under the glitter of the grand crystal chandelier," he wrote, "were scores of people ... But when I looked again, I realized these were not reporters, most of them. They were too quiet, too well dressed in their grey and bureaucrat blue suits ... These were the mandarins, the courtiers, and even a few courtesans of culture... On the walls were original oil paintings brought out for the occasion ... This was no ordinary press conference, I realized. No wonder the name of Versailles had popped into my head as I walked in. We were at court. There was a royal, not to say imperial mind lurking behind all this splendor and display."15 Prominent on the podium for this occasion were the prime minister and the minister of communications, Francis Fox. Flanked by Canadian flags, and by Galleryowned paintings by Borduas and Emily Carr, Trudeau spoke first, declaring that, with the constitution patriated, "the next step" was "the creating of a nation" and the preservation of "those values that make our identity possible." Echoing Vincent Massey, he told his audience that "I prefer to look at the arts as an enrichment of Canadian identity... Those that might criticize the kind of expenditure we're about to make in a time of restraint have failed to understand the thrust of the government in the past few years ... We are providing new homes to two of our very important cultural institutions which preserve our past and guarantee our enlightenment in the future."16 With this link among art, "enlightenment," and "the creating of a nation," Trudeau also - clearly without deliberate irony and perhaps unwittingly reached into the past to recall the agendas of Eric Brown. He then let Fox fill in the substance, with an announcement that not one but two new museums - a National Gallery and a National Museum of Man - were to be built within five years, with a combined budget of $185 million. Fox's contribution did not hearken back so far and was steeped instead in the national sentiment and patronizing tone that had come to be associated with the Trudeau government, as with the NMC. "In the magnificence of their collections, in their display of works of national excellence," Fox said, "both the Gallery and the Museum have become symbols of our national pride, ...When you go to the National Gallery of Canada or the National Museum of Man, you will be partaking of an invaluable public resource, which will tell you in both historical and aesthetic terms where we have been in the past, where we are now, and where we will be in the future. In proud new homes with better facilities and more room for display and preservation, the National Gallery and the National Museum of Man will be in a much better position to play these vital national roles."17 Given the record of Liberal governments since 1967, this rhetoric was absurdly hyperbolic, if not fanciful. For these

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same Liberals, after all, had overseen the near-fatal picking apart of the National Gallery not as a "symbol of national pride" but as a working institution. More consistently with this record, the rhetoric also predictably presented the Gallery and Museum of Man in "resource" terms, and urged investment in them as vehicles for the entrenchment, preservation, and even construction of a sense of national "we." Yet the universality of this "we" was belied by the implicit admission of failure in the announcement itself. Fox's rhetoric emphasized the role of both museums as centralized institutions, such as Jean Sutherland Boggs had called for in 1967. What this meant in practical terms was that their construction in "the National Capital Region" would provide the area's biggest building project since the second set of Parliament Buildings sixty-five years earlier. But this redirection of government priorities was also a slap at the "decentralizing" agenda of the NMC, as at the corporation itself which was still without its own quarters. Nor did the implied rebuke of the NMC stop at this. The museums, Fox said, would be built under the authority not of the NMC, which had overseen them since 1968, but rather of an entirely new crown corporation which was not yet named. This corporation would work in what he called "close consultation" with the NMC toward the choice of sites, architects, and designs. But the same consultative role would be given to the National Capital Commission and to the directors of the two museums. Given that the record of relations between the NMC and its "national museums" had since 1974 been one of almost unchecked transfers of authority toward the former, this, too, signalled a major reversal for the NMC. The coup de grace was the announcement of a head for the new corporation. For seated beside Trudeau and Fox was the current director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the very woman who, after calling for a National Gallery that would be "a great centre," had resigned half a dozen years earlier as director of the Lome Building, after being outflanked by the secretarygeneral of the NMC. " S O M E O N E W H O ' S A D R I V I N G FORCE"

Jean Sutherland Boggs had not, according to all sources close to the situation, lobbied for this assignment. Instead, the prime minister - who had been kept abreast of her whereabouts and activities by such mutual friends as the Gallery's assistant director, Gyde Shepherd, the clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Pitfield, and the head of the CBC, Pierre Juneau - had simply phoned her in Philadelphia at Christmas time and asked that she return. According to Boggs herself, her role had been finalized only the week before the announcement.18 In presenting her, Fox offered cogent grounds both for this gesture and for the extent of government confidence in its appointee: "There are very few people with her broad experience of museums and galleries in Canada, in the United States, and in the rest of the world. Even among the people with such experience, only a very small number have her clear vision of the ultimate purpose of a gallery or museum, and the sensibility to imagine the meaning of such institutions for our country. It is that vision which we hope will shape the new facilities for the National Gallery and National Museum of Man." But the dense

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Jean Sutherland Boggs presenting a sense of mission shortly after her appointment as head of the crown corporation, in company with two old associates from her period as director: Brydon Smith, left, and Joseph Martin, right, by then the Gallery's acting director. (National Gallery of Canada)

subtexts of a relationship between two deeply private, complex, and powerful people that stretched back nearly four decades are suggested in the facial expressions of Boggs and Trudeau themselves as they reached to shake hands "under the glitter of the grand crystal chandelier" (page 278). Of all possible choices of a project director, then, "Miss Boggs" was probably the one most guaranteed to rattle the NMC. She also had the most developed view of what a Gallery building ought to look like, and the most persistently smouldering drive to carry the project through. And almost certainly, she had the most profound historical sense of how frequently in the past good intentions had come to naught. Given her renewed independence, and so clear a vote of confidence in her "vision," the menace in this case was posed not by the bureaucracy of the NMC. Rather, it lay in the likelihood that the electorate, sick of precisely the imperial style that had made for the new corporation's founding, would show its disfavour in the election pending in 1984. And waiting to pounce were the Progressive Conservatives who, under Brian Mulroney, were promising scrutiny of government programs, in a way that could shut the project down if Boggs did not - as she later put it - "get very large, and politically embarrassing" holes dug as quickly as possible.19 Fox himself was explicit about this goal. "We really wanted to make sure it doesn't bog down," he said, making a Freudian slip that was, under the circumstances as inappropriate as it was inadvertent, but that perhaps revealed his own anxieties. "We wanted someone who's a driving force, someone who can cut through the bureaucratic red tape."20 Unintended irony had, of course, also long been a staple of the National Gallery's history. This new occasion did not disappoint. For the very government that had pursued "decentralization and democratization" through one of the most centralized bureaucracies ever imposed on Canada, thereby creating much of the "red tape" that Fox denounced, implicitly reversed this policy in 1982 for the sake of reaffirm286

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ing the National Gallery and the National Museum of Man as "centres." But if the policy changed, the method did not. Instead, the practice of centralized authority that had maintained the NMC behind its rhetoric was applied to the establishment of the new corporation through order-in-council, and vested in its new head, who, through her prime ministerial protector, was given an authority even more sweeping than that which she had renounced by stages in 1968,1972, and 1976. The ad hoc entity received a name in July 1982: it was to be called the Canada Museums Construction Corporation (CMCC). By this time - and notwithstanding the nominal "consulting" role given to the NMC - Boggs was already embarked on what amounted to a personal search for sites and architects. She also declared that, while she would be consulting with William Taylor, the director of the National Museum of Man, on these matters in regard to his museum, she felt she could herself "represent the needs of the National Gallery."21 This declaration clearly lent a certain logic to the continued presence, as the Gallery's temporary director, of her own former assistant, Joseph Martin. Nevertheless, there was one matter on which Boggs would not have her way. Informing her search was the further irony that Cartier Square, for which she had long declared her preference ahs a site for the Gallery, was declared off-limits.22 Shortly afterwards, it would be committed to provincial court buildings. But this was not the main consideration. Besides the imperative that the museums be built on land that was federally owned, there was a limiting factor that had explicitly political dimensions. Because the museums would still be part of overall policy on the knitting together of French and English Canada, one of them had to be in Quebec, and the other in Ontario. The goal, based on a concept established in 1971, was to create both a "cultural bridge" and - more grandiloquently - a "ceremonial route" called "Boulevard Canada", that would twice cross the Ottawa River between Hull and Ottawa.23 There were, then, five possible sites for the two museums. But only one of these - Laurier Park in Hull, across the Ottawa River from the Parliament Buildings - was in Quebec. It was therefore virtually assured the Museum of Man, which the CMCC board conveniently decided would benefit Hull through its higher attendance. This left four options for the National Gallery. The best known of these was the Wellington Street "wind tunnel" that theoretically still lingered from the competition of 1976-77. Apart from Boggs's personal hostility, however, its appeal was further reduced by the fact that a promised pedestrian walkway to Parliament Hill had not been built. Even less auspicious, and still farther west of the city's core, was the grassed-over void of LeBreton Flats, through which a transit-way for suburban buses was under construction. Downtown, there remained the small rectangle of Centennial Park beside the National Arts Centre, and across Elgin Street from both the Lome Building and Cartier Square. But there was also a fourth site that, oddly enough, had been suggested by Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker in the 1920S.24 This was an area between Sussex Drive and the slow rise to the west of Nepean Point, across a traffic artery from Jack Pickersgill's preferred site of Major's Hill Park. Like the park, it offered a view of Parliament Hill and of the Ottawa River's wide expanse The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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to the west. Having itself been cleared of wartime buildings in the 1960s, it was by this time hosting a parking lot for the Canadian War Museum. Boggs commissioned the Toronto architect Roger du Toit to do a study of all five sites, and in November 1982 he not surprisingly reported in favour of Nepean Point. It was, he said, "almost exactly in the centre of gravity" of Ottawa's main tourist route, "the Mile of History" between Parliament Hill and the governor general's Residence. It also gave "one of the best views of the Parliament Buildings" and was close to the War Museum, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Roman Catholic Basilica, and a proposed United States Embassy building to the south. "Perhaps the most interesting feature of this site," he concluded, "is the variety of ways in which it is perceived. It is between two landmarks, the Nepean promontory with its vertical punctuation given by the statue of Samuel de Champlain, and the silver spires of the Basilica de Notre Dame. It is seen from important vantage points throughout the Ottawa-Hull core area [and] is also revealed in an interesting way as one travels east along the Alexandra Bridge."25 Devising a points system, du Toit gave the sites of LeBreton Flats, Wellington Street, Confederation Square, and Nepean Point respective scores of 54, 44, 38, and 25, with the lowest paradoxically the most preferred. Boggs, too, announced that - while the study would be run past the corporation's seven-member board, and the final choice would be up to cabinet - her preference was Nepean Point. It was, she said, "a site of great natural beauty" that - with its other advantages - "would also be within reach of the new Rideau Centre," Ottawa's main downtown shopping complex.26 While the du Toit study was being done, Boggs also used her freedom from NMC bureaucracy and electoral accountability to visit fifty architectural firms across the country and send her staff to twenty-eight more. The public view was that the criteria for both the gallery and museum selection were "vague."27 Boggs, however, was drawing on the accumulated energy of six years' exile from her "Life Work," as well as on ten years' experience directing the Gallery and on the studies she had commissioned while there. She also had available a July 1982 letter from Richard Alway as Chair of the visiting committee that provided guidelines on how a Gallery architect should proceed. This letter, though awkwardly worded, summarized the committee's and the NMC board's goals for a Gallery building, and was often cited by Boggs herself. Itsfivepoints were: i) that in line with the general principle of integrating art with life to the greatest degree possible, and in order to promote general public accessibility a site be chosen as close to the center of Ottawa as possible; ii) that the effective public exhibition of fine art should be the first priority of the New Building; iii) that... the new Gallery should combine with its site to give a sense of approach and a sense of ceremony appropriate to a great national institution; iv) that a new National Gallery should, in its design concept, clearly say that while this is a great museum it is also for this reason a place of delight and celebration; and

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v) that the idea that the National Capital region is not just the seat of government, but the National Capital of Canada, should find its most eloquent expression in the new home of perhaps the most significant of our national cultural institutions, the National Gallery of Canada.228 After her travels, and in consultation with her board, Boggs next prepared, in January 1983, a short-list of twelve firms - six for each building - that would be invited to submit proposals. She refused to make public either how many firms were being asked or their names, declaring instead that a public competition "would take too long and cost too much."29 Given that the previous year, the cabinet had awarded the new Canadian embassy in Washington to Arthur Erickson, a personal friend of Trudeau's, over the preference of a competition jury, this approach drew vitriolic criticism from both the press and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. It soon leaked out also that the Parkin Partnership of Toronto, winners of the 1976-77 competition, were not even on the new short-list, and were instead being offered in a way that recalled the "office block" project given to Blankstein, Greene and Russell after the failed competition of 1954 - "a role in the production process."30 But Boggs - secure in the knowledge that she enjoyed the prime minister's direct support - simply ignored the criticism and gave the competing firms a mere three weeks to prepare their proposals. Obviously, a case could be made that Boggs s haste - if not her high-handedness - was in these circumstances justified. For just as she had herself borne the brunt of NMC manoeuvrings for nearly a decade, and followed from a distance their effects on her successors, so she had also seen the slow unfolding of two earlier public competitions come to nothing. Nor was she unaware that her authority might last only so long as her protector was in office: perhaps another two years at most. The entire consultative process was kept a closely guarded secret, among the competing architects, the CMCC board, and - ultimately - the cabinet. The decision came quickly. On 11 February 1983 - almost a year to the day after the establishment of the crown corporation - Boggs again stood with Francis Fox to announce sites and architects for the new museums. The Museum of Man was indeed to be built at Laurier Park in Hull, and was to be designed by the Metis architect Douglas Cardinal. The National Gallery would be built at Boggs's preferred site, Nepean Point. The Parkin Partnership would, as previously reported, retain a secondary role in site engineering. The primary designer, however, would be Moshe Safdie Associates, of Montreal, Jerusalem, and Boston. These architects, Boggs said, had submitted not full-scale plans but only "small sketches and ideas"; their selection had been based also on "their reputations, past designs, and the recommendations of their peers." She expected, she said, that the designs would be completed "in about six months."31 Both Safdie's and Cardinal's selection came as a surprise to the architectural community. One critic, Stephanie White, even alleged that "in the end, it appears to have been largely an intuitive choice by Boggs," to which Trudeau had acquiesced.32 Whether this was the case or not, there is little point at this stage of the story to spec-

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Enter Moshe Safdie: Boggs shows her chosen architect the four per cent of "the collection" that could be shown at any given time in the Lome Building. To the right is Brydon Smith, by then the assistant director in charge of collections and research. (National Gallery of Canada)

dating either on the mechanics of a process that took place largely in secret or on the "sketches and ideas" that were not accepted. Instead, what may prove more fruitful, towards an understanding of the edifice that was built will be a look at the factors that accompanied the cabinets - and Jean Boggs's - choice of Safdie as primary architect for the National Gallery. For with his arrival was added to the history of the Gallery another of the idiosyncratic and strong-willed individuals - Walker, Brown, and Harris in earlier years; Jarvis, Boggs, Ostry, and Trudeau himself more recently - who had figured in its development. The difference was that two of these individuals - Safdie and Boggs - would not only be working together after this decision in what Boggs would call "a complicated collaboration";33 they would also be, with Trudeau a more distant overseer, the people most responsible for the building that Eric Brown had hoped would be both "beautiful and worthy," a "dream castle... overlooking the Ottawa River." This pattern implied continuity as much with past ironies as with past hopes. In this case, a building ostensibly being designed to house art for the Canadian people was in the process of becoming - as has happened often in Canada - a consultation between extraordinarily determined individuals, operating with an impunity that for as long as their protector held office - put them beyond accountability to this "people." That this happened, however, after an official attempt at "decentralization and democratization" had itself generated, over fourteen years, an immense, centralized, and grinding bureaucracy perhaps suggested, above all, that a working relationship among democracy, the modern state, and art conceived in national terms would be at best fragile, and invariably at risk of abuse. And there were more ironies 29O

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The Canadian project that made Moshe Safdie famous but that provided him no work in Canada for fifteen years: Habitat, modular housing designed for Expo 67. (Jerry Spearman, Courtesy of Moshe Safdie and Associates)

to come. In the relationship between Boggs and Safdie, there lurked incongruities that made its very existence seem bizarre. Yet these were - and had to be - balanced by deep affinities that ultimately outweighed their differences. A mapping of these incongruities and affinities is indispensable toward an understanding of the building that resulted, in both its relationship to the Gallery's institutional past and its status as an encompassing environment for every visitor. These will come into focus only through a look at Safdie's record as an architect and as an architectural theorist. " T H E ISSUE OF CONTEXT IS A B U R N I N G C O N C E R N "

As an architect, Moshe Safdie arrived at the museums competition having worked for a dozen years in Jerusalem and with offices there and in Boston. But he had also banked his own Canadian capital through the mythic year of 1967. Though born in Israel, he had grown up in Montreal. And it was there that, while a student at McGill University in the mid-1960s, he wrote a thesis on stacked modular housing, based on buildings in the hillside city of Haifa, where he had lived as a child. In this design, each unit was given its own entrance and garden, so as - Safdie claimed - to maximize both privacy and the benefits of urban density. Shortly afterwards, he was involved, with his thesis adviser H.P. Van Ginkel, in the overall planning of the Expo 67 site. And this involvement, in turn, drew him into one of the variants on the "Man and His World" theme that shaped the National Gallery's own fme-arts display at Expo. In Safdie's case, the theme area was called "Man and the Community" and "was to house an ideal urban residential area with schools, shops, and services." It was also intended to remain after the World's Fair closed.34 Safdie used this opportunity to The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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build a version of his thesis proposal, which, under the title Habitat, became one of Expo's most popular and innovative sites. Subsequently, however - and in the absence of Canadian commissions to match his celebrity - Safdie returned to Israel and settled in Jerusalem. There, he was again caught up in the legacy of 1967, but in a different way. In Israel, 1967 did not involve a World's Fair that honoured the centennial of a peaceful county and international humanism's claim that "man is fundamentally the same throughout the world and through centuries of time." Instead, it framed a short, but stunningly successful war, which expanded the boundaries of an ethnic and sectarian state to absorb an ancient city sacred to three of the world's great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the wake of this conquest, Safdie bid for a variety of state-sponsored and private projects, and by 1982 he was widely recognized for eight that his firm had been awarded, all but one either in or along the edge of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The exception pertained to geo-political events that antedated 1967 and involved not a building, but a semi-underground Children's Memorial for the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial near Mount Herzl in West Jerusalem. This project, commissioned in 1976 and still under way when Safdie received the commission for the National Gallery, actually bore an inverse formal relationship to his design for the Gallery, in that he introduced the memorial with a descending ramp, leading as the ascending Colonnade ramp would do in Ottawa - to the defined threshold of a larger room. Just as the National Gallery's Great Hall would be based on what Safdie called a "geometry of octagons," so the subterranean chamber of the Children's Memorial was also octagonal. Its light was provided not by the sun but by candles reflected off a multitude of geometrical surfaces. "The effect," according to Safdie's archivist Laura E. Dent, "is one of a million flames floating in space, in a room without boundaries, symbolizing the souls of lost children." This was Safdie's Jerusalem project that spoke explicitly to the unequivocal catastrophe that befell European Jewry in the Second World War. His other projects, by contrast, bespoke an implicit relationship to the more ambiguous politics of the modern Jewish state, colluding in microcosm with an occupation that was condemned by the United Nations and materially cementing Israel's hold not least on Jerusalem itself, as a hoped-for capital city. The first of these projects, begun in 1971, was also perhaps the best-known and most influential: the Yeshiva Porat Yosef Sephardic Rabbinical College, built in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, on a site that had held a Yeshiva from 1920 until its destruction in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Occupying a rocky ridge beside the ancient Temple Mount, Safdie's Yeshiva building overlooked what is arguably the most volatile bit of land in the world, containing as it does both the Western Wall, as a relic of King Herod's second Jewish temple, and the Haram ash-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary, from which Muhammad allegedly travelled to heaven and received revelation directly from God. The former is Judaism's most sacred site, while the latter, incorporating the seventh-century Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, is Islam's third most sacred site, after Mecca and Medina. Clearly, in this case, Safdie's provision of a Sephardic Rabbinical College asserted the permanence of an Israeli hold on East Jerusalem, contested though this was by the 292

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Building for a sacred zone: the Yeshiva Porat Yosef in Jerusalem (centre left) as designed by Moshe Safdie. The Dome of the Rock is in the foreground. (Michal Ronnen Safdie, Moshe Safdie and Associates)

Designing for a sacred zone: Moshe Safdie's model of his master plan for the Western Wall of King Herod's Temple in East Jerusalem, Judaism's most sacred site but, under international law, illegally occupied by Israel. (Moshe Safdie for the Municipality of Jerusalem and Corporation for the Redevelopment of the Jewish Quarter, 1974-88, Moshe Safdie and Associates) The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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UN as well as by an Islamic population that, in one form or another, had governed Jerusalem almost uninterrupted for over a millennium. Two of Safdie's other major building projects in East Jerusalem consisted of residential renovations located, again, in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, which had also been largely destroyed in the 1948 war and left undeveloped under Jordanian rule for the next twenty years. A fourth involved what his archives describe as "the renovation, reconstruction, and architectural redesign" of a "600-year of structure" beside the Western Wall, the Hedra Yeshiva, to accommodate both "a Torah centre" and "a small police station." Two much larger projects spanned the post-1948 line of partition between the Israeli and Jordanian parts of Jerusalem, and were both in early stages of development when Safdie received the National Gallery commission: the Mamilla commercial complex between the Old City and a modernized West Jerusalem; and the relatively secular Hebrew Union College near the Old City's walls. The seventh among his major Jerusalem projects was at once the most extensive, the most symbolically charged, and - for Safdie himself - the most frustrating, because it was repeatedly postponed. Beginning in 1972, at the request of the municipality of Jerusalem and the Corporation for the Redevelopment of the Jewish Quarter, he produced a master plan for restoring, opening up, and enlarging the Western Wall Precinct as a site of Jewish worship. Safdie's plan was to excavate the area in front of the Wall to a depth of nine metres, exposing Herod's wall to its original height amid an archaeological layering that dated back at least two millennia. The sheer political sensitivity of the area, however, given Muslim resistance to encroachments on the Haram ash-Sharif above the Wall, and volatile Orthodox Jewish ambitions for a Third Temple on the site, meant that the design was still unrealized by 1982.35 In all these projects, whether they came to fruition or not, Safdie embraced the Israeli government's policy that both new and renovated buildings should blend seamlessly into the ancient, highly sacralized context of Jerusalem's Old City. He even made a point of honour out of going further, repudiating any notion of being a vassal to changing styles. Of the Yeshiva Porat Yosef, he wrote in 1982 that "the rabbis in Jerusalem believed they wanted a traditional building. They had already fired two other architects, and when they hired me they said, 'Will you make for us a traditional or a modern building.' To avoid the issue, I said, almost defensively, 'If I succeed, when the building is built you will not be able to answer that question.'"36 It had been his goal, Safdie wrote, that in "accommodating a new building to the heart of historical Jerusalem," he should ensure that such a structure should, "out of respect and deference to the site ... appear as though it had always been there."37 In the case of Jerusalem, this entailed his use of archways, flat roofs, and cut-stone facing that indeed made the Yeshiva seem to disappear into the texture of the ancient city. Safdie's claim of being able to make his public - and in this case sectarian - buildings look as though they had "always been there" obviously recommended him to an Israeli government that was staking its own eternal claim to Jerusalem, against the objections of its Palestinian inhabitants. But it was also sure to recommend him in a Canadian capital that - unlike Jerusalem - had little more than a century separating 294

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it not just from wilderness but from aboriginal occupancy, and that only recently had emerged from being a colonial outpost of the British Empire. But Safdie grew into this role slowly. Initially, he was not asked, nor did he apply, to design the National Gallery but rather submitted sketches for the National Museum of Man. He later gave the simplest of reasons for his having done so. "I figured the Museum of Man was in Quebec," he said in a 1984 interview, "and I was a Quebec architect. But I was also working at that moment on a cultural anthropological museum in Quebec City, and I felt it a natural connection."38 Safdie's Musee National de la Civilisation in Quebec City would indeed be built in parallel with the National Gallery: a glassfronted complex near the St Lawrence River, with roof lines closely coordinated to the seventeenth-century architecture of the Old City, but with integrated skylights. Despite his claim of "a natural connection," however, Jean Boggs would have other ideas. A sense of Safdie's approach,to domestic architecture had already been introduced at the Lome Building while Boggs was director, via a 1974 exhibition called For Everyone a Garden, which had travelled there from the Baltimore Museum of Art.39 His Museum of Man proposal continued to emphasize that he was sensitive to user needs and that "the issue of context is a burning concern in our work."40 But the proposal also included a sketch of an immense, triangular "Great Hall," through whose glazed walls visitors would be able to look across the Ottawa River at the Parliament Buildings, the Supreme Court, and other Ottawa icons. This "Great Hall" would, as Safdie put it, provide "a living room on the city."41 As the Gallery director who had overseen several studies about a building, Boggs had certainly by this time developed her own sense of what she wanted not for the "Museum of Man" but for the National Gallery. As early as 1971, she had focused on contextual compatibility and user-friendliness. "There is an optimum size for a museum beyond which the visitor faces fatigue and boredom," she had written, adding that a new building should "fit rather agreeably into the Ottawa landscape." And while she had deplored the Lome Building's "hermetically sealed" floor structure, she had also allowed that one of its strengths was a glass-walled ground floor, arguing that "it should be possible to have some of the Gallery's activities visible in glass from the street."42 ' Yet such concerns might have reshaped any of the half-dozen concepts that were submitted for a National Gallery building, rather than for a "Museum of Man" in the closed "competition." Indeed, the eventual glass-walled frontage along the Gallery building's entire south facade bore remarkable resemblance to one of the other concepts, as developed by the firm Barton Myers Associates.43 Why, then, did Boggs opt for a transposition of Safdie's "small sketches and ideas" for the Museum of Man to a full-fledged design for the National Gallery? This question becomes much more puzzling when other aspects of Safdie's record are factored in. For these might have suggested his special incompatibility with the project of designing an art museum, and least of all one that would house modern and contemporary as well as older art. This was because, in making his proposal for the Hull museum, Safdie did not bring only his stature as the architect who - according to his archivist Irena zantovska Murray - had left the most "profound impression upon the Old City of Jerusalem."44 The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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He had also, since Habitat, become an architectural theorist. And curiously, the most systematic presentation of his views came out as a book in 1982, the year he developed his concept for the Museum of Man. Form and Purpose was a polemic launched by Safdie at recent trends in his profession. In it, he made next to no mention of Canada. What the book entailed instead was an iconoclastic reading of the grand sweep of anthropology, history, urban planning, and - last but not least - art, as they all pertained to architecture. That Jean Boggs read Form and Purpose when it was published was made clear in an article she wrote for the Burlington Magazine in 1985, about the building process for the National Gallery. And, as yet a further dose of irony, her comments there can serve to introduce the paradox of Safdie's selection for the Gallery project. It had been, she noted, "somewhat discouraging to be confronted" with Safdie's statement in Form and Purpose that "practically nothing that has been done in the name of art during my lifetime has had any significance for my understanding of the universe." She then cited some of Safdie's disparaging remarks about modern art. "For a National Gallery," she wrote, "that has collected contemporary art enthusiastically and is proud of its recent acquisition of a Picabia and past acquisitions of a Warhol, Segal and Oldenburg it is not reassuring to have the architect of the new building writing of Dadaism and the Pop movement 'Personally I can't consider either as art.'"45 These were not Safdie's only disparaging comments in Form and Purpose about modern and contemporary art. Boggs could even have continued at length in citing Safdie's dismissal of much of Europe's art since the Renaissance. She opted not to. But his remarks on Pablo Picasso must have especially irked her, given her own 1969 description of Picasso as the artist who most "determined the way I look at art and, to some extent, life." For Safdie, Picasso most exemplified what he called the "narcissistic" and "egocentric" attitudes of contemporary artists.46 Referring to Picasso's provision of a sculpture for the Richard J. Daley Plaza in Chicago, Safdie accused him of "selling out" to corporate interests, "without caring about the context" where his work would be shown. This plaza, Safdie claimed, was the opposite of a "living room on the city:" a "desolate" and "barren land" that served as "a memorial to the corporation whose phallic tower dominates it."47 In providing the sculpture, therefore, Picasso had played to the role of "Art the Fixer": "the anesthetic used by architects" to decorate "unacceptable space." Safdie's views on Picasso also informed his statement that "very rarely do I see evidence of the collaboration of various people, including artists, working in harmony to create our environment." In this case, the opprobrium was directed toward the sheer volume of work produced by Boggs's artistic mentor. "The fact that Picasso painted thousands of paintings," Safdie wrote, "has little to do with the quality of life in our cities and houses."48 With this criticism, Safdie was, of course, repudiating art's claim to independence as a special category, whose very uselessness may contribute to its range of potential meanings. It seemed instead that, for him, art ought to be a reinforcing part of a larger whole, an "environment" which would improve "the quality of life in our cities and houses." What, then, was Jean Sutherland Boggs, who had invested so much in 296

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the scholarly integrity of art as an independent enterprise, and in the National Gallery itself as an independent institution toward the collecting and display of this enterprise, doing recommending an architect who held such views? The answer may be that there was, in Safdie's overall structure of argument, a paradoxical link with Boggs's perspective, not on Picasso and Warhol, but on museums generally, and even on their relation to contemporary art. This link merits exploration, because it may provide a clue not only as to why - public rhetoric aside - Boggs supported placing the building in Safdie's hands, but also as to why the building came to look as it did. For the deeper question is whether Boggs supported him not in spite o/the "friends and enemies list" he presented in Form and Purpose but in part because this list dovetailed sufficiently with her own anxieties about contemporary art, to render the similarities in their positions improbably more important than the differences. These questions can be considered only through a still tighter focus on Safdie's views, in parallel with Boggs's own about contemporary art and museums. How, then, did Safdie arrive at such comments, and what role did they play in both his overall theory of architecture and the approach he would bring to the National Gallery? To consider briefly the argument in Form and Purpose: Safdie's concern was with insisting on the importance of "a motivation based on the concern for the wellbeing of those for whom we build."49 It was his goal in designing buildings, he said, to find "things which are 'organically truthful" in their response to individual and collective needs."50 But this assertion did not take place in a vacuum. Safdie was also angry with contemporary "postmodern" - or, as he called them, "Post Modern" architects who, he alleged, were ignoring such concern with "well being" for the sake of a "formalistic (and sometimes eclectic) visual game in which there are no rules." To confirm this assessment, he cited statements by the architects Philip Johnson ("There are no rules, surely no certainties in any of the arts. There is only the feeling of wonderful freedom.") and Frank Gehry ("I want to be open-ended. There are no rules, no right or wrong.").51 As an example, he cited Johnson's AT&T building in New York City, as embellished with what Johnson himself called "neo-Renaissance detail" and "derivations from the twenties." This, Safdie claimed, was just the sort of building that was not done "with a deep sense of commitment to people, a commitment in the broadest sense to man in all his complexities, hopes, fears, and, above all, his well-being."52 Such a claim of "commitment" to "man in all his complexities" would itself have endeared Safdie to the humanist in Jean Boggs. Curiously, though, he did not write of finding inspiration for this "commitment" in a tolerant and catholic consideration of human history in all of its "complexities." Rather, he spoke glowingly of what he called "indigenous environments" and of their alleged similarity to "how the forms and structures of nature, with all their complexity, richness, intricacy, and beauty, evolved in response to an organism's will to survive." "I have always found it inspiring to study the constructions of indigenous builders," he wrote, "and to examine the evolution of forms in nature, where I am perpetually confronted with the intimate connection between form and purpose ... Every time I design a building, after attempting to define what is fundamental to the 'survival of the organism' and The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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exploring forms that evolved in response - in a sense attempting to imitate a process that has evolved over millennia in nature - 1 wonder if this is possible for us. Can we imitate Darwinian evolution? Can we recognize the great number of requirements, and can our minds synthesize them?"53 Safdie, then, set himself no small goal as an architect: to "imitate Darwinian evolution," after first identifying a commissioned "building" with an "organism" to whose "survival" he was committed through the terms of his employment. This very goal, however, of "imitating] Darwinian evolution" seemed just a little incompatible with that cultural evolution of "man in all his complexities," to which he also professed his loyalty. And it seemed especially suspect in relation to the fundamental principles of a social democracy such as Canada, which - far from investing in Darwinian principles of "natural selection" - had, nominally anyway, given protection of the weak a special importance. Moreover, in his advocacy of such "imitation," Safdie came perilously close to running together, under the heading of "organisms" human societies, animal collectivities, and the buildings he had been commissioned to design. "The fact that a house in Yucatan," he wrote, "with a thatched roof and curved walls, corresponds so closely to a house in India, where there is a similar climate and similar building materials, is convincing demonstration that what evolved was not arbitrary. It is almost like the similarity between the nests of certain birds in America and in Europe, or the fact that ants make their houses of mud, and bees theirs of wax, regardless of what region of the world they evolved in."54 How "indigenous builders" themselves might feel about this alleged "almost... similarity" to birds, ants, and bees was not considered in Form and Purpose. Instead, Safdie just as freely placed himself, as architect, outside and above whatever "organism" he was considering, in terms of his goal of assessing its "survival" needs and "imitating Darwinian evolution" to improve its chances. This tendency did recall, just a little, the Platonic demiurge of the Timaeus, who "out of disorder... brought order, considering that this was in every way better." And it also, in running together "nature" and human society, recalled the National Gallery's own more recent past, via Maud Brown's description of how her husband Eric had carried his religious commitment to his work: "As he saw it," she wrote in 1964, "growth, whether of an individual or an institution should be a natural unfoldment, a part of that inherent Tightness of purpose which, when unopposed, operates spontaneously and inevitably all the way from the growth of a seed and the song of a bird to the circling of a planet round its sun." The difference is that in their own commitment to metaphysical system, as to the Gallery as an institution, the Browns considered themselves to be inside and a part of such "unfoldment," as it was "here and now guided, guarded, and governed by that one infinite divine Principle which is God." Safdie, by contrast, conceded no such allegedly divine guidance, even as, in his role as architect, he remained outside the "organism" he was studying. And, in suggesting a continuity between animal "communities" and human "societies" that in some way could be and ought to be deliberately imitated, Safdie also provided, throughout Form and Purpose, a case study of what is called, in philosophical ethics,

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"the naturalistic fallacy."55 This is the logical error of deriving a prescriptive "ought to be" from some interpretation of "nature" that is presented as descriptive of what is "natural," and therefore worthy of imitation by human beings. But error though it may be, this confusion of interpretation with description, and of both with prescription, has been used to "justify" programs as diverse as free-market Social Darwinism and Soviet-style collectivization. Perhaps, though, for the reader that he found in Jean Boggs, Moshe Safdie's logic was of less concern than was his passionate interest in the "survival of the organism," broadly defined. Boggs had been for many years, and was still, concerned about the "survival" of an institutional "organism": the National Gallery of Canada, whose own "complexity, richness, intricacy, and beauty" had been under siege since the late 19608 from not one but two directions. On one side were radical artists who did not respect the "hallowed atmosphere" she sought to cultivate in "the museum." On the other were the "decentralizing and democratizing" bureaucrats of the NMC, who did not respect her goal of making the Gallery "a great centre." Boggs had even used the term "organism" herself in 1969 to describe the Gallery's collection. She had done so defensively, in resisting an NMC board member's suggestion "that the National Gallery could carry out its role if it never added another single painting." "Like all organisms which do not continue to grow," Boggs said then, "the collection would die."56 At that time, Boggs also said that "the collection is ... at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish." This claim went on to inform her 1971 history of the National Gallery, which was essentially a history of "the collection" and of how it had evolved. It was around "the collection" that she had sought to build both the National Gallery's "aura" and its "centripetal" status as a "great centre," "a world apart in time and space from the community that surrounds it." Given the semantic looseness that informed his own notion of "an organism," the Safdie of Form and Purpose could certainly have been expected to sympathize with such goals. He even brought to his understanding of societies as "organisms" a cardinal "principle": that "the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces." This "principle," Safdie wrote, "seems to define the very nature of urbanism; a city or village is not simply a haphazard collection of people working and living independently but represents people converging, so that what each does as an individual contributes to a greater whole. Why were other cultures so successful at this, while, by comparison, we continually fail?"57 Obviously, the National Gallery's collection itself entailed a convergence in which "the sum of the parts" could be said to be "greater than the individual pieces." What did Safdie himself mean, though, by "converging"? That he was thinking of more than just the physical movement of people toward a given area was suggested in his enthusiasm for certain kinds of sacral architectures as manifestations of the impulse to "worship." He was effusive, for example, about "the great Gothic cathedrals," in which "every piece of sculpture is subordinated to the overall order." In the building of such cathedrals, he wrote, "any sense of economy was overshadowed by the collective will of a group of people to build a place of worship to God, who was the cen-

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tral object of their lives and their hope of survival."58 In this case, then, according to Safdie, "God" became the "central object" that made for convergence of "collective will," just as the term "survival" seemed to extend for him into questions of otherworldly as well as this-worldly endurance. This example hints at Safdie's flexibility of reference for the conceptual vocabulary that he presented in Form and Purpose. And given this flexibility of reference, there indeed seemed no reason why his advocacy of the "converging" as distinct from the "haphazard" could not - like that of an "organism" - extend to the "survival" of a wide range of institutions and objects, depending upon his commission. In regard to the National Gallery of Canada, "the collective will" of the small "group of people" resolved to produce a building was not directed toward "worship" of God, as "the central object of their lives and their hope of survival." Jean Boggs, however, had herself posited - or, as Nietzsche might have put it, willed - the value of a different kind of "central object," which she claimed "is at the heart of everything we" do. This was "the collection," as a constantly expanding assembly of parts that was ordered from above according to scholarly methods to which she was deeply committed. But the very existence of this centripetally organized - or "converging" - national art collection had, since Eric Brown, been seen also as an aid to the "wellbeing" of the nation itself as a social organism: an "immense influence for good" that could "serve [the] native sense of nationality" and "add fitness and order and suitability to everything it touches." This overlapping of vocabularies, then, offered the basis for both a personal bond and a modus operand! between Boggs and Safdie, as well as between Safdie and the earlier history of the Gallery itself as an institution. Except there were also those remarks in print about modern art that Safdie had offered in his reading of modernity in terms of "narcissicm" and"egocentricity." Why did such art so affront him? The answer seemed to lie in part with his reading of architectural history. According to Safdie, "the emergence of individuality" during the Renaissance made for the rise of "sophisticated builders " whose "stage set" architectures fostered in turn "the disruption of the evolution of building technology." This was because - he claimed - the architects of the Renaissance and Baroque were indifferent to "the function and purpose" of their buildings. As an example, he cited how "unfulfilling ... an experience" he had had in "frequently" visiting St Peter's in Rome. "It lacks scale," he wrote in contrasting it with Gothic cathedrals. "Despite its size, [it] lacks a sense of wholeness or greatness... It is poorly designed."59 This attack on what he called "rule breaking" in the European Renaissance and Baroque, however, prepared the way for Safdie's assault on the present, and particularly on "Post Modern" American contemporaries such as Johnson and Robert Venturi. As "a result of distorted value systems," such architects were, he wrote, carrying on the "disruption" of these earlier periods by indulging in "certain symbolic gestures at the expense of down-to-earth, straightforward livability."60 As an example, Safdie had in an earlier article cited Venturi's "gold-anodized TV antenna placed over the roof of a home for the elderly." This practice, he insisted despite the ubiquity of television, "confuses genuine universal symbols ... with private symbols that are meaningless to the public." He went on: "Post Modernism exalted ... the desire for decoration, the 3OO

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intellectual pleasure of mannerism in architecture, irony and metaphor, and the unappreciated value of vulgarity."61 But in doing so, it showed little concern for "the well-being of those for whom we build." Yet the "distorted value systems" of these architects, according to Safdie, had another source besides the Renaissance. "The dichotomy between the flourishing of the visual arts in recent decades and the constant struggle of architects has frustrated architects," he had written in 1981. "While 'making if was not always easy for a painter or sculptor, once support by critics and galleries was achieved - most often through ... self-promotion - an 'anything goes' situation resulted. Artists were playing their own game... A delicate alliance among critic, artist, and merchandiser (the galleries) established the framework. Artists did not have to be socially useful, relevant, or politically conscious, nor did they have to deal with the... economic constraints of the era ... to achieve the gratification of self-expression. It was perhaps inevitable that architects would adopt the methods of successful artists."62 In Safdie's view, then, it was contemporary artists who had given contemporary architects a bad example, though as part of a larger pattern. "I believe," he wrote, "that Post Modernism has merely absorbed into its dogma current values in the worlds of art, fashion, and merchandising - the rise of narcissism, the hunger for novelty, and deep pessimism about the prospects for humanity that have descended upon us in the past decade."63 This claim was elaborated in Form and Purpose, into terms that almost implied a conspiracy: "Art and fashion, in our time have become almost indistinguishable ... We create cycles of acceptance for art products just as we do for fashion. Both are influenced by manipulators of taste: In one case it is the critics; in the other it is Madison Avenue. Though the manipulators are not exactly the same people, they certainly appear in and use the same media."64 Safdie's attack on modern and contemporary art, then, did not stop at the dismissal of Pop Art as "an embarrassing measure of the gullibility of our society" that Boggs acknowledged in her Burlington Magazine article. This was the easy part, and could have echoed Clement Greenberg's 1967 derogation of Pop as a kind of "Novelty art" that had set about "the task of extricating the far-out 'in itself from the merely odd."65 But Safdie also targeted the abstraction that Greenberg had claimed was the "major art" of the twentieth century. Claiming that "the majority" of people "simply believes that contemporary art is meaningless," he declared that "for the first time in history, the majority of the population is uninterested and uninvolved in what artists are doing. This rejection is often expressed as, 'Oh well, I could do that myself.' I am not saying that the man in the street has the skill to mix the acrylic paints and produce that subtle white square on another white square, but he knows that he could have conceived it. What he's really saying is, 'I've learned nothing from it. It hasn't enriched me. I could have conceived it myself. It was not worth conceiving in the first place.'"66 Safdie followed these words, which seemed to express as much his own feelings as those of a hypothetical "Man in the street," with a quotation from Gunther Stenfs The Coming of the Golden Age: "Many people feel that art has somehow turned into a dead-end street and that for there to be any future an escape must be found from the present direction." The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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Safdie's gloss of art history in Form and Purpose was, to say the least, simplistic: were the peasant majority in eighteenth-century France, for example, "interested" and "involved" in the art of Watteau and Fragonard? But the eighteenth century itself was perhaps unacceptably recent for Safdie's sense of scale. "I think of art as an elevated activity that goes beyond the immediate, beyond personal idiosyncrasies," he wrote, and hinted at two routes for this "elevated activity" out of its current "deadend street."67 The first he derived from the "indigenous societies" that he equated with "nature." "A person carves his own piece of wood to make an image to worship," Safdie conjectured, "and then makes a comb out of the leftover piece of wood. Art is not institutionalized to the point where the process of enrichment is delegated to others." Safdie seemed oblivious to how much he was making the "indigenous" woodcarver sound like a primordial television viewer, in this proclivity to "image worship." Presuming instead to a magisterial understanding of "indigenous" mental states, he went on to claim that "the person" who carves wood in this way "because it satisfies him also fulfills a higher purpose: that of enabling himself to take part in a ritual or ceremony."68 Safdie was also willing to concede, however, that this prescriptive model for art making might not be adequate to more complex societies. Accordingly, he presented another one, derived from a more urban "older culture" where - as he put it - "art and craft generally were not differentiated." When the Persian emperor Darius built his capital Persepolis in the fifth century BC, Safdie wrote, "he searched for the great artists or craftsmen and commissioned them to carve the story of the kingdom. What is important to recognize is that the quality and richness of the environment was the sum of the efforts of many people. If we attach the label 'artist' to those who did the more complex work, then we can say that the artists of that age were directly involved with creating the environment." Safdie did not seem to notice that there might be something significant about the fact that these "artists" were not "creating the environment" on their own, or in collaboration with others, but were doing so under the direction of an absolute emperor. Instead, and as usual excoriating the present, he went on to say that such "direct involvement" on the part of artists "is not the case today." For "today," he wrote, "most of the effort of those who call themselves artists has no direct impact whatsoever on our environment. The fact that Picasso painted thousands of paintings, has little to do with the quality of life in our cities and houses."69 Here, then, was the context for Safdie's comment about Picasso: an unfavourable comparison with the "direct and integrated" work of "artists," in an "environment" produced and overseen by an ancient emperor. This was, to say the least, a comparison that ran the present and distant past together in ways that suggested an indifference not only to the nuances of art history but to distinctions between modern democratic societies and ancient despotisms. And in its indifference to these distinctions, the comparison did more than uncannily parallel the "Versailles"-like atmospherics of the Liberal government's announcement in Ottawa of two new museums. It also gave a further twist to Safdie's investment in the naturalistic fallacy.

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The palace of Darius at Persepolis showing monumental doorways, de-individuated repeating wall reliefs, columns, and a straight, gradually sloping ceremonial stairway, circa 516 BCE. In his 1982 book, Form and Purpose, Moshe Safdie expressed admiration for Darius's palace as an instance of art and architecture working together to create an "environment." (Erich Schmidt, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)

For it seemed that he was indeed value-neutral on the political dimensions of the humanly created "environments" that he was presenting as "simply there," in the way that natural "environments" are "simply there" as outcomes of "Darwinian evolution." Obviously, this was the sort of claim that also implicitly informed his design and construction of sectarian buildings in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, in such a way as to make them, too, appear as though "they had always been there." Nevertheless, according to Safdie, Darius's Persepolis was a worthy example of art in relation to "environment," because the emperor had "searched for the great artists or craftsmen" - the two terms seemed ideally interchangeable for him - "and commissioned them to carve the story of the kingdom." But Safdie s use of "or" was not the only revealing grammatical quirk in this example. His use of the definite article "the," rather than the indefinite article "a," in referring to "the story of the kingdom," recalled George Ignatieff's use of the same definite article in describing how "the story of Canada's varied environment and heritage" would be carried "to millions of Canadians each year" by the NMC s Discovery Train. It did so, however, in an even more suspect way, suggesting that Safdie found no problem at all in the dictation of a given society's master narrative - along with its "environment" - by a despot. He even added a touch of surly humour. "Examining the wall-reliefs at Persepolis of the

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horses, parading figures, and lions all carved in stone," he wrote, "I imagined the artist going to the master mason, or maybe to the king himself, and saying, 'I'm not going to carve horses and lions; I'm in my elephant period.'"70 Safdie did not elaborate on the next phase of this scenario, regarding "the artist" who refused to conform to an emperor's version of "the story." But in adding that "the attitudes of the ancient Persian artist and an artist today are fundamentally different," he seemed to forget that the attitudes of the ancient Persian subject, cast as an anonymous, de-individuated figure in processional wall reliefs, and of the citizen today might also be legitimately different. Instead, he gave the impression of finding the likely fate of a non-submissive artist under Darius amusing, just as he carried over into modernity this antagonism to art as a legitimately independent - never mind critical - activity. "The very word aesthetics is a curse," he wrote, "When people say "aesthetics", they refer to some kind of need, or else they wouldn't talk about it. It is a shorthand way of referring to a whole set of feelings they have difficulty expressing. For convenience, and perhaps out of confusion, they set it apart from function. They don't see the interdependence of the two, and the need to expand the word function to include all human needs."71 Thus did Safdie pronounce upon "people" who presume to speak - from "convenience" or "confusion," of course - as though "aesthetics" might be worth considering in itself. This was a stunning foreclosure on any notion of art's independence, as also of the critical dialogue concerning it, such as developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries out of Kant's isolation of a "faculty" of "aesthetic judgment." But especially did this assessment mock art's value as an activity whose deliberately useless objects can escape predetermined meanings, so as to generate multiple indeterminate meanings that can be filled in by anyone, rather than only by their maker or his/her overseer. Instead, Safdie insisted on the criterion of "function" as pre-eminent in regard to all objects, including art, and so limited potential meaning - and even legitimacy - from the outset, on the basis of how well this criterion was satisfied according, evidently, to whatever "ruler" was responsible for "the environment." At the very least, such opinions put Safdie on collision course with a "Post Modernism" that may actually celebrate fragmentation, along with the ironies of human fallibility, in the absence of those theological authorities and secular rulers that formerly decreed the proper - or "natural" - identity of the "whole" and ensured suppression of those "parts" deemed deviant. But his sweeping dismissals of contemporary art were also stunningly insensitive to the "context" in which the artists of his own time had to function: namely, the very vacuum of authoritative value which Nietzsche had foreseen as an inevitable adjunct to the rise of science. By the 1980s and irrespective of Safdie's pronouncements - thoughtful artists in Canada as elsewhere were grappling with this destabilized context and with the changes being wrought in human experience by technologies of speed, information processing, and media packaging. The most insightful art was also, by this time, moving past both Greenberg's neo-Kantian preoccupation with its own forms and limits and Minimalism's neo-scholastic scrutiny of the fine points of art-system context. Instead, many artists were exploring the strange new worlds of technology, without 304

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prior metaphysical or museological commitments, acutely sensitive to art's role in articulating the terms of what Heidegger had called "the historical moment." Neither such dilemmas nor such a role for art seemed to interest Safdie. Instead, in the letter to Philip Johnson, he made the astonishing claim that "in terms of the forces and realities of life today, a solution is a process of moving towards a truth, which is the complete opposite of freedom from rules ... If our energies were wholly directed to making a city, a building, a place, the rediscovery of the Garden of Eden, we would not need to indulge in frivolities."72 The confident and morally valenced use of such words - "realities," "truth," "frivolities" - implied Safdie's own assumption of a tone of moral authority in distinguishing the meanings of these words and the differences among them: one that hearkened back yet again to an earlier era of apparent certainties that nevertheless could conceal great injustices. How far he could carry this tone was suggested in a story he told in Form and Purpose. "When I was designing the rabbinical college [Yeshiva] in Jerusalem," he wrote, "the rabbis said they wanted stained-glass windows in the synagogue.'Well,' I said,'stained glass is a Christian concept. Stained glass means images and the Scriptures say, "He makes a graven image and falls down before it (Isaiah 44:15).'" This argument did not impress the rabbis. They said, 'Don't worry. Make them abstract.' But I knew that stained-glass windows were out of place opposite the Western Wall in Jerusalem. What did they really want? They wanted colour, the sense of joy that coloured glass gives. So I searched for a more fundamental way of achieving this, and from this search was born the idea of putting large prisms in the skylights. As the sunlight penetrated, it would break into the spectrum of colours and flood the walls of the synagogue with colour."73 This tale of the architect who quotes Scripture to spiritually lazy rabbis - "opposite the Western Wall" no less - and then searches for and finds a "more fundamental way" of giving them what they "really" want, goes beyond suggesting even the Platonic "demiurge" in its presumptive resonance. It also recalls the biblical story of the young Christ who, visiting the temple, knows Scripture better than the rabbis do. Among the differences is that at least Jesus let his chroniclers tell the story. The anecdote, however, does more than suggest the ambiguity built into Safdie's claim to be building for a client while presuming to know what this client "really" wants. It also illustrates his capacity for mixing stylistic innovation with a simplifying rhetoric of moral authority that in this case relied on sectarian scripture to determine what was "out of place," even as it obscured the sheer legal messiness of Israel's contemporary hold on the place where the building would stand. " H O W DEEP A CANYON"

What in all of this did Jean Sutherland Boggs find congenial? For while she later wrote that she had found Safdie's dismissal of Pop and Dada in Form and Purpose "discouraging," she did not say this about any of the book's more dramatic claims. Instead, her Burlington Magazine article focused primarily on the conflict that arose over Safdie's desire to allow natural light into the building's interior "white cubes" that would contain contemporary art.74 Perhaps in Boggs's very silence on the wider The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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issues raised by Safdie's polemic, then, is to be found a guide to the subtle similarities between them. Both did seem to cleave, after all, with differing degrees of sophistication, to the view of art as an "elevated activity." To recall Boggs's memorable words from 1969 criticizing "the lack of a core" in contemporary art: "I expect art to express tensions, violence, brutality, partly as a catharsis but also as a reminder of the world in which we live. But I expect these to be given form and contained within the frame of a painting, drawing or print, or placed upon a pedestal. If you know contemporary art, you will realize how deep a canyon this places between it and me."75 That this "canyon" continued to be "deep" was revealed in Boggs's own casual choice of words sixteen years later, when in her Burlington Magazine article she gently chided Safdie's views. It had, she confessed, been "somewhat discouraging to be confronted" with the architect's 1982 statement that "practically nothing that has been done in the name of art during my lifetime has had any significance for my understanding of the universe." She then refrained, however, from adding the next line in Safdie's polemic: "It is not a factor in how I conceive buildings." Instead she commented: "For a National Gallery that has collected contemporary art enthusiastically, and is proud of its recent acquisition of a Picabia and past acquisitions of a Warhol, Segal and Oldenburg it is not reassuring to have the architect of the new building writing of Dadaism and the Pop movement 'Personally I can't consider either as art.'" But for all the appearance of criticism of Safdie, it was within this very statement of unease that a subtle but crucial clue to her common ground with him could be found. For just as Safdie used the definite article "the" to claim that "artists" under Darius had carved "the story of the kingdom" under the emperor's direction, so Boggs had her own set of priorities that were also grammatically embedded. She used the indefinite article "a" to refer to the artworks that the National Gallery had "collected": "a Picabia,""a Warhol, Segal and Oldenburg." This indefinite article pertained to artworks that - in accordance with convention - were physically separable as freestanding, permanent objects from the body of work produced by these artists, even as they represented this body. But Boggs's use of the indefinite article as a convention also showed that she continued to "expect" art's expression of "tensions, violence, brutality" to stay, if not necessarily "within the frame of a painting, drawing or print," or "upon a pedestal," at least within the realm of collectable objects assimilable to that whole which she in turn favoured with the definite article as being greater than the sum of its parts: namely, "the collection" that she had claimed "lies at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish." When she announced this expectation, the affront of N.E. Thing Co.'s "escape" as she had called it - towards an ephemeral but incisive rearrangement of the Lome Building's ground floor into office space had still been a recent memory. Its impact clearly lingered, for she had voiced her irritation over a year later, in a September 1970 speech to the Northeast Museums Conference in Ottawa. "Increasingly," she said, "artists want to divorce themselves from the manufacture of objects - preferring to work with 'concepts' or ideas rather than with materials. Like the Vancouver artist Iain Baxter, an artist may want to conceal even his own personality behind the 306

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name of a company - his called with questionable wit the N.E. Thing Co. - and send directions to produce works of art to different parts of the country by telex. Sometimes these are neo-dadaist jokes. But whether these artists are laughing or jibing they are cynical about the continuity of our society and the probability of preserving what we produce now."76 Boggs, then, had been affronted also by the Baxters' refusal to join in the game of providing unchanging collectable objects - special things rather than "N.E. Thing" - that could be absorbed permanently into both "the collection" and the "hallowed atmosphere" of the museum itself as "centripetal." This passage bears remarkable resemblance to Safdie's own polemic against a postmodern present in Form and Purpose: his accusation, for example, that Phillip Johnson was as an architect indulging in a "visual game in which there are no rules" but which "is motivated sometimes by whim, humour, or desire to shock, and sometimes by boredom or nostalgia." It also anticipated Safdie's dismissal of contemporary artists generally as people who were "playing their own game," and his depiction of "current values in the worlds of art, fashion, and merchandising" in terms of "the rise of narcissism, the hunger for novelty, and deep pessimism about the prospects for humanity that have descended upon us in the past decade." The extent of this set of similarities is striking. And it suggests that, in Safdie, Boggs found - whether consciously or subliminally - a "kindred spirit" in regard to her own anxieties about the lack of limits which had emerged in the art of the 1960s and which had been illustrated during her tenure as Gallery director not only by the N.E. Thing Co. installation but also, even earlier, by the tensions within sculpture '67, which she had ordered shut down early. Safdie brought to the project, then, besides his "small sketches and ideas," a lexicon of "survival," of "convergence," and of art as "an elevated activity," which could be turned toward providing a context for the presentation of art as self-contained and portable objects: an "environment" that would overarch, showcase, and itself re-frame such objects but that would - like Darius's Persepolis - resist structural and semantic subversion by forms of art that did not respect such conventions. But how would it do so? A key to this question may lie in Boggs's further concern about what she had in 1970 called the "anti-historicism" of contemporary society: its indifference to things of the past and to preservation of things of the present for the future. She had even named this tendency through a link between the visual arts and architecture that might have pleased Safdie: "In talking about anti-historicism in 'our' society, I may only be talking about Canadian society - but I doubt it. It is a phenomenon which is conspicuous in the visual arts. The artist deliberately uses materials which he knows will not survive because he is working for the present and not for the future. Even architects talk about their buildings as becoming ultimately obsolescent; and builders consequently build of perishable materials."77 Boggs had then said in the same speech that "the artist's indifference to the probability of the future is equalled by the layman's indifference, or even hostility to the past. The layman may like the idea of an object being old, but not that it can be meaningful." Accordingly, in a policy paper of the early 1970s, she had also written that an "ideal" National Gallery should resist such attitudes by containing reminders The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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of continuity with the past in its very form: "We should be able to experience something ... of the principal periods from which our own Canadian traditions have grown - Gothic and Renaissance Florence, Reformation Germany, Flanders and Holland in the seventeenth century, Baroque Rome, eighteenth-century Venice, France and England from the seventeenth century, and nineteenth and twentieth century United States. In savouring these civilizations we should be better able to understand and enrich our own."78 Boggs's taste for the European past was undoubtedly more encompassing than was Safdie's, in that she had never argued for a "disruption" of "evolutionary development in building and art" due to the Italian Renaissance and "Baroque Rome." But within the range of his preferences, Safdie, too, brought to his work an intensely historical interest, which - especially when he wrote of religious architecture - could verge on the rapturous. Of a visit to the twelfth-century cathedral of Chartres, for example, he wrote in Form and Purpose that "there was a sense of place and of harmony with nature, of all elements working together toward a great spiritual experience ... The builders of Chartres wanted a great, soaring space. Pushing masonry construction to its limit, they achieved a delicate balance between the forces of gravity while creating the largest possible space, allowing light to penetrate into the church through openings on all sides ... Light, images, sculpture, colour, stone, gravity and music work together to uplift the spirit of the worshipper.79 Again, Safdie hinted in this account at a persistent longing for styles of dogmatically unified "harmony": in this case for the last great epoch of a unified Christian Church in Europe, before the Protestant schism. Nevertheless, his likes were bound neither by sectarian preference nor by the limits of Europe and North America, as Boggs's often seemed to be. He was richly linked through his work with the ludaic heritage of that city which - along with Athens - did the most to shape Western civilization. But he could muster equally rapturous, if paradoxical sentiment about another Middle Eastern tradition in sacral architecture, the dome shape used in Islamic mosques: "As it appears in Genesis, And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the Light, that it was good.' Having built the dome, man observed and saw that it was good. And when he made a house and then a mosque, he made an even finer and greater dome - not only because it was an efficient way to enclose space with bricks, but because it had a sense of space and unity that transcended shelter, that bespoke of communion and worship of God."80 So many references to sacral architectures in Form and Purpose might have prompted a reader to conclude that its author was a religious man, with even something of the intensity brought to faith by, say, Eric Brown. Adding to the apparently unintended web of irony, however, was Safdie's disavowal of finding bedrock for his moral authority in a sectarian belief in God. Rather, he noted that, while he had been commissioned to design a rabbinical college in Jerusalem and to renovate the Western Wall district, he did not "usually go to synagogue, although I recognize the possibility that sometime I may want to."81 Yet, even as he eschewed sectarian allegiances, Safdie wrote with the assurance of a true believer of some kind. "I really believe," he said in his letter to Philip Johnson, "that there are so many important 308

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issues requiring understanding and resolution that should form the basis for our collective efforts. To start with, we have yet to understand the process by which what we build in the urban environment relates to the rest of the city so as to fulfill the principle of'the sum being greater than the individual parts.'"82 Jean Boggs, during her tenure as director of the Gallery, certainly had not presented herself either as bound by religious commitment. Instead, she had been responsible for renewing Jarvis's emphasis on sensuous "delight" through "quality" in art and for changing the Gallery's working paradigm to one of careful art scholarship, according to an international and secular standard. Nevertheless, she had committed publicly to the National Gallery as a "Life Work," even as she had hinted, through - for example - the careful 1972 display of Gothic religious art in Art and the Courts, that she had her own sense of how religion in art could cultivate her priority: what she called "the very hallowed atmosphere within a museum which separates it from the community." For Boggs, "that museum aura, that museum spell - a world apart in time and space from the community that surrounds it" did not seem to refer to any transcendent authority beyond itself from which it might draw legitimation. Rather, it seemed to find material anchorage in the museum's very contents as "the collection," which she had claimed lay "at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish" and which had been the basis of her book on the National Gallery in 1971. Both Safdie and Boggs, then, came to their "collective efforts" on a Gallery building having strongly expressed, if idiosyncratic, beliefs: Safdie in the "principle" that "the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces" and that architecture should serve the "survival" of an "organism"; and Boggs in the core value of "the collection" and of the museum itself as a "spell-casting" and "centripetal" institution in society. The vigour with which these beliefs were held, articulated, and acted upon seems - at first glance - to make of both figures potent counter-examples to Nietzsche's claim that modern people had, with the failure of confidence in God, lost their capacity for staking out and defending a fixed moral standpoint. But closer scrutiny suggests that, instead, they were providing a further development of Nietzsche's case. For both Boggs and Safdie, in the intensity of willed belief in their chosen objects and principles, and in the style of active willing that carried this belief outward into the world, exemplified that form of "value positing" that Nietzsche associated with the exercise of "the will to power," precisely in the absence of allegedly God-given frameworks for such belief. Yet paradoxically, in this very style of "value positing," Safdie and Boggs were also binding themselves to, and further developing the influence of, earlier "believers" who had helped shape the Gallery's history and who themselves had made for a record of transition, during the twentieth century, in the "central object" of such belief. Four figures stand out: Eric Brown, with his faith in his ordained mission via the Christian Science version of God, and in art as a nation-building "force for good"; Lawren Harris, with his belief in the transcendent Principle of theosophy, and in the mission of the artist as a spiritual guide for the nation; Vincent Massey, with his foreshortening of transcendent reference into belief in "Canada," even as he The New Triumvirate: Trudeau, Boggs, Safdie

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continued to give a privileged role for art; and Charles Comfort, with his belief in the role of the National Gallery itself as "an agency of central government" and a force for "public spiritual welfare." Safdie's own program of understanding what people "really want" better than they themselves understand it was profoundly continuous with the spiritually guiding role claimed for the arts, and promoted top-down "for the benefit of the people" by all these figures. And it was as though his appearance, via Boggs with her own willed belief in "the collection" as a "core" and "central object," brought the possibility of fulfilment, in stone and glass, of this tendency that was etched so deeply in the Gallery's history as an institution. But as with all these figures, too, Safdie brought a subtext of exclusions that crossreferenced most clearly and even uncannily with the agenda of Eric Brown, as perhaps the single most shaping person in this history. In his rhetoric, Safdie projected a view of architecture itself as a force for good, toward "the well-being of those for whom we build." And similarly Brown, from 1912 through the 1930s, had publicized his view of art as an "immense influence for good." Brown's sense of a religion-based scale of artistic value had, of course, long been superceded among most "serious" artists and curators by a more unsettled view of art as keyed to the uncertainties of a post-religious society. Nevertheless, it was recalled by the assured tone of Safdie's declaration that "I think of art as an elevated activity that goes beyond the immediate, beyond particular personal idiosyncracies, whereas fashion is a drive for novelty and differentness for its own sake."83 And given Safdie's reverence for design in nature, and for "indigenous societies'" collaborative participation in such design, he might also have favoured Brown's claim about that "whatever else art can be it can be nothing greater than a revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty." The distinction between "fashion" and "elevated activity," however - like Safdie's dismissals of contemporary art as "meaningless" and of "Post Modern" architecture as "arbitrary" - also recalled the less appealing side of Brown's sectarianism, in his 1919 excoriation of "degeneracy" in "futurism." The two used almost identical pejorative terms to disparage styles they found an affront to harmony: the one in art, the other in architecture. In "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," Brown wrote of the "futurist" that "as fast as one banner wears out, another goes flapping to the mast head, each more outlandish than the last. But almost anything incomprehensible does to call a law-breaker by, and after all that is what he is and nothing more."84 Safdaie, for his part, wrote of the "playing around" with vocabulary in Baroque and postmodern architecture, that "with the disruption of evolutionary development in building and in art, the new boredom emerges, and, once again, rule breaking becomes widespread."85 The two even shared a disdain of Picasso: Safdie for his alleged "narcissism" and "detach[ment] from society," Brown because he painted "peanut heads" and "elephantine torsos" that made nature seem "chaotic." Undoubtedly, Brown's and Safdie's notions of "good," in terms of which "lawbreaking" and "rule breaking" could be assessed, differed from one another. Brown was explicit in his commitment to a higher order of value as decreed by God and interpreted in terms of the "divine Principle" of Christian Science. Safdie's commitments were not so explicit, in that he did not subscribe openly to the values of Juda31O

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ism - or any other religion - as providing a scale for distinguishing "genuine universal symbols" from "private symbols that are meaningless to the public." At first glance, Safdie's notion of "good" seemed largely a social one: concern for the "wellbeing" of "those for whom we build." Yet, while the building of a house might provide clear terms for pursuing "down-to-earth, straightforward liveability" rather than "distorted value systems" and "symbolic gestures," could the same be said when the project was not a house but a National Gallery for the nation-state of Canada? Safdie did, however, have a "principle" that, in Form and Purpose, he promoted as vigourously as Brown, in his testimonials, promoted his faith in "divine Principle": namely, that "the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces." And in this case, given that the "ruler" of the project was not simply Jean Sutherland Boggs, with her investment in "the collection," but also the government of Canada under Pierre Trudeau,"the sum" being served - by architecture as by art, in the sense called for by Brown - would most certainly be the 19805 version of what Brown called the "native sense of nationality," in the form of the unified Canadian nation-state. "I was certainly conscious of my preoccupation with the necessity of creating processional routes and a sense of ceremony," Safdie wrote in 1997, "and spoke about the disappearance of these qualities from modern architecture. The prominence of the site and idea of a national gallery overlooking Parliament appeared to be an appropriate place for such a gesture."86 The emphasis in this statement of mission was Safdie's own. Such confidence of moral tone, based on non-aesthetic "values" and carrying with it selective exclusions, had undergone mutation since Eric Brown. But it had persisted in the Gallery's history, whether in the form of Vincent Massey's influential folding of metaphysics into "Canadianism" or via Alan Jarvis's self-description as "the Billy Graham of Canadian art," even as he collaborated in excluding the very sort of American abstract art that Safdie would dismiss as "meaningless." Even Boggs herself had used the term "heretical" about a contemporary art that did not fit her notion of a search for "meaning" within the limits of the frame or pedestal, and of the "museum" itself as providing a "hallowed atmosphere." And in so doing, she too had hearkened back not only to Brown's agenda of exclusions but - more implicitly - to the Platonic Ur-text on "grace" and "gracelessness" in the arts, as found in the Republic. Perhaps appropriately, then, it was Boggs who would be pivotal in the reintroduction of the language of "principle" not so much into the discourse of the National Gallery as into the project of constructing the shell which would contain its art. For it would be her chosen architect Moshe Safdie's job to provide a new frame for the Canadian national collection, one that would contain it as securely and flatteringly as frames had long contained paintings, and one that would resist subversion, either by renegade artists or by "decentralizing," nationally minded bureaucrats.

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A determined-looking Jean Sutherland Boggs with Bernini's Bust of Pope Urban VIII on 18 May 1976, shortly before she left the National Gallery for Harvard University. (National Gallery of Canada)

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A "Magical Spot"

Postmodernist architecture attempts to appropriate the past not as a dead, over-aestheticized form but as a living, symbolic substance, charged with contemporary significance - which is the only way the past can remain viable. - Donald Kuspit, The Contradictory Character of Postmodernism, 1990 The idea of limit is unavoidably the idea of God. - George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, 7959

The collaboration between Jean Boggs and Moshe Safdie entailed, along with the Gallery's usual web of irony, an almost comically ambiguous relationship to time and space. It was Safdie's job as architect, and Boggs's as chief administrator, to produce the building that had been sought by the National Gallery's partisans since 1910 and that would also endure as its "appropriate" shell for the indefinite future. Toward this goal, Safdie would paradoxically reach back in time, as well as far away in space, toward the retrieval of motifs that he and Boggs thought suitable. Adding to this ambiguity was the fact that many of these motifs would be drawn from much earlier styles of sacral architecture, as these evolved mainly in Europe and the Middle East, in conjunction with claims of special insight into the mysteries of time and eternity and into versions of truth alleged to be eternal. Providing the element of comic paradox, however, was the relationship of this enterprise, which spoke to several versions of the grand scale of history at once, to the immediate terms of the construction process. For practical and narrowly political dilemmas threatened, several times, to provide an architectural version of the story told by Plato of the philosopher Thales, who was so preoccupied with the stars that he tripped and dropped into a well. Yet the project did not unravel. And that it escaped this fate was due mainly to the canny manipulations, the occasional ruthlessness, and the eventual self-sacrifice on the altar of politics of Jean Boggs herself.

" W E ALL C L I M B E D UP T H E R E "

The relationship to time was shaped initially by the very commission of Moshe Safdie as Gallery architect, for, as the author of Form and Purpose a year earlier, he came to the project with opinions vastly different from those of the museum architects of his own time, who had given form to the building boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. There is no need to get mired in the ambiguous term "postmodern" for these differences to be identified, given that even Safdie's own "Post Modern" whipping boy, Robert Venturi, formally disavowed the label regardless of how it was spelled.1 Instead, a brief exemplary comparison should convey how Safdie's rhetoric of "belief," his investment in the cardinal "principle" that "the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces," and his concern with "creating processional routes and a sense of ceremony" were extremely atypical of museums intended for modern and contemporary art. During the few years on either side of the National Gallery project, a loosely affiliated group of architects - James Stirling and Michael Wilford of England, Hans Hollein of Germany, and Arata Isosaki of Japan - all designed major museums. Stirling and Wilford were the most prolific, with their major projects being the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany (1977-84), and the Clore Gallery as an extension to the Tate Museum in London (1982-86), to house the paintings of J.M.W. Turner. Hollein's most notable project was the Staedtiches Museum in Monchengladbach (1976-82), while Isozaki's was the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1982-86).2 All of these architects, in rejecting the homogenized glass and concrete of 1960s modernism, borrowed motifs from the past, as Boggs had hoped would be done with a building for the National Gallery of Canada. And all of them played too, inevitably, toward Douglas Crimp's criticism that the museum per se provides an overarching and reordering context for the works of art brought together within its precincts.3 The crucial difference is that they did not do either of these things in terms of an architectural vocabulary that even remotely resembled Safdie's prescriptive rhetoric. There was, in these new museums, little sense of a "process of moving towards a truth," much less toward "rediscovery of the Garden of Eden." Instead, they were buildings whose architects acknowledged that the world they shared with contemporary artists was one of uncertainties. And, just as many of these artists engaged in explorations of unresolved context, so too did the architects admit an ambiguity in regard both to their surroundings and to the past that was often not without humour. Perhaps most exemplary among these museums, and worth describing briefly for the sake of comparison, was Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, a city in southwest Germany that was largely rebuilt after massive bomb damage during the Second World War. The Neue Staatsgalerie was sited beside the restored neo-classical Staatsgalerie that, as designed by Gottlob George Barth, had opened in 1843. In his own plan, Stirling imitated the u-shape of the old Staatsgalerie, to which his building would be connected by a walkway. But he did so in concrete, which he then - to quote Thomas Muirhead - "embellished with stone cladding, Egyptian cornices, De Stijl canopies, romanesque or Loosian windows, and ... other stylistic frills."4 These 314

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The Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, by James Stirling and Michael Wilford, 1977-84; the restored nineteenth-century-old Alte Staatsgalerie in the background provided the model from which Sterling and Wilford worked. (Annemarie Adams)

"frills" were what gave the building its eclecticism, its playfulness, and its paradoxically unstable warmth. Among them were bright red outdoor railings, bright blue load-bearing segments, and bright green window frames, with stone facing in horizontal light and dark bands. The building itself integrated curves that included, within the u-shape, a walled open-air circular sculpture court. For Charles Jencks, this court mingled "echoes of the Pantheon Rotunda ... with the ruins of Hadrians villa," while the entire building was "a well-scaled place that mixes sacred and profane meanings in equal measure" and with "delightful ambiguity."5 For Muirhead, the Neue Staatsgalerie offered "a connoisseur's random selection of abandoned architectures ... which only indistinctly describe the epochs or places to which they might originally have pertained." But crucially, Muirhead went on, "there [Stirling] leaves them, suspended in an ideological void, where they mingle in nonchalant accumulation, setting off dissonances which Stirling himself could not control, transcending architecture to invite philosophical contemplation of our unstable modern condition."6 This was not an architectural language of "converging" or of "harmony" or "of all elements working together toward a great spiritual experience," such as was used admiringly by Safdie in Form and Purpose. Nor, certainly, was it one that emphasized art's own status as what he called "an elevated activity." Instead, "a connoisseur's random selection of abandoned architectures," left "suspended in an ideological void" so as to "set ... off dissonances," sounded downright improvised and even A "Magical Spot"

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vaguely shabby, and seemed to invite accusations of the "rule breaking" which Safdie had linked with the Renaissance. Muirhead could claim, however, that, consistently with contemporary art and even with the Jean Sutherland Boggs of 1965, Stirling's Staatsgalerie was also "inviting philosophical contemplation of our unstable modern condition." And such contemplation certainly did not seem out of place in Stuttgart, whose citizens might conversely have resisted taking seriously an architecture of "converging" and "of all elements working together toward a great spiritual experience," given that its own centre had been destroyed by Allied bombing of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, after much of its population had converged toward a madman in the guise of a Fuhrer. With the commission for the National Gallery of Canada, however, Moshe Safdie was not engaging with a Stuttgart whose citizens had themselves in the 1930s - to adapt his own panegyric on Darius - invested in a modern "emperor" and even in the "artists of that age" as submissively "involved with creating the environment," and then been bombed into near oblivion by those who disagreed. Instead, he carried his rhetoric of "ritual," and his "principle" that "the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces," to a national capital which had been untouched by the convulsions of war and whose administrators wanted a building that would "combine with its site to give a sense of approach and a sense of ceremony appropriate to a great national institution." What was more, he was working with a project supervisor who not only had an intimate knowledge of this "national institution" but who had stated her preference that it provide "the very hallowed atmosphere within a museum which separates it from the community": an "atmosphere" that she had also described in terms of "museum aura" and "museum spell - a world apart in time and space from the community that surrounds it." This set of goals would be furthered by a strategy introduced by Boggs herself, in a way that layered into the design process a relationship to the past that was - to recall Muirhead on the Staatsgalerie - far from "random." In the months after his appointment, Safdie got to know the Nepean Point "space" itself and the guidelines that had been set by the visiting committee. But unlike Douglas Cardinal, who, though generally less experienced, was left largely alone to develop the sinuous, land-hugging forms of the Museum of Man, Safdie was also, as an architect who had never designed an art gallery, quickly swept up in a 1980s version of the old European Grand Tour. This was provided by the woman who, he would later say, gave him "guidance""in the profoundest sense" throughout the project, as well as the opportunity to visit, via subsidized travel, a multitude of places "apart in time and space" from the specific "community" that would surround a new Gallery in Ottawa.7 With him went a team from the Gallery, headed at different times by Boggs herself, by Brydon Smith, and by Gyde Shepherd. What passed between Boggs and Safdie, on these visits to museums, galleries, and places of worship throughout Europe and North America, is known only to them. But the tissue of their relationship clearly helped to shape, along with the Gallery's interior display rooms, one of the dominant features in the new building, and perhaps the single main feature in establishing a visitor's perceptual set. This was the narrow, straight, gradually slop316

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ing ramp which, at a length of eighty metres, should ensure no shortage of time for the visitor to develop a sense of art as "an elevated activity" and of "the collection" itself as "a world apart in time and space from the community that surrounds it" (image on page 18). But one of the most important questions raised by the ramp, as the immensely scaled feature which introduces each visitor to the building, is whether, indeed, it "works" primarily in this way at all. A closer look at the process of the ramp's development will not only speak to this question but serve a number of goals at once. First, it will introduce - with all due paradox and irony - what Safdie has implied was the core inspirational experience toward the form of the Gallery as a whole: the experience that seems to have originated for him outside chronological time, even as it was anchored in local space, so as eventually to demand - in his and Boggs's opinion - an initiatory motif linked to distant, highly sacral space. Secondly, it will convey a sense of how, in the building's design, Safdie introduced postmodern appropriations based not on the admission of contemporary uncertainty, and on the sense of thwarted grandeur that is its ironic concomitant, but rather on non-ironic motifs of centrality drawn from sacral histories. Thirdly, it will shed light on the behind-the-scenes influence of Boggs herself, in cultivating results that would not always honour the architect's statements about his preferences. And fourthly, it will clarify the question central to Safdie's design for the National Gallery: whether the obligatory access route provided by the architect establishes a perceptual set that pertains to "art," especially as this term has been shaped by modernity. Safdie inherited the challenge that would lead to the ramp from the site itself and from the visiting committee's prescription that "the new Gallery should combine with its site to give a sense of approach and a sense of ceremony." Nepean Point was, at the time of his commission, a bulge of parkland that sloped gradually uphill to the west of Sussex Drive and that - like Parliament Hill farther west across Enclosure Bay - jutted into the Ottawa River atop a limestone cliff. It was up to Safdie to make sense of this site's potential, and in 1988, after the building's opening, he offered his own retrospective version of how he had done so, via an interview with the Ottawa writer Dan Turner, which Turner then self-published as a chapbook called Safdie's Gallery: An Interview with the Architect. The interview itself is an extraordinary document, in that Turner was so clearly in awe of both the building and Safdie himself that he allowed the architect as much latitude to talk as he wanted, with no interjection of critical questioning. "I'm no expert in the field of architecture," Turner declared in his introduction. "I've written for newspapers and magazines about people and politics, and I've written books about baseball. But I like the arts and I like this gallery, so it is a pleasure to offer this interview in the hopes it will help you share my pleasure."8 For as he had noted a few lines earlier: "There were hundreds of thousands of people streaming through an exciting new building without knowing much about it, or how one of the world's great architects went about making it as special as it is." In keeping with this tone, Turner began the interview with a comment, not a question, and Safdie then spun this into a lengthy and revealing monologue on the A "Magical Spot"

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evolution of the Colonnade ramp. "I've watched people come into the gallery," Turner said, "and move toward the art. They like the way the adventure begins. The entrance is close to the street, but it's not at all common. Then right off the bat your colonnade ramp creates a mood of anticipation and exhilaration." Safdie replied to this enthusiasm as follows: After first visiting the site I remember coming back, spreading a piece of paper and taking out my charcoal. And the first thing I asked myself was "what's the right place to enter the building?" Well there was only one right place, immediately on the southwest corner where the gallery connects with the cathedral, the market, the sidewalk, and the streets themselves. That was a symbolic linking place with the community, but it was also a practical thing. Ottawa isn't tropical. I kept thinking of thirty-below temperatures and a howling wind. I couldn't march people up the side of the hill to the river to bring them in, or set up an entrance on the far side of the building. They had to be invited in as soon as they got to the neighbourhood.9 The idiom of this interview closely echoes that of Form and Purpose, as a book that Safdie had intended for a non-specialized audience. But there is also continuity in the tone of morally invested self-assurance. "There was only one right place ...""I couldn't march people up the side of the hill to the river to bring them in ..." Turner did not interrupt with questions, and Safdie went on, as to how he had decided the "invitation" should be extended: When I was examining the site I walked from the street up to the river. And soon after I started climbing up toward Champlain's statue, my relationship with the river changed dramatically. To about the middle of the site I was still connected to the park coming down from the Chateau Laurier. I was inland. I knew the river was on my right, but there was no strong sense of it. But as soon as I climbed up three or four metres, there was the feel of a precipice looking down on the water. Parliament became almost touchable. I asked them to build a platform, right at the corner where the Great Hall is now. I wanted to see what it would be like going up another four or five metres. They built it and we all climbed up there. And it was like magic. So then it was a matter of connecting the entrance with that magical spot. That could have involved a climb - a journey uphill. The secret was to turn that journey into a procession. The statue described by Safdie is at the summit of Nepean Point, overlooking the river above a limestone cliff. As created by Hamilton McCarthy in 1915, it depicts the French explorer Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) who passed through the area in 1613 and 1615 in a fruitless search for the western sea. The statue is both comical, in that it depicts Champlain holding the navigational instrument called an astrolabe upside down, and controversial, in that it depicts a native Canadian guide kneeling at his feet. What is most striking about Safdie's description of his own ascent near this statue, however, is the way in which it actually surpasses the rhetoric of Form and Purpose, in its quasi-mystical and alchemical deployment of such terms as "that 318

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magical spot," "the secret," and "a journey uphill" that could be turned into "a procession." Yet the style of language also is recognizable from the early history of the National Gallery as an institution: for example, Eric Browns depiction of his Christian Science mission in terms of "the road that leads upward" and Lawren Harris's theosophical reliance on Madame Blavatsky s The Secret Doctrine. Turner's very diffidence as an interviewer only reinforced the connection with earlier periods of alleged certainties. In his introduction, he described Safdie as "an impressive man ... But he is much warmer than people of his station often are, and his ego, while not exactly hidden, never gets in the way of his humanity."10 Whatever this assessment's overall accuracy, Turners use of the anachronistic phrase "people of his station" itself hearkened back to a time of fixed social ranking, such as indeed had prevailed in 1910, when Sir Edmund Walker, as chairman of the Advisory Arts Council, hired Eric Brown. As befitted Turner's casting of himself in a lesser "station," he also did not question Safdie's introduction of a quasi-mystical vocabulary, and the architect went on: It struck me that you should really go through some kind of procession to make your way into something as important as the National Gallery. The entrance had to be more than just a store front with the merchandise set out inside the front door. There had to be something to prepare you for the special event inside. That's what the ramped colonnade is for. It's to erase the practical problems of arrival and entry, to clear your mind, to change your pace, to lift you up and take you away from the endless bustle of day-to-day life. It doesn't rush you toward the collection. Youfindyourself ascending. There is excitement to the ascent. To me it often has a religious feeling to it: Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream. Ascent offers - I don't want to say purification, but there's both an intellectual and emotional uplifting ... Once you're inside, you unburden yourself of all your weights at the checkroom. And then you ascend. It's a ritual, a ceremony. And I think it excites people.11 Safdie did not say at what point in his reflecting upon the idea of a long, straight ramp he had begun to think of it in "religious" terms, or when these terms were filled in by a specific association with "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream." But the hint is that such associations with the place itself began early in his involvement. For as he said about the impressions left by his initial visit: "I asked them to build a platform, right at the corner where the Great Hall is now... They built it and we all climbed up there. And it was like magic. So then it was a matter of connecting the entrance with that magical spot." Obviously, Safdie was already carrying with him, from Form and Purpose, a lexicon that linked significant architecture with religious experience, and that had shown itself in more than just his claim of having found a "more fundamental way" of colouring light for a rabbinical college near the Western Wall. For to recall one crucial example of this rhetoric, as deployed throughout a book published in the year the Gallery project itself was announced, he also wrote: "As it appears in Genesis, 'And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the Light, that it was good.' Having built the dome, man observed and saw that it was A "Magical Spot"

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good. And when he made a house and then a mosque, he made an even finer and greater dome - not only because it was an efficient way to enclose space with bricks, but because it had a sense of space and unity that transcended shelter, that bespoke of communion and worship of God." What exactly Moshe Safdie sensed as "magical" about the "spot" where he had the platform built, he didn't say. But these terms cannot be easily dismissed as theatrical excess contrived for the interview. For he would indeed build into the design for the National Gallery, directly above this "spot," his own adapted version of such a "dome" that was based also - he claimed later in this same interview - on "Platonic geometries." But if Safdie lodged references to Plato in the Great Hall, he also, by his own admission, lodged references to "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream" - and so to early biblical Judaism - in the Colonnade ramp by which visitors would reach the Great Hall, and then beyond it "the collection." Paradoxically, at times in the Turner interview, Safdie played down the significance of this "processional" route into the National Gallery. "The entrance had to be more than just a store front with the merchandise set out inside the front door," he said. But he also added: "There had to be something to prepare you for the special event inside." Which "special event" he meant, he did not make clear. His first mention of "art," however, in an interview that goes on for thirty-three pages, is perhaps revealing. It occurs on the third page, after the words "And then you ascend. It's a ritual, a ceremony. And I think it excites people." He then went on: "Mind you, it's also one of the things that has come under attack. Architectural critics have said 'it's a long way until you get to the art.' Well, yes, a lot happens before you get to the first gallery, and why not? In the old museums one would go up the grand stairs and enter the rotunda, and then there'd be a whole sequence of spaces."12 What Safdie neglected to mention in this comparison of the new National Gallery building with "the old museums" was that even they, for all their reproduction in stone of the hierarchical codes of their respective societies, did not tend to be represented by their architects in terms of "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream." Far from it. Given their post-Enlightenment association with the rise of Reason, and with an aestheticized ranking of civilizations that tended to leave out ancient Israel owing to Judaism's banishment of images, a link with the Book of Genesis was especially unlikely. Nor did such museums - whether the Louvre Palace, or the National Gallery in London, or the Pinakothek in Munich - contain ramps, never mind eighty-metre-long, perfectly straight ones that were intended by the architect to make for "a procession." Indeed, Safdie's comparison of the new building's access route with "the grand stairs" of "the old museums" seemed especially strained, given that - according to the interview as printed - he only a few minutes earlier had said, after his identification of "ascent" with "intellectual and emotional uplifting," that "I could have built steps up to the entrance and had a level walkway to the Great Hall. But the last thing I wanted was stairs coming up to the building at the front. Not even one little step." If this justification of the new National Gallery's Colonnade ramp in terms of "the grand stairs" of "the old museums" was flawed, though, where did this leave the 32O

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alleged comments of "architectural critics" that "it's a long way until you get to the art" and Safdie's self-justifying reply that "well, yes, a lot happens before you get to the first gallery, and why not?" Perhaps an answer might lie in the subtext of Safdie's saying "a lot happens before you get to the first gallery?' and in whether this "a lot" would prove as neutral as he implied it was when he added "and why not?" What, then, was Safdie saying he hoped would happen, via the design of the Colonnade ramp? "A ritual, a ceremony^'"an intellectual and emotional uplifting" by means of "ascent," but with what associations? As in the passage on "the dome" in Form and Purpose, the only specific association was with an episode in the Book of Genesis. And as with the alleged instant of Creation in which "God said, Let there be light: and there was light," this was no minor episode. Rather, in the biblical "record," "Jacob's dream" was itself the mythical moment of transformation that gave to the Jewish people the anchor precisely of their own "magical spot" and their own "promised land." In so mythically turning them from landless nomads, to a territorially grounded "indigenous people," it laid the basis for their flight from Egypt under Moses toward the "promised land"; for their claim of divine sanction in displacing the earlier occupants of this land; for the establishment their own "kingdom" there, with its palaces and temple; and for their much later claim to a state in Britishmandated Palestine, in 1948, that came with its own new wave of displacements. What was implied for the National Gallery of Canada in this invocation by its architect of "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream," in conjunction with his own alleged discovery of a "magical spot" and with the provision of a ramp that, for him, seemed to evoke both of these? Even the National Gallery's commissioned chronicler of the new building, Witold Rybczynski, seemed a little nervous in regard to this motif, writing of the Colonnade ramp that "climbing it among a group of people, one feels like part of a ceremonial procession in a Cecil B. DeMille movie."13 To resort to one of Safdie's key terms: the "context" for this reference in the King James Bible reads: And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth; and thou shall spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it.14 A "Magical Spot"

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Like Safeties reference in the same interview to the Great Hall's "Platonic geometries," this reference to "Jacobs ladder, Jacob's dream," carried weighty baggage. But in this case, the baggage came not from the Platonic Ur-texts of Western philosophy, and their model of atemporal truth that was exemplified in geometry and that could allegedly be reached through reason. Rather it came from the Judaic Ur-Text of Western revealed religion, and its model of truth as given by God and realized through history. This was a text that had served for millennia as the codified and narrative basis of the Jewish religion. But it had also, as merged first with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and later - via St. Augustine - with Platonism's own investment in a higher, invisible world, formed the basis for the Christian religion. And this religion had, in turn, served to sustain Europeans in their colonization of the foreign, inhospitable, and previously occupied place called Canada. Such had been the tenaciousness of this textual tradition that even in 1951 the Royal Commission chaired by Vincent Massey had cited its elaboration in the New Testament as having provided the "Christian principles" which "inspired" the "freedom based on law" of which Canada could "boast." But why this passage? What was Safdie hinting had informed his syncretistic design of the Colonnade ramp and would also be available to those who walked it? Or to rephrase the question via the biblical passage: what did the Lord God Himself allegedly say in it to Jacob, in "Jacob s dream?" The words are hardly trivial: that "the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth; and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed." This biblical passage, then, was not simply one that recorded Jacob's arrival at a holy place, which he identified with "the house of God" and "the gate of heaven" and where he was vouchsafed a vision of both of these. It was also and more important - the one that claimed to record God's gift to Jacob and to his descendants, of "the land" where he had slept. The text, then, is one that claims to establish divine legitimation of a particular "people's" occupancy and even - as would prove to be the case with the Israelites - eventual conquest of a "land" as "promised" to them, regardless of its previous occupants. That Safdie would make this association, in suggesting how people might feel in "ascending" the ramp he had designed for the National Gallery of Canada, added a whole new dimension to his claim in Form and Purpose that he had designed a sectarian building for East Jerusalem to look "as though it had always been there." For in this case, he seemed to want to transpose into glass, stone, and steel the Bible's value not to the Israelites in Canaan but to non-aboriginal Canadians, as implying divine legitimation of their "dominion" over precisely that territory which would be visible, in microcosm, from the vast windows of the Great Hall, in such a way as even to be identifiable - beyond the summit of "Jacob's ladder" - with Jacobs heaven. This was not, perhaps, what the visiting committee had anticipated when it expressed the hope in 1982 that a new building would honour "the general principle of integrating art with life to the greatest degree possible." Nor, perhaps, was it even what Jean Boggs had been getting at, in her hope of entrenching the "hallowed atmosphere 322

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within a museum which separates it from the community." And indeed, Safdie had to contend, before the ramp could be integrated into the Gallery's design, with resistance from Boggs herself, who as early as 1971 had written that an "ideal" gallery should not be physically challenging for its visitors. Nevertheless, Boggs acquiesced. And the manner in which she came to do so provides an especially crucial instance of how the dynamic of compromise, between these two strong personalities, would coalesce semantically via the ramp's implicit codes. Safdie gave, in the interview with Turner, his version of how this happened, in the final section of the interview devoted to the ramp and after the reference to "the old museums": Anyway, Jean Boggs, who was in charge of putting the gallery in place and who was so helpful throughout, was worried that the colonnade would be forbidding, particularly to older people - even though there's an elevator for people who really need help. So she said we should go to a place with a similar experience - my design being a ramp 80 metres long with about a 5J/2 per cent slope - to see how it would really feel. We were going to Italy anyway to look at courtyards and stairs, and somebody remembered that in the Vatican, leading to the Scala Regia on the right side of the grand square, is a ramp done by Bernini that had a quality similar to what I had designed. When we got there we went to a door on the right-hand side as you face St. Peters, then entered a ramp lined with columns, with a grand stair at the end. We measured the incline and it was 82 metres long. And it was exactly the same slope. Jean spent two hours walking up and down, and that day she approved it. So now you'll read that the promenade was inspired by the Scala Regia. That's not true. I hadn't been to St. Peter's since I was sixteen, and I certainly didn't remember Bernini's ramp. But seeing it was the confirmation Jean was looking for that the promenade would work.15

The "somebody" who made this suggestion was likely the Gallery's assistant director, Gyde Shepherd, whom Boggs described, in her Burlington Magazine article, as having visited the Scala Regia with Safdie. It is at this point, however, that the question of the ramp's implicit meanings, and of the kind of experience it would foster, takes an important turn. For in what sense did spending two hours walking Bernini's ramp in the Vatican provide "the confirmation Jean was looking for that the promenade would work" in the Gallery building? Was this simply a matter of her concluding that "older people" might not have a difficult time with so long a ramp? Or did the context - one of Safdie's favourite words - also play a part? Any phenomenology of "being convinced" is, of course, speculative, for this is an invisible mental process that is almost bound to be overdetermined. And it is as impossible to get inside the principal players' minds as it is to recover the nuances of dialogue that took place between them. But what Safdie neglected to mention in telling this story is that Bernini's ramp in St Peter's is no ordinary ramp either. Instead, and as the prelude to the Scala Regia, it provides ceremonial access to the pope himself. The refurbished question, then, is whether in the course of those two hours' "walking up and down" Bernini's ramp in the Vatican, Jean Boggs began to appreciA "Magical Spot"

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The Corridoio Bernini in the Vatican Palace, leading to the Scala Regia and designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini around 1665. According to Moshe Safdie, Jean Sutherland Boggs spent two hours walking this sloped corridor before approving his design for the Colonnade ramp in the National Gallery. (Tod Marder)

ate the feeling that might be subtly conveyed to visitors, concerning both "the collection" and "hallowed atmosphere," by the experience of mounting a ramp almost identical to one which, in Rome, led not to the "heaven" of "Jacobs dream" but to the pope, as Catholic Christendom's central figure: the alleged direct descendant of St Peter. Informing this experience, too, was a piquant irony of which she could not have been unaware. Among the purchases for "the collection" of which Boggs had been most proud during her tenure at the National Gallery was, in 1974, a bust of Pope Urban v m (Maffeo Barberini) that had been made around 1632 by Bernini himself. Urban v m has often been described as Bernini's major patron, especially in regard to the loggias of St Peter's, though not in regard to the Scala Regia itself. But if his record from 1623 to 1644, as one of the major Baroque popes, was in other ways mixed, it was also obliquely relevant both to Canadian history and to the concept of divine legitimation precisely as it pertained to the place called Canada. As an historical figure, Urban v m was the scion of an aristocratic Florentine family, an astute politician in an age of religious absolutism, and, appropriately, a contemporary of Cardinal Richilieu in France. Within Italy, his great achievement was to consolidate the Papal States, even as, in facing the schism of the Protestant Reformation, he failed at maintaining papal authority in northern Europe. He also played the politics of the Thirty Years' War between Catholics and Protestants in a way that shaped the devastation and political marginalization of Germany for the next two centuries, and led in France to the persecution of Jansenism - the quasi324

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Protestant doctrine of God's sovereignty - as heretical. Ironically, given the terms of Boggs's visit, Urban VIII oversaw a building program whose nepotism and opulence - that included the papal villa of Castel Gandolfo - nearly bankrupted the papacy. But he was also the pope under whose authority French Jesuits claimed their own divinely ordained mission to the Iroquoian peoples of New France, and the Company of the Hundred Associates was established by Richilieu to control the fur trade in North America. Which of these associations passed through Jean Boggs's historically wellinformed mind, in the course of the two hours she spent walking up and down Bernini's ramp to the Scala Regia? Only she might be able to answer this question, and "Miss Boggs" was never free with her private musings. But she did leave behind, in May 1976, near the end of her tenure as the Gallery's director, a photographic portrait that provides its own kind of evidence (page 312). It suggests, as a visual record, that Bernini's bust of Pope Urban VIII had - to use one of her own preferred words in regard to art - special "meaning" for her. The portrait shows her posed, wearing one of her Op-Art dresses, and with a very determined look on her face, in front of and just to the right of the papal bust, in such a way as almost to suggest an identification with it. And given this record, as well as her sense of history, it is difficult to imagine that she was oblivious to the tissue of resonance that would be brought to a new building if it received its own ramp on the same scale as Bernini's. The ramp to the Scala Regia had, for more than three centuries, provided the route to a succession of real popes. But Moshe Safdie's ramp at the National Gallery, in echoing Bernini's ramp, would also lead to Bernini's pope, whose features had been aestheticized via Bernini's genius with a piece of marble. This was a sculpture that even gave human form to the link between "hallowed atmosphere" and art. Could there be any more effective symbolic way, then, of entrenching and enriching the terms of "museum aura" in the new building? Yet if the experience of walking Bernini's ramp in Rome could only have added to Jean Boggs's sense of its possible awe-inspiring role in the National Gallery, surely Safdie should have felt awkward about these grounds for approval. Wasn't Boggs's enthusiasm for his proposal coming out of her experience, not of discovering "a magical spot" in Ottawa and associating this with "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream," but of walking a ramp designed by a Baroque architect for St Peter's Basilica in Rome? Safdie did not, in the interview with Turner, bring up his own assessment of the Baroque in Form and Purpose. But he had criticized it there, along with the Renaissance, as having heralded the "frivolous" approach to building that he identified with "Post Modernism." Especially had he singled out St Peter s: "Every time I visit St. Peter's, I am surprised to discover how unfulfilling and disappointing an experience it is ... Despite its size, the cathedral lacks a sense of wholeness or greatness ... I visited St. Peter's first when I wasfifteen,again at the ages of twenty one and twenty five, and then frequently thereafter. I always had the same reaction. It is poorly designed."16 This criticism of St Peter's paralleled Safdie's critique of Picasso in Form and Purpose as exemplifying the social irresponsibility of twentieth-century artists. A "Magical Spot"

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Boggs had recommended that he design the National Gallery despite this dismissal of the artist who she claimed had "determined the way I look at art and, to some extent, life." The suggestion has been that she did so in part because his more general views made him the architect likely to provide the museum itself as a "frame" which - ironically recalling Picasso - could contain the "violence and brutality" of contemporary art while restoring a sense of what Benjamin called "cultic" aura. With Bernini's ramp in St Peter's, the accommodation process was in effect reversed. For Safdie clearly did not stand on his blanket criticism of St Peter s, when one of its features proved pivotal in convincing Boggs to approve his idea for a ramp. Instead, the willingness to overlook his earlier words seemed to extend even to the memory of his experience. If in Form and Purpose he said that he had "visited St Peter's first when I was fifteen, again at the ages of twenty one and twenty five, and then frequently thereafter," by the time of his 1988 interview with Turner, he was claiming that "I hadn't been to St Peter's since I was sixteen, and I certainly didn't remember Bernini's ramp." At the very least, this discrepancy suggests - probably to Safdie's credit - that in the face of the sheer excitement of his discovery of a "magical spot," and of his realization that this could be reached by a ramp, he was willing to "forget" doctrinaire pronouncements, if to do so meant furthering the potential that he had sensed. The "ceremonial access route" of the new building, then, provided the terms for these different agendas to mesh and harmonize, with Boggs's prior interest in "hallowed atmosphere" providing the basis on which Safdie's more grandiose and even primordial vision could grow and prosper. But just as Safdie's range of associations, as built into the ramp, did not stop with "Jacob's dream, Jacob's ladder," so possibly did Boggs's own stop neither at seeking a "hallowed atmosphere" for "the collection" nor at identifying this "atmosphere" with Baroque Catholicism, through a simulacrum of Bernini's ramp, with a Bernini pope beyond the summit. Safdie, for his part, carried the ramp's association's beyond Judaism's own "dreaming phase" and into the historical phase in which the Jews built a capital for their kingdom, after they had occupied their "promised land.""The idea of ascent [the ramp]," he wrote in 1997, "and the juxtaposition of the ramped mass next to the flat processional route in the Concourse, have their roots in Egyptian and Gothic structures. Such elements might be found in Jerusalem's archaeology - the Cardo Maximus or the monumental entrances to Herod's Temple."17 Similarly, by adding squared pylons, glass walls, and a high, peaked roof above the narrow ramp, he gave the Colonnade itself the flavour of a Gothic nave, albeit of a tilted one, that in its rise recalled also the ceremonial climb required by temple pyramids from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica. There was also, however, a further obvious allusion in the scale, slope, and overall shape of the ramp that not only exemplifies the historical over-determination of motifs throughout the Gallery's access route, but that also suggests both unresolved complexity and a different potential. Among its other resemblances, the ramp design cross-referenced, strikingly, with the well-known ramp that leads to the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir-el-Bahari, on the west bank of the Nile River near Thebes (page 20). This resonance is only strengthened by the tall, square pillars 326

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on its either side, which recall Egyptian colonnaded temples such as persist not just at Deir el-Bahari itself but at the "great national shrines" of Luxor and Karnak, which Hatshepsut herself - in pharaonic tradition - restored.18 Hatshepsut was Egypt's first great queen, who marginalized her stepson Thutmoses i n and ruled as pharaoh from 1503 to 1482 BC, in the New Kingdom's Eighteenth Dynasty. According to Spiro Kostof,"this unusual and precarious situation created the added urgency to demonstrate nearness to the gods"; this was achieved in her temple's long, straight lower ramp, such that "the greatest moment came for the visitor ... as he reached the top of the first ramp, and entered the middle court."19 Adding to the story is the rage of Thutmoses ill once he took the throne in 1482 BC. It is not clear that Hatshepsut died naturally; what is clear is that, once he succeeded her, he sought to eradicate all reference to her name in the kingdom. The resonance here is too enticing to ignore. For was there also a hint, in the ramp's design, of a memorialization - more or less unconscious - of the National Gallery's own "first great queen," the indomitable Jean Boggs herself? Had she not, during her career at the Gallery, been the first woman director, in a field that had previously been ruled by men, and even the first female deputy minister in the civil service? Had she not been, too, an innovator, who strove to make of the Gallery itself a "great national shrine," whose "hallowed atmosphere" separated it "from the surrounding community?" And had she not, in the later years of her directorship, endured the attempt at a figurative erasure of both the Gallery itself and her own role, courtesy of Bernard Ostry and the NMC, in such a way that she was first humiliated and then driven away? Yet had she not also - unlike Hatshepsut - been given a second chance, to return and reinscribe her presence, confounding her tormentors. These are intriguing associations which have, perhaps, been lying latent since the ramp's design. Were they implanted deliberately? Jean Boggs was a complex, selfprotective, and erudite woman, who had clearly been only half joking when, in 1971, she referred to women's role at the Gallery as dynamically "subversive." And she had also for years been obliquely inscribing clues to the mystery of her personality both in her writings on the Gallery and in its photographic record, despite having been described in 1967 as "tough, logical, charming, hard-edged, in a box, a person who's given up revealing herself." An extraordinary case in point, which bears describing for comparison, is to be found in an October 1971 photograph of the launch party at the Lome Building for Boggs's short history of the Gallery's "collection" that she so valued. In it, she is shown alone with a wheelchair-bound Alan Jarvis, in the company of Simone Martini's fourteenth-century painting of St Catherine. This had been part of the third lot of Liechtenstein paintings, whose purchase had been initiated by H.O. McCurry, and carried through by Jarvis, via Agnew in London, in 1956. It was also the very painting with which Boggs introduced her visual narrative of the collection in her book. "St Catherine," Boggs wrote, "represented a combination of chastity, conviction, and breeding that this age of chivalry could revere. According to tradition she was a virgin from a fourth-century aristocratic family of Alexandria (as we might guess from her crown and the exquisite embroidery on the garnet-red dress), A "Magical Spot"

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Alan Jarvis, Jean Sutherland Boggs, and Simone Martini's painting St. Catherine (circa 1320; tempera on panel, 83.2 x 40.6 cm) at the launch party for Boggs's history of the collection, 27 October 1971 (National Gallery of Canada, Dominion Wide Photos)

who confounded scholars with her arguments for Christianity (hence the quilled pen in her left hand), and who was consequently tied to the wheel (symbolized by the brooch at her throat), which shattered at her touch. She was nevertheless finally martyred by a headsman's sword (which she holds in her right hand)."20 This photograph was made five years after Boggs assumed the directorship of the National Gallery, and three years after the Gallery itself was absorbed into the National Museums of Canada, curtailing her authority. By then, she may herself have felt a little like a martyr "tied to the wheel," and, if still "courageous," much less like the "confident" and "free" being that she had identified with Picasso in 1964. In this image, however, Boggs stands resplendent in a white Op-Art tent dress, between the portrait and the wheelchair-bound Jarvis, whom she had explicitly described as "a martyr" in the book's text but who was also the Gallery's version of an Aristotelian 328

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tragic hero: a man "not preeminent in virtue and justice" but "of great renown," "who falls into adversity not through evil and depravity, but through some kind of error." Jarvis, who would die the following year, holds his own set of symbols that are rich with the record of his personal struggles: his cane in one hand, his omnipresent drink in the other, and Boggs's brand-new book on his lap. The photograph is richly iconic, and as much Egyptian as Christian, recalling the inclusion in pharaonic sculpture of official and personal symbols. And in collaborating with Safdie over a decade later to suggest, among other references, Hatshepsut's ramp and tomb, "Miss Boggs" may also have been providing a reminder that great queens - regardless of their male successors' determination that they be forgotten - have a way of persisting in their legacy. "IT'S NOT PASTICHE IN ANY

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The development of the access route would involve one more intervention: this time not from a "magical spot," but from the project's third major player and originator. Initially, Safdie produced two versions of the ramp, one of which he described as "extroverted" and the other as "introverted." The latter would have involved the ramp's passage between high stone-faced walls on both its sides, with galleries behind them. Visitors would then have "ascended" toward a glassed-in round whose light-filled presence and spectacular views would have been the more impressive on account of sensory deprivation in "the ascent" itself. Safdie himself, in the interview with Turner, referred to this scheme as "very powerful" and "more mysterious," and insisted that he was himself "ambivalent." "Looking at it from Major's Hill Park," he said, "would have been like looking at a big stone wall - almost like the wall of a city - with crystals at both ends ... It was like a city within a city. It would have seemed like Jerusalem, where you start from the outer city and come upon the walled inner city... It would have been like entering the precinct of the arts."21 Safdie insisted to Turner that he had been sincerely enthusiastic about this design, and had not - as he said some colleagues had alleged - floated it as a throwaway. Yet, if this was the case, then he had surely been naive about the plan for a ceremonial route binding Ontario and Quebec, and the National Gallery's place in this plan. For what the federal government emphatically would not have wanted the Gallery to provide was "a big stone wall" between Ottawa and Hull. Both designs went before the cabinet committee responsible for choosing a design, and both - according to Safdie - had their "passionate" partisans, such that the choice "finally came down" to Pierre Trudeau himself, "and he decided on the extroverted design." The prime minister's concern, Safdie said, was mainly "political," and was with "establishing the museum as a very unexclusive, open institution," rather than as one that would be "more private, more exclusive, and, arguably, more dignified."22 But in terms of the dynamic between the access route and the art within the Gallery, the "introverted" design would also have broken up the "ascent" experience, making it less spectacular, for, as Safdie put it, "you'd have been encircled by galleries as soon as you entered the building." By contrast, although the "extroverted" version made for a glass facade along the ramp's entire length on the building's south side, this would not so much A "Magical Spot"

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suggest the presence of art as show the ramp's own repetitive "processions" being enacted in silence behind the glass. In this sense, then, the new building would still provide a "precinct of art," but one actually distinct from and beyond an obligatory entry and exit route, whose visual codes, as deployed on an immense scale in relation to the human body, would make for their own overarching "environment." Integral to this "environment" also, of course, was the major feature that Safdie was carrying over from his sketches for the Museum of Man: the crystalline Great Hall that, like Jacob marking the site of his dream with a stone, he would build around the "magical spot." Rendered as round rather than triangular, this likewise far from neutral space - and not "the collection" - would provide the Gallery's parallel to the pope beyond the summit of Bernini's ramp in the Vatican, and to the "middle court" where, in Hatshepsut's temple, "the greatest moment came for the visitor": a zone of converging symmetries that would overlook the Parliament Buildings and the Ottawa River. Like the ramp, the Great Hall would prove to be overdetermined in its allusiveness, integrating an eclecticism of sources so as to suggest, subtly, an architectural continuity from the distant past to the Canadian present. From outside, it would in silhouette evoke the tiered forms of Mesopotamian temple pyramids, even as it would also emulate precisely the "Chapter House" shape of the Parliamentary Library across Enclosure Bay. But from inside, it would, in the proximity of its proportions to those of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, do more than just convey a generic sense of the Islamic mosques of which Safdie claimed great fondness. It would also extend still further the identification of the ramp's summit with the "gate of heaven" described by Jacob, given that al-Haram ash-Sharif is also Islam's third most sacred site, from which the Prophet Muhammad himself allegedly began his mystical voyage to heaven on a white horse. Most significantly, though, in terms of the Gallery's own history, it was in the Great Hall, erected above the alleged "magical spot," that Safdie chose to incorporate his crystalline "Platonic geometries." In their evocation of metaphysical tradition and its investment in higher "truth," these would recall in broad terms both the texts of Plato himself and the attempt by the Glaserne Kette, in 1920s Europe, to foster communitarian higher feeling through geometrical and crystalline architecture. In more focused terms, however, they would also give physical form to the agendas of Eric Brown, Christian Scientist, and Lawren Harris, theosophist, toward the merging of art with the "revelation" of hidden order, and even visually suggest Harris's attempt to provide, in the crystalline forms of his Arctic iceberg paintings, a "particular" channel for what he believed were the "spiritual flow" and "replenishing power" of "the Great North." Nor would it be any less intriguing that the Ottawa River itself, as visible from Safdie's Great Hall - or from the "magical spot" - provides a literal flow, if not from due north, then from the same northwest where Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, and the other members of the Group of Seven drew their inspiration for a style of painting tied, as Vincent Massey would put it, to "Canadian spirit." Given Safdie's claim to have been unaware of these earlier figures in the Gallery's history, his introduction of motifs that would so clearly suggest their metaphysical agendas was a bit uncanny.23 But this revival would carry so much freight as to make 33O

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a mockery of his casual "And why not?" in response to the criticism that "it's a long way until you get to the art." Clearly Safdie could not, in his design, be accused of the merely diverting or "frivolous" appropriations for which he had blamed "Post Modernists." That being said, however, his own appropriations for the access route were tied without exception - like Brown's and Harris's views on art - to traditions of belief, and of belief that honoured not simply a Divine Being or Divine Order but also the concept of an earthly order allegedly established by that Divinity. This was a curious shell for the art of a twentieth-century democracy: one ostensibly ruled through the general will as expressed through elections, through legal precedent, and through the largely pragmatic versions of "truth" that emerge from an adversarial political process. And it would likewise impose an incongruous cordon sanitaire around a contemporary art which had, in that same century, come to explore precisely the unknown spaces left in the wake of general retreat from claims that any one sect, any one religion, claims privileged access to "truth." The sheer variety of sacral sources condensed by Safdie into his chosen motifs did indeed seem - in harmony with the Canadian policy of multiculturalism - to repudiate any one sect's claims to such access. Yet this repudiation was being physically structured in such a way as to cultivate, in the visitor, a generic experience of religious awe, amid immensely scaled motifs that would not only revive the Gallery's metaphysical past but risk turning the multicultural past into the visual sum of its own metaphysical and even theocratic threads. And indeed, this language of belief soon carried over into Safdie's own comments on his design. "Here's a building," he said in 1984, "which I believe grows out of its method of construction in the true sense; its construction methods and forms aren't separable; it attempts to deal with all the iconographic, symbolic and ritual issues that interest the Post Modernists, but not responding in their way at all. It's not pastiche in any way; it's my positive way of dealing with Post Modernism apart from my critical way of just saying I think they're wrong."24 This sweepingly judgmental rhetoric - flagged by such phrases as "I believe" "the true sense," "all the iconographic, symbolic, and ritual issues,""I think they're wrong* - clearly itself recalled an age of religious faith and - need it be said - intolerance. But it also just as clearly echoed Form and Purpose. "I really believe," Safdie had written in his letter to Philip Johnson, "that there are so many important issues requiring understanding and resolution that should form the basis for our collective efforts." The impression left by a cross-referencing of these two statements is that, with the commission for the National Gallery of Canada, developed under Jean Boggs's "guidance," Safdie felt that he had found a vehicle for addressing these "important issues," as well as - in his own view - a "positive way of dealing with Post Modernism." He seems to have found, that is, to turn the phrase just a little, a chance to give form to the purposes he had outlined in his book, even as he was bringing his own sense of purpose to the form of the National Gallery. This goal clearly hearkened back as much to Eric Brown's hope for a "dream castle overlooking the Ottawa River" as to "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream." But oddly enough, it also seemed to anticipate a very different understanding of postmodA "Magical Spot"

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ernism that would be ventured by the American critic Donald Kuspit in 1990. In his own attempt to make sense of what he called "the contradictory character of postmodernism" and implicitly against Safdie's own reading of it in terms of arbitrary and "frivolous" appropriations, Kuspit would write that "postmodernist architecture attempts to appropriate the past not as a dead, over-aestheticized form but as a living, symbolic substance, charged with contemporary significance - which is the only way the past can remain viable. The return to the past is in effect a criticism of the present's lack of integrity, and is in purpose motivated by an effort to recover that integrity in symbolic form.25 Safdie had certainly railed enough, in Form and Purpose, about "the present's lack of integrity." But granted that his own method of selective appropriations from the past identified him as a "postmodernist" in Kuspit's sense, if not in the sense that Safdie himself used the term pejoratively, the question that arises is this. What kind of "integrity" drawn from the past was Safdie seeking when he incorporated so many sacral motifs, drawn from authoritarian religious traditions and metaphysical investments in absolute "truth," into "the grand public spaces" of Canada's National Gallery? This question is important because it was these "spaces" that would define public access to the new building, and so establish visitors'"perceptual set" in regard to the art they would see only after they had passed through this route. Similarly, the access route would again present itself after visitors' experience of this art, shaping their "descent" back toward what Safdie called "the endless bustle of day-to-day life": that state of "distraction" identified by Walter Benjamin as integral to modern life. Given both the sketchiness of his designs at the outset, however, and the subsequent degree of collaboration that was taking place between him and Boggs, a second question quickly follows. What sorts of motifs did she - through Safdie - find herself encouraging and leaning on, in the attempt to achieve her long-standing goal of a Gallery building? For it had been her stated hope that such a building would provide "that very hallowed atmosphere within the museum which separates it from the community," just as it had been her clear preference that the building also resist such attempts at subverting "museum aura" as had been successfully carried out, from different directions, by N.E. Thing Co. at the Lome Building and by the NMC as a corporate parent that did not respect art's independence. The answer to both these questions may lie, to some extent, in an architectural working through of George Grant's profound comment that "the idea of limit is unavoidably the idea of God." That is to say: the mid-1960s enthusiasm for "openness" on the part of both Grant and Jean Boggs, as expressed at the 1966 Couchiching Conference, had led by the mid-1970s to what both also saw as unacceptable violations of important taboos. In Grant's assessment as a Christian, the violation came to involve the taboo on the taking of what he believed to be human life, on account of feminist advocacy of abortion on demand. But for Boggs, given her own belief in the value of "the collection," of "museum aura," and of the frame or pedestal as contemplatively distancing devices, the violation seemed most to involve the semantic assaults made from different directions by contemporary art and

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administrative bureaucracy. Grant found refuge in his faith that "the Perfection of God" offered standards by which to limit the depredations of the unlimited "openness" that for him increasingly made, during the 1970s, for unanchored excess. Boggs, however, as a very different kind of "believer," arguably found refuge, through the spectacular deployment of sacral motifs by her chosen architect, in the visual signifiers of God that would re-bind art through the museum itself to the "cultic" status described by Benjamin. For these signifiers, when hybridized and impressively deployed along an obligatory access route, might define a "hallowed atmosphere" resistant to subversion as much by the art born of "openness" in the 1960s as by a homogenizing bureaucracy which dated from the same era's nationalistic enthusiasms. Such goals, along with the vistas that would be offered by the Great Hall's windows, may also have implied investment - by Safdie, Boggs, and Trudeau all at once, though perhaps not consciously - in a more modern understanding of "the dream" than Jacob's. In his seminal book of 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud took a more materialist approach to the meaningfulness of dreams, based on his study of those of his patients. Writing of what he called the "dream work" of "condensation," Freud claimed that the images which appear in dreams are "overdetermined" by the unconscious, so as to represent several different "dream thoughts" or associational references at once. This process is central to their production of meaning, and also correlates in reverse. "Associative paths," he wrote, "lead from one element of the dream to several dream thoughts, and from one dream-thought to several elements of the dream."26 Freud obviously contrasted the dreaming state with what Moshe Safdie would call "the endless bustle of day-to-day life." But he also developed his observations toward the insight, crucial to psychoanalysis, that "when the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish."27 The Gallery's access route - or "zone of transition" - would, when completed, also display in its motifs these qualities of condensation and overdetermination that Freud associated with the dream work. In the Colonnade ramp, for example, might be found suggestions of several different religious traditions - Gothic, Baroque, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Mesoamerican - which could be read as analogous to Freud's "dream thoughts." But conversely, some of these traditions would also surface in other visual features: the immense post and lintel gate at the ramp's summit, for example. This is not to suggest a one-to-one correspondence between the National Gallery's access route and Freud's theory of dreams, which claimed, of course, that "the wish" was primarily sexual in nature. Nor is it to suggest that Safdie's goal with the Colonnade ramp was to make for visitors' literal passage into a dreamstate, during their physical passage from "the endless bustle of day-to-day life" to his "magical spot." But if the rhetoric of "ascent" and "purification" certainly did invite Kuspit's reading of postmodern architecture as an attempt to "satisfy living needs symbolically" through evocation of the past, Safdie's provision, at this "liminal" transition zone's summit, of a perfectly symmetrical "Great Hall," built above a "magical

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spot" and offering spectacular views of Parliament and the Ottawa River, seemed itself to correlate with Freud's description of the dream as "wish-fulfilment." In this sense, Eric Browns 1920 description of a future National Gallery building in terms of a "dream castle" would assume a whole new texture of meaning via Safdie's design: the Gallery itself as a wish-fulfilment. For Safdie as architect, this wish clearly had to do with his use of motifs from earlier periods of religious authority, and a less deliberate use of methods analogous to the dream work of condensation, to provide a reassurance that is indeed widely absent in contemporary society but that was present in the doctrines linked to these earlier times. For Jean Sutherland Boggs, the wish had just as clearly to do with a structure that would satisfy her own desire for "hallowed atmosphere" in her beloved National Gallery, and for a symmetry that would "contain" contemporary art as surely as the symmetrical frame had "contained" the "violence and brutality" of Picasso and other moderns. And for Pierre Trudeau, the wish perhaps had to do, more simply, with a desire for a lasting monument. The provision of the Parliament Buildings themselves, however, as the first tableau visible from "the magical spot" at the summit of the Colonnade ramp, and from beneath the converging symmetries of the Great Hall, hinted at a different kind of wish from within the Gallery's history. Not only did it hearken back to Brown's wish that art "be made to serve [the] native sense of nationality"; it also recalled the Royal Commission's wish that visual art provide an anchor for "Canadianism," in a national context where - as Vincent Massey put it - "the pursuit of unity is like the quest for the Holy Grail." The very process of appropriating motifs from different traditions, condensing them to their common elements, and then recombining these fragments in a functionally unified building bespeaks this priority. What is broken, what is fragmented, and what - as in the case of the Canadian nation state - is in danger of fragmentation can be made whole again, and kept whole. The Canadian Dream. "THE

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What, though, of the actual display rooms of the Gallery itself, which would, in Safdie's final design, be sited beyond this obligatory access route and contain "the collection"? In the interview with Turner, Safdie claimed that "we had taken the classic museum plan ... and turned it inside out," such that "the public spaces wrap around the galleries, instead of the functional spaces wrapping the public spaces."28 In fact, "the public spaces" would "wrap around the galleries" only on one side - the south - via the obligatory access route. But this was crucial, for if Safdie could add that he considered this arrangement a "true invention of the building," it nevertheless made for consignment of the galleries themselves to, in effect, an immense three-storey concrete bunker. Unlike the Lome Building, this would indeed be, in physical terms, friendly to traditional, collectible art: precisely controlled in humidity as well as temperature, and lit not just artificially but by skylights and mylarlined "light shafts" that Safdie viewed as another of his innovations. It would also be developed - again under Boggs's "guidance" - in consultation with the Gallery's curators. "The collection," then, was at last ensured rooms on a par with those of 334

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other major art museums: rooms large enough to accommodate uncluttered display, and even loosely adapted to each art-era's style of exhibition, as well as to the concept of "museum aura." What this meant in practice was, for example, large barrelvaulted rooms in rich colours, after the style of a European royal palace, for the European Baroque collection that contained Bernini's bust, and rectangular white rooms for its modern collection, all arranged around interior courtyards that would also honour Boggs's concern, since the early 1970s, about "museum fatigue."29 Yet what this also meant was that the actual galleries would be housed entirely behind and beyond the spectacular access route, with especially significant implications for the Gallery's relationship to contemporary art. Throughout the design process, Safdie obviously had to shed at least enough of his hostile sentiments about recent art to be able to design the rooms that would contain it. And Boggs, in her 1985 Burlington Magazine article, described how, in order "to bridge the gap between Safdie and the curators of contemporary art," "five Canadian artists were brought to the Gallery from across the country to talk with him about the problems of providing space" for this art.30 In the style of one of his architectural mentors, the American modernist Louis Kahn, Safdie sought to provide natural light throughout the building. The artists Michael Snow, Jeff Wall, Guido Molinari, Liz Magor, and Vera Frenkel, therefore, were all commissioned to convince him of the importance to contemporary art of artificially lit, reductive, and (allegedly) neutral "white cubes." This process carried with it a new mutation in the historical pattern of Gallery irony. In 1972 Boggs had enlisted the conservative American critic John Canaday to dispel any notion left by Jack Burnham's Flavin article that the Lome Building might be congenial for (then) contemporary art. Yet a decade later, she turned to Flavin, too, as - by this time - a modernist icon, toward assuring Safdie that, insofar as "contemporary art" is concerned, "natural light is mostly irrelevant." What contemporary artists need, Flavin declared agreeably, are "plain, ordinary, white walled, wood floored, squared off, flexible, geometric containers, side by side by side."31 Of course, such "geometric containers" might just as readily - apart from the wood flooring - have been available in the Lome Building, or for that matter in any disused warehouse. But transposed into a new National Gallery building, which was making its own unchallenged investments in sacral motifs via an obligatory public access route, such "containers," aligned "side by side by side" within the concrete bunker might also serve to "contain" contemporary art in a different way. Boggs herself had said, in 1970, that she expected the "tensions, violence, [and] brutality" expressed in modern art to be "to be given form and contained within the frame of a painting, drawing or print, or placed upon a pedestal." Contemporary art, both in form and semantic prodigality, had already escaped both of these, with the emphasis in the later 1970s on performance and installation art that was - like N.E. Thing Co.'s appropriation of the Lome Building - both ephemeral and context-sensitive: work that, as the French artiste provocateur Daniel Buren put it, "exposed the subsoil" of a given place.32 The goal of such a practice, Buren said during the same period of the Gallery's construction, in 1986, was "to show a little better, or to show differently the things A "Magical Spot"

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which are there, or which are not well seen, or which are not visible."33 Nor was this goal, he added, "without connection to the unveiling of the practices of a possible dominant ideological power." This notion of art in expository and implicitly critical interplay with wider context clearly recalled Robert Morris's, Jack Burnham's, and Les Levine's manifestos of the Iate-i96os. But in the very design of Safdie's building, Jean Boggs's preferences for framed "containment" would be turned instead toward a subtle but decisive reworking of Charles Comfort's 1965 remark on whether Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes were "sculpture": "One draws a line." In this case, the "line" would be physical: between an interior whose allegedly value-neutral "white cubes" would contain contemporary art, and the building's obligatory access route that would stand between this art and the outside world, and, in so doing, consist of an immensely scaled, quasi-sacral zone of processional "ascent" and "Platonic geometries." To this extent, Safdie's own claim, in his architect's statement of February 1984, that "the National Gallery is first and last a place to experience art" was deeply misleading.34 For in terms of spatial alignment, the new building would be first and last a place for the visitor to experience not art at all, but rather Moshe Safdie's symmetrical access route. The implication of this spatial split, however, was that the interior "white cubes" would collude with the museum's overall structure to "contain" contemporary art semantically as well as physically, via the access route's own vastly expanded version of the symmetry traditionally imposed on art by the "frame or pedestal." And just as visitors, too, would experience the access routes's converging symmetries before and after their encounter with art of any kind, so the very scale, sacral resonance, and overarching harmony of this route would discourage easy subversion within its precincts by critically interrogative contemporary art, which, in any case, had been assigned its place deep within the museum. The further irony, then, was that Boggs's chosen Canadian artists, asked to make a modest case for modern display terms to an architect who had already written of his blanket hostility to modern art, likely themselves colluded - unwittingly - in cultivating a general scenario in which contemporary art would be defused in regard to the museum itself as overarching "environment." For in focusing on the assigned, but very limited issue of natural versus artificial light in the contemporary galleries, all of them more subtly concurred toward providing a version of contemporary art that was "space-passive," and aloof from the semantically charged "public spaces" built around Safdie's "magical spot." Moshe Safdie's design for the National Gallery was unveiled on 28 November 1983, even as work had already started on preparing the site. Despite his investment in allegedly timeless motifs for the access route, however, and his claim of having found "a magical spot," the actual public construction process soon began to resemble, in its sheer entanglement in temporal concerns, a comic strip, adding dimensions of irony almost unprecedented in a densely ironic Gallery history. For "Miss Boggs's" tendency to ignore procedural niceties for the sake of both educating Safdie and forging ahead within a limited time frame soon began to leak at its seams. Raw determination, combined with cabinet support, had enabled her to ignore com-

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plaints by the Royal Architectural Society, the parliamentary opposition, and the public at large about the secrecy of the selection process. But no sooner were these quelled than the cities of Ottawa and Hull announced, in April 1984, that the Museums Construction Corporation had declined to purchase building permits, worth $800,000 and $400,000 respectively, for the National Gallery and the Museum of Man. This meant also that city building inspectors were denied access to the site. Then, even as negotiations to waive the permits began, Boggs, with classically bad timing, announced that the corporation needed another $5 million so as to buy stone rather than brick facades for both buildings. Allegations of liberties with taxpayers' money were made in the press, and - more ominously, given the Jarvis debacle a quarter-century before - by the opposition Conservatives.35 Boggs seemed not to be intimidated by these criticisms. Instead she announced, in the same month of April 1984, that the $185 million allotted for both museums would actually suffice to produce no more than the "practical" shells of the buildings that had been designed. Still more money, she said, would be needed to supply such amenities as landscaping outside and wooden floors inside, and to move and install the museums' exhibits. This seemed guaranteed to infuriate the National Museums of Canada, whose responsibility it would be to administer the new buildings. Yet no one need worry, Boggs declared. For she had decided, with cabinet support, to raise an extra $25 million through private-sector donations.36 For the publicly funded arts sector, this was tantamount to a betrayal and triggered a chain reaction that reinscribed the battle lines which had formed during the NMC'S "decentralization" program. There were country-wide protests by the directors of smaller institutions that the NMC had cultivated during the 1970s. In a period of shrinking public largesse, they felt - probably with justice - that their regionally based private donations, already modest, would be syphoned off toward the "national monuments" in Ottawa. And more seriously - as John McAvity, the director of the Canadian Museums Association argued - they were worried that the appeal for private subsidy would "set a precedent that may influence the way ... federal cultural projects are funded." "We need guarantees," he wrote in the Globe and Mail, "that our national cultural institutions will not be held hostage to arbitrary and private interests, guarantees that our national institutions will remain truly ours."37 Suddenly, it was as though Jean Boggs, in her search for money, were threatening the legacy of the Massey commission, whereby the arts were seen as contributors precisely to an enhanced national sense of "we" and were publicly funded as such. Significantly, however, it was Boggs herself who drew most of the fire on these issues, which dragged on unresolved for the next year. Behind her formidable public presence, meanwhile, the actual building of the National Gallery proceeded more or less on schedule, though the National Museum of Man - perhaps suffering a little from her focus on the Gallery - lagged behind. Moshe Safdie even described the process as, from his perspective, "most enriching." "There is a little bit of the feeling of Expo here," he said, citing the paradigmatic icon of cultural enrichment in Canada. "A very dedicated group of people working together who really feel there's

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a cause uniting them."38 Yet if this language also recalled the moral rhetoric of Form and Purpose, and especially the association of Gothic cathedrals with "collective will" directed toward a "central object," there was one more major obstacle in store for the "dedicated group." This was imposed by the brute fact that their protector was not, like Darius of Persia, an absolute emperor, but rather a mere prime minister, who held office at the pleasure of an electorate. Pierre Trudeau indeed retired in 1984 and was replaced by his former rival John Turner, whose limited appeal as a Toronto patrician was further reduced by a list of patronage appointments bequeathed to him by Trudeau. The federal election held in September 1984 was, as expected, won with a majority by the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, and put an end to the Liberal rule which - apart from Joe Clark's minority government of 1979 - had begun with the fall of John Diefenbaker two decades earlier. And as expected also, among the first acts of a government elected on a platform of fiscal control in the face of deficits, was the establishment of a review process for cultural programs. Among the programs to be reviewed was the very construction of the two museums. In these changing times, the Museums Construction Corporation was not helped either by its public profile or by the slurry of problems that began to surface once the buildings were conveniently well under way. By September of 1984, the issues of April were still unresolved; moreover, among the Tories' election platforms had been rejection of Boggs's proposed fundraising in the private sector. The tension was only fuelled by Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar's announcement, after the change of government, that she would pursue the new minister of finance, Michael Wilson, over the Gallery's still unpaid building fees; and by the surprise resignation, in December, of the Gallery's project director, Cyril Allan, amid rumours that he was unhappy with cost over-runs.39 There was also the problem that, on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, Douglas Cardinal's plan for a curvilinear "symbolic form" that would "speak of the emergence of this continent," of "man and woman living in harmony with the forces of nature," was running far behind schedule, without even a firm design.40 That the new communications minister, Marcel Masse, appointed both an eightmember task force to study the two museums and a replacement for Allan from the Department of Public Works seemed to hint that the days of independence for Boggs and the Museums Construction Corporation might be numbered. So, too, did a discreetly timed public comment in March 1985 by an assistant secretary-general in the National Museums of Canada, Dan Michaels, that the NMC had in 1980 sent a memorandum to the Liberal government "estimating move-in costs" for the two museums at about $75 million. The NMC had, since Boggs's appointment and the minting of the Construction Corporation, been perforce a silent partner on the building itself. Its speaking out after the change of government seemed designed to embarrass the CMCC and to link it with the Liberals who, Michaels said, had ignored the memorandum.41 Finally, the art critic of the Ottawa Citizen, Nancy Baele, reported that the corporation had spent $275,000 to build a full-size, temporary mock-up of a Gallery cross-section, to test Safdie's idea of filtering natural light onto

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lower floors via mylar-lined shafts.42 Though the cost was defended as necessary by Charles Slade, the Gallery's associate project director, owing to the "unique nature" of Safdie's design, it seemed to exemplify the CMCC'S profligacy with public funds, not least because Safdie had indeed scaled back his skylights in response to the objections of the contemporary art lobby. Initially, then, in an attempt at consolidation, Masse transferred the cost of the CMCC to his own department. But such was the government's exasperation that in May 1985, Treasury Board President Robert de Cotret announced bluntly that the CMCC was to be "dismantled immediately." Responsibility for the museums' completion, he said, would be transferred to the Department of Public Works. For Boggs herself, the coup's style was both less dramatic and less acrimonious than either the Diefenbaker government's move against Alan Jarvis in 1959 or Bernard Ostry's engineering of her marginalization eleven years earlier. But it was also no less effective. As oversight of the museums would remain with Masse, so Boggs, it was announced, would be retained as a "senior cultural advisor" to him. The new secretary-general of the NMC, Leo Dorais, who was due to take over the buildings on their completion, barely hid his delight. "From the National Museums point of view, this doesn't change a thing" he told the Ottawa Citizen, "except we might be able to have a few more hard-nosed decisions."43 And indeed, retrospective reports soon surfaced perhaps conveniently - "of acrimonious board meetings, staff bickering, and indecision that made management of the projects almost impossible."44 Boggs's removal by no means resolved the problems. "There is just no money for moving in," an anonymous CMCC official told the Citizen, after insisting that costs for the Gallery were $25 less per square foot than was being spent on comparable museums in the United States. "Masse is enraged to find there is no budget for this. He expected there was money to spend on outfitting the museums, but there isn't and he has to find it."45 This situation hearkened back to the very day of the CMCC'S announcement, on 18 February 1982, when Jean Boggs was reported to have said, within minutes of her introduction as the new corporation's head, that she would be "ready and willing, if necessary, to go back to the government and get more than the $185 million earmarked."46 What it turned out she had done was conveniently not think past the building phase in the deployment of funds. This impasse recalled the conundrum that had faced an earlier Conservative cabinet - John Diefenbaker's regarding money that was supposed to have been available after a long Liberal tenure, but wasn't. Unlike his predecessors Fulton and Fairclough in regard to Alan Jarvis, however, Masse was faced with the fact that two partially constructed buildings were not so easily deniable as two early Renaissance paintings had been. When the CMCC'S dissolution was announced, the National Gallery was only 15 per cent complete. Yet this was complete enough that the project, already prominent on the Ottawa skyline, could not be set aside. Despite the awkwardness of her departure, then, and the unconventionality of her methods, Jean Boggs succeeded in her goal of getting the two museums so far along in their construction that - though far overbudget - they were unstoppable by a change in government.

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But events would soon reveal that her manoeuvring had been even more sophisticated. The former project director, Cyril Allan, publicly admitted in June that "all the steps necessary to properly control the budget weren't put in place. Things got further and further out of control." Boggs, he charged, had "allowed the architect to design in excess of costs." Yet he was also brutally frank about the new government's response to the dilemma she had left: "Instead of the government saying: "We have a design, but in order to finish it we need more money,' they're crucifying or butchering the design, or leaving it unfinished. If you don't finish it, or you butcher it, it costs more to redesign. You don't have the facilities, so then you pay more to redesign and rebuild to get it back to where you started. Sooner or later the Government will have to face the facts. Leaving a building in a semi-finished state costs more money. Gallery systems and collections have to be protected... If you're going to build a new facility and you can't finish it, you've got to keep the old facility operating. If you want to throw money down the drain, this is the way."47 The irony in this case was that, after the dissolution of the CMCC, Leo Dorais had declared, as the NMC'S secretary-general, that "We would like to have very operational buildings, ones that are cheap to operate ... This is at odds with the architectural features."48 But "the architectural features," as matters turned out, were too far advanced in their construction even for this to be an option. Boggs, then, had effectively outflanked both the change in government and her old arch-rival the NMC. She had done so by using the budget allotted by the Trudeau government to give her chosen architects licence to design spectacular shells for both museums, and especially for what Allan said they had hoped would be "the finest gallery in the world." In the process, she had conveniently neglected the costs which would be faced by the NMC in actually outfitting, occupying, and running the buildings. Moreover, by fast-tracking both buildings' construction - and simply overriding opposition while she had the authority to do so - she had ensured that by mid-1985 both of them were too far along to be simply mothballed. She was uncharacteristically blunt, after her removal, in assessing her role. "The budget was always a problem and time was very tight," she told the Globe and Mail. "In an ideal world, you're not on a fast track. Completed design before construction was not possible ... There was [also] a conflict between me and Leo Dorais. I wanted more money for the buildings, he for the installations. He was certainly not a friend... The role I played was to protect the architects. What was most disappointing was the degree to which I had to play it. I thought I could be phased out as things went along, but I was necessary to the end ... I'm really glad both buildings are on their way. I am delighted the shell of the National Gallery is up and will be finished some day."49 But even with this assessment, Boggs the master strategist may not have been entirely forthright, in the extent to which, in a less than "ideal world," she had "protected" the version of an ideal world that Safdie was designing. Given the role she played in the selection of architects, and given especially her close consultation with Safdie on the design of her beloved National Gallery, it is perhaps safe to say that in "protecting the architects," she was also protecting her own long-standing vision of what the National Gallery could and should be, against both the perceived threat of 34O

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a change in government and the fact that the building would, eventually, be handed over to the bureaucrats of the NMC. A period of chaos did indeed follow the transfer of authority to the Department of Public Works, a period during which even Safdie admitted that "I don't know what's going on. Unless more money becomes available, we can't finish. I have no knowledge or sense of where we're going."50 But eventually, even as estimates for both museums ballooned to $265 million, or 41 per cent over budget, the government caved in. "We can't spend huge sums of taxpayers' dollars, and end up with second-rate buildings," Public Works Minister Roch LaSalle said in July. "That would amount to squandering millions of dollars."51 Boggs had won. The buildings would go ahead, and they would go ahead as designed. Moreover, even as this debate was going on, another emerging pattern suggested that, although Jean Boggs had lost her overt influence, the momentum of the times was piling up in such a way as to provide not only the building of which she had long dreamt but a final, decisive defeat for her decades-old nemesis, the bureaucracy of the NMC. The dissolution of the Museums Construction Corporation was not the only attack by the Mulroney government on museum-related bureaucracies that lingered from the Trudeau era.

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Discreet transgression: a room in the new building devoted to 1964 versions of Marcel Duchamp's Ready-Mades (1913-1917), purchased for the National Gallery by Brydon Smith in 1971 with part of the office-furniture budget. The fifth version of Fountain, a porcelain urinal originally produced in 1917 during the First World War, is mounted conspicuously above the doorway. (National Gallery of Canada; ©Estate of Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP [Paris]/ SODRAC [Montreal] 2002)

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The cultural sphere, embracing as it does artistic and intellectual activity, has as one of its central functions the critical scrutiny of all other spheres including the political. On this score alone it cannot be subordinated to the others. - Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, 1982 It may surprise you to learn that I am unable, as Director, to travel outside Ottawa without the permission of the SecretaryGeneral. -Joseph Martin, director of the National Gallery, to the Task Force on federal museums policy, 1986

Behind the change of government in 1984, and the topsy-turvy fortunes of the Canada Museums Construction Corporation from 1982 to 1986, there also took place, more quietly, another round of government-sponsored studies on the role of the arts in Canada. Though comparable in process to the Royal Commission's hearings from 1948 to 1951, the assessment this time was not done via a small group which - under a patrician guide - established a semi-official view that would endure for decades. Rather, by the 1980s, a more diverse ethnic fabric virtually demanded of elected politicians that such efforts incorporate a wider variety of perspectives.The first of these was initiated by the Trudeau government, via the eighteenmember Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, under Louis Applebaum and Jacques Hebert. When it reported in 1982, the committee discreetly recommended among other things- greater independence for the National Gallery from the proselytizing authority of the National Museums of Canada. And significantly, it did so via an approach to art that recognized the more politically engaged practices which were emerging in the early 1980s, after the emphasis on abstraction in the 1950s and early 1960s and Minimalism's explorations of art-system context in the later 1960s and 1970s.

Given the NMC'S persistent subordination of art to both the iconography of national identity and the rhetoric of redneck populism, the Applebaum-Hebert report seemed a model of enlightenment, and as such merits quotation. "Government serves the social need for order, predictability and control," the committee wrote, "seeking consensus, establishing norms, and offering uniformity of treatment. Cultural activity, by contrast, thrives on spontaneity and accepts diversity, discord and dissent as natural conditions - and withers if it is legislated or controlled. The well-being of society is threatened if the state intrudes into the cultural realm in ways that subordinate the role and purposes of the latter to the role and purposes of government itself - or of any other spheres of activity. Moreover, the cultural sphere, embracing as it does artistic and intellectual activity, has as one of its central functions the critical scrutiny of all other spheres including the political. On this score alone it cannot be subordinated to the others."1 If the language was not so elegant as that of the Massey commission, the assessment of a dialogical relationship between the arts and society was more sophisticated and recalled Jean Boggs's own description of twentieth-century art in terms of a search for "meaning." But it also went further, in that Boggs, while admitting artists' role as "dissenters," had never explicitly equated this search with direct criticism of accepted social norms. Indeed, through her commitment to "frames" and "museum aura," and her recommendation of Safdie as Gallery architect, she seemed most to support the "containment" of art, in both the narrow and broad senses of the term, by its museum "environment." Yet, in surpassing Boggs to grant this "critical" role to art, the Applebaum-Hebert committee also drew an analogy which - given the almost complete public disappearance by this time of the term "spirit" in conjunction with art - seemed not just curious but prescient, given the atmospherics that were soon to take shape in the National Gallery's own building. "This critical function," they wrote, "suggests an analogy with religion, as an autonomous source of moral judgment resting on its own authority."2 "A GREAT EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOP"

So direct a claim of relationship between art and religion recalled the views of Eric Brown and Lawren Harris. But it also reflected the profound change in attitude since Brown and Harris had looked to their religious beliefs to provide a basis for how art should operate in society. For rather than subordinating art to pre-existent metaphysical standards, the Applebaum-Hebert committee urged that art could be placed on a comparable level with religion as "an autonomous source of moral judgment resting on its own authority," by means of which social norms might be criticized. Yet, despite the catchiness of the analogy, it had its flaws, which opened onto the paradoxical position of contemporary art in Canada. The committee did make common cause with the Massey commission in emphasizing the importance of such art. But it emphatically did not couch this importance in terms of a prior investment in "Canadianism" or "Canadian spirit": the very valuation that, as filtered through the excitement - or the mania - of 1967 had made for the overarching authority of the NMC as a national bureaucracy. 344

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But where, then, would art get its own alleged moral authority? Making this question more difficult was precisely the weakness in one of the terms of the analogy that was made by Cultural Policy Review Committee. For few if any theologians would suggest that "religion" itself is "an autonomous source of moral judgment resting on its own authority." Rather, such claims as religions make to moral authority tend to be based on their prior claims of special relationship to what Aristotle called an "unmoved mover," neo-Platonism the Logos, and the Christian theologian Paul Tillich "the ground of Being," which in the West has gone by the name of God. In Brown's Christian Science and Harris's theosophy, this "ground" was described again in different ways - through the term Divine Principle, whose alleged presence in the world art could and should serve. But art unhinged from its ties to such religious beliefs could only very dubiously make such prescriptive claims on its own, without first being reanchored in some comparable alleged grounding that claimed ethical as well as aesthetic dimensions. The movements of nineteenth-century Aestheticism, early twentieth-century Vart pour Vart, and Clement Greenberg's influential post-war emphasis on "medium" had all based themselves precisely on art's complete irrelevance to, and independence from, such wider considerations. Indeed, Greenberg, in one of his last formal interviews, declared in 1969 that, "given what I've heard art-silly people say all my life ... if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art." He blamed "the Germans" for having started, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "the business of assessing the worth of a society by the quality of art it produced."3 But whether this reading was historically accurate or not, a variant on the style of assessment itself had certainly made its way to Canada by the 1920s, embedding itself in the evolution of Canadian art via Eric Brown, whose "sermon" was that "no country can be a great nation until it has a great art," and via Lawren Harris, whose proclamation was that "the Canadian artist serves the spirit of his land and people." The most influential figure in Canadian art at mid-century, Vincent Massey, then built on the record of Harris and Brown in a multitude of ways: as a patron and collector; as chair of the National Gallery's Board of Trustees; as the author of On Being Canadian; as chair of the most influential Royal Commission on the arts in Canadian history; and as the first Canadian-born governor general, in the years when the Canada Council was being developed. He added to their legacy, however, by investing "Canada" itself with the metaphysical status that had inhered for Brown and Harris in "Divine Principle," and by insisting on art's value in building a sense of Canadian "spirit" and "Canadianism." "The idea" of "unity," Massey wrote in On Being Canadian, "to us must be supreme, for in Canada the pursuit of unity is like the quest of the Holy Grail." This rhetoric, and its translation into a myriad of effects by Massey as influential, in itself discouraged a "critical" role for art, in that art was assumed to be contributing positively toward the forming of this unformed "unity," which offered a substitute anchorage amid the retreat of religious faith as a force in public life. And clearly, the tendency to positivize art in this way was then carried to Potentialities

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an embarrassingly uncritical extreme of national celebration, and so to a kind of reductio ad absurdum, during the 19705 and early 19805 by the NMC, even as art itself was degraded to the status of "national heritage" and "cultural resource." The Applebaum-Hebert committee seemed to recognize the perils of this pattern, when it made a case for non-subordination of artistic inquiry to political agendas. But they were not so clear as to where art was going to derive a basis for its own critical authority. Offering some help - as well as adding to the embarrassment of the Canada-first status given to art by the NMC - were the sophisticated arguments developed in the late 19705 by the German critic Peter Burger, based on the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jiirgen Habermas, to the effect that international modernism's concept of an avant-garde need not, as Greenberg had urged, be limited to stylistic audacities that would simply "keep culture moving."4 Instead, according to Burger, art's status as a part of an independent "institution" potentially does position it in a unique critical and "truth-telling" relationship to society, though only when this "institution" - or "system" - itself comes under scrutiny, through art, as reciprocally involved with the larger society.5 In such cases, art's value to society is not a matter of its own authority - as the Cultural Policy Review Committee suggested - but rather of the richness of its insights into contingent and historical circumstances, as developed in dialogue and possibly even confrontation with a multitude of other factors. Crucial among these factors is a "lived world" that no longer consists, in advanced industrial societies, of "nature" as this term was understood by Brown and Harris, but mainly of a multitude of humanly constructed signs, whose meanings are notoriously unresolved. Among such signs are those of "the art system" itself. In artistic rather than theoretical terms, this approach to stepping "outside" art as itself a system perhaps found its most compelling international development during the 19708 and early 19808 in the activities of artists who were not American but western European. Foremost among these were the apparently meaningless "Actions" of the German artist Joseph Beuys and the unvarying, repetitive stripes that were carried from place to place by the French artist Daniel Buren. With Beuys, the aggressive disordering process of his Actions involved - to recall Jarvis on Picasso his "breaking up" the usual "at-hand" relations among everyday objects. But the Actions also suggested, through immediate unframed performance, a primordial intensity of relations between a human being (Beuys himself) and certain objects (often felt and animal fat) that indeed recalled a shamanism for which art as "system" or even category did not exist. In Buren's case, by contrast, art did not so much rest "on its own authority" as play an active role in helping people to see those aspects of museum context - or of "hallowed atmosphere" - that usually go ignored. But in this aspect of "exposing," Buren's stripes, along with the context-specific critical commentary that he often provided with them - also bore strong similarity to N.E. Thing Co.'s project, in 1969, of exposing the Lome Building as the implicitly corporate office block that it was.6 By the early 19805, a rich spectrum of such work was filtering into Canada, toward the provision of non-nationalistic paradigms in the making of art. Explicitly 346

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Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, gay rights, First Nations, and Third World "discourses" entered the artist-run gallery system that had - through arts council subsidy - sprung up across Canada during the late 19705. As the younger artists who showed in these galleries tended to be art-school graduates, so most of the curators who ran them had emerged from university fine-arts programs that offered a strong dose of critical theory. Much of this theory was also European, without the American bias toward pragmatism and the explicit patronage of art by the wealthy; instead, and as befitted the model of social democracy that had evolved in post-war western Europe, it wove art into the concept of a critically aware and politically active public domain. And to an extent, the public gallery/museum context in which this model developed in Canada was also another unanticipated outcome of the NMC'S influence. For smaller galleries across Canada had not only received funding through the "decentralization" program; they had also, as a function of "democratization," widely emphasized the inclusion of previously marginalized or unformed voices, at the expense of lingering notions of abstract aesthetic "quality" - never mind "museum aura" - such as had been called for at the National Gallery by both Jarvis and Boggs. But, to some extent, this direction in art was also developing further the current that had begun with Duchamp and that had made its way through Surrealism and Dada in the 19205 and 19305, and through the Situationists of the 19505 and 19605, as contextually shaped forms of art that responded increasingly to what Guy Debord, in France, called "the society of the spectacle." If this current implied art as a form of thought, it also often incorporated an explicitly transgressive and post-Nietzschean agenda which had emerged in France from the 19505 through the 19703, via such figures as Roger Caillois, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. Loosely described, this nexus of thought suggested that art is neither reflective of pre-established norms of meaning and beauty, as with Brown and Harris, nor a process of discovering such meaning, as Jean Boggs implied it might be when she spoke of a "plan" to existence. It is rather a production of meaning.7 And in its most striking form - via Caillois, Bataille, and Blanchot as heirs of Surrealist excess - such production takes place through deliberate violation of established norms and hierarchies, toward the generation not of systematic critique or practice but rather of experiential intensities.8 Such intensities - like the media-grabbing party that accompanied sculpture '6/s opening in Toronto - are likely to be indifferent to questions of art as an agent of "public spiritual welfare," or as a "cultural resource," even as they undercut and question existing norms. Foucault and Deleuze, as philosophers of the 19608, were especially impressed with Nietzsche's understanding of "nature" as a "great experimental workshop," underlain by "a monster of energy" which constantly throws forth new forms. This was not a sense of "nature" as a passive "wonderland of beauty"; nor was it a "nature"overseen from the top down, as with Brown's and Harris's "divine Principle" and Plato's theory of ideal forms. Rather, in cultivating a model that was, in effect, bottom up, Deleuze especially developed a reading of "events" as "surfaces" across which such "singularities... distribute themselves." And the greater the degree Potentialities

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of apparent incompatibility - or paradox - among the chains of meaning attached to the singularities, the richer the "meaning" produced through the event.9 Again, the sculpture '67 party could be cited as exemplary, with the chains of meaning attached to the National Gallery, to the Toronto City Hall, to multiple currents in contemporary sculpture, and to the energies of 19605 acid culture all intersecting across the surface prompted initially by the exhibition as shown in Nathan Phillips Square. Yet in this approach to art - as in Heidegger's equation of art with a "setting-intowork of truth" - could also be found analogies with religion. Bataille, for example, developed an eloquent theory of "the sacred" in which the "inner experience" of extreme and quasi-religious states was unhinged from any reference to an allegedly transcendent order, or to an allegedly transcendent being. Instead, it was based to a great extent on deliberate violation of social taboos, leading to focused instants of intensity. Similarly, Caillois wrote of a "sacred of respect" and a "sacred of transgression," with the former encompassing the awe generated by observance of traditional norms and the latter encompassing the intensities generated by their violation.10 Insofar as both these men related these perspectives to art, they anticipated the reexamination, in the 19705 and 19805, of Immanuel Kant's eighteenth-century distinction between "the beautiful" in art and the awe-inspiring "sublime" in nature. For increasingly, postmodern theorists of art suggested that what Kant had to say about "the sublime" in nature - that it constituted "a negative pleasure" and "an outrage on the imagination" that makes for "mental movement" - deserved all the more to be said of art, and especially of "significant" art toward the end of the twentieth century." These were not, perhaps, the models for art's "critical" and quasi-religious role on which the Applebaum-Hebert committee - as a respectable, government-appointed body - would have preferred to dwell. Nor, certainly, were they friendly to Safdie's notion of art as "an elevated activity" that could be expected to blend in harmoniously with a larger "environment" as decreed from above. Yet, by the time of both the Applebaum-Hebert report and Safdie's commission, these models were being given serious hearing in Canadian art schools and in the artist-run gallery network. And in arguing for the autonomous and critical status of art in this way, the committee was opening the door to their semi-official recognition as fully legitimate. "SUB-COMMITTEES AND SUB-SUB-COMMITTEES" At the very time it was taking this more catholic approach to art, the ApplebaumHebert Committee was also delivering - after the establishment of the Canada Museums Construction Corporation - a second rebuke to the NMC. It did so both implicitly, by urging the liberation of art from narrow "cultural resource" and "national heritage" agendas, and explicitly, by urging greater independence for the National Gallery. Yet a third rebuke quickly followed, this time directly from the cultural left, where the model of art as critical and/or "transgressive" had its greatest appeal. In 1983 Jennifer Dickson and Sarah Yates published a study of the National Gallery's relationship to contemporary Canadian art and artists, which had been commissioned by Canadian Artists Representation/Le Front des Artistes canadiens. 348

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By the 1980s, CARFAC served as the functional descendant of the Federation of Canadian Artists and claimed to speak for artists in their relationship to institutions. The study itself was based on a cross-Canada survey of artists and arts administrators, virtually all of whom felt that the National Gallery had lost ground to the Canada Council's Art Bank and to artist-run centres as a "showcase" of contemporary art. Dickson and Yates concluded that, since the mass resignation of curators of Canadian and contemporary art in 1979, which had included Pierre Theberge, Mayo Graham, Dennis Reid, and Bruce Ferguson, the Gallery's record of "cooperative and special closeness with artists" had been neglected. They urged that "unless the gallery is to become an empty shell, it must re-establish strong links and greater credibility with the Canadian artistic community."12 But they were also aware such a recommendation assumed the Gallery's own authority to make such links, and that so long as it was a subsidiary of the National Museums of Canada, it simply could not do so. Accordingly, the CARFAC study, too, recommended that the Gallery be freed from its ties to the NMC and again established as an independent, arms-length institution. The NMC itself, meanwhile, since Ostry's departure, had never again been as sophisticated in its manoeuvrings as it had under the triumvirate that he established with Ignatieff and Bachand. But it also, given the consolidation effected during the early 1970s, had not needed to be, especially in regard to the National Gallery. For in extending the NMC'S authority, the triumvirate had laid the groundwork for subsequent secretaries-general - Ian Christie Clark from 1978 to 1982 and Leo Dorais afterward - to continue absorbing under NMC jurisdiction services that had been provided by the individual museums. This mandate was only strengthened by a House of Commons committee report that recommended, in June 1982, that the directors of the four "national museums" be made directly responsible to the secretary-general of the NMC, for the sake of greater efficiency.13 In consequence, shortly after Dorais's arrival, a July 1983 restructuring of NMC by-laws centralized the corporation even further, concentrating everyday management authority in the hands of the secretary-general, who also became the vice-chairman of the NMC'S board. Among the costs of this consolidation by the early 1980s was the almost complete demoralization of staff at the National Gallery, with major curatorial posts left unfilled and with Boggs's former assistant Joseph Martin serving his second term as acting director. Martin would eventually be confirmed, in August 1983, as the Gallery's seventh director, but not out of any hope that he would accomplish much. Sarah Jennings, reporting for CBC, had already described the modest goals associated with his appointment. "He will not demand a voice in the building of a new Gallery," she observed, "he gets along well with Jean Boggs ... [and] he's scheduled to retire in five years, at which time the new Gallery should be ready for occupancy, and ready for a new director."14 Under these circumstances, with a new building pending but with the National Gallery itself still a subsidiary of the NMC, the Gallery's institutional life became a succession of behind-the-scenes skirmishes for physical and semantic control of "cultural resources," amid the build-up to the first major electoral change in Canada since the fall of John Diefenbaker two decades earlier. Potentialities

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In terms of outcomes, one of the most important of these skirmishes was a months' long struggle over the Gallery's library, which first Clark and then Dorais sought to fold into a "Corporate Library Services" model that under a policy announced by Francis Fox in May 1984 absorbed the holdings of the other three "national museuhThms" and was intended to absorb hthe Still Photography Division of the National Film Board. This conflict spanned the period before and after the September transfer of government, which benefited Martin in his attempt to keep a specialized art library at the Gallery. Marcel Masse, as the new minister of communications, viewed himself as a patron of the fine arts, a friend of museums, and an enemy of "red tape."15 With Masse in the background, Martin retained the Gallery's art library through a direct appeal to the visiting committee and to the NMC'S own by-laws, which made the director responsible for "the research and scholarly activity" of a given museum. Signalling another subtle shift in leverage away from the NMC, the National Gallery in the process took on a new responsibility. Faced with "piles of letters, postcards, and signed petitions from the photographic community," Masse also reversed the transfer of the Still Photography Division to the NMC, and in the autumn of 1984 he mooted a Museum of Contemporary Photography as a submuseum of the National Gallery, under the direction of Martha Langford.16 The ambiguity of this administrative tug-of-war, taking place under drastically changed political terms, extended to both the Gallery's own collection and its public profile, but in different ways. In 1982, what remained of Jean Boggs's vision regarding the primacy for the Gallery of "the collection" had sustained a hit with the decision, made under Ian Christie Clark, that acquisitions would no longer be reported by individual museum, as had hitherto been done, and would be logged instead as purchases "for the collection of the Corporation."17 Nevertheless, in March 1985, the National Gallery's staff developed a comprehensive forty-two-page paper on "Collections Policy and Procedures" that focused not on the "intermuseum concept" which had ruled the previous decade but on the Gallery's role as a specialized art museum benefiting from "over 100 years" of "perspicacious and careful purchases" in "the visual arts."18 Though this document was labelled as having been "approved by the NMC Board of Trustees" and as forming "Part II of the 'Codex musealis" on the Collections Policy and Procedures of the National Museums of Canada," it drew heavily on policy consultations which been held by Jean Sutherland Boggs with her staff in the early 19705. In doing so, it looked most like the basis of a collections policy for an independent National Gallery, and implied a reclamation of semantic authority. Paradoxically, while this was going on, the Gallery's public reporting of its own activities continued to shrink, so that by 1984-85, the Bulletin was down to forty pages, with no staff lists and two articles.19 Then in December 1985, Brydon Smith, as assistant director of collections and research, announced that the Gallery was drastically scaling back its program of contemporary video art as a budgetary measure, simply to be able to retain enough staff to complete the move to the new building.*0 This was significant not least because, between the mid-ig/os and mid-1980s, many young artists had been taking advantage of video's cheap production costs, its 35O

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Simmering tensions: Joseph Martin, director of the National Gallery, with Leo Dorais, secretary-general of the National Museums of Canada, and the new Conservative minister of communications Marcel Masse, 12 December 1984, at the unveiling of Bernard van Orley's Virgin and Christ Child. Such is the tension among these three men that the painting seems almost forgotten. (National Gallery of Canada)

reproducibility, and its connection to popular culture to explore especially unorthodox and critical styles of narrative, just as seemed to have been called for by the Cultural Policy Review Committee. This specific retreat, therefore, made the Dickson-Yates criticisms all the more apt, even as it conveyed the sense that the Elgin Street version of a National Gallery was at best in a state of suspended animation in the lead-up to a new building, and little more than a lingering symbol of art's subordination to bureaucratized nationalism. The build-up of momentum behind the scenes finally broke into public visibility in January 1986, when Masse announced a new Task Force, which would focus on the achievements and weaknesses of the NMC. He did so in a way that built on the reservations which had already shown themselves not only in the Trudeau government's sidelining of the NMC in the museum construction projects but in the Applebaum-Hebert report and the CARFAC study. Formally speaking, the Task Force was given the mandate "to assess the present and potential effectiveness of the National Museums Act of 1968 and the National Museums Policy of 1972."21 But journalistic comment soon suggested that the Task Force was stacked against the NMC from the beginning. One of its two co-chairman was the long-serving director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, William Withrow, who in 1962 had introduced Jean Boggs to museum work by hiring her as curator. Clearly, Withrow could be expected to sympathize with the National Gallery's and the other "national museums'" goal of renewed autonomy. The other co-chair was former Parti Quebecois Cultural Potentialities

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Affairs Minister Clement Richard, who had - like Lucien Bouchard - entered Parliament in Ottawa as part of Mulroney's Quebec coalition of conservative expedience. And Richard, for his part, was just as unlikely to be thrilled with the NMC'S agenda of subordinating museums policy to Canadian nation building. Among the submissions received by the Task Force was a "personal response" by Joseph Martin, who was by this time also dealing with Leo Dorais's cancellation of a long-planned catalogue of the European collection in 1985, because it allegedly would not produce enough revenue. Martin's "response" was part cri de coeur and part a restating of the case for Gallery independence that had been made as early as 1912 by Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker. The NMC'S "zealous pursuit of good management'" had, according to Martin, "subvert[ed] the original purpose of the Corporation, which was established to serve rather than control the member institutions." The NMC had also, especially through the office of the secretary-general, made for "the attempted erosion of [his] authority." "My personal capacity to manage and direct the National Gallery of Canada," Martin wrote, "is seriously impeded by the inordinate amount of time I must spend at the NMC Management Committee, attempting to satisfy seemingly endless bureaucratic requirements ... My Assistant Directors ... are similarly hampered by the heavy demands made upon them, as members of the sub-committees and sub-sub-committees of the NMC Management Committee... It may surprise you to learn that I am unable, as Director, to travel outside Ottawa without the permission of the Secretary-General. On one particularly noteworthy occasion, in October 1984,1 was forbidden to attend a press conference ... in Toronto, to announce the creation of the new Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography as a sub-museum of the National Gallery of Canada."22 Apart from this record of personal frustration, Martin's case against the NMC involved his reiterating what Gallery staff had since 1968 seen as the main flaw in its mandate: a failure to recognize the differences among the four museums being united under one administration and one set of management principles. He called for re-establishment not only of the Gallery's independence, with its own separate Board of Trustees, but also "of its own mandate, as a federal institution and a fine arts museum of international stature, which makes an essential contribution to the development and recognition of a distinctive Canadian culture." Such a mandate, he argued, would enable the Gallery's return to "a leadership role" in the visual arts that would be commensurate with its "splendid new building." Martin even claimed that the representation of the Gallery itself "as a museum, a heritage institution" - as had been entrenched through the NMC'S official change of its French name, in 1984, from the feminine "La Galerie nationale" to the masculine "Le Musee des beaux arts" - was "misleading" in regard to its "continuing commitment... to the collection of contemporary art and the encouragement of contemporary artists." Echoing the Cultural Policy Review Committee, he claimed that this area especially - "with its potential for both controversy and political interference" - demanded the existence of "an arm's length agency."23 Sharpening this appeal throughout was the continued decline in Gallery attendance, which at 200,000 in 1986 was two-fifths what it had been in 1970. Martin's 352

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case was not hurt either by the publication, in early August 1986, of both his "personal response" and a "secret brief" that had been sent in reply to the Task Force by Leo Dorais, also in April. Both were leaked, by an unknown source, to Southam News. In his brief, Dorais recommended that the secretary-general of the NMC be given even greater control over museum directors than already existed, including the right to hire and fire them. The retention of order-in-council appointments, Dorais argued,"has allowed the directors in particular... to operate protected from changes in government policies and sheltered from the trend toward more and more constraints in government administration." Dorais also alleged that, insofar as there was still "friction" at all, it was "caused solely by persons nostalgic for the pre-1968 situation. My conclusion is that the atmosphere is poisoned in one of the component museums which has been brooding over 15 years of history. A change of personnel in two key positions would change the air... In my view, all the problems are caused by individuals, not by structure."24 The museum with the "poisoned" atmosphere was widely reported to be the National Gallery, with Joseph Martin one of the "nostalgic" persons who was causing "problems." But if the tone of this brief was stunningly ad hominem, petulant, and even - with its suggestion that "directors" should be subject to "changes in government policy" - ominous, Dorais's credibility was hurt still further when a New Democrat MP, Lynn McDonald, pointed out that he had in May, after secretly sending the brief in April, formally denied to the Commons Culture Committee that he had ever suggested to the Task Force that two museum directors be replaced.25 In the short term, Dorais won the battle with Martin, who resigned in mid-August 1986, four months after his "personal response" was submitted and a month before the Task Force report was tabled. In his letter to Communications Minister Flora MacDonald, Martin cited health reasons - he had been scheduled to retire anyway the following year - and a need to preserve his "dignity."26 With his departure, Brydon Smith became acting director and - like Donald Buchanan nearly thirty years earlier after Alan Jarvis's resignation - assumed the unenviable job of organizing a move to a new building under strained conditions. But even as the Gallery lost yet a third director to the acrimonious struggle with the NMC, and was placed under the interim authority of Richard Alway as chair of the visiting committee, the Task Force signalled that this would be the last such victory for the NMC. In its report of September 1986, it as much as restated the positions of Martin and Dickson/Yates. Comment had, it said, been especially negative about the NMC'S effects on the National Gallery: "The National Gallery provoked the most trenchant criticism ... It was once regarded as the leading proponent of Canadian art. However it is now perceived as having progressively lost its leadership position, to the point that it is no longer a leader at all... People do not know whether to blame the Gallery or the Government or the Corporation or whatever. We repeatedly heard that 'it costs so much and produces so little'; that the institution which should be 'au courant' with the emerging arts in Canada is no longer so; that 'we never see anybody from the National in our regional gallery, let alone in our artists' studios'; that the Gallery is preoccupied with 'dead Europeans rather than living Canadians.'"27 Potentialities

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This last remark recalled precisely what A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris had said about the National Gallery before the First World War. But rather than fault the Gallery - as Dickson/Yates often verged on doing - the Task Force turned to the NMC itself, and to the act that established it, as the main source of problems. "We have concluded," they wrote, "that the system is too heavy, inefficient, costly and almost unworkable... In attempting to consolidate the four museums into one corporation, the 1968 Act moved with the fashion of the time, which regarded orderliness, tidiness and large scale in public administration almost as ends in themselves."28 Quoting a brief that read suspiciously like Martin's, they claimed that the outcome of this approach, far from honouring the differences among the museums, had been that "the Corporation [itself] has become self-important, its administrative ambitions more ends in themselves than respective museum objectives which were to have been served. By its centralizing of functions, instead of facilitating the implementation of museum programs, the Corporation has enmeshed them in bureaucratic complexity, so that coping with that is what consumes and exhausts staffs' energy, relegating creative work to a secondary role."29 Curiously, one of the report's comments suggested that the NMC had indeed mutated into the nightmare and thoroughly un-self-critical side of that "systems esthetic" which Jack Burnham had deemed so important in the late 19605. "Many of the people whom we interviewed, both within and beyond the Corporation," the Task Force wrote, "described it as 'process driven rather than 'product driven." This language directly recalled Burnham, who had said that "increasingly 'products' either in art or life - become irrelevant, and a different set of needs arise ... We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done." In the case of the NMC, however, a "systems-oriented" approach not to art itself but to a superintending museology in "the national interest" had led less to change than to bureaucratic gridlock and to what the Globe and Mail had called "empire building," even as contemporary art's potentially critical relationship to such a process was neglected and even denied. Not surprisingly, given these assessments, the Withrow-Richard Task Force recommended in its report the complete dissolution of the NMC, and the reversion of its four major museums to independence, with roughly $25 million in savings to be distributed to smaller museums. As might also have been expected, the NMC under Dorais and Pelletier then mounted its own self-justifying counter-attack. The grandiloquent language with which it did so suggested the extent to which its bureaucrats were beginning to suffer from almost delusional notions, both of their own importance and of a context whose pluralism was by the mid-1980s escaping imperious generalizations. "The Board's first premise," this anonymously written document declared, "is that the federal government has a unique role in safeguarding and sharing the Canadian heritage... This national role should be reflected in a comprehensive policy framework developed in conjunction with the Provinces, Territories, museum community, and public."30 This was precisely the mid-1960s language of singular "heritage" and "comprehensive" blurring of the distinctions 354

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among museums that had already provoked anger in briefs to the Task Force. That the NMC seemed oblivious to this anger was revealed in the board's self-description. "As the voice for all regions and all public interests," the Response to the Report of the Task Force declared, "the [NMC] Board has a responsibility to ensure that the National Museums of Canada serves the Canadian people as a whole."31 With this announcement that it had become uthe voice for all regions and all public interests," the NMC s board revealed the extent to which the drive toward strong central authority and homogenized symbols, which had been a hallmark of Pierre Trudeau's style of federalism, had slipped into bureaucratized absurdity. Given the criticism heard by the Task Force across the country about the NMC, what this document conveyed most effectively was the way in which this drive had, by 1986, made for extreme presumption, and even for a Reichsbunker mentality. The NMC had, in its anonymously written self-promotions, been inflating its importance and even bending the record to do so, for over a decade. By the mid-1980s, however, the conductor was waving his baton to the empty air, as well as to a Parliament dominated by the party which had been in opposition when the NMC was established in 1968, and which was by 1986 dismantling many of the sweeping national policies that were Trudeau's legacy. Despite the NMC s claim to be defending "as essential the national role of the Government of Canada in support of the Canadian heritage," on 29 January 1987 the parliamentary standing committee on communications and culture formally sided with the Task Force. In its own report, the Conservative-dominated committee asked for "new legislation ... to establish the four major federal museums as autonomous institutions," with the proviso that "their collections [be] more widely distributed, through ... generous lending programmes."32 Five months later, the minister of communications, Flora MacDonald, announced that the NMC would be systematically dismantled over the next two years and that the museums would regain their autonomy. In a way that recalled lean Boggs's removal as head of the Museums Construction Corporation, Leo Dorais was quietly shifted to a job as "special advisor to the deputy minister of communication," and an interim administration more amenable to the devolution was appointed under a new secretarygeneral, John Edwards.33 Thus, as the new building moved toward completion, the National Gallery was again promised administrative autonomy, under the authority of new legislation. In practice, this would entail the Gallery's recovery of its own act of Parliament in 1990; its own board of directors, with authority over the budget and acquisitions; more flexible year-to-year funding than had been allowed under the NMC; and the Gallery director's own recovery of authority to negotiate with Treasury Board and cabinet on the Gallery's behalf. Perhaps most important, though, it would entail the National Gallery's recovery of its mandate as an "independent institution," toward collecting, displaying, and circulating visual art, both throughout the country and internationally. With this retreat from the legacy of 1967, there seemed the possibility that national unity and identity goals might slip quietly into the informing background, and cease providing, as quasi-metaphysical and unassailable first principles, the Potentialities

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Gallery's semantic ether, which ironically had had to be micro-managed bureaucratically lest it dissolve. "SPIRITUAL REFRESHMENT AND A GLASS OF CHILLED WINE"

Given the extent of these sweeping changes - as well as the more banal dilemma of a vacant director's chair - the issue of who would head the newly housed and independent National Gallery took on at this point greater importance than it had since 1966, when Jean Boggs had been hired to restore credibility. But the Gallery had also, in ten years, gone through as many directors - four - as had preceded Boggs in the previous half-century. There were some murmurs within the art world to the effect that, given her role in the building's construction, as well as in the Gallery's history, she was again the appropriate choice, if only for a symbolic period. Boggs, however, had been a Liberal appointee both as director and as head of the CMCC. She had also, in her will to see both the Gallery and the Museum of Civilization buildings completed, made life difficult for those of Mulroney's ministers who had had to deal with her, and had been removed from her job by the Tory government. Besides, she was - as she said herself when asked - in her mid-sixties, and considered herself too old to take on the directorship. In keeping with the tradition established with Blankstein, Greene and Russell in 1954, and continued with Parkin and Associates with the new building, then, Boggs was given the equivalent of a golden handshake. In her case, it was the role of curating and writing the catalogue for the opening exhibition, which was to consist not of Canadian art but of the pastels of Edgar Degas, on whom she had written her doctoral thesis. This exhibition's terms quickly suggested that the gremlin of unintended irony which had long haunted the Gallery's grandest efforts had not been banished. As a joint project initiated by Joseph Martin with the Reunion des musees nationaux in France and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Pastels by Degas built also on the pattern of private sponsorship that he had begun with Vatican Splendour in 1986. Yet, if this signalled a move by the Gallery away from complete dependence on the federal government, and from the sort of homogenized public domain fostered by the NMC, the exhibition's sponsor did not provide an auspicious start. For there were those who wondered why the Gallery was relying for its inaugural show on United Technologies Corporation, which was described in Canadian Art as "an arms and aircraft manufacturer."34 Given the prominence of the new building itself, however, the question of who would actually direct the Gallery seemed paradoxically no longer to carry the public charge that it had in 1955, with the arrival of Alan Jarvis, or in 1966, with the arrival of Jean Boggs, or in 1976, after Boggs's departure. Canadian society was by this time more diffuse, and more focused on technologies of media that were themselves indifferent to place, even as contemporary art had assumed a much lower profile. The position's revolving door over the previous decade and the Gallery's eclipse within the NMC since 1968 had also made for lowered expectations, and for a certain exhaustion in the art world. Nevertheless, the immediate future held aspects of extreme uncertainty, given the untried terms of the new building and the immi356

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The first director of the National Gallery in its new building, Dr Shirley Thomson, with Moshe Safdie, November 1987. (J. Wonnacott, National Gallery of Canada, )

nence of an act of Parliament that would renew the Gallery's independence as an institution. The selection committee, under the durable Gerard Pelletier of National Museums Policy renown, chose in these circumstances to opt for proven administrative competence, and for a figure whose own low public profile was unlikely to offend art world factions or displace the building, even as it might incline her to cooperate with the government. This figure was Shirley Thomson, whose appointment was announced in August 1987 by Flora MacDonald. At fifty-seven, Thomson was a bureaucrat and art historian who had specialized in the European Baroque. Having taken her doctorate at McGill University in her early forties, she was by 1987 the secretary-general of the Canadian Commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which, under the Canada Council, organized Canadian involvement in international cultural events. Thomson's pro-Canada credentials were therefore in order, but her only museum experience had been in directing the small McCord Museum at McGill. Nevertheless - and as with Hsio-Yen Shih - her very obscurity meant that she would bring no art-world debts to the job and would be able, as a stabilizing transition figure, to ease the National Gallery into both a new building and renewed independence.35 She gave a sense of the pending style of her directorship, and of her vision for the National Gallery in a November interview. "It's going to be a place where tired public servants come for spiritual refreshment and a glass of chilled wine," she said. But she also added - perhaps lest this goal seem a tad too modest - that "we will establish our presence through quality, with exhibitions Potentialities

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that have the first-rate scholarship evident in Jean Sutherland Boggs's role in organizing the Degas show."36 In this implicitly stabilizing comment were an appeal both to past authority Boggs's "first-rate scholarship" - and to that work-horse word of the art world: "quality." Perhaps as much out of useful naivety as for any other reason, Thomson continued to use this word as though the ruptures of the previous forty years had never happened. Yet these ruptures as they pertained to the relationship between art object and context, and to the interrogation of space as something more than an "empty" medium, remained important, not least in regard to the National Gallery. For what was the recovery of administrative autonomy likely to mean, in a building whose public face owed so much to the semantically bound architectures of the religious past? Was it possible that, even as with the NMC'S demise the quasi-metaphysical investment in "Canada" was losing its main bureaucratic lever, the building itself, in the spectacle of its sacral references, might be introducing a whole new brew of such potential investments that could shape the sense of Gallery autonomy and authority? The Ottawa Citizen's art critic, Nancy Baele, hinted at the unresolved pertinence of these questions when, after a tour of the building in the spring of 1987, she wrote that "a heightened sense of drama and ceremony is one of the effects of Safdie's architecture. The visitor is never unaware of the space that encloses him."37 One early hint of the role that this "enclosing" space might play was given by yet another development during the construction process. For not only would the design incorporate, with syncretistic freedom, multiple motifs from earlier sacral architectures, but the building itself would come to house an officially de-sacralized site drawn from what had, for the previous three centuries, been the dominant sectarian tradition in Canadian society. This was the reconstruction of the Chapel of the Convent of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, whose building on Ottawa's Rideau Street had dated from the 18405 and been described in 1971 as "the largest concentration of pre- and post- Confederation construction in Ottawa."38 In keeping with a neglect of the architectural past that has shown itself often in Canada, this complex had, despite its historical value, been bought in 1972 by Ottawa property developers and demolished in the course of a single night in May. The demolition had not taken place without resistance by citizens' groups, however, who, with the support of Robert Hubbard and Jean Boggs at the National Gallery, had sought to save first the convent buildings themselves and then - after non-cooperation by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada - just the chapel. This had been designed in the i88os by Canon Georges Bouillon, with neo-Gothic fan vaulting and woodwork in the style of the English sixteenth century and in keeping with his interior for Ottawa's Basilique Cathedrale. The rescue effort, carried out in the midst of the demolition, had then been aided by the Gallery, which bought the chapel for "the cost of the salvage operation." The outcome had been that, even as the convent itself had been succeeded by a parking lot, the chapel had been carefully dismantled, labelled, and stored in a warehouse, in the hope that, someday, it could be restored. The new Gallery building provided, through its scale, the opportunity for this to happen, and negotiations led in 1984 to the design of a room in which the chapel 358

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The aestheticization of Christian experience: The Chapel of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Convent (The Rideau Convent), as designed by George Bouillon in 1887-88, and as restored in the National Gallery's new building in 1988, after its rescue from the convent's demolition by commerical developers in 1972. (National Gallery of Canada)

officially de-sacralized - could be rebuilt for the centennial of its own construction in 1888. In the process it became something less than a consecrated chapel, but in its material unity something more or other than a standard art exhibit. Many museums, of course, contain relics of sacral architecture, some of them more or less complete. Generally, however, these originate in other times and places, so that it would seem a rare phenomenon for a museum to display, complete, an architectural "relic" from a sacral tradition that is supposedly not only alive and flourishing but the dominant tradition in the society beyond the museums walls. Yet this was just what happened with the reconstruction of the Rideau Convent Chapel in the National Gallery, because the ascendant secular society beyond the Gallery's walls had not cared enough about this instance of sacral architecture and local history to protect it from developers whose concern with profit seemed to exclude all other values. The rebuilding of the Rideau Convent Chapel's interior within the National Gallery, then, was more than just a gesture toward protecting architectural heritage. It entailed a miniaturization of ostensibly dominant religious tradition, in such a way that it, too, could be absorbed into the architectural syncretism of the Gallery, and in being absorbed be demoted from dominant. Both the absorption and the demotion lent piquant irony to Shirley Thomson's reference to the new building as a place for "spiritual refreshment and a glass of chilled wine," for this was obviously a Potentialities

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"refreshment" that would not need the consecrated warm wine integral to the chapel's Eucharist. And yet the Gallery was performing this appropriative and protective role in default of the Chapel's protection by the wider society. In doing so, it recapitulated the process by which the church, after giving European settlers a framework of moral purpose amid perceived wilderness, was itself miniaturized and all but hidden by the technological society that grew out of that purpose and that Heidegger and Grant saw as forming a "metaphysic" different from JudaeoChristianity. With this gesture, then, the new National Gallery also played further toward its own quasi-sacral status as a repository for the signifiers of God, amid a surrounding commercialism that Safdie himself had identified with "the endless bustle of everyday life," to which the Gallery's experience of "ascent" would allegedly provide an alternative. But this default clearly hinted also that, among the centrifugal forces faced by a Canadian nation-state defined in part by its own history, would be a capitalism which, in 1970, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had called "deterritorializing" in that it honours neither national boundaries nor traditions in pursuit of profit and instead turns what enters its grasp into further "images of capital."39 What made both this phenomenon and this analysis especially relevant before the new building's opening was that the Canadian state itself was about to embark on a great experiment: a Free Trade Agreement with the United States such as had been thwarted, in more modest form, by Sir Edmund Walker's defection from Laurier's Liberals to Robert Borden's Conservatives in 1910. This defection had played a crucial role in the Gallery's early history, for it will be recalled that Walker used his leverage with a grateful Borden to effect its first major expansion, which included the hiring of Eric Brown, the move to the Victoria Museum, and the incorporating act of 1913. The irony, then, was that even as the Gallery was undergoing its third and largest expansion, the pattern of 1910 was being reversed by Borden's own heirs in the Progressive Conservative Party, toward the admission of an even greater flood of consumer goods and mediated influences from the south. It was within this context that, perhaps following a logic of overcompensation, as well as the suggestion of the building itself, a new variant on Vincent Massey's nonsectarian mingling of "spirit," art, and Canadian nationalism soon slipped back into the National Gallery's public discourse. The agent for this resurrection was Shirley Thomson, who as the recently installed director began to speak from within Safdie's building in terms that had not been linked with the National Gallery in decades. Nevertheless, they directly recalled the Royal Commission's case for Canadian art as "the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit" and Charles Comfort's 1951 promotion of the Gallery itself as the site for "a regenerated Canadianism." Thomson spoke almost loquaciously, in a way that suggested she was unaware of or indifferent to the nearly half-century of artistic developments that had gradually purged this sort of rhetoric from the Gallery's own public idiom, if not from - in broader terms - that of the NMC. But she also spoke from within the precincts of a new, overarching, and sacrally charged building that, for its part, seemed almost to invite this rhetoric, as a means of recharging in symbolic terms a statehood that, 360

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materially, was about to be tested. So that, as during the 19205 Eric Brown's "sermon" had come to be "there has never been a great nation that had not a great art," Thomson soon forged less a sermon than a trademark slogan, to the effect that "we have the soul of Canada in all its dimensions and diversity hanging on our walls."40 The phraseology could perhaps have been more careful, given that "the soul of Canada" came off sounding, in the process of this alleged materialization, like so much freshly washed laundry. But what this phrasing seemed to imply was that - as far as Thomson was concerned - the building had absorbed not only the Rideau Convent Chapel but "the soul of Canada in all its dimensions and diversity." The totalizing aspect of this phrase - "in all its dimensions and diversity" - actually recalled the language of the NMC, which during the same period was defending itself in vain as "the voice for all regions and all public interests." In transferring this totalizing impulse to the National Gallery as itself reascendant, however, Thomson added a metaphysical dimension that went beyond "all regions and all public interests" into the quasi-mystical, geistlich realm of "soul." The phrase also recalled, and even seemed in some sense to announce the fulfilment of, Lawren Harris's 1928 manifesto that "the creative artist... pioneer[s] for the soul of a people." What Thomson left out, in implicitly reviving Harris's claim, was his qualifier that the artist goes about this pioneering "in terms of th[e] inner standard" bequeathed by Plato and by his ostensibly universal metaphysics of immutable truths. But crucially, Safdie's building itself did the work of providing, via its own metaphysically based access route, unspoken but encompassing affirmations of just this anchorage. The new director, in her style of adapting earlier rhetoric, also recalled the way in which Comfort recycled Harris in his 1951 essay on "Painting" for the Massey commission. But in providing this inflated rhetoric by means of quotable sound bites, rather than through internally coherent discourse, she was doing more than just playing to the media style of the period. Paradoxically, she seemed also to exemplify that style of postmodernism which Safdie himself alleged "uses somebody else's language" through "borrowing fixed images from it." Yet such was the persistent thread of Gallery irony that, in this case, Thomson was rhetorically appending such borrowed images to the very building that Safdie had designed, out of his own reactive theory of architecture. The process made for odd inversions. When the building opened, by way of important example, she added hints of an adaptation of Eric Brown's claim, made from his anchorage in Christian Science, that "if art can't be tried on ... the touchstone of good it is less than nothing." "The gallery has a national role, and so does the capital," Thomson declared. "If you can't have a national capital reflecting through art a nation's spiritual and moral concerns, you have nothing."4' Like Moshe Safdie with his historically-charged references to "Platonic geometries" and "Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dream," the new director dropped loaded terms with almost casual abandon. But because this was hardly a neutral language, and was being publicly revived during a crucial transition in the Gallery's history, it deserves a closer look as to implications. Eric Brown, in saying that art would be "less than nothing" if it could not "be tried... on the touchstone of good," was overtly subordiPotentialities

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nating art to a metaphysical theory of "good" that, as given form in Christian Science doctrine, was providing a "touchstone" not just for art but for life in general. Thomson, however - while giving no hint of speaking from within a sectarian doctrine - seemed to be suggesting that an Ottawa without the National Gallery or some equivalent would, though it might retain a democratically elected Parliament, be "nothing." The claim, then, was as sweeping in terms of linking Ottawa's non-art activities with this "nothing" as her claim about the Gallery itself - that "we have the soul of Canada in all its dimensions and diversity hanging on our walls" - was in terms of tying art and the Gallery's role to some kind of unitary national transcendence. The hint, again, was of a radical distinction between the inside and the outside of the new Gallery building, with the former "spiritually" invested and "sacred" and the latter not at all so and "profane." Between the two would be Safdie's "access route," forming a liminal zone of transition toward those "walls" where, according to one of Thomson's statements, "the soul of Canada in all its dimensions and diversity" would be "hanging," and where, according to another, art would be "reflecting" the "nation's spiritual and moral concerns." The further subtext seemed to be that, for the new director, Canadian art itself was an enterprise engaged in the material making of Canadian "soul," as a reflection of the "nation's spiritual and moral concerns." This, too, was obviously in direct descent from the Massey commission's claim that "Canadian painting, through its honesty and its artistic value, has become above all the other arts the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit." Accordingly, the new National Gallery as the apt repository for this "soul" might also be expected to provide - again as per the commission - "the spiritual foundations of our national life." But crucially, this view also implied an anachronistic mutation of Jean Boggs's own art-historical investment in "the collection" per se as "at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish." For "the collection" - much larger by this time - was again being tied to a quasimystical language of national "soul," via terms that Boggs herself had eschewed, even as she had struggled against art's subordination to the differently encompassing rhetoric of the NMC. What the Gallery's renewed independence seemed to be implying as well, therefore, was that it would take over not only some of the functions of the NMC, but also - within the physical context of a sacrally-invested building - its style of totalizing national rhetoric as refocused on art. Yet, even as she recalled Lawren Harris's association of art with "the soul of a people," Thomson seemed to be urging a retreat as much from his view of the artist as pioneer as from the Applebaum-Hebert view of the artist as potentially critical, toward the artist as a visual "reflector" of the "nation's spiritual and moral concerns." Nor was she evoking the style of Jean Boggs's universalizing humanism, with art perhaps "reflecting" the concerns of "man." Instead, the new director's assignment of priority to "a nation" seemed to do a backwards leap-frog past Boggs, to reconnect with the Gallery's earlier record of investment in art for both metaphysical and national reasons, as well as with Vincent Massey's personal doctrine of a spiritually charged "nation," the "idea" of whose "unity" "to us must be supreme." The rhetoric itself, as deployed so soon in the new building's presence as a context for art, seemed 362

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to convey Thomson's own sense of the symbolic Order the building would cultivate, in its physical placement between symbolic Peace, conveyed by the Basilique Cathedrale/Peacekeeping Monument, and symbolic Good Government, conveyed by the Parliament Buildings. This was, however, an Order in which art was again about to be subsumed, courtesy in part through a rhetoric that prescribed it the role of cooperating with "the national capital," toward reflecting the "nation's spiritual and moral concerns." Yet such rhetoric was by this time only a handmaiden to the building that provided the walls on which - according to Thomson - "the soul of Canada" was about to hang "in all its dimension and diversity": a building that offered its own correlations among art, sacrality, symmetry, and - via the panorama visible from the Great Hall - Canadian nationhood, via an obligatory "access route" that hearkened back to periods of spiritual authority, confidence, and certainty. The new building finally opened on 21 May 1988, two weeks ahead of schedule, and at a cost nearly double the initial allotment of $82 million.42 The official fanfare of press releases and private showings for dignitaries was accompanied by engineered festivities, including a parade for children through Ottawa's Byward Market and a lavish feast in the Great Hall that - with free food and drink - was attended by nine thousand people. Such largesse added to the prominence of the building itself in making for a veritable riot of declarative statements. A long-time resident, the photographer Yousuf Karsh, declared, after presenting the Gallery with sixteen of his portraits of artists, that he had never seen the city so excited about an event.43 Brian Mulroney, apparently forgetting for the moment his government's removal of Jean Sutherland Boggs from the project, declared that the building itself was "extraordinary," while the Free Trade negotiator Simon Reisman resorted to his own professional idiom in declaring that "we have a world class monument here. Culture is the lifeblood of this nation. It deserves to be preserved."44 Ottawa itself for once even came to the attention of the outside world as something other than a seat of government, with the New York Times echoing its long-retired critic John Canaday in declaring that, "for the first time, Canadians will finally have a National Gallery that is not a subject for apology."45 There were, of course, amid these celebrations, familiar rumblings from the Canadian hinterland, which in this case was practically everywhere not within the triangle of Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto. The columnist Paul McKeague, in the Windsor Star, perhaps best caught the mood of these when he wrote that "the new National Gallery of Canada is just down the street from the Royal Canadian Mint and that's fitting considering it took $162 million to build it."46 But Moshe Safdie's answer to such sentiments was likewise declarative. "It's a bargain," he told a reporter. "An absolute bargain."47 Shirley Thomson - as quoted by McKeague - was more oblique, but in her curious relationship to language possibly even more offensive. "Is Canada worthy of the building?" she asked. "I say yes. Canadians merit a building like this, and the collection should be shown in a building like this. The collection will grow."48 A more diplomatic approach might have been to ask whether the building was worthy of Canada. But the phraseology suggested how the building's seductive combination of physical scale with sacrally charged and deliberately awePotentialities

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inspiring motifs might already be working to skew priorities. Moreover, Thomson's insistence that "the collection will grow" hinted at another problem which had already proved touchy. For a number of Canadian critics, after touring the building a year before it opened, had voiced concerns that the art which had been assembled by the Gallery since 1880 would as much as be swallowed up by the sheer grandeur of the architecture. There was obvious irony in the very emergence of such a question, given the extent to which this grandeur ostensibly served the goal that the institution never again become what it had under the NMC: a "minor bureau of the government," as Robert Fulford had called it when commenting on Charles Comfort's tenure in i960. Fulford, however, was then among those who in May 1987 was paradoxically uneasy, asking whether the spectacular access route was "in danger of becoming the kind of overture that makes the rest of the show look small." Of the Colonnade ramp, he wrote that "at the top of it, a Metropolitan Opera production of Aida would hardly be excessive, and a collection of Rubens murals would be just barely adequate. It's hard to imagine ascending in this style in order to see a group of A.Y. Jackson sketches."49 The critic for the Globe and Mail, John Bentley Mays, took a different and more audacious tack, assessing the building itself in terms of a profusion of "little vulgarisms": "sheets of ugly Mylar lining the light shafts; the pompous ramps and oppressive neo-Egyptian stonework; and the pool at the bottom of one courtyard' shaft, giving the gallery the look of a resort hotel." But just as Nancy Baele noted, after the same tour, that "the visitor is never unaware of the space that encloses him," so Mays wondered, in walking the building, "whether these and other elements of nouveau-riche eclecticism and luxuriousness will overwhelm the art."50 These were not questions that, initially anyway, troubled the Gallery's staff, who were familiar with the collection, and more than familiar with the terms under which it had been displayed since i960. Instead, they were unashamedly thrilled about the new building's improvements. Nor was this only to do with the threat that had been posed in the Lome Building by condensation, or with an increase in display space. Claude Dupuis, an Ottawa artist who worked as a guide, was especially eloquent. "It's as if everything has been cleaned," he told Anne Duncan of the Montreal Gazette.urThe colours just glow. I feel like I'm seeing a lot of these works for the first time."51 Yet for those who were seeing the works for the first time - such as a reporter for the German magazine Die Welt - the potential problem suggested by Mays and Fulford loomed unresolved. Safdie's building, Reinhard Beuth wrote, "guards the art as in a shrine, wraps it up, surrounds it with secrets. Whoever wants to get to the art must cross the threshold with forethought, must approach the art with a palpitating heart." But the build-up, he claimed, made for an anti-climax, because beyond the ramp's summit "there is only the old collection in the new building ... and it is short of masterpieces."52 Beuth perhaps missed the point a little, as this had been shaped by the Gallery's own history as an institution. Given Boggs's emphasis on "hallowed atmosphere," and on nurturing a cultic status for art that - if Benjamin was correct - would actually thrive on objects being not too freely visible, the assertion that the building 364

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"guards the art as in a shrine" might be welcomed as a compliment. And given also the "spiritual" investment since Eric Brown's time in the "younger generation" of landscape painters of 1915, a shrine was precisely what their works seemed to demand. In fact, once the building was finished, neither Fulford nor other visitors would have to wait until the ramp's summit to be introduced to a version of A.Y. Jackson that may itself have been "nouveau-riche" but that did seem to suit the grand scale, as well as the Gallery's revised relationship to "a nation." This was Cornelia Hahn Oberlander's oversized, derivative Taiga Garden, which - with its careful plantings of pine trees and northern grasses - implied in its very name the further success of the Canadian nation-state in domesticating Terre Sauvage. But inside the building, beyond the ascending ramp and the symmetrical, converging emptiness of the Great Hall, the works of the "younger generation" were indeed nestled as the culminating end point of the Canadian galleries on the first floor. For the architecture critic Trevor Boddy, also writing sceptically of the building in Canadian Architect, these rooms "tucked under the European galleries" were "the most didactic" and "the most disappointing spaces in the building." "One enters the linear historical sequence," he wrote, "and rumbles through, guiltily, perfunctorily, like a teen through a CanLit text."53 While Boddy had a point about both this sequence and "the remarkably standard plan, the squat monotony" of the rooms themselves, however, the placement of works by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven at what seemed the very core of the building itself as well as of the collection only served to emphasize the cultic aspect of this work. And this placement, like the building itself, seemed to signal the culmination also of a multitude of Brown's hopes: not only for "the dawn of a new art era in Canada which will glorify [the] country'' but for "a dream castle ... overlooking the Ottawa River," where art could serve the "sense of nationality," even as it formed a vehicle toward "fitness and order and suitability." Yet the question lingered, as to whether the building was presenting itself not only as an overarching but as an overwhelming "environment," where art - in the apparent absence of what Beuth called "world class ... masterpieces" - would as agreeably slip into a supporting role, as at Darius's Persepolis. What, though, of that "great experimental workshop" of contemporary art, that, according to the ApplebaumHebert committee of 1982, "has as one of its central functions the critical scrutiny of all other spheres including the political?" What latitude would it be granted? On his pre-opening tour of the building, in the spring of 1987, John Bentley Mays also asked: "Is the new National Gallery array going to reflect what the most advanced Canadian artists of the past 20 years have been telling us - that the definitive art of modern Canada is the situation, not the discrete painting, sculpture or other thing?"54 This was the question that followed out of the 1960s concern with space itself, which had led in art to an engagement with context. And surely, if there was a "situation" that asked to be explored, it involved the context provided by Safdie's building itself, in terms of both its semantically loaded interior access route and its placement on "a magical spot" among so many other icons of the Canadian nationstate. Potentialities

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The Colonnade ramp of the National Gallery prepared for a state event, in this case a state dinner hosted by the prime minister for the president of the Philippines in 1998, with red carpet and pedestal-mounted flags of both nations. (Douglas Ord)

Epilogue: "The Spiritual Foundations of Our National Life"?

The work with which we have been entrusted is concerned with nothing less than the spiritual foundations of our national life." - Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1951 Examining the wall-reliefs at Persepolis of the horses, parading figures, and lions all carved in stone, I imagined the artist going to the master mason, or maybe to the king himself, and saying, 'I'm not going to carve horses and lions; I'm in my elephant period.' - Moshe Safdie, Form and Purpose

The first dozen years of the new building's operation contained enough exhibitions and public controversies, big and small, that a separate volume would be needed to do them justice. But if there was one clear trend and baffling lacuna by the turn of the millennium, it was the lack of any program of site-specific installation by contemporary artists that might interrogate the Gallery's own nuances as a place, and thereby answer to the insistence of the 1982 Applebaum-Hebert committee that "the cultural sphere ... has as one of its central functions the critical scrutiny of all other spheres including the political." Instead, the Great Hall and Colonnade ramp - as the building's most audacious and spectacular features - remained throughout the 19905 almost entirely empty of art, not least to facilitate their being rented out for state dinners, corporate conventions, and charity fundraisers. For the National Gallery soon became - as Robert Fulford had anticipated it would - Ottawa's preferred site for such events. The only exclusions were of activities deemed by the Gallery's special-events department to be politically partisan or religiously sectarian. But to those organizations judged suitably neutral, and in possession of a $5,000 per diem fee, the building offered the benefits of "ascent" along the Colonnade ramp,

culminating in the Great Hall's marriage of an allegedly "magical spot" with an allegedly transcendent order of "Platonic geometries," as mapped out in glass and steel. The presence of art within the building beyond this zone was pointedly irrelevant to the feel-good atmosphere fostered for almost any occasion by these harmonious forms, and to their linkage of this atmosphere, via the framed grandeur of the Parliament Buildings, to the Canadian nation-state and its machinery of government. Evidently, this pattern of use honoured the concern of the National Museums' visiting committee, also in 1982, that a new Gallery maintain a sense of ceremony while welcoming a non-specialized public. Yet there was also a more subtle message. Enacted amid the stylized motifs of so many religious traditions, harmoniously reconciled, such events served, beyond their limited ends, to convey to those involved a sense of the tolerant diversity of the Canadian nation-state itself. The new building incorporated a multitude of sacral motifs: Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Mesoamerican, and even Megalithic. In so doing, it affirmed a sense of national unity based on more than the traditional Canadian goal of reconciling two western European peoples, the English and the French. In keeping with post-1967 immigration policy, it hinted also at the possibility of harmonizing, under the umbrella of a secular but multicultural nation-state, much more diverse ethnic groups and sectarian traditions that have often come into conflict with one another. And given Moshe Safdie's own experience of living and working in close proximity to a site - Jerusalem's contested Temple Mount and al-Haram ash-Sharif - whose religious legacies continue to be a cause for vicious conflict, this ambition, at least, seemed eminently sound. Nevertheless, there were also wrinkles in this pattern of use that begged for scrutiny and that went beyond the almost complete exclusion of art - ostensibly the building's raison d'etre - from the zone of spectacle. In social terms, many of the events held in the Great Hall were by invitation only. This meant that the Gallery's frequent presentation at night was as an immense, glittering crystal, lit in pale blue or rose from within, but out of reach to passers-by. Moreover, although the Great Hall could not be used for "politically partisan" events, the accession of any one political party to government meant that it gathered to itself the machinery of state, which after 1988 included the right to rent the Hall for affairs of its choosing. The access route's atmospherics could thereby be turned - to recall Safdie's description of the ascending ramp - toward "rituals" that invested the successful politicians themselves as figures of state, surrounded by motifs drawn mostly from authoritarian religious traditions. Such events were introduced by a red carpet and by pedestal-mounted Canadian flags the length of the Colonnade ramp, as accoutrements that pointed to the grandeur, success, and unity of the Canadian nationstate. But they also carried the usual Gallery surcharge of unintended irony, this time regarding Safdie's comment that "you should really go through some kind of procession to make your way into something as important as the National Gallery." For it was not into the mainly hidden "gallery" part of the building that these "processions" would lead, but rather - for the invitees - into the conspicuously "national" 368

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part which, overlooking Parliament Hill, consists of the Great Hall's "salubrious region" of symmetrical harmonies that converge high above toward a single centre. This usage played to another of Nancy Baele's insightful comments in the Ottawa Citizen, which dated from her tours of the building before it opened. Safdie's Great Hall, she suggested presciently, would offer not the "living room on the city" that his promotional material described but rather a "party palace for visiting dignitaries," and even a "throne room."1 Fulford, too, had sized up the Great Hall's political possibilities, in a way that recalled Frank Howard's sense of "a royal, not to say imperial mind lurking behind all [the] splendor and display" of the museums announcement in 1982. "One can barely imagine a prime minister or governor-general worthy of it," Fulford wrote after his tour in 1987. "Safdie has created a room in which Charles de Gaulle would be comfortably at home."2 The uses to which the Great Hall and the Colonnade ramp were put in the 19905 did not reach quite this imperial scale. Nevertheless, the access route, with its "ritual" allure, did figure as the anticipated end point for one especially focused public incident, which took place at about noon on 15 February 1996 and which certainly seemed to suggest its seductions. " S O M E P E O P L E C A M E IN MY WAY. I HAD TO CO

..."

The incident's ceremonial context was provided by the first celebration of Canada's "Flag Day" which had just been decreed by the Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien to honour the official adoption of the maple leaf flag on 15 February 1965. The thirtieth anniversary had been honoured the year before. But Chretien had opted for a formal National Flag of Canada Day in the wake of a Quebec referendum on independence which the separatist Quebec government had come within 60,000 votes of winning in October 1995. In keeping with the celebration's upbeat style, Chretien had a busy day scheduled, which in its early phase involved a speech at Cartier Park in Hull, mainly to bused-in schoolchildren who had been issued small Canadian flags and asked to wave them. The speech, however, was frequently disrupted by heckling demonstrators, who were protesting cuts to federal unemployment-insurance benefits. Accounts of what happened next agree that when the prime minister finished his speech, he and his entourage began to walk quickly through the crowd toward cars that would take them to their next destination. The protesters moved along with him, chanting and getting closer, so as to verge on blocking Chretien's way. According to Paul Koring of the Globe and Mail, the prime minister at this point "bulled his way through the mixed crowd of children and demonstrators" and arrived face-to-face with a much smaller man whom he had never met before: a forty-two-year-old anglophone activist from Hull named Bill Clennett.3 Before his bodyguard could catch up with him, never mind stop him, Chretien grabbed Clennett by the throat with one hand, and by the back of the head with the other, and began to shake him. Several of the RCMP bodyguard then intervened, though not to stop Chretien. Rather they seized hold of Clennett, flung him to the pavement, and piled on top of him, breaking his dental bridge. This was an incident almost unprecedented in Canadian history, in that Clennett as a citizen had been exercising his legal right to non-violent protest. Nor was he Epilogue

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according to the Globe and Mail's Koring - alone in feeling the grip of the prime minister's hands. In his account published in the next day's paper, Koring wrote that "nine seconds before he grabbed Mr. Clennett, according to the best videotape of the incident, the prime minister also appeared to move aside a youngster by putting his hands on the boy's neck."4 But it was not this video that provided the most memorable image. The next day also, newspapers across the country ran a front-page photograph of Chretien with his teeth clenched, his eyes hidden by sunglasses, and his hand around the throat of a small bespectacled person who, in a knitted hat, looked as though he might have been someone's spinster aunt. Chretien was even wearing a black trenchcoat, which combined with the twisted grimace, neatly coifed hair, and sunglasses to make him look not like a prime minister but like some unsavoury dictator's hired thug. Adding to the image's irony was that visible above his hand as it gripped Clennett's throat were two of the small Canadian flags which had been issued to the bused-in children. So in this case, the flag as a symbol of national unity seemed not to be standing for Canadian tolerance and respect for the rule of law, but rather to be bearing passive witness to a bullying assault by a wealthy politician on a much smaller and economically marginalized Canadian citizen. Chretien himself, when subsequently asked about what had happened, was almost incoherent, as though he had undergone a temporary spell of amnesia. As quoted by Susan Delacourt in the Globe and Mail, he said, "He was in my way. What happened? I don't know. Some people came in my way. I had to go, so if you're in my way, I'm walking."5 Another account, by Edison Stewart in the Toronto Star, rendered the mish-mash this way: "I had to go, so if you are in my way I am walking. So I don't know what happened. Something happened to somebody who should not have been there."6 What went completely unpublicized at the time, however, was the detail of where exactly the prime minister so felt he "had to go" that, in his eagerness to get there, he publicly assaulted a dissenting citizen and then mentally blanked on the entire incident. But once Clennett had been hustled off, and a path cleared for Chretien, the entourage travelled quickly by bridge across the river for the next event, for which they were by this time late. This was a "Citizenship Court," in which recent immigrants were to receive their official citizenship and pledge their allegiance to Canada. But because the court was being held on the first official Flag Day, it was being mounted with special pomp, in a venue whose grand view of Parliament Hill was provided by an immense circular hall with glass walls and ceilings that rose in faceted stages toward a single centre. Nor was this the only advantage that the venue offered, in that the route to this view consisted of a long, straight, ascending ramp that could be adorned with a red carpet and with Canadian flags its entire length in preparation for the solemn ritual. When Jean Chretien disembarked, then, after his meeting with Bill Clennett, for a quicker than anticipated "procession" up the National Gallery's Colonnade ramp, it was not an experience of art and its unresolved meanings that awaited him at the summit on that first Flag Day, beneath the converging harmonies of the Great Hall's ceilings. Rather, it was a ceremony of induction into national belonging that coalesced around that most bluntly national of all symbols: the Canadian flag. And 37O

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with the usual charge of irony, this ceremony itself - though held in a National Gallery that had ostensibly regained its institutional independence and been freed from the rhetorical machinery of the NMC - was couched in terms that the entire succession of NMC secretaries-general might have relished. For according to the Ottawa Citizen, which reported on the Citizenship Court in its "Citylife" section, and which did not connect a single dot in regard to the earlier incident in Cartier Park that filled the same edition's front page, the prime minister, though delayed, arrived just in time for the court's big event. This was the singing of a "patriotic rock song" which, as written by two Grade Eight students, had won a local competition and then been arranged by professional musicians. The song was called "Canada" and was - as described by Deborah Richmond of the Citizen - "a hit before the band reached the first verse. Several seconds into the song, a lone hand rose above the heads of the audience waving a Canadian flag in time to the music. It was quickly joined by another, and another, until a swirl of red and white flashed in the sunlight beaming into the Grand [sic] Hall." "You are the mountains," the song went, "tu es le ciel. We are the People, we are Canada. We love you."7 This was heady stuff, though the sceptical reader might be forgiven for wondering whether that first "lone hand" that "rose above the heads of the audience waving a Canadian flag" had been as carefully orchestrated as the crowds of busedin schoolchildren had been in Cartier Park. But no matter. The song, along with the "swirl of red and white" that "flashed in the sunlight beaming into" the Great Hall, seemed to provide the moment for which the prime minister had been waiting: the moment which, perhaps, he had been so eagerly anticipating that he had practically throttled Bill Clennett in order to reach it on time. According to the Citizen's Richmond, Cathy West, the mother of one of the student songwriters, "admitted to choking up as the surge of emotion swept the crowd, and she noted that she saw tears in the Prime Minister's eyes as well. Chretien, sitting on the podium only a few feet in front of her, beamed as the song reached its crescendo." Of all the ceremonials that were staged at the National Gallery during the 19903, this Flag Day Citizenship Court, involving the prime minister, perhaps went furthest in following through on the implications of the new building's physical exclusion of art from a grand-scale symmetrical access route that lends itself to national goals. Ostensibly, this ritual was intended to link the building not only with the flag but also with the process of citizenship, and so with the democratic responsibility and inclusiveness that citizenship entails. The lesser irony of these intentions, as of the actual event, derived from the fact that these linkages had nothing at all to do with art, or even with the "gallery" aspect of the building, whose own design colluded in the ease with which both could be set aside. The prime minister himself, however, pushed the irony of this exclusion into a zone unprecedented even in the National Gallery's own long history of unintended ironies. For he ensured that his government's official use of the new building's "grand public spaces," toward the admission of diverse peoples into Canadian society, was preceded by his own bizarre public gesture of exclusion in regard to dissent, even as he was on his way to oversee this ritual beneath the Great Hall's "Platonic geometries" and converging ceilings. Epilogue

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There were, of course, no Bill Clennetts among the invited guests who waited amid the glassed-in splendour at the summit of the Colonnade ramp. Nor were there errant photographers, or demonstrators, or disruptions of any kind. There was not even any art, any hint of unresolved meanings that might jeopardize the careful stage management and stock national cues that were supposed to accompany the ceremony. Instead, along with the "swirl of red and white" that "flashed in the sunlight," and the mind-numbing "We are Canada" lyrics of the "patriotic rock song," there were dozens of recent immigrants who, each one in Canada for his or her own reasons, were only too happy to collude in the government's desire for positive Flag Day press. So, in this instance, the ordered harmonies of the Great Hall's windows, and the panoramic views offered by its windows, became part of a blatant representation of Canada - and of the Liberal government that was overseeing Canada - as inclusive, egalitarian, and non-discriminatory, with the immigrants themselves as an advertisement for a successful, unified country, and a successful unifying government. In terms of the National Gallery's role as a gallery, however, the rented context offered by the access route was emphatically not providing terms for "the critical scrutiny of all other spheres including the political,"such as the Applebaum-Hebert committee had identified with the role of "the cultural sphere." Instead, it was lending itself to the governments own efforts to make the surface of "the political sphere" more smooth, more symmetrical, more impervious to questioning. On that February afternoon, neither the immigrants assembled for ritual induction into citizenship nor the immigrant service workers who accompanied them likely learned about the incident which had delayed the prime minister until they got home in the evening and heard the news. Certainly, they did not learn about it through being at the National Gallery. But what the incident with Clennett had already conveyed was that behind the mask of one level of inclusiveness - the one which by the 1990s could accommodate the immigration of diverse ethnic groups to Canada - there was another gestating level of social exclusions which was exemplified in the image of a wealthy, powerful prime minister throttling a small, poor, economically marginalized man who was demonstrating legally on behalf of the unemployed. That the incident took place across the Ottawa River only three months after the federal government had barely won a referendum on Quebec independence, and that Clennett himself proved to be an anglophone supporter of Quebec sovereignty, only further hinted at the complex tensions that the feel-good promotion of Flag Day by the government had been supposed to dissipate. In this case, however, the National Gallery did not offer either exposure or exploration of these tensions, such as might be associated with a contemporary art engaged with context. Instead, its "access route" simply assisted in smoothing them over. The role of exposing an unprovoked, and ultimately unpunished, assault against a person exercising his democratic right of protest fell instead to the popular media, whose spokespeople had so often shown themselves uncomprehending of contemporary art. But crucially, even they did not venture any further in exploring the wider context: the possibility of a connection between the place of converging "Platonic geometries" where the prime minister felt he "had to go" and the action he took in order to try to get there more quickly. 372

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What this specific incident also did, however, was tightly focus the question of whether a small-1 liberal nation-state based in part on ethnic inclusivity might yet be prey to the seductions of exclusionary hierarchy in different terms. But insofar as it involved the National Gallery as Chretien's own ritual destination when he throttled Clennett, the incident was part of a wider if usually more subtle pattern of state use that introduced, into the Gallery's immediate vicinity, still more non-art symbols that were consistent with it. Especially under Chretien's Liberal government, which took office in 1993 and retained it into the next millennium, the Great Hall became the habitual Ottawa site for state dinners. Within the Hall, this pattern of use entailed the reduction of art's physical presence, by 2001, to a single small, realistic, and pedestal-mounted sculpture of a horse by the Canadian artist Joe Fafard. The prominence accorded this sculpture added its own uncanny twist to, and seemed even to bring to fulfilment, Safdie's approving remark in Form and Purpose that, under the emperor Darius, deserving artists agreeably stuck to carving horses and only at great risk ventured even a personal "elephant period" that was unsanctioned from above. But in attendance for such state dinners also, and joining the Canadian flag in playing a conspicuous supporting role, was invariably a contingent of uniformed and armed police. It was they who, as posted outside the Entrance Pavilion, more regularly offered an approach to aesthetics that seemed especially attuned to the authoritarian legacies implicit in the building's sacral motifs, as drawn from many traditions. Ceremonially clad in black, with their motorcycles parked in front of the Gallery, and with - depending upon the light - the pale blue, pale green, or inwardly glittering cupola of the Great Hall in the background, the police often seemed intent, for those not invited inside, on adding to the sense of stylized spectacle. This was, however, spectacle of the sort identified less with a tolerant and inclusive democracy than with the camera of Leni Riefenstahl during the 19305, via her cultivation of the iconography and homogenized glamour of mystical fascism in Nazi Germany. Obviously, the "security apparatus"of many states inclined increasingly toward such iconography in the 19905. But what gave this iconography a special edge as deployed at the National "Gallery" in Ottawa was the very prominence of the motifs, as described by Safdie himself, of "ascent," "ritual," "ceremony'' "convergence," and "Platonic geometries." Clearly it was mere coincidence that by 2001 - amid the decline of political opposition, diminished voter turnout, and widespread comment that Canada was becoming a de facto one-party state - the terms "imperial prime minister" and "friendly dictatorship"were being floated publicly by the Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson in regard to the style of Pierre Trudeau's former minister Chretien: a man by then inured to state use of a Great Hall in which - as Robert Fulford had put it - "Charles de Gaulle would be comfortably at home."8 As should now be obvious, too, however, much of the Gallery's own history as an institution contained an evolving pattern of investment in an especially grand version of "order" which both anticipated this Hall's atmospherics and entailed exclusions. Both Eric Brown and Lawren Harris, prior to 1930, claimed a privileged relationship, via different sects, to the alleged truth, oneness, and "harmony" of a "divine Epilogue

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Principle" that cross-referenced easily with Plato's theory of eternal forms. And both men sought to apply this relationship to art and to the concept of nationhood. Brown did so via mutually reinforcing claims: that "art is a unifying ... force which can be made to serve [the] native sense of nationality," and that the National Gallery itself, in the interest of this equation, deserved to become "a dream castle ... overlooking the Ottawa River." Harris did so via the application of theosophical theory to his own painting, and via the ascription of a mystical "leadership" role to "a few artists." For it was they, he claimed, who would give form to "the North" as a "single simple vision of high things" that would 'shape our souls into its own spiritual expressiveness." And these two visions then coalesced, during the 19205, into Eric Brown's sustained support of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, toward what he called "the dawn of a new art era in Canada which will glorify their country" through their "revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty." This tendency to link art and the National Gallery with a sense of order based on "spiritual," "national," and "unifying" goals then persisted, in various forms, throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Crucially, it was retooled for a more secular era by Vincent Massey, whose biography, as written by Claude Bissell, was aptly titled The Imperial Canadian. For Massey, the oneness of "Canadianism" supplanted that of "Divine Principle" but was still underwritten by quasi-religious rhetoric: "the idea [of "unity"] to us must be supreme, for in Canada the pursuit of unity is like the quest for the Holy Grail." In On Being Canadian, he developed still further a mystically national role for art, not least via the language of "surrender" to an "environment" that mythologized the Group of Seven. This perspective was then given the authority of one of the most influential royal commission reports in Canadian history, via die statement that "Canadian painting... has become above all the other arts the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit." Thus framed, the equation then was melodramatized dirough Alan Jarvis's naively arrogant attempt to gather the stratospheric "leadership" role into his own persona, and was rendered more routine, after Jarvis's fall, via Charles Comfort's identification of the National Gallery as "an agency of central government." And even as it seemed on the verge of being overthrown by Jean Sutherland Boggs's international humanism, it paradoxically resurfaced with her retreat from the "openness" of contemporary art in the 19605, toward cultivation of "museum aura" and "hallowed atmosphere" with "the collection" - preferably as "contained within a frame" or "mounted on a pedestal" which was declared to be "at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish." But alongside of, and even contributing to, Boggs's investment in such an "aura" was a bureaucratic "dumbing down" of the Royal Commission's rhetoric of Canadianism as it pertained to art, via the self-serving representations produced by the board and anonymous writers of the National Museums of Canada. These are, in each case, examples chosen from a range of tropes that carried all of these players, via the records they left, into rhetorical zones that had little to do with a concept of art as integrated with participatory or electoral democracy, even as they sought to cultivate a relationship between art and the nation-state. Nor was the tension lessened by the pattern of top-down exclusions that - echoing Plato's 374

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paradigmatic distinction between "grace" and"gracelessness" in the arts - developed in tandem with these efforts to make art nationally beneficial: Brown's Christian Science-based exclusion of "futurism" as "degenerate"; McCurry's and Jarvis's more pragmatic exclusion of American modernism; Comfort's refusal to recognize Warhol's Brillo boxes as sculpture; and even Jean Boggs s use of the word "heretical" to describe the art of the 1960s. These patterns within the Gallery's history as an institution, however, were then hardened into physical form with the arrival of Moshe Safdie, as Boggs's chosen architect for a Gallery building, in a process that allowed for no public input. For along with his record of building for the Israeli government in the charged area of East Jerusalem, in a way that made his projects look as though "they had always been there," Safdie brought a stated investment in "convergence," "harmonies," and the principle that "the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces." Claiming the moral authority of knowing what his clients "really want," and of moving in his work "toward a truth," he restored a link with Eric Brown's conflation of aesthetics and ethics. But he then also went far past Brown, with his apparent lack of distinction, in Form and Purpose, between ancient despotisms and modern democracies, and with his notions of an "environment" that art should serve rather than dare to criticize. Undoubtedly, with Safdie's access route, Jean Sutherland Boggs acquired for the National Gallery a new style of symmetrical frame that would "contain" what she had called the "tensions, violence, brutality" in art, such as she had said she "expect[ed] to be given form and contained within the frame of a painting, drawing or print, or placed upon a pedestal." This arrangement clearly contributed also to the "aura" of authority and separation from "the surrounding community" with which Boggs had said she wanted to imbue the Gallery. Yet the irony was, as usual, palpable, for the Gallery's own institutional history was rife with instances implying that where art is concerned, "authority" is intuitive, inexact, and contingent, with enormous blind spots. Examples of the actual failure of such "authority" within this history abound, and not least within the agenda of exclusions, for Brown refused to buy the modernist painting that most shaped the art of the twentieth century, just as McCurry refused to buy American abstract art when it was of comparable influence. But there were also other clear instances in which artistic "authority" showed its limits: Alan Jarvis's loss of career in pursuit of a Bruegel painting of dubious attribution; the fiasco of the Chrysler exhibition under Charles Comfort; Dorothy Cameron's investment in a standard of "quality" that ignored the schisms that were breaking up sculpture in the 1960s; and Jean Boggs's own hostility to contemporary art that did not honour the conventions of frame and pedestal and the sanctity of "museum aura." Clearly, however, the scale and semantic web of the access route were doing more than just providing a "frame" that invested art itself with the signifiers of authority, even while isolating "the collection" from what Boggs called "the community" and from what Safdie called "the endless bustle of day-to-day life." The crisis of authority being implicitly addressed by the building was wider, hearkening back to the Nietzschean dilemma put so succinctly by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamozov - "If God does not exist, then everything is permissible" - and to George Epilogue

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Grant's corollary: "The idea of limit is inevitably the idea of God." Much as the Canadian constitution of 1981 resorted, in its preamble, to mention of "God" as the alleged guarantor of the values being decreed within a secular state, so the new National Gallery fell back, through its obligatory access route, less on any sectarian version of God than on the grand-scale material legacies of many different societies' commitment to God, as the apparent guarantors of several kinds of authority at once. Among these: the authority of art; the authority of the building itself as a national icon; the authority of the unified Canadian nation-state, many of whose other monumental icons were framed beneath the converging "Platonic geometries" of the Great Hall; and - plausibly - the authority of the politicians who themselves could bask in the "aura" of all these associations, in their own role as figures of state. Yet, as a further irony, the access route's investment in sacral motifs even suggested a fall-back retrenchment in relation to Jean Boggs's style of humanism, with its own investment in "man." For this new, architectural investment seemed to address in microcosm the dilemma of a "humanism" that - once severed from the theology that deemed human individuals sacred because created in the image of God - may offer little protection against the collapse of both meaning and limits and the absorption of "man" into technological systems. Boggs's humanism had proved vulnerable on both these fronts in the late 1960s and early 1970s: to the depredations of unlimited "openness" as cultivated by what she called "cynical" artists, and to the omnivorous appetite of a bureaucratic "system" which, as run by the NMC, did not respect art as a privileged vehicle of meaning for "man." Boggs's initial defensive response to these threats entailed not only a setting aside of the legacy of "transcendence" in the Gallery's own history, such as she had done already anyway, but also a qualification of her vulnerable humanism, through her proclaimed and almost fetishizing investment in "the collection" as "at the core of everything we attempt and accomplish." But "the collection" itself, as a defensible anchorage, had to be not only exalted but also protected from these corrosive and diminishing forces. And what more effective, if unintentionally ironic, way to do this than to wrap it - and effectively reframe it - with the signifiers of pre-humanistic religious authority, such as she had already begun to map in such exhibitions as Art and the Courts7. Obviously, both Boggs and Safdie hedged their bets, so as not to invest in any one dogmatically unified set of principles, beyond the establishment and protection of "museum aura." Yet, if this allowed for a policy-friendly subtext of "multiculturalism," the access route itself drew on the widespread religious distinction between elevated, "sacred" space and everyday "profane" space to emphasize the persistence of hierarchy and authority, even as it capitalized for effect on what Safdie had called a "magical spot," with its views of Canadian monuments framed by "Platonic geometries." And it was here, given Canada's own twentieth-century social investment of authority in fallibly human politicians and in an increasingly mediated "democratic process," that the provision of a grand-scale, seductive "environment" of centralized metaphysically-based "order" became rather perilous. Theoretically, a gallery that honoured the Applebaum-Hebert equation of art itself with "the critical scrutiny of all other spheres including the political," and contemporary art's own concern with 376

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Wall relief at Persepolis, depicting tribute-bearing delegates contributing to the "environment" decreed by the king. (East Stairway of the Apadama, circa 516 BCE) (Photograph by Erich Schmidt, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)

what John Bentley Mays called "the situation," would be able to encourage and present art as a questioning counterpoint to such investments. Ironically again, though, even as the architect was allowed an intimate and shaping relationship to place and to what he called a "magical spot," art itself, as almost entirely excluded from this access route, was disallowed both the role encouraged by Applebaum-Hebert and even the organic momentum of its own evolution. For contemporary art had, by the 1990s, built widely on the Minimalist insistence that three-dimensional space is not neutral but itself a medium, both artistically and for the transmission of value. And if this had led to the prominence of context-sensitive and often volatile installations, the National Gallery's investment in "white cubes" as "containers" for contemporary art was conversely a conservative and even reactionary gesture: a return to the modernist homogenization of space, and its industrially useful reduction to Cartesian x/y/z coordinates that do not allow for distinctions of place. Paradoxically, it was just this homogenization that had been rejected by Safdie himself, in his admitting the experience of a "magical spot," and in his designing around that spot an "access route" which invested in harmonious motifs of sacrality. But if such harmonies are going to provide the alleged benefits of a "salubrious region" - or what Safdie himself called "one of the nicest feelings in the world" - then they, too, demand exclusions, such as Plato himself laid out in his paradigmatic distinction between "grace" and "gracelessness" in the arts, and such as already existed as a pattern in the Gallery's history. With Safdie's building, then, this pattern again Epilogue

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mutated, so that art itself was split off from the Gallery's metaphysical heritage through blunt physical exclusion from an ascending, symmetrical access route that - as easily emptied of any challenge or questioning - became a magnet for affairs of state and for politicians who could present themselves beneath ceilings that converge toward a single centre. The historical pattern was thus hardened into seductive form, and in such a way as to invite the new Gallery's development not only of the legacy of "Platonic geometries" but of those aspects of the Republic that made Plato the first great theorist of allegedly benevolent authoritarianism, even as the Persian Darius was a practitioner. "THE SANCTUARY OF AN ARISTOCRATIC SPIRITUALITY"

Two further developments of the 1990s, one inside the Gallery and one outside, served to add their own twists to this bifurcated pattern of usage. Among the further ironies of Safdie's building was that no sooner did it establish an obligatory and sacrally charged access route to the Gallery's art collection than technology reprised Walter Benjamin by providing its own back door not to the art objects themselves but to their reproducible images. Under the directorship of Pierre Theberge, who returned to the National Gallery to succeed Shirley Thomson in 1998 after directing the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, priority was given to establishing an Internet presence for the National Gallery. As a result, by the turn of the millennium, much of the collection was available in high-resolution digital form to anyone with Internet access. This achievement put the National Gallery of Canada in the forefront of technological momentum among museums around the world. But it also further loosened the connection between the building's obvious drive to establish "aura" and the actual collection beyond the access route, in that a two-dimensional version of the latter became visually available without either the building or the access route; instead, it was framed by the ubiquitous symmetry of the computer screen. And this, in turn, only further emphasized the non-art, national role being played by the access route in physical space, as distinct from cyberspace. Yet among the many other developments of the 1990s, there was one that served also to emphasize, by changing the visual fields around the National Gallery, why such broad national gestures had been tied to art in Canada in the first place. With Douglas Cardinal's curvilinear Museum of Civilization already providing, at its lower site across the Ottawa River, one sort of counterpoint to the National Gallery, construction began in 1997 on a massive new United States Embassy building only a few hundred metres to the Gallery's south, on a strip of higher ground between two main traffic arteries into downtown Ottawa, Sussex Drive, and Mackenzie Avenue. And just as Safdie's Gallery design had been modelled to blend with the Basilique cathedrale to the east, and with the Parliamentary Library to the west, so the new U.S. Embassy building, as designed by the American architect David Childs, clearly fed for its own shape on the National Gallery, even as it drew negligibly on the cathedral and the Houses of Parliament. When ceremonially opened by President Bill Clinton in October 1999, the United States Embassy building proved remarkably similar in height, length, and general shape to that part of the National Gallery 378

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clearly visible just downhill from the Embassy's own site: the glazed and columned access route that culminates in the Great Hall. The Embassy was even topped at its mid-point by a cupola that, while grey and opaque, cross-referenced easily with the crystalline cupolas of the National Gallery. But despite these similarities of form, there was also more than a hint of antagonism, owing to the higher siting of the Embassy, to its difference in directional alignment, and to the very different use of glass along the Embassy's extended west facade. While the Gallery building paralleled the westward thrust of the Basilique cathedrale, the Embassy building was aligned at a north-south right angle to both. The visual tension was especially prominent from the Gallery's own entrance, to the south of which the narrow northern wall of the Embassy rose like the prow of an immense ship, which seemed the more overbearing on account of the the Embassy's higher site. Seen from the east, along Sussex Drive, the Embassy's grey form also contrasted starkly with the light-admitting south facade of the Gallery, even as it cast long afternoon shadows in Ottawa's Byward Market, whose streets for a century had offered views of Parliament Hill. But the most prominent daytime contrast was provided by the darkened glass of the Embassy's west-facing wall. For as seen from Major's Hill Park, with the Gallery slightly lower to the north and the rocky promontory of Parliament Hill to the west, this west facade seemed to look out on the Canadian Houses of Parliament like a dark, unblinking cyclopean eye. With the establishment of the U.S. Embassy in so prominent a way, another major motif in the Gallery's institutional history, as in the history of Canada itself as a nation-state, was given material and local form. This was the perennially problematical relationship with the continental, then hemispheric, then global power to the south, which - in the Gallery's case - began to manifest itself as early as Sir Edmund Walker's withdrawal from the Laurier government in opposition to planned freer trade, and Eric Brown's arrival, the same year, bearing Mrs Eddy's Boston-based Christian Science textbook as a blueprint for "the road that leads upward." Much within the Gallery's subsequent development was then informed by its vexed relationship with the border eighty kilometres to the south, and by the ironies that accompanied this: Lawren Harris's notion of a "flow" passing through Canada from "the North," to "purify" the United States, even as he invested in a theosophy that had started in New York City; H.O. McCurry's quiet extension of Brown's ban on "futurism" to apply to the American art of the 1940s and 1950s, even as an "expert jury" for a new building was weighted with Americans; the Massey Commission's investment in a "Canadianism" identified with static paintings, as an anchor of resistance to the pending ceaseless motion of American television; Alan Jarvis's piggy-backing on the figure of Billy Graham, to make the terms of his mission more instantly recognizable; Charles Comfort's fiascos, which echoed the contradictions of Diefenbaker's foreign policy; and Jean Sutherland Boggs's ambivalent relationship to American-influenced "openness," on which she sought to impose limits through "museum aura." Just as Safdie's building changed the terms of how this history's material legacy would be presented, so the opening of Childs's building just down the street pushed Epilogue

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the terms of how the American counterpoint would be present to the Gallery. This was not least because, as a consummate irony, Childs to a great extent opted for the kind of "Post Modernism" that Safdie, with his hostility to Philip Johnson's and Frank Gehry's "no rules" approach, claimed to loathe. As a long, narrow structure, the Embassy mimicked the form not of the entire Gallery building but of one of its most distinctive features: the south-facing glass-walled facade that holds the access route. But if the Gallery building invested in motifs drawn deliberately from earlier "converging" architectures of religious authority, the Embassy suggested an almost haphazard appropriation: just the practice that Safdie, in Form and Purpose, decried as 'exalt[ing] ... the desire for decoration ... and the unappreciated value of vulgarity." Among the Embassy's few historical motifs, for example, were two small multitiered, chrome-plated pyramids on either side of its western entrance. These vaguely resembled the Mesoamerican temple pyramids on whose own style of access route the National Gallery's Colonnade ramp drew consistently and grandly, in such a way as to foster awe. By contrast, Childs's little chrome pyramids looked like just the kind of tacked-on, unreferenced embellishment for which Safdie savaged "Post Modernism." The differences in style were made especially obvious through the ways in which the two buildings were lit at night, just after the turn of the millennium. In contrast with the National Gallery's subdued after-dark lighting along the access route, the west side of the Embassy building was lit along almost its entire length with a cold, harsh, static brilliance. This not only conveyed the sense that Major's Hill Park itself was under surveillance, but also accentuated the chrome work around the four long rows of windows. Illuminated to excess in this way, the Embassy facade reminded anyone who happened to walk or drive past that the American reputation for squandering energy is not undeserved. But in offering this reminder, the facade itself also suggested, on a gigantic scale, the crass, shiny grille-work of an early 1960s Cadillac, with the central cupola as the equivalent of a hood ornament. By slight contrast, the building's own small cupola on the north end was lit in pale blue. It was unclear, however, whether this was in respectful imitation of the Gallery's Great Hall or in parody, given that in this case, the lighting suggested not so much "Platonic geometries" as the oversized ball of a roll-on deodorant stick, iridescently enhanced in the style of a TV ad. Such bizarre reminders of American commercialism, bound to American officialdom through the Embassy, marked an aggressive and deeply ironic intrusion of "Post Modern" values into the visualfieldshaped by Safdie's building: Learning from Persepolis mocked by Learning from Las Vegas; Peace, Order, and Good Government haunted, as ever, by the irreverent seductions of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But there were also some ambiguities. For despite the differences in appearance between the two buildings, they resembled one another not only in their nationally referenced monumentalism but also in the shared preoccupation with "security," which made both of them, behind their facades, well-guarded and protected concrete bunkers. The National Gallery's concrete bunker, behind the crys-

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talline, politically useful access route, housed "the collection," which had often been described in the Gallery's history as a "treasure." The United States Embassy's concrete bunker, behind the flashy night-time grille-work, housed the official American presence in Canada, which included both trade missions and military attaches. Both bunkers, in this sense, gave a late-twentieth-century twist to Le Corbusier's trenchant comment that "the 'styles' are a lie."9 Yet, just as the buildings' facades differed, so too did the contents of their hidden bunkers, and in ways that suggested, again in microcosm, a perhaps increasingly dangerous flaw in the Canadian tendency to tie national "spirit" to art via vocabularies of metaphysics, not least as a means of distinguishing the Canadian focus on "Order" from the American fetishization of "Liberty." The terms of this flaw can best be explored, at this point, by means of a brief allegory involving that figure who was most outspoken in urging a "spiritual" leadership role for Canadian artists, and who uncannily prefigured the crystalline exterior of the Great Hall with his theosophically conditioned paintings of icebergs in 1930. Like Eric Brown in relation to Christian Science, and Moshe Safdie much later in regard to - among other things - "Platonic geometries," Lawren Harris ran his experience of Canadian place through the filter of metaphysical theory. And as with them, too, this investment in allegedly universal and beneficial "harmonies" entailed exclusions. For the phase of Harris's career that produced Icebergs, Davis Strait, these exclusions involved, via the colour theory of theosophy, the lower colours of the "desire-body": what Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater called the "browns and dirty greens and reds" that formed "the denser matter of the astral plane" in the "undeveloped" or "gross type" of man.10 Such colours did not appear in Harris's paintings of far northern landforms, which he identified with the source of "spiritual flow" in North America. Instead, in the larger form especially of Icebergs, Davis Strait-, Harris inscribed those "luminous" shades of green, yellow, and blue, which Besant and Leadbeater claimed "show... the divine power of sympathy,""the highest and most unselfish use of intellectual power," and "self-renunciation and union with the divine," indicating - they said - the elimination of "selfishness" in "a man of the higher type." But just as Eric Brown's exclusion of "futurist" art from the Gallery's collection did not prove sustainable, in terms of representative art history, once he was succeeded by directors not so bound to his sense of divine mission, so Harris's exclusion of the colours of the "gross" "desire-body" proved no more sustainable in terms of his personal life. And this course of events had, perhaps, some lessons for the future of the National Gallery. During the 19205, the claim of a "pure" and "spiritual flow" from "the replenishing North" had seemed, for Harris, to resolve the dilemma in Plato as to how an immutable, eternal order makes its way into the particularities of time and place, and into an art that might further this relationship. In going to the far north, therefore, Harris was ostensibly getting closer to the source of this "flow," just as, through the use of "luminous" greens, yellows, and blues, he was ostensibly creating "thought-forms" that not only revealed his own "higher type" but would also -

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according to Besant and Leadbeater - exercise a beneficent influence and "awaken the power of higher thought" in others. For what they in their book called "missionary work," he in his manifestos called "pioneer [ing] for the soul of a people." Yet the frozen precision of the iceberg paintings, with their pale forms neatly locked within static lines, was assessed in a very different way in 1931, after their first exhibition, by a critic who during the 1920s had been sympathetic to Harris's work. Comparing them unfavourably with the work of A.Y. Jackson, who had accompanied him to the Arctic, Jehanne Bietry Salinger wrote that "Lawren Harris has not identified himself with nature or the life he has found in the Arctic... In spite of their titles the pictures ... give the painters own conceptions of these spectacular scenes. And these conceptions are essentially abstract and philosophical. His icebergs are strange monuments, with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours."11 Less than a year later, Salinger elaborated on this criticism, claiming that with the metaphysically inspired trajectory of his recent paintings, Harris had "retired to the sanctuary of an aristocratic spirituality, where his understanding and aesthetic appreciation of human values suddenly froze as though under the spell of a magic wand, his voice ceased to speak, his heart ceased to beat, and his mountains, and his lakes, and his rocks, and his trees in their cold blue, green, or white garment did not seem to live anymore."12 This was a withering assessment of the painter who had claimed, a few years earlier, to be "one with the hidden, forming aspirations of his race and people toward divine clarity and the spirit of Life itself." For what Salinger implied was that, instead of signifying a flow between eternal and temporal, universal and particular, transcendent and living, the very pictures that came from Harris's experience of the alleged "source" had made for a kind of death: "his voice ceased to speak, his heart ceased to beat, and his mountains, and his lakes, and his rocks, and his trees in their cold blue, green, or white garment did not seem to live anymore." But not long afterwards, Harris himself as much as confirmed the suggestion that, in these paintings, there was something important missing. No longer producing new work, and responding less to a "spiritual flow" from "the North" than to inner needs that the trip north had not resolved, he in 1934 abruptly left his family and mansion in Toronto, severed most connections with the art world he had helped create in Canada, and eloped with his friend Fred Housser s wife. Together they moved not north but south to the United States: first to New Hampshire, and then in 1938 to the warmth of New Mexico.13 This surprising new emotional trajectory, which was also a physical trajectory away from "the North," brought with it a new approach to painting for Lawren Harris: one that was increasingly abstract and emptied of any reference to place or nationhood. But this change was more gradual, and included, around 1935, a representational-abstract hybrid called Winter Comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone, which suggests the artist's extreme reaction against, and even flight from, the one-sided extremity of his investment in "the North" as "a single, simple vision of high things." Pale blue and dark blue forms, at once suggesting mountains and icebergs, are consigned to background by, in the foreground, a white form that resem382

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Winter Comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone by Lawren Harris (circa 1935, oil on canvas,

74.1 x 91.2 cm.). (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, by permission of the family of Lawren S. Harris)

bles both a snow-covered tree and a clutching hand, which seems to reach toward the viewer above a series of horizontal white forms that resemble snow-covered bodies, gathered beneath a curl of snow that is like a shroud. Far from associating "the North" with spiritual purity and enlightenment, this painting done in New Hampshire - oddly enough the home state of Mary Baker Eddy - presents it as a subtly horrific vision of grasping menace. Once in New Mexico, by contrast, Harris, as a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group, purged all hints of particular or national reference from his paintings of "universal" abstract forms, just as he also admitted a full range of colours - even those allegedly of the "gross" "desirebody" - into the geometrical interplay of these forms. Photographs of Harris during this period show him looking more exuberantly, expansively happy than at any time before or after.14 He moved back to Canada only when, in a grotesque parody of his earlier agenda, his own source of family funds was "frozen" north of the border because of the outbreak of the Second World War. And even then, he opted to settle not in "the North" but in the balminess of Vancouver. At the very least, so extreme a reaction by so central a figure in the twentieth-century history of Canadian art hints at the danger of claiming to understand and contain the dynamics of place according to preconceived metaphysical frameworks. Yet Epilogue

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this was just the pattern established in the parallel history of the National Gallery, not just by Harris's own integration of his art with theosophy, but also by Brown's commitment to Christian Science, the Royal Commission's attempt to reconfigure unitary "spirit" in terms of "Canadianism," and, eventually, Moshe Safdie's enclosure of an allegedly "magical spot" by the symmetrical forms of "Platonic geometries." But Safdie's design of a spectacular, formal access route, in honouring both his own view of art as "an elevated activity" and Jean Boggs's pursuit of a "hallowed atmosphere" for "the collection," also uncannily reprised the very forms of Harris's bestknown Arctic painting, Icebergs, Davis Strait. And it did so even as it drove a physical wedge, by means of its grand-scale static symmetries, between art and any direct engagement with the unruliness of what Safdie called "day-to-day life." In consequence of this design, the National Gallery's entire "collection" was itself consigned to a zone beyond this obligatory access route, and wrapped within it: a zone that, in being cut off from the outside world by "ascending" and "converging" "geometries" in frozen perfection, all too easily suggests Salinger's 1932 phrase "the sanctuary of an aristocratic spirituality." But a crucial question must be whether the National Gallery's complete physical removal of art, via this immense zone of symmetries, from "the endless bustle of day-to-day life" risks and even invites the next part of Salinger's 1932 assessment of Harris's painting, in regard to the Gallery's entire "collection": "his understanding and aesthetic appreciation of human values suddenly froze as though under the spell of a magic wand, his voice ceased to speak, his heart ceased to beat, and his mountains, and his lakes, and his rocks, and his trees in their cold blue, green, or white garment did not seem to live anymore." In 1972 Jean Boggs herself asserted that, in implied contrast to the all-male bureaucracy of the NMC, women helped to "keep the National Gallery alive as a flexible, imaginative, spontaneous, unpredictable, and very modern institution." Ironically, however, die fixed, rigid, and utterly symmetrical design of the new building's access route, toward which she collaborated with Safdie, itself foreclosed on at least three of these adjectives - flexible, spontaneous, and unpredictable - that had paradoxically been compatible with the Lome Building's sheer unpretentiousness. For the access route contains the Gallery's "collection" more completely than any frame ever contained an individual work of art, by effecting this containment on a scale that both dwarfs the human body and renders art itself invisible during the long ascending walk to, and the long descending walk from, the art-bunker part of the building. And as if this were not enough, the exclusionary static perfection of the access route is also, like the forms of Icebergs, Davis Strait, a perfection foreign to the hungry incompleteness of that dynamic, libidinally charged "desire-body" which - as Sigmund Freud suggested with his theory of the return of the repressed, and as Lawren Harris himself learned in 1934 - cannot be purged by an act of will and asserts itself with all the more intensity if denied. Precisely here, in this newly introduced style of physical exclusion at the National Gallery, may be the flaw to which a new United States Embassy building especially plays, from a distance of only a few hundred metres: a potential threat and seduction that the Gallery building itself empowered, through its latest pursuit of a metaphys384

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ically too-clean concept of Order. The access route may indeed lend itself to such engineered and mind-numbingly facile cultivations of national sentiment as were on display - along with an especially vicious kind of exclusion - on Flag Day 1996. But for how many actual visitors to the National Gallery does the sheer in-your-face brashness of the United States Embassy building come as a relief after what John Bentley Mays called "the pompous ramps and oppressive neo-Egyptian stonework" of the access route? The Embassy building, with its tacked-on embellishments and its garish night-time facade, is an ever-present reminder of how easily the American investment in "Liberty" caters to the indulgence of a kind of "desire-body" whose very existence is as much denied in the National Gallery's access route as it was in the painting Icebergs, Davis Strait. Obviously, the central unblinking-eye motif, which is suggested by the darkened glass of the Embassy's west facade, hints also at the underside of the American fetishization of "freedom" for its own citizens: a preoccupation with surveillance and "security" that became only more obvious after the attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. in September 2001, via fencing and concrete anchors along the same west side. Yet the American version of "security" nevertheless maintains - like Disneyland as a paradigm case - a remarkably seductive fa9ade of playfulness, "freedom," and "no rules," even as, behind the facade, the operational machinery and drive toward expansion of a global power are maintained with utmost seriousness, according to strict rules. And in the presence of this machinery and this drive, does the removal of art's capacity for engagement with the world, and its consignment instead to the passive "sanctuary of an aristocratic spirituality," really help? "THE CALL OF THE UNKNOWN" But in a way befitting his role as Canadian art's central figure in the first half of the twentieth century, the legacy of Lawren Harris has, perhaps, one more contribution to make toward an understanding of the National Gallery's potential. For if, once he reached New Hampshire en route to New Mexico, Harris represented his own flight from "the North" in implicitly nightmarish terms, he also - paradoxically with age, once he returned to Canada - took a more humble approach to Canadian nature. While living in Vancouver in 1949, he sent a remarkable letter to Canadian Art, out of concern at younger artists' turn away from the Canadian landscape toward abstraction. "The whole of the North," he wrote at sixty-four, "all of the wilderness, whether it be forest, lake country, or mountains, is impregnated with a spirit which manifests itself in infinite variety. Our experience, the experience of the group, was that every lake, every valley, every river, every mountain contained a spirit within its physical makeup that is different from that of others. We found localities that were very friendly, others that were inimical, others remote in spirit beyond words, others intimate and even seductive and this did not arise from our moods and thoughts or from the physical features of the scenes. It is inherent in the land in all its parts and most apparent in woods, wilderness and mountains."15 The phrase "the whole of the North, all of the wilderness" showed Harris's usual tendency to totalize, just as his emphasis on "a spirit" recalled theosophy's OneEpilogue

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behind-many version of "divine Principle. "Nevertheless, his downplaying of a directional vector to emphasize "all of the wilderness" recalled less his earlier manifestos about "the North" than the catholicity of Eric and Maud Brown's experience of the aurora borealis on their canoe trip to Algonquin Park. "The aurora was blazing from every point of the compass," Eric Brown wrote around 1915. "Red, blue, green and yellow streamers flamed and flickered, waxed and waned from the horizon to the zenith and back again. We lay down in our tracks, with our heads on a log, and watched entranced... Our cup was as full as it would hold, and, when at last the flames died down and the stars returned to their duty, there seemed nothing more that nature could do for us." For all the fullness of this experience, Brown, too, of course, had sought to make it fit the frames in which he had already invested, with foremost among them Christian Science's "one infinite divine Principle which is God, conscious and capable good." And interwoven with this was also his own assessment of art as, at its best, a "revelation of nature's wonderland of beauty;" of the nation-state of Canada as "a heritage of greatness irrepressible"; and the National Gallery as his own ordained "road that leads upward," under "God's rule" and "blessing." Tom Thomson's mysterious death in Canoe Lake, in 1917, did not sit well with this neat assessment, however, and in his unpublished writings, Brown's confidence in "nature" as part of the "creation" of God as "conscious and capable good" faltered just a little. "Nature took him by the hands," Brown wrote in 1922. "He went out into the wilderness, nothing doubting, as all prophets have done before him. He began to see what was there, what others were beginning to see the world over, nature's marvelous design and what he saw was what he painted or some of it, some little of it, alas! And nature never let him go, she does not choose her prophets idly." In writing "she does not choose her prophets idly," Brown, too, ascribed an agency to "nature" that suggested it might be more - even ominously more - than simply a "creation" which has "always been there and always will be": a "creation" that "the artist" could do no better than see "more beautifully, more perfect in design, form and colour than other people do," so as "to give it [to] them for their betterment." This question of "nature" as a kind of agency - like the question of latent "spirit" in different places, such as was suggested by Lawren Harris - is obviously a volatile one. It grates as much against inherited Judaeo-Christian monotheism as much as it does against scientific materialism, for which space is definitely neutral and reducible to x/y/z coordinates. Yet, just as Harris's painting Icebergs, Davis Strait seemed uncannily to anticipate Moshe Safdie's design for the National Gallery's access route, so his claim that "every lake, every valley, every river, every mountain contained a spirit within its physical makeup" seems to resonate with Safdie's description, derived from his own experience, of the Great Hall's site as a "magical spot." But paradoxically - given Safdie's investment in the sacral motifs of civilizations that developed mainly in the Middle East and Europe - Harris's description, like Brown's depiction of "nature" as an agency, recalled also the ascribed belief of those peoples who lived with this "nature" long before the coming of Europeans, namely that a dynamic "multitude of spirits ... inhabited the plants and animals, rocks and rivers, wind, rain and stars, and all other natural phenomena." 386

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This was not, of course, a view of "nature" that sat well with Brown's and Harris's investment in the centrality of "divine Principle," or - for that matter - with the Royal Commission's later but influential attempt to map "spirit" according to national boundaries, so as to cultivate "Canadianism" via "Canadian painting." But neither did such a view of "nature" sit well with a model of art history as filtered from European history, to which North America was as marginal as Europe itself had been to "the Holy Land" during the Christian imperium of the Middle Ages. And it was certainly this model of art history that was introduced with the establishment of the National Gallery in 1880 as an aesthetic outpost of the British Empire, and that was systematized after 1910 by Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker. In keeping with this template, the National Gallery of Canada, for most of its development as an institution, and under most of its directors, paid as little heed to such beliefs as it did to the peoples who held them. The only "indigenous" role in art - to use Brown's term from 1915 - was assigned to the "younger painters" who, minus Tom Thomson, would go on to form the Group of Seven in 1920. For it was they who, according to Vincent Massey in 1948, "turned their backs on Europe" and "surrendered themselves to their own environment, striving to uncover its secret." There was obvious delusion in this assessment, given that, in retrospect, the "younger painters" had more in common with Europe than otherwise, in their approach to "nature" as landscape, via symmetrically framed canvases that owed their method to French plein air Impressionism. Nevertheless, Charles Comfort could claim in 1951 that they had "released a spirit of national consciousness, which has been beneficial in the widest sense," while the Royal Commission report announced that "Canadian painting ... has become ... the great means of giving expression to the Canadian spirit." This notion of a unitary "spirit" that honoured the borders of Canada as pre-eminent was in keeping also with Comfort's view that Canada had been "a virgin country ... when settled," and with Harris's that "the Canadian character ... is born of the spirit of the north," which "comes to us pure in ideas, thoughts, character and attitude." Obviously, such a lineage did not invite the possibility that objects produced by "Indians," with their own different heritage of place and "spirit," belonged anywhere other than among the ethnographic collections of the Museum of Man. Even the directorship of Jean Sutherland Boggs, which nurtured the introduction of modern American art, added no such aboriginal art to "the collection," despite the modest renaissance that followed upon Norval Morisseau's widely shown paintings of Ojibway "spirit figures" in the 1960s. If there is one pattern in the National Gallery's history that most exposes the presumption to "authority," it is indeed the longstanding exclusion of an aboriginal perspective in the accepted understanding of "art," "nature," and "spirit," as also in the notion of "founding peoples." The irony of the National Museums of Canada's role in enhancing aboriginal peoples' sense of their own past, however, extended also to the Gallery's display, while under the NMC in 1970, of Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art. Even as the organizer, Marcel Evrard, claimed that, "in terms of the universality of mankind," "the way of the senses" is "the privileged path of understanding" such "masterpieces," still he acknowledged that, in the objects themselves, Epilogue

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"the call of the unknown and the supernatural vibrates." Evrard insisted that these objects' "secret power" and "original strength," as derived from a very different relationship with "nature," had "declined." Yet the further irony was that, between the 1960s and the 1980s, many non-aboriginal artists broke as much from the self-policing of art via the symmetrical, containing frame as from the policing of sensibility implied in Brown's program of "so ordering our thought that we can dismiss from it whatever is discordant," according to a preconceived standard of "good." Instead, and pushing Boggs s depiction of the Abstract Expressionists as "oracles that speak with paint," whose works were "the result of some force functioning through their unconscious," they admitted a model that uncannily resembled Christian Zervos's description, in the Masterpieces catalogue, of "the shaman." "In giving shape to a fragment of wood, a piece of bone, copper or cloth," Zervos wrote, "materials in themselves insignificant, he lifts them out of their common mould and gives them a second life, thereby intimately joining together the raw material and the artist's vibrant sensibility." By way of germane example: similar terms could have been applied to Dan Flavin's transformation of "hardware store fixtures" into luminous icons that - as Boggs put it in 1969 - "consume the proportions of the room disturbingly." The written record's evidence is that this style of transformation carried into art - especially as it took place through N.E. Thing Co.'s bestowal of "a second life" on office furnishings in 1969, so as to strip the Lome Building of "museum aura" proved disturbing for Boggs herself. So much so that, when given the chance, she reprised Brown's reaction to "futurism" by investing in an architect for the National Gallery who had made an extraordinary statement. "Practically nothing that has been done in the name of art during my lifetime," Moshe Safdie declared in the very year of the competition, "has had any significance for my understanding of the universe: It is not a factor in how I conceive buildings." Boggs then - as Safdie later put it - provided "guidance ... in the profoundest sense" and he responded with a building whose most distinctive features - apart from mylar-lined light shafts - hearkened backward to ages of religious authority and philosophical confidence in a realm of higher "truth." And these features, in their sheer completeness and symmetry, as well as in their allusiveness, not only established what Boggs called that "that very hallowed atmosphere within the museum which separates it from the community." They also resisted the intrusion of mere artworks that might disrupt the "salubrious region" that they created, around what Safdie himself - as the architect who had also developed a "master plan" for Jerusalem's Western Wall Precinct - called a "magical spot." Nevertheless, in the background of this grand-scale project, there had by the 1980s been enough of a political advance by First Nations that aboriginal artists were themselves questioning their exclusion from the National Gallery, and their continued status as extensions of the Museum of Man's ethnographic collections, even as this museum was itself mutating into a Museum of Civilization designed by a Metis architect. At this point, the Gallery played not a leadership role, as it had with the Group of Seven's aesthetic "discovery" of Canadian "nature," but a reactive, catch-up one. In 1986, again while still within the NMC, the Gallery - through the curator of 388

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contemporary art, Diana Nemiroff - finally added to "the collection" a work by a contemporary aboriginal artist: a photo-montage called The North American Iceberg, by the Ojibway Carl Beam. The title not only suggested the iceberg that, off Newfoundland, sank the Titanic as the pride of Europe's empires in 1912. It was also viciously ironic, in cross-referencing with a major 1985 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Called The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today, this had featured western European Neo-Expressionist painting, which had developed in the 19708 but gone unnoticed in a North American art world still tied to the centrality of New York and grappling with the dogmas of Minimalism and Conceptualism.16 Like the Europeans, Beam returned to the framed canvas, but as splashed with garish colour and imprinted with both phrases in English and images of "Indians," including himself. The style recalled the American Pop collagist Robert Rauschenberg, himself part Cherokee. What Beam was obviously suggesting was that there might be a large hidden iceberg of creativity in North America itself, and among the peoples whose very existence gave the lie to Charles Comfort's claims about "a virgin land." Beam's own title then took on an added layer of resonance - and of irony - when this work, too, was installed within the new Gallery building. Like almost the entirety of the collection, it was, when displayed, kept within the "sanctuary" that Safdie had designed beyond and behind the symmetrical public access route, whose own forms cross-reference so easily with Lawren Harris's Icebergs, Davis Strait. But, paradoxically, this arrangement recalled yet another "iceberg" citation from the Gallery's history, for Alan Jarvis, in his trans-Canada tour of 1955-56, had persistently described the National Gallery itself, then based in the Victoria Museum, as "an iceberg, only one-tenth visible to the public."17 These multiple concepts of "the iceberg" then finally "converged" in 1992, on the apt occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of North America. Amid widespread celebrations and counter-celebrations, and after invited involvement in National Native Indian Artists' Symposia, the National Gallery staged its first major exhibition of contemporary aboriginal art, called Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada. Shirley Thomson introduced this exhibition from beneath the symmetries of the Great Hall's ceilings, and again - as she had done before - resurrected an older vocabulary from the Gallery's history. Taking place also "as Canada celebrates its 125th birthday,"she said, the exhibition marked "an important step towards the openness of spirit that we hope will characterize the next 125 years. In particular, as nations search for new and compelling visions to hold them together, and the earth is endangered by our carelessness towards the environment, Land Spirit Power may remind us in a very contemporary way of one of the oldest sources of unity and sustenance - the land in all its aspects."18 Thomson's insertion of the charged theme of Canada's "birthday" into a display of works by artists who, in many cases, had come to see themselves as belonging to "First Nations" (plural) gave credence to the decision by some aboriginal artists to boycott the exhibition, allegedly because it smacked of the Gallery's "jumping on a bandwagon."19 But there was also a patronizing undertone to the very subtitle, "First Epilogue

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Nations at the National Gallery of Canada," which seemed to imply that Safdie's syncretistic harmonies would, in cultivating "the nicest feeling in the world," serve to absorb even angry First Nations under the converging ceilings of a single National Gallery. And indeed, in no other exhibition of the 19905, was there so clear a hint that in the Gallery's access route, and especially in the Great Hall, there was at last a symbolic machinery for giving form to the concept of a unified Canada, and to the inchoate "Canadianism" that, with the arrival of Massey and Comfort, had succeeded Brown's and Harris's sectarian mixture of metaphysics, art, and nationhood. In keeping with the Great Hall's incorporating ceremonial role, a generic aboriginal sweetgrass ritual was even held as part of the opening, though in such a way to downplay distinctions among the various nations involved. The actual works of art, however, were then consigned, as was the practice, to the more conventionally structured Special Exhibitions Hall beyond the access route. Land Spirit Power was above all an exercise in integrative balance, containing works that, while they hinted at mysteries foreign to the categories of European thought, were formally anchored in paradigms of Western art history.20 That they established their presence along so delicate a line had undoubtedly to do with the selection process, which involved not only the Gallery's curator of contemporary art, Diana Nemiroff, but also the critic/anthropologist Charlotte Townsend-Gault and the Saulteaux artist Robert Houle, who had himself been taken away from his family to be "educated" in a residential school. Nemiroff herself would shortly go on record as saying that her purchases of art for the Gallery were shaped by the goal of "represent [ing] to future generations the dynamic actuality of our times," via "judgments of quality." This inherited notion of "quality" implied - as it had long done in Gallery history - the pre-eminence of a context-indifferent and implicitly enduring aesthetic. Nevertheless, it was also adapted by Nemiroff into what she called a search for "the art that has the greatest significance for our time and our place, in terms of the pertinence of the ideas, the originality of the means, and the strength of the expression."21 But if this implied an openness to experiment that recalled the 19608, the collective effort of organizing Land Spirit Power with Houle and Townsend-Gault introduced a much more loaded sense of the term "our place": one more querulously keyed to the style of sacral investment that had run through the Gallery's own history like a thread but that had never been associated with its temporary locales, until Moshe Safdie's arrival and his announcement of "a magical spot" for a permanent building. "Modern society has, to a large extent, lost the sense of the sacred," the three curators wrote for the catalogue. "This may be nowhere more evident than in its contradictory, contemporary attitudes to the land. The 'spirit of a place' or the 'spirit of the land' is often spoken about lightly. Place is in the background of our daily activities, shaping them without attracting attention. Yet ... as the ongoing struggle of the aboriginal people of North America for their ancestral lands reveals, the land has social meanings that are profoundly spiritual and intensely political in their implications. To other North Americans, it is becoming clearer ... that survival

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depends on recognizing that notions of the land as an empty, alien place, or a frontier to be conquered, are not only inadequate, but destructive."22 The great irony of this overall statement was that, as an exhibition presumably sensitive to the "sacred" nuances of "place," Land Spirit Power was - apart from the opening ceremonies - bluntly excluded from the "magical spot" over which Safdie had erected the Great Hall with its converging ceilings, and around which he had framed spectacular views of Canadian icons. Instead, it was consigned to the deliberate neutrality of the Special Exhibitions Hall that opens off it and that Safdie had himself described, with contempt, as "a dumb warehouse space."23 But the curators seemed to speak obliquely to this very situation, in writing also that "cultural schizophrenia may be the result of an inability to accept our locale, as Carl Beam has suggested, or equally, it may be a yearning for a place that has been removed from us, except in spirit. In this sense, the work of Teresa Marshall speaks of both alienation and survival." This, too, was a curious statement to make about the work of aboriginal artists whose ancestors had been removed, by force or legal manoeuvring, from their own sense of place, but who were also themselves being shunted into spatial neutrality - or into "a dumb warehouse space" - even as the curators were urging their readers to take seriously what they called the "spirit of a place." Teresa Marshall's contribution, however, did more than speak, elegiacally yet constructively, to this exclusion. Of all the installations at the National Gallery during the new building's first decade, her three-part Elitekey perhaps came closest despite its display in the Special Exhibitions Hall - to conveying the absences, the exclusions, and the foreshortened potential of this decade. Ironically enough, she had almost been excluded herself, in that - as a Nova Scotia artist whose father was Scottish Canadian and mother Mi'kmaq - she had been invited at the last minute on account of an absence of East Coast artists.24 But having grown up dividing her time between winters in the Nova Scotia public school system and summers on a Mi'kmaq reserve, she brought a likewise inside-outside perspective. This had already found form in ear-lier work, via her appropriation of familiar icons from the dominant commercial culture and her rearrangement of them with viciously ironic humour: a room-sized Monopoly game, for example, in which the place names were drawn from the record of interaction between aboriginal and European societies in North America. Elitekey pushed far beyond this sort of humour. The title, she told Nemiroff in a published interview, came from a Mi'kmaq term prounounced E-lida-gay, meaning "I fashion things, these are the things I make."25 But given the allusive richness of the work, especially in the context of the National Gallery, the title as spelled in English, rather than as pronounced in Mi'kmaq, was just as apt: Elitekey. In its very substance, Elitekey continued Marshall's investment in irony, because it was made from concrete, as the basic construction material not only of modern cities but of the National Gallery's own recessive "container" for its art. Of this material's "aesthetic, bone-like quality," she said - repudiating its usual neutrality - that "the weight of cement metaphorically reflects the history of oppression that visited our ancestors, and came to influence the way our lives have been altered from the original connectedness with the land."26 The dimension of metaphor extended into Epilogue

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Teresa Marshall, Elitekey, in the Special Exhibitions Hall of the National Gallery, 1992, as part of Land, Spirit, Power (National Gallery of Canada)

the objects that Marshall had fashioned out of this "weight" in whitish-grey. At one antipode of the installation was a concrete flag pole, on which a concrete Canadian flag was suspended at half-mast, with a maple leaf-shaped hole at its centre. At the other antipode was a concrete figure wearing, Marshall said, the traditional clothes of her Mi'kmaq grandmother, but lacking hands and - beneath the garments hood - a head. Aligned between these was a concrete canoe, with a stylized, circled cross etched into the apparently interchangeable bow and stern. Marshall described the canoe as "a story boat" and traced it to the "hero figure Glooscap, who at time of great need, was to come to the aid of the people in a great stone canoe." The canoe had begun as "a vessel of hope," she told Nemiroff, and there was at least a hint, in the installation, of an implied movement of communication between the Mi'kmaq grandmother figure and the flag. But Marshall went on to say that the 1990 stand-off between Mohawks and the Canadian army at Oka, Quebec, in which the Mohawks had eventually surrendered and been brought to trial, had made the canoe into "a crypt rather than a cradle." As made, then, Elitekey bespoke absences and the breakdown of communication. Her "rage and despair," Marshall said, had also influenced her removal of the maple leaf from the flag, which she had come to see "as an icon of oppression, assimilation, injustice and racism, that intends to deny First Nations people the inherent right to 392

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self-identity and human rights."27 This was not quite in keeping with the usual triumphal repetition of the Canadian flag along the Gallery's access route, as a simple symbol suggesting the wholeness and integrity of the nation-state as well as the Gallery's role as "a federal institution." But four years later, Bill Clennett might have agreed with her assessment, in relation to a prime minister's own Flag Day excesses when he was eager to get to this very access route and engage in its "ritual." Marshall's version of the flag - besides also reprising the theme of the fig leaf long used in European art to conceal impropriety - even added its own participatory potential for visitors to Land Spirit Power. In a way that recalled Les Levine's controversial All Star Cast of sculpture '67, everyone had the option of entering the installation simply by looking through the maple leaf-shaped hole in the concrete flag, toward the concrete canoe and the figure in Mi'kmaq dress. With this gesture, the visitor's own face was remodelled in the shape of that central symbol of unitary "Canadian identity," the maple leaf, for anyone viewing the flag from the perspective of the headless figure. But what exactly was this perspective? The figure itself seemed dense with a troubling potential, not least because it so clearly evoked lines written by the figure who offers the greatest paradox of Canadian literary history, the "Confederation poet" Duncan Campbell Scott, in his most famous poem "Powassan's Drum." As deputy superintendent general for the Department of Indian Affairs, Scott did not simply occupy himself with such derivative Victoriana as "Fragment of an Ode to Canada," which contains the lines "we inherit/What built the Empire out of blood and fire." He also helped literally to depopulate the landscapes that the Group of Seven depicted as humanly empty, by negotiating treaties that severed the northern Ojibway from their ancestral lands, and by overseeing a residential-schools system that severed multitudes of aboriginal children from their families.28 But he also tried, around 1925, and as though trying to write his way out of his own nightmare, to convey a sense of Ojibway shamanism, via a poem which contains the lines: A canoe moves noiseless as sleep, Noiseless as the trance of deep sleep, And an Indian still as a statue, Molded out of deep sleep, Headless, still as a headless statue Molded out of deep sleep ...29

So odd a parallel with Marshall's Elitekey was not without its own direct link to the National Gallery's past, evidence for which is provided by a photograph reprinted in Maud Brown's short 1964 book on her husband Eric. It shows the participants in a 1936 "tea party" that was held in the Gallery's Victoria Museum office, in honour of a retrospective exhibition of works by the Group of Seven that had just opened at the Gallery.30 The attendees were a Who's Who of the National Gallery's intersection to that point with Canadian art: Eric and Maud Brown; H.O. McCurry and his wife, Dorothy; Lawren and Bess Harris, along with Harris's son from his first marriage, Lawren P. Harris; A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven; Harry Epilogue

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A tea party in Eric Brown's office in the National Gallery, then located in the Victoria Museum, 1936, in honour of a retrospective exhibition of the Group of Seven. From left, seated: F. Maud Brown, Eric Brown, H.S. Southam, Bess Harris, Dorothy McCurry; standing: Harry McCurry, Donald Buchanan, Graham Mclnnes, Duncan Campbell Scott, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, and Lawren Harris, Jr. In the background is a portrait of Sir Edmund Walker. (National Gallery of Canada)

Southam, the Christian Scientist newspaper magnate who was also chairman of the Board of Trustees; Donald Buchanan, who would become Alan Jarvis's associate director; and the rather more obscure art critic Graham Mclnnes. But standing behind Southam, and beside Lawren Harris, Sr at the photograph's very centre is the apparent anomaly: an austere-looking, seventy-four-year-old Duncan Campbell Scott. Likely Scott was there because, besides writing poetry and serving as the deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, he also wrote monographs on Canadian art, including one on the Quebec painter Clarence Gagnon for a 1942 exhibition at the Gallery. But he was also closely connected with the artistic circle that had formed around the Group of Seven: indeed, Lawren Harris wrote of Scott's house - which contained his own collection of "Indian artifacts," many of them gathered in the course of his treaty-making expeditions - that it had "a lovely aura."31 This iconic texture of association, dating back to Ottawa's own small Englishspeaking community of the arts in the 19308, only enhanced Eliteke/s critical pertinence to the National Gallery's historical embeddedness in this community's agendas, and in their linked exclusions. For all of these men did their work and pursued their visions in the context of the "deep sleep" that, tied to Canada's own development as a nation-state, had been enforced on aboriginal relationships with place, with "nature" and with "spirit." Elitekey, in speaking to and even out of this condition, did not appear along the new building's access route in a way that directly challenged Safdie's own precipitation of the Gallery's ties to exclusionary metaphysics, 394

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via the converging, harmonious spectacle that awes the visitor, on the way in and on the way out, with its impression of enveloping completeness. But from within the Special Exhibitions Hall, Elitekey's own internal absences - faceless figure, leafless flag - only fed on the work's physical exclusion from the symmetrical access route, as exemplary of long-established practice. And in doing so, they played to the appearance in Scott's poem of another term that had figured unresolved throughout the Gallery's history. In describing the distant pulsing sound of the shaman's drum, Scott wrote: The live things in the world Hear it and are silent. They hide silent and charmed As if guarding a secret; Charmed and silent hiding a rich secret, Throbbing all to the Throb-throb-throbbing of Powassan's Drum.32

From the influence on Eric Brown of Mrs Eddy's claim that "whoso will study Science and Health can get from it the secret of ... the Spirit of God" and Lawren Harris's reliance on Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, through Vincent Massey's claim that the Group of Seven had "surrendered themselves to their own environment, striving to uncover its secret," to Safdie's own claim about the Colonnade ramp that "the secret was to turn that journey into a procession," the word "secret," too, has been part of Gallery lexicon.33 What all of these men shared also, besides the word, was their assumption that they - or in Massey's case, the artists he celebrated - had successfully unlocked the "secret." But, just as the German critic Reinhard Beuth said about the new building itself that the Gallery "guards the art as in a shrine, wraps it up, surrounds it with secrets," so, too, did Christian Zervos write of the "secret power" of the sacred objects shown in Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art in 1970. And it was this last mysterious and unresolved usage that seemed best to cross-reference with Scott's allusion to "a rich secret" guarded by "the live things in the world," "Throbbing all to the / Throb- throb-throbbing of Powassan's Drum." Elitekey's absences were remindful also of the unrecovered mystery of such a primordial "secret," and gave their own twist of irony to the curators' statement about "yearning for a place that has been removed from us, except in spirit." For surely the implication of both these absences, and Scott's use of the word "secret" in "Powassan's Drum," was that the "secret" of the "place" might be "removed from us" precisely "in spirit," regardless of the claims made by Brown, Harris, Massey, Comfort, and Safdie. Nor was Eliteke/s eerie legacy of unresolved absences diminished by what happened to it after Land Spirit Power closed. The National Gallery did not purchase it for the collection, and once the show finished its tour of western Canada, it was crated up and returned to Teresa Marshall, who could not afford indoor storage. She therefore left the crates in a neighbour's backyard. With the Epilogue

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passage of time they began to leak, and the details of figure, canoe, and flag were dissolved by rain and melting snow: by Canadian "nature," that is, not as a passive "wonderland of beauty," but as an active agency of transformation.34 This loss of detail worked against Eliteke/s strictly visible and ostensibly timeless aesthetic "quality," and in 1997 the National Gallery, after arranging for an inspection, declined Marshall's offer of it as a gift. Yet, even as Elitekeys detail vanished into the earth, Land Spirit Power did leave lodged in the National Gallery's record another terse three-part formulation that, with the usual charge of irony, provided its own key term toward filling in the word "Order," as it has developed in relation to the Gallery's historical role. Just as this is the middle term in both the Canadian desiderata of "Peace, Order and good Government" and Eric Brown's claim that art "can add fitness and order and suitability to everything it touches," so "Spirit" was the middle term in the exhibition Land Spirit Power. And if there is one word closely tied to the Gallery's history, it is this one, evolving from an alleged link to "divine Principle" in the metaphysical systems honoured by Brown and Harris to a "floating signifier" that was assigned a succession of useful ties. Brown himself wrote of "art and national spirit," "the spirit of Canadian nature," and "the new spirit of Canadian landscape painting," while Harris invoked first "the spirit of the north" and then "the living spirit of the arts," toward a national "unity of spirit." At mid-century, Vincent Massey s Royal Commission and Charles Comfort favoured the term "Canadian spirit," while twenty-five years later the Globe and Mail editorialized about the Gallery's friendliness to the "human spirit" in lauding the tenure of Jean Sutherland Boggs. The term fell out of favour during the National Gallery's eclipse within the system of the NMC, but it was reintroduced by Shirley Thomson almost immediately on her arrival, when she invited visitors to the new building for "spiritual refreshment and a glass of chilled wine" and called for "openness of spirit." Thomson made this call, however, not only to introduce Land Spirit Power, but within the context of an explicitly metaphysical "access route" whose architect himself had borrowed from the Gothic as exemplary of a style in which - as he put it he saw "all elements working together toward a great spiritual experience." Clearly the building designed by Moshe Safdie injects its own alleged relationship between "spirit" and "order" into the presence of art in Canada's capital. But given that Thomson was indeed introducing the Gallery's first exhibition of contemporary First Nations art, what might be implied for the future by such an "openness of spirit"? How might this future relate to the "spirit of place" cited in regard to this same exhibition by its curators, and to art's own role, according to the Applebaum-Hebert committee, as indispensably "critical"? And how will the relationship among "spirit," "order," and art evolve, in close proximity of place to the two newer buildings on either side of the National Gallery, which establish a north-south as well as an eastwest axis of monumental icons? To the Gallery's north, at the level of the Ottawa River, are the pale brown undulating forms of the Museum of Civilization, as designed by a Metis architect and with their own glass facade through which immense Haida totem poles look out on 396

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Teresa Marshall, Elitekey, detail. (National Gallery of Canada)

the Parliament Buildings. To the Gallery's south, on higher ground, is the Embassy of the United States, with its dark impenetrable wall of glass informing America's tie to a "Liberty" that is itself the middle term of Thomas Jefferson's desiderata of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Of the National Gallery's Colonnade ramp, Witold Rybczynski wrote, with the informed self-consciousness so integral to postmodern irony, that "climbing it among a group of people, one feels like part of a ceremonial procession in a Cecil B. DeMille movie." The self-consciousness lingers in a walk away from the National Gallery, back through Major's Hill Park and past the Embassy's dark glass wall. Could this be the same Cecil B. DeMille movie, The Ten Commandments, in which Charlton Heston decreed, as the last words of Moses, "Go, proclaim Liberty unto all the lands, and unto all the inhabitants thereof"? Poised crystalline above the Ottawa River, and with the Gatineau Hills in the hazy distance, the National Gallery gives no clear answer. But is the "secret" by any means as resolved as Vincent Massey and Moshe Safdie, Eric Brown and Lawren Harris, clearly wanted to believe it was? Epilogue

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Notes

CHAPTER ONE

1 The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report 1928-29,6. 2 Department of Justice, Canada, A Consolidation of the British North America Acts 1867-1975,24. 3 The Peacekeeping Monument, officially titled "Reconciliation," was sponsored jointly by the Department of National Defence and the National Capital Commission. It was designed by a team consisting of Jack Harman (sculptor), Richard Henriquez (urban designer), Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (landscape architect), Gabriel Design (lighting), and J.L. Richards (engineering). 4 Quoted in "Director lauds modern school" (unattributed article), Vancouver Daily World, 21 June 1921. 5 See a three-part series by Geoffrey Stevens in Globe and Mail: "A National Disgrace," 13 January 1981; "A gallery in retreat," 14 January 1981; and "A depressing saga," 15 January 1981. See also Betty Lee, "Our national disgrace," Globe and Mail, 28 March 1981. 6 Quoted in Richard Gwyn,"Trudeau's graceless neglect of the National Gallery," Toronto Star, 23 June 1981. 7 On the absence of arts concerns from Trudeau's speeches, see Sandra Gwyn,

8

9

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"Arts policy in Ottawa: no vision, no direction," Saturday Night, May 1976,12. Also, Audrey Johnson, "Culture is a frill attitude won't die," Montreal Star, 27 May 1976. As quoted in Peter Menyasz, "New gallery, museum to cost $185 million," Vancouver Sun, 19 February 1982, Trudeau said: "Those that might criticize the kind of expenditure we're about to make in a time of restraint have failed to understand the thrust of the government in the past few years. I prefer to look at the arts as an enrichment of Canadian identity." For a more extended argument on the anti-institutionalism of contemporary art in the 19705, and the compensatory role played by art museums, see the essay "Narrating Art" in Ord, Navigating without a Compass, 28ff. As described in Doug Bale, "Irreplaceable art at risk in shabby National Gallery," London Free Press, 7 February 1981. Statement by Francis Fox, minister of communications, on "New Facilities for the National Gallery of Canada and the National Museum of Man," 18 February 1982, Information Services, Government of Canada, i.

CHAPTER TWO

1 Rybezynski,A Place for Art: The Architecture of the National Gallery of Canada, 65. For a more extensive description of Rybezynski's commissioned book, and of a still more serious error of fact, see chapter 7, n.n. 2 Turner, Safdies Gallery: An Interview with the Architect, 5. 3 Such was the obscurity of the reference to the "ramp done by Bernini" that the author had to seek the assistance of both Gyde Shepherd, who accompanied Safdie on the trip to Rome, and Tod Marder of Rutgers University, the author of two books on the Scala Regia, in order to clarify it. 4 Turner, Safdies Gallery: An Interview with the Architect, 4. 5 Genesis 28:10-18, in The Holy Bible (King James Version). 6 Comfort, "Painting," in Royal Commission Studies, 409. 7 Massey, On Being Canadian, 34. 8 Massey, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 211. 9 van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 18. 10 See Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, i4ff. 11 Turner, Safdie's Gallery, 18. 12 For Safdie on "the geometry of octagons," see ibid., 10. The story of the Mi'raj has its basis in the first verse of Sura 17 in the Qur'an, which in the translation by M.H. Shakir reads: "Glory be to Him Who made His servant to go on a night from the Sacred Mosque to the remote mosque of which We have blessed the precincts, so that We may show to him some of Our signs; surely He is the Hearing, the Seeing." Like many aspects of the humanly altered Mount Moriah, called by Jews the Temple Mount and by Moslems the Noble Sanctuary, even this verse is a matter of contention. For example, The Dictionary of Islam, by Thomas Patrick

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N O T E S T O P A C E S 19-40

Hughes, reads: "Praise be to Him who carried His servant by night from the Masjidu '1 Haram (i.e. the Makkan [mosque]) to the Masjidu'1 Aqsa (i.e. the [mosque] of Jerusalem ...)"Some Jewish sources claim that the designation of Jerusalem as the site of the "remote" or "farthest" mosque was ex post facto and conjectural. Some Islamic sources, by contrast, claim that Jews' designation of Mount Moriah as the site of the First and Second Temples is also conjectural. The more elaborate story of the Mi'raj, with its details of the Angel Gabriel, a white horse-like creature called a Buraq, and Muhammad's ascent through seven heavens, is told in the collection of Arabic traditions called the Mishkatu 'l-Masabih. 13 Massey, On Being Canadian, 25. CHAPTER THREE

1 Lacasse, National Gallery of Canada Guide, i. 2 Turner, Safdie's Gallery, 10. 3 M.O. Hammond, "Leading Canadian artists: Lawren Harris, O.S.A." Globe and Mail, 26 July 1930. 4 Harris, "Creative Art and Canada." I am indebted to Charles Hill, curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery, for his provision of binders containing writings by Harris. 5 Quoted in Nancy Baele, "THIS is ART?", front-page story in Ottawa Citizen, 22 June 1991. The question was asked not about Oberlander's Taiga Garden but about Tadashi Kawamata's Favela, which was installed on top of it. For an analysis of Favela in relation to the National Gallery, see "Kawamata's Sheds," in Ord, Navigating without a Compass. 6 Brown, "Canadian Art and Artists," 8. 7 Jackson, "Lawren Harris, A Biographical Sketch," 6. 8 Lawren Harris, on his painting "The Return to Town," as quoted in B.B.C

9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

(pseudonym),"A Departure in Art Criticism," Macleans Magazine, May 1911,69. Harris, "Justice in Human Life," transcript of Radio Talk no.4, delivered 5 November 1933. For a detailed description of this period of Harris's life, see Larisey, Light for a Cold Land, 35ff. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Volume One: Science, 22-23. For other artists on the role of theosophy in their art, see Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1928. In the latter, see especially "God Is Not Cast Down" (1920), 188-223. For an astute analysis of the shaping role of theosophy in international modernism, see Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, 50-95. Quoted in Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting 1920-1940, 101. Besant, Annie and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms, 5,8, and 11. Ibid., 9 and 14. Ibid., Foreword. Harris, "Different Idioms in Creative Art," 32. Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms, 21,26-8. Ibid., 22-5. This section of the book, called "The Meaning of the Colors," offers a comprehensive schema of meaning for the full spectrum of colors. The unpublished paper "Art Is the Distillate of Life," quoted in Larisey, Light for a Cold Land, 75. Harris, "Creative Art and Canada," 1928,2. "Art Is the Distillate of Life," 56. Ibid. Harris, "Creative Art and Canada," 2. Harris, "Revelation of Art in Canada," i. Personal communication from Moshe Safdie to the author, 26 June 1997: "To your specific questions, I am not aware

that my design was influenced by Browns or Harris' agendas or by Harris' approach to landscape painting. Are there such influences? I'd be interested in learning about them." CHAPTER FOUR

1 Turner, Safdie's Gallery, 10-11. 2 Richards, "Ottawa's Crystal Palace," 59. 3 See Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters 110-11 (Wassili Luckhardt, "Cult Building"). 4 Thomsen, Visionary Architecture, 82,90. 5 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, xiii. 6 Ibid., xi. 7 "Art is the Distillate of Life," in Larisey, Light for a Cold Land, 56. 8 Harris, "Different Idioms in Creative Art," 32. 9 Plato, Timaeus, 28b ff., trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Hamilton and Cairns, ed., The Collected Dialogues, n6iff. 10 Plato, Republic, VII, 525d-527c, trans. Paul Shorey, in ibid., 759. 11 Ibid., X, 597a-e, in ibid., 822. 12 Plato, Timaeus, 34c, in ibid., 1165. 13 Plato, Philebus, 59C, trans. R. Hackforth, in ibid., 1141. 14 Plato. Timaeus, 2?d, in ibid., 1161. 15 Republic,Vll, 5i8c, in ibid., 750. 16 Philebus, 6ia ff., in ibid., ii43ff.; also Symposium, 2o6a, trans. Michael Joyce, in ibid., 558. 17 Philebus, 6$a, in ibid., 1147. The concept of "the guardians" is developed especially in Books III and IV of the Republic. 18 Plato, Statesman, 3O3b, trans. J.B. Skemp, in ibid., 1074; and Republic, Vlll, 5606, in ibid., 789. 19 Republic, VI, 5o8d, in ibid., 744. 20 Republic, X, 598b, in ibid., 823. 21 Philebus, 596, in ibid., 1142. 22 Philebus, 59C, in ibid., 1141. 23 Republic, III, 40ia-c, in ibid., 646. 24 Ibid., 40id, 646. 25 Trudeau's remarks at the opening of the National Arts Centre on 31 May 1969 N O T E S T O P A G E S 40-51

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were quoted by CBC Radio in an obituary report, 28 September 2000. 26 Quoted in Radwanski, Trudeau, 87. The quotation in this book is undated, but obviously derives from the early to mid1970s, when Trudeau was actively involved in "contingencies" and "everyday life," not least in order to stay in power. CHAPTER FIVE

1 Quoted in E Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 16. 2 Quoted in A.C. Cummings, "Praises achievements of late Eric Brown," Ottawa Citizen, 9 April 1939. 3 Brown, "Man's Capacity," i. 4 Ibid. 5 Brown, "Pushing Onward," 27-8. 6 Brown, "Man's Capacity," i. 7 Ibid. 8 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Volume One, x. 9 Ibid., 22; and Eddy, The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany, 115. Quoted in Steiger, Christian Science and Philosophy, Si. 10 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Volume One, 63. 11 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 330. 12 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, no. 13 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 281. 14 Plato, Euthyphro, ioa-i2d, trans. Lane Cooper, in Hamilton and Cairns, ed. The Collected Dialogues, 178-81. 15 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 166 and 168. 16 Ibid., 603. 17 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 89ff. 18 Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 12. 19 Ibid., 17. 20 Brown, "Pushing Onward," 26. 21 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 468. 22 Ibid., 167.

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23 For trenchant analysis of Eddy's concept of "malicious animal magnetism" or "malicious mesmerism," and its relationship to her well-documented persecution anxieties, see Gather and Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science, 226ff. 24 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 46. 25 Twain, Christian Science, 159. 26 Ibid., 68. Twain also quoted from an 1886 ad placed in the Christian Science Journal by Mrs Eddy, soliciting enrolment for her classes. The ad read: "No invalids, and only persons of good moral character are accepted as students. All students are subject to examination and rejection; and they are liable to leave the class if found unfit to remain within it" (158). 27 Gather and Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, 209-10. 28 Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 17. 29 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 2-3. 30 Brown, "Pushing Onward," 27-8. 31 Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 17-18 32 Brown's meeting with Grier is recounted in Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, 53. 33 Letter from Eric Brown to Brian Meredith, 23 August, 1934, box i, file 16 (Correspondence), Eric and Maud Brown fonds, National Gallery of Canada Archives. 34 The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Reports for the fiscal years 1924-25 (5); 1923-24 (8); 1931-32 (5). 35 Brown, "What is Art," 6; and "Lecture to be given at Seignory Club, Lucerne," 3. 36 "From National Gallery Director" (letter to the editor), Ottawa Citizen, 4 November 1921. 37 Plato, Greater Hippias, 2^jb, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Hamilton and

38 39

40

41

42

43

44

45 46

Cairns, ed., Plato: The Collected Dialogues, 1551. See also Symposium, 20ic ff., in ibid., 553ff. Brown, "Explanations," i. Report of the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (no. 9), 62 Victoria, A. 1899,12- "But one addition was made to the art gallery during the year, an oil painting by Charles Eugene Moss, R.C.A. This painting was presented to the gallery by the Royal Canadian Academy, in accordance with the Act of Incorporation requiring diploma pictures to be deposited in the National Gallery." F. Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 22. Maud Brown wrote that the Gallery's paintings were moved from the Supreme Court to the Fisheries Building in 1882, but the Sessional Papers indicate that the move took place in early 1888. See Sessional Papers (no. 9) 52 Victoria A. 1889, Appendix no. 17: National Art Gallery, Curator's Report, 189. Report of the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (no.9) 58 Victoria, A. 1895, ii. Reports of the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (no.i9), 2-3 Edward VII, A. 1903,19; and 7-8 Edward VII, A. 1908,21. Reports of the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (no.19), 1-2 Edward VII, A. 1902,19; and 64 Victoria, A. 1902,21. For an account of the development of public museums in New York, Boston, and Chicago, see Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 49ff. Reprinted in The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1920-21,22. Reports of the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (no.i9), 7-8 Edward VII, A. 1908,21; and 9-10 Edward VII, A. 1910,31.

47 F. Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 28. 48 Considered in terms of the future, Walker's gesture was also dense with dramatic irony, given that seventy-five years later, and even as the Gallery was at last getting a building of its own, the party roles would be reversed, with a Conservative government sponsoring this time successfully - free trade with the United States. 49 Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 26. Though Maud Brown confided that she and her husband paid only $22 a month in rent for "a very small house," she also wrote that her husband's salary "was never much more than a good stenographer earns today... We gardened assiduously." 50 Report of the Department of Public Works: "The Report of the Advisory Arts Council in Charge of the National Gallery of Canada, 1911-1912," Sessional Papers (no.ig), 3 George V, A. 1913,59. 51 Report of the Department of Public Works: "Art Gallery," Sessional Papers (no.19), 4 George V, A. 1914,61. 52 Ibid. 53 F. Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 31 and 27. 54 "Act Incorporating the National Gallery of Canada," 3-4 George V, Chapter 33.3, Appendix to National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1920-21,20. 55 The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1921-22,7. 56 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 27. 57 Statement of the administrators of the Louvre, 1794, quoted in ibid., 25. 58 Ibid., 32. 59 "National Art Gallery," Report of the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (no.i9), 5 George V, A. 1915,7; and "The Report of the Advisory Arts Council in Charge of the National Gallery of Canada, 1911-1912," Report of

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the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (110.19), 3 George V, A. 1913.5960 Ibid., 62. 61 Ibid., 60. Also, for the reference to "Mecca," see "National Art Gallery," Report of the Department of Public Works, Sessional Papers (19) 9-10 Edward VII, A. 1910,15. 62 The Gallery's fifth director, Jean Sutherland Boggs, in her short history of the collection, suggests Walker's influence, for example, in "three fourteenth century Florentine panels ... bought in 1922-23." Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 14. 63 F. Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 35. 64 The reference to "good things without great names" is in Brown, "The National Gallery of Canada," 5. The reference to Bernardino Luini is in the National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1926-27,7. 65 Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 29. 66 Brown, "Art and Science," 3.

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CHAPTER SIX

1 Harris, letter to the editor, Toronto Globe, 4 June 1914. 2 Brown's trip to England is described in Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 34. 3 Lawren Harris, "The R.C.A. Reviewed," The Lamps, December 1911,9. 4 Letter from Eric Brown to Sir Edmund Walker, 13 June 1914, National Gallery Curatorial File 6529: Jackson, Autumn in Picardy. 5 Helena Blavatsky and William Q. Judge, "Some of the Errors of Christian Science"; quoted in Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life, 156. 6 Eddy, No and Yes, 13. 7 Letter from Eric Brown to Wyly Grier, 13 November 1913, National Gallery Curatorial File 6529. 8 Letter from Wyly Grier to Eric Brown, 12 404

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21 22 23

November 1913, National Gallery Curatorial File 6529. Report of the Department of Public Works: "Annual Report of the Trustees of the National Gallery, 1914-15," Sessional Papers (no. 19) 6 George V, A. 1916,61. Charles Hill, curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery, 15 November 2001. Brown, F. Maud, Breaking Barriers, 68. Ibid., 56. Brown, "Tom Thomson Canadian Painter," 3-4. "But for once his friends knew more than he did. They bought canvases, they got him a studio nearby, they almost thrust him into it and turned the key and said through the key-hole, 'you shall come out when they're done.' Great was the result." But what if Thomson had been left to his own devices by "his friends," who were actually working within a much more conventional model of art - the "big painting" model - than he was? Brown, "The National Art Gallery of Canada." The joking comment about his "sermon" is in an undated, untitled typescript found in box i, file 8 (Lectures), Eric and Maud Brown fonds. "The sermon is that there never was really a great country which had not a great art." Ruskin, John, St. Mark's Rest, 5. Brown, "Artistic Liberty," 2. Brown, "Canada and Her Art," 8. Brown, "Tom Thomson Canadian Painter," 2. Brown, "Artistic Liberty," 3; and Brown, "Re-opening the National Gallery of Canada," 4. See also Brown, "Tom Thomson Canadian Painter," 2. King, Thunderbird and Lightning: Indian Life in Northeastern North America 1600-1900,55 and 11. Brown, "Art and National Spirit," i. Brown, "Artistic Liberty," 4. Brown, "Re-opening the National Gallery of Canada," 4.

24 The first part of this reference is from Brown, "Canadian Art and Artists," 8. The second part is from Brown, "The National Gallery of Canada," 8. 25 Brown, "The New Movement in Art," 3. This lecture on the relationship between the fine and the practical arts deserves more attention than can be given here. 26 Brown, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," 2. 27 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 263. 28 Brown, "The Fine Arts in Canada," 2. 29 Maud Brown, "Eric Brown: His Contribution to the National Gallery," 32. 30 Harris, Group of Seven: Catalogue Exhibition of Paintings, 4. 31 Brown, "Canadian Art and Artists," 4. 32 Brown, "The Fine Arts in Canada," 5. 33 Excerpted from the following unattributed reviews, as reproduced in the National Gallery of Canada's Annual Report, 1924-25,7-10: "New school of landscape painting," Morning Post, 28 May 1924; "The Palace of Arts, Wembley," Saturday Review, 7 June 1924; Daily Chronicle, 30 April 1924; "Palace of Fine Arts, Dominion tendencies," The Times, 6 May 1924. 34 "At the Musee du Jeu de Paume. Exhibition of Canadian Art," Le Figaro Artistique, unattributed review reproduced in the National Gallery's Annual Report, 1927-28,12. 35 Ibid., 6. 36 Brown, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," i. 37 Quoted in Boggs, Listening to Pictures, 11. 38 Brown, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," 3. 39 E.G. Grant, "Canadian art," letter to the editor, Ottawa Journal, 19 February 1926. 40 Brown, "Those new pictures: A defence of them," letter to the editor, Ottawa Journal, 22 February 1926. 41 Brown, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," 2.

42 Gather and Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science, 191. 43 Brown, "Arnesby Brown, R.A.," i. 44 Brown, "Explanations," i. 45 Plato's own account of his disastrous relationship with Dionysius is contained in eight letters which most scholarly opinion accepts as authentic. See Letters II-IV, VI-VIII, X, XI and XIII, trans. L.S. Post in Hamilton and Cairns, ed., The Collected Dialogues, 1560-1603. 46 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 23. 47 Brown, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," 2. 48 Brown, "Those new pictures: A defence of them" 49 Brown, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," 2. 50 Brown, "Art the Sacrifice," 4. 51 Brown, "Painting the War at Home," 2. 52 Brown, "The Second Exhibition of the Canadian War Memorials' Pictures at Toronto Ontario," 5. 53 The "Bolshevists in art" reference is from "Modern Canadian painting equal to world's best, says director of art gallery" (unattributed), Winnipeg Tribune, 11 June 1921. The "We must not confound ..." reference is from "Director lauds modern school" (unattributed), Vancouver Daily World, 21 June 1921. 54 Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists, 65. 55 Brown, "Art and Science," 3. Charles C. Hill, in conversation (November 1996), noted the link with the Winnipeg General Strike. 56 See Stephanie Barron, "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1991), 360. The quotation is taken directly from the Fuhrerfur die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, which was issued by the Reich Propaganda Office to accompany the exhibition (trans. David Britt). 57 Brown, "Pushing Onward," 29. N O T E S T O P A G E S 82-92

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58 The suggestion that the Canadian public of the 19205 would not for an instant have countenanced the Natural Gallery's purchase of radically modernist work, even had Brown wanted to supply it, was made by Charles Hill, the National Gallery's curator of Canadian art, in conversation (November 1996). This still, however, does not seem adequately to address the fact that it was Brown's own vigorously stated preference not to include such work. 59 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 258. 60 Quoted in Wain, The Approaching Storm, 236. 61 Adolf Hitler, "Speech Dedicating the House of German Art," 18 July 1937; quoted in Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 42. 62 The "art dictator" and "Mussolini" comments appeared in the Toronto Star, 20 November 1926. The "wise head of the tribe" comment was in a letter from Eric Brown to Wyly Grier, 13 November 1913, National Gallery Curatorial File 6529. 63 Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 74. 64 Brown, "Art and National Spirit," i. Remarkably, Brown also applied this assessment to the Germany of the First World War. "To German art, if it is to live at all," he wrote, the war "must bring a revolution. The distruction [sic] of her material hopes, the squandering of her material resources and the holocaust of death and destruction she has brought upon herself and others in pursuit of world dominion must first abase her national spirit and then dissolve it with the solvent of humility and peace from which a better art will spring cleansed of her degeneracy." 65 Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, viii. 66 Maud Brown, Breaking Barriers, 112; and "Eric Brown: His Contribution to the National Gallery," 33. 67 Brown, "Those new pictures: A defence of them". 406

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68 Letters from H.O. McCurry to Eric Brown, 16 June 1922, and from H.O. McCurry to Eric and Maud Brown, 19 July 1922, box i, file 15 (Correspondence), Eric and Maud Brown fonds. 69 Alan Phillips, "Liberty Profile: Harry O. McCurry," Liberty, 22 June 1946,16. 70 H.O. McCurry, "Speech to the Professional Institute of the Civil Service," undated but cross referenced to 1946 or early 1947, i. National Gallery Archives, clipping files under H.O. McCurry. 71 Brown, "The Function of an Art Gallery," Ottawa Citizen, 14 November 191472 McCurry, "Speech to the Professional Institute of the Civil Service," 2; Phillips, "Liberty Profile: Harry O. McCurry," 17. 73 Phillips, "Liberty Profile: Harry O. McCurry," 17. 74 See Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 39-45, for a description of Gallery acquisitions during McCurry's tenure. 75 H.O. McCurry, "Untitled Remarks given on 26 June 1941 at the Opening Session of the Conference of Canadian Artists," National Gallery of Canada Archives, box 7.4 F, Outside Activities/ Organizations: Federation of Canadian Artists, file 1. McCurry, "Speech to the Professional Institute of the Civil Service," 2. 76 The pattern of irony in the history of the National Gallery would, nearly five decades after McCurry's retirement, slip even into the legacy of his proudest achievement: the postwar acquisitions of European paintings using blocked currency. In December 2000 the National Gallery announced that it was posting on its Internet website images of 106 of the paintings acquired after the Second World War. The concern was that some of these had been looted by Nazi troops and so had come onto the post-war

market illegally. Furthermore, there seemed at least the possibility that Anthony Blunt, who served as an adviser from 1948 to 1955, but was later exposed as a Soviet double agent, may have routed to the National Gallery paintings that had been stolen by Republican troops during the Spanish Civil War. See Stewart Bell, "National Gallery adds paintings to list of possible loot," and Czegledi, Bonnie, "Who knew what about Nazi loot?" National Post, 16 December 2000. 77 Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 41. 78 Brown, "Re: National Gallery" (letter to the editor), Ottawa Citizen, 18 January 1917. CHAPTER SEVEN

1 The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1922-23,23. 2 "The National Gallery of Canada" (unattributed article), Toronto Globe, 29 October 1927; and "What is the Answer" (unattributed article) Montreal Daily Star, 23 February 1928. 3 Quoted in Augustus Bridle, "Artists Assert the Need for a New National Gallery," Toronto Star, 12 November 1929. MacDonald's visit was described in "The National Art Gallery" (unattributed), Winnipeg Free Press, 13 November 1929. 4 As described in Granatstein, The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 65. This reference came via Litt, The Muses, The Masses, and the Massey Commission, 11. The originator of the nickname was apparently Loring Christie. 5 See Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, 134-139, for an account. The new trustees as appointed by King were August Richard (Montreal), Newton MacTavish (Toronto), and Warren Soper (Ottawa), who was also - as Hill puts it - "a collector of Ahrens' paintings." 6 Quoted in Tippett, Making Culture, 74.

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The relevant entries in Mackenzie King's diary are those of 17 July 1932 and 14 April 1934. Letter from H.O. McCurry to Eric Brown, 24 June 1924, box i file 15 (Correspondence), Eric and Maud Brown fonds. See Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 96 ff. "Premier Favours National Gallery" (unattributed article), Ottawa Journal, 18 April 1928. See Tippett, Making Culture, 72 and 124. Massey's proposals to King were made in 1932,1934, and 1937. For a record of these proposals, see Rybczynski, A Place for Art: The Architecture of the National Gallery of Canada, 54. A Place for Art was commissioned from Rybczynski by the National Gallery itself after the new building's opening. As such, it is useful for conveying a sense of how the Gallery building project was related to the development of galleries and museums especially in Europe. It contains, however, next to no reference to the distinctively sacral vocabulary in Safdie's building, or to the way in which the building was related to Safdie's earlier career and polemics. As will be seen, moreover, the book contains an error of fact so serious as almost to vitiate its overall reliability. According to Rybczynski, "in 1976 the National Gallery's director, Jean Sutherland Boggs, convinced the Trudeau government to sponsor another competition on a new site between the Supreme Court and the National Library and Archives" (57). Given that the driving force behind both this competition and this choice of site was the Board of Trustees of the National Museums of Canada, and that Boggs was vehemently opposed to the site itself, this claim by Rybczynski implies his almost complete misreading of the complex dynamics that informed Gallery politics during the 19708. In N O T E S TO P A G E S 98-104

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doing so, it also puts into print a version of these events that does not invite further scrutiny, and so glosses over conflicts that, while awkward, were arguably germane to how the Gallery building eventually came to look. See Chapters 13 to 16. See Lucy Van Gogh, "Capital of the Future," Saturday Night, 17 May 1949 for a general description of the Greber plan. Quoted in "The National Art Gallery," Winnipeg Free Press, 13 November 1929. "Letter to the Conference of Canadian Artists," Queen's University, Kingston, 26 June 1941, National Gallery of Canada Archives, box 7.4 F: Outside Activities/ Organizations, Federation of Canadian Artists. Lawren Harris, "Federation of Canadian Artists: Presidential Letter Number i, May 1944," 2; National Gallery of Canada Archives, box 7.4 F: Outside Activities/Organizations, Federation of Canadian Artists. See Tippett, Making Culture, 144-54. On the National Gallery, Tippett is especially valuable in pointing out the role of H.O. McCurry as secretary of the Carnegie Corporation's "Canadian Committee" during the 19305, toward the disbursement of arts grants toward both individuals and institutions. Among the recipients of Carnegie Corporation travel grants during this period were Alan Jarvis, who served as director of the National Gallery from 1955 to 1959, and Donald Buchanan, who ran the National Gallery's Design Centre throughout the 19505 and served as Jarvis's associate director. For the role of the Carnegie Corporation in the MiersMarkham report, which emphasized the largely unprofessional status of museums in Canada, see Gillam, Hall of Mirrors: Museums and the Canadian Public, 59. Conversation with Brydon Smith, curator of modern art at the National 408

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Gallery of Canada, 15 November 1996. See also Chapter eight, n.63. Massey, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 7. Minutes of the third meeting of the Royal Commission, 20-21 June 1949, quoted in Bissell, The Imperial Canadian, 218. The other members of the Royal Commission were: the Very Reverend Georges-Henri Levesque, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval University; N.A.M. Mackenzie, the president of the University of British Columbia; Hilda Neatby, the acting chairman of the history department at the University of Saskatchewan; and Arthur Surveyer, "an engineer and businessman" from Quebec. See Ibid., 209. Brown, "The National Gallery and Art in Canada," 5. See Bissell, The Imperial Canadian, 5. Ibid., 3. Massey, On Being Canadian, 8. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid. Ibid. 34. See Bissell, The Imperial Canadian, 9. Massey, On Being Canadian, 184. Ibid., 25. Massey, Royal Commission Studies, vii. Malcolm Wallace, "The Humanities," in ibid., 112. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, vol. i, 47 and 55. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 307. See also The Will to Power, vol. i, 9: "Among the forces reared by morality, there was truthfulness: this in the end turns against morality, exposes the teleology of the latter, its interestedness, and now the recognition of this lie so long incorporated, from which we despaired of ever freeing ourselves, acts just like a stimulus."

36 On art as "the stimulus to life": Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 529. On "natural instincts": The Will to Power, vol. i, 101. 37 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 105. 38 Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 61. 39 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 558. 40 Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume One: The Will to Power as Art, 220. 41 Quoted in Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 130. 42 Letter from Martin Heidegger to Herbert Marcuse, 20 January 1948, quoted in ibid., 284. 43 Heidegger, Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister," 44. 44 Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 115. 45 For Heidegger on American "measurelessness" and "ahistoricality" see Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister," 55 and 70. 46 George Grant, "Philosophy" in Royal Commission Studies, 122. 47 Ibid., 119. 48 Ibid., 128. 49 This comment on "degeneracy" is to be found in "The Fine Arts in Canada," 2. 50 Plato, Timaeus, 2?c, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Hamilton and Cairns, ed., The Collected Dialogues, 1161. 51 Grant, "Philosophy," 119 and 132. 52 See Christian, George Grant: A Biography, 85-86. Christian describes this experience thus: "One morning, likely on 11 or 12 December [1941], as the first rays of the sun lit the darkness, George was riding his bicycle along the narrow country road between the hedgerows; then he turned up a gated road. A considerable nuisance to travellers, these roads had gates across them every quarter-mile or so to keep the sheep or cattle from straying. With nothing much apparently in mind,

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George Grant got off his bicycle to open one of these gates, walked his bike through, and closed the gate behind him. As he did so, it just came to him at once, in a moment and forever, that all was finally well, that God existed." Grant's own description of the experience, in a letter to his mother, seemed differently valenced. "There is no fear for my mental health, as just recently I feel as if I had been born again. Gradually I am learning there are unpredictable tremendous forces - mysterious forces within man that are beyond man's understanding driving him - taking him along courses and over which he has no or little control." Additional information was provided through a telephone interview with Sheila Grant (George Grant's widow) on 8 January 1998. Heidegger," The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 136. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in ibid., 24-26 and 35. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 78. Massey, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 20. This description appears in Charles Comfort's short, privately printed autobiography, Journey, 1924-1964,3 (of sixteen pages). A less formal account is contained in an interview done with Comfort by Charles Hill of the National Gallery on 3 October 1973, National Gallery of Canada Archives, 2 ff. Charles Comfort, "Painting," in Royal Commission Studies, 407. Ibid., 408. Ibid. Ibid., 414. Ibid., 415. Ibid., 411. Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 55 and 63.

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4°9

65 Comfort, "Painting," 416. 66 Ibid., 413. 67 Borduas, Refus Global/Projections Liberantes, 35. 68 See Comfort, Journey, 1924-1964. 69 See Bissell, The Imperial Canadian, 233ff. Bissells opinion was that Massey and Neatby worked as close allies in the preparation of the report. See also Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, noff. where the case is made that Neatby was the report's main author. Litt's book maps the actual process of the Royal Commission. 70 Massey, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 7. 71 Ibid., 211. 72 Ibid., 205. 73 Ibid., 206. 74 Ibid., 207. 75 Ibid., 271. 76 Ibid., 314. 77 Ibid., 315. 78 Ibid., 7979 The Royal Commission's recommendations concerning the National Gallery appear on pages 314-18 of the report. 80 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1953-54,8. 81 James, "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago 1938-45," in Barron and Eckmann, Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, 236. 82 These comments are taken from letters to the Winnipeg Tribune, 6 and 13 March 1954, and the Montreal Star, 11 March 195483 As reported in the Ottawa Journal, 14 February 1955. 84 "New National Gallery on Elgin Street" (unattributed article), Ottawa Journal, 15 February 1955. 85 Pickersgill's "long time" comment was quoted in "National Art Gallery in Distant Future" (unattributed article), Ottawa Journal, 8 March 1955. His comment that "this building will be 410

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the permanent gallery for the lifetime of everyone in this chamber" was made in the House of Commons on 28 August 1958. 86 Quoted in "National Art Gallery in Distant Future." CHAPTER EIGHT

1 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1953-54,52 See Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 43. See also King, The National Gallery of Canada at Arm's Length from the Government of Canada. I am indebted to King's thesis for introducing me to the overall pattern of the Liechtenstein purchases. 3 "New Fixture" (unattributed), New York Times (Canadian edition), i August 1955. 4 Of great value in tracing this and other exhibition patterns in the Gallery's history has been Mainprize, The National Gallery of Canada: A Hundred Years of Exhibitions: List and Index, with Addenda. 5 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Reports, 1940-41 to 1947-48. From $6,000 in 1940-41, the acquisitions budget went to zero for 1941-42 and 1942-43. It rose to just over $15,000 per annum for 1943-44 and 1944-45, and then leapt to over $50,000 per annum in 1945-46. 6 Clark, The Other Half: A Self Portrait, 32. Jarvis's appearance in Clark's autobiography is paradoxical. He is mentioned only on page 32, and his name is misspelled as "Alan Jarves." Moreover, despite the gravity of what Clark has to say about him, the context for his mention is provided only by Clark's reminiscence about his visits to the "modest and somewhat austere Cotswold house" of one Hiram Winterbotham. The passage reads: "As a rule Hiram was away, occupied in running aircraft factories with his friend Alan Jarves [sic], who was Stafford Cripp's [sic] personal assistant.

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Alan was the handsomest man I have ever seen, a good sculptor, with a wide knowledge of art. He later became Director of the National Gallery of Canada; but his face was his misfortune, and the last years of his life were a tragedy. So when I went to Woodchester I was alone, completely alone, because Hiram's cook usually retired to bed, with some fancied illness, leaving me to fend for myself. On one occasion she left a cold goose, which I ate through steadily for five days ..." There is, to understate the matter, some incongruity in Clark's describing Jarvis's "last years" as "a tragedy" and then going on, in the same paragraph, to focus on the "cold goose" that he ate "for five days." Peter Newman, "Is Jarvis Mis-Spending Our Art Millions?" Macleans Magazine, 22 November 1958. Robert Hubbard, curriculum vitae, dated to 1959; National Gallery clippings files, under Robert Hubbard. Biographical material on Donald Buchanan is to be found in the National Gallery clippings files. Reference material on the acquisition of Parachutes vegetaux is to be found in National Gallery Curatorial File 4911. The decision to formalize the exclusion of contemporary American art was taken at a meeting of the National Gallery's Board of Trustees in Ottawa on 23 and 24 May 1956. See Chapter three, n.i5. According to Robert Fulford, who was familiar with the National Gallery during the 19505, Buchanan was fundamentally a shy man, and would likely not have had the public dynamism to serve as director. Telephone conversation with Robert Fulford, 27 September 2000. Insight regarding Buchanan's hearing problems was provided by Gerry Grace, archivist at the National Arts Centre, by telephone on 15 October 2000. Quoted in Chisolm, The Things We See.

14 Massey, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 5. 15 Ibid., 7. 16 "New Fixture," New York Times 17 Newman, "Is Jarvis Mis-Spending Our Art Millions?" 18 Jarvis, The Things We See: Inside and Out, 62. With an ear for the identifying value of a simple phrase, frequently repeated, Alan Jarvis made "The Things We See" his personal slogan. The legacy can be confusing, in that he applied it to several of his achievements: a book, a television series, and a newspaper column. In addition, it was the title of the CBC radio documentary cited above. 19 Ibid. 20 Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 47. 21 Quoted in Robert Moon, "Museum mauled," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 25 January 1957. 22 Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 48. 23 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1957-58,10. 24 Clement Greenberg,"Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume One, 8. 25 Clement Greenberg, "Abstract and Representational," in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume Three, 187. 26 Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology, 136. 27 Jarvis, The Things We See: Inside and Out, 3. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 62. 30 Ibid., 26-9. 31 Ibid., 10. 32 Ibid., 18. 33 Ibid., 32. 34 Clark, The Other Half: A Self Portrait, 32. 35 As reported in the Globe and Mail, 25 July 1955N O T E S TO P A C E S 131-43

4!!

36 Newman, "Is Jarvis Mis-Spending Our Art Millions?" 26. 37 Quoted in "Persona Grata: Is Art Really Necessary," unsigned editorial (probably written by E.J. Pratt), Saturday Night, 21 January 1956,11. 38 See, for example, Calgary Albertan, 22 November 1955. 39 There is no indication that Jarvis mentioned a debt to Clark for this pun during the period he was actually alluding to it in his cross-country tours. But in a column in the Montreal Star, titled "How to enjoy modern art," dated 24 December 1965 - that is, six years after his resignation in 1959 - he did so. 40 See Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, i82ff. 41 Newman, "The Sublime Is Now," in Selected Writings and Interviews, 172. 42 Buchanan had written of Borduas's work as early as 1945. "The real break with his past as an artist," Buchanan wrote, "the revelation that proved the intensity of his purely personal spiritualism, came a few years later when he began to experiment with the dreamlike practice of automatic drawing. New and violent forms, colours that were often violent, in this way made their first appeal to him. These he then began to use consciously. He organized them into bold designs, which were often based on composition in movement, in the same way that music is. Far from being completely abstractionist, his designs are in fact related to natural objects, such as animals and trees. This mysticism which guides his feelings is the firm rock on which his personality as a painter is founded." Buchanan, "A Very Personal Art," 201. 43 The other artists in Painters Eleven were Harold Town, Jack Bush, Oscar Cahen, Hortense Gordon, Tom Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, Jock Macdonald, Ray Mead, Kasuo Nakamura, and Walter Yarwood. 412

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44 For an account of the development of Painters Eleven, see Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 238-63. See also Leclerc, The Crisis of Abstraction in Canada, 57-63. Leclerc is especially helpful in tracing the development of abstraction in Quebec. 45 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1955-56,20. 46 Gillespie, Shirley, "Role of National Gallery outlined by Alan Jarvis," Ottawa Journal, 22 September 1955. 47 For Greenberg on "the best art of our day," see "Abstract and Representational," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume Three, 189. For "new Vision'" see "The European View of American Art," in ibid., 62. A sense of the pervasiveness of Greenberg's influence during the 19505 is conveyed by the fact that Denise Leclerc, in titling her own catalogue for a 1993 National Gallery exhibition on the Canadian art of the period, openly acknowledged reliance on the title of Greenberg's 1964 essay "The Crisis of Abstract Art." Leclerc's title for the exhibition was The Crisis of Abstraction in Canada: The 19505. 48 For the "half-baked and revivalist" reference, see Newman, "Response to Clement Greenberg," in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 163. For Greenberg's string of "pseudos," see Greenberg, "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume Four, 144. 49 Greenberg's seminal essay on "purity in art," and its relationship to the rise of abstraction, is "Towards a Newer Laocoon," published in 1940. See Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume One, 36ff. 50 For Kant on the independence of the "judgment of taste," see Kant, Critique of Judgment, 4iff. For the non-conceptual "subjective universal validity" of this judgment, see ibid., 44. For its relation-

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ship to "pleasure without interest," see ibid., 64. Greenberg, "How Good Is Kafka? A Critical Exchange with ER. Leavis," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume Three, 216. In November 1955, Greenberg wrote that Kant had "establish [ed] in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment... the most satisfactory basis for aesthetics we yet have." See "Review of Piero della Francesca and The Arch of Constantine, both by Bernard Berenson," in ibid., 249. Lest there be any confusion, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is the first part of the Critique of Judgment. Greenberg, "Abstract and Representational," 190. Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume One, 11. Among the fascinating paradoxes of Greenberg's career was his continued affinity with a Marxist social analysis, even as he recognized this dependency of "the avantgarde" on "the rich and the cultivated," and even as this same group came to provide - apart from artists themselves - the major audience for his own writings. "Show a little tolerance, Jarvis urges Canadians" (unattributed), Montreal Gazette, 27 October 1955. See also "Jarvis delighted with Calgary art" (unattributed), Calgary Albertan, 22 November

195555 Thomas B. Hess's letter is reproduced in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume Four, 116. 56 Greenberg, "Polemic against Modern Art: Review of The Demon of Progress in the Arts by Wyndham Lewis," The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume Three, 254. 57 "Best art always ahead of public taste but furious criticism a 'healthy sign"' (unattributed article), Montreal Gazette, 27 October 1955.

58 "Art pendulum seen swinging away from non-objective work" (unattributed article), London Free Press, 10 November 195559 "Need more hissing at art, says National Gallery head" (unattributed article), Winnipeg Free Press, 2 December 1955. 60 "One view on art: interest in it is a 'duty'" (unattributed article), Winnipeg Free Press, i December 1955. 61 "Director of art gallery would train staff here" (unattributed article), Calgary Albertan, 22 November 1955. 62 "Alan Jarvis addresses women's forum, (unattributed article), Ottawa Journal, 7 December 1955. 63 The decision was taken at the meeting of 23-24 May 1956. Box 9.216 (Board of Trustees Minutes of Meetings, 23 May 1956 - 6 September 1958), National Gallery of Canada Archives, 753. Present at the meeting were: Charles B. Fell (chairman), Mrs. H.A. Dyde, Jean Chauvin, R. Flemington, Lawren Harris, John A. MacAulay, Jean Raymond, Alan Jarvis (director), George Hulme (secretary of the board), Donald Buchanan (associate director, by invitation), and R.H. Hubbard (chief curator, by invitation). Recorded as absent was Cleveland Morgan. 64 Conversation with Brydon Smith, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Canada, 15 November 1996, 65 "Urges public be acquainted with national art gallery" (unattributed article), Port Arthur News Chronicle, 8 December 1955. 66 Jarvis, The Things We See: Inside and Out, 40. One of the ironies of this photograph's appearance in the book is that the credits show Jarvis himself was responsible for it. What is implied, therefore, is that his view of technology as a neutral tool in the hands of "man" was inhibiting his seeing, in the relationship between the camera itself and the dressmaker's model, a very different set of N O T E S TO P A C E S 147-50

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parameters in the making of art. This seemed to be the case despite his advocacy early in the book of the importance of photography. Quoted in Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 256. Robert McKeown (interviewer), "Is Art Necessary?" Weekend Magazine, vol. 6, no. 20,19 May 1956. Quotations from: Margaret Aitken, "Between you and me," Toronto Telegram, 24 May 1956; "Have a modicum of good manners and courtesy" (unattributed editorial), Coburg Sentinel-Star, 31 May 1956; Gordon Duffy, "National Gallery director criticized by Halifax mayor," Halifax MailStar, 25 May 1956; "Curious appraisal" (unattributed editorial), Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 28 May 1956; and "City museum called pompous" (unattributed article), Regina Leader-Post, 29 May 1956. Quoted in "Persona Grata: Is Art Really Necessary?' Saturday Night, 21 January 1956,12. Quoted in "National Gallery of Canada described to Canadian club" (unattributed article), Kingston Whig Standard, 15 November 1955. Jarvis, Alan, The Things We See, Part One (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1957) (16 millimetre film, 30 minutes). Jarvis, Alan, The Things We See (film), Part Thirteen. Jarvis, Alan, The Things We See (film), Part One. After an abbreviated version of this and the following chapter appeared in Canadian Art in the spring of 1998, some question arose as to how the films were actually rediscovered. According to the National Gallery's archivist at the time, Cyndie Campbell, the films in their canisters were found by chance

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during cleaning. The independent critic Clive Robertson has claimed, however, that it was he who, while a research fellow at the Gallery, identified the films as missing episodes of The Things We See, and prepared a finding aid in regard to them. I had not been made aware of the finding aid, or of Clive Robertson's role, before the article's publication. But if this is taken into consideration, the two stories are not incompatible. CHAPTER NINE

1 Quoted in Ottawa Citizen, 24 March 1956. 2 Jarvis, "Art Means Business," 146. Jarvis explained at the beginning of this talk that he had changed the title of his speech from "Is Art Necessary" because he had been speaking at so many "women's clubs," whose members - he claimed - were uncomfortable with the Thurber reference. 3 House of Commons (Debates), 22 March 1956. 4 "Rapid growth of arts in Canada stressed by speaker" (unattributed article), Moncton Transcript, 26 April 19575 Letter from Dr Hans Schaeffer to Alan Jarvis, 11 January 1957, National Gallery of Canada Archives, box 3-i2,vol. i. 6 The article that seemed to do the most to establish the painting's limited credibility was Charles de Tolnay, "An Unknown Early Panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder," Burlington Magazine, vol. 97, no. 629 (August 1955), 239-40. De Tolnay wrote that "With the discovery of this picture, the most important of the master's early period, we have the earliest signed and dated oil panel by Bruegel." The painting's provenance, however, was extremely vague: "The panel here published for the first time, with kind permission of the owner who

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wishes to remain anonymous, is an old family possession, mentioned in the inventories of the castle in which it is preserved in 1804 with the full name of the artist: 'A large landscape of the peasant Bruegel.'" Given that the painting was dated 1553, the gap was considerable. All of this being said, its surface ordering of represented landscape is extremely eloquent and certainly suggests Bruegel's style of rendering panoramic views. Shortly after de Tolnay's article, F. Grossmann - also in the Burlington Magazine - allowed the genuineness of the landscape as attributed to Bruegel. But, he continued, "the biblical figures ... are certainly not by Bruegel. They differ in technique from the rest of the picture and show an impasto quite alien to Bruegel at that period." F. Grossmann, "New Light on Bruegel," Burlington Magazine, vol. 101, nos. 678-9 (September-October 1959), 344. September 1959 was the very month of Jarvis's resignation. As reported in E.D. Fulton, "Memorandum to the Cabinet, Re: Amendment to Cabinet Document No. 244/53 - Special Grant to the National Gallery of Canada for the purchase of pictures from the Liechtenstein Collection," box 3-12, vol. i, National Gallery of Canada Archives. This was the document in which Fulton, the new Conservative minister of citizenship and immigration, transmitted to cabinet the request of the National Gallery's Board of Trustees that funds from the Liechtenstein "allotment" be made available for the purchase of the Bruegel and Monaco paintings, even though the Bruegel painting was not even part of the Liechtenstein collection. Ibid. Letters from Alan Jarvis to Geoffrey Agnew, and from Jarvis to Hans

Schaeffer, both dated 19 Feburary 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, National Gallery of Canada Archives (hereafter NGCA) 11 As referred to in a letter from Alan Jarvis to Fulton, 18 April 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA.

12 Ibid. 13 Letter from Hans Schaeffer to Jarvis, i May 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. 14 Memorandum from the Department of Justice, Office of the Deputy Minister of Justice and the Deputy Attorney General of Canada, 4 July 1958, to Alan Jarvis from S. Samuels, for the deputy attorney general, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. 15 See King, The National Gallery of Canada at Arms Length from the Government of Canada: A Precarious Balancing Act, 46ff. 16 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1957-58,62. 17 Letter from Alan Jarvis to E.D. Fulton, 12 May 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. J.R. Veit was the business administrator for the National Gallery. 18 Memorandum from the Department of Justice. See n.i4. 19 Letter from Alan Jarvis to E.D. Fulton, 12 May 1958. 20 Letter from Hans Schaeffer to Alan Jarvis, 25 June 1958. "Trusting the validity of a Government contract and the agreed date of payment on May 12th [the Baron] has undergone considerable obligations himself which he has to fulfill." box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. 21 "Excerpt from a letter from Alan Jarvis, dated 8 June 1958," box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. This somewhat mysterious document has no addressee but reads: "First of all, about the problem pictures: the only possible solution to the muddle is to buy for re-sale and I understand that Mr. Fulton sees this as a sensible way out." Schaeffer would also make the same suggestion in his letter of 25 June, quoted above, but would accompany it

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with a veiled threat. "If the Government intends to resell the [Bruegel] picture I would be only too happy to do this, although in my opinion this would be a terrible loss for the National Gallery of Canada, loosing [sic] a most desirable and rare painting as well as its reputation in the art world, should the strange background of this deal become known." See King, The National Gallery of Canada at Arms Length from the Government of Canada: A Precarious Balancing Act, 63ff. Letter from Alan Jarvis to Baron Gerhard von Polnitz, 12 May 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. Letter to Alan Jarvis from W.R. Jackett, deputy attorney general of Canada, 9 July 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. Quoted in Davey, Clark, "Art director resigns, ends feud with MPs," Globe and Mail, 10 September 1959. Letter from Hans Schaeffer to Alan Jarvis, 25 June 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. Letter to the Honourable Ellen Fairclough, from Clark, Macdonald, Connolly, Affleck, Brocklesby & Gorman, Barristers and Solicitors, 20 August 1958, box 3-12, vol. i, NGCA. Letter from Ellen Fairclough to C.P. Fell, 2 September 1958, box 3-12, vol. i,

34

35

36

37

38

NGCA.

29 Alan Jarvis, "Art and the world we live in," Time Magazine (Canadian edition), 13 October 1958,107. 30 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1960-61,70. 31 See King, The National Gallery at Arm's Length from the Government of Canada, 65. 32 Quoted in "Resignation of Jarvis from Gallery accepted" (unattributed), Montreal Star, 10 September 1959. 33 As described in Chisolm, The Things We See. See also King, The National Gallery

416

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39 40

at Arm's Length from the Government of Canada, 66 "Landscape with Christ Appearing to the Apostles" failed to sell at an auction held by Sotheby Parke Bernet on 6 July 1983. This was pointed out in a memorandum to Joseph Martin, then director of the National Gallery, by Jean Sutherland Boggs, then chair of the Canada Museums Construction Corporation, dated 14 July 1983. National Gallery Clipping File, Canada Museums Construction Corporation. Minutes of the 92nd Meeting of the Board of Trustees, 17-19 February 1960, box 9-218 (Board of Trustees, Minutes of Meetings), National Gallery of Canada Archives. See Mainprize, The National Gallery of Canada: A Hundred Years of Exhibitions, List and Index, 37-9. Robert Fulford, "New crisis threatens National Gallery," Toronto Star, 30 July 1960. Charles F. Comfort, "Foreword," National Gallery of Canada Bulletin, vol. i, no. i (1963), 1. For a detailed description of the Bulletin's development over the next three decades, see Beglo,"The National Gallery of Canada Bulletin and Annual Bulletin: A Brief History." This source is especially helpful in mapping the confusing relationship that developed after 1968 among the National Gallery's Annual Report, Annual Review, and Bulletin, and the Annual Report of the National Museums of Canada. It is also noteworthy that, during the Comfort period, the collection of prints and drawings continued to grow, overseen as it was with great conscientiousness by Kathleen Fenwick, who had been hired by Eric Brown. National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1964-65,4. National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1965-66,4.

41 Comfort, The Controversial Century, 1850-1950,4. 42 William J. Gill, "Colossal Collection of Fakes: Strange Story of Walter Chrysler Jr. Art Scandal," Life Magazine, 2 November 1962,4. 43 John Canaday, "Seconds in Ottawa," New York Times, 14 October 1962. 44 John Canaday, "Provincetown report," New York Times, 17 June 1962. 45 Robert Alden, "Paris art experts challenge some of Chrysler pictures," New York Times, 19 October 1962. 46 See Robert Green, "Gallery director alerted to paintings, House told," Globe and Mail, i November 1962. 47 The catalogue for the exhibition was also conveniently unpaginated, making precise references difficult. But even forty years later, it makes for amusing reading. 48 "Scent of Scandal" (unattributed article), Time Magazme(Canadian edition), 26 October 1962. 49 Sue Solet, "Art sale investigated," Ottawa Citizen, 20 October, 1962. 50 Jack MacBeth, "Top Gallery official quits exhibition job," Ottawa Citizen, 19 October, 1962. 51 Florence Berkman, "Questioned art exhibit draws plea for Canadian probe," Hartford Times, 23 October 1962. 52 The first part of the quotation appeared in Jack MacBeth, "Phoney art charges shock Gallery head," Ottawa Citizen, 17 October 1962. The second part appeared in Robert Green, "Gallery director alerted to paintings, House told," Globe and Mail, i November 1962. According to this article: "Dr. Comfort has denied he was warned some of the 187 paintings in the collection were reputed to be either fakes or of dubious origin. 'Most emphatically not,' he said, shortly after the opening of the exhibition. 'Nothing of this nature has ever been brought to my attention.'"

53 See Votes and Proceedings of the House of Commons of Canada, vol. 107, nos. 17 and 22,22 October 1962 and 29 October 1962, for a record of LaMarsh's questions. The government's replies were given in vol. 107, no. 24,31 October 1962. Rumours that Evan Turner had been involved began to appear in the New York press in mid-October. See Tania Long, "Canada is wary of Chrysler art," New York Times, 18 October, 1962. 54 See Robert Green, "Gallery director alerted to paintings, House told," Globe and Mail, i November 1962. 55 Quoted in "Scent of Scandal," Time Magazine. 56 Paul Duval, "The Year of the great hoax," Toronto Telegram, 29 December 1962. 57 Barrie Hale, "National Gallery can't see pop art," Toronto Telegram, 6 March 1965. 58 Gerald Waring, "Budget opens border to Warhol soup tins," Toronto Star, 3 May 1965. Different parts of the letter were quoted in both Waring's and Hale's articles. 59 Ibid. 60 George Grant, Lament for a Nation, 5. 61 Ibid., 12. 62 See the following articles by Clement Greenberg for the contexts in which he used these key terms. For "patient experience": "On Looking at Pictures: Review of Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture: From Giotto to Chagall, by Lionello Venturi," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2,63. For "the judgment of taste": "Review of the Exhibition A Problem for Critics," in ibid., 29. For "the practiced eye,""The Identity of Art," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,120. Notwithstanding these useful citations of Greenberg, I do not want here to over-simplify or caricature his positions. Clement Greenberg was both an eloquent and an immensely perceptive writer. But he was also a very

N O T E S T O P A C E S 176-81

417

complex man, and even - I would suggest - deeply divided in his relationship to art. In 1955, for example, at around the time Alan Jarvis was being welcomed as the director of the National Gallery of Canada, he wrote the following: "Advanced art - which is the same thing as ambitious art today persists insofar as it tests society's capacity for high art. This it does by testing the limits of the inherited forms and genres, and of the medium itself ... There is no such thing as an aberration in art: there is just the good and the bad, the realized and the unrealized." [In "American-Type Painting," The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3,235.] But having written this, Greenberg would prove resistant to, and even dismissive of, precisely those forms of 19605 art that would most ambitiously "test society's capacity for high art." Of Pop Art, for example, he would say in 1968 that "I like psychedelic posters the way I like Pop Art and Novelty Art in general - they're fun. Not bad art, but art on a low level - and fun on a low level too ... Some day Pop Art is going to have a nice period flavour." [In "Interview conducted with Edward Lucie-Smith," The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,281.] During the early 19605, Greenberg also sought refuge in a peculiarly foreshortened notion of "openness," that pertained largely to and effectively stopped with - the "postpainterliness" of colour field abstraction. On the portability of Greenberg s insights in regard to Canada, see also Ord, "Magic Lanterns, Stars and NoPlace." This was a response to the symposium Modernist Utopias: Postformalism and the Purity of Vision held at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal in December 1995. 63 As cited in Chisolm, The Things We See. 64 Quoted in Don Attfield, "Jarvis to head art paper after quitting Gallery post," 418

N O T E S T O P A G E S l8l-8

65

66

67

68

Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 10 September 1959 Plato, Cratylus, 4080, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Hamilton and Cairns, ed., The Collected Dialogues, 444. See also Republic, III, 395C, 640. Aristotle, Poetics, 14533, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1995), 71. I learned this when trying to secure rights to reprint the photograph in my 1998 article on Jarvis in Canadian Art. Karsh's agents in New York, Woodsen, Camp and Associates, who also handled his archives, advised me that they could find no record of it. Perhaps I should mention that, when I came across the photograph itself, misfiled in the photo archives, I was astonished not only by its condition but also by the fact that there seemed to be no other copy or record. This seemed odd, given that the image was widely reproduced during Jarvis's tenure. See Davies, What's Bred in the Bone, 385 and 388. CHAPTER TO

1 Carl Weiselberger," The gallery wants Canadian art... but only the best," Ottawa Citizen, 30 June 1966. 2 Judy LaMarsh in Parliament, as quoted in "The National Gallery's New Director," National Gallery Press Release, May 1966. The quotation about "elevator operators" is from Moncrieff Williamson, "The National Gallery's New Director," Canadian Art, vol. 23, no. 3 (July 1966), 2. 3 Barrie Hale, "The National Gallery's interior decorator," Toronto Telegram, 26 November 1966. 4 "A Leonardo for all Canadians" (unattributed article), Ottawa Citizen, 10 November 1966. 5 Sally Barnes, "A threesome may put Canada on the world art scene," Toronto Telegram, 25 June 1966.

6 "National Gallery's first lady" (unattributed Canadian Press article), Toronto Telegram, 5 May 1966 7 Quoted in Wendy Michener, "Jean Boggs, The Woman They Didn't Want," Chatelaine, June 1968,74 8 Williamson, "The National Gallery's New Director," 2. See also "Jean Boggs is named National Gallery head" (unattributed article), Globe and Mail, 5 May 1966. 9 Boggs, Jean Sutherland, "Picasso: The Early Years," in Boggs, Picasso and Man, Toronto: The Art Gallery of Toronto, 1964,10. 10 Boggs, Listening to Pictures, 39. 11 Boggs, Picasso and Man, 152. 12 Elizabeth Dingman,"No politicians pokes at Dr. Jean Boggs?" Toronto Telegram, 30 June 1966. 13 Ibid. 14 Doris Giller, "Hopes to have permanent home for Gallery someday," Montreal Star, 19 October 1966. 15 "Best art always ahead of public taste but furious criticism a'healthy sign'" (unattributed), Montreal Gazette, 27 October 1955. 16 Barnett Newman, "The Painting of Tamayo and Gottlieb," in Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, 73. 17 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1960-61,10. 18 Giller, "Hopes to have permanent home for Gallery someday." 19 Boggs, Listening to Pictures, 44. 20 Irwin, Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, 68. 21 Ibid., 68. 22 Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 74. 23 Irwin, Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, 70. 24 Ibid., 71-6. Grant's text as published contains the word "titivation." This possibly was a typographic error, since "titillation" would seem to make more sense in the context.

25 Irwin, Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, 75. In most of his writings, Grant preferred to use the term "openness" with the preposition "to," and with an object to this preposition in the form of such terms as "the whole," "eternal order," and the transformative workings of God, such as he believed he had encountered in England. But the mid1960s were for Grant a period of - to use S0ren Kierkegaard's term - "indirect communication" on religious matters in public. In part this was on account of fallout from academic philosophers in regard to the "Philosophy" essay he had prepared for the Massey commission of 1951. But he was also, in his personal search for an alternative to "technological nihilism," making a closer reading of Heidegger, who presented the "mystery of Being" as unresolved, neutral, and self-disclosing through historical processes, which in turn could be clarified in works of art. These factors seem to have conspired - in this talk anyway toward his providing the term "openness" as unhinged from both linguistic and ontological closures, so as to make the term itself attractively open in meaning. The evidence of Grant's other writings - both earlier and later - suggests that such distancing was ambiguous. I am indebted to Sheila Grant for giving me a clearer sense of the sequence of Grant's reading of Heidegger. (Telephone interview, 8 January 1998.) 26 See Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 72. Also 39 and 62. 27 Irwin, Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, 68 and 70. 28 Greenberg foreshortened even the "metaphysical abstract expressionists" Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko into this notion of "openness." "By renouncing tactility and detail in drawing," he wrote in 1962, "Newman and Rothko N O T E S TO P A C E S 188-92

419

29 30

31 32 33 34

35 36

achieve what I find a more positive openness and colour ... Yet the ultimate effect sought is one of more than chromatic intensity; it is rather one of an almost literal openness that embraces and absorbs colour in the act of being created by it. Openness, and not only in painting, is the quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time." "After Abstract Expressionism," in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,130. For Greenberg's championing of "post painterly abstraction," see the catalogue essay of the same title, in ibid., 192-5. For Greenberg's alleged stature as "brigadier general" "among New York abstract artists," see the exchange between Greenberg and Thomas B. Hess, who coined the term, in ibid., 116. Given Greenberg's affinity for Kant, and Kant's claim that "the verdict of the aesthetic judgment" is not for "the statesman" but for "the general," the term as applied by Hess seemed doubly apt. Rose, "The Value of Didactic Art," 33 and 35See, for example, Pepe Karmel, "The Body is in the World: A Prehistory of the Felt Works," in Sokolowski, Robert Morris: The Felt Works, i and 3. Morris, "Notes on Sculpture," 44. Rose, "The Value of Didactic Art," 33. Burnham, "Systems Esthetics," 3iff. Among the most incisive critics of the international "art system" in the 19605 was the French artist Daniel Buren. Consideration of Buren's views is beyond the scope of this text, but for further analysis see Ord, The Scrubbing o/Les Deux Plateaux: Thoughts on Buren. By way of example, see also Buren, Les Ecrits, vol. i, 246. Morris, "Notes on Sculpture Part 4: Beyond Objects," 51. The editorial statement appeared in Artforum, vol. i, no. i (June 1962), 3. The quotation from Greenberg is in 42O

N O T E S T O P A G E S 193~7

37

38

39

40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47

48 49

50

"Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,292. Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. i, 8. Greenberg, "Recentness of Sculpture," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 252. For Greenberg on "the practiced eye," and on "the good and the bad" in art, see "The Identity of Art," in ibid., 120 and 117. Leider, "American Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art," 9. Leider, "The Cool School," 47. Burnham, "Systems Esthetics," 34. Leider, "American Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art," 9. Jean Sutherland Boggs, "Editorial - No. 100," Canadian Art, vol. 23, no. i (January 1966), 11. Boggs, Listening to Pictures, 21. Newman, "On Modern Art: Inquiry and Confirmation," in Burnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, 69 Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, 31 and 33 (Propositions 1.1; 2; 1.13; 2.0121; 2.013). Ibid., 183,185,187 (6.41,6.4312,6.52, 6.521). Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 48 (§115). The influence of contemporary philosophy - or of idiosyncratic readings of contemporary philosophy - on art in the 19605 was both rich and complex and these citations barely scratch the surface. A case could also be made, for example, on the influence of structural linguistics in some forms of conceptualism. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and Nonsequiturs [sic]," Artforum, vol. 5, no. 10, (June 1967), 29. Different phrasings of "the meaning is the use" appear throughout the Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. One example: "For a large

51 52 53 54

55

56

57

class of cases - though not for all - in which we apply the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Investigations, 20 (§43). Boggs, Listening to Pictures, 52. Conversation with Brydon Smith at the National Gallery, 4 February 1997. Quoted in Vancouver Province, 7 April 1967. Brydon Smith as quoted in "James Rosenquist Exhibition January 24," National Gallery of Canada Press Release, 5 January 1968, National Gallery of Canada Exhibition Files on James Rosenquist. As will be seen in the following chapter, this special parliamentary appropriation could also be read as compensating the Gallery for its loss of independence under the National Museums Act, which took effect in April 1968. The Gallery's official absorption by the NMC indeed gave a piquant irony to the very title of the painting that was so prominently purchased: The Tribute Money. But a still further layer of irony was added to the prominence of the painting's display by the case made in 1982 by a group of Dutch experts - even as the NMC itself was winding down - that the attribution to Rembrandt should be withdrawn. "A Leonardo for all Canadians" (unattributed article), Ottawa Citizen, 12 November 1966 The Dutch team was led by Dr. Joshua Bruyin. Certainly the exaggerated facial expressions of the figures in the painting do not suggest Rembrandt's sensitivity to nuance. They do, however, cross-reference nicely with some of the bureaucratic practices to which the National Gallery was subjected during the next decade. For a description of the Dutch study, see Christopher Hume, "Was Canada's 'Rembrandt' painted by a nobody?" Toronto Star, 30 October 1982. A response by the National Gallery can

58

59 60

61 62 63

64

65 66 67 68

69

70 71

72

be found in Laskin and Pantazzi, Catalogue of the National Gallery of Canada: European and American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, vol. i, 242. National Gallery of Canada, Annual Reports, 1928-29,6; 1924-25,20; and 1922-23,24. Boggs, "The Museum's Role in the Community," 3. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, 222. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 223. Boggs, "Two and a Half Years at the National Gallery," 9; and "Canada's National Gallery," 13. Jean Sutherland Boggs, "Talking Paper on Future National Gallery Building," typed memorandum dated 14 March 1971, circulated 29 March 1971,2 and 5. Quoted in "Very brave new world," Financial Post, 19 October 1968. Morris, "Anti Form," 35. Burnham, "Systems Esthetics," 32. Michelson, "Robert Morris - An Aesthetics of Transgression," in Robert Morris, Baltimore: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969,7ff. Gail Dexter, "Brydon Smith and his little collection of artistic shockers," Toronto Star, 7 December 1968. Boggs, "Whither the National Gallery," 8. See James Nelson, "Retiring National Gallery director honored," Summerside Journal-Pioneer, 25 June 1976. Written in regard to Jean Sutherland Boggs's retirement dinner in June 1976, this article includes the statement: "Prime Minister Trudeau, who attended the dinner with his wife, said that when he was 25 and a student at Harvard - he earned an MA in political economy there in 1945 - he first met Miss Boggs." "Anti-U.S. mural has Hill in tizzy" (unattributed), Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1968. N O T E S T O P A C E S 197-208

421

73 Iain and Ingrid Baxter, LOOK at the N.E. THING CO, 3. In this "catalogue" the Baxters satirized Canada's recently introduced policy of bilingualism in all government documents, by running French and English text not on alternate pages or half-pages but on alternate lines. The text was as a result almost impossible to read with any continuity. 74 Quoted in Sheila McCook, "Husband, wife team exhibit anti-aYt," Ottawa Citizen, 6 June 1969. In some of the reports of the period, Ingrid Baxter was referred to as "Elaine." The name "N.E. Thing Co." was also frequently rendered as "N.E. THING co." 75 Charlotte Townsend, "N.E. Thing goes across Canada," Vancouver Sun, 5 September 1969. 76 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 237. 77 Dan Flavin, "Some Remarks," Artforum, vol. 5, no. 4 (December 1966), 27. 78 Jack Burnham, "A Dan Flavin Retrospective in Ottawa," Artforum, vol. 8, no. 4 (December 1969), 49 and 53. 79 Jean Sutherland Boggs, Introduction to fluorescent light etc. from Dan Flavin, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1969), unpaginated. 80 Boggs, "Convocation Address, McMaster University," 3. 81 Ibid., 6-9. Sufficiently discreet was Jean Boggs about this speech that when I cited sections from it in a talk at the National Gallery in 1997, Brydon Smith - who was then nearing retirement as the Gallery's curator of modern art not only insisted that he had never heard anything about it, he also asked me to photocopy the quoted sections. It seemed he could not quite believe that "Miss Boggs" had ever said such things. 82 Boggs, "Whither the National Gallery," 10. This speech, as given in January 1969, also included Boggs's list of desired works, whose "acquisition," she wrote, 422

N O T E S T O P A C E S 21O-25

83

84 85

86 87

"should carry us into a sufficiently distant future." The list consisted entirely of framed or frameable paintings. See also Aileen Campbell, "Modern art defended by gallery director," Vancouver Province, 23 October, 1968. Boggs, "Art and Meaning at the National Gallery of Canada," 24. Newman, "Embattled Lamb: Review of Embattled Critic by John Canaday," in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 124 and 127. According to O'Neill, Newman's review first appeared in ARTnews, no. 61 (September 1962). Boggs, "Two and a Half Years at the National Gallery," 8. Boggs, "The National Gallery and Education," 11. CHAPTER ELEVEN

1 National Gallery of Canada, Man and His World: International Fine Arts Exhibition, v. 2 Ibid., xvi. 3 Robin Neesham, "Canadian Art Comes of Age?" Executive, July 1967,26. See also Ostiguy, Three Hundred Years of Canadian Art, 164 ff. 4 Robert Ayre, "Three hundred years of art," Montreal Star, 20 May 1967. 5 Ibid. 6 Kay Kritzwiser, "Friends honor Dorothy Cameron with mixture of laughs and tears," Globe and Mail, 12 November 1965. 7 Dorothy Cameron, sculpture '67,6. The title of sculpture '67 was also variously presented as Sculpture 67 and sculpture 67. 8 Tony Emery, "Gallery sponsors exciting sculpture," Victoria Times, 10 June 1967. 9 Barrie Hale, "Sculpture 67: Qualified Nathan Phillips' Square success," Telegram, 3 June 1967. 10 Paraphrased in Lenore Crawford, "Two trends dominate Sculpture '67," London Free Press, 24 January 1968.

11 Ibid. 12 Robert Fulford, "Our Centennial's sculptural glory," Toronto Star, 2 June 1967. 13 Helen Worthington, "Will Hogtown kill sculpture?" Toronto Star, 13 June 1967. 14 "Damage by vandals to close City Hall Square art show" (unattributed article), Toronto Daily Star, 5 July 1967. 15 Letter from Dorothy Cameron to Jean Sutherland Boggs, c.c. to Judy LaMarsh, secretary of state, and Ernest Steele, office of the secretary of state, i July 1967, National Gallery of Canada Archives, box 13-4-310, vol. 7: Exhibitions in Canada, sculpture 67, correspondence July 1967-September 1967. 16 Grace Glueck, "Switching it off downtown," New York Times, 23 July 1967. 17 "Don't let them take it away" (unattributed editorial), Toronto Star, 6 July 1967; see also Kay Kritzwiser, "Scupture '67 a success despite vandalism," Globe and Mail, 17 July 1967. 18 Fulford, "Sculpture'67." 19 Wendy Michener, "Jean Boggs, The Woman They Didn't Want," 76. 20 Vladislaw Speichert, "'Sculpture 67'... un succes manque," Sept-Jours, (Montreal), 15 July 1967. 21 Ralph Thomas, "1000 at wild bash to salute sculpture," Toronto Daily Star, 2 June 1967. The photographs accompanying this article were outrageously funny, with both "the redhead" and one of the tinsel-gazing males looking as though they had been into the same batch of LSD. 22 Gutheim, The National Museum of Canada: Program Planning and Location, 73. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 7. 25 Ibid., 10. 26 Ibid., 9. 27 Ibid., 15. 28 Ibid., 84 and 28.

29 Sheppard, Report on Cultural Policy and Activities of the Government of Canada, 227. 30 Ibid., 230. The provenance of the Cranach Venus appears in Laskin and Pantazzi, Catalogue of the National Gallery of Canada: European and American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, vol. i, 87. 31 See Jean Boggs, "Gallery director answers 'ruthless, moody' comment," Ottawa Citizen, 8 June 1976. See also Chapter 10, n.2. 32 Sheppard, Report on Cultural Policy and Activities of the Government of Canada, 239. 33 An Act to Establish a Corporation for the Administration of the National Museums of Canada (Short title: National Museums Act), Section 23(1), Acts of the Government of Canada, 1967, (Ottawa: Queen's Printer 1967), 169. 34 See Grey and Martin, "Bernard Ostry," Canadian Artists'Representation News, vol. 2, no. i, (Autumn 1976). 35 Joan Lowndes, "The time has come for a Canadian to head the National Gallery," Vancouver Sun, 8 May 1976. The comment came from the first chairman of the Gallery's visiting committee, J.R. Longstaffe. Under the National Museums Act, the visiting committee replaced the Gallery's independent Board of Trustees. 36 Senate of Canada, Proceedings of the Standing Committee on Finance, 17 May 1967 (Ottawa: Queen's Printer 1967), 14. 37 National Museums Act, Section 23(2). 38 The letter from Jean Raymond, dated December 1967, was quoted in Martin, "The Future of the National Gallery of Canada," 9. 39 Gutheim, The National Museum of Canada: Program Planning and Location, 19. 40 National Museums Act, Section 13 (b) 41 Ibid., Section 5(1).

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42 Gutheim, The National Museum of Canada: Program Planning and Location, 8. 43 See Irwin, Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, 60. 44 Gutheim, The National Museum of Canada: Program Planning and Location, 14. 45 Massey, On Being Canadian, 25. 46 This was how Gutheim described himself on page 2 of his report. 47 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 12 and 22. 48 Quoted in Grey and Martin, "Bernard Ostry," 11. 49 The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Report, 1966-67,54; and National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, i April 1969 to 31 March 1970 (Ottawa: photocopied and unattributed typescript 1970), 30 (Exhibit II). National Gallery of Canada Archives, Directors' Files, box 22. Even by fiscal year 1972-73, the Annual Report of the NMC under Charles Mackenzie was still being issued as a typescript. With the arrival of Bernard Ostry in 1973, the NMC adopted a more standard printed and perfectbound format. But the government's stated goal that the NMC would enhance "administrative efficiency" is belied somewhat by the fact that its records, as deposited in the National Archives, were in such disarray that even by the late 19905, only two among thousands of boxes had been sorted and organized for research purposes. 50 National Gallery of Canada, Fifth Annual Review, 1972-73,135. 51 Boggs, "Whither the National Gallery," 10,6. 52 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, i April 1969 to 31 March 1970 (photocopied typescript), 4. 53 Ibid., 8 and 2. 54 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1970-71 (photocopied typescript), 24. 55 Ibid., 3. 424

N O T E S TO P A C E S 235-43

56 Ibid., 29. 57 Senate of Canada, Proceedings of the Standing Committee on Finance, 17 May 1967 (Ottawa: Queen's Printer 1967), 14. 58 National Gallery of Canada, Third Annual Review, 1970-71,9. 59 Boggs, "The Object Preserved?" 2. 60 Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 69. 61 Joyce Wieland, True Patriot Love, interview with Joyce Wieland by Pierre Theberge, with Michael Snow as interpreter, 28 March 1971, National Gallery Archives, Exhibition Files, 1972. 62 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Review, 1971-72,11. Even this bit of slippage was eventually noticed by the bureaucrats of the NMC, and La Galerie nationale du Canada became, in June 1984, Le Musee des beaux-arts du Canada. 63 For example, for less than a month in early 1952, and for just over a week in early 1955, the National Gallery under H.O. McCurry had presented displays of "Eskimo Art" and "Eskimo Sculpture." These had been organized through the Canadian Handicrafts Guild from Montreal, and the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources respectively. But throughout this period, the Gallery had preferred exhibitions of "Swiss Postage Stamps" (1947), "Australian Textiles" (1948), and "Contemporary [East] Indian Art and Crafts in the United States" (1953) over any consideration of the aboriginal heritage of Canada itself. Similarly, during the Comfort period, there had been a circulating exhibition of "Eskimo Graphic Art" from Cape Dorset, Baffin Island, in 1962. 64 See Mainprize, The National Gallery of Canada: A Hundred Years of Exhibitions, 56 (exhibition # 1365). 65 Evrard et al. Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art from Canada, unpaginated. This excerpt and those that follow are

66 67 68 69

from the "Introduction" by Marcel Evrard. Why so large a catalogue, with a Preface, an Introduction, essays on regional cultures, and descriptions of 186 objects, went unpaginated is not clear. Ibid. Christian Zervos, "Preface," in ibid. Quoted in Jocelyn Dingman, "Women," Chatelaine, May 1972,10. National Gallery of Canada, Annual Review, 1972-73,17.

8

9

10

11

CHAPTER TWELVE

1 National Museums of Canada, The National Museums Policy: A Program for Canadian Museums, 1-8. 2 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1972-73 (photocopied typescript), 2. 3 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1976-77,22. 4 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1973-74,45 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1972-73 (photocopied typescript), 6. 6 These figures were compiled from statistics in the annual reports of the National Museums of Canada, 1968-69 to 1978-79. 7 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1972-73 (photocopied typescript), 109. The full statement by the acting auditor general reads: "My examination of the records of the Corporation in previous years disclosed inadequacies and unsatisfactory conditions in the accounting procedures and the system of internal control which were regularly drawn to the attention of management but which I was satisfied did not materially affect the correctness of the accounts. However, the condition of the records and internal control has deteriorated to such an extent that I am unable to express an opinion on the validity of either the accounts or financial state-

12 13 14

15

16 17

18

ments of the Corporation for the year ended March 31,1973." Kathleen Walker, "For Ostry, culturepushing is all uphill," Ottawa Citizen, 2 April 1977,29. Robert Fulford, "A Personal Struggle in the Corridors of Power," Saturday Night, July/August 1976,8. Kildare Dobbs, "The Life of a Lady Mandarin," Canadian Magazine, 16 August 1975,3. Gretchen Pierce, "Ostry's mandate: preserving the Canadian imagination through culture, a hedge against mass communication," Halifax Mail Star, 20 December 1976,25. Fulford, "A Personal Struggle in the Corridors of Power." Pierce, "Ostry's mandate." "Behind the Scenes at the National Museums: An exclusive interview with Bernard Ostry," arts bulletin, vol. 3, nos. 7-9 (September-October 1977), 8. Ibid., 9. The records of subsequent NMC board meetings were by this gesture rendered difficult to research, because the NMC files as handed over to the National Archives after the NMC s dissolution in 1991 were in such disarray as to be inaccessible. This meant that I had to rely - when these were available in the National Gallery Archives - on Jean Boggs's personal copies of the minutes. But because she was not allowed to attend NMC board meetings in their entirety, there was no available record of the parts of these from which she had "been excused." Yves Dagenais, former deputy director at the National Gallery, was especially helpful in making available Jean Boggs's copy of the minutes of the March 1974 board meeting. Ibid., 9. Quoted in "Canadian art treasure lauded" (unattributed article), St Catherines Standard, 26 October 1955. Quoted in a "National Museums of Canada Accommodation Position N O T E S TO P A G E S 243-53

425

19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Paper," included in the National Museums of Canada, Minutes of the 25th Board Meeting, 21 March 1974,3, National Gallery of Canada Archives. The 24* board meeting from which Jean Sutherland Boggs and the other "national museum" directors were initially "excused" took place on 13 and 14 February. These minutes were kindly provided to me in 1997, without my being obliged to make an Access to Information request, through the auspices of Yves Dagenais, deputy director of the National Gallery. National Museums of Canada, Minutes of the 26th Board Meeting, 17 June 1974, 9, National Gallery of Canada Archives. Kathleen Walker, "For Ostry, culturepushing is all uphill," Ottawa Citizen, 2 April 1977 Conversation with Michael Pantazzi, head of education at the National Gallery under Jean Sutherland Boggs, 21 March 1998. National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1973-74, i. Ibid., 17; my emphasis. Ibid., 18. "Behind the Scenes at the National Museums," 9 Boggs, "The Object Preserved?" 9-10. National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1976-77,8. National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1977-78, i and 18 National Gallery of Canada, Annual Review, 1972-73,52-4. For Boggs's election as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, see "Boggs elected head of art museum directors' association" (unattributed), Halifax Mail Star, 11 July 1973. National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1974-75,3See James Purdie, "A yellow brick road, Monopoly and the Boggs affair," Globe and Mail, 3 July 1976.

426

N O T E S TO P A G E S 253-?

32 Jean Sutherland Boggs, "View from the top," (letter to the editor) Ottawa Journal, 20 December 1973. 33 Jean Sutherland Boggs, "Talking Paper on Future National Gallery Building," memorandum dated 14 March 1971, circulated 29 March 1971,3 and 4, National Gallery of Canada Archives. 34 Patrick Best, "$35-million National Gallery plan," Ottawa Citizen, 29 December 1973, for an outline of the report by Abraham Rogatnick, and a description of Faulkner's response. See also Orland French, "Moving again: National Gallery to locate on Wellington St.," Ottawa Citizen, 5 December 1974. 35 "Government considering Hull site for $35 million National Gallery building" (unattributed Canadian Press article), Globe and Mail, 3 January 1974. 36 Canadian Press, "National Gallery move considered," Winnipeg Free Press, 7 January 1974. 37 "Government considering Hull site for $35 million National Gallery building." 38 Maud Brown, "6o-year wait" (letter to the editor) Ottawa Citizen, 25 January 197439 Quoted in John Lymburner,"Two sites proposed for $35 million National Gallery," Daily Commercial News and Construction Record, 4 January 1974. 40 National Museums of Canada, Minutes of the 25* Board Meeting, 21 March 1974,4, National Gallery of Canada Archives. 41 Quoted in Grey and Martin, "Bernard Ostry." 42 "National Gallery, Museums to be Relocated," Secretary of State News Release, 5 December, 1974, National Gallery Archives, Clippings Files. 43 Virginia Nixon, "Not what they want but what they need," Montreal Gazette, 9 December, 1974 44 Rumours about a postponement began to circulate in the autumn of 1975. See

45

46

47

48 49

50

51

52

53

54

Peter Thomson, "Two-ways at once," Montreal Star, 18 November 1975. The formal announcement by the Public Works Department came in January 1975. See "Gallery's birthday present must wait" (Canadian Press) Montreal Gazette, 16 January 1976. Richard Gwyn,"The National Gallery loses a fine director," Toronto Star, i May 1976. Kathleen Walker, "After Boggs, a Gallery 'cast of thousands,'" Ottawa Citizen, 10 July 1976. For example, in a short study of the National Gallery policies done for Canadian Artists' Representation in 1979, Jennifer Dickson, an Ottawa artist, wrote retrospectively that "under Jean Boggs's directorship, the public were subject to extremely heavy surveillance by the security guards, and very often unpleasant personal harassment." Dickson, "A Study of the National Gallery of Canada," 5. Editorial, Globe and Mail, 22 May 1976. "10 gallery plans arrive in Ottawa" (unattributed article), Globe and Mail, 16 February 1977 "Interview with Bernard Ostry" (Part Two), Canadian Artists'Representation News, vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 1977), 8. Rogers, Dave, "Gallery design approved, building delayed," Ottawa Citizen, 14 March 1977. Jean Sutherland Boggs, "New National Gallery a must: ex-director" Ottawa Citizen, 14 April 1977. National Gallery of Canada Press Release, 20 December 1976, National Gallery of Canada Archives. Roslyn Nudell, "De-Bogging Ostry" Canadian Review, September 1976,30. The search committee also included Marie Tellier from the NMC'S board; Jean des Gagniers, Ronald Longstaffe, Stephen Vickers, and the artist Alex Colville from the Gallery's visiting com-

55

56

57

58

59

mittee; and Richard Graburn, head of the Gallery's National Program, as the other staff member from the Gallery. Des Gagniers and Longstaffe were also members of the NMC board. Robert Fulford, "Who should run the National Gallery?" Saturday Night, October 1976,2 Art Perry, "Boggs tough act to follow at National Gallery," Vancouver Province, 29 December 1976. Ibid. Also Wayne Edmonstone, "The National Gallery looks west," Vancouver Sun, 4 January 1977. Quoted in Pat McNenly, "City woman heads the National Gallery," Toronto Star, 20 December 1977. Information about Shih's academic background was included in a National Gallery of Canada "Data sheet" released in October 1979. Bob Cohen, "Can Shih match her reputation?" Montreal Gazette, 8 January

197760 Ostry was quoted in ibid. Ignatieff s comment was included in the National Museums of Canada press release, 20 December 1976. 61 Information concerning the 1967 date of Shih's citizenship was contained in the National Gallery of Canada press release that was issued on the same day. 62 Cohen, "Can Shih match her reputation?" 63 Michael Prentice, "New curator has 'sense of fun,'" Ottawa Journal, 14 January 1977 64 Edmonstone, "The National Gallery looks west." 65 Prentice, "New curator has 'sense of fun.'" 66 Sandra Peredo, "Art and Taxes," Canadian Magazine, 17 December 1977. 67 "Dr. Shih," CAR News, vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 1977), 5. 68 Cohen, "Can Shih match her reputation?"

N O T E S TO P A G E S 258-63

427

69 Adele Freedman, "The New First Lady of the Arts," Saturday Night, 7 February 197770 Jean Sutherland Boggs, "The National Gallery: timidity or commitment to the fierce ghosts of the Demoiselles?" Globe and Mail, 2 October 1976. See also Kathleen Walker, "Fresh breeze blows through," Ottawa Citizen, 2 April 1977. 71 "The Gallery's choice" (editorial), Ottawa Journal, 21 December 1976. 72 See Freedman, "The New First Lady of the Arts," and Tom Henighan, Ottawa Revue, 22 September 1977. 73 Murray Maltais, "D'abord etudier comme une folle," Le Droit, 29 January 1977. English translation: "Here in North America individualism rules. One often takes one's own decisions alone. This is an attitude that I explain by the JudaeoChristian mentality that one finds here. In the Orient, people don't live by the same concepts. Individualism is less important; people live according to a more altruistic attitude." 74 "It's Happening at the National Museums," two-page advertisement for the National Museums of Canada, April 1977 75 See Kathleen Walker, "For Ostry, culturepushing is all uphill" Ottawa Citizen, 2 April 1977. 76 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1977-78 (chairman's remarks), i. 77 For Ostry on the role of the NMC Board of Trustees, which he claimed "is the National Museums of Canada," see "Interview with Bernard Ostry, (Part One)," CAR News, vol. 2, no. i (Autumn 1976),10. 78 The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Bulletin (incorporating the Annual Review), 1977-78,15. 79 National Gallery Archives, Comite des expositions, Canadian Art, Box 45. 80 Mayo Graham, Another Dimension, 10.

428

N O T E S T O P A G E S 263-9

81 Georges Bogardi, "Art in motion," Montreal Star, 19 November 1977. 82 Artist's statement in Graham, Another Dimension, 39. 83 Ibid., 42. 84 Kathleen Walker, "What's wrong at the Gallery?" Ottawa Citizen, 12 November 197785 James Nelson, "Best funded museums not drawing crowds," Vancouver Sun, 6 July 1978 86 Walker, "What's wrong at the Gallery?" 87 The comment on Mannerism was by Georges Bogardi in the Montreal Star, and pertained especially to Carr-Harris' work. "Wylie Sypher has identified the essential elements of Mannerism as being elegance, high technique, acid colour, drama, and use of cliche: the work of Carr-Harris satisfies all these requirements." Bogardi did not add that Mannerism is generally regarded as a decadent phase of the Baroque, which itself involved repeating variations within an overall framework that went unquestioned. In the seventeenth century, this overarching framework was provided by the authoritarianism of the Counter-Reformation and the Holy Roman Empire. The "playground" reference is in Kevin Elliott, "The Philistines are upon us," Ottawa Today, 3 November 1977. 88 Nancy Devitt, "Modern Chinese art 'traditional,'" Windsor Star, 13 October 1978. 89 Kathleen Walker, "Security staff cares about Gallery's art," Ottawa Citizen, 17 December 1977,56. 90 Elizabeth Gray on CBC-Radio's Morningside, 14 November 1980; Media Tapes and Transcripts, Ottawa, 1980,5. 91 Dickson, A Study of the National Gallery ofCanada, 4. 92 As reported by Robert Fulford, "Turmoil in the Art World: The Empty Halls of

the National Gallery," Saturday Night, June 1978,3. 93 Adele Freedman," The mess at the National Gallery," Globe and Mail, 6 June

197994 Phil Kinsman, "Surrounded by culture all her life," Ottawa Journal, 21 March 1980. 95 Hsio-Yen Shih, "Discoveries of a New Director," in National Gallery of Canada, Annual Bulletin, 1977-78,12. 96 National Gallery of Canada Invitation Pamphlet for The Sensuous Immortals, 1979. Because of budgetary constraints, not even the catalogue from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art could be reproduced for the exhibition. 97 James Nelson, Canadian Press, "Asian art exhibit 'sensuous, erotic,"' London Free Press, 27 January 1979. 98 Arnold Edinborough,"A $1.5 million gift for the National Gallery," Financial Post, Toronto, 30 December 1978. 99 Kathleen Walker, "Fresh breeze blows through Gallery?' Ottawa Citizen, 2 April 1977100 Interview with Robert Houle by Sarah Jennings, Stereo Morning, CBC-FM, 2 October 1979 101 Quoted in Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada, 116. This book provides a valuable overview of Scott's career and role in the Department of Indian Affairs. For more detailed material on Scott's role in the negotiation of treaties, see Dragland, Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9. 102 Quoted in Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada, 116, from a letter written by Scott to David S. Hill, 11 June 1921. 103 Scott, "Indian Place-Names," in The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott, 22.

104 "Interview with Bernard Ostry, (Part Two)," CAR News, vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 1977)> 8. 105 National Museums of Canada, Annual Report, 1976-77,2 and 13. Ethnographic research is also detailed on page 15. 106 Adele Freedman, "Birks' silver: national scandal or tempest in a porringer?" Globe and Mail, 19 January 1980. 107 Sandra Gotlieb, "The Bleeding of Canada," The Canadian, 4 November 1978,25. The legislation also provided museums with funds toward such "treasures'" repatriation, and individuals with tax incentives to encourage donation. 108 Interview on CBC Radio's Morningside, 13 December 1979; Ottawa: Media Tapes and Transcripts, 1979,10, National Gallery of Canada Clipping Files. 109 Glaus, Jo Anne, "Knowing the country seen as major part of her job," Fredericton Gleaner, 13 May 1977. no Interview on CBC Radio's Morningside, 13 December 1979. 111 National Museums of Canada, Annual Review, 1979-80,20. 112 Unattributed editorial, Ottawa Journal, i February 1979. 113 National Museums of Canada, Places of Discovery 1972-1977: Highlights from the First Five Years of the National Museums Policy (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada 1978), 4. 114 Anonymous, Ten Decades of Service: The National Gallery of Canada, 22. Lines of accountability were by the late 19705 so scrambled in regard to the National Gallery, that practically everything about this booklet's origins is garbled, apart from the fact that it exists. 115 Shih, "Discoveries of a New Director," 13. 116 As reported by Doreen Millan on CBO Morning, CBC Radio, 14 November 1980; Media Tapes and Transcripts, National Gallery of Canada Clipping Files.

N O T E S TO P A G E S 269-77

429

117 Quoted in Michael Valpy, "The drying up of the Ottawa cow," Vancouver Sun, 14 November 1980; and in Regina HicklSazabo and Linda Drouin, "Gallery director resigns over government inaction," Ottawa Citizen, 12 November 1980. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1 Barrie Hale, "The National Gallery's interior decorator," Toronto Telegram, 26 November 1966. 2 Jean Sutherland Boggs, "New National Gallery a must: ex-director," Ottawa Citizen, 14 April 1977. 3 Regina Hickl-Szabo, "National Gallery officials paint gloomy picture of staff morale," Ottawa Citizen, 5 January 1982. 4 "The Dowager Queen at 100: The National Gallery's not-so-happy centenary" (unattributed), Canadian Heritage, April 1980. 5 Doug Bale, "Irreplaceable art at risk in shabby National Gallery," London Free Press, 7 February 1981. 6 Richard Gwyn," Toward genteel irrelevance," Ottawa Citizen, 23 June 1981. Gwyn's wife Sandra had also written in a 1976 article in Saturday Night that "Trudeau, considered the first intellectual prime minister since Arthur Meighen, has given an average of a speech a week in eight years and not one has had culture as its theme." See Audrey Johnson, "Culture is a frill attitude won't die," Montreal Star, 27 May 1976. 7 Allan Fotheringham, "National museums suffer during Trudeau's reign," Ottawa Citizen, 7 January 1982. 8 Betty Lee, "Our national disgrace: Unless Ottawa moves fast much of Canada's heritage is in danger of being lost," Globe and Mail, 28 March 1981. 9 Richard Alway in a telephone interview with the author on 27 November 1996. 10 Northcutt, Mitterrand: A Political Biography, 311. 11 Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 142. 43O

N O T E S TO P A G E S 277-87

12 Quoted in Robert Gretton, letter to the editor, Canadian Architect, June 1981. 13 Richard Gwyn, "Trudeau is doing what he pleases," Lethbridge Herald, 5 March 1982. 14 Radwanski, Trudeau, 87. 15 Frank Howard, "Bureaucrats" (regular column), Ottawa Citizen, 22 February 1982. 16 As reported in: "Ottawa to spend $185 million on gallery, museum buildings" (Canadian Press, unattributed), Regina Leader Post, 19 February 1982; David Vienneau, "Art treasures get new homes for $185 million," Toronto Star, 19 February 1982; Peter Menyasz,"New gallery, museum to cost $185 million," Vancouver Sun, 19 February 1982; and Jamie Portman, "Cultural neglect may be ending," Calgary Herald, 22 February 1982. The focus on the figure of $185 million in the titles of three of these four articles gives some idea of how the projects were viewed outside "the National Capital Region." 17 "Statement by Francis Fox, Minister of Communications, on New Facilities for the National Gallery of Canada and the National Museum of Man," Government of Canada, Department of Communications, 18 February 1982. 18 See Lisa Balfour Bowen, "Boggs is back wearing new crown," Toronto Star, 6 March 1982. In this article, Boggs was quoted as saying she had been asked back "by the Prime Minister himself," and that, while initial feelers had been sent out "around Christmas time," her "position was only agreed upon less than a week before the minister's announcement." 19 Quoted in Trevor Boddy, "Enjoy the Gallery mania while it lasts," The Ottawa Citizen, 21 May 1988 20 Peter Menyasz, "New gallery, museum to cost $185 million." 21 Quoted in Bowen, "Boggs is back wearing new crown."

22 Ibid. See also Kit Collins, "Nepean Point possible for National Gallery site: Dewar stunned by rejection of Cartier Square for gallery^' Ottawa Citizen, 2 March 1982. 23 Roger du Toit Architects, Five Museum Sites (Ottawa: Canadian Museums Construction Corporation 1982), 9. The date 1971 for the concept of a "cultural bridge" was cited by Jean Sutherland Boggs in her "Talking Paper on Future National Gallery Building," 3. 24 This was brought to my attention by Charles Hill, curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery, in 1997. 25 Du Toit, Five Museum Sites, 33 and 80. 26 Quoted in Baele, Nancy, "Boggs determined that Gallery find new home," Ottawa Citizen, 25 October 1982. 27 Gillian, Mackay, "Competition among the Castle Builders," Macleans Magazine, 7 February 1983. 28 Letter from Richard Alway to Jean Sutherland Boggs, 5 July 1982, National Gallery Archives: Canada Museums Construction Corporation Portfolio A, NBO box 22. 29 "Which Architects" (editorial), Edmonton Journal, 6 January 1983. 30 Mackay, "Competition among the Castle Builders." 31 Jane Taber, "Sites, architects chosen for Gallery, Museum of Man," Ottawa Citizen, 11 February 1983. 32 Stephanie White, "Museums and Their Buildings: Our National Galleries," Vanguard, February 1985, p. 8 33 Jean Sutherland Boggs, "The designing of a National Gallery," 201. 34 Murray, Moshe Safdie, Buildings and Projects: 1967-1992,16. 35 See Ibid., 122,76-7,83-4,119,115,87-8, 116-17, and 102-3. 36 Moshe Safdie, Moshe, Form and Purpose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1982), 97. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 Jim Strasman, "An Interview with Safdie," Canadian Architect, February 1984,31-

39 For greater detail on the Quebec Museum of Civilization, see Murray, Moshe Safdie, Buildings and Projects: 1967-1992,149. 40 Proposal for the Museum of Man, by Moshe Safdie and Desnoyers, Mercure Associated Architects, in Renault, ed., "Twelve Proposals for the National Gallery of Canada and for the National Museum of Man," 42. 41 Moshe Safdie, "The Architect's Statement," Canadian Architect, February 1984,22. 42 Jean Sutherland Boggs, "Talking Paper on Future National Gallery Building," dated 14 March 1971,2,5, and 8. 43 Renault, ed. "Twelve Proposals for the National Gallery of Canada and the National Museum of Man," 4-6. 44 Murray, Moshe Safdie: Buildings and Projects, 101. 45 Boggs, "The Designing of a National Gallery'' 202. 46 Safdie, Form and Purpose, 87 47 Ibid., 85. 48 Ibid., 39. 49 Ibid.,xiii. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., xi. While "postmodern" is the usual North American spelling of the term, Moshe Safdie rendered it "Post Modern" while the architectural critic Charles Jencks used "post-modern." In this book it will appear as "postmodern" except when it is quoted or directly ascribed, especially to Safdie. The quotations from Johnson and Gehry are in Safdie, "Private Jokes in Public Places," 12. 52 Ibid., xi-xvi. Safdie, in the introduction to Form and Purpose, quoted a 1978 exchange of letters between himself and a rather bemused Philip Johnson. 53 Ibid., 3-7. 54 Ibid., 41. 55 "The naturalistic fallacy" was initially named by David Hume in 1740. The reference can be found in Hume, A Treatise N O T E S TO P A C E S 287-99

431

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

of Human Nature, 469. It was further developed by G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica (1902), with particular reference to the sorts of analogies made by Safdie about "evolution" and - as will later be seen in regard to the National Gallery the metaphysics of "Platonic geometries." See Principia Ethica, 9-17,37-58, and 110-127. Boggs, "Whither the National Gallery," 10. Safdie, Form and Purpose, 43. Ibid., 55 and 20. Ibid., 5iff. Ibid., 63. Safdie, "Private Jokes in Public Places," 12 and 10. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Safdie, Form and Purpose, 89. Greenberg, "Recentness of Sculpture," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,252. Safdie, Form and Purpose, 82. The quotation is from Gunther Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age (New York: Natural History Press 1969), 104. Safdie, Form and Purpose, 79. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 100. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., 77. See Boggs, "The designing of a National Gallery," 2O2ff. Boggs, "Convocation Address, McMaster University," 3. Boggs, "The Object Preserved," 3. Ibid., 2. Boggs, "The National Gallery and its Public," 3. Safdie, Form and Purpose, 54-5. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 11. Ibid., xii. Ibid., 79.

432

N O T E S TO P A G E S 299-321

84 Brown, "The Fruit of the Artistic Tree," i. 85 Safdie, Form and Purpose, 63. 86 Personal correspondence to the author, 26 June 1997. CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1 See, for example, "A Bas Postmodernism," the mission statement on the website of Venturi, Scott, and Associates (http://www.vsba.com). There Venturi declares: "I am not and never have been Postmodernist and I unequivocally disavow the fatherhood of this architectural movement." 2 See Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, i4iff. 3 See Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, 29off. 4 Muirhead, "Modernism and the Urban Tradition: Stirling's Mature Architectural Method in Four Museum Projects of the 19705," in Maxwell, ed., James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates, Buildings and Projects 1975-92,15. 5 Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 142 6 Muirhead, "Modernism and the Urban Tradition ,"15. 7 See Turner, Safdie's Gallery: An Interview with the Architect, 32. 8 Ibid.,i. 9 Ibid., 3. 10 Ibid., i. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 Ibid., 5. Safdie seemed especially to be referring to articles by Larry Richards in Canadian Art and Trevor Boddy in Canadian Architect. 13 Rybczynski, A Place for Art/Un Lieu pour I'art, 65. This oblique parody of Safdie's goal of providing "a ritual, a ceremony," stands out all the more in that Rbyczynski, like many commissioned authors, was generally restrained in his critical comments about the National Gallery, which was serving as his employer. In this iO4-page, lavishly illus-

14

15 16 17

trated French/ English book, Rybczynski also almost entirely ignored the pattern of sacral reference in the Gallery's access route, that differentiates it so profoundly from other major art museums. He was also clearly unaware of the extent of metaphysical investment that accompanied the Gallery's history as an institution, and was either unaware of or ignored comparable affinities in Safdie's own writings. Genesis 28,10-18, in The Holy Bible (King James Version). Curiously, this particular edition of the Bible, which I found in the garbage outside a United Church in Toronto, was the one that accompanied the Church of England and the British Army to Canada in the nineteenth century. It was printed in the very year that "the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty," by royal decree, made Ottawa the capital of the United Province of Canada, ten years before these provinces became a Dominion. Turner, Safdie's Gallery, 5. Safdie, Form and Purpose, 51. Personal correspondence with the author, in answer to questions, 26 June

199718 See Hugh Plommer, Ancient and Classical Architecture, 3off. 19 Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture, 79, and Plommer, 38. 20 Jean Sutherland Boggs, The National Gallery of Canada, 70. 21 Turner, Safdie's Gallery, 7. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 As noted earlier, Safdie wrote in a personal communication of 26 June 1997: "To your specific questions, I am not aware that my design was influenced by Brown's or Harris' agendas or by Harris' approach to landscape painting. Are there such influences? I'd be interested in learning about them." 24 Strasman "An Interview with Safdie," Canadian Architect, 28.

25 Kuspit,"The Contradictory Character of Postmodernism," in Silverman, ed., Postmodernism - Philosophy and the Arts, 64. 26 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 384ff27 Ibid., 199; also 33iff. 28 Turner, Safdie's Gallery, 9. 29 For a more detailed, if generally uncritical, report on the interior rooms of the National Gallery designed by Safdie, see Rybczynski, A Place for Art, 70-88. 30 Boggs, "The designing of a National Gallery," Burlington Magazine, 202. 31 Ibid. 32 For Buren on "sub-soil," see Buren, Les Ecrits, vol. i, 111 and 141. This project received its most ambitious development, both literally and figuratively, with the installation Les Deux Plateaux, in the courtyard of the Palais-Royale in Paris, in 1986. Throughout Buren's project of contextual "exposure," there was, especially during his early career, a more or less explicit commitment to "art populaire" and to art as integral to "class struggle." See especially "Entretien avec Achille Bonito Oliva," in Buren, Les Ecrits, vol. 3,239ff. For a more extensive analysis of all of these aspects of Buren's work, see Ord, The Scrubbing of Les Deux Plateaux: Thoughts on Buren. 33 Quoted in Mo Gourmelon, "Daniel Buren, Melodic en sous-sol... et sur deux plateaux," in Canal, (Summer 1986). Reprinted in Buren, Les Ecrits, vol. 3,123. 34 Safdie, "The Architect's Statement," Canadian Architect, February 1984,22. 35 See Kit Collins, "Gov't won't buy permits to build area museums," Ottawa Citizen, 5 April, 1984. 36 Jamie Portman, "New museums seek private funds," Ottawa Citizen, 11 April 1984; and Bert Hill, "Private funds needed: museums spokesman," Ottawa Citizen, 12 April 1984. Jean Boggs was

N O T E S TO P A C E S 321-37

433

37 38

39

40 41

42

43

44

quoted in the latter article as saying that she felt "it would be irresponsible not to go after any source that would make certain that these are not only serviceable museums, but also that they will arouse genuine pride in their architecture and the capital of our country." John McAvity, "An ominous move on museums," Globe and Mail, 12 May 1984. Gaye Applebaum, "Designing national art gallery poses problems," Canadian Jewish News, 19 April 1984. For reporting on this, see, for example: Iain Hunter, "Gallery requires $50M to open on time: official," Ottawa Citizen, 29 May 1985; Adele Freedman, "Designs in jeopardy as project reels out of control," Globe and Mail, 8 June 1985; and Nancy Baele, "National Gallery, Museum of Man going to cost bundle, DPW official says," Ottawa Citizen, 20 July 1985. Quoted in Situation 86. See Nancy Baele, "Gallery, museum final costs still a mystery," Ottawa Citizen, 2 March 1985. Nancy Baele, "Gallery spends $275,000 to see the light," Ottawa Citizen, i March 1985. Stevie Cameron, "Government takes over museum job," Ottawa Citizen, 17 May 1985. Stevie Cameron, "Trouble has dogged new museums," Ottawa Citizen, 21 May

1985. 45 Cameron, "Government takes over museum job." The figure was $225 for museums in the United States, versus $200 for the National Gallery and the Museum of Man. 46 Quoted in James Nelson, "Ottawa museum scheme gets off to a rocky start," Winnipeg Free Press, i March 1982. 47 Adele Freedman, "The National Gallery gamble that didn't pay off," Globe and Mail, 8 June 1985. Freedman's prediction in this article of the project's demise was premature. 434

NOTES TO P A C E S 337-47

48 Cameron, "Trouble has dogged new museums." 49 Freedman, "The National Gallery gamble that didn't pay off." 50 Ibid. 51 Claude Arpin, "Showdown looms over museums' soaring costs," Montreal Gazette, 8 July, 1985. CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

1 Applebaum, Hebert, et al., Report of the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, 15. 2 Ibid., 15. 3 "Interview Conducted by Lily Leino," in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,314. 4 Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. i, 8. This essay dates from the earliest phase of Greenberg s career as a critic, when he identified himself with the revolutionary internationalism of Leon Trotsky. 5 Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 22. "The concept of 'art as an institution'... refers to the productive and distributive apparatus, and also to the ideas about art that prevail at a given time, and that determine the reception of works." Burger, like his Frankfurt School forebears, was heavily influenced by dialectical materialism and its analysis of society in terms of material forces. As Karl Marx himself did, he dismissed religion as a sham, but as a sham that nevertheless pointed to aspects of human misery. Burgers own belief in the underlying "truth" of dialectical materialism itself made for the political and ethical underpinnings of his critique. 6 For Beuys on his own work, see Par la presente,je nappartiens plus a I'art. See also Chapter 14, n.32. 7 As exemplary works, see: for Caillois, L'Homme et le sacre; for Bataille, Theory

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

of Religion; for Foucault,"A Preface to Transgression" and "Theatrum Philosophicorum," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon; for Deleuze, Logique du sens and (with Felix Guattari) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This choice reflects my own reading of these writers. Others might, of course, give priority to different texts. For Bataille on "the privileged instant" and "the sacred instant," and their relation to art, see his essay "The Sacred," in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 241. For Deleuze on "the disjunctive synthesis," see Logique du sens, 61-2 and AntiOedipus, 76. For the later aestheticization of this concept via "the Neobaroque, with its upsurge of divergent series within the same world," see Deleuze, Le Pli, 112. For Caillois on "the ambiguity of the sacred," see L'Homme et le sacre, 35ff. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, 91 (§23) and 94 (§24). For a technically difficult but illuminating study on the relation of Kant's understanding of "the sublime" to Heidegger's philosophical vocabulary and approach to art, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Sublime Truth," in Jeffrey Librett, ed. and trans., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 1993), 71-108. Sarah Yates, with research by Jennifer Dickson, A Study of the National Gallery of Canada, (Ottawa: Canadian Artists' Representation /Le Front des artistes canadiens 1983), 4,7. "Museums report urges shakeup" (Canadian Press, unattributed), Winnipeg Free Press, i June 1982. Report by Sarah Jennings, CBC Stereo Morning Arts Report, with Simon Wageamakers, 14 June 1982.

15 Correspondence with Martha Langford, first director of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 12 March 2002. 16 Ibid. 17 Annual Report of the National Museums of Canada, 1981-82. 18 National Gallery of Canada, "Collection Policy and Procedures/Politique et plans d'action en matiere de collections," typescript, "Approved by NMC Board of Trustees March 1985" as "Part II of the 'Codex musealis" on the Collections Policy and Procedures of the National Museums of Canada, 7. 19 Annual Bulletin of the National Gallery of Canada, 1984-85. The articles were "Harold Town et 1'art du collage" by Denise Leclerc, and "Henry D. Thielcke: A Recently Found Portrait and Some Reflections on Thielcke's Links with the English School" by Ross Fox. There were then no more bulletins or reviews until 1990-91 when the Annual Report returned with the Gallery's independence. 20 Nancy Baele, "Canadian artists protest National Gallery cuts in video program," Ottawa Citizen, 18 February 1986. 21 Withrow et al., Report and Recommendations of the Task Force charged with examining federal policy concerning museums (Withrow-Richard Report), Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1986; vii. 22 Martin, "The Future of the National Gallery of Canada: A personal response to questions asked by the NATIONAL MUSEUMS TASK FORCE," dated April

1986; National Gallery of Canada Library, 15-16. According to Martha Langford (correspondence of 12 March 2002), Martin was incorrect on the date, in that the announcement took place in December 1984, and not October. Worth noting also is that the three directors of the National Gallery - Boggs, Shih, and Martin - were not the only directors of N O T E S T O P A G E S 347-52

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23 24

25

26

27 28 29 30

31 32

33

34

the "national museums" to resign under the NMC. Both David Baird, of the Museum of Science and Technology, and Louis Lemieux, of the Museum of Natural Science, resigned in 1981, while William Taylor at the Museum of Man (later the Museum of Civilization) left in 1982. See Matthew Eraser, "Museum Quality," Globe and Mail, 31 January 1987. Martin, "The Future of the National Gallery of Canada," i, 2,7,21. Jamie Portman, "Museum boss wants government to fire directors," Ottawa Citizen, 9 August 1986. Jamie Portman, "NDP MP accuses museums boss of'discrepancy,'" Ottawa Citizen, 13 August 1986. Jamie Portman, "Gallery director quits to preserve health and dignity," Ottawa Citizen, 29 August 1986. Withrow et al., Report and Recommendations of the Task Force, 6. Ibid., 19. Ibid. The Board of Trustees of the National Museums of Canada, Museums in Canada: The Federal Contribution: Response to the Report of the Task Force on the National Museums of Canada (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada 1986), Executive Summary. Ibid., i. Standing Committee on Communications and Culture News Release, "Commons Committee Recommends Autonomous Federal Museums," 29 January 1987. Hugh Winsor, "Museums plan tabled," Globe and Mail, 22 May 1987. Information on John Edwards as the devolutionary secretary-general of the NMC came from Martha Langford, 12 March 2002. Peter Day, "Art's First Lady," Canadian Art, (summer 1988), 69. According to the Gallery's new director, Shirley Thomson,

436

N O T E S TO P A C E S 352-63

35

36 37

38

39 40

41

42

43 44 45

46

interviewed in 1988, the United Technologies sponsorship came as part of a package. "We had nothing to do with that," she told Day, claiming that the arrangement had been made through the Metropolitan Museum in New York. William Johnson, "New gallery is part of nation-building," Montreal Gazette, 21 August 1987. Quoted in Nancy Baele, "State of the art," Ottawa Citizen, 21 November 1987. Nancy Baele, "Our cultural core: A progress report," Ottawa Citizen, 21 March 1987. Letter from R.A.J. Phillips in the Ottawa Citizen, 26 March 1971; quoted in Noppen, In the National Gallery of Canada: "One of the most beautiful chapels in the land," 19. The interested reader is referred to this io8-page book for a more comprehensive treatment of both the history of the Rideau Street Chapel and the process of its rescue and reconstruction. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 303. This particular use of the phrase appeared in Susan Riley,"The art of survival," Ottawa Citizen, 20 July 1996. Quoted in Anne Duncan, "Canada's art finds a home," Montreal Gazette, 21 May 1988. The overall cost of $162 million was, as reported in the article above, broken down as follows: $117 million for construction; $26 million for "fit-up costs"; $5 million for landscaping; and $14 million for consultants' fees. See Brad Evenson, "Gallery bash draws 10,000," Ottawa Citizen, 21 May 1988. Ibid. John F. Burns, "For Canada's art, a home of its own," New York Times, 21 May 1988. Paul McKeague, "New gallery a lavish work of art itself?' Windsor Star, 21 May 1988.

47 Quoted in Duncan, "Canada's art finds a home." 48 Quoted in McKeague, "New gallery a lavish work of art itself." 49 Robert Fulfbrd, "Is National Gallery too posh?" Toronto Star, 16 May 1987. 50 John Bentley Mays, "National Gallery preview keeps us guessing," Globe and Mail, 25 April 1987. 51 Quoted in Duncan, "Canada's art finds a home." 52 Reinhard Beuth,"With a palpitating heart into the temple of art," Die Welt, 21 May 1988, trans. Roy Engfield. 53 Trevor Boddy, "Critique: Architecture on the Fast Track," 47. 54 John Bentley Mays, "National Gallery preview keeps us guessing."

1

2 3

4

5

6

7

EPILOGUE (N.B.: Because many of the Quotations in this chapter appeared earlier, they are not, for the sake of simplicity, cited in the following endnotes.) Nancy Baele, "Sooner and later at two museums," Ottawa Citizen, 31 May 1986, for "throne room" reference; and "Our cultural core," Ottawa Citizen, 21 March 1987, for "a party palace for dignitaries." Robert Fulford, "Is National Gallery too posh?" Toronto Star, 16 May 1987. Paul Koring, "Flag Day scuffle is security dej$ vu," Globe and Mail, 16 February 1996. Paul Koring, "RCMP says protection adequate, closes case on PM'S lunge at man described as no threat to security?' Globe and Mail, 17 February 1996. Susan Delacourt, "Chretien manhandles protester," Globe and Mail, 16 February 1996. Edison Stewart, "Labor activist no threat to Chretien, RCMP say," Toronto Star, 16 February 1996. Deborah Richmond, "Country's top MP turns emcee to introduce patriotic rock song," Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 1996.

This article appeared in the paper's "Citylife" section under the category "High Priority: Teenage Perspectives." 8 Stevens, The Friendly Dictatorship, 61. 9 Quoted in Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 61. 10 Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms,

911 Jehanne Bietry Salinger, "Paintings depict Canadian Arctic," Montreal Gazette, i May 1931. 12 Salinger, "Comment on Art: The Group of Seven," Canadian Forum, January 1932,14313 The details of Harris's elopement with Bess Housser can be found in Larisey, Light for a Cold Land, 115-17. 14 Photographs of Harris in New Mexico can be found in Reid, Atma, Buddhi, Manas: The Later Work ofLawren S. Harris. 15 Lawren Harris, "Letter to the editor," Canadian Art, vol. 6, no. 3 (spring 1949). 16 See the Foreword by Roald Nasgaard in Celant, The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today, 7. 17 Alan Jarvis's reference to the National Gallery as "an iceberg" recurred several times during his trans-Canada tour of late 1955 and early 1956. Three references are: "New National Art Gallery for Canada" (unattributed), Niagara Falls Review, 8 November 1955; "Seek to learn language of modern art, director of National Gallery advises" (unattributed), London Free Press, 10 November 1955; and "Jarvis delighted with Calgary art" (unattributed), Calgary Herald, 22 November 1955. This particular formulation is from the second of these articles. 18 Shirley Thomson, Introduction, in Nemiroff, Houle and Townsend-Gault, Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, 7. For the sake of simplicity, the title of this exhibition is cited as Land Spirit Power, without commas.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 363-89

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19 See Elissa Bernard, "Halifax Micmac artist lends voice to national exhibition," Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 24 September 1992. 20 For an analysis of Land Spirit Power as an exhibition, see Anne Whitelaw/'Lancf Spirit Power: First Nations Cultural Production and Canadian Nationhood." While this article takes a fundamentally different approach from my own, it helpfully places the exhibition within the context of other events of 1992, and especially of the Charlottetown Conference, at which, for the first time, aboriginal groups were given a role in constitutional talks. 21 Diana Nemiroff, "Report on the Collections: Contemporary Art," Presentation to the Acquisitions Committee of the Board of Trustees, 16 October 1994, i. Courtesy of Diana Nemiroff. 22 Land Spirit Power, 12. 23 Turner, Safdie's Gallery, 26. 24 This was conveyed to me by Robert Houle in conversation, August 2000. 25 Land Spirit Power, 200. 26 Ibid., 202. 27 Ibid., 200,201,197. 28 For "Fragment of an Ode to Canada," see Scott, The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott, 12. Accounts of Scott's work in the Department of Indian Affairs and of his role in treaty negotiations can be found in Dragland, Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9, and Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada. 29 The entire text of "Powassan's Drum" appears in The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott, 59-63. 30 In her 1964 book Breaking Barriers, Maud Brown wrote that the tea party had taken place in 1938, in honour of the opening of an exhibition of Canadian art at the Tate Gallery in London, 438

N O T E S TO P A G E S 389-95

England. Charles Hill, the National Gallery's curator of Canadian art, has argued, however, that the date of the photograph should be pushed back to 1936 and the opening at the Gallery of the Group of Seven retrospective. 31 Quoted in Dragland, Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9,257. 32 The full text of "Powassans Drum" reads: Throb-throb-throb-throb; Is this throbbing a sound Or an ache in the air? Pervasive as light, Measured and inevitable, It seems to float from no distance, But to live in the listening world Throb-throb-throb-throb-throbbing The sound of Powassans Drum. He crouches in his dwarf wigwam Wizened with fasting, Fierce with thirst, Making great medicine In memory of hated things dead Or in menace of hated things to come, And the universe listens To the throb-throb-throb-throbThrobbing of Powassan's drum. The world seems lost and shallow. Seems sunken and filled with water, With shores lightly moving Of marish grass and slender reeds. Through it all goes The throbbing of Powassan's Drum. Has it gone on forever, As the pulse of Being? Will it last till the world's end As the pulse of Being? He crouches under the poles Covered with strips of birchbark And branches of poplar and pine, Piled for shade and dying In dense perfume With closed eyelids

With eyes so fierce, Burning under and through The ancient worn eyelids, He crouches and beats his drum. The morning star formed Like a pearl in the shell of darkness; Light welled like water from the springs of morning; The stars in the earth shadow Caught like whitefish in a net; The sun, the fisherman, Pulling the net to the shore of night, Flashing with the fins of the caught stars; All to the throbbing of Powassan's Drum. The live things in the world Hear it and are silent. They hide silent and charmed As if guarding a secret; Charmed and silent hiding a rich secret, Throbbing all to the Throb-throb-throbbing of Powassan's Drum. Stealthy as death the water Wanders in the long grass, And spangs of sunlight Slide on the slender reeds Like beads of bright oil. The sky is a bubble blown so tense The blue has gone gray Stretched to the throb-throb-throb-throbThrobbing of Powassan's Drum. Is it a memory of hated things dead That he beats - famished Or a menace of hated things to come That he beats - parched with anger And famished with hatred -? The sun waited all day. There was no answer. He hauled his net And the glint of the star-fins

Flashed in the water of twilight; There was no answer. But in the northeast A storm cloud reaches like a hand Out of the half darkness. The spectral fingers of cloud Grope in the heavens, And at moments, sharp as pain, A bracelet of bright fire Plays on the wrist of the cloud. Thunder from the hollow of the hand Comes almost soundless, like an air pressure, And the cloud rears up To the throbbing of Powassan's Drum. An infusion of bitter darkness Stains the sweet water of twilight. Then from the reeds stealing, A shadow noiseless, A canoe moves noiseless as sleep, Noiseless as the trance of deep sleep, And an Indian still as a statue, Molded out of deep sleep, Headless, still as a headless statue Molded out of deep sleep, Sits modelled in full power, Haughty in manful power, Headless and impotent in power. The canoe stealthy as death Drifts to the throbbing of Powassan's Drum. The Indian fixed like bronze Trails his severed head Through the dead water Holding it by the hair, By the plaits of hair, Wound with sweet grass and tags of silver. The face looks through the water Up to its throne on the shoulders of power, Unquenched eyes burning in the water, Piercing beyond the shoulders of power Up to the fingers of the storm cloud.

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Is this the meaning of the magic The translation into sight Of the viewless hate? Is this what the world waited for As it listened to the throb-throb-throb-throbThrobbing of Powassan's Drum? The sun could not answer. The tense sky burst and went dark And could not answer. But the storm answers. The murdered shadow sinks in the water. Uprises the storm And crushes the dark world; At the core of the rushing fury Bursting hail, tangled lightning Wind in a wild vortex Lives the triumphant throb-throb-throb-throbThrobbing of Powassan's drum. 33 Mary Baker Eddy as quoted in Twain, Christian Science, 266. 34 This information was conveyed to me by Teresa Marshall in a telephone conversation on 4 February 1997.

44O

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Index

This book is a narrative of interwoven themes, into which the index offers different routes. Pages with relevant pictures are indicated by italics. The following acronyms appear in subheadings for names that repeat: NGC (the National Gallery of Canada); AHJ (Alan Hepburn Jarvis); BNAA (British North America Act); CFC (Charles Eraser Comfort); CMCC (Canada Museums Construction Corporation); EB (Eric Brown); HYS (Hsio-Yen Shih); JSB (Jean Sutherland Boggs); LSH (Lawren Stewart Harris); MS (Moshe Safdie); NMC (National Museums of Canada); NMM (National Museum of Man); PET (Pierre Elliott Trudeau); RCND (Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences); and VM (Vincent Massey). aboriginal peoples: assimilation policy, 272; and contemporary artists, 271-2; exclusion from NGC collection until 1986,242,273,387, 424n63; and D.C Scott, 272,393-5> 3945 Elitekey, 391-6; goals of HYS, 262, 271-3; Hooper Collection, 273; Land Spirit Power, 389-97; Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art, 242-4, 387; and M. Barbeau, 242, 272; and NMC, 264, 271-3; and NMM, 271-2, 387,388; and N. Morisseau, 387; North American Iceberg, 389; and "openness of spirit" for S. Thomson, 389,397; represented at NGC via

Inuit art, 173,424^3; residential schools, 271,390, 393; and shamanism, 243, 387-8,393> 395; and "spirit of place," 390-1,397; and "spirits" in nature, 82,386-7; and statue of Champlain, 318; taxonomies of ethnography, 272,388; T. Marshall, 391-6; and view of Canada as "virgin country," 115,387,389; Walsh Collection, 273. See also Beam; Canadian Museum of Civilization; Cardinal; First Nations; Houle; Land Spirit Power, National Museum of Man Abstract Expressionists, 118, 144,148,173,193,216; as "oracles" for JSB, 190,

388. See also abstraction; Greenberg; Jarvis, A. abstraction, 343; and AHJ, 136-8,144-8,170; for A. Lismer; 121; and British Columbia, 148; and Canadian artists in 19505, 121,145-9; for CFC, 118, 172-3; and C. Greenberg, 147-8; geometrical, 98; informe, 118,145,216; and J. Diefenbaker, 170; Le Gueridon, 136-8,137; Les Parachutes vegetaux, 119, 133; and LSH, 106,144, 383,385; for MS, 301-4, 311; and Painters Eleven, 145; and P.-E. Borduas, 118, 119,133,144,145,216; and photographic reproduction, 148; and "primitive art," 242; and RCND, 120-1; and W. Ronald,

145,146,216. See also Abstract Expressionism; Automatisme; Binning; Borduas; Hodgson; Jarvis, D.; Kandinsky; Kiyooka; Molinari; Mondrian; Nakamura; Newman; Picasso; "rational modernity"; Shadbolt; Tanabe; Town access route, in NGC building designed by MS, viii, i9-34>5i, 332-6,376, 384-5,388; absence of art, 27,30,368,371,377; agendas of MS and JSB, 320,326,375-6; and Elitekey, 394-5; and Gothic, 22,326,333,397; and "hallowed atmosphere," 334,384; and Icebergs, Davis Strait, 36-8,37,384-5,386; and J.B. Salinger, 384; and "magical spot," 376-7, 384; and rhetoric of S. Thomson, 362-3,397; and rituals of state, 368, 37i, 373! r°le °f PET, 329; and sacral motifs, 330, 335,397! and signifiers of God, 333,375-6; symmetry, 334,369,371,375; and temple of Hatshepsut, 326; and U.S. Embassy building, 379-80,384-5. See also ascent; Colonnade ramp; Concourse; frame as convention; Great Hall; National Gallery of Canada (building); sacral motifs; Safdie; symmetry Acconci,Vito, 193 Adam and Eve (Tintoretto), 72 Adorno, Theodor, 346 Advisory Arts Council 456

INDEX

(NGC), 64; establishment, 67,234; expansion, 69 aesthetic, the, 242-4,269, 281,387-8; and Elitekey, 396 aestheticism, 134,345 Agnew, Geoffrey, 159-66 Agnew, Thos. and Sons, 166, 168,327 Ahrens, Carl, 103 Aktionismus, 199 Al-Aqsa Mosque (Jerusalem), 33,292 Albers, Josef, 98 Algonkian peoples, 244 Algonquin Park, 64,79 Allan, Cyril, 338,339-40 All Star Cast (Levine), 225-6,393 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 69 Alte Nationalgalerie (Berlin), 25,70 Alternating Pink and Yellow (to Joseph Halmy) (Flavin), 212 Alte Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart), 314,315 Alway, Richard, 281,288,353 Amis du Musee de rHomme (Paris), 242 Andre, Carl, 197 Angerstein, John Julius, 69 Anglicanism: for AHJ, 131, 141; for VM, no Annual Report of the National Gallery of Canada, 65,124,129, 136-7,173, 174, 199, 4i6n38 Annual Report of the National Museums of Canada, 240,248-9,273, 4i6n38 Annual Review of the National Gallery of Canada, 217,239,4i6n38, 424n49; and JSB, 240-1 Another Dimension (exhibi-

tion), 266-8,267,428n87. See also Carr-Harris; Duchamp; Favro; Graham; Mannerism; Snow; White "anti-form," 204-5 anti-humanism: in architecture, 210; and critiques of humanism, 222; in 19605 art, 197 anti-institutionalism in 19605 art, 204,206; and HYS as director, 264 Apadama (Persepolis),377 Aphrodite Yawns (Handy), 227 Applebaum, Louis, 343 Applebaum-Hebert Report. See Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee Aquinas, St Thomas, 51 Arab-Israeli War (1948), 292 Arche de la Defense (Paris), 281 Archer, The (Moore), 227 Aristotle, 139-41,182,345 Arp, Hans, 136 "Art and Meaning at the National Gallery of Canada" (JSB), 217 art and spiritual improvement, 187; for CFC, 115-16,309; and AHJ, 136-8,148,169-70; for EB, 7,9,12,55,65,69,83, 89,99,102,121-2,169, 300,309; and "good," 121, 300,309; for LSH, 38, 41-3,309; for MS, 302, 305,306; for PET, 51; for Plato, 50-1; for RCND, 120-2,374; for S. Thomson, 361-3; for VM, 108,309-10 Art and the Courts, 204,212, 217-18,309; for JSB, 244;

and NGC access route, 376 art as category: and art of 1960$, 193-4; and A. Warhol, 178-80,196; for B. Ostry, 252; as critical, 235; as "cultural resource" and "national heritage," 249; and "didactic art" in 19705,265-9; for JSB, 201, 213,216,219,306; for M. Heidegger, 114,192; for MS, 301-6; and museum building boom, 281; and "openness," 217; in NGC record, 244; role of CFG, 178-80; and readymades, 150,179-80,193; and technology, 304-5. See also authority; context; "didactic art"; environment; frame as convention; "treasure" Art Association of Montreal, 188 Art Association of Toronto, 64 Artforum, 193-5, i97> 2°4> 211 Art Gallery of Ontario, 198, 262,351,389. See also Art Gallery of Toronto Art Gallery of Toronto, 115, 122,144,172; and B. Smith, 198; and JSB, 188, 198 Artist and Model (Kirchner),i96 "Art Means Business" (AHJ), 201,4i4n2 I'art pour I'art, 345

artist-run centres, 346-7, 349 Artists' Jazz Band, 266 "artists' statements": as convention, 267 artscanada, 228. See also Canadian Art

"art system": and art of 1970$, 266; and D. Buren, 42on34, and "didactic art," 193,195,343 "ascent" (as motif in NGC access route): described by MS, 21,319,333; and events of state, 367-8, 373; for Plato, 49; as process, 18-27; 384; and Rideau Convent Chapel, 360 "Associate Museums," 247, 250,252 Association of American Art Dealers, 176 Association of Art Museum Directors, 255 Assyria, 24 Athens, 26 AT&T building (New York City), 297 Auditor General: and NMC, 250,253-4 "aura": and D.C. Scott's home for LSH, 394; and museums for JSB, 202-3, 316,375> 376; and photographs of PET, 282-3; in theosophy, 41-2,202; for W. Benjamin, 202,211 authority: and aboriginal "art," 242-4,271-3; and AHJ, 143,147-9,161-8, 311; for ApplebaumHebert Committee, 343-8; and art of 19605, 195,204-6,209-17; and art of 19705,266-9; and art of 19805,345-8; and authoritarianism, 332, 378; and BNAA, 7; and "Canadianism," 344-5; and Carnegie Corporation, 106; and CFG, 115-19,175-80; and "Christian principles," 120; and C. Greenberg,

i47~8> 345; citation of Plato, 47,311; and critical theory, 346-8; and dream for S. Freud, 333-4; for EB, 58,88,94,309; and electoral politics, 68, 103-4,159-70,180-2, 250-2,330-1,374; and F. Nietzsche, 113-14,309; for G. Deleuze, 347-8; and God as guarantor, 112-15, 309,332,345; for G. Grant, 113-14,313,332; and HYS, 262-3,277; inexactitude in art, 242-4,262-3; 375! and JSB, 15-6,189-92,199, 213-19,228,285-91, 323-9.337.339-4i; and LSH, 150,309; for M.B. Eddy, 58; metaphysical investment at NGC, 149, 388; for M. Heidegger, 112-14; an 309 Century Building: and NMC, 239 "ceremonial route" (between Ottawa and Hull), 287,329. See also Boulevard Canada Cezanne, Paul, 87-9,96,98, 99,176,239; Portrait de Gustave Boyer, 96 Chagall, Marc, 92,98,195 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 92 Champlain, Samuel de (McCarthy), 288; and MS, 318 Chapel of the Convent of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. See Rideau Convent Chapel Chardin, Jean-BaptisteSimeon, 159,162 Chateau Laurier Hotel, 146, and MS, 318 Chatelaine, 244 Chaudiere Falls, 29 Chief Architects Office (Public Works), 66 Childs, David, 9,378, 379-80 INDEX

463

Chinese scroll paintings (exhibition), 269 Chretien, Jean: and National Flag of Canada Day incident, 369-73 Christ Child and St. John (Botticelli), 73 Christianity: and Canada for RCND, 322; and concept of "man," 219; and G. Grant, 332; and Jerusalem, 292; and Middle Ages, 218-19,387; and MS, 305,308; and NGC access route, 368; and Plato, 322; and pope, 19,324; and S. Martini's St Catherine, 328 Christian Science, 58-64; on belief, 84; and CFC, 119; and Divine Mind, 59; and "divine Principle," 57, 59,310-11,345; and EB, 55-9> 73,63-6,78,141, 309,3i9> 361,379> 38i, 386; and E. Walker, 64-5; and H.O. McCurry, 96,99; and H.S. Southam, 99, 394; and "malicious animal magnetism," 62, 402n23; and M.B. Eddy, 56-62; method of healing, 59-60; for M. Twain, 62; mutation at NGC via AHJ, 149,183; role of prayer, 63; Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 58,60; and The Sensuous Immortals, 270; and theosophy, 58-9; unreality of "matter," 60; for W. Gather and G. Milmine, 62 Christian Science Journal, 57 Christian Science Monitor, 57,78 Christian Science Mother Church (Boston), 57 464

INDEX

Christian Science Sentinel, 55,57 Christ with Angels (Veronese) 88 Christ with the Cross (Rubens), 73,86 Chrysler, Walter P., 4171147; controversy, 175-8. See also Controversial Century, The Cirrus Cloud (N.E. Thing Co.), 226 Citizenship Court (at NGC): and Flag Day incident, 370-2 Clarendon Hotel (Ottawa), 66 Clark, Ian Christie, 274,349, 350 Clark, Joe, 283,337; and recommended NGC budget cut Clark, Kenneth, and AHJ, 131,134,142,144,147,148, 182,188,190,4ion6; on EB, 56-8,73,132; and VM, 132,134 Clark, Paraskeva, 145 Claxton, Brooke, 107 Clay, Cassius, 208 Clean Machine (Levine), 195 Clennett, Bill: and Flag Day incident, 369-73,393 Clinton, Bill, 378 Clore Gallery (London), 314 Coburg (Ontario), 152,188 Cohen, Bob, 262 Colin, Ralph, 176-7 collection (of NGC), 34,136, 311,350; and Colonnade ramp, 320; and Elitekey, 395-6; and Internet, 378; for JSB, 206,217,239,241, 299,300,306,309,332; 206; and NGC access route, 384; and NMC collection, 350; and PET's introduction of

M. Sinclair, 215; and rooms designed by MS, 334,364; 381; and S. Thomson, 361-3; storage in 19705,265 "collective will" (for MS), 299-300,338 Colonnade ramp, 16,18, 18-22,31,317-26; and "ascent," 18-27,49,3*9! and Children's Holocaust Memorial, 292; and Concourse, 33; and Corridoio Bernini, 19,27, 323-4,324,40on3; and EB's "road that leads upward," 319; and Egyptian temple colonnades, 22,25; evolution, 317-29; and Flag Day incident, 370; and Freudian dream theory, 333; and Gothic cathedral, 21-2,22; and Group of Seven, 23-4; and Icebergs, Davis Strait, 36, 37,40,43; and JSB, 323-9; as "liminal zone," 25; and LSH, 319; for MS, 21,25, 27,320-2,319-20; and Nepean Point, 317-19; and NGC Guide, 34; for R. Fulford, 364; and Scala Regia, 19,25,27; and Taiga Garden, 23; and Temple of Hatshepsut, 20,21,27; and temple pyramids, 19,20,36,326, 380; and rituals of state, 366,367-9; for W. Rybczynski, 19,321,397 Columbus, Christopher, 389 Colville, Alex, 145 Comfort, Charles Fraser, 171,1/5,258,283,364,395, on abstraction, 118; annual report of 1964-65, 173; appointment as

director, 170; as authority on sculpture, 178; and A. Warhol, 178-80,198,336, 375; on Canada as "virgin country," 115,387,389; and Canadian Group of Painters, 115; on "Canadianism," 117,243, 360,390; on "Canadian spirit," 116,396; and Chrysler controversy, 157, 175-8,375> 379,4171152; and classification, 116-18, 178-80; and curator of Canadian art, 173,208; and Group of Seven, 34, 38,115,116; and JSB, 188, 190,214-15,336; Lake Superior Village, 115; and Lome Building, 203; and LSH, 115-16,361; and "magical spot," 318; and "national consciousness," 116; and National Industrial Design Centre, 171,210; NGC as "agency of central government," 117,170,310,374; and NGC Bulletin, 173; as NGC director, 119,170-80; as painter, 115; Prairie Road, 115; and "public spiritual welfare," 116,177,310; on "rational modernity," 118, 170,173; and RCND study, 23-4,101, in, 115-21,170, 175,178; retirement, 180, 187; and Royal Canadian Academy, 170; sense of space, 172; on "spirit of a people," 116; on "spiritual democracy," 117; andS. Thomson, 361; University of Toronto, 111,115,170; and war art, 173 Coming of the Golden Age, The (Stent),3oi Commons Culture

Committee, 353 Conceptualism, 193,197,389 Concourse, 32,33,326 condensation: in Freudian dream theory, 333 Confederation poets, 98, 272,393

Confederation Square, 126 Conference of Canadian Artists (Kingston), 97, 106 Congress of Vienna, 70 Consolidated Revenue Fund: of NMC, 234 Constable, W.G., 72-3,76, 149 Consultative Committee on National Museums Policy, 248 containment: of contemporary art by NGC access route, 335-6,344; and frame, 388 contemporary art (note: this term is relative in a study that spans a century), vii, ix; aboriginal, 242,271-3,388-97; abstraction in 19405 and 19505,118,119,121; and AHJ, 144-7,150-1,181; and "anti-form" in 19605, 204-6; and ApplebaumHebert Committee, 343-8,365,397; "artists' statements" in 19705, 266-7; and A. Warhol, 178-80,179; and B. Smith as curator, 198-200,200, 202,206,213; and Canadian centennial, 223-30; and CARFAC study, 348-9; and CFC, 174,178-80; and C. Greenberg, 98,138,147-8, 158,179,181,192; and Chinese Peasant Painting, 269; context and "envi-

ronments" in 19605, 193-5) 209-12,211-13,235; and critical role, 209-12, 235; curators and HYS, 269; and D. Buren, 335-6; and D. Flavin, 211-13,213> "didactic art" in 19605, 193; and EB, 75-96,365; and European theory in 19805,347; and "events" during 19605,199; and Flag Day incident, 372; fracturing of term "quality" in 19605,193-5; 224-30,227-8; and "great experimental workshop," 347,365; H.O. McCurry and American art, 98; and HYS, 265-9,267,270; and interpretation, 108-9,167,196,235; and J. Burnham, 194-5,198,212; and JSB, 188,195-8,212, 213,213-19,238,241,374; and Les Parachutes vegetaux, 119,133; and M. Duchamp, 150,179-81, 193,225; and meaning production, 347-8; and M. Heidegger, 114; and Minimalism in 19605, 193-6; and MS, 301-2, 311,335; and museums in 19805,13,282,315; and natural light for NGC, 305,335,338; and NGC access route, 331; and NGC rooms as "containers," 335; neo-scholasticism of late 19705,265-6; N.E. Thing Co. at Lome Building, 209-12,209; NGC cancellation of video program, 350; and NMC, 235,237,248-50; and "openness" in late 19605,192,374; PET and M. Sinclair at NGC, INDEX

465

214-15; and philosophy in 19605,196-7; and public in 19705,266-8; Refus Global as manifesto, 118; and sculpture '67,223-30; and Second World War, 98; and "situation" for J.B. Mays, 365; and "systems" in 19605,194-5,198, 245-5,237! "The Sublime Is Now," as manifesto, 144; and "transgression," 205,347-8; and "white cube," 335,377 Contemporary Canadian Music Collective, 266 Contemporary Chinese Peasant Paintingfrom Hu Country, Shensi Province, 269 context: and AHJ, 159; and Another Dimension, 266-8; and art of 19605, 193-4,204; Canadian and American, 206; and Elitekey at NGC, 391-6; environments in sculpture '67,225; and events as art, 199; and Flag Day incident, 372; for J. Burnham, 193; and JSB, 202,214,295; and M. Duchamp, 150,199,225; and MS, 295; museum as overarching, 314; and NGC's evolution under NMC, 237; and NGC with Museum of Civilization and U.S. Embassy, 397; and National Museums Policy, 248-50; for R. Morris, 192; and "situation," 365; thematic contraction in 19708,266; and use of Lome Building by PET, 215. See also environment Controversial Century: 466

INDEX

1850-1950, The (exhibition), 283,375,4171147; allegations of fakes, 176; and CFC, 157,175,177; covered by LIFE Magazine, 175-6; and E. Turner, 177; and J. LaMarsh, 177; and "opprobrium," 233; and R. Colin, 176-7; and W. Dale, 177. See also Chrysler; Hartert Galleries; Yotnakparian convergence: and Flag Day incident, 371; for MS, 299-300,307,375; Neue Staatsgalerie as contrast, 315-16; and NGC collection, 299-300,384; and NGC Great Hall, 28-31, 330,334,336,365,369, 376,378,390,3955 and "security apparatus," 373; U.S. Embassy building as contrast, 380 Cooke, Michael, 226-7 Corbusier, Le, 381 Corridoio Bernini, 19,324, 40on3; and JSB, 323-6 Cotret, Robert de, 339 Couchiching Conference, 191-2,217,332 Council for Business and the Arts in Canada, 268 Coward, Noel, 131 Cranach, Lucas the Elder, 232-3 "Creative Art and Canada" (LSH),38 Crimp, Douglas, 314 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 131,135, 139 critical theory, 346-7 Critique of Judgment, 25, 147, 412H50

Crystal Chain, 46 Cubism, 88,137,193 "cultural bridge," 287

Cultural Property Export and Import Act, 274 "cultural resources": in announcement of new NGC and NMM buildings, 284; and Applebaum-Hebert Committee, 348; and art as "transgression," 347; and National Museums Policy, 247; and NMC, 249,253,264,346; struggle between NGC and NMC, 249-50. See also National Museums of Canada, "national heritage" Cultural Revolution (China), 269 "cultural stratosphere": and AHJ, 149,153; and RCND, 129,134 Culture Committee of the House of Commons, 353 Cumbria (Murray), 226 Curnoe, Greg, 208-9,224, 223, 262; and Canadian centennial birthday cake, 223,224; Dorval Airport mural, 208; on HYS, 262; and P. Theberge, 208; Dada (Dadaism), 88,90,98, 118,347; and MS, 296; and N.E. Thing Co. at NGC, 209-11; for W. Benjamin, 211 Dagenais, Yves, 425ni5, 425m8 Dale, William, 177,208,221, 224 Dalhousie University, 111 Dali, Salvador, 98 Darius of Persia: as cited by MS, 302-4,303,316,337, 365,373,377,378 "Darwinian evolution": for MS, 298,303

Daumier, Honore, 69 Davies, Robertson, 183 Debord, Guy, 347 "decentralization and democratization": effects during 19805,347; and JSB, 299; and National Museums Policy (1972), 247,283; paradox of centralized bureaucracy and funding, 248; and process of NGC building in 19805, 290,337; in rhetoric of NMC, 253,275. See also National Museums of Canada, National Museums Policy Degas, Edgar, 176,177, 356-7; and JSB, 189,219, 356; Pastels by Degas (exhibition) 356,358 "degeneracy": for A. Hitler, 93; for EB, 89,92,114, 4o6n63; in Nazi Germany, 92 Deir al-Bahri, 20,19,22, 326-7 Delacourt, Susan, 370 Delacroix, Eugene, 189 Deleuze, Gilles, 347-8,360 DeMille, Cecil B., 321,397 demiurge, 48,298,305 Demoiselles d'Avignon, Les (Picasso), 189,216 Dennison, William, 227 Dent, Laura E., 292 Denver Art Gallery, 231 Department of Citizenship and Immigration, 123,126 Department of Communication, 353 Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, 250,256 Department of Indian Affairs, 272,393-4 Department of National Defence, 125,126

Department of Public Works, 15; and B. Ostry, 259; early authority over NGC, 66-8,231; and H.O. McCurry, 96; NGC and NMM building projects, 338-40, and RCND, 117 Department of the Environment, 256 Department of Trade and Commerce, 171 Department of Transport, 208 Derain, Andre, 176 Design Council of Great Britain, 131,135 desire-body (in theosophy), 41,78,381; and Freudian "return of the repressed," 384 Devil Speaks, The (Gauguin), 88 Dewar, Marion, 338 Dickson, Jennifer, 348-9,

351, 353~4> 427IH7 Dickson-Yates Study. See CARFAC study "didactic art," 193-4; 205-6; 265-9 Diefenbaker, John, 11,171, 201,206,280,338,349, 379; and AHJ, 158-70, 181-2; and Canadian art, 158,165,167; and CFC, 170,171,177,180; and electoral record, 159-60, 180; for G. Grant, 180-1, 221; nationalist rhetoric, 158,178; cut in NGC purchase budget, 162,167 Diefenbaker, Olive, 174,175 Diggers, and sculpture '67, 227 Dionysius of Syracuse, 89, 4051145 "Discovery Train," 254,303; and United States Freedom Train, 255

Disneyland, 285 "dissent" in art: for JSB, 192 "divine (Divine) Principle," 309-11,345,374; and B. Newman, 144-5; and "Canadianism," 120; in Christian Science, 59,61, 310; for Christian Science and theosophy, 59,88, no, in, 120; for EB, 57,63, 65,76,79,80,81,122,144, 216,243,298,310,345, 347, 373,387; and LSH, 76,81,345,347,373,385-7; and meaning production through events, 347; and "order," 396-7; and VM, 108,110-11 Dix, Otto, 92 Dome of the Rock (Jerusalem), 27,35,36, 292,293,330 Dorais, Leo, 339-40, 349-50,351,352-5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 375 Douglas, Tommy, 153 Downing, Robert, 225 dream, Canadian, 334; for EB on NGC, 12,17,290, 331,333,365; and Jacob for MS, 21,27,319-22, 331; and NGC access route, 333-4 Drive, The, 76,76 Drummond, Sir George, 67 Duchamp, Marcel, 98,144, 342,347; and Another Dimension, 266; and art of 19605,193,225; ready-mades, 150, 179-80,193 Duncan, Anne, 364 Duncan, Carol, 25-6,70 Duncan, Douglas, 142,183 Duncan, Frances, 142 Duplessis, Maurice, 118,133 Dupuis, Claude, 364 Dupuy, Pierre, 222 INDEX

467

Durer Albrecht, 69 Dusseldorf (Germany), 282 Duval, Paul, 157,177,283 Early Chinese Pictorial Art: and HYS, 262 Earth Art, 193 E.B. Eddy Forest Products (Hull), 29 Eddy, Mary Baker, 55,56, 64,78,88,92,379; on belief, 84; on "creation," 83; for EB, 57-8,60-1,63, 94; and H. Blavatsky, 58-9; healing method, 59-60, no, 4O2n26; and "malicious animal magnetism," 62,4O2n23; on matter and spirit, 57-8; for M. Twain, 62; Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 58,60-2, 83,395; and theosophy, 76-7; on Truth and discord, 57,89; for W. Gather and G. Milmine, 62 Edge of the Maple Wood (Jackson), 40 Edwards, John, 355 Egypt, 321; ancient temple motifs in NGC access route, 19,22,25,326,333, 368; and Temple of Hatshepsut, 20,19,27, 326-7 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The, 175 Elgin Street (Lome Building), 127,255,287,35i Elitekey (Marshall), 391-6, 392,396; and "Powassan's Drum," 393,395; and theme of "secret," 395 Emergency Purchase Fund, 248 Emery, Tony, 225 Emma Lake (Saskatchewan), 151 468

INDEX

Enclosure Bay, 34,317,330 Entartete Kunst, 92 Entrance Pavilion (NGC), 19,373; and Icebergs, Davis Strait, 36,37,40,43 environment: and B. Smith on "Centre for Living Art," 198; critique by JSB, 215-16; and D. Flavin, 211-13; and Group of Seven for VM, 108-9, 134.374,387> 395; and "hallowed atmosphere" for JSB, 218,309; and L. Levine, 195,198, 225-6; and M. McLuhan, 204; for MS, 296,302-3,307, 348,375; and N.E. Thing Co., 209-11; and NGC access route, 329-30,336, 365,376; and Persepolis, 303-4,303,377; as reframing, 307,375; and sculpture '67,225-9; for S. Thomson, 389; and "systems esthetic," 194-5, 197,204. See also context, frame as convention; "hallowed atmosphere"; "museum aura"; "museum spell"; "systems esthetic" Epstein, Jacob, 136 Erickson, Arthur, 289 Ernst, Max, 98 Eros '65,224 "Eskimo art." See Inuit art Etemenanki (model), 20 Stranger, L' (Camus), 139 Eucharist, 25,360 Europe: and Abstract Expressionism, 144-5, 147; and art of 19605,199; and art of 19805,346-8; and Chrysler controversy, 175-8; and colonization of Canada, 81-2, 115-16,322,360,368; and

early history of NGC, 66, 77; and EB, 68-73,77> 81-2,85-96,272; and Enlightenment, 59-60; and First World War, 77, 82,89-92; and Group of Seven, 24,85-6,88-95, 108,387; and Holocaust, 113,292; and H.O. McCurry, 96-7; and HYS, 271; and JSB, 218-19,244,308-9,323-5; and JSB-MS "collaboration," 308,313,316,323-6, 335; and Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art, 242-4; and megalithic, 24-5; and modernity, 112-14,125; and MS, 296, 299-300,308,313,320, 326,386; and Nazism in 19305,92-4,106,151; for NMC, 275; and North America, 387; and Pope Urban VIII, 324-5; as "rule stick" for AHJ, 150-1,181,242,244; and The Tribute Money, 201-2; and twentiethcentury museums, 26-7, 281; 314-16. See also Baroque; British Empire; Glaserne Kette; Gothic; Liechtenstein purchases; Renaissance European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today, The (exhibition), 389 Euthyphro (Plato), 59 event: as art, 199; and G. Deleuze, 347-8; and J. Beuys, 346; and N.E. Thing Co., 209-11,209, 214-16; PET and M. Sinclair at Lome Building, 214-15,214; and photodocumentation by

JSB, 199; sculpture '67 party, 228-9,347~8 Evrard, Marcel, 243,281, 387-8 Ewart, David, 71,101 exclusions: accepted by AHJ, 145,148-51,375; for A. Hitler, 92-4; and American modern art at NGC, 98-9,133,149-50, 158,190,375; of art from NGC access route, 27,30, 368,377-8,384; and CFG, 173-4,375; of contemporary aboriginal art until 19805,242; and "day to day life," 21-7,384; for EB on "futurism," 80,86, 88-90,92,93-4,98-9, 145,310,375,381; and Elitekey, 391-6; and Flag Day incident, 372-3,385; of JSB from NMC decision on building, 252; for LSH, 381-2; for MS, 301, 305>307,3io, 394; as pattern in NGC history, 374-5; for Plato, 50; and term "heretical" by JSB, 216,311,375 Exhibition Centres, 248, 250,252 "exhibition value" (Benjamin), 202 Expo 67,242; International Fine Arts Exhibition, 221-2,220,230; and MS, 291-2,291,337; as mythologized, 262,292; and Places of Discovery, 275 Expressionism, 98 Fafard, Joe, 373 Fairclough, Ellen, 165,775, 256,339; and AHJ, 165-6, 168; and J. Kennedy, 174, 175

Far Eastern art, 262 Farnsworth House (van der Rohe),i24 Faulkner, Hugh: and NMC Board, 250-2, and Wellington Street site proposed by NMC, 256-8 Favro, Murray, 266-7 Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee (Applebaum-Hebert Committee), 343-6,348, 351,367,372; on art and religion, 343-8; and art as critical, 343-8,365,367, 372,376,377,396; and S. Thomson, 362 Federal Development Commission, 126 Federal District Commission, 104 federalism, 355 Federation of Canadian Artists, 105,349 Fell, Charles P., 166,174 Fenwick, Kathleen, 159, 4i6n38; and collection of Inuit art, 173; and Expo 67,222 Ferguson, Bruce, 349 Festival of Canada, 231 Figaro Artistique, Le, 86 Financial Administration Act, 166 Fines, C.M., 153 First Nations: and category "Indians," 273; displacement, 81,391,393; and Elitekey, 391-6; Inuit art, 173,271; Land Spirit Power, 389-97; and "multitude of spirits," 82; and NMC, 242-4,271-3; political advances in 19805,388; and rhetoric of CFC, 115,117; and S. Thomson, 389,397; and unified Canada, 272; and

White Paper, 14-15. See also aboriginal peoples First World War, 69,75,85, 88,101,354; and EB, 90-1 Fisheries Building, 64,66, 101 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 182 Flag Day. See National Flag of Canada Day Flavin, Dan, 213,240.335; fluorescent light, etc., 211-13; and J. Burnham, 211-12; and JSB, 213, 214-15,335; and shamanism, 388 "floating signifier": and "spirit," 117,397 fluorescent light, etc. (by Dan Flavin), 211-13,2.13, 240 Fluxus, 199 folk art, 242 Fontainebleau (exhibition), 204,218-9 For Everyone a Garden (exhibition, MS), 295 Form and Purpose (MS), 296-305,314,3i5> 373> 380; on "aesthetics," 304; on artists'"narcissistic" attitudes, 296,300-1; and Chartres cathedral, 308; and Colonnade ramp, 321-2; critique of "Post Modernism," 45,297,300, 325,331,380; on Darius and Persepolis, 302-4, 3