At the McMichael, an anniversary makes peace with a complicated history

For its 50th birthday, the woodsy museum is filled with art its founders would hate. But as it moves forward, it also honours its past.

Thestar.com
June 11, 2016
By Murray Whyte

Sarah Stanners, the chief curator at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, has an unconventional legacy in mind when, many years hence, her time at the woodsy museum is done. “A loading dock,” she snickers, though not really kidding. “The Stanners loading dock. Because really, that would be the point where everything changed.”

As she confesses her curator’s heart’s desire, Stanners is surrounded by the big, bright abstract paintings of Jack Bush, the towering Canadian artist who accomplished the remarkably un-Canadian artistic achievement in his time of being internationally known.

Bush’s apex came in the mid-’60s, just as the McMichael was opening. But his presence here, as perhaps the signature offering of 50/50/50, the gallery’s 50th anniversary show, is a notable first. The galleries here barely accommodate him, with one big canvas bumping up against the ceiling, waiting to be moved somewhere more roomy in the days to come.

To think this was an architectural oversight - an art museum purpose-built in the ’60s that couldn’t accommodate the dominant scale of art made in its time - is to not know the McMichael, or the McMichaels, at all. And this is where the missing loading dock comes in.

“Robert McMichael was very conscious of what he didn’t want in here, which were big abstract paintings,” Stanners says. “It was a real shame, ultimately. How could you open in the mid-’60s and claim to be representing Canadian art, and be completely ignoring the most exciting stuff that was going on then? It boggles the mind completely.”

Of course, for McMichael, whose devotion to the Group of Seven’s woodsy depiction of a mythic Canadian wilderness bordered on the fanatical, building a physical barrier to the Modern art he despised only made sense.

Works that fit through the front door - still the only way art enters the building - nicely served McMichael’s preference. In 1966, he and wife Signe gave their Kleinburg estate and 169 artworks, mostly sketches and paintings by the Group and their peers and acolytes, to the province to establish a new museum focused on the art of Canada.

But McMichael’s wilfull blindness not only to Bush and his painterly peers but generations of others brought him in constant conflict with his namesake museum and the province both. As the collection blossomed to include some 6,000 works from all eras, an infuriated McMichael sued the Ontario government in 1996 to regain control.
The suit, which he pushed to the Supreme Court, failed. But in 2000, McMichael found an opening. The Tory government, led by Mike Harris, a close associate of McMichael’s, drafted Bill 122. It crystallized the public gallery’s mandate as though McMichael himself had written it, limiting the collection and display to “works and objects and related documentary material created by or about” the Group of Seven.

The bill, which passed that year, also put Robert and Signe at the head of an art advisory board that would control all the gallery did, meaning “other artists” would be collected and shown at the McMichaels’ sole discretion. (At provincial hearings that year, warnings about that concentration of power went unheeded: “(D)ecision making regarding the collection and the programming will be rest with a few individuals, some of whom will be not professionally-trained,” York University Fine Arts professor Joy Constaedt told the provincial committee at the time. “They will have a strong avocational interest … the museum and gallery community has moved well beyond this practice.”)

One of Robert’s first acts was an attempted purge of some 3,000 works he deemed inappropriately contemporary for the mandate he now controlled. He didn’t succeed, but the concentration of power squarely on his shoulders severely damaged the gallery’s reputation both in the museum world and in the public eye. Attendance nosedived and the museum entered a state of limbo as a narrowcast view of an exclusive, particular view of Canadian history and art.

Robert died in 2003 and Signe, her view of art more inclusive than her husband’s, in 2007. But the strident sense of ownership he held over the museum hung like a pall for years after. In struggling to move forward, it was still held back, almost as though haunted.

In 2011, the McMichael’s surviving relatives, Penny and Jack Fenwick, joined with the Ontario government to perform a final exorcism. Bill 188, passed that year, gave the gallery an unrestricted exhibition mandate and terminated McMichael’s advisory board, which still functioned, though less aggressively, in his spirit.

In its language, the bill was careful to keep a focus on Group of Seven peers and aboriginal art, but it made clear its priority was to “preserve and modernize” the gallery throughout.

In the years since, contemporary artists like the painter Kim Dorland and the performer Terence Koh have done stints here, and Sarah Anne Johnson, a renowned photography and installation artist, occupies the log cabin great room of the museum with a show right now.

But if there’s an outward opportunity to signal change, once and for all, then a golden anniversary is it. “I think that’s very much the case,” says Andrew Dunn, the acting chair of the McMichael’s board. “There are a lot of things we’re focused on changing. We realize now that there’s no lessening of the value of the core of our collection by saying, ‘Hey, there’s some really cool contemporary art that can be meaningful here too.”

If Dunn’s words might have been seen as heresy only a decade ago, then Stanners’ 50/50/50 exhibition is an outsize temple of sacrilege. Anywhere else, its conceit - a show of A.Y. Jackson and Tom Thomson in 1916, 50 years before the founding; Bush, who reached his apex as the museum opened; and Vancouver-based Colleen Heslin, painting with stitched-together fabric swatches, here and now - would be elegant and uncomplicated.

But here, nothing ever is and history needs to be acknowledged. Finally, perhaps, it’s not with kid gloves.

“I have a deep knowledge and love and understanding of the Group and historical Canadian art; I don’t want to turn my back on that,” Stanners says. “And I have no intention of turning this into (the Museum of Modern Art’s) PS1 in the woods. But I really do believe in the stories in Canadian art. And there are a ton of stories, not just one. We can’t be so wrapped in the gloss of the Group being the nation’s painters that we forget everything else.”