Dali House

I’m planning a string of posts on Canadian art, but I think I’ll begin with a Canadian art “scandal” that actually involved an American artwork.

In 1990, the National Gallery of Canada purchased “Voice of Fire”, a huge abstract painting by Barnett Newman, for $1.76 million. The media, the government and a big chunk of the public went postal for two months. We’ll get to my own take on the controversy, published at the time.

The fury was hot enough to justify a 1996 book, “Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power and the State”, which tracked the debacle from March 7 that year, the day gallery director Shirley Thomson first gloated over having seized a “rare chance”. The work had been commissioned by the US government for Expo ‘67 in Montreal, but when it became Canadian property, the consensus was that it looked like something “my son’ll do in daycare”.

Parodies were knocked together, editorial cartoonists had a field day, and letters to the editor flooded newsrooms, many saying the purchase had proved PT Barnum correct.

Usual suspects Newman, Jackson Pollock and minimalist sculptor Tony Smith in 1951.

The House of Commons committee on communications and culture urged the gallery to withdraw its offer, but the sale was already a done deal. Assistant gallery director Brydon Smith said charges that the gallery should have “bought Canadian” simply suggested it should sell all its Picassos and Van Goghs. He pointed out that Newman was a great influence on contemporary Canadian artists like Guido Molinar, Robert Murray and Claude Tousignant.

“As we struggle nationally and internationally with our individual and collective identities,” a gallery brochure said, “Voice of Fire” is a “timely reminder for each of us what it is to be independent and free of oppression while at the same time part of a larger world”.

And speaking of Independent, that’s the name of the newspaper in Georgetown, Ontario, where I was working at the time, and where I printed My Two Cents on March 28, 1990. It’s full of references to other Canadian issues of the day, but regardless:

Art investors are spendthrifts, but don’t blame ‘Voice of Fire’

I was just putting the finishing touches to a self-portrait in oils the other day, having lent it an undeniably melodramatic tone by lopping off an earlobe while shaving that morning and then rendering the swath of gauze bandage in ivory white with a little cadmium red, when someone asked me (since I was obviously an expert on art) how long I thought it took Barnett Newman to paint “Voice of Fire”.

This, of course, is the National gallery’s recently acquired painting, which seems to have turned us overnight into a fragmented nation of art critics. A sort of cultural Meech Lake, the work has sharply divided us with an immense gulf of mutual disgust.

The gallery’s purchasers, a distinct society unto themselves, think it’s so fantastic that it’s worth bearing the scorn of taxpayers everywhere, because its price tag came in at a cool $1.8 million.

Flinging brickbats from the door of a bar immediately opposite the gallery on Ottawa’s wretched Road of Excess, John Q Public admits he doesn’t know much about art, but he goddamn well knows what he can’t afford. He determines that the Newman piece is mnerely two cans of paint, a roller and some masking tape. A chimp’s work in a chump’s game.

Could’ve been worse: Newman’s “Onement IV”.

The morning after the initial binge of raucous debate on the National Taste, I overheard a radio talk-show host loudly articulate the reaction of many: “I’ve never even heard of this guy!”

Well, let’s not make a virtue of ignorance. The late Barnett Newman is certainly not a household name, but is to minimalist art what Picasso is to cubism, Monet to impressionism and Jackson Pollock (all much-maligned pioneers in their day) to abstract expressionism.

That is to say, “Voice of Fire” may not say much to the common man (since biligualism of a different order is involved), but it must be respected as a work typical of the guy who did this sort of thing best, if not first.
To those who say, “I could have done that!” comes the reply, “Well, why didn’t you, then? No, forget it, it’s too late now – it’s been done!”

Barney Newman is a well-known name to students of art history who have taken that guided tour from the neolithic cave paintings of 20,000 years ago to the neoclassic nostalgia of the mid-1800s, viewing figurative renderings both compelling and forgettable, only to arrive at the gateway to the Modern Era to find artists systematically tearing down all that had gone before.

The impressionists broke all the rules of colour and light, the cubists destroyed preconceptions about form, the surrealists ripped open whole new vistas within the hidden subconscious in search of daring new subject matter.

Then came Pollock, an ugly American of the macho 1940s, who abandoned figurative representation altogether and allowed psyche and sinew to explode all over the canvas. Atom-bombed, the human race had to devise an entirely new way of looking at things, and art led the march.

Joe Average has always had a hard time reconciling even these brave new works with what followed. Minimalism, which has seen huge, white, empty canvases called paintings and unabashedly sterile rectangles of bronze called sculpture, took art to its next logical stage, and its propagators have never truly been forgiven by the kind of art fandom that regards Bateman’s latest limited-edition print as sublime.

“What exactly is art?” Newman et al decided to ask. And no less than the Mercury 7 astronauts provided the right stuff to push out the restraining envelope of static knowledge and blast man into space, these artists dared to be the first to paint a canvas all blue, all black, in pairs of tones, in just primary colours …

The juxtaposition of solid colour and form for pure aesthetic effect aside, there is often considerable symbolism at work in minimalist art, and a textbook’s worth of mythic speculation.
So, how long did it take Barnett Newman to paint “Voice of Fire”? About 20,000 years.

Having praised Newman for his life-enriching work, let us now bury the National Gallery for negotiating a $1.8-million deal with our money.

Is “Voice of Fire” worth it? If the National Gallery was so inclined, it could very well claim twice or three times that amount for the same work within a few years. That’s one way of paying off the national debt – dangle some Group of 7 efforts in front of the Japanese. They’ve got the ready buckage and know a good Northern Pine when they see one.

But don’t expect National Gallery possessions to turn up on the world’s auction blocks. “Voice of Fire” will still be taking up space on that gallery wall when your great-grandchildren treat their kids to a tour of the capital and wonder aloud, “Who the hell is Barnett Newman?”

Nevertheless, if current trends continue, they will not wonder at the price tag. Multi-million-dollar prices for art are no longer news, with poor old penniless Van Gogh fetching record sums and even Robert Bateman’s distant cosuin’s barber’s accountant commanding handsome figures with his latest “artist’s proof” of a beat-up old barn owl chewing on a field mouse.

Recently a Texas billionaire paid $12.1 million for a 1760-vintage mahogany desk. A wooden desk! Other American antique furniture has also sold for millions, and we’re not talking about diamond inlays here.

Art – hand-crafted or lithographed, original or a reasonable facsimile – has found a bold and brassy new market in the low-heeled yuppie investors who believe the only good cigar-store Indian foyer ornament is an expensive one.

They’re the reason Gucci is Gucci and Yves St Laurent is smarter still. That’s why blue jeans, for Levi’s sake, gotta be designer-labelled, pre-faded and factory-torn, and why modern man can’t walk upright unless he’s shod in $200 Reeboks.

Unfortunately for the Canadian taxpayer, our National Gallery curators wouldn’t be caught dead in bib overalls and construction boots.