Drawn Forth

Leafing through the lushly illustrated pages of the National Gallery of Canada’s book of highlights from its works-on-paper collection, any art lover with a taste for tradition might sigh with contentment. Pause to admire Roman ruins rendered in black ink by Giovanni Paolo Panini, a refined row of trees in graphite by Vilhelm Hammershøi, a pastel of a woman fixing her hair by Camille Pissarro. The cumulative effect is of timelessness.

Turn from the pictures to the text, though, and a careful reader is brought back to the moment. The publication of Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault, with a parallel exhibition in Ottawa, was originally planned to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the museum’s drawings collection in 2021, supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation. That milestone was missed, writes Sonia Del Re, the senior curator of prints and drawings, because of “institutional hurdles and ensuing delays.”

Del Re doesn’t elaborate, but she does make a point of thanking Jean-François Bélisle, the gallery’s new director and chief executive officer, “who from the moment of his arrival revitalized the enterprise by inspiring us all with confidence and determination.” For anyone who missed the news, Bélisle was recruited in 2023 to restore calm after the rocky reign of Sasha Suda, whose polarizing bid to “decolonize” the gallery and emphasize art from outside the European tradition led to high turnover among staff and high anxiety among donors.

So Gathered Leaves lands, perhaps unintentionally, as a reassertion of the gallery’s attachment to its own past — even to the wider museum tradition. It is hard to imagine a book more steeped in that history. According to Del Re’s account of her section’s evolution, the gallery bought its first Old Masters drawings in 1911, the seeds of a collection that would grow, after the department’s formal establishment in 1921, to proudly encompass “every major Western school: American, British, Central European, Dutch and Flemish, French and Italian.”

Never fear, however: dead white men don’t own this story. In fact, Del Re titles her essay “A Woman’s World.” In 1928, Kathleen M. Fenwick arrived from England to embark on a foundational forty-year run as the prints and drawings curator. Miss Fenwick, as Del Re says she was known, was succeeded by Mimi Cazort, an expert on the art of Bologna. (Is there a pattern here? Diana Nemiroff’s Women at the Helm, from 2021, chronicles how the gallery was run from 1966 to 1997 by Jean Sutherland Boggs, then Hsio‑yen Shih, and Shirley Thomson.)

The predominance of women in charge provides a through line for Del Re’s tale of the collection’s expansion over the course of a century. Beyond that, the artworks raked together for Gathered Leaves are too varied to allow for any unifying concept. Rather than organizing the pictures chronologically, the book groups them into eight thematic chapters. “In the Making,” for example, features sketches that reveal the artist striving toward a completed work; “The Human Condition” assembles figure studies and portraits; and “Modern Eyes” highlights twentieth-century innovations. (It’s worth noting that the book does not draw from the gallery’s Canadian and Inuit works on paper.)

Individual taste will dictate which pages hold the gaze. For anyone who has visited the gallery regularly over the years, certain images will stir memories. Back in 1996, a survey of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s open-air paintings from the early nineteenth century made a stirring case for why the Impressionists revered him. Gathered Leaves brings together a Corot oil, View at Narni, with two preparatory sketches. One of those drawings, Del Re writes, is “stiff, linear and rather inexpressive,” the other “far more fluid.” The contrasting studies — analytic versus instinctive — combine in the final work, teaching a deep lesson about making art.

Of all the gallery’s past exhibitions, arguably none surpassed the Edgar Degas blockbuster in 1988, which inaugurated Moshe Safdie’s glass and granite edifice — now a must stop for tourists to the capital. Gathered Leaves conjures that landmark show with assertive pastels by Degas on two of his most important subjects, the ballet and the track. Interestingly, the brief essay on Racehorses, from the late nineteenth century, identifies it as the artist’s last work on the theme.

Many intriguing discoveries are scattered through Gathered Leaves. A portrait-study drawing by Gustav Klimt, purchased only last year, reveals the gallery adding to its high-quality handful of holdings by the Austrian superstar. Fans of Henry Moore’s beloved sheep sketches are sure to enjoy Rosa Bonheur’s Study of a Reclining Ewe, from 1845, a charmer Del Re says the gallery acquired almost by accident and rescued from obscurity for the current exhibition and book.

For all its pleasures, Gathered Leaves might look outmoded if viewed through the lens of those who suspect, not always without justification, that big museums remain bastions of a smugly Eurocentric world view. (There’s even a chapter devoted to, of all things, “Victorian Rebels.”) But for that critique to keep packing a punch, art galleries, along with elite universities and performing arts halls, would need to go on playing the part of a self-satisfied establishment — at best snobbish, at worst racist — that deserves shaking up.

Does that caricature still make much sense in an era when these pillars seem so wobbly? Across Canada, symphonies struggle to meet payrolls, theatres sweat to draw decent crowds, colleges shrink. In the United States, Donald Trump presides personally over the Kennedy Center and his administration wages war on universities. Meanwhile, young people growing up online are screened off, so to speak, from the sensory oomph of what used to be called culture. On a smartphone, a Degas racetrack pastel isn’t much; on the page of a well-printed book, it hints at inner life; on the gallery wall, to quote the curator Kirsten Appleyard’s note, it is “a sumptuous feast of colours that positively pulses with energy and anticipation.”

Serving up such feasts is the job of arts institutions. In a liberal democracy, they elevate. Against the blur of technological change, they show what lasts. The work never ends. Every century or so, give or take a few years for “institutional hurdles,” it’s good to step back and admire the results.