The Critic

Long retired from law, art journalism, and the collection of painting, sculpture, and photography, Harry Malcolmson feels an obligation to Canadian artists of the 1960s, a period when patriotism reached an apex with Expo 67. It was a time of economic prosperity and new-found freedom from Anglo-Saxon puritanism and established religion.

Toronto, where Malcolmson lives, had taken to the arts to demonstrate its modernism, helped in a significant degree by Jewish dealers and gallerists. Between 1950 and 1960, there were only two private galleries, the Laing and the Roberts, but by the mid-’60s, eight were in operation. The British bias in painting and sculpture was losing some force, and even the Group of Seven was becoming passé to many contemporary artists and critics. The gallerist David Mirvish, the painter Jack Bush, and the critic Clement Greenberg further accelerated change by promoting leading contemporary New York artists. Malcolmson — who began writing about art for the Toronto Telegram, the Toronto Star, and Saturday Night while studying law — was at the forefront of the new milieu, bent on smashing what some perceived to be “a conspiracy of silence” against artists in Canada.

Although it is far from perfect, Scene: How the 1960s Transformed Canadian Art adds to Malcolmson’s service, especially if you ask those who read it prior to publication. Its jacket boasts blurbs from such eminences as Michael Parke-Taylor (once the curator of modern art at the Art Gallery of Ontario), Matthew Teitelbaum (formerly of the AGO and now the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Roald Nasgaard (of Florida State University), and Sara Angel (the founder of the Art Canada Institute and a member of this magazine’s board of directors). Inside, the opening page is full of additional praise: “a truly great read” (the photographer Edward Burtynsky); “at once very personal yet almost encyclopedic in scope, quirky yet astonishingly insightful” (the general director of Koffler Arts, Matthew Jocelyn); “engaging and highly personal” (Stephan Jost, the current head of the AGO); “surprising, informative, and delightfully opinionated” (the University of British Columbia art historian John O’Brian); and “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of thriving art ecosystems” (Janne Sirén, of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum). Such impressively effusive encomiums could be a stratagem — but for what? To forestall and disarm negative criticism? Or to generously bruit the primary text?

I began to read, fearing from a quick scan of the illustrations that visual aesthetic intercourse would be disappointing, even though Malcolmson had lived through the period he was describing. Apart from ten tables, there are only thirty-six illustrations spread over 253 pages of what is essentially an insider memoir brimming more with gossip, chit‑chat, and anecdote than with what I would consider criticism. The colour illustrations are chiefly muddy in look, and of the three dozen, only twenty-two are reproductions of paintings or sculptures. The others include such miscellany as pictures of friends, the author’s old newspaper byline photo, Carmen Lamanna’s ostentatious signature (though this looks like art in its own right), Harold Town in a fur coat, a gallery bulletin, and a Venice Biennale protest. The cited works near the end are a mix of the good and the dumbfounding, including reputable art critics and columnists (Ian C. Ferguson, Lee Johnson, Elizabeth Kilbourn, Sarah Milroy, and Robert Fulford among them) but no fewer than seven Wikipedia articles, which are not the lowest rung of the critical ladder but are pretty far down, given the frequency of misinformation or partial information they can contain.

But I read on, respecting the author for his lengthy, conscientious career while regretting much of the content. In his foreword, the museum executive Marc Mayer dutifully praises Malcolmson’s “clear, lean, and engaging writing style,” which uses “accessible language free of alienating insider-isms.” Malcolmson, we are told, “bears cultural witness directly, unfiltered by anything more than his engaging personality and intelligence. He has a prodigious memory for the things he has seen, for the people who made them, and for those who made art their business.” I am all for such engagement, exempt from academic dry rot or extravagant pronouncements, but I am not so sure about the “unfiltered” part. No one is a tabula rasa, certainly not when it comes to opining about art. Malcolmson, now in his early nineties, does have an engaging personality, but his memory sometimes slips — as is usually the case with age — and his anecdotes, while not uninteresting, are often beside the point.

That said, Malcolmson’s informal discourses and revelations can be pleasant — rather like cozy fireside chats in inclement weather. And he does help readers see how gallerists, artists, and curators helped turn boringly conservative Toronto into a hub of artistic experimentation. While Malcolmson acknowledges that a lot of the art and some of the artists have not stood the test of time — though great talents did emerge, Alex Colville and Michael Snow among them — he wears his heart on his sleeve for the likes of Les Levine, Iain Baxter, and Jack Bush. In some of his strongest pages, he celebrates the curators Doris Shadbolt and Jean Boggs, but, overall, Scene has a piecemeal structure as it covers “the most important decade in Canada’s art history,” when the AGO and the National Gallery of Canada transitioned from “parochial shells to internationally respected institutions.”

Malcolmson does show how Montreal and Vancouver differed from Toronto and Ottawa. Montreal was distinctly French and intellectual with its Plasticiens (Guido Molinari, Yves Gaucher, and Jacques Hurtubise, for example) and Automatistes (Paul-Émile Borduas, Marcel Barbeau, Roger Fauteux, and Jean Paul Riopelle, in particular), while Vancouver had no pop art and little sculpture until Shadbolt’s Los Angeles 6 exhibition (featuring Robert Irwin, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Ron Davis, Edward Kienholz, and Craig Kauffman), which shifted the “stylistic tectonic plates.” This chapter contains some of Malcolmson’s best analysis, as he describes Bell’s ten-foot glass panels, glazed and polished to astonishing transparency in order to “dematerialize his art and reduce its density virtually to zero”; Kauffman’s vacuum-formed coloured plastic hangings; Davis’s use of light as if it were on his palette; and Irwin’s “structural intellectualism,” where painting is metaphorically dissolved onto wall space.

Elsewhere, Malcolmson writes of influential dealers, including Carmen Lamanna from Italy (who promoted David Bolduc, Paterson Ewen, and the collective General Idea); Jerrold Morris from England (who featured international artists such as Karel Appel, José Luis Cuevas, and Isamu Noguchi); Av Isaacs (who devoted space to William Kurelek, Michael Snow, and Christiane Pflug); Walter Moos (who exhibited Bush, Borduas, Greg Curnoe, and numerous European painters and sculptors); Dorothy Cameron (who featured Rita Letendre and Robert Markle, whose nudes led to a criminal conviction and the end of Cameron’s gallery); and David Mirvish (who championed Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, and others from New York).

But what bedevils even these sections is what I would call Malcolmson’s “listosis.” He is an effective advocate for his favourites, yet he allows personality to dominate his considerations. At times, his descriptions or analyses are paper-thin. His approval of Ewen, for example, is largely inconsequential, and he adds but a whit to what we already know about Snow. Some of his enthusiasms sound like wrong-headed appreciations (“classic Wieland — intense patriotism rendered in whimsical form”) or like gushes, as when he calls Baxter “one of the great artists of the era,” despite also describing one of his gimmick-ridden exhibitions as “un‑art‑like.” There is little value in his profile of the pre-eminent magazine illustrator Oscar Cahén, which ends fancifully: “Had he lived, it is probable that Cahén’s green shoots would have blossomed into a distinctive Toronto style.” Or maybe not? He quotes Teitelbaum on Richard Gorman (“a great lyrical painter in every phase”) as well as Milroy on the same artist (“a tour de force of trowelled‑on pigment that collapses under the weight of its own glorious excess”) without showing which view has more aesthetic validity. And he does not or cannot offer a counterpoint to Milroy’s demolition of Markle: “a slobbering dinosaur from the swamps of misogyny.”

Malcolmson is less reticent when it comes to Town. Instead of offering aesthetic critique, he bears down with all guns blazing, berating the artist for his “compulsive need to control” and a “preening, constructed persona” that obscured “an insecure, angst-driven personality.”

By contrast, the “painting pragmatist” Bush receives an incisive critical appreciation, though it originally appeared in 1966:

I wish more of this book were as insightful as these lines, but the truth is that Scene’s best quality is its author’s general heartfelt motivation, not its structure or technique.