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Introduction
by Joseph Martin
Article en français
Pages 1 | 2
In November 1983, plans and models for the National Gallery's new building were unveiled;
construction began with a brilliant display of fireworks above the Sussex
Drive site. This celebration followed months of hard work by staff at the
Gallery and at the Canada Museums Construction Corporation (CMCC) and
by the architects from the firms of Moshe Safdie of Montreal and The Parkin
Partnership of Toronto. We shared our excitement about the designs with
the public by organizing an exhibition of the models, plans, and drawings,
and also by hosting lectures by CMCC chairman, Jean Sutherland Boggs, and
design architect Moshe Safdie.
Planning the new building and meeting present responsibilities
pressed us to balance future and present demands. Responses to the design
proposals were solicited from people both inside and outside the Gallery;
in particular, staff sought solutions to problems concerning the display
and storage of the collections, and the natural and artificial lighting
schemes. The revision and addition of collections records through the computerized
Canadian Heritage Information Network (designed to provide detailed
information on the national collections to the Canadian public), and
a physical inventory of the National Gallery's holdings, were identified
as priorities to be completed before the move into the new building.
Simultaneously, the extensive loans and public programmes required the expertise
and support of many of those divisions in the Gallery which were also involved
in activities with the new building, particularly curatorial, restoration
and conservation, and technical services. Throughout the year, curators,
conservators, librarians, educators, and exhibition organizers continued
to share freely their knowledge and time with the public and with other
institutions. These services included responses to letters and queries
from galleries, museums, and individuals, curatorial and conservation examination
of works of art, provision of teaching materials for schools, and other
professional contacts with the museum community and the public in Canada and abroad. Conservators and curators drafted a new conservation policy
and procedures document, and while a qualified moratorium was imposed on
purchases, curators revised the Gallery's policy and procedures governing
its collections.
Despite the moratorium, the collections continued to expand. Two oil paintings, The Coureur de Bois and The Art Lover
by the Impressionist Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, and Jack
Bush's Three Greens and Black were outstanding among Canadian
purchases. A work by Canadian painter and mixed-media artist John Massey, Body and Soul - A Cinematic Stasis,
and a ceramic sculpture by Jamelie
Hassan were acquired for the Modern and Contemporary collections. Also
noteworthy were important European drawings by Samuel Palmer and Puvis
de Chavannes, a superb etching, The Table, by Picasso, and a
portrait of Stéphane Natanson by Félix Vallotton.
Prominent among the many donations were Jean Arp's bronze Torso
of Kore from Mr G. J. Rosengarten of Montreal, The Temptation of St
Anthony, attributed to Hieronymus Bosch, donated by the late Mrs Jeanne
tynch-Staunton of Lavaltrie, Quebec, and Emily Carr's Four Children
in a Breton Cottage, one of four works donated to the Gallery by Dr
Max Stern of Montreal. In honour of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Friends
of the National Gallery donated twenty Cape Dorset prints commemorative,
in turn, of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Cape Dorset studio.
The Gallery's active loans programme continued to attract national
and international attention to the high quality of its collections. We
played a major part in celebrating the opening of the new Vancouver Art
Gallery with the loan of seventeen Canadian and twenty-seven European masterpieces.
Other notable loans were to the National Museum of Man for the exhibition The Covenant
Chain:
Indian Ceremonial and Trade Silver, to James
Kerr-Lawson: A Canadian Abroad, organized by the Art Gallery of Windsor,
and to the Art Gallery of Ontario's Murray Favro Retrospective. Six
major works, including Tom Thomson's Northern River, Lawren Harris's
Maligne Lake, Jasper Park,
and A. Y.: Jackson's Terre Sauvage were
loaned to the Art Gallery of Ontario's Mystic North exhibition.
The Gallery also lent works to exhibitions in western Europe and Japan.
An exceptionally varied and interesting programme of eighteen exhibitions was offered to Gallery visitors.
Cultural Engineering,
an exhibition spanning a decade of work by video artist Tom Sherman,
explored the effects of the media on public and private life. Walker Evans: The Phyllis Lambert Gift
celebrated a major donation, which
gave the Gallery the world's most important collection of works by the outstanding
American photographer Walker Evans. The donation over the next few years
of an important collection of 170 works was marked by The Magic Worlds
of M. C. Escher. The exhibition featured prints from the Dutch artist's
entire career, ranging from realistic landscapes to the invented universes
he designed until his death in 1972. Giuseppe Penone presented recent
works by this contemporary Italian sculptor that explore the mysterious,
invisible processes of change in the natural world. "We enjoyed the pictures
that we saw," a children's exhibition capturing the child's reaction to
a Gallery visit, was organized by the Friends of the National Gallery and
the Gallery's Education Services to celebrate the Friends' twenty-fifth
anniversary.
Following the renovation of the sixth-floor Prints, Drawings
and Photographs galleries in the Lorne Building, a new series of rotating
installations from the permanent collections was launched in anticipation
of the kind of programme the new building could accommodate. The first
of these, Animals, featured beasts as subjects of artistic representation
through six centuries. In addition, a video room was opened; it offers
regular video viewing from the Gallery's permanent collection.
The following exhibitions borrowed from other institutions
further enriched the Gallery's programme: Maurice Cullen (Agnes
Etherington Art Centre, Kingston); Murray Favro (Art Gallery of
Ontario ); L'art de l'architecte: Three Centuries of Architectural
Drawing in Quebec City (Université Laval and the Musée
du Québec); Sidney Grossman (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston);
and Ladders to Heaven: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage (Royal Ontario
Museum).
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