Page 23 - Studio International - January 1965

Gallery going in Toronto

rich: besides entertaining such travelling shows as
Clement Greenberg's Post Painterly Abstraction and the
British Council's Contemporary British Painting, the
gallery organized the world's first Canaletto exhibition
and a study of 273 Picassos, entitled Picasso and Man,
that John Richardson called the most imaginative to
have bee.n devoted to that artist.
The gall.ery is designed around a skylighted sculpture
court whose fountain is a replica of Verrocchio's Boy
with the Dolphin-complete even with that parched
trickle of water that you find in the Palazzo Vecchio!
The sculpture section is small, but it contains robust
pieces by Moore, Hepworth and Butler and an elegant
Emilio Greco, as well as rare bronzes by Picasso and
Matisse. Gaps in the gallery's collection of European
painting are also compensated for by rewarding
individual items, and the rooms that follow the
chronological development of European art are an
essential asset to Toronto's two universities. The section
devoted to Canadian artists, for reasons already men­
tioned, is rich in the work of the new generation as well
as in that of Canada's celebrated 'Group of Seven·­
which between the wars developed a style of painterly
landscape reminiscent of, though unconnected with,
the same period in Scandinavia.
Among postwar artists, a long list of English names
the youngest of which is Harold Cohen's, reflects the
'loyalist' temper of Toronto patronage throughout the
'fifties. Some extent of this, now waning, loyalty to the
'old country' can be judged from the claim of one dealer
that he could locate fifteen Chadwick sculptures in
Toronto alone; and if you begin a tour of the uptown
dealers by visiting the Laing Gallery you will find this
predilection for British artists of the 'fifties still strong,
Harold Town in spite of reorientations going on.
Optical. 1964 The Laing family, who have been channelling top
54 X 54 in. European names into this continent for over thirty
Picture Loan Society years, find their trade in British gilt-edged undiminished.
At Laing's, the international set drive up, as ever, to
appraise an Epstein or a seven foot Bather by Emilio
Greco, a Butler or a Manzu Cardinal or, perhaps, from
the gallery's collection of classic Canadians, a painting
by Cornelius Kreigoff, Canada's most rare and delightful
landscapist. Laing provenance is a hallmark across
Canada and the States, and G. Blair Laing, who
inherited the business from his father in 1959, is also
well known on the European scene. which he visits
several times a year to buy for his decorous Bloor Street
collection.
Laing's opened in 1934, but there was an art trade in
Toronto long before then. The Cooling Galleries on Bay
Street, which still specialize in the petits maftres of the
19th century, were established as early as 1797, and
the Roberts Gallery on Yonge Street has a pedigree
dating from 1842. Laing's nearest contemporary in fact
is the Picture Loan Society, formed by a group of
enthusiasts in 1937, rather like London's A.I.A.
Douglas Duncan, doyen of the Toronto scene, can
still be found at Picture Loan, the one original sponsor
still involved. He recounts how the Society opened
with a one man show by Carl Schaefer, and struggled
to maintain the flickering avant garde for over twenty
years. Here came such names as David Milne, LeMoine
Fitzgerald, Paul-Emile Borduas, Will Ogilvie and the
Richard Turner exiled and impoverished Wyndham Lewis-and in 1954
Chamber. 1 963 Harold Town, Canada's enfant terrible, now in the Tate
Cast cement fondu with Toni Onley and David Partridge. You may still
9 ft. 7 in. high
Dorothy Cameron Gallery pick a future star from Picture Loan's enormous bran-
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