Page 24 - Studio International - November 1968

Beaux Arts or the Musée d'Art Contemporain, anything to compare Canada's two social cultures, the French-speaking one started 200
with Toronto's Ontario Museum, with its great Chinese collections years earlier and then stood still: it virtually missed out on the nine-
(one of the very few major museum experiences available in Canada), teenth century. The Anglo-Scottish settlement of Ontario, on the
or the Art Gallery of Ontario, with its magnificent representation of other hand, is predominantly of the nineteenth century. Marshall
contemporary Americans and record for exhibitions of international McLuhan has pointed out that in the long run this could produce
calibre. Yet perversely in Montreal, the authority of a rival metro- unexpected rates of adaptability: that it might well be easier, in
politan centre persists, with a clear identity, whereas in Toronto it other words, to make a clean jump from seventeenth century to
can seem diffuse and sporadic. twentieth, than to plod through the less inspiring transition from
What the lack of a tradition signifies in the character of Canadian nineteenth to twentieth. There are already some indications that
art at present is a question I touched on briefly in considering such a paradox might prove true politically; in terms of the arts, it
Vancouver, and will return to in a moment. Montreal's 'tradition' is probably doesn't rest with the future of painting or sculpture at all,
of a curious double kind. Like every regional centre in Canada, it has but with advanced intermedia thinking. Vancouver, Toronto and
a history of lone voices in the wilderness, the occasional artist-teacher Montreal all have their intermedia activity, and all have their con-
preparing the way for a younger generation, and a final 'break- tacts with the Cage/Rauschenberg EAT (Experiments in Art and
through'. The difference is that this took place in a development Technology) movement. Of the three, Montreal would seem to be
closely paralleling the development of post-war painting in the the intellectual dark horse. A painter/film-maker like Charles Gag-
United States. In a kind of miniature version, the circumstances and non, who is also Professor of the Philosophy of Communications at
the timing are comparable. There were the same war-time émigrés Loyola College, and who designed what many people regard as the
from Europe, the same vital links with both pre-war and post-war most 'thinking' major contribution to Expo '67, the controversial
experiment in Paris (notably through James Morrice, John Lyman Christian pavilion, represents a position both less exposed and pos-
and Alfred Pellan). Borduas and his pupil-collaborator, Riopelle, sibly more serious than much of the entertainment that passes for
were in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, and when a intermedia experiment elsewhere.
hard-edge development arrived, it was as a parallel but largely Toronto is where all the promise and the problems of the current
independent development rather than an American-inspired one. If Canadian scene loom largest—a big city which can be surprisingly
one is talking of quality in individual paintings, rather than the small-town; an art-scene which has the strongest pull as a metropoli-
general outlook for a healthy art-scene, I would tend to say that this tan centre, but which has no definable centre of its own; a place
independent continuity in Montreal, with roots going back to where you are likely to hear the most contemptuous impatience with
Europe, as in the finest senior-generation painting in the States, Canadian chauvinism in art, but where the neurosis about making it
reveals itself in the unforced poise of its best artists' work. But there is internationally is most marked. At the Ontario Art Gallery an
another, as yet unpredictable, aspect of Montreal 'tradition'. Of inspired two-year period of buying by Brydon Smith (now at
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