What Museums Are For
"What Museums Are For" by Daniel Baird, Spring 2009, pp. 58-65
When the Art Gallery of Ontario reopened in mid-November, I dodged the long lines and cold rain by showing up at 11pm—the museum was open until midnight on Friday and Saturday. Ignoring the architecture—the massive sheets of glass and titanium and beams of wood and steel I had watched being assembled over the past year—I headed straight for the permanent Canadian collection, the reason I had ever cared about the AGO in the first place. On the second level, I found Emily Carr’s Indian Church (1920), a simple white church set against a lush vortex of green, Lawren Harris’s moody, glimmering Beaver Swamp, Algoma (1929), Jean Paul Riopelle’s autumnal Chevreuse II (1953–54) and Paterson Ewen’s ecstatic Cloud Over Water (1979). These are all visionary paintings, but in a way that feels peculiarly North American, with earth, water, sky, trees and light turbulent, haunted and on the cusp of transformation. It struck me that engaging with art of this kind is what going to a North American museum is for.
The best way to begin a visit to the new Art Gallery of Ontario is not to hurriedly duck out of the rain via the great glass-andwood facade at the main entrance, but rather to start at the back, in Grange Park. Hovering above the Grange, the reserved 19th century Georgian manor in the park, is an immense cube clad in shimmering, reflective blue titanium. Set amid the blue is a T-shaped window from which whorls upward an enclosed steeland-glass stairway spanning the fourth and fifth levels: from a distance, it looks evanescent, like a silvery jet of spiralling water.
If the AGO’s southern face is sublimely elemental, deferring to the classical balance of the Grange, then the main entrance on Dundas Street West radiates an immediate warmth and intimacy. The exterior curved glass skein that encloses the Galleria Italia (and sculpture gallery) is ribbed with Douglas fir beams that bend and torque against the cascading rhythm of the glass. And with the galleries’ wood-panelled backing, the museum seems to float and smoulder like a massive communal hearth, the inviting heat spreading out onto the street. Upon actually entering the building, the visitor encounters a serpentine wooden ramp that slithers toward Walker Court and the Grange, a powerful north-south axis that is one of the museum’s organizing principles. And then there is the vastly expanded installation of the collection itself.
The first level of the AGO is largely, though not exclusively, devoted to European art, and there are several highlights that give the collection the kind of historical depth that it previously lacked. In Tintoretto’s beautiful Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet (ca. 1545–55), for instance, Christ is relegated to a right-hand corner of the wide rectangular canvas while a dog lies in the foreground and other disciples clown around, unaware of the gravity of the moment. Bernini’s 1655 bronze The Crucified Christ (Corpus) is by turns erotic and remote, its tone one of quiet lamentation. The sculpture’s smooth surface, softly lit, has the sensuousness of skin; the body hanging down from the cross subtly writhes, tendons and muscles taut and rippling: Bernini captures Christ in transition between the materiality of this world and the immateriality of the next. And in what may be the AGO’s single most spectacular room hangs a trio of Rubens masterpieces—The Entombment (1612–4), Samson and Delilah (1609–10) and The Massacre of the Innocents (1611–12). If Bernini gravitates toward the melancholy dimension of the life of the body, Rubens is shamelessly carnal and dramatic. In The Entombment Christ is muscular and ravaged, unmasked in harsh light, more like a dead gladiator than the son of God, and in The Massacre of the Innocents a frenzied clutch of naked men hurl infants onto the paving stones, the swooning women’s long silk and velour gowns half ripped off, as though they were being raped.
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