But the European wing does not only include the work of Old Masters; in a spirit characteristic of the whole museum it allows for contrasts and associations that rise above history. In a room called “Encounters with Diversity,” for instance, one finds Delacroix’s hallucinatory The Fanatics of Tangier (1857) alongside Nancy Spero’s deliberately archaic-looking feminist scroll Rebirth of Venus (1984). In the sculpture atrium, whose windows look out onto Grange Park, one finds David Altmejd’s The Index (2007), which consists of a wall that is littered with shards of mirror and from which artificial trees grow. There are swaths of bloody fur, brittle white rodent bones and stuffed squirrels. Life-sized figures in suits with bird’s heads lord over the scene. At the far end of the installation is a glittery cave in which another bird-man sits, presumably ready to head out for the office. The Index is funny, beautiful and creepily allegorical: North America as a shattered naturalhistory-museum-cum-hall-of-mirrors, ruled by hybrid beasts who are one part company man, one part indigenous god.
It is both inevitable and appropriate that the AGO’s defining collection, the one that Frank Gehry’s architecture thematically alludes to throughout, is the Thomson Collection. The rooms devoted to the Thomson Collection are clean, elegant, austere and brightly lit. There are no labels on the walls, just hand-held guides at the entrance of each room with a list of works. While this can be inconvenient, it encourages sustained contemplation. Set in raised glass cases are examples from Thomson’s significant collection of First Nations art, drawing attention to the deeper continuity—the vertical integration, one might say—of North American artmaking. Highlights include an intricately ornamented shaman’s rattle and a beautifully carved antler club, both made by members of the Coast Tsimshian from northern British Columbia.
While the Thomson Collection contains works by numerous important artists, its real strength lies in the work of Lawren Harris and David Milne, two profoundly different kinds of painter. While Tom Thomson and most of the Group of Seven painters adopt a visionary stance toward landscape, Lawren Harris’s mature work goes a step further and is openly mystical, bathed in otherworldly light. In Lake Superior III (ca. 1923–24), bright clouds slide along above radiant blue water and an infinite horizon. In Untitled Mountain Landscape (1927–28), a vaulted cathedral sky cracks open, flooding the snowy mountains with pale golden light—an annunciation enacted among the elements. In works like Baffin Island Mountains (ca. 1931), the ice-congested sea and sheer ice mountains are dwarfed by the vast blue dome of the sky. These paintings are not only devoid of human presence but depict an alien, spiritual realm from which human beings seem to be excluded. By contrast, David Milne made paintings that have an intimate, human touch, suggesting that Milne’s world is far gentler than Harris’s, with its Platonic absolutes.
From the intensity of Harris and Milne one spills out into the glowing warmth of the Galleria Italia and its long, bending wooden ribs, its view of the street and beyond and Giuseppe Penone’s sculptural installation The Hidden Life Within (2008). In one portion of the installation, a massive cedar trunk has been hollowed out to reveal a tree growing within the tree, and on the back wall, planks have been whittled into branches. Penone’s work suggests that we here in this world of wood and flesh are enfolded within deeper processes of growth, continuity and time. The Galleria Italia, whose structure evokes the skeleton of a giant canoe, is one of many places in the museum where Gehry’s architecture, in concert with the collection, proposes this kind of continuity while remaining conscious of the very contemporary city outside—the panorama of bustling Dundas Street West literally fills the room.
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