In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The National Gallery of Canada: Ideas, Art, Architecture
  • Christopher Drew Armstrong (bio)
Douglas Ord. The National Gallery of Canada: Ideas, Art, Architecture McGill-Queen’s University Press. xii, 496. $49.95

With the expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum underway and plans for the transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario in preparation, the appearance of a detailed study of the history and architecture of the National Gallery of Canada would seem to offer a timely reflection on the ideologies and politics that subtend the construction of public spaces for the exhibition of art. Designed by the McGill-trained architect Moshe Safdie and built between 1983 and 1988, the new National Gallery building signalled a transformation in federal cultural policy, reversing a century of neglect for an institution that had been housed in a sequence of temporary venues, all singularly ill adapted for the presentation and conservation of works of art. [End Page 354]

No academic history of the National Gallery exists, though there has been substantial media interest in the institution at key points in its recent history. While Douglas Ord's book is based on research conducted during a year-long fellowship at the National Gallery, it should be approached as a polemic that exploits the history and architecture of the institution to serve the author's rhetorical ends. Thus, while the book contains much fascinating information about the directors of the gallery and other figures who played prominent roles in the institution's history, this material is subordinated to an overarching idea that emphasizes the more parochial, nationalistic, and authoritarian aspects of these individuals and their goals for the National Gallery.

At the core of Ord's book is an attempt to understand the genesis and significance of Safdie's principal design gesture, the sequence of spaces through which the visitor enters the building. A long ramp behind the gallery's south-facing colonnade leads to a vast great hall dominating Nepean Point above the Ottawa River. Echoing the form of the Gothic-revival library of Parliament, the great hall underlines the relationship between the cultural goals of the National Gallery and the political agenda of the federal government. Nowhere on the ramp or in the great hall does the visitor experience the works of art that the gallery was built to house; exhibition and curatorial spaces are appended in a clumsy, bunker-like structure. The dichotomy between the colonnade-great hall sequence and the exhibition spaces suggests a schism between the political function of the building as a crutch for ideas about Canadian nationalism and the works of art, which serve only a subordinate role in Safdie's monument.

Ord sees the ramp as emblematic of authoritarianism, evoking models from Egyptian temple architecture to the little-known ramp that precedes Bernini's 'Scala Regia' in the Vatican. The great hall, which according to Safdie was the product of geometrical investigations linked to Platonic metaphysics, is construed by Ord as a quasi-religious space. With these readings established in the first part of the book, Ord moves on to show how a deeply religious and nationalistic approach to art emerged in the rhetoric and acquisition policy of the institution. The first two directors, Eric Brown and Henry Orr McCurry, as well as the influential trustee Sir Edmund Walker (who appointed Brown in 1912), were Christian Scientists; another influential trustee, Lawren Harris, was a Theosophist as well as being the outspoken leader of the Group of Seven. With the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences chaired by Vincent Massey in 1951, religious justifications for art began to dissipate, but a strong authoritarianism persisted, notably in the pronouncements of the first female director, Dr Jean Sutherland Boggs. As head of the Canadian Museums Construction Corporation, Boggs would oversee the realization of Safdie's 'crystal palace,' but her relationship with [End Page 355] the architect was anything but a meeting of minds, as Boggs's own published statements attest.

Ord's irksome manner of deploying quotations is the clearest indication that he is concerned primarily with reinforcing his thesis. The same quotations are repeated over and over throughout the book as if to...

pdf

Share