Introduction: Art in the University of Toronto Collections

ELIZABETH LEGGE Introduction: Art in the University of Toronto Collections Choosing artworks to be exhibited at the opening of the University of Toronto Gallery in the University Art Centre in November 1996 was a perplexing task, since the University collections are wildly heterogeneous. In the end, I decided' to capitalize on exactly that aspect of them, and to exhibit a dozen or so works that were, by and large, as different from one another as they could be. To situate the University's art (ordinarily dispersed throughout the campus) within the diversity of the University's intellectual life, I asked people associated with the University in various ways to write about a chosen work of art for the University of Toronto Quarterly. In one case, the portrait ofJohn Graves Simcoe in the president's office in Simcoe Hall, it seemed appropriate to have someone write who could represent visitors to the university - so a professor from York University has made a contribution as well. The essays here have come out of this trawling of a range of disciplines and interests in art. Linda Hutcheon (Department of English, and Centre for Comparative Literature) chose a painting that she passes every day in the entrance to the Robarts Library: Malcolm Rains's Samothrace (1991), an enlarged representation of a' piece of paper, both crumpled for discarding and stagily posed. This painting provoked Hutcheon to consider the vexed matter of the author's intention. However rigorously or piously expressed the artist's statement may be - and exhibition mores require the artist to issue a statement - the artist cannot prevent the viewer from bringing absolutely anything else to bear on the work of art, from a vast knowledge of literature and critical theory to pets. Linda Hutcheon wryly meditates on the mutual interference of artist, intentions, and viewer. Another image of discarded paper, Will Garlitz's Litteratus with Flowers (1989), depicts pages of a book or manuscript and freesias floating out to sea. When this painting was acquired for the Faculty Club, Peter O'Brien (Manager of Community Relations), then on the Art Committee, thought that this richly painted, ironically romantic image of the futility of poetic aspirations would be appropriate to the intellectual environment. As O'Brien points out in his essay here, the painting is not meant to represent anything but the desire or nostalgia for mimetic representation. There is a further irony in this. At the meetings of the Faculty Club Art Committee at whi~h we were considering contemporary art acquisitions (to augment the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1997 396 ELIZABETH LEGGE fine collection of Group of Seven paintings already there), I showed slides of various artists' work. One was a Garlitz pastel (from his JThree Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,' discussed in O'Brien's article) showing apples enmired, perhaps rotting, in some dark muck. When it carne up on the screen, there was a kind of relieved general expression of pleasure on the part of the committee. 'Is this really what you'd want in the Faculty Club dining room?' I flippantly asked. 'Yes - at least it's representational,' came the reply. Eleanor Bond's painting Development ofa Fishing Village as a Honeymoon Resort (1985-88) was another ofthe rnajarcanternporary paintings acquired for the Faculty Club. Like many other artists dealing with landscape, she seem's only able to do so in a way that comments, often ironically, on the national landscape tradition. There is no loon call to draw us directly into the unspoiled pure north of the Group of Seven landscape any more. Contemporary landscapes flaunt the ta~t of the tourist wilderness, its reproduction on brochures and postcards (as Bond noted elsewhere in a proposed painting title, 'displaced farmers set up cappuccino bars and sushi stands in Lake of the Woods'). Bond's work imagines the demise of present economic structures and the advent of a world in which the only commodity is leisure. Mel Watkins (Department of Economics) has woven an appropriately humorous and complex account of his response to Bond, drawing on his knowledge as an economist and his longstanding concerns with Canadian national identity. Vera Frenkel...