By way of England, Scotsman champions Canadian art
Ian Dejardin comes to the McMichael Collection from Dulwich Picture Gallery with a ‘fresh eye’
A good number of years ago — enough of them that he’s loath to count just how many — a young Ian Dejardin was a curatorial assistant at London’s esteemed Royal College of Art when he happened across an unusual book. Between its covers were dynamic, expressive images of a teeming, faraway wilderness and a place he had never been.
Among the authors of these pictures — Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer — not a single name was familiar. How odd, he thought, for an art historian with deep knowledge of global artistic movements, as he was.
For three decades, those images stayed embedded in his mind, quietly refusing to leave. In 2011, Dejardin finally performed an exorcism: that long-ago fascination became Painting Canada, a broad survey of paintings by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven aimed at giving his fellow Britons the same unknown pleasure he had experienced so many years before.
It opened at London’s venerable Dulwich Picture Gallery, Britain’s oldest art museum, where Dejardin had become director. It became a dark-horse hit in London’s competitive museum scene and there, one could imagine, the Scottish art historian’s Canadian odyssey might have ended.
Hardly. In 2013, he produced another Canadian survey there of B.C. painter Emily Carr, which outdid Painting Canada in viewership and critical raves. Next year, Dulwich hosts another Canadian survey, of painter David Milne, again on Dejardin’s initiative. It’s meant a lot of back and forth over the Atlantic, which has had a lasting effect.
“There was a point where I would be in the taxi coming in from the airport and it felt less like I was visiting and more like I was coming home,” he said.
So why not make it official? This summer, as you may have heard, he did exactly that.
In July, Dejardin, to the surprise of many — himself included — accepted the vacant role of director at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, a woodsy temple built expressly by its founder to keep the mythic wilderness vision of Thomson and the Seven intact.
For Dejardin, an erudite Scotsman with deep expertise in European old master painting, that mission is more disservice than homage.
“One of the — I hope — benefits of me coming in is the fresh eye,” said Dejardin, in town recently on a house-hunting expedition in advance of his arrival next spring. In the bright sunlight of a late fall afternoon, Dejardin perched merrily on the patio of a downtown café, drinking it all in.
From London, Dejardin brings all of the enthusiasm for Canada, and for Toronto, one could hope for — “I get positively emotional about being given this opportunity at this stage in my career,” he says — but none of the hang-ups.
“Toronto is a wonderful city,” he says, which, in the mouth of a longtime Londoner, might be the first indication of the fresh look he intends to bring. “This Canadian attitude; are we good enough? That has to stop,” he says. “When I did Painting Canada, I had to put up with this ridiculous amount of gratitude, as though I’d done some great national service when, in actual fact, I should be thanking you.”
How that will translate to Dejardin’s view of the McMichael remains to be seen. But when asked what his fresh eyes might mean to the gallery, he laughs.
“The Group of Seven, without the maple syrup,” he grins. “It’s all about relevance. If you’re a fan, like I am, you don’t need to be told the group is relevant. But for the broader public, with so much interest in contemporary art, we need to make those dialogues work. Because it’s all about that dialogue, isn’t it?”
The McMichael has been histor- ically, famously poor at just that kind of engagement. Its founders, the late Robert and Signe McMichael, who donated their home of several dozen Group of Seven paintings to the province in 1965, loathed modern and contemporary art. They saw it as their museum: an effective bulwark against the flood of difference washing over Canadian society and a preservative of traditions that they believed the rising social upheaval of the era surely threatened.
As a result, the tension between now and then has possessed the McMichael like a living thing. Over the years, Robert McMichael went so far as to sue the government over control of the collection, as it grew by the thousands into modern and contemporary works.
Over that time, the museum ate directors for breakfast, churning through years of tumult and chief executives like so many butter croissants. Even since McMichael’s death in 2003, that appetite hasn’t been fully satisfied: Tom Smart left the gallery abruptly in 2010, after a few years of seeming to make great strides toward a gallery more in step with the world around it; his successor, Victoria Dickinson, slipped away last year when her contract was not renewed, a fact the McMichael felt compelled to announce publicly, via news release.
The top job remained vacant for almost a year until Dejardin was confirmed, which might tell you something about its long historical shadow. Dejardin, who has spent ample time in its galleries and vaults selecting works first for Painting Canada, then Emily Carr and now Milne (“I think I’m more familiar now with Canadian artists than I am with British,” he says) nonetheless took some convincing.
“I thought, well, yes, but no, no, no,” he says. “I thought about it, of course. It’s a magical place and I love it. But it had some of the same issues that Dulwich had a few years ago: Everyone loves it, but it should be more, somehow.”
Dejardin faced some of the same issues at Dulwich, a small jewel box of a museum chock-full of old European masters, but well off the central-London beaten path. In his time there, he built its reputation well be- yond those limitations, something Toronto curator and critic Sarah Milroy thinks he can do here, as well.
“Ian has enormous confidence, but without the arrogance that can sometimes go along with it,” says Milroy, who co-curated the Carr and Milne shows with him. It means not only is he willing to take risks, she says, but bring people along with him. “That kind of fearlessness is palpable: to the public, to the press, to the donors. It makes so much possible.”
Confidence, of course, was a key element in the McMichael’s courtship of Dejardin. Badly bruised over the years, a strong leader seems the final piece it needs to move forward.
“In its most basic form, our goal is to increase viewership and you do that by being dynamic and relevant,” says McMichael board chair Andrew Dunn. “Ian embodies those things and everyone will come to see the McMichael that way because of it.”
To be fair, the McMichael spent more than a decade severely hobbled by its founders’ wishes and, until very recently, its limitations were legislatively enshrined. Robert McMichael, who was close to conservative provincial premier Mike Harris, succeeded in having legislation passed in 2000 that restricted the museum’s collecting and exhibiting to all but the artists McMichael approved. He ensured the restrictions would outlive him: The legislation mandated an advisory committee bound to uphold his terms.
In 2011, the terms of the legislation were finally loosened and the gallery has taken tentative steps into its new context with several notable contemporary exhibitions (one, by Winnipeg photo-installation artist Sarah Anne Johnson, closed this month).
But under Dickinson, it struggled to have the impact that many hoped its unfettered mandate would bring forth. The McMichael’s chief curator, Katerina Atanassova, one of Dejardin’s Painting Canada co-curators, left in early 2014 to become the head curator of Canadian art at the Na- tional Gallery, more than a year before Dickinson’s departure, leaving it without curatorial leadership.
A pause can also refresh, though, and that’s what’s been happening at the McMichael most recently. In March 2015, to replace Atanassova, the gallery brought in Sarah Stanners, whose expertise is in modern art, the likes of which McMichael hated. Tasked with the gallery’s 50th anniversary show, Stanners drew a line in the sand: She included a survey of giant abstract paintings by Jack Bush, alongside new works by Vancouver painter Colleen Heslin. In the mix, and for balance, was a pocket-sized display of the works by Group of Seven elder statesman A.Y. Jackson.
It’s a gesture, Dejardin says, that would have Robert McMichael “turning in his grave as we speak,” but he means it with sympathy, not contempt. “It needs to be possible to respect the achievement of the McMichaels while moving forward at the same time,” Dejardin says. “And this is respectful. They might not see it that way, but it is. Of course they wouldn’t be happy with the collection growing away from what they had originally intended. But it is a line in the sand and maybe now it’s something we can move on from it.”
Moving on to what is the question of the hour, Dejardin’s not one for grand proclamations months before the job even begins. He offers at least a bit of a clue.
“There are two things I’m allergic to: one is snobbery and the other is pigeonholing,” he says. “A museum has a personality of its own and it should talk with a particular voice. At the McMichael, you have this unique selling point of something profoundly Canadian and you can use that. You can embrace that.”
But not too much, of course. “Well, the restaurant won’t be having any back bacon,” he laughs, then turns serious. “The McMichael represents something intrinsic to the creativity that produces Canadian art. That’s what we need to draw out.”