OUT THERE
Mystical Landscapes reimagines the blockbuster exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario
At first blush, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Mystical Landscapes might seem the product of a very unfortunate time warp: The big names — Van Gogh, Gaugin, Monet — are all up on the marquee and the stage appears set for a throwback, prefab touring blockbuster art exhibition of days gone by, the likes of which museums like the AGO once used, with some regularity, to bolster their bottom lines.
You can think of such things as the equivalent of the Nth “reunion” tour by rock and roll geriatrics like the Rolling Stones, who haul their creaking hips on stage time and again with not even the pretense of creative expression: It’s about the money, baby, and the fact it continues to flow assures such things won’t be going away any time soon.
To think that way about Mystical Landscapes, though, would be wrong.
Museums in the past decade have shifted away from such greatest hits tours, citing concerns both practical (like, say, insurance) and philosophical — when even museum directors themselves wear out on guaranteed ticket sales, you know there’s a problem.
Build in a widening view of art history — no longer is it perfectly kosher to say all important art in the 20th century exists along a straight line drawn from France to America, excluding all else — and the big-name model weakens further.
Make no mistake: Mystical Landscapes is a blockbuster, but within it lies a highly considered reimagining of the form’s various faux pas. First off, the show is built from within the AGO itself, which is a big deal. The museum’s history with such things has always been as a receiver, not a generator.
No longer is it perfectly kosher to say all important art in the 20th century exists along a straight line drawn from France to America, excluding all else
That means, alongside the Gauguins, the Monets and the Van Gogh (there are just two, including his absurdly famous The Starry Night Over the Rhone At Arles, 1888, which occupies a wall of its own in the show’s moody, deliciously weird final room) you’ll find such hometown heroes as Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris and Frederick Horsman Varley, who almost steals the show all on his own.
This is the AGO doing what it should: Resituating our national chestnuts in the history of painting, and not just in the true north strong and free.
Significantly, that’s not all: When the show closes here in January, it packs up and ships off to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, one of the world’s grand high temples of Modern painting, where the Canadians will be seen for the first time alongside the great icons of French art. It’s the Canadian art version of a Trojan Horse.
So, Mystical Landscapes is less a blockbuster than a full-throated declaration of self: Like it or not, one way a museum moves from B-level — good, not great; catcher, not pitcher — to A-level is by generating shows that other museums want and will pay for. With the old blockbuster model off the table, new models need to be invented, and with Mystical Landscapes, the AGO does it with an aplomb that is both risky and surprising.
It departs from the creaky, simplistic blockbuster template in more ways than one.
AGO curator Katharine Lochnan builds the exhibition through a personal point of view: In recent years, while on a quest to uncover her own roots, she found herself on the far coast of Ireland, a nexus of ancient, out-there spiritualism: Celtic, Druidic, you name it.
Looking up at emerald cliffs looming over a turbulent, grey sea, Lochnan had an epiphany: In the swirl of modernity that utterly transformed western society a little over a century ago, perhaps the shift in art that accompanied it — from realism to the heady, gestural realm of Impressionism and beyond — went deeper than content and technique.
And that maybe, just maybe, the transformation of the land — through the birth of heavy industry and rapid urbanization — had sparked for some artists a retreat from an increasingly grim reality into not just a landscape of the mind, but of the soul.
Here, we pause for the rolling of the eyes. I get it: Mysticism isn’t for everyone, and count me among them (the AGO itself has a sense of humour about the whole thing; the obligatory gift shop at the show’s exit is outfitted with chunky crystals).
What can’t be denied, though, is a natural human urge to recoil from ugliness — in whatever form — and seek solace wherever it can be found. And when it can’t, we invent it — and so was organized religion born, and continues to thrive in these trying times.
Mystical Landscapes is founded in something entirely plausible. The dawn of the Modern era cast virtually everything into doubt — even formal religion itself, the sacred tenets of which were under constant attack from a burgeoning realm of scientific know-how (see: Charles Darwin).
In that splintering of belief systems, art — in Europe, so long tethered to Christian morality — attended to a more ambiguous sublime, found in nature, that captured the otherworldly without the specifics of Christian mythology.
That said, the show develops its theme along logical lines. It opens with a bang: A triptych by Paul Gauguin featuring not his trademark Polynesian nudes, but instead, Jesus Christ. The set has not been seen together since it was painted in 1888, marking an art-historical moment, but also a point from which Lochnan quickly departs.
After a few too many works along the same lines by the French painter Maurice Denis, we’re deep into the mystic: The beatific glow of Claude Monet’s Poplars (1891), his luminous Grain-stack (1891), the dark mystery of his (drum roll, please) Water Lilies (1907).
Past such greatest hits, the show defines itself with impactful surprises: The dark turbulence of Swedish painter Eugene Jansson (if you’re thinking “who?” join the club), the colourful, angular sweep of light across a Verdun battlefield by Felix Valloton, or the neon flashes of our own A.Y. Jackson’s Gas Attack Lievin (1918). The war works are a strain on the theme, to my eyes, but big ideas are built for broad embraces — that’s what curators do — and the paintings themselves deliver on sheer visceral effect.
From there, it’s on through familiar turf cast in new light — Emily Carr’s late works, looking skyward to the warm opacity of the beyond; a strangely limp-looking West Wind, by Tom Thomson, maybe a little out of place here; a gnarled, fleshy scene by Frederick Horsman Varley veiled in misty obscurity that all but steals the show — and into the show’s wildly wonderful grand finale.
At the end of a long gallery and facing Lawren Harris’s overworked icon Isolation Peak ( 1929) is an image of a towering crystal aglow from within. It’s by Wenzel Hablik, a Czech artist I’ve never heard of, but so what? Painted in 1914, it’s monumentally, weirdly beautiful, and a signal that whatever Lochan’s kept bubbling beneath the surface is about to spill out and make a spectacular mess.
Hablik ushers you into a dark cathedral of out-there images: Georgia O’Keeffe’s incandescent Red Hills, Lake George (1919); Sunrise (1924) and Me and the Moon (1937), abstracted skyscapes of Arthur Dove; Maurice Chabas’ Space and Matter (1909), a beacon of light shining through clouds of dark towards a glowing orb.
But dominant here is another by Hablik, the cheekily titled Starry Night (1909), an awful mess of a painting that is by far the worst single work here, with its clusters of planets swirling towards a glowing galactic centre as though in the gravitational pull of some great cosmic toilet.
That it happens right across from the watchful eye of Van Gogh’s own Starry Night, there in the same room, is the key that Mystical Landscapes is happy to embrace a bit of necessary sacrilege.
Lochnan’s show refits conventional wisdom about modern art with deliberately delirious unconventionality, reminding us, perhaps, that the rationale is but one side of the human experience — and more importantly, perhaps, that a little irrational indulgence can yield some welcome surprise. It’s out there. Mystical Landscapes opens Saturday at the Art Gallery of Ontario and continues to Jan. 29, 2017. For more information go to ago.net.