Ken Danby: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Gallery’s survey of beloved artist’s work does no service to the painter or museum
I’ll say this much for Beyond the Crease, the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s achingly sincere reclamation effort of the work of Ken Danby: It’s bold. Just not in the ways I’d hoped.
Danby, of course, is famous, if for just one reason: At the Crease, his muchloved, instantly recognizable rendering of a hockey goalie, coiled to react at the millisecond of the puck’s release.
A staple of dorm walls and rec rooms the nation over, At the Crease was hailed, on Danby’s untimely death in 2007, as “one of this country’s defining works of art” by, of all places, the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Strange for many reasons — Danby himself called the piece “pure hoke — a Sports Illustrated illustration” in 1979 — it smacked of the institution retreating to a neutral corner.
Opening the Danby oeuvre to real scrutiny was a bridge no museum seemed willing to cross — until, of course, here and now.
The AGH deserves credit for nominally considering a broader legacy for an artist who has produced at least one work stamped indelibly on the Canadian psyche (and maybe two; Lacing Up, another hockey-themed piece of photorealistic painting, is a close second). But it does itself no favours in the process.
When it comes to the “Beyond” part, as the museum has fashioned it, there’s no there there: the 70 works in Beyond the Crease do little more than reinforce Danby’s stature as a master technician — verisimilitude in his work often approaches the uncanny, which is part of the problem — whose talents are put, more often than not, to little useful purpose.
Still, the show begins with promise: Untitled (Barbershop) from 1973, layers images reflected in a pane of glass on a sunny day, its understated palette evoking ambiguous tension with masterful ease.
But it’s an anomaly here amid a field of images whose overworked precision leaves the viewer little room to move.
A roomful of paintings of farmhouses and golden fields are, as is often the case with Danby, tightly pretty and void of all but the most cloying of emotion. There’s a mention here of the master realist Andrew Wyeth, whose images of the American heartland simmered with palpable dread. Danby, who saw Wyeth’s work at the Albright Knox in Buffalo in the ’60s, achieves none of this, aiming instead for a kind of idealized nostalgia. It’s a sign of things to come. Shifting through an exhausting breadth of landscapes and portraits, the Danby project stiffens to rigor mortis in the artist’s rigid renderings of the world.
Lake Superior (2004), a shoreline image, the likes of which Danby favoured, is jarringly crisp and impossibly coloured, managing to be garish and empty all at once. A big, bizarre canvas of barrel-racing horses at the Calgary Stampede seems determined to expose the artist at his worst; Danby’s gift was to capture stillness, a fact the dynamic scene conveys in the worst possible way.
It’s rigid and lifeless, like a colossal greeting card served up for a close scrutiny it can’t possibly endure.
Things get worse and quickly: In the portraits section, Pancho (1973) shows a man in a, well, poncho, flecked with studiously exacting droplets on its bright yellow surface. The man himself leers theatrically, cigarette dangling from his lips. It works an ugly dichotomy: of being impressively lifelike while feeling entirely lifeless.
It is not, unfortunately, the apex of such things here.
That dubious honour is owned wholly by Mask (1983-85), a portrait of modern dancer Robert Desrosiers, who peeks with cloying mystery from behind the titular object, awash in a background of aquamarine. The piece is Seinfeldian in its bizarre welding of supreme ability and hokey content: it disgusts, but one cannot look away.
As far as the Art Gallery of Hamilton is concerned, I get it. In the ongoing churn of contemporary art, realism runs a natural cycle of reappraisal and scorn.
The wheel has turned again in its favour and here on home turf, recent years have seen surges of interest for both past masters — Alex Colville and Jack Chambers at the AGO — and a budding cohort of new realist blood (Stephen Appleby-Barr Alex and Charles Bierk, Mike Bayne, Keita Morimoto: the list goes on).
That being the case, Danby presented an opportunity: to resuscitate an artist in both a continuum and a position of influence. At his best, that’s very possible. Stronger pictures here, like the imposingly dark and enveloping bus windshield of Charter (1978), or the looming threat of a ship’s prow in Opening the Gates (1975), brim with Colvillean dread (even Colville, now revered for his signature, restrained postmodern angst, was dismissed as folksy not so long ago).
Untitled (Barbershop) (1973), opens the show with the promise of a painter connected, as in the understated greatness of American realist Robert Bechtel, to the mundane anxieties of a world in flux.
Here, it’s a slim thread that can be followed to works like Motel (1971), a desolate, unpeopled scene of rumpled sheets and burnt-out cigarettes, and Mannequin (1973), whose sterility bathes in the chill of perfectly rendered light as it falls against folds of a discomfitingly realistic drape of curtain behind.
But it’s overwhelmed by an ideal- ized nostalgia for a world that, for the most part, never was: of idyllic shorelines plied by svelte canoes; a stampede of wild horses; or heroic athletes made ghastly by unabashed artistic hagiography. (Olympic gold medal swimmer Alex Baumann’s portrait, waist-deep in the pool, is topped for pure cheese here only by one of late Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Tim Horton, painted in cringeworthy, ghostly triplicate. And let’s not talk about Wayne Gretzky.)
But if there’s blame to be laid, it’s at the feet of the institution.
To be fair, the AGH spared the artist’s legacy some of his worst impulses (naked women on horseback, say, of which there are several).
But it also denied us some of his best: Towards the Hill ( 1967), a dreadfilled, Wyeth-esque scene of a boy racing his bicycle through a bleak sun-bleached field; or the chilling Taxi Window (1978), a taxidermied owl behind the glass of a shop window — stilted, artificial nature pinned in place by drab urbanity.
A judicious edit — much more judicious — would have denied the breadth of Danby’s career but teased out something previously unheard of: an actual reappraisal of the artist’s worth. As it stands, Beyond the Crease stays completely within the lines, as confoundingly uneven as Danby’s oeuvre itself. It fails almost entirely to surprise. Why bother? Ken Danby: Beyond the Crease continues at the Art Gallery of Hamilton to Jan. 15.
Shifting through an exhausting breadth of landscapes and portraits, the Danby project stiffens to rigor mortis in the artist’s rigid renderings of the world