Catalogue Raisonne by Mike Barnes Read Free Book Online

seemed to nudge the tour back a bit in time, and to up the representational quotient as well. There were abstracts by Borduas and Riopelle, but alongside these – Walter was a bold juxtaposer – hung one of Colville’s scenes of suicidal stasis. Warmer interiors by Goodridge Roberts and John Lyman. And two luscious nudes, one by Edwin Holgate and one by Bertram Brooker. The subjects were big-bodied women, so large and warm-skinned I barely thought of them as paintings.

    Leaving those, and taking a left into the smaller of the Teale Galleries was a bit of a jolt. In the little room, with the low ceiling and slatted wooden floor, Walter had hung the gallery’s oldest Canadian paintings. They were mostly small dark oils, showing old men in frock coats and old women in bonnets, along with a few heart-faced brides. A few watercolours, cruder but brighter, of streams and waterfalls. Several drawings and paintings of old towns, one of them on fire. An embarrassing, though popular, scene of Indians dancing, the gestures frenzied, the faces caricatured. Probably the most interesting, at least to a local, was Robert Whale’s “View of the City”. Showing a scattering of small houses between clumps of forest by the side of a fresh blue lake I’d never seen. I couldn’t even be sure what vantage point the picture had been painted from – everything in Hamilton had changed that much in one hundred and thirty years.
    Walter used the main Teale Gallery, just before the surrealist show, for the jewels of the gallery’s permanent collection. All of the abstract pieces had their fans, but these more familiar pictures drew most of the patrons we got, and perhaps most of the money as well. Our Group of Sevens. Our Krieghoffs. Our Kurelek series. Our Paul Peel (a pretty dicey, very popular, back view of a pubescent girl after her bath). Our Paul Kane and William Brymner. Morrice and Cullen and Carr and Milne and Schaeffer. Overlapping the eras and styles of the ones in the other rooms, but by public appraisal the gallery’s best. Probably the picture that people stopped at most often, and longest, was George Reid’s “Illicit Hour”, with the boy and girl sitting tantalizingly near each other in the hayloft. Like most things, painting worked better when you worked sex, sexual energy, into it. A thought which put me in the ideal mood to enter the surrealist show.

    Mumbles wasn’t mumbling, for once; just reading. Rounding the entrance panel – SECRETS OF THE SURREALISTS worth the hippy’s time and the gallery’s money – I found Sean studying a quote silk-screened on the other side. “He is as handsome . . . as the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an
umbrella.” from Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont .
    Sean, who had been staring at this with concentration, sniffed when he saw me. “Surrealism 101. I could have found them a better quote.” Turning his back on it, he tugged the walkie-talkie from his belt. “I’ve been calling into this. Surely at least Hans is wearing one?”
    â€œThe music’s pretty loud.”
    â€œChrist, yes. Le sacré d’everything followed by Killer.”
    â€œThriller?”
    â€œHardly. That ought to be enough surrealism for anyone. Anyway, it’s given me a Code 2.” He handed me the walkie-talkie and stalked off. Sometimes I wondered, as with Ramon – though to precisely opposite effect – how much of it Sean was putting on.
    When he’d gone, I looked around me. One thing I did appreciate about the job was the leisure it gave me to absorb art gradually, in glances. No two-hour culture cram: I could look at what I liked when I liked, knowing there’d be plenty of other chances.

    The small introductory room I was in had black and white photographs of some of the leading surrealist artists on the walls.