The boundary-pushing young curator behind the Flavin show was Hamilton, Ont., native Brydon Smith. He would rise to be the National Gallery’s chief curator, a major shaper of its 20th-century collection. It was Smith who, in 1987, visited Newman’s widow, Annalee, to begin negotiating first to borrow and then buy Voice. Actually, negotiate isn’t the right word. In an interview, Smith couldn’t repress a long chuckle when asked how they came to terms. “Annalee said to me, ‘You know about the market, you tell me what the value is,’ ” he recalled. “So I basically set the price.”
Bourgeois Bust: Jeff and Ilona, by Jeff Koons, 1991
Retired for the most part now at 71, but still curating the occasional small show from his Ottawa home, Smith brushed off any further talk of money by saying he doesn’t keep up with art prices anymore. His reticence can’t be out of any misgivings over the deal he struck on behalf of the Canadian taxpayer. Prices for major American postwar abstract painters have soared. Consider that a small ink-on-paper work by Newman—in austere grey and black—sold for more than $5 million (U.S.) at auction in 2008.
If the fuss over the price seems quaint in hindsight, the deeper question—can three stripes, no matter how monumentally presented, be considered an important creation?—is not so easily dismissed. After a lifetime spent championing abstract art, and hunting down major examples of it for Canada’s national collection, Smith still considers the question respectfully. By way of an answer, he turns to explaining how he worked closely with architect Moshe Safdie on designing the interior spaces of the National Gallery’s new glass-and-granite building before it opened in 1988. A large, high room on the second level needed an assertive anchor. “It occurred to me,” Smith says, “that there was one work of art I knew that would fit and hold that space.”
He was right. Gallery C214 is 24 m long and nearly half that wide; its walls rise almost 12 m to where the ceiling begins sloping upward from either side toward a room-length skylight. The space brings to mind a church, and Voice flies solo at one end, soaring where stained glass might be. Arrayed around the room with plenty of space to breathe are a few choice American abstracts, some of Smith’s plum acquisitions, including a Jackson Pollock, a Mark Rothko, and one of Newman’s stark steel sculptures. For fans of modernism, it’s a wondrous assemblage.
For scoffers, it’s an equally grand place to fume, although perhaps not quite so inviting as a much smaller room just down the hall. There the gallery-goer finds a complete set of Marcel Duchamp’s so-called “readymades,” including the infamous bicycle wheel attached to a wooden stool. An ordinary store-bought snow shovel hangs framed by the room’s main entrance—much as Voice does so nearby—for dramatic effect.
A snow shovel is art? It’s enough to make Voice look like it belongs with the Group of Sevens. By the way, the gallery’s purchase of Duchamp’s readymades was negotiated 40 years ago this year by the young Brydon Smith.
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