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Transformation AGO (5s, Gehry) COMPLETE

I don't know how the heck Archivist and his friends got away with a whole documentary on the building. All I can say is: determination, a keen eye for the location and movement patterns of AGO staff, and quick hand. Also lots of experience around the world - "no photos" to me represents a challenge to my core set of beliefs, rather than an actual rule. I was once surrounded in Mexico City by a phalanx of security guards who forced me to delete a photo from my camera!
 
Thanks for the great update Archivist! The member's lounge is indeed an unfortunate move for what otherwise appears to be a superb project. Still find the concrete columns on the ground floor a little disconcerting though.

Seems that more art is destined for the AGO - from the Globe:

ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO

Prized collection unveiled after AGO privately canvassed donors
JAMES BRADSHAW

November 10, 2008

The Art Gallery of Ontario is unveiling yet another prized new collection of 40 artworks this week, having quietly persuaded prominent collectors to each donate a single rare treasure.

The initiative, dubbed The Works of Art Campaign, was three years in the making and gathered paintings, sculptures, drawings and etchings by the likes of Paul Cézanne, Rembrandt, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Emily Carr, Tom Thomson and many others.

Gallery director Matthew Teitelbaum described the campaign as a way of broadening the revitalization of the AGO collection by allowing donors to build on the landmark gift from Kenneth and Marilyn Thomson of their private art collection.

The gallery approached 40 families with whom they have strong relationships and asked if they would give one work - sometimes targeting a particular piece - to both enrich the gallery and commemorate their connection to it.

"What I find so moving and powerful is the willingness of so many collectors to share a work that is meaningful to them, that reflects their interests and judgments as collectors," Mr. Teitelbaum said.

The campaign is publicly commemorated in a book entitled Collecting for the future: Gifts of art to celebrate the new Art Gallery of Ontario. Special labels also mark the works, which have been spread throughout the gallery. All 40 are currently on display and have either been donated outright or promised in the future.

The donor list includes stalwarts of arts philanthropy such as Isadore and Rosalie Sharp, Michael and Sonja Koerner, Richard M. Ivey, the late R. Fraser Elliott, Charles and Marilyn Baillie, Joey and Toby Tanenbaum and the Bronfman family.

Vincent Tovell, who sat on the AGO's board for 20 years, has given Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Girl in Pink Pareu, a rare watercolour transfer from a woodcut to paper that he grew up with. His parents, Harold and Ruth Tovell, bought it in the 1930s. He thinks it was purchased on a trip to Paris, or possibly from a New York art dealer they were friendly with.

"It's a very simple thing - I've always loved it and along the way it became mine. We don't have a lot of Gauguins in Canada and I'd always thought, 'well, that belongs in the AGO,' " he said.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081110.AGO10/TPStory/TPNational/Ontario/

AoD
 
Archivist, interchange and I spent over four enthralling hours there - and we still didn't visit the print and photography galleries, or the ship models.

Having seen the AGO through four incarnations - the original Neo-Classical building when I arrived here in '70; Parkin's white, moated Modernist battleship in '75; the Barton Myers addition - I feel strongly that the gallery has finally become the place it was always intended to be. Very Ontario, with the use of woods. Very Toronto with the views outwards, connecting with the city.

The bones of the Barton Myers addition can be sensed when you walk through the north end of the building.

Yes, some mad interior designer has transformed the ground floor of the Grange ... into a Pottery Barn. But if enough members complain, or boycott the space as I will, pressure can be put on the institution to do something more appropriate with the building. The most gruesome apparition there is the framed print of Ken Danby.

Also, the Tanenbaum Atrium is but a shadow of its former self.

The drum-like spiral stairway to heaven, captured so nicely in Archivist's photos of the Walker Court, is gorgeous - all the more so in contrast to the rather laboured version of a spiral staircase seen from Grange Park.

Simon Starling's Musselled Moore, shown in Archivist's photo, was part of his Power Plant show this summer. I can't think of the original - Moore's Warrior With Shield, on display at the opera house for a couple of years - the same way ever again.
 
And I suppose I should confess that the spectacularly coloured vase nestled among the photos from the modern art floors is actually something I purchased from the artist in St. Jacobs the day before. It sits in my kitchen rather than in the AGO. But isn't it pretty?
 
Sneaky!

As we age we get more duplicitous and sly - knowing how to snap photographs in forbidden zones, right under the noses of uniformed gallery staff for instance ... or wandering into the fancy lounge at the opera house, drinkie in hand, and daring the twentysomethings guarding the door to challenge us ... or gliding past the people queueing to get into the Unbuilt Toronto book launch as if we had no idea we were supposed to do the same ... that sort of thing. Catch us if you can!
 
I think one of the coolest things in finally seeing all this is how forcing Gehry to "compromise" really worked in the AGO's favour.

It would have been neat, I guess, to get one of his titanium designs on some new site. On the other hand, seeing the warm, wood-driven look of much of this design makes it look like we got a really unique Gehry refit.

This is in contradiction to the ROM design where more than the crystal itself, what annoys me is Liebeskind et al trying to act like it's a Toronto-specific design, rather than another version of something he has done elsewhere.
 
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Toronto's cultural building boom - and the increase in museum display space - has been the strengthening of connections between institutions like the AGO and the ROM.

The AGO's new Frum Collection of African and Oceanic art, for instance, meshes nicely with the new collections on display in the ROM Crystal gallery of Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific. Comparisons can be made between both. There are similarities between the AGO's Ken Thomson collection of Kane and Krieghoff paintings and the ROM's Sigmund Samuel collection, between the Medieval objects he donated and the ROM's collection ... and so on.

Similarly, such things as the Gardiner Museum's Peruvian figural pottery can now be compared with the ROM's collection across the street. The Museum of Textiles collection and exhibitions, and the ROM's new Textiles and Costume gallery, form a twin set. When the Aga Khan Museum opens we'll see similar connections being made between it and the Islamic art at the ROM.

The ROM involves the public in exploring the contemporary arts as a window on their cultural collection, and their mandate to display the arts. The AGO now displays objects of non-European origin that would have once been considered better suited to the ROM. And we're all the better for the more inclusive mandates of these institutions.
 
I found the combinations of objects and art at the AGO pleasurable in the extreme, so it's a good point.

At this, the sort of completion of the "Big Seven" cultural superbuild projects (notwithstanding that the AGO, the ROM and the RCM each have some ways to go) it's best to offer a tip of the hat to Mike Harris who started the ball rolling. All the best to ya, Mike, though I would not be unhappy to know that your party never got elected in this province again.
 
The next challenge is to keep them running - which is why they're all going after setting up endowments, funded through charitable giving now and future beneficence through estate planning.
 
Very Nice job on that picture set Archivist!! Wow, never knew that much had been done inside as well...it looks very....well new! Great shots!
 
I like how, in the African and Oceanic gallery that Shim-Sutcliffe designed, the walls seem to float. Archivist's images of the inner sanctum capture the effect nicely. The central platform bearing those three carved wooden figures floats too, and the floor directly beneath it is recessed down by the same thickness as the platform, giving the impression that the platform has been created by the central part of the floor being extruded upwards. This gallery - so spare and uncluttered - as well as other spaces, prompted a brief discussion of horror vacuii and the merits of suspending just one object from a particular point in the ceiling of one of the contemporary galleries.

We also considered the plus and minus effect of the Thomson bequest. The new AGO consists of an extraordinarily high proportion of objects from his collection. How many galleries of remarkably similar Krieghoff snow scenes with Habitants do we really need, for instance? And just look at Archivist's images of all those identical 19th century figurines on plinths. There was an entire wall of them. What's that all about?
 
Great shots guys. And just so we get the players straight - in that initial photo, is it Archivist, Interchange and Urbanshocker from left to right?
 
La Shocker in a buttonless Yohji Yamamoto mammoth wooly from N()IR, lambswool Paul Smith scarf from Heathrow, and leather gloves found on a streetcar.
 
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