by John Metcalf
“Well, that’s all very well, but . . .”
“Now if we were dealing with a mask of the Guro . . .”
A tiny shrug.
The suggestion of a moue.
“But this . . .”
Not long afterwards, Elizabeth was tragically killed in a traffic accident. As she was stepping between two parked cars, one reversed and she was crushed to death. The Elizabeth and Justin Lang African collection, more than six hundred items, was donated to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s, where a paltry selection is now indifferently displayed.
I had become interested in African art in the sixties and can remember the exact moment that I was drawn to it. I was walking along Sherbrooke Street and paused to look in the window of Le Petit Musée. There among Chinese bowls and flintlock pistols and a Georgian silver coffee pot stood a wooden thing. It had a large disc-like face with delicately suggested features and a column as a body. Tiny breasts stood out. It made me look at it harder than anything had for years. I went into the store and asked the owner, Max Klein, what that thing in the window was.
He explained that it was a kind of doll from the Ashanti tribe in Ghana. But not exactly a doll. Women who were pregnant or wished to become pregnant carried these “dolls” tucked in their robes at the back. The face embodied the Ashanti ideal of good looks and the doll was thought to confer these attractive features on the child-to-be-born. The object was known as an akua ba.
I was so moved aesthetically by this thing that I bought it on the spot, having with me, by chance, its exact price as I was on my way to pay the rent.
Over the years since then I taught myself a great deal about African carving, reading the journal African Art and gathering together a useful library of reference. I also read the fieldwork of ethnologists and anthropologists. I sometimes thought the inside of my head was coming to resemble the higgledy-piggledy cabinets of Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum. Push this button and the cabinet lights up to reveal the varied tribal concepts of the human figure: Dogon, Fanti, Luba, Fang, and Pende; push that button for cross-cultural arcana. My mind was chock-a-block with information.
There are funerary masks of the Igbo and Ibibio people of southern Nigerian—Cross River masks, too—which are decorated in white, the colour widely associated with death. The very earliest masks used a white clay as pigment but quite early on the carvers decided that a British shoe polish for white leather and sneakers called Meltonia was just the job. It amuses me to imagine scientists in the war against fake and fraud testing not for the fingerprint trace elements of Nigerian clay but for the correct formula for Meltonia Shoe Cream. Similarly, the Yoruba colour of choice was obtained from Reckitt’s Blue Dye laundry bags. Beads were fashioned from the thick glass of Pond’s Cold Cream jars. In Benin, they continue to cast plaques and figures of the Oba with his mud-fish legs using spent cartridge cases from the Biafran war.
But information is no substitute for having handled so many pieces that the eye goes immediately to the piece that is “right.” It is a fusion of knowledge, taste, and experience. The feeling is exactly like that of Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy character, an antiques “divvie,” for whom bells ring when he comes across a genuine artifact.
At exactly the moment that I became near-expert, the prices skyrocketed and I had to revert to sad gazing in museums.
Le Petit Musée soon became one of my favourite shops. It carried a vast stock of antiquities and pottery and silver, glass, edged weapons, firearms, African carvings, furniture, jade, ivory, Japanese prints, Arabic bowls, calligraphy . . . This wonderful emporium was presided over by Max Klein, a tall and elegant Viennese Jew, grave of mien and manner but charged with the invigorating larcenous instincts common to all in the antiques business.
Mr. Klein’s always grave demeanour and his pronouncements afforded me rich amusement. Once while gazing in abstracted manner at a vitrine, he said, “I have always understood an interest in pottery in a Canadian-born man as an infallible indicator.”
On another occasion he was trying to sell me a bronze adze.
“It is,” he said, “fairly obviously Celtic.”
I had been boning up on the subject.
“Or possibly,” I said, “Luristan.”
He inclined his head.
“Or possibly,” the lovely old operator conceded, “Luristan.”
Over the years, I’ve bought many a small antiquity from Max Klein, Han jade, Luristan bronzes, amber, Greek wine cups, Kufic calligraphy from the Abbasid dynasty. I’ve always liked to have a few antiquities about me; apart from their beauty, they give life a context and solidity. If I can work one of these artifacts into the texture of daily life I’m doubly delighted. Rootling about one day in a coin shop in Ottawa I found two identical examples of what is known as “spade” money. These Chinese coins are rectangular in shape and bifurcate. In the upper part, the “body” as it were, there is a hole cast through. They bear a design which I’ve always taken to be a lotus. They date from the reign of Wang Mang (A.D. 6–23). Myrna and I use them as key rings—much to my brother’s anguish—and there is a daily pleasure in touching and using something two thousand years old.
I suppose this love of ancient things dates back in part to my brother’s museum in the pantry and to my almost psychotic rage and jealousy and desire at his being given by a retired missionary when he was thirteen or so a beautiful bronze Chinese bell and a pair of black figure lekythoi.
When young, I wanted to be a painter so intensely that the fact that I had an anti-talent for the activity seemed irrelevant. During my two sixth-form years I devoured Skira art books and mucked about in the art room labouring on sludgy landscapes. There was a new teacher at the school in his first year out of the Slade. We admired each other’s suede shoes. Using a brush or his thumb, he’d turn an inch or two of my turgid determination into something full of life and sparkle.
“Do you think it’s getting any better?” I’d ask him.
“Christ, no!” he’d say. “It’s worse than shit-sausage but keep daubing away. It’ll help develop your eye a bit and keep you from playing with yourself.”
(Needless to say, he lasted only two terms.)
He once took me to London to visit the studio of his teacher, John Minton. With the brushes, the clutter, the painty smells, and the cooking sherry we drank from teacups, I felt I was at the source. There’s a haunting portrait of Minton by Lucian Freud in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He committed suicide in 1967, anguished, apparently, by his homosexuality.
While I was at Bristol University I was keenly interested in the painting of William Scott and haunted the Arnolfini Gallery where he showed. At the Bristol Guild of Applied Art I used to stroke and lust after the Bernard Leach pottery. But it was not until I came to Canada that I actually bought a painting.
I’d been one evening to Sir George Williams University, now Concordia, to listen to some wretched poet. Who it was I can’t remember now but he was reading in front of an exhibition of paintings by Roy Kiyooka who was painter-in-residence that year. All next day, teaching, I saw those green egg shapes swimming before my eyes. The paintings were in the Pop-Op style but had far more presence than such work usually did. I phoned Kiyooka and asked him if he’d sell me the painting and let me pay for it over a period of time. He seemed perfectly agreeable and I arranged to go to his house in NDG the next evening.
He opened the door and stared at me in silence. He shuffled to one side which I took as an invitation to enter. We walked into a front room entirely bare except for a kitchen chair. Leaning against one wall was a package done up in corrugated cardboard and tape. Kiyooka still had not spoken. He stood staring intently into the empty fireplace. I had put $500 into an envelope in a vestigial notion of bourgeois manners and now handed it to him. He still just stared at me in silence. The cliché “inscrutable” flashed into my mind. Had I unknowingly breached some matter of et
iquette in picture buying? Had I unknowingly flouted some intricacy of Japanese courtesy?
Feeling quite sweaty, I began to babble inanities about the weather. But something about his face . . . Slowly, very slowly, it dawned on me. He wasn’t inscrutable. He was stoned. He was massively, monumentally stoned, stoned beyond even the possibility of speech. I picked up the painting, bade him a cheery farewell, and left him staring, rapt, into the grate.
I’m telling the story about Roy Kiyooka as a way into saying that buying a painting is essential in beginning self-education in visual art. It concentrates one’s eye and aesthetic faculties as nothing else can to know that imminently you are going to part with the price of four refrigerators and a high-end dishwasher.
It’s not really possible to understand a painting without living with it. Dailiness is important in revealing the painting that is flashy or meretricious, the painting where awkwardness bleeds through. Posters and reproductions of any kind are a delusion, because they always betray the original by masking texture and flattening the paint’s true life. The Irish painter Jack Yeats even stipulated in his will that no reproductions of his work be made, so sure was he that reproductions betrayed.
I’ve been familiar for many years, through photographs, with Picasso’s great painting Night Fishing in Antibes. I can still feel the intensity of shock at seeing the painting at MOMA in New York. No photograph had prepared me for the complexity and gorgeousness of its colour. This was a Picasso I had never known.
Lucian Freud said something simple yet profound when he said, “Learning to paint is literally learning to use paint.”
Many people seem to feel intimidated by the hush of commercial galleries and the seeming disdain of their often bitchy staff but they are, after all, only shops. And for the most part crammed, as my painter friend Tony Calzetta says, with Stuff.
The Canadian art world should intimidate no one. It is easy to grasp. Just glance through a couple of Joyner’s Canadian Art auction catalogues and you’ll get the picture. What the audience, such as it is, is willing to pay for is second- and third-rate landscape paintings. Old barn, cedar rail fence, trees.
Especially trees.
Abstract work tends to cause titters of unease.
Joyner has been quoted as saying that he would not hold an auction of abstract work as the results would entirely destroy what market there is.
David Milne (1882–1953) is beginning to be recognized by the more daring.
Even in the realm of paint one cannot escape the contamination of nationalism. The Group of Seven (1920) remain Canada’s pin-up boys. See “Trees” above. Canada’s pin-up girl is Emily Carr, who trumped the deal by painting autochthonous totem poles amidst trees. Hugh Hood and I shared a profound loathing for her work. Hugh always claimed that it was patently obvious that these muddily coloured exercises were all versions of her vulva. I miss conversations with Hugh; they were always bracing.
Since the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, popular taste has celebrated Ken Danby, Robert Bateman, Toller Cranston, Charles Pachter, and the like. “Woodland” artists like Norval Morrisseau and Daphne Odjig blossomed. This “Woodland School” paints decorative myths and legends badly. Morrisseau first showed at the Pollock Gallery in 1962. He is often described as a shaman. I’ve never been sure about what it is that shamans do but I’ve rather doubted the sincerity of the man’s calling since hearing Jack Pollock’s comic accounts of Morrisseau’s epic matings with a life-size rubber doll.
Also widely revered are the paintings of Alex Colville, weirdly frozen frames from an untold narrative, enabling the viewer to invent the implied story. What happened to the running girl? Why is she running so fast? What might she be screaming? Who is she waving at? Why should we be asking stupid questions like this?
The actual paint is devoid of interest.
Popular with many are Inuit carvings, dismissed by all experts in tribal sculpture as “airport art.”
I like to furnish my fiction with Inuit sculpture.
“On the glass table in front of the couch lay a gigantic soapstone seal with a bulbous Eskimo trying to do something to it.”
“Bulbous” was good.
(“. . . trying to do something to it,” obviously derives from Kingsley Amis. As does, “It was nice in the bathroom,” from the same novella.)
Canada has had and still has superbly gifted painters but usually doesn’t seem able to recognize them. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes painting as “an essentially reactionary form.” If I were wealthy and had acres of wall space I’d chuckle to see the National Gallery silting itself up with conceptual profundities and feeble-minded videos while for absurdly low prices I’d be buying the reactionary canvases of Guido Molinari, Yves Gaucher, Charles Gagnon, William Ronald, Alexandra Luke, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, Tom Hodgson, Harold Klunder . . .
And Tony Calzetta.
Tony Calzetta was born in 1945 in Windsor, Ontario, to a Croatian mother and Italian father. He attended Catholic schools in Windsor and went to the University of Detroit, from which he graduated in 1968 with the degree of Bachelor of Science. Most of the courses he took were, however, in math, business studies, and accounting, and his degree might more properly be described as being in commerce.
On leaving the university, he immediately secured a job in Windsor with Price-Waterhouse, where he remained in increasing misery for two years. At the beginning of 1970, he gave notice and went to Toronto to look for work. For the next nine months he worked as a labourer for a construction company. Up in the morning dark, the crew’s boss passing round brandy to numb them against the day. Following this, he drifted back to Windsor and worked in a desultory manner as a drapery installer.
During this period of drift, he somehow arrived at the idea that what he really wanted to do was to study art. Drawing and painting had always fascinated him. When a child, he had badgered his parents into buying oil paints for him, but the murky results were not wildly encouraging as he’d been unaware that turpentine was supposed to be mixed with the oil. On the slender basis of this childhood interest and in the what-the-hell climate of the time, he phoned the art department of the University of Windsor in September 1971 and was instructed to appear with his portfolio.
“You talk about embarrassment! My portfolio was a ratty piece of cardboard in which I’d got sandwiched some little drawings I’d done when I was about ten years old, a few watercolours, and a copy of a brassiere commercial from a magazine. And when I got to the interview room there were all these black portfolios open to show work that was professionally matted and I thought, Oh, my God! What have you done to yourself, you fool!”
He graduated with a BFA in 1975 and went to York, from which he graduated in 1977 with an MFA. His first three shows after York were at the Pollock Gallery. I first encountered the work at his third show at the Pollock Gallery in 1980. I was in Toronto on some kind of publishing business and wandered into the gallery on a whim. What hit me was one of those rare art experiences where one feels one’s life suddenly illuminated, enlarged, enriched. Over the years since then Tony has become my closest friend.
It is extremely difficult to write about paintings but I will attempt to describe what I saw and first felt at that Pollock Gallery show. These were the Cloud paintings, the elements of landscape drawn in a cartoon-like style to make landscapes or seascapes afresh by combining the conventional “signs” for rain, clouds, waves. These paintings were at the same time very sophisticated and elegant and yet childlike. There are suggestions in them of Paterson Ewen and Philip Guston. I have one of these huge canvases in Ottawa and its charcoal-drawn centre shape has been variously referred to by visitors as a cauliflower, a mop, a brain, and an engorged sexual organ; this may say more about the visitors than about the painting.
The central problem is that the “clouds” have charcoal-drawn stems on them which attach them to the side or top of the pa
intings.
“Is it a cloud?” I say.
“Well,” he says, “it could be. It is and it isn’t.”
John Newlove claims to hate all painters because, he says, at the drop of a hat they’re always ready to impart to you their philosophy of life. Which derives from the one book they’ve ever read. Which is inevitably a work of science fiction.
One knows, rather guiltily, what he means, of course, but of Tony Calzetta this isn’t true at all. Tony is reticent and ambiguous to the point of being shifty. He spouts no philosophy. I think he wants the paintings to remain undefined and mysterious. Talking about them makes him uncomfortable. I think he has the feeling that if we can’t define the painting then we’re unable to turn it off. We’ll keep looking, keep wondering, “Is it a cloud?”
The shocking part of the third Cloud exhibition at the Pollock Gallery was the energy of the line. This show broke through into what has now become the essence of his work—the combining of drawing with painting, the use of charcoal to produce a line of marvellous sensitivity. Paul Klee spoke famously of “taking a line for a walk”; Tony takes them for a hundred-metre sprint.
He said to me once, “The energy that’s conveyed in a line is so exciting. The line defines the image. The line is the energy. Colour supplies the mood.”
On another occasion, he said, “Charcoal’s a sensual pleasure. There’s a film on Alechinsky working and there’s one part where he has a huge sheet of paper and he’s putting down a line in charcoal and—oh, God!—the excitement just of the sound.”
Tony works in series and his images—his iconography, as the art historians love to say—evolve from series to series. You couldn’t possibly predict the next series but when it arrives it has an inevitability about it. Clouds move to the sides of the paintings and become curtains. Dramatic skies become pelmets. The waves turn into a stage. What were once strange floating objects in the sea now become boulders on the stage, flatirons, possibly ruined buildings. Sometimes huge slabs of rock are furnished with wheels. The paintings are somewhat surreal and nearly always cheerful if not funny.