An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  Philip Ottenbrite, when he was working at the Mira Godard Gallery, said, “The history of Tony’s work has a real logic to it and a sense of progression. He has a very personal sense of style, and elegance is the essence of that style. He makes everything he does look very easy but that ease has been worked for. He’s bringing something new to painting. I don’t want to inflate things but his work has a certain . . . majesty. He’s unique. His work fits into no category and of course he’s suffered because of that.

  “I can tell you one important thing from personal experience. The work of many painters—it dies on the wall after two months. That never happens with Tony. Energy emanates from a Calzetta canvas and keeps on emanating. He’s poured so much energy into the canvas, you see, that we keep on receiving it, the picture keeps growing and expanding for us.”

  Tony has always insisted on his own direction and usually, of course, to his detriment. Being funny in Canada probably isn’t a good idea; being funny in Canadian painting is probably unforgivable. He gives his paintings such titles as Jive Ass Atomic Art Queen, Lester’s Love Wagon Leaves Late and The Queen Realizing the Court Was Starving Lets Out a Scream and Orders the Crew to Their Boats in Search of Herring. And, of course, he arrived upon the scene just when the mindlessness of “conceptual” art had begun to dominate. He finds paintings with writing on them dreary beyond bearing. When he comes to stay with us he always says, “Let’s go down to the National Gallery for a good read.”

  Tony often refers to the Theory of Stuff. The world, he says, is crammed with Stuff. Most Stuff is awful. Therefore when looking at an exhibition, hurry round and find the best painting. This saves time and effort because, the best painting found, the rest becomes Stuff. And there’s no point in squandering time on Stuff. Especially when that time could be spent quaffing martinis.

  It’s more than possible, though, that Tony’s vision and dedication to purpose will be vindicated. Who knows which of us time will treat well? I felt a sudden warning shift in the world when I went with Myrna, Tony, and his companion, Gabrielle de Montmollin, to see a Philip Guston exhibition at the National Gallery. In the first room there were examples of his work as an abstract expressionist. These were well done but there was a faded feeling about them; they were a minor part of a movement now history. When one moved on into the Guston Gustons—violent, crude, uncouth, almost barbaric—it was easy to see the necessity of his breaking out of a past which was becoming too pretty, vitiated.

  I think Tony felt that warning shift in the world many, many years ago; that he did so is a measure of his originality and talent and steadfastness.

  Tony’s art and his day-to-day life are inseparable. His concerns are always aesthetic and he reveals himself as much in making toast as in painting. He has, typically, a professional restaurant gas stove, a Garland, and makes toast in a medieval-looking utensil, a thing exactly like a wok but with holes in it like a colander. This he sets on the gas; the toast when done is pimpled with black spots. He refuses to discuss this practice.

  Not only have I had the profound pleasure of watching his work evolve over a twenty-year period but I’ve also had the pleasure of his friendship and learned from him so many good things: Japanese papers, Asiago cheese, tarte Tatin, the importance of Chaim Soutine, rascasse in bouillabaisse, the existence of the Musée Dapper in Paris, Sienna cake, martinis with a drop of fino sherry, Tio Pepe, say, instead of vermouth.

  Tony’s ease and charm inevitably attract a wide acquaintance, some of them quite mad. One acquaintance seriously cherishes the vision of opening a restaurant serving nothing but liver and Geneva gin. Another collects Jaguar cars. Another photographs Chinese herbal remedies. Orbiting Tony is exhausting. Days spent with him usually evolve into celebration, a key perhaps to both his life and his art. He shapes his life into ritual and ceremony. There is even a certain majesty to his hangovers. I treasure the memory of Tony, much hung over, tottering along the Danforth in search of a beef heart to roast, a sovereign cure, he claims.

  A couple of years ago Tony and Gabrielle spent the winter and spring in Provence at Gabrielle’s house, La Garance, in the village of Les Bouilladoires. Myrna and I visited in March and they took us to Gordes and Gabrielle showed us the tiny house Jack Pollock writes about in Letters to M where she had nursed him during his long decline into cocaine and AIDS. Then to Les Baux-de-Provence and a visit to the mental hospital Maison de Santé St. Paul which started as a monastery in 982. Here Vincent Van Gogh committed himself in May 1889 and stayed until May 1890. During this year he painted 150 pictures and executed 100 drawings. There was an exhibition on of sad daubs by current inmates and Tony said they exhibited better taste and attack than anything he’d seen in Toronto for a decade. Myrna went into the ancient chapel and found under the altar a mad-woman lying on the floor.

  We filled Tony’s bidon with Lubéron wine and then back to Bouilladoire for Henri Bardouin pastis and the inevitable talk: what had we been working on?

  A relative of Gabrielle’s who lives in Villefranche had a walled garden. In one of the walls there was a niche, perhaps constructed to house an urn or a statue of the Virgin Mary. Tony had been commissioned to make something beautiful to fill the space, something, as David Bolduc would say, to rest the eye on.

  Tony had typically hurled himself into this work. He first had a pair of doors cut from steel plate. Then he welded onto the flat surface further rectangles and strips of plate to give depth and variety to the surface. Then—quintessentially Calzetta—with a grinding wheel he chased into the skin of the metal lyrical whorls, abstract arabesques.

  As the garden was close to the sea Tony decided on a seascape. He fired sheets of ceramic, making shapes which fitted together to suggest a ship. He then made rows of waves for the ship to sail on. The back and sides of the niche he tiled with blue-green mosaic chips with here and there the glitter of a gold tile. I could imagine the owner opening the doors of the niche as one might open the ark of the covenant or an elaborate reliquary and gazing upon this almost Byzantine splendour.

  But he wouldn’t quite grasp that he was looking at the Calzetta signature, looking at a completely new expression of what Tony has been labouring on for years, the playful, elegant combination of conventional signs into new worlds of line and colour. A comparison with the conventions of Japanese prints would not be inappropriate in explaining this aspect of Tony’s work.

  John Bentley Mays got it about right when he said of Tony’s works: “They document no recognizable reality, but simply commend themselves, with elegance and masculine beauty, as objects of creative work worthy of our attention.”

  Not long after my Kiyooka encounter, I met, through Hugh Hood, the photographer Sam Tata. Again it was happy coincidence that I’d bumped into someone eager to teach me both theoretically and by allowing me to watch him on so many occasions at work. In 1991 I edited and published with the Porcupine’s Quill his Portraits of Canadian Writers.

  Prior to meeting Sam I had not given photography much thought. In my snotty teens I probably professed to admire Man Ray but really didn’t. “Art” photography seemed to be thought of as shapes that looked like breasts or buttocks but turned out to be disappointing boulders. What appreciation of photography I had was probably reserved for a nudist magazine called Health and Efficiency which was printed on yellowish coated stock whose smell I can recall to this day. Health and Efficiency featured flabby nudists whose interesting bits were hidden behind coy Ping-Pong bats or beachballs. They were about as arousing as a bulk bin of crunchy granola but in my distant youth one grasped whatever titillation was on offer, which was never, sadly, much.

  Sam was born in 1911 in Shanghai. He came to Canada in 1956. He was a Parsi but brought up in Shanghai where his father managed cotton mills for the Tata industrial empire. When we first met and I found out about his background Sam was flabbergasted when I started to ask him questions about Ch’i Pai-shih, one of the painte
rs I most admire. I don’t recall now how I’d found out about the painters of the Shanghai School—most probably a scroll seen in a museum—but I had developed a passionate admiration for Ch’i Pai-shih, Ch’ên shih-tsêng, Hsü Pei-hung, and Lin Feng-mien.

  In 1988 the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography organized a retrospective exhibition of Sam’s work and Pierre Dessureault edited a catalogue entitled The Tata Era/L’Époque Tata to which I contributed a piece about Sam’s portraits entitled “Conversations without Words.” I tried to pay tribute to Sam’s endless charm and humanity and tried to suggest ways of looking at the richness of his craft. What follows is culled from that tribute.

  I am neither photographer nor art critic. My only credentials for writing about Sam Tata are that we have been friends for many years and that I am a seasoned sitter; Sam has been taking my picture regularly since about 1970, photographs that have been reproduced on the jackets of a variety of books and on posters.

  The title of this very personal tribute attempts to suggest what is happening when Sam is taking someone’s picture. There is between Sam and the sitter a conversation; it is a conversation without words.

  This is not to suggest that Sam is taciturn or laconic. While this silent conversation is going on between photographer and subject, Sam will be talking. He rarely stops. Sam is a Vesuvius of conversation, a walking compendium of quotation and reference, a cornucopia of anecdote. His reminiscences of life on three continents flow from him unstoppably.

  Sam’s stories are of his childhood in Shanghai, of his eccentric expatriate British schoolmasters, of his gilded youth in Shanghai’s international society, of Eurasian beauties lost and won. He tells stories of exploits and adventures in Hong King, Japan, and India and though he claims to speak nothing but a word or two of foreign languages I’ve heard him chatter in Shanghai dialect, Japanese, and Gujarati.

  Sam’s conversation on any given day might typically range over incidents in the Parsi community, the scurvy behaviour of Bombay taxi drivers, the wisdom of Akbar the Great, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, the intricate language of Chinese courtesy and insult, the work of Atget or Cartier-Bresson, the life and paintings of Lin Feng-mien, who used to give lessons to Sam’s ex-wife Rita, art forgeries in Hong Kong’s Nathan Road. A newspaper headline catching his eye—the capture of a mass murderer in British Columbia—will prompt him to recall the line from a Saki story: “Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.” This in turn will lead to forthright pugnacity on the subject of capital punishment, which will in turn remind him of executions he witnessed in Shanghai before the Maoist troops rode in—a time when he wandered the dangerous streets nonchalantly taking the brilliant photographs that arrest and hold us to this day.

  But however convoluted the arabesques of anecdote he always returns to his emotional centre; he always returns to stories of Toni, the daughter he so adores; to stories of his sometimes irascible Gujarati-speaking mother who in fits of exasperation used to hurl at him her tortoiseshell-backed hairbrushes; to stories of his father who by day sternly managed the Tata mills but who by night unbuttoned and sat tall in the saddle with the westerns of Zane Grey.

  Sam’s conversations with me are not much different from the conversations he has with the people he is photographing. He has said of portraiture: “The sitter must be willing to be photographed. The photographer must be sensitive to the sitter. And a rapport between the two has to be established.”

  At the beginning of a photographic session, people are wary. The task of the photographer is to get them to relax, to remove the mask. Sam works at establishing the necessary rapport through conversation. He chats with people for twenty minutes or so until they are convinced that he is not a threat. “At some point,” says Sam, “both know that they’re ready to go.” He usually takes a full roll of twenty-four to thirty-six exposures and his experience is that the better pictures start to arrive in the middle—that is, when the sitter has moved from acquiescing in the process to actively embracing the idea of being photographed.

  It’s important to stress here, however, that creating that necessary rapport isn’t a trick or part of some well-rehearsed schtick; Sam’s conversation and the rapport it builds are an expression of his personality and nature.

  If one looks at a range of Sam’s portraits, most of the subjects will be found to be in eye contact or near eye contact with the photographer. Many of the photographs are intense, almost fierce. The people in these photographs are deeply involved, indeed absorbed, in the process of being photographed. Sam has said of the experience, “The confrontation is like a conversation—a conversation without words.”

  Note the words “confrontation” and “conversation”; there is no hint of self-effacement here. Sam has also said: “I cannot avoid myself in every portrait I do.”

  When he gathered together a selection of his portraits of artists in 1983 he chose to call the book A Certain Identity; he derived this title from something written by his friend and mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson: “It is true, too, that a certain identity is manifest in all the portraits taken by one photographer. The photographer is searching for the identity of his sitter, and also trying to fulfil an expression of himself.”

  “I have to be on my toes,” says Sam. “There’s a stress and tension in all this and when it’s over I enjoy the relaxation; it’s a pleasant kind of tiredness.”

  No one can be entirely unselfconscious when being photographed, of course, but paradoxically someone sitting for Sam is least self-conscious when most consciously engaged in the process of the wordless conversation.

  What I’ve written so far with its talk of confrontation and of people fulfilling themselves and expressing themselves and attending to “inner lines of force” perhaps gives the impression that a portrait session with Sam is a deeply emotional experience akin to therapy or a group encounter. Nothing could be further from the truth. The photographer Geoffrey James got close to the nature of the experience when he wrote: “I have been photographed by Sam several times, and always experience the mild euphoria of having just discovered a painless dentist.”

  Because the sitter must be relaxed, Sam always prefers to work with available light and in the familiar surroundings of the subject’s home; he sees the studio and the paraphernalia of tripods, flashes, and reflectors as inhibiting. Many of Sam’s portraits, then, offer us the almost voyeuristic pleasure of observing domestic interiors, for there are usually things in Sam’s pictures—ornaments, paintings, books, plants, pianos, sculpture, dogs, furniture. These furnishings and possessions further express and suggest the sitter’s personality; Sam has actually called these photographs “environmental portraits.”

  These background details are rarely, however, merely descriptive. Sam is an artist and a considerable one. His pictures are carefully composed. He is, of course, concerned with capturing the “inner lines of force in the being of his subject” but he is equally concerned with the making of a picture, with composition, with shapes, with blackness and whiteness. In successful portraits, psychological and artistic concerns fuse.

  In a word, then, Sam’s concerns are painterly.

  When he comes into someone’s home for the first time to make a portrait, he is naturally more aware than anyone else of the quality of the light. In this room, the light is flat, rather dead. But here it’s very full, very alive. And what a handsome armoire that is! From Quebec? Could he see it with the doors open? Are those chisel marks? Or an adze, perhaps? He may well be listening to the history of your armoire or telling you a story about Akbar the Great or a White Russian nightclub hostess in Shanghai—and enjoying the listening or the telling—but because he rarely crops a picture or enlarges detail, his seemingly innocent eye will be framing and composing, seeking textures as he talks.

  In the long months of 1991 when Myrna’s mother was in the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal dying of cance
r, Myrna and I drove down every weekend from Ottawa. On those visits I’d usually walk down to Kensington Street in NDG to visit Sam and we’d pore over his prints and contact sheets. We put together a collection of one hundred photographs that Sam thought represented his best work over the years. I took the pictures away with me, promising to find a publisher. Later I wrote a biographical essay to introduce the collection.

  Eleven years later that box of photographs is still sitting in my study, having been considered by publisher after publisher who delivered such verdicts as “too expensive to produce,” “It’s all a bit liberal-humanist, isn’t it?” “Who’s ever heard of him?” and “Well, they’re just pictures—what’s the hook?” Dismaying reactions to the work of a man who according to the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography defined an epoch.

  Perhaps Sam’s work will come into its own when the National Portrait Gallery opens and they’re searching for exhibits. They already sound desperate for stock. An Ottawa functionary was interviewed last year by the Ottawa Citizen and was asked what sort of famous Canadians would be honoured in the proposed Gallery. He prevaricated for a while and then said, “Canadians like . . . like Northern Dancer.”

  Sam himself is now frail and largely lost to us. He suffered a stroke and his memory was impaired. When it happened, I went down to Montreal on the bus and went straight to the Royal Victoria Hospital. Sam saw me come into the room and said, “Why, John! What are you doing here?” He seemed bright and voluble and we chatted for a while and then I needed to visit a washroom. I was away a few minutes. When I went back into the room, his face lit up and he said, “John!” reaching out his hands to me. “What are you doing here?”

  THE TANKS CAMPAIGN