Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
his troubles, it was the same, and although it was against regulations, he would often ride up in the construction bucket on a Saturday morning to take photographs of the site as the building rose up out of the ground. Colleagues on this massive undertaking became friends for life and, like old war veterans, they continue to hold an annual reunion and golf tournament, known as the “Disaster Open.”
One of the remarkable innovations dreamed up by Jim Langford and his deputy architect in Public Works called for 1 to 3 percent of the capital cost of any project to be spent on “artistic embellishment of the building.” They made sure that the policy was imposed on federal construction projects, and Langford got a lot of flack for it, especially from his staff in regional offices across the country. The result, however, was that a lot of art (“not all of it good”) was placed in new federal government buildings.
It did not take long for Southam and his associates to spot the new policy, and they immediately struck an artistic advisory committee of some of the most distinguished people in Canada’s visual arts community to take it in hand. With the new building’s budget standing at $12.8 million in July 1964, nearly $390,000 was earmarked to buy art for the new centre. Southam’s family had always been strong supporters of the National Gallery of Canada, and this aspect of the work was close to his heart. He had convened the first meeting of the Advisory Committee on Visual Arts at his home in April of the previous year, and Donald Buchanan, the director of the National Gallery, who was also organizing the arts exhibitions for Expo, accepted the chair. Other members of the committee included Montreal’s Andrée Paradis, an attractive “belle-laide” of a woman who was editor of the avant-garde Montreal magazine Vie des Arts, and Eric Arthur, a top architectural consultant from Toronto.
When the group agreed that “art and architecture should be married on this project,”15 that basic principle meant that architect Fred Lebensold would play a controlling role in the selection of artworks for the building. Their first meeting set out some ideals, several of which would hastily be discarded, including the stipulation that all the art should be Canadian. These artistic proposals were to be channelled through Hamilton Southam, who would convey them to the Department of Public Works to foot the bill. Lebensold and one of his partners, Guy Desbarats (who would later become deputy minister at Public Works), attended the first meeting and agreed to provide the committee, within the month, with crucial information regarding the “spirit of the building.” In the meantime, committee members would draw up a list of artists for potential commissions.
True to his promise, Lebensold soon returned to a meeting of the advisory committee, where he outlined the interior spaces for them. Four main inside units—the Salon, Theatre, Studio, and Opera—would need art. The “jewel of the entire place” was the Salon, which would also serve as a VIP room. The Theatre, he proposed, should be subdued, with interest focused on the performance. Lighting would be a major source of decoration there, and he had the lighting expert to do it. The Studio should be “bare and naked,” and the artwork placed in it would be “its only decorative element.” The Opera was to be different from all the rest. It would be subdued during performances, but at other times would “spill over with light, colour and luxury,” lending a special atmosphere before performances and during intervals. The intricate opera house lighting, by designer Bob Harrison, gave a gorgeous elegance to the hall, but its thousands of individual light bulbs also imposed a lifetime of special equipment and maintenance costs on the centre. Skilfully sweet-talking the committee, Lebensold kept full control of the overall interior design of the building to fit his architectural vision. “The Architect’s opinion was to have major consideration in any decision,” read the minutes, a fact that was tersely reported to the government’s Interdepartmental Committee, which was “steering” the project.
Lebensold soon returned to the visual arts group with a shopping list of “decorative requirements,” setting them out in a detailed memo that called for a tapestry ($25,000) and tall sculpted doors ($15,000) for the Salon, and stage curtains for the Opera and the Theatre ($50,000 and $25,000, respectively), among other things. Names of leading artists swirled about—Jean-Paul Riopelle for the Main Lobby, and Alfred Pellan or Harold Town for a mural in the Studio lobby. (William Ronald would eventually get this job on Lebensold’s say-so after the architect paid a visit to the artist’s studio.) Southam had his own tastes and preferences and, on his European research trip, he had already visited the studio of sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris. He immediately “gave in to one of his desires” and ordered an exquisite bronze free-standing sculpture of The Three Graces to stand in the new centre’s lobby. Southam liked the work so much that, later, he ordered a similar sculpture for his own home. As building costs rose, Treasury Board eventually set a ceiling of $500,000 on the visual arts budget—a colossal sum for the day. Among the better acquisitions was an exquisite tapestry by French artist Alfred Manessier, inspired, he said, by the light he had experienced during a visit to Southam’s beautiful cottage on the Rideau Lakes. He would not be the only artist to claim inspiration from Southam’s idyllic summer surroundings, but his commission came with a special Canada Council grant that permitted him to travel from Paris to Canada to install his wall hanging.
Canadian artists were not forgotten. There was the magnificent Beauchemin curtain for the Opera, a piece so large that no loom in Canada could weave it. On a commission that would rise to $75,000, the artist went to Japan for a year to create it. Sculptor Charles Daudelin won the competition for an enormous free-standing exterior work, which still adorns a major outside terrace and casts an elegant high shadow against the back wall of the building. In one of the foyers, artist Jean Hébert devised a glass and metal Tree Fountain designed to filter light through its colourful segments. He struggled with the colours and special moulds, and when Canada’s glass companies could not meet his demands, he asked for additional monies for a special kiln to fire the glass tiles himself. His contract rose from $15,000 to $25,000 as the committee justified its decision on the basis that it was advancing technical knowledge for Canada’s glass producers.
From the start, the visual arts were to play a big part in the NAC building. In Paris, Hamilton Southam visited the studio of the artist Ossip Zadkine and couldn’t resist purchasing The Three Graces for the NAC foyer. Later he picked up another version of the piece for his own house. Photo © NAC.
By this time the Visual Arts Committee was in full cry and ready to propose another $300,000 worth of items to the Public Works Department, but, in an unusual move, Southam felt it prudent to draw the line. The beleaguered Langford struggled in vain to maintain the budgets, but Southam generally took the artists’ side when issues arose and, with his wily diplomatic skills, usually got the commissions through. When the National Arts Centre Act was finally passed and a Board of Trustees was created to replace the Steering Committee, the visual arts team would be the only advisory committee retained by the board until the building was finished. Such was the importance placed on the visual and plastic arts in this period.
Southam and his colleagues had anticipated “the threat of gifts of art,” and, from the start, they were determined to resist. In practice, they employed “a lot of smoke and screens to avoid gifts,” and they accepted nothing without the Visual Arts Committee’s approval.16 Somehow, Southam managed to circumnavigate this policy on at least two occasions, accepting an Orrefors glass chandelier from the Swedish government for the Salon and a bust of Chopin from the Poles. “After all,” he reminisced later, “I had served in both countries.” The new National Arts Centre was becoming ever more “his house,” which perhaps it had always been. In 1972, when the NAC was finally in full operation, an unexpected $30,000 turned up in the Visual Arts budget. Southam wasted no time in commissioning a puckish mural of football-playing owls from Vancouver artist Jack Shadbolt and orchestrating a grand celebration for its installation in the Restaurant during a popular run by the Vancouver Playhouse in the Theatre.
While his artistic advisory committees buckled down