From Wedding Cake to Music Garden

The neglected story of Toronto’s public art revolution.
MARK LOVEWELL

Creating Memory: A Guide to Outdoor Public Sculpture in Toronto
John Warkentin

Becker Associates and the City Institute at York University
347 pages, softcover
ISBN 9780919387607

culpture intended for outdoor public sites is costly,” notes John Warkentin Creating Memory: A Guide to Outdoor Public Sculpture in Toronto. “It takes time and support of many different kinds.” This set of constraints helps explain the remarkable differences in the stock of outdoor public sculpture found in various Canadian cities. Montreal’s rich sculptural heritage, for example, says much about the centuries-long creative tensions between the English and French. Vancouver’s collection may be smaller due to its more recent origins, but in many ways it is as impressive as Montreal’s, especially in the imaginative appropriation of aboriginal themes by West Coast artists.

Toronto’s accumulation of sculpture is so varied and wide-ranging as to be virtually impossible to categorize. This is one reason Warkentin’s meticulous study is so welcome. There is more public sculpture in Toronto than in any other city in Canada—more than 600 works, in contrast to about 450 in Montreal and 300 in Vancouver. The great majority of Toronto sculpture dates from after 1950, which makes the older pieces that much more noteworthy.

The city’s first major public sculpture was designed by a Montrealer, Robert Reid. Located on the University of Toronto campus, near the Ontario Legislative Building, it is a memorial to the Canadian volunteers who died in the 1866 battles against the Fenians. Although partly eroded, it remains a fitting representative of its time and place, with elaborate allegorical statues that in Warkentin’s apt metaphor are “heaped one on top of the other like a wedding cake.”

Within a few decades of this memorial’s installation, a group of Toronto-based sculptors had begun winning the bulk of local commissions. The earliest was transplanted Englishman Hamilton MacCarthy, almost forgotten today except for a pedestrian statue of Egerton Ryerson found next to the former site of the Toronto Normal School on Gould Street. MacCarthy’s younger contemporaries Walter Allward and Emanuel Hahn were more successful in producing lasting work. Allward’s South African war memorial is regarded by many commentators as the most impressive of Toronto’s early monuments. Strategically sited near the intersection of University Avenue and Queen Street, its soaring obelisk and larger-than-life figures leave a striking impression. The most celebrated work of Emanuel Hahn, a statue of Hydro technocrat Adam Beck, is just to the south on University Avenue. “Beck is not quite in a heroic pose,” Warkentin observes of Hahn’s skilful portrayal of Beck’s seemingly infinite self-assurance, “but this is as close as we get to that in Toronto.”

The remaining two members of this original Toronto group were Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, whose close collaboration and life-long partnership gave them a certain Bohemian cachet in their own time and today makes them standard entries in Canadian queer histories. Both women were Americans and they moved to the city together. Their local reputation was based on several major installations—among them Wyle’s memorial to World War One nurse Edith Cavell, located in front of the Toronto General Hospital, and Loring’s monument in honour of the Queen Elizabeth Way, now next to the mouth of the Humber River. Other works by Wyle and Loring can be found at Guildwood Park in Scarborough. This Toronto gem was the inspiration of collectors Herbert Spencer Clark and his wife, Rosa Breithaupt Hewetson Clark, who systematically saved hundreds of architectural carvings from Toronto buildings as they were being demolished during the city’s post-war construction boom. The site of an artists’ community until the 1970s, the large lakeside property was turned over to the city of Toronto. It is now a municipal park, providing the Clarks’ unique sculptural collection with a permanent home.

The torch of beaux arts sculptural classicism was kept alive in Toronto until mid century. The swing toward abstraction finally began after World War Two, but it took a political flare-up to become fully evident. In the early 1960s, Viljo Revell, the Finnish designer of Toronto’s much-ballyhooed new City Hall, insisted that a Henry Moore work entitled Three Way Piece No. 2/The Archer be acquired for his civic square. A firestorm of popular disapproval met Revell’s demand, forcing Toronto’s embattled mayor Philip Givens to seek private funds to buy the work. The Moore piece was finally installed as Revell wished, but the stain on Toronto’s image as a cosmopolitan city caused by the popular uproar was not quickly forgotten. So great was the embarrassment among Torontonians in positions of power at the knee-jerk reaction of the masses that in no time criticism of high abstraction became a badge of crass philistinism as far as the city’s elite was concerned. Meanwhile, a younger generation of tradition-baiting sculptors was more than ready to help in the transformation of Toronto from stuffy Anglo-Canadian backwater to modern-minded metropolis.

Among this rising generation of sculptors were two key players: the Romanian-born Sorel Etrog, who was quickly gaining a name for his distinctive brand of abstract expressionism, and the Russian-Israeli Kosso Eloul, whose equally individual style featured arrangements of precariously welded steel boxes. By the 1970s this pair, along with a few local rivals, faced an embarrassment of riches. Not only were municipal and provincial policies now encouraging public art, but the city’s protracted construction boom was creating constant demand for fresh work. In the end, Etrog and Eloul overplayed their popularity. Except for a few high-profile installations, their output, still a common sight throughout the city, now receives little attention except by a small artistic elite. As Warkentin diplomatically remarks: “Some very good abstract sculptors can be so over-represented in a city that, even if their work remains consistently high in quality, it may be so repetitive … that as the works accumulate the later installations become regarded as trite.” There is no doubt, given the context of these comments, to whom he is referring.

By the 1980s it was becoming more common to have major sculptural works funded by local patrons of independent means. Such patrons—some individuals, others community groups—often had less than sterling artistic standards. As their prevalence grew, so too did the risk of controversy. In 1984 and 1985, two pieces were the subject of harsh political debate. One was by the Anglo-Croatian sculptor Oscar Nemon. A privately financed memorial to World War Two Commonwealth pilots, it features an airman with arms stretched upward who, as Warkentin puts it, unfortunately resembles “a child’s rubber manikin.” “Gumby Goes to Heaven” was the critics’ immediate mocking nickname. The other contentious work, sculpted by Italy’s Francesco Pirelli and again privately sponsored, was a paean to multicultural harmony that depicted a male figure, aided by industrious doves, constructing a skeletal globe: “Multicultural Kitsch” was the verdict of its legion of detractors. Efforts to stop the installation of both pieces failed. The airmen’s memorial now occupies a choice spot on University Avenue while the symbol of multicultural harmony stands in front of Union Station. But the protests did have an impact. Within months, tighter municipal regulations concerning the approval of public sculpture were in place, and the Toronto City Council was developing a permanent funding mechanism for public art through annual appropriations while instituting a percent-for-art policy for major development projects.

Have these measures improved the quality of Toronto’s public art? Most critics would say it has. Admittedly, the 25-year period ending in 1985 saw a few landmark additions to Toronto’s cache of public art: among them the austere memorial to the Katyn Massacre near High Park, designed by the Polish-American engineer Tadeusz Janowski and still much loved by the Toronto Polish community, and Joe Fafard’s oft-photographed series of bronze cows occupying a green space west of the TD Centre, the lifelike ensemble hinting at bucolic bliss amidst the downtown bank towers.

All the same, the list of important new installations post 1985 is longer. Several of these recent works, such as the evocative commemorations to Chinese railroad workers near the Rogers Centre and refugees from the Irish Famine at the end of Bathurst Quay, continue a well-established tradition of immigrant communities memorializing their arrival in Canada. What distinguishes these two works is the stunning mise en scène realism achieved by a panoramic view of the construction of a railway trestle in the case of the first, and a recreation of gaunt famine victims reaching the Canadian shore in the second. Equally memorable, although of far different character, is the Toronto Music Garden between Bathurst Street and Spadina Avenue. A collaborative effort involving artists and landscape architects, based on the original inspiration of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, it accomplishes what at first strikes the visitor as an impossible feat: transforming a one-hectare patch of waterfront into a visual interpretation of Bach’s Suite No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello in six separate sections corresponding to the suite’s movements.

Each of these post-1985 landmarks uses sophisticated artistic language, while attempting to speak to a broad audience, and is closely attuned to its site. Warkentin is very much aware of these criteria as he analyzes the successful, the humdrum and the egregious in his catalogue of every substantial piece of public sculpture in the city. Because many readers will wish to use his catalogue as a guide, he makes sure to postpone his evaluative commentary to separate chapters, where he focuses on broader social and aesthetic issues. It is obvious that Creating Memory has been, for its author, a labour of love of years’ duration, and the final result is remarkable. By gathering the stories of an extraordinarily disparate sculptural heritage into a single coherent narrative—the first comprehensive attempt for Toronto’s public art—Warkentin has produced a book that will be studied and consulted for years to come.

Mark Lovewell is the interim dean of arts at Ryerson University. He is the co-publisher of the LRC.