PDF - Odon Wagner Gallery

36 Portraits of Toronto’s Art Dealers
36 Portraits of Toronto’s Art Dealers
Published in 2009 by
Tightrope Books
602 Markham Street
Toronto, ON
M6G 2L8
Canada
www.tightropebooks.com
Photography:
Frank Mazzuca (Portrait Photography)
www.mazzuca-dpi.com
John Drajewicz (Artwork Photography)
www.proofstudiogallery.com
Book design:
KaKi Creative Sdn. Bhd.
www.kakicreative.com
Copy Editor:
Shirarose Wilensky
Printed by:
Phoenix Press Sdn. Bhd.
Penang, Malaysia
Copyright © Viktor Mitic, 2009
www.viktormitic.ca
www.artorwar.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying
or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright,
the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
www.accesscopyright.ca
[email protected]
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mitic, Viktor
Dealers: 36 portraits of Toronto's art dealers / by Viktor Mitic;
with an introduction by Gary Michael Dault.
ISBN 978-1-926639-14-7
1. Mitic, Viktor. 2. Art dealers—Ontario—Toronto—Portraits. 3. Portrait painting, Canadian—21st century. I. Title.
N8659.D43 2009 759.11 C2009-906293-3
This book is dedicated to Azusa, Ansel and Ana
06 / Dealers: A Suite of Portraits by Viktor Mitic / Gary Michael Dault
10 / Works
13 / Alan Loch
15 / Benjamin Diaz
17 / Blaise DeLong
19 / Christopher Cutts
21 / Clint Roenisch
23 / David Kaye
25 / Diane Rosenthal
27 / Georgia Scherman
29 / Indira Roy Choudhury
31 / Jamie Angell
33 / Jane Corkin
35 / Katharine Mulherin
37 / Leo Kamen
39 / Lynne Wynick
41 / Mary Sue Rankin
43 / Michael Klein
45 / Miriam Shiell
47 / Nicholas Metivier
49 / Odon Wagner
51 / Olga Korper
53 / Pari Nadimi
55 / Patrizia Libralato
57 / Paul Petro
59 / Paul T. Wildridge
61 / Phillip Gevik
63 / Robert Birch
65 / Ron and Amanda Moore
67 / Rupert Young
69 / Stephen Bulger
71 / Steven Schwartz
73 / Susan Hobbs
75 / Thomas G. Beckett
77 / Tien Huang
79 / Walter Moos
81 / Wil Kucey
83 / Zack Z. Pospieszynski
84 / Biodata
86 / Acknowledgements
0607
A Suite of Portraits by Viktor Mitic
John Singer Sargent once defined a portrait as a painting in which there was
“always something wrong about the mouth.” While this is amusing enough, and
while there is probably a certain amount of truth in it, I suppose it is safe to say,
despite Sargent’s waggishness, that there is more to any portrait—and to the
discipline of portraiture in general—than any recalcitrant difficulties about
mouths.
using a low-quality cellphone camera, in order to produce a casual snapshot of
each of my prospective subjects. It was hard to get them to do anything more
than pose for two seconds! I think I kind of got them off-guard . . . the presence of
the cellphone, not some fancy camera with flash and umbrellas, allowed them
to assume natural, relaxed poses. The cellphone made the whole thing of
getting photographed seem like fun—and not like serious work.”
The great age of the portrait—the period of the Italian Renaissance—was, to
some degree, a product of the increasingly complex, indeed ornate, relationship
between the painter and the sitter, that is to say, between artist and, almost
inevitably, patron (in the portrait work of, for example, Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo da
Vinci, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Titian, Tintoretto, Bronzino—work to be
continued, during the next two centuries, by Velasquez, Rembrandt, Van Dyke,
Rubens, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Goya, Degas, and, in the twentieth century, by
Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol,
and others).
Given the fact that Mitic knew some of his hypothetical “sitters” only slightly (or
not at all), his feeling for his rather distanced subjects was, of necessity, a factor of
the knowledge he already possessed of their galleries and, generally speaking,
of their ideas about art—all this, conflated with the information inherent in their
photographs (a not inconsiderable amount of information, by the way, given
the photograph’s role as a recorder, first of surfaces and then of atmospheres
and auras).
The portrait was normally commissioned, and the resulting work, the portraitartifact, was likely to be not only a product of what the artist saw and recorded in
oil pigments, but also a compression, an emblemizing, of the time the two had
spent together. The portrait was, therefore, not only (presumably) a convincing
likeness, but carried, at the same time, a certain density of experience—being a
part, in the end, of all that it had met during the days, weeks, and months (maybe
even years) of its gradual coming into itself. The portrait, in history, has thus been
primarily the record of a psychological encounter—or, more particularly, of the
mutual encountering of two personalities juxtaposed in place and time.
Today, the patron is in short supply (except for a gaggle of impatient-looking
CEOs that always need painting, and they aren’t patrons anyhow, just clients).
And, as a result, there is little time anymore for a transformative encounter
between artist and subject, for their prolonged (sometimes agonized)
interrelationship.
When painter Viktor Mitic set out on his project—a portrait-survey of the art
dealers in Toronto—he was not granted audiences, precisely, but was at least
given the opportunity to photograph each of the personages he would then
proceed to paint. Which, of course, drastically compromised and modified the
age-old artist-sitter relationship. “Mostly,” Mitic told me, “I made the photographs
1
2
Art historian Max J. Friedlander, in his classic but still indispensable study,
Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life: Their Origin and Development,1 notes that in his
“Reflections on Physiognomy,” Schopenhauer makes the point that “the
portraitist can take in a personality that is strange to him, seen perhaps for the
first time, more correctly because more objectively than that of a friend, an
acquaintance or anybody with whom he has human relations.”2 And it is
certainly true that, even with the sometimes subtle and complex support of the
photograph, the relationship between portraitist and snapshot is
inescapably—almost, in a way, comically—objective.
And so Mitic was pretty much on his own in the making of this remarkable suite
of thirty-six paintings. In the course of having written about art in Toronto for
decades now, I know most of these people. Some of them, I know very well
indeed. And if I were in Mitic’s shoes, and holding his brush, I’d have no
objectivity at all. I’d be utterly lost in my affections and my antipathies, victim to
the influence of my memories, distracted by the insinuations of anecdote,
bedevilled by the blurring of shared histories, buffeted by the up-and-down
evaluating and re-evaluating of curatorial triumphs and disasters.
What are art dealers like? Well, I don’t suppose you can make any very telling
generalizations about them. The one curious thing about them, though—and
something that, as disparate a bunch as they may be, they nevertheless have in
common—is that, like architects, they are all half aesthetes and half hard-
Friedlander, Max J., Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life: Their Origin and Development, (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1949).
Schopenhauer, Arthur, “Reflections on Physiognomy,” 247.
headed, (and maybe hard-hearted) businessmen and businesswomen. They are
in the business of peddling art because, first, they love art (a number of them
began as artists—Lynn Wynick and photographer Michael Klein come to
mind—or continue to make their own art). But they are also, inescapably, first
and foremost, in the business of business.
I have known (and felt great ongoing affection for) Olga Korper since the 1970s.
The Olga Korper Gallery is one of the finest galleries in Toronto and in Canada,
both physically (it is a stunningly handsome space), and metaphysically (her
exhibitions are almost inevitably fine). I asked her, a few days before writing this
essay, what being an art dealer meant to her. She told me that, years ago, her
daughter brought a boyfriend home for dinner and that “he was beautifully
behaved and had obviously been taught to speak to the person on his left, then
turn to his right and engage that one in conversation.” Apparently, in the course
of dinner, he dutifully turned to her and asked, “So, Mrs Korper, do you have any
hobbies?” Whereupon, Korper told me, she opened her mouth and before
something extraordinarily rude could come out, Leo [her business partner]
answered for her: “Olga is one of those lucky people,” he told the young man,
“whose hobby is her job!” Lucky indeed. To tell the truth, I don’t know how any art
dealer could make it through the week if he or she didn’t feel somehow
nourished, enriched, just by being close to the art in the gallery.
How is the portrait painter to proceed? Is it his business to idealize? Or to be
merciless in his revelations? Hegel, in his “Aesthetics,” opted for idealization,
railing against “almost repulsively lifelike portraits,” and demanding, rather, that
the portrait painter flatter his subject, downplaying the sitter’s outward
appearance and “presenting us with a view which emphasizes the subject’s
general character and lasting spiritual qualities.”3
It would be unrealistic, and certainly less than fair, to expect much of an
exploration of “lasting spiritual qualities” in the portraits of Toronto’s art dealers,
but there cannot be much doubt that Mitic has successfully captured their
“general character.” As I sift through them I’m struck, for example, by the degree
to which Benjamin Diaz’s [Diaz Contemporary] molten red-gold shirt seems to
exemplify his Mexico-City–derived Latin passions. I’m struck, too, by Wil Kucey’s
[Le Gallery] infectious insouciance (his yellow shirt a flag to rally the youthful
avant-garde), and by the way the all-green outfit of gallerist David Kaye [David
Kaye Gallery] gives him a sort of hospital-orderly atmosphere—replete with an
affectionate but efficient kind of caring.
3
4
I like how jaunty and offhand Leo Kamen [Leo Kamen Gallery] is, and how
genially shrewd Nicholas Metivier [Nicholas Metivier Gallery] looks. I like the
haunted, rainbow-clad Clint Roenisch [Clint Roenisch Gallery], an archcontemporary channelling the ’60s; and I like Christopher Cutts’s [Christopher
Cutts Gallery] “Tennis, anyone?” vivacity. I like Katharine Mulherin’s [Katharine
Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects] big blue hair. And Phillip Gevik’s [Gallery
Gevik] warm, fuzzy look (which is just like him). And Walter Moos’s [Gallery Moos]
Michael-Caine–like urbanity. And Jamie Angell’s [Angell Gallery] full-frontal
engagement with whatever is next. In fact, there isn’t a portrait here that doesn’t
provide not only a fine likeness of its subject, but also a telling, charming, incisive
route into the sitter’s essential nature. As I say, Viktor Mitic doesn’t know a lot of
these people. But body language is powerful, no?
There’s just one more thing to add. And it’s about the isolation of each figure in
its proffered space. In Mitic’s paintings, there is no context, no environment, no
employment of the sitter’s attributes. Friedlander offers a useful thought about
this kind of pictorial isolation: “The more the figure becomes visible as a whole,”
he writes, “the more solidly entrenched the sitter seems in his station, his
profession, his social class, and the more his local and temporal ties will govern
the impression. Especially the costume betrays something of the Where and the
When.”4
One more note about Mitic’s relentless subjecting of his sitters to pictorial
isolation on the picture-plane: it’s important to notice that each of them—all
thirty-six of them—is floating against a sensuous, lushly painted, golden
ground. Which leaves them looking a bit like icons.
Gary Michael Dault
Napanee, Ontario
September 24, 2009
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich, “Aesthetics,” in The Art of the Portrait, edited by Norbert Schneider (London: Taschen, 2002), 15.
Freidlander, Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life, 237.
0809
1011
1213
Alan Loch / Loch Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
1415
Benjamin Diaz / Diaz Contemporary / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
1617
Blaise DeLong / DeLong Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
1819
Christopher Cutts / Christopher Cutts Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
2021
Clint Roenisch / Clint Roenisch Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
2223
David Kaye / David Kaye Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
2425
Diane Rosenthal / Hollander York Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
2627
Georgia Scherman / Georgia Scherman Projects / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
2829
Indira Roy Choudhury / Trias Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
3031
Jamie Angell / Angell Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
3233
Jane Corkin / Corkin Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
3435
Katharine Mulherin / Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
3637
Leo Kamen / Leo Kamen Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
3839
Lynne Wynick / WynickTuck Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
4041
Mary Sue Rankin / Edward Day Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
4243
Michael Klein / MKG127 / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
4445
Miriam Shiell / Miriam Shiell Fine Art / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
4647
Nicholas Metivier / Nicholas Metivier Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
4849
Odon Wagner / Odon Wagner Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
5051
Olga Korper / Olga Korper Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
5253
Pari Nadimi / Pari Nadimi Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
5455
Patrizia Libralato / Birch Libralato / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
5657
Paul Petro / Paul Petro Contemporary Art / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
5859
Paul T. Wildridge / Roberts Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
6061
Phillip Gevik / Gallery Gevik / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
6263
Robert Birch / Birch Libralato / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
6465
Ron and Amanda Moore / Moore Gallery Ltd. / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
6667
Rupert Young / Gallery Moos / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
6869
Stephen Bulger / Stephen Bulger Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
7071
Steven Schwartz / Engine Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
7273
Susan Hobbs / Susan Hobbs Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
7475
Thomas G. Beckett / Beckett Fine Art Ltd. / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
7677
Tien Huang / Bau-Xi Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
7879
Walter Moos / Gallery Moos / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
8081
Wil Kucey / LE Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
8283
Zack Z. Pospieszynski / Peak Gallery / 2009 / 32 x 40”
acrylic, oil, japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on board
8485
Viktor Mitic was born in Belgrade, Serbia. A University of Toronto graduate
artist, classically trained in art schools in Europe, Mitic has produced a major
body of work that spans a career of over two decades. For a number of years, he
was painting non-representational paintings using natural elements such as
rain and hail to render surfaces of the paintings in oils on canvas. Mitic has
successfully integrated various materials into his recent body of work: charcoal,
graphite, oil, acrylic, watercolour, pen and ink, and japanese traditional natural
pigment. He has recently developed a distinctive, some would say provocative,
method; he paints portraits of international iconic images and later shoots the
outline of the figures using various weapons and live ammunition. He has had
many successful solo and group shows of his paintings in Europe, the United
States, Canada, and, most recently, Japan. Viktor Mitic lives in Toronto.
Notable Collections & Collectors
Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
National Gallery of Grenada, Georgetown, Grenada
Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Hon. Keith Mitchell, Prime Minister Of Grenada
Hon. Jean Chrétien, Former Prime Minister of Canada
Hon. Gary Filmon, Former Premier of Manitoba
Hon. Preston Manning, Former Leader of Opposition
Hon. Stockwell Day, Former Leader of Opposition
Hon. Bob Rae, Former Premier of Ontario
Hon. Jean Augustine M.P. Etobicoke-Lakeshore
Hon. John Manley
Hon. Pierre Pettigrew
Hon. Ken Dryden
Recent Media & Critical Review
BBC Radio, London, UK, 2009
Globe & Mail, Jennifer Yang, 2009
Toronto Star, Peter Goddard, 2008
Toronto Sun, Mike Strobel, 2009
Telegraph-Journal, 2009
Daily Gleaner, 2009
The Press Enterprise, California, USA, 2008
ArtDaily.org, 2009
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2008
Viktor Mitic would like to offer special thanks to Spomenka and Borivoje Mitic for
their genuine support of this exhibition and catalogue. Thanks to Kiatlim Chew
and Frank Mazzuca for their invaluable guidance and assistance. Additional
thanks are due to Ewan Whyte, John Drajewicz, and Edward Zawadzki. Thanks to
all the participating art dealers without whose help and enthusiasm this project
and catalogue would not have been possible.
Special thanks to Tan Chiew Seng and Ch'ng Kiah Kiean.
8687