Candidatesvyingtotake Rae`sLiberalstronghold

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NATIONAL POST, SATurdAy, SePTember 14, 2013
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First World War civilian prisoners remembered at new Banff site
An exhibition has been opened in Banff National Park
to mark the thousands of Canadians who were taken
prisoner by their own country during the First World
War. The 8,500 civilian prisoners, most of Ukrainian
descent, were arrested and held in internment camps
only because they were originally from Eastern Europe. Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney says
internment camps
the camps have been covered up for decades and it’s
time to put things right. He says the prisoners were
torn from their families and took part in what could
be called slave labour. Dozens of people, the descendants of the prisoners, attended the ceremony at the
exhibit, which is next to
where the Banff camp
was located. Nothing remains of the camp, which
is grown over with bushes
and trees. The Canadian
Press
Candidates vying to take
Rae’s Liberal stronghold
B y N at a l i e a l c o B a
BRIAN MCNEIL / WIKIPEDIA
A former Ontario prison guard claims a painting he owns was created years ago by Peter Doig, above,
and could be worth millions. But Doig and his lawyers insist the painting in question is not his work.
disputed art saga
sees new twist
Lawyers for famed painter Peter Doig identify
artist they say created piece at centre of lawsuit
By RaNdy Boswell
a
bizarre lawsuit pitting a
retired Ontario prison
guard against Peter Doig
— a superstar of the international art scene whose works now
routinely sell for more than $10-million — has taken a dramatic turn
after lawyers for the Canadian-raised
painter identified a now-deceased Alberta oilpatch worker as the “actual”
creator of a disputed canvas.
The case has been raising eyebrows among art aficionados since
late last year, when a multimilliondollar bid to sell the contentious,
1.1-metre-wide piece — presumably
painted by Mr. Doig nearly 40 years
ago, when he would have been 17
years old and living in Canada — was
scuttled by the artist’s insistence it
wasn’t his creation.
The ex-corrections officer claimed
he bought the painting directly from
Mr. Doig at a Thunder Bay jail in the
1970s.
The scene depicted, which appears
to be a southwest U.S. landscape featuring the shoreline of a shallow
pond and a cactus-dotted desert, was
signed by a “Pete Doige” and purchased for $100 in 1976 by Robert
Fletcher, then a guard at the Thunder Bay Correctional Centre.
Mr. Fletcher claims to have encouraged the artistic passions of a
young inmate who was serving six
months at the time for a juvenile
drug conviction.
After Mr. Doig’s work emerged
in recent years as one of the hottest
commodities in the global art market,
Mr. Fletcher and his Chicago-based
brother, Doug, began to suspect that
— despite the slight surname variation — the amber-hued desert scene
was possibly the renowned artist’s
earliest known painting and could be
worth millions.
When plans to sell the painting
last year through Chicago’s Bartlow
Gallery were foiled by Mr. Doig’s
claims that the work wasn’t his, gallery owner Peter Bartlow and Mr.
Fletcher sued the artist for $12-million, arguing in court documents
filed last April that all available evidence suggests they possess “a valuable painting executed by the hand
of a world-renown(ed) living artist in
1976.”
The 53-year-old Mr. Doig and his
legal team, meanwhile, have denied
his authorship of the work, insisting
that while the artist had dropped
out of high school and was travelling
around Canada at the time — working on oil rigs in Alberta, completing
some pencil sketches and admittedly
dabbling in drugs — he was never
charged with any criminal offence,
was never incarcerated in Thunder
Bay and didn’t create a painting until
1979, by which time he was attending
an art school in Britain.
Mr. Doig told the New York Times
in July Mr. Fletcher’s lawsuit was
“spurious,” and he dismissed the
work in question as a “schoolboy
painting” that wouldn’t be worth
$10,000 even if he had created it.
The art market, however, would
likely beg to differ.
Mr. Doig’s paintings, including
many of his best-known, multimillion-dollar works, are understood to
have been powerfully influenced by
his years in Canada, where he lived
from 1966 to 1979.
Mr. Doig was born in Edinburgh
and lived briefly in Trinidad as a toddler, but was raised in Ontario and
Quebec after his parents moved to
Canada. The eerie landscapes that
shot Mr. Doig to stardom often depict lone figures standing in wintry,
The painting over
which they have
brought suit was not
painted by Peter Doig
woodsy settings or canoeing along
a forested lakeshore reminiscent of
Canadian cottage country.
His paintings, some of which
are suggestive of scenes from horror movies, have been described as
“Group of Seven on acid.”
In June, Mr. Doig’s “nostalgiatinged” 1994 painting of a solitary
figure standing on a dock at Alberta’s
Cameron Lake was sold by Christie’s
auction house in London for a stunning $11.3-million, well above the
pre-sale estimate of $6-$9-million.
But he and his lawyers are ada-
mant the Arizona-esque landscape
owned by Mr. Fletcher has been erroneously attributed to Mr. Doig, who
now lives in Trinidad.
“The painting over which they
have brought suit was not painted
by Peter Doig,” one of the artist’s attorneys, Chicago lawyer Suyash
Agrawal, stated in an Aug. 28 submission to an Illinois district court.
And in the same submission, the
lawyer delivered a potentially devastating blow to Mr. Fletcher’s claims:
“We have now found the person who
actually painted the work at issue.”
Mr. Doig’s lawyer identified an Alberta man named Peter Doige — who
had died in February 2012 and was
memorialized on the website of an
Alberta labour union — as the work’s
true artist.
“A simple Google search for ‘Peter
Doige’ revealed several Canadians
with the first name of ‘Peter’ and
a family name of ‘Doige,’ “ said Mr.
Agrawal.
“Among these Google results was
an ‘in memoriam’ listing on the website of the Alberta Regional Council
of Carpenters and Allied Workers
(ARC) regarding the passing of one
of its members, Peter Doige in February 2012. “
Mr. Doig’s defence team had located the sister of the late Peter Doige
— Marilyn Doige Bovard of Hinton,
Alta. — who confirmed that he must
have been the inmate-artist Mr.
Fletcher met in the 1970s.
“Ms. Bovard provided a detailed,
under-oath declaration confirming
that her brother attended Lakehead
University in the 1970s and served a
jail sentence at the Thunder Bay Correctional Center,” Mr. Agrawal stated.
“Ms. Bovard confirmed that her
brother was also an artist.”
Mr. Fletcher said Friday he and his
lawyers are examining the new evidence.
BARTLOW GALLERY CHICAGO.
Detail from the painting controversially attributed to renowned
British-Canadian artist Peter Doig, but signed Pete Doige 76.
T OrON T O • In the shadow of a digital billboard, amid the cacophony of
street-corner preachers and streetcars and skateboards of downtown
Toronto, Chrystia Freeland pumps
her arms as she runs to make the
lights.
She used the city’s bike share to
get here, the venerable Imperial Pub,
to attend a “Young Liberals” launch
night. The campaign was accidentally told the wrong location, so she left
without entering, but first slipped
out of her sneakers and into towering
black patent heels for a photo shoot.
Although she blends into the
crowds at one of the busiest intersections in the city, Ms. Freeland,
a prominent Canadian author and
journalist until recently living in New
York City, is a commanding presence
who has brought some star power to
the race to fill Bob Rae’s well worn
shoes.
With provocative left-wing journalist and writer Linda McQuaig
vying for the NDP nomination, the
still uncalled byelection in Toronto
Centre could have the makings of a
political junkie’s thrill ride.
Ms. Freeland, 45, and Ms. McQuaig, 62, must first clinch their parties’ respective nominations at meetings this weekend — and despite the
buzz, neither claims to be a shoo in.
Todd Ross, a longtime community leader, and Diana Burke, a retired
bank executive and seasoned Liberal organizer, are also vying for the
Liberal nod, while former journalist
and Much Music VJ Jennifer Hollett
and well-known local activist Susan
Gapka are seeking to represent the
NDP. This week, the Green Party announced it, too, had found a media
candidate: former Toronto Star
journalist John Deverell. The Conservative riding association did not
respond to requests about its candidate.
Toronto Centre is traditionally a
Liberal stronghold. Ms. Hollett, 37,
calls the riding a “postcard of Canada” — it includes some of the richest neighbourhoods in the city, the
country’s oldest and largest social
housing project and Toronto’s gay village. Its boundaries will be redrawn
for the next general election, in 2015,
but for now it has become somewhat
of a bellwether between NDP leader
Thomas Mulcair and Liberal leader
Justin Trudeau, argues Ms. McQuaig,
who has lived in the riding for 13
years.
She seems to relish the chance to
debate Ms. Freeland, who like her
has written extensively on the topic
of income disparity. Ms. Freeland is
the author of Plutocrats: The Rise of
the New Global Super Rich and the
Fall of Everyone Else; Ms. McQuaig
co-wrote The Trouble with Billionaires: How the Super Rich Hijacked
the World and How We Can Take it
Back with professor Neil Brooks. Ms.
McQuaig says their takes are very
different: “She treats the rise of inequality as inevitable in the global
economy; I see it as a consequence
of a very deliberate set of economic
policies.”
Ms. Freeland, a Peace River, Alta.,
native who studied at Harvard and
Oxford, declines to comment on Ms.
McQuaig at this juncture. “I think I
can help us figure out a few things,”
says the mother of three who first
met Mr. Trudeau at party for her
book last year and has a number of
his backers working on her campaign. “One is how do we, as a country, how does Toronto Centre, as the
central place in Canada’s biggest city,
how do we succeed in a changing,
highly competitive economy?”
National Post
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Twitter.com/nataliealcoba
TyLer ANderSON / NATIONAL POST
Linda McQuaig, above, of the NDP and below, Chrystia Freeland of the
Liberals, are seeking to replace the retired Bob Rae in Toronto Centre.
MATTHEW SHERWOOD FOR NATIONAL POST