Good morning! Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.
Journalists aren’t known for their patience: Marsha Lederman and I weren’t examples of the virtue during our many, many discussions about the mystery she uncovered at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015.
But Marsha – formerly The Globe and Mail’s Western Canadian arts reporter and now a Globe columnist – is a model of persistence.
Nine years ago, Marsha reported on the astonishing circumstances that led the Vancouver Art Gallery to acquire 10 long-hidden new works by famed Group of Seven artist J.E.H. MacDonald. The gallery was jubilant about the acquisition of the oils on paperboard, including studies for Mist Fantasy, Northland; The Elements; and The Tangled Garden.
The sketches, the gallery said,were made between 1910 and 1922, and had been buried for more than four decades in a backyard in Thornhill, Ont., then kept for another 40 years or so in the home of Toronto art collectors. They were donated to the VAG after its senior curator, Ian Thom, a highly respected Group of Seven expert, authenticated them and arranged the gift. A second expert agreed with Thom’s assessment.
But the story never sat well with Marsha. This week, after nine years of refusing to answer Marsha’s persistent questions of whether the works were fake, the gallery opened an exhibit explaining in detail that, yes, indeed, the original story was too good to be true. The 10 sketches are fakes. And the gallery has known that since 2016.
After the initial media coverage of the VAG’s acquisition, Marsha began getting calls from skeptical experts on the Group of Seven. Alan Klinkhoff, a respected Montreal gallerist, noted in a blog post that he was asked to appraise the sketches and refused.
“I was not 100-per-cent convinced,” he said in an interview then with Marsha.
“It’s my opinion that there’s an excellent chance, a very excellent chance, that they are not right, and they absolutely have to be tested,” Ken Macdonald, a retired but still active art dealer and consultant, said at the time.
Scientific analysis was conducted on the paintings by the Canadian Conservation Institute in 2016.
Over the years, Marsha repeatedly asked for the results of the tests. The institute wouldn’t answer the question, referring her back to the VAG. Freedom of Information requests came back empty. Kathleen Bartels, the long-time director of the gallery, who oversaw the donation, refused to explain.
As Marsha writes today, the mess was inherited by Anthony Kiendl when he became the VAG’s director and CEO in the summer of 2020 after Bartels left.
“I just can’t really understand why the delay in cleaning this thing up,” Klinkhoff told Marsha this week.
Kiendl says the reason it took so long for his administration to reveal the truth was logistical: he was dealing with so much when he started – the pandemic and its fallout primarily – and wanted the person he hired as the gallery’s curator of Canadian art to take on the project and create an exhibition around it, where the gallery would come clean.
In the exhibit, the gallery does come clean: Some of Marsha’s stories are included in the display. In a video created for the exhibit, Thom addresses what happened.
“When it first started, I thought this is one of the great experiences of my life. And then it just got worse and worse and worse,” says Thom, who retired from the gallery in 2018. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life, frankly.” (Thom declined an interview request from The Globe this week.)
But mystery remains.
Bartels, now executive director and CEO at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, did not respond to Marsha’s requests for an interview.
It remains unclear if MacDonald didn’t paint the sketches, who did? And how did they get to the point where they were identified as being created by one of Canada’s most iconic artists?
“Given the cards we were dealt, we’re trying to respond responsibly and ethically,” Kiendl says.
“Museums traditionally like to be authorities and we like to present accurate information and we do our best,” he added. “But I guess, from time to time, that doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
