Riopelle, Tousignant, Comtois — am I in the National Gallery? Letendre, Perehudoff, Meredith — these are the giants of abstract painting in Canada. What are they doing here, in what has always been the “cards room” in Victoria’s Union Club?
The effect is dramatic — charcoal grey walls, brilliant coloured canvases focused in bright pools of light across a darkened room. A game of cards is absorbing the attention of a group of men in shirt sleeves, and I am left to revel in the paintings in a setting more sympathetic than a stark white gallery.
Elizabeth Levinson of Winchester Modern has walked me over from her nearby gallery to show me this installation. For the past few years, she has operated her own Winchester Gallery on Humboldt Street, next to the Café Mela (which she and her sister opened some years before). Now that space has been sold by the parent Winchester Galleries Ltd., and she has moved her desk to the Modern location just a few doors to the west where she and her colleague, Peter Redpath, are able to spell each other off while they get on with their projects.
Levinson, for example, has done much more than sit at her elegant desk and wait for customers. She was responsible for the hanging of artwork at the new Oak Bay Beach Hotel — 300 original artworks in 100 rooms, plus the complete installation for a number of residences there and the display in the public spaces, where all the artwork is for sale. With her new freedom, she will be more able to get away to oversee installations in clients’ homes, and to visit artists’ studios. And, if she finds a quiet moment, Redpath certainly enjoys some companionship in the high-minded exhibition space he has created.
There is a level of seriousness about Winchester Modern which is unique in Victoria. Winchester Galleries has pursued the most senior and renowned artists in Canada — and then their estates — making a home on the West Coast for the work of a generation of Québécois abstract painters. Who would have expected that? Following the recent exhibit of Charles Gagnon’s work, brilliant and large paintings by Claude Tousignant now have pride of place at Winchester Modern. Redpath told me that Sotheby’s is planning an important sale — not an auction, but an art sale — of Canadian Abstraction in New York next month. Winchester was able to persuade Tousignant to redirect one of the three works from the New York sale to Victoria. It’s a yellow circle in a yellow square, almost two metres across. The effect is profound.
Levinson and Redpath are full of anticipation for their upcoming William Perehudoff show. One of the most famous Alberta abstractionists, Perehudoff died last year. This show, the “first pick” of material from his estate to be offered on the market, will attract a lot of attention to Victoria. One of his canvases, a huge pink tongue of viscous acrylic on a silvery ground, has a niche at the Union Club. It’s near a striking work by John Meredith, a turquoise field with a magenta “splat” in the centre. And beside that hangs one of Rita Letendre’s vivid streaks of electric colour from 2007. Her career took off when she exhibited with the Automatistes in 1952, and reached a peak when she received the Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts in 2010.
Harold Klunder builds up his canvases with thick gobs of colour. After establishing himself on the top rank of Toronto artists, he moved to Victoria a few years ago and Winchester continues to sell his work for very high prices. Michael Morris, our own international art star who pursues his worldwide projects from Brentwood Bay, is represented at the Union Club with a stylish and appealing hard-edge painting in his signature parallel-lines style. One of the finest Toni Onley canvases available is hanging here too, an intriguing image poised exquisitely between his torn-canvas abstracts and his landscapes of glacial erratics on the beach. A large Doug Morton canvas hangs over the fireplace. Earlier, Morton came to fame as one of the Regina Five and, toward the end, was the head of the fine-art department at the University of Victoria.
Though these paintings are all venerable classics by acknowledged masters, there may be some Victorians who haven’t yet caught up to abstract painting. There may be some at the Union Club who find this all a bit shocking. I asked David Hammond, the general manager, how the installation is going over and he told me the members are delighted.
At the moment, under the direction of member Martin Segger, the Union Club is doing an inventory of the more than 200 artworks which already belong to the club, and it was Segger who suggested that the club form a partnership with Winchester Galleries. This is a good idea, one that could certainly benefit other galleries and clubs. That said, it’s unlikely that anyone else would set up a discreet social lounge in a manner which makes one think of the National Gallery.
Winchester Modern, 758 Humboldt St., 250-386-2773, 250-382-7750, winchestergalleriesltd.com