A Magnificent Obsession

Art collector Ash Prakash pursued his love of Montreal painter James Morrice with what he calls reckless abandon. Canada is all the richer for it, as a show opening soon in Edmonton attests.

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Ash Prakash had a life-changing experience in the early 1980s when he visited the home of Toronto art dealer Blair Lang: He took in his “first dose” of century-old paintings by Montreal artist James Morrice.

It was love at first sight for the federal bureaucrat. The Indian-born Prakash, who was to become a confidant of both the Trudeau and Mulroney families, had soon visited all the Canadian museums that owned Morrice’s work. He read every book he could find on the artist, who lived from 1865 to 1924. And then he started buying work.

“My relationship with Morrice and his work is that of a lover and a beloved,” says the Toronto-based Prakash. “It has never been didactic or scientific or analytical. It has been a magnificent obsession that I have pursued with reckless abandon.”

Fast forward to 2015, when Prakash donated 50 of his Morrice paintings and sketches, reportedly valued at about $20 million, to the National Gallery of Canada. An Ottawa exhibition followed. That same show, James Wilson Morrice: The A.K. Prakash Collection in Trust to the Nation, is on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta from July 21 to Oct. 7. The Edmonton gallery will add some of its own Morrice works to the show and give it much more room to breathe in the building’s second-floor exhibition space. In Ottawa, the works were squeezed into hallways.

Morrice, who left Canada for Paris in 1890, was this country’s first international art star. Many top European galleries, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, have at least one of his paintings. Yet, after his death, he was overshadowed by the Group of Seven, abstractionists and other, more contemporary schools.

Trying to pigeonhole Morrice is complicated. His work resembles Impressionism but most art scholars say he isn’t an Impressionist because his brushstrokes and use of light are so different.

But, certainly, Morrice did borrow from the Impressionists, just as he was influenced by the Nabis, the Fauves and such diverse peers as James Whistler and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Henri Matisse was a soulmate, a neighbour in Paris and, in Tangier, the two – who had both trained as lawyers – shared a studio and locations for plein air painting.

Morrice absorbed all these artistic approaches and then created his own style to become, according to some scholars, Canada’s first Modernist painter. He followed no one school or political ideology but, as Quebec curator Anne-Marie Bouchard says in the exhibition catalogue, was simply “an aesthete devoted exclusively to capturing the beauty of the world.” Being independently wealthy liberated Morrice – he could paint what he wanted without fear of starving.

The Edmonton show contains examples of Morrice’s street scenes, including cafés in Paris, Venice and Tangier, where he often showed women sitting alone, staring straight ahead as if at the artist painting the picture. It also features Morrice’s work as a war artist during the First World War, paintings from his travels in the Caribbean and winter scenes in Quebec.

Many of the Prakash works are small studies on wood known as pochades. Some Morrice fans prefer them to the large canvases, which include Woman in a Chair, 1900-1905, depicting an anonymous woman from Venice; Winter, Montreal (The Pink House), a dreamy winter scene from 1905-1907; and a dazzling fall painting, circa 1905, called Luxembourg Gardens, Paris.

So, why does Prakash so love Morrice? It’s because Morrice is a “cerebral” artist, Prakash responds. “Reality is often transcribed by artists in terms of what the eyes see. Very few have had the faculty and the imagination to go deeper – to reach into the inner core of the mind and to ask the mind how it responds to what it sees.” ■

James Wilson Morrice: The A.K. Prakash Collection in Trust to the Nation is on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton from July 21 to Oct. 7, 2018.

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