Women at the Helm

New book looks at the careers of the first three female directors of the National Gallery of Canada.

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Note to future directors of the National Gallery of Canada: Never disparage Western landscape masterpieces by saying they are inferior to traditional Chinese landscapes.

That impolitic comparison, we learn in a hefty new book about the gallery’s first three women directors, was made by Hsio-yen Shih during her little-remembered years, from 1977 to 1981, as head of the Ottawa gallery.

“Given the importance of landscape in Canadian art,” according to Michael Pantazzi, a former senior curator at the gallery, “her misstep was irreparable – a psychological as well as an aesthetic faultline – and incurable.”

That was not Shih’s only perceived fault during her time at the gallery, years that saw the renowned Asian art scholar from Toronto grow increasingly distant from everyone who mattered in Ottawa. She left a year before her term was to end, frustrated at the inability to move files forward, especially the government’s half-hearted plans to build a new gallery.

Shih’s supposed sins are detailed in Women at the Helm: How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada, a scholarly book by Diana Nemiroff, a senior curator at the gallery from 1990 to 2005. In the book, Victoria Henry, former head of the Canada Council Art Bank, calls Shih “politically naïve.” Ann Thomas, a former gallery curator, says Shih did not know how to use the gallery’s national role to advantage in her dealings with the federal bureaucracy.

The book reveals Shih failed to network with key politicians or bureaucrats, including the meddlesome National Museums of Canada Corp., which could have made her life less miserable. She championed Asian art although it really had never been in the gallery’s mandate. She was a stranger to her curators. And there was her dislike of the Western landscape tradition at an institution that beatified the Group of Seven. She simply did not fit in.

Nemiroff’s well-researched book is not a triple biography of the first three women, all now deceased, who made it to the top of Canada's art establishment. Instead, it is a blow-by-blow look at how they tried – sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing – to make the gallery a better place. It is a must-read for any serious scholar interested in the history of the 141-year-old gallery from 1966 to 1997.

For non-academic readers, the lack of biographical details may be frustrating at times. Who were these women when not battling politicians and bureaucrats and spending millions on art? What made them tick?

Thomson, director from 1987 to 1997, is the only one presented as a fully-formed character – she and Nemiroff worked closely together for years. The chapters on Thomson are more about the gallery’s art choices than about political wrangling. Her decisions sometimes sparked controversy – like the acquisition of Voice of Fire by Barnett Newman for $1.8 million in 1989, the infamous meat dress by Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, displayed in 1991, and the cancellation of an exhibition about the 1970 October Crisis prior to a Quebec referendum in 1995.

Thomson comes across as warm, intelligent, insatiably curious and totally loyal to friends. She stood for “excellence and integrity” and had an uncanny ability to connect with almost anyone. We learn some gossipy details about a failed marriage before her gallery days, and how she could charm cantankerous art philistines. More details like that about the other two directors would have made the book far more readable for a general audience and less like a 480-page memo to the Privy Council.

We learn little about Boggs and Shih in their lives outside the gallery. Maybe those two, both childless and never-married, were such workaholics they did not have a life beyond work. We are told Shih sometimes knitted in meetings. And we learn a young Boggs gave up her own dreams of becoming an artist because she could not abide “bad art,” especially her own. But there must be so much more.

The tenacious Boggs, director from 1966 to 1976, the first woman to hold the post, pioneered the gallery's collection of American contemporary art. She comes across as the only superhero. Some fondly called her “a benevolent dictator.” She was ultimately the one responsible for the building that now houses the National Gallery. Although plans for the new gallery were not finalized until after she left her post as director, the government later hired her as the head of the Crown corporation tasked with building the gallery, which opened in 1988, and the edifice we now call the Canadian Museum of History, across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Que.

“She’s still there,” says Rosemarie Tovell, a former gallery curator. “The gallery before she came … had no profile outside the country. She created what it is today. It’s really quite special that one woman was able to shape it."

"That’s her building, her institution and every director since has followed in her footsteps, continuing her legacy.”

Nemiroff’s book was well underway when the government hired Sasha Suda, the fourth woman to lead the gallery, in 2019. Her story will have to be told in a different book.

So, what can we say now about Suda? Well, she has not been heard disparaging the Group of Seven. She did end the regular gallery biennials of newly acquired contemporary art without really explaining why. She also cancelled a long-planned blockbuster exhibition last year of works owned, or formerly owned, by the Prince of Liechtenstein because slave labour was used on the prince’s Austrian farms during the Second World War. One of those shunned paintings formerly owned by the prince, Heroine from the Old Testament, was nevertheless made the star of last summer’s Rembrandt exhibition. The show contained text panels by Indigenous and Black historians, posted beside Rembrandt masterpieces, decrying the sins of the Dutch Golden Age. Decolonization and Indigenization are supposedly the new watchwords at the gallery although all senior curators remain white, except for the Indigenous department. Sounds like meaty stuff for the next book on gallery directors. ■  

Women at the Helm: How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada by Diana Nemiroff: McGill-Queens, 2021.

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