SPOTLIGHT 106 gifts would shape the destinies of Canadian museums. The institution that benefited the most from these is without doubt the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), due to the promised gifts of real estate developer Murray Frum and his second wife, Nancy Lockhart (figs. 9 and 10). Wanting to be sure that the pieces they intended to give the institution would be suitably displayed, they took a direct involvement in the design and creation of the exhibition spaces and requested that architect Frank Gehry use the presentation format of the Louvre’s Pavillon des Sessions as the inspiration for his work. The result of these efforts was unveiled in autumn of 2008 when the AGO reopened. In addition to the Frum material, the installation includes a remarkable group of ivory objects, the gift of media tycoon Kenneth Thomson (1923–2006), who had developed a great passion for art. Honing his eye over a period of five decades, Thompson built the largest private art collection in Canada. As eclectic as it was sublime, it included not only Flemish paintings, Japanese art, Greco-Roman antiquities, but also—and especially— sculptures in ivory, some of which are true masterpieces of sub-Saharan African art. PERSPECTIVES Also at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Canada’s oldest museum, the MBAM, powerfully reaffirmed its FIG. 9: Headrest. Luba, Shaba region, DR Congo. Attributed to the Master of the Cascade Coiffure. 19th century. Wood with patina from use. Frum Collection, Toronto. the eminent William Fagg of the British Museum, and asked him to act as curator for the exhibition. Opened in 1981, it was titled African Majesty, a reference to the pieces it featured from the kingdoms of the Cameroon Grasslands, an area that was largely neglected by the collectors of the time, despite the power of the art that had developed there.6 That Fagg, considered by many specialists to have been one of the greatest Africanists of the twentieth century, agreed to travel from London to Ontario to work on this project was itself seen as a major tour de force. Another attestation to the commitment of Canadian institutions to promotion of appreciation for African art came in 1989 when Montreal hosted a temporary exhibition titled Témoins de la Tradition, which featured objects from the collections of both the MBAM and the Redpath Museum. Just after, in 1990, the ROM organized Into the Heart of Africa (fig. 6), an exhibition that focused on the background of the museum’s collection, specifically highlighting for the first time the African objects collected by missionary Walter T. Currie (1857–1915) and veterans of the Boer War (1899–1902). The considerable length of time between the acquisition of these objects and their being presented to the public could be explained by the preeminence given to Far Eastern cultures by the ROM’s first director, Charles Trick Currelly. He felt that Canada was increasingly intensifying its economic and cultural ties with Asia, to the point that they would become as important as those it had with European nations, and consequently emphasized Asian art in his exhibition program. COLLECTORS AND CANADIAN MUSEUMS The aesthetic strength of the works acquired by Canadian collectors presented in the exhibitions described above demonstrates that there, just as elsewhere,7 the arts of Africa were shifting from the realm of anthropology to that of fine art. This encouraged a number of Canadian collectors to make laudable efforts to bolster the country’s museum collections. This was certainly true for Justin and Elisabeth Lang, who, after having collected African art for forty years, gave more than 570 works to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (figs. 7 and 8).8 This large group of works was the fruit of an encyclopedic approach to collecting, one that focused not only on ritual creations such as masks and figures, but also included oftenmodest utilitarian objects and embraced objects made of all kinds of materials: clay, metal, wood, etc. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, further FIG. 10 (facing page): Reliquary guardian figure, byeri. Mvaï Fang, Gabon. 19th century. Wood with patina from use. Frum Collection, Toronto.
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