Mueck, Ben-Ner, Fernandes, McMichael, others -- my week.

In keeping with Michael's suggestion, here's what I've been up to this week:

A review of the Oakville Gallleries' staging of "Real Life," with Ron Mueck and Guy Ben-Ner, a touring show from the National Gallery: 

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/841510--mueck-looms-larger-than-life

And a profile of your Ontario Sobey nominee, Brendan Fernandes (above, at the Art Gallery of Hamilton) which is in the paper today -- last I heard -- though mysteriously not online (no idea why).

***THIS JUST IN!! Fernandes piece mysteriously appears!

Then there's a speculative piece on Tom Smart's sudden departure from the McMichael:

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/842492--head-of-mcmichael-gallery-resigns

And somewhere in there -- maybe tomorrow? -- is the story of local painter Shaun Downey, whose portrait ended up in the National Portrait Gallery in London as their 30-foot high banner image for their annual portrait awards.

***THIS JUST IN!!, 2.0: It ran today.

And then there was all that Adams nonsense, too.

Busy week. Happy weekend ...

What the? McMichael announces resignation of CEO/director Tom Smart

A press release landed in my inbox about 30 seconds ago, anouncing the resignation of Tom Smart from the boss's chair at the McMichael.

I don't get it. Suffice to say the directorship of the McMichael has ever been fraught, with the McMichael family's legal challenges to the province regarding content over the years; at the same time, under Smart's directorship, a balance between twee visions of Canadian art, preserved in amber -- the McMichael family's vision -- and work that challenged that narrow convention appeared to have been struck. I'm thinking of the recent Diana Thorneycroft show, for one, and "Challenging Traditions," a show of contemporary First Nations' work that was the first show curated in-house by the McMichael in more than a decade. baby steps, true, but steps all the same.

In other words, it was my view that the Smart had gently righted the ship, respecting the McMichael's legacy while giving the institution actual relevance for the first time in a very long time. I guess the board disagrees; nothing in the release suggests where Smart might be going to -- which typically suggests the resignation might not have been his idea. But that's just my opinion. One way or the other, I'm sorry to hear it.

Adams "lost" negatives are fakes, photographer's estate says

Well, it seemed only a matter of time, didn't it? Adams' estate is hugely protective of his legacy. Yesterday, past deadline, I had an interesting conversation with the Maia-Mari Sutnik, the AGO's curator of photography, who did an Adams show in 2007 in collaboration with the estate. She guessed it would be a matter of days before a legal challenge was issued. So here we go .. and apoliogies for the format -- %#$@!% Typepad.

Christina Hoag The Associated Press

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.—A trove of old glass negatives bought at a garage sale for $45 has been authenticated as the lost work of Ansel Adams and worth at least $200 million, an attorney for the owner said Tuesday, but the iconic photographer's representatives dismissed the claim as a fraud and said they're worthless.

Arnold Peter, who represents Fresno painter and construction worker Rick Norsigian, said a team of experts who studied the 65 negatives over the past six months concluded "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the photos were Adams' early work, believed to have been destroyed in a 1937 fire at his Yosemite National Park studio.

Adams is renowned for his timeless black-and-white photographs of the American West, which were produced with darkroom techniques that heightened shadows and contrasts to create mood-filled landscape portraits. He died in 1984 at 82.

Norsigian, who works for the Fresno Unified School District, is already planning to capitalize on his discovery. He's set up a website to sell prints made from 17 negatives from $45 for a poster to $7,500 for a darkroom print with a certificate of authenticity. A documentary on his quest to have the negatives authenticated is in the works, as well as a touring exhibition that will debut at Fresno State University in October.

Representatives of Adams, however, said they're not buying Norsigian's claims.

"It's an unfortunate fraud," said Bill Turnage, managing director of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. "It's very distressing."

Turnage said he's consulting lawyers about possibly suing Norsigian for using a copyrighted name for commercial purposes. He described Norsigian as on an "obsessive quest."

"We've been dealing with him for a decade," he said. "I can't tell you how many times he's called me."

Adams' grandson, Matthew Adams, who heads the Ansel Adams Gallery in San Francisco, said he reviewed Norsigian's authentications last fall and thinks they're stretches. Many photographers took pictures of the same places Adams did in that era, he said.

"There is no real hard evidence," he said. "I'm skeptical."

Norsigian bought the negatives from a man who said he had purchased the box from a Los Angeles salvage warehouse in the 1940s, bargaining the price down from $70 to $45. He saw they were views of Yosemite but never suspected they might be Adams' works until someone mentioned they resembled the famed photographer's shots.

"We got a laugh out of that," Norsigian said.

But the idea stuck with Norsigian, and he started researching the photographer, eventually concluding they were Adams' work.

The shots are of places Adams frequented and photographed. Several shots contain people identified as Adams associates. Adams taught at the Pasadena Art Center in the early 1940s, which would account for the negatives being in Los Angeles.

The negatives are the size Adams used in the 1920s and '30s and several have charred edges, possibly indicating the 1937 fire.

"You keep adding bits and pieces," Norsigian said.

For years, he tried to get them officially verified, taking them to experts at the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Center and others, but no one would venture to authenticate them.

Three years ago, he met Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer Peter, who assembled a team of experts to review the negatives.

The key evidence came from two handwriting experts, who identified the writing on the negative sleeves as that of Adams' wife Virginia.

But Matthew Adams said there were inconsistencies in the handwriting and a lot of misspelled Yosemite place names.

"She grew up in Yosemite. She was an intelligent, well-read woman. I find it hard to believe she would misspell those names," he said.

Peter also hired a meteorologist who studied the cloud formation, snowdrift and shadows on one image and compared it with a similar photograph by Adams, concluding they were taken at the same location on the same day.

But Matthew Adams said those evaporation clouds appear every day and the snowdrift is on mountains 32 kilometres away. "I suggested carbon dating of the charring and the envelopes," he said.

Matthew Adams said it was unlikely his grandfather would have misplaced the negatives, especially after the devastating fire that destroyed 5,000 negatives — a third of his portfolio.

"Ansel was very meticulous about his negatives," he said. "He kept them in a bank vault in San Francisco after the fire."

Beverly Hills art appraiser David W. Streets said he conservatively estimated the negatives' value at $200 million, based on current sales of Adams' prints and the potential for selling never-seen-before prints.

Turnage called that figure ridiculous because the value of Adams' work is in his darkroom hand-crafting of the prints, and said the negatives are next to worthless.

"Ansel interpreted the negative very heavily. He believed the negative was like a musical score. No two composers will interpret it the same way," he said. "Each print is a work of art."

Norsigian is not fazed by naysayers.

"Prove me wrong," he said. "This has been such a long journey. I thought I'd never get to the end. It kind of proves a construction worker-painter can be right."

By the by ...

Anybody seen this? Temporary construction hoarding along Lansdowne Avenue, north of Bloor.

If you know whodunnit, let me know.

EDIT: Gabby tells us that Lorna Mills and Sally McKay know the score. Check out their site for the big reveal ...

So here's the thing

If any of you even left out there, you've probably noticed I've been a bit of a laggard on this blog the past month or so. This is due mainly to growing demands, in this digital era, to feed the actual newspaper, which I've been appearing in 3 or 4 times a week recently.

Suffice to say, it's a ton of work, and leaves precious little time to spend here, however much I enjoy it (and I do, believe me). Personally, I believe spontaneous postings and the interaction this medium allows us is of at least equal value to the paper itself, if not more.

That said, if this blog disappeared, would anybody miss it? I say this referring to its diminished form, where I can really only get to it once or twice a week. I worry that whatever value it had might have been removed by demands on my time from elsewhere. Of course, if I can conceive of a way to reinvigorate it at the expense of newsprint, I'll do that; but for now, this seems to be how it is. Drop a line and let me know.

Ansel Adams in full

This morning's paper offers a severely abbreviated version of the story I wrote about Ansel Adam's "lost" negatives being revealed at a Beverly Hills gallery yesterday.

As many readers have asked for more detail -- things like background, figures, etc, that were included in my original story -- I'm re-publishing it here. More later.

Murray Whyte

Visual Art Critic

How’s this for art appreciation: A Fresno, Calif.,man who spent $45 on 2 boxes of negatives at a garage sale 10 years ago has had them authenticated as lost works of the iconic American photographer Ansel Adams, worth an estimated $200 million (all figures $US).

 Yesterday, art appraiser and gallerist David W. Streets revealed at his Beverly Hills gallery that the negatives acquired by Rick Norsigian in 2000 were in fact verifiably by Adams himself.

 For Norsigian, it ended a decade-long quest to source the 65 images to their true maker. Convinced he recognized some of the images from various publications, Norsigian finally confirmed what he had intuitively believed: That the negatives were from Adams’ formative years in the 1920s and 1930s.

 "It’s very exciting,” said Andrea Kunard, associate curator and historian at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography at the National Gallery. “Adams always wanted to show you nature at its most pristine. That early period is when he’s formulating that vision of what his work would become.”

Adams, who is perhaps the best-known photographer of the American landscape of the 20^th century, saw a fire destroy his studio in Yosemite National Park in 1937. He believed that as many as 5,000 negatives of his early career, from 1919 through the early 1930s, had been lost forever.

 Many of them had never been printed, meaning that much of Norsigian’s collection has never before been seen. Through a web site, Norsigian is selling photographic prints for as much as $7,500 each, in an edition limited to 50. Digital prints are priced at $1,500 in an edition of 250. In June,  an Adams’ image titled “Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park,” of a rugged mountain scene shrouded in cloud from the 50s or 60s, sold at auction in New York for $722,000. It bested the previous record of $609,600 for his "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," from 1941, set in 2006.

A renowned photographer and environmentalist, Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902. By the age of 17, he had joined the Sierra Club, and was avidly taking pictures of a landscape on the verge of wholesale transformation, from wilderness to a patchwork of freeways, suburbs and industrial sites. Adams’ images read not only as documents of an idyllic era, but a lament for its passing.

By the 1940s, Adams’ silvery black-and-white landscapes of iconic scenes of the American west, such as Yosemite National Park in California and Glacier National Park in Montana, had secured his place as perhaps the most important American photographer of his time. Perhaps his most famous photographs, of snow-laden trees in Northern California’s High Sierra mountains, taken just as a violent winter storm receded, were shown at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institute in 1931, beginning his rise to international prominence.

 In addition to his vast, dramatic landscape images, Adams captured an array of stunningly crisp images of minute detail, of the rigid nubs of pinecones, or the delicate veins of fallen leaves, and petals of flowers. By the late 30s, troubled by increasing commercialization and car traffic through his beloved Yosemite, Valley which he visited every year, Adams’ sensitivity to the encroachments of industry on his beloved wilderness had begun to show up in his work. Oil derricks in Long Beach, CA, or buildings in California and New Mexico appear with increasing frequency.

 Nonetheless, Adams’ commitment to the natural environment, and to photography, never wavered. He helped found the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1975, where a significant archive of his work celebrating “the redemptive power of the natural world,” the Center’s web site says.

Norsigian’s pictures, mostly of scenes in Yosemite, could help fill in an otherwise blank spot in Adams’ development as a photographer. “Or they might just be more pictures of Yosemite, which is great too,” Kunard said. “These are the gems of 20^th century photography. Whether it’s Alfred Stieglitz or Dorothy Lange, some photographers just become icons, and Ansel Adams is definitely one of them.”

 Adams died in 1984, in Monterrey, Calif. He was 82.

 

AGO news, some happy/sad, some just sad

You probably already read the story in the paper by my colleague, Wendy Gillis, about former chief curator Dennis Reid being forced to retire prior to the 2014 date written into his contract. There are a million arguments to be made here, about clearing the way for young, dynamic staff, or for an infusion of independent projects giving the museum new life, and none of them are bad; but one thing's for sure: At the age of 67, Reid (left, with painter John Hartman) was likely the most prominent scholar on Canadian art actually working in a museum, not a university, and moreover, was a tireless champion of Canadian artists -- a conscience the AGO needs, and will miss. I wish him the best in whatever he does.

ANyway, on to the happy/sad. As we know, multi-disciplinary impresario Will Munro, who died in May, will be featured in the museum's ongong "Toronto Now" series, opening next week; it'll serve as an institutional memorial, following on the ad-hoc outpouring of fond farewells that sprung up in Trinity Bellwoods Park the day he died. A deserved tribute to a passionately community-minded artist and his uncanny ability to build bridges across them. Opens July 31. Be there. 

If you stay still, you sweat less

 It's about that time again, when summer hits full flight, compelling most of us, particularly via humidex, to do as little as possible. It's not really any different in the art world, where museums typically go on auto-pilot with one long-running blockbuster of sorts or another, and galleries either go into lockdown -- Jessica Bradley closes her excellent show of Sarah McKillop's work on Saturday and shuts down for the summer; ditto Clint Roenisch -- or major slowdown, dusting off the storage closet for the inevitable summer group shows that serve as placeholders for the more active fall season.

And me? Well, the regrettable infrequency with which I've managed to appear here speaks to both summer hols and summer blahs; there are a bunch of things I'm dying to see before they close, and I will; but I just want to make quick mention of something that's actually opening this week, a relative mid-July rarity. Katherine Mulherin brings Seth Scriver home after successful outings at her spaces in New York and L.A., showing his creepily colour-filled, Robert Crumb-esque airbrush drawings (above), a technique that always put me in mind of 70s cartoon porn, for some off reason, a genre with which I'd imagine Scriver not being terribly unfamiliar; as well as work by Shaun Morin, aka slomotion, and Annie MacDonell's significantly more austere, abstract black and white photo-collage and light-and-mirror based works. Tonight from 6 to 9, 1082 and 1086 Queen Street West.

Tonight

Many multiple things. If you can stand the heat, some notables include the entire -- extended -- strip of Tecumseth Street, from Diaz Contemporary way down south at Niagara all the way up to Susan Hobbs, almost at Queen. They've been sporadically timing their openings together for a while now, and I think it's genius, bringing a critical mass of people to the neighbourhood all at once. In no particular order, opening tonight:

Blue Republic at Georgia Scherman Projects: Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski -- the two-part collective that is Blue Republic -- toggle playfully between cheeky representation and subjects heavily charged with unpleasant realities. In their elaborate installations of found objects, they question ownership and consumerism, but their water drawings, like the one at left, are my favourite: Quickly-rendered sketches on the rocks are captured before they dry away to nothing, shifting a favourite child's game to an urgent commentary on consumerism's dead-ends -- and, by the way, its deleterious effect on our increasingly-scarce natural resources -- without surrendering its sense of play. 6- 8 pm, 133 Tecumseth Street. To Aug. 14.  

Site Exercises at Susan Hobbs: A couple of doors north, Robin Collyer, Ian Carr-Harris, Didier Courbot, Brian Groombridge, Patrick Howlett and Axel Lieber are in a group show -- the summer standard, for those slow, hot days -- with a clever little twist: All the work is meant to address the two-storey, cinder-block bunker that the gallery has inhabited since 1993. It's an odd structure, in that it's both iconic and non-descript; I haven't seen the work, but I trust the brand, and Collyer's massing of foamcore volumes meant to mimic the industrial buildings that occupied huge tracts of nearby land not so terribly long ago will be worth the price of admission (which is free, but anyway). Of particular interest, too, is Groombridge's piece, which will somehow span both floors. 7- 9 pm, 137 Tecumseth. 

Nota Bene at Birch Libralato: Between those to, BL follows its excellent Mitch Robertson show with a summer offering -- group show, natch -- featuring gallery artists Cathy Daley, Arthur Duff, Michelle Gay, Martin Golland, Luis Jacob, Ginette Legaré, Micah Lexier, Jaan Poldaas and Richard Storms. Strong roster; should be good. 5 - 7 pm, 135 Tecumseth.

Flavio Trevisan and Ilse Gradwohl at Diaz Contemporary: Finally, way down south, Toronto's Trevisan offers a suite of his beguiling map sculptures, for lack of a better term, rendering the convention of urban mapping in austerely beautiful, often remarkably structural high relief. With paintings by Mexico City's Gradwohl. 6 - 9 pm, 100 Niagara Street (at Tecumseth.

Toronto Art History 101 with Paul Petro (and Madame Zsa Zsa), tonight

Anybody who's been around even a short while will have come to appreciate Paul Petro's enduring presence on the Toronto art scene, with a strong roster of artists and a commitment to fostering the local culture that's the equal of anyone. So it's with a pang of regret that I've learned that his teeny Special Project Space at 962 Queen West, a few doors down from his proper gallery, will be closing for good at the end of August. The building's been sold, Petro says, and the new landlord doesn't appear to be as willing to accommodate the meagre rent such an enterprise can reasonably afford.

No idea what the space will become, but it's a venerable little venue, having been home base to Andrew Harwood's Zsa Zsa Gallery from 1998 to 2005, followed by my favourite iteration, Petro's Multiples and Small Works, and finally the project space, which welcomed a breadth of offerings culled mostly from open submissions.

It was hit or miss to say the least, but it was always surprising, occasionally brilliant, and will be missed. Tonight, Harwood -- Madame Zsa Zsa, the 2-dollar psychic herself -- is back in town for a reception for Ron Loranger's "Now Bigger and Better," which, it turns out, has become an impromptu wake for the space, its days as an art venue now numbered in weeks.  Drop by to celebrate a bit of history as yet another domino in the Queen West West art scene tumbles under the weight of inner city suburb-ification. Sigh. From 7 - 10 pm.