The Rogers media mogul just delviered a 300 million dolalr gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario, well it s more then that if you include a 50 million dollar bribe to Frank Gehry and a 20 million dollar endowment.

1/3 rd of the 300 million dollars is taken up by the purchase of a Reubens (well 117/300 million). This painting was just recently refound, and its authourship is heavily debated, mostly b/w those for auction houses and real art historians- the real art historians mostly in agreement that it was a student and not the master.

Aside from the "Reubens", there is the usual Kreighoffs, Kanes and Group of 7ers

Kane is a v. v. v. minor history painter known mostly for his sentimanetalizing portraits of natives, which I guess is better then killing them off whole sale.

Kreighoff is a 19th century dutch immigrant to Canada, who painted cloying scenes of life in Rural Upper Canada, which was as unrelated to life as could be possible (ice skating vs freezing to death-which makes a better picture ?)

The group of 7 pictures include a handful of good to great Harrises and a bunch of other shitty landscapes.

Harris paintings do not have the tennous of JEH McDonald or the whole sale rip offs of post impressionism or the cake icing thick impasto of a JEH McDonald.

What they do have is serene and glorius color, lots and lots of whites and greens and blues and blacks, , with large bimorphic shapes that vaugley resemble mountains or icebergs.

his last paintings were done in the Bahamas and oh my god, the color is amazing, parrot greens, corals, crimsons, pinks, oranges, just land evoked with swirling lines and elegant shapes. –an undervalued period, none of the moguls collection contain any of them .

the oddity of the collection is the huge amounts of unremarkable English pottery , mostly English and mostly made b/w the 16th and 18th Centuries, it’s the sort of polite collectible that smacks of hummels for the upper classes.

its boring, and all comes on the tail of auction results from vancouver0 where Kane sold for a new record (17 million)- a similar auction in Toronto will sell of half a dozen Kreighoffs and expect similar prices. Both of them are safe, dull and prestigious, sold more for patriotism then aesthics. And Harris, while Brillant and Shamelessly unknown outside of Canada, is over compensenated within because of it.

Why Cant we get decent results for unknowns- the recent Covilles are all about Death and God, somber and photrealsitc and almost exenestial in their misery.

or Kurlek, whose religious paintings are as plain as a Methodist hymn and as gory as his native Orthodoxy ( he did a series of paintings on Mathhew- one of which features a farmer, whose field is half plowed, crucifed on a fence post. )

or the stern potruitre of 19th century Quebec

or even the most recent workers, Jeff Walls massive often ugly Cibrachromes, o whose violence seems nesscary, or Stan Douglas's video peioces, who show the method of their artifice, and are all the more moving because of it or Robert Attila Lucas's connections b/w the cult of the body and the cult of body politic or Joyce Weilands quilts, or Agnes Martins scared evocations of light or hundred of others.

im sick of the boredom of the canuck establishment and how they buy art.