Catalogue Raisonne Read Online Free Page A

shifts for a ten-minute nosh of pop and pizzas that had been ordered in. It was at this stage too that Neale and Walter left to go home, presumably to have dinner and get dressed. Hans stared glumly after them. Serving the two midwives had worn him out. In the year since his arrival from Toronto, “Secrets of the Surrealists” was certainly the most important show Neale had curated. Maybe the most important show the gallery had had. You could understand Walter wanting to hang the best of the permanent collection in the other galleries, but not his leaving half the work till the last hours. To someone’s innocent-sounding query, Walter had answered cheerily, “Big show . . . gallery’s got to look its best. Ab-so-lutely super.” And it could be defended that way. But it seemed to have as much to do with each man needing to proclaim his fiefdom of expertise. With Walter it was all things actually owned by the gallery, accent on contemporary, accent on Canadian. Neale considered himself an internationalist. In practice this meant European, since you didn’t see much art from Asia or Africa making it into the gallery. When his show was hung except for finishing touches, Neale walked briskly through the showcase of the permanent collection Walter had arranged, eyes fixed on the elevator in the lobby ahead. Much as Walter had power-strolled through Neale’s galleries a few hours earlier, murmuring approval without breaking his stride. It seemed a childish rivalry, something from a world of games and gold stars.
    At 7:45 I joined Hans, who was smoking his pipe under the self-portrait of J. E. (“Josh”) MacMahon, 1903-1977. MacMahon had been Hans’s first boss and the first director of the gallery, going back to the days when the gallery was a one-room out-building loaned by the university on a corner of the campus.
    â€œLook at those young fools,” Hans said, gesturing with his pipe at Lars and Leo, who were taking turns running a Hoover over random strips of carpet, while nearby Ramon was actually vacuuming. Sean was already pacing upstairs, self-exiled in anticipation of “the rabble”.
    Finally, after a gruelling day, Hans was getting a breather. Relaxed enough to let the luxury of tolerance creep back in. I felt it too. This
was a calm you could actually savour, since it came between bouts of activity. Each opening, I waited for it.
    I looked above Hans at the picture, its focus softened by the floating veils of smoke. A bald, kind-faced man, dressed in a suit and sitting in an armchair, hands folded quietly in his lap. I liked the picture, though as with most of the pictures I passed every day, I hadn’t looked at it in a while. It might have been MacMahon’s sentimental, or just accurate, view of himself, but it was done in robust, unafraid oils and framed in plain varnished oak. With, I noticed now – and couldn’t recall noticing before – a pipe perched high on the edge of the bookcase behind him. A reformed smoker, the habit placed in view but out of easy reach? There was a hint of humour in the eyes, a jawline that could firm up if it needed to.
    â€œHe looks like an interesting man,” I said.
    â€œMr. MacMahon?” Hans looked up with unabashed reverence. “He was a grand old gentleman. Not like this crew,” he added, but with a sharp glance that pre-empted any elaboration of this by me. Though bound to the past, Hans actually thought quite highly of Walter, and anyway, wouldn’t brook any very expanded criticism of an employer. There were times when I drew a line from Hans’s habit of servility straight through to Nuremberg, before I remembered to allow for an immigrant’s gratitude. He’d come here a few years after the war, a teenager from a bombed-flat country. Josh MacMahon had given him his first, and still his only, job in Canada.
    â€œIs it true he and Casson used to ski down Main Street to