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rfmcdonaldI met up for an enjoyable day at the Art Gallery of Ontario to catch the exhibition "Catherine the Great -- Arts for the Empire". In retrospect, it might have been wise to visit the museum just a few days before it was scheduled to close, since we might otherwise have avoided the line up that threaded us through the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre for an hour. Oh well.
The exhibition itself was almost surprisingly small, taking us under an hour to navigate and that with great clots of fellow tourists obstructing the flow of traffic. Despite its compact size, it managed to present a surprisingly compelling portrait of Russia's famous late 18th century empress Catherine the Great as a monarch who was strongly concerned both with justifying her rule over a fragile country often at war and with establishing herself as a model ruler of the Enlightenment. The empress has apparently gained her greatest fame in her selection of artworks for St. Petersburg's famous State Hermitage Museum; this exhibition, as a point of fact, drew from that museum's collection. Where this exhibition breaks new ground is in its presentation of Catherine as a woman concerned with Russia's production of works of cultural import--everything from industrial crafts to Western models of portraiture and sculpture--even as she wanted to gain recognize of Russia in the West as a fundamentally European power. Skilled immigrants--from France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy--played an important role in this grand project, as did trade. Catherine's wars against the Ottoman Empire in the Black Sea incidentally played a major role, presented as they were (via such writers as Voltaire) as crusades agaisnt the Turks who had blotted out the heritage of Greece. All said, it was a fascinating critical exhibit.
The secondary exhibits didn't delay us for long, although "The Transformative Power of Art" deserves kudos for its study of the engagement of casual viewers with specific artworks and the reasons for this engagement and Michael Awad's "Present Tense" provides interesting looks at Toronto's streetscape with Award's long continuous photographs of streets, escalators, corridors. If only the admission price wasn't $C18 for me as a non-student adult, I might have been entirely pleased.
The exhibition itself was almost surprisingly small, taking us under an hour to navigate and that with great clots of fellow tourists obstructing the flow of traffic. Despite its compact size, it managed to present a surprisingly compelling portrait of Russia's famous late 18th century empress Catherine the Great as a monarch who was strongly concerned both with justifying her rule over a fragile country often at war and with establishing herself as a model ruler of the Enlightenment. The empress has apparently gained her greatest fame in her selection of artworks for St. Petersburg's famous State Hermitage Museum; this exhibition, as a point of fact, drew from that museum's collection. Where this exhibition breaks new ground is in its presentation of Catherine as a woman concerned with Russia's production of works of cultural import--everything from industrial crafts to Western models of portraiture and sculpture--even as she wanted to gain recognize of Russia in the West as a fundamentally European power. Skilled immigrants--from France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy--played an important role in this grand project, as did trade. Catherine's wars against the Ottoman Empire in the Black Sea incidentally played a major role, presented as they were (via such writers as Voltaire) as crusades agaisnt the Turks who had blotted out the heritage of Greece. All said, it was a fascinating critical exhibit.
The secondary exhibits didn't delay us for long, although "The Transformative Power of Art" deserves kudos for its study of the engagement of casual viewers with specific artworks and the reasons for this engagement and Michael Awad's "Present Tense" provides interesting looks at Toronto's streetscape with Award's long continuous photographs of streets, escalators, corridors. If only the admission price wasn't $C18 for me as a non-student adult, I might have been entirely pleased.
