ARTS

ARTS VAG donor honoured by Everything Under the Sun

by Martin Dunphy

Grant Arnold wants you to feel how he felt all those years ago.

It was 2004, and he had been charged with cataloguing the works in an extensive and eclectic collection of valuable photographic art that had just been donated to the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“I’ve been a curator for 40 years, and it was an amazing time, one that I’ll always remember,” Arnold told the Straight by phone.

Eighteen years later, he is finally able to present some of the artwork that regularly made his jaw drop for the better part of a month in a crowded upstairs room of a house on Vancouver’s West Side. This opportunity came, unfortunately, with the death last December of one member of the donor couple.

“We wanted to do something in the memory of Andrew Gruft,” Arnold said.

The works will be shown to the public in a VAG exhibition opening April 15 titled Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft. It will run until September 11.

The VAG web page devoted to the exhibition says Gruft “played a vital role as collector, critic, patron and life force in Vancouver’s art community for almost five decades”.

Arnold, the VAG’s Audain curator of B.C. art, knew Gruft and his wife, Claudia Beck,

Robert Frank’s Trolley-New Orleans, 1955 is a highlight of a new Vancouver Art Gallery show. Photo from the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of Andrew Gruft and Claudia Beck. both “socially and professionally”, he said in the interview. “I had known both of them for quite a while….They met at UBC in the ’70s.”

The couple, both of whom taught at UBC—Gruft in the school of architecture and Beck as a summer sessional instructor

The difficult thing was getting a selection from such a large collection.

– VAG curator Grant Arnold

in art history—opened NOVA Gallery for photographic works on West Fourth Avenue in 1976. (“They taught in the same building,” Arnold said. “It was not surprising that they ran into each other.”)

In 1978, they hosted the first solo show by the then-unknown Vancouver artist Jeff Wall, but they also showed famed contemporary and historic photographers such as Robert Frank and William Henry Fox Talbot.

The gallery closed after six years, but “they continued to collect after that”, Arnold said. “They were very supportive of the Vancouver arts community.”

Meanwhile, the couple’s collection— which included many examples of historically important early photographic works— grew in importance and size.

“I first started meeting them in 2003,” Arnold said. “That’s when serious discussions started about bringing their collection to the gallery. That was really exciting; that was a huge possibility for us. I knew that there were some great photographs in their collection. That would have hugely changed our holdings.”

After the donation of much of their collection actually happened the next year (a total of about 400 pieces), Arnold didn’t do much else but sit in an upstairs room of a house in Point Grey for the next couple of weeks.

“It’s an old house with great views of English Bay,” Arnold remembered. “The collection was mostly housed on the second floor of the house.” The photos were in many boxes. “It was very packed; there wasn’t a lot of room. I would take a box out, put it on the table…take them out and look at them.

“I would go out there just about every weekday. It took me a month to go through them.”

Arnold said the couple continued to donate works “pretty much every year from 2004” until Gruft’s recent death. He estimated that the VAG’s Gruft and Beck holdings now number about 750, with the inclusion of some new additions. “They were in Andrew’s collection when he died, and he bequested them to the gallery.”

Arnold has selected only 65 of the pieces for Everything Under the Sun.

“The difficult thing was getting a selection from such a large collection,” Arnold said. “They have given most of it to us. It’s an incredibly diverse collection; they travelled quite a bit.”

When asked about the value of such a collection, Arnold would only say “millions” and that the gallery had gone to “a great deal of effort” to properly assess its holdings.

One of the centrepieces of the exhibit, a silver gelatin print of Frank’s TrolleyNew Orleans, 1955, sold at auction in 2013 for $242,500. In the photo, from Frank’s famous 1959 book of photographs, The Americans, the frame is filled with the side of a city bus, with faces—white at the front, black at the back—staring into the lens from the bus windows. ”It’s an image of segregation,” Arnold said. “The facial expressions of the people are compelling.”

Arnold said the number of artists and pictures on display and the time line they represent during the history of photography might just be the show’s raison d’être. “It might help people to think a bit about the role that images play in our world. It might help us think of how photography has evolved.”

Other contemporary artists/photographers recommended by Arnold in the show (“It would be hard to have a single favourite”) include Karin Bubaš, Marian Penner Bancroft, Oriol Maspons (“The one in the show is just an amazing image”), Stephen Waddell (“There are some really great works by him”), and Evan Lee.

Pioneering photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and David Octavius Hill are also represented in the exhibit, and notables like Eugène Atget, Anne Brigman, Becky Cohen, Helen Levitt, Gabriel Orozco, and Issei Suda are also supported by works. g

Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft, runs from April 15 to September 11 on the third floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery.