Henry Moore Sculpture Centre, 1974.Supplied
Fifty years ago, the Art Gallery of Ontario decided to go big. Its major expansion featured a top Canadian architect, John C. Parkin, and a star of contemporary art – the sculptor Henry Moore.
Now the gallery has started constructing another new wing, the $100-million Dani Reiss Modern and Contemporary Gallery by Selldorf Architects, Diamond Schmitt and Two Row, which will increase its gallery space by 40,000 square feet, or about a third. The AGO’s leadership is taking the occasion to look back at its Moore collection, and the bold moves that remade the museum and the city of Toronto.
One recent morning, gallery CEO Stephan Jost, associate curator Adam Welch and conservator Lisa Ellis gathered for a tour in the Moore Centre’s main gallery. In the commodious 25-metre-long room, morning sun spilled through skylights and the waffle grid of the ceiling onto Moore’s sinuous bronzes and plasters. The space seemed purpose-built for the work. Which it was. Moore worked closely with Parkin and his office to create an ideal setting, lit from above against a dark, reflective ground.
“Fifty years ago, this was part of a major expansion of the museum and a dedicated space for one artist,” Welch said. Now, with the Reiss Gallery, “we are reconceptualizing how to present art after 1900 in a space designed by Annabelle Selldorf. It’s interesting to think of how that space will evolve in 50 years.”
Henry Moore inspecting a model of the expanded AGO, with Large Two Forms, 1966 and 1969, positioned outside, in October, 1971.Supplied
The Moore galleries, and the 1970s addition of which they formed a part, provide tall, column-free gallery spaces that are valued today. Among the AGO’s century-old assemblage of wings, the tall 1970s galleries are much loved by the curators, Jost said. The Reiss wing will supply five levels of such spaces, suited to today’s increasingly bulky sculptures and installations.
In that light, Moore’s work feels contemporary; for one thing, his forms are very much objects in space. In his rural studio at Much Hadham, outside London, England, Moore often found these forms in nature. A display in the Moore Centre shows small stones and bone fragments whose forms Moore imitated or assembled into collage. From there, he would make maquettes, and these would be cast in bronze.
Each step is legible in the AGO’s collection. Moore’s marks in the soft plaster are legible in bronze. Meanwhile the plasters, having been brought to a foundry for casting, would pick up bronze dust. A 1968 plaster for Draped Reclining Woman is spackled with bronze, now aged to a dark green.
Moore’s central concerns, of truth to materials, drawing on forms from nature and complex composition in three dimensions, “are perennial problems for sculptors,” Welch said. “And so this collection, I think, is a place for artists to think through all these problems that he grappled with.”
Naturally, Moore took close interest in the architectural setting of his works. He collaborated closely with the Hungarian-American architect Marcel Breuer on the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and with I.M. Pei on several important works in the U.S.
Moore in front of Three Way Piece No. 2: Archer, on his first visit to Toronto, in March, 1967.Supplied
In Toronto, he found an architect who spoke the same language. John Cresswell Parkin had gotten a modernist education at Harvard in the late 1940s; Breuer was among his professors. By the sixties he was a partner at the firm of John B. Parkin (amusingly, the two were not related) and the two had built the largest office in Canada, with commissions including the 1964 Toronto airport and Ottawa’s rail station. Their work of that period is increasingly overlooked, and much is being demolished, but they brought modernism to Canada with great ambition and skill.
The Moore Centre’s “waffle slab” concrete ceiling – which spans the gallery while giving an uncanny aura of heft – reflects the engineering advances of the 1960s and a resulting aesthetic that shows up, for example, in Breuer’s Whitney Museum. The scholar Barry Bergdoll dubs this tendency “heavy lightness.”
Moore’s strength in Toronto was a product of his friendship with another architect: the Finn Viljo Revell. When Revell won the design competition for Toronto City Hall in 1958, he recommended Toronto acquire a Moore sculpture for the new square. Toronto’s then-mayor Philip Givens agreed “the city needed a Moore to telegraph our cosmopolitanism and our advanced taste to the world,” as Givens wrote in a memoir.
Toronto was at a moment of profound change, from a Commonwealth backwater into a multicultural metropolis. The new City Hall faced serious opposition for its expense, and so did Moore’s sculpture The Archer. Givens went to the wall for Moore, and arranged to buy the work for $120,000 through public donations. The Archer was unveiled in 1966.
Henry Moore Sculpture Centre, circa 1970s.Supplied
“Moore loved this story because the mayor of a city basically gave up his political career in order to champion his sculpture,” Welch explained. “The story is not quite that simple, but it had an effect.” Indeed. Moore was preparing to make a major donation of his work for long-term view; the donors who had rallied for The Archer, including Allan Ross and Sam Zacks, lobbied Moore to pick the AGO. The Moore Centre was born as the gallery was remade.
Crucial to Moore’s fame was his engagement with public space. Parkin and Moore imagined an arcade along Dundas Street, which would have brought the gallery out into the cityscape. Instead, Moore’s Large Two Forms was a landmark outside the AGO for decades until being moved in 2017 into the adjacent Grange Park. Its replacement in that spot, Brian Jungen’s Couch Monster: Sadzěʔyaaghęhch’ill, is a bronze that is Moorean in its monumentality, playfulness and ambiguity.
Ironically, the architecture of the 1970s has become hard to perceive, at least from outside. The white-concrete Parkin additions that remade the museum were largely enclosed by the Barton Myers-KPMB addition of 1993, which in turn was largely wiped out by Frank Gehry’s 2008 renovation. The Reiss Gallery will rise as a six-storey tower right next to the Moore Gallery, and it is designed to be as retiring as possible: a box clad in shimmering tiles. It lacks the ambition of City Hall. But it carries a lesson from the past: Architecture can change a city, but it can also disappear. Art abides.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Henry Moore's sculpture Large Two Forms was moved into Grange Park in 2022. It was moved in 2017. This version has been updated.