Art dealer Christopher Cutts marks 40 years in a tough business

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Back when Christopher Cutts began his career as an art dealer, Toronto rents were relatively affordable and you could cold call a famous artist by looking up a name in the phone book.

Forty years later, real estate prices are through the roof but the Canadian art market remains a tough proposition, and Cutts isn’t sure a young hustler could still do what he did: Build a thriving commercial art gallery business starting with $3,000 in seed money from his parents.

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“The Canadian market is very fickle and very small,” he said, recalling some sleepless nights over his 40-year career. “If I don’t make sales, there’s no oil in the pipeline; I’m not making a thing. And I could see that being very unnerving for people. I can handle it okay. I wouldn’t say there’s not the odd night that the eyes pop open and I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on now?’ I do think, every time I sell a picture, another little miracle happened.”

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Perhaps Cutts’s biggest miracle was his connection with the Painters Eleven, the Canadian abstractionists who helped introduce modernism to Toronto in the 1950s. They were the toast of the town in those years, but by the time Cutts was doing graduate work at York University in the 1980s and peddling art from a portfolio: “The bloom was off their flower.”

A revival of figurative art, raw stuff dubbed Neo-Expressionism, was the new thing and non-objective art had fallen out of favour. Several of the artists, including Tom Hodgson, Kazuo Nakamura, William Ronald and Ray Mead, were only too happy to have an energetic young dealer take them on.

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The son of a Mormon family, Cutts grew up in Winnipeg and studied art history at two small American universities. He loved art and liked hanging out with artists – but knew he wasn’t one. He had, however, inherited the smooth-talking sales gene from his banker father, and soon quit York to establish his own gallery in 1986, working out of a studio in Liberty Village by his mid-20s.

In 1990, he made the big move further west to Morrow Avenue, where Olga Korper had established her renowned gallery in a renovated factory. Looking for more room and more public exposure, he set up in a second-floor space in her complex that included small living quarters at the back, then moved downstairs to a large gallery in 1996, but he still lives behind the shop.

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His stable of artists came to include five members of the Painters Eleven; today they are all gone and he represents their estates, selling the works they left behind. It began when a friend took him to a café where Hodgson had a show. He met the artist, went to his studio, took a look at his watercolours and got permission to start selling them. Soon he was introduced to Nakamura at an Art Gallery of Ontario event, and signed on to be his primary dealer. Ronald followed suit.

Cutts would sell by cold calling potential corporate collectors, and one bank that bought several of these artists’ work asked if he had anything by Harold Town for sale. Town, with a mercurial personality and continually shifting style, had been a towering figure on the Toronto art scene, still had a dealer and could command good prices.

Cutts looked him up in the phone book and called him. The artist agreed to let Cutts take a few pieces for a tiny percentage. “He gave me just a little scratch. It was very small, like 7.5 per cent.” (Commissions are negotiable, but a dealer would standardly take 50 per cent of the purchase price of work by the living artists they represent.) Town died in 1990 at the age of 66, only shortly after Cutts had made a few sales of his work, but today the dealer represents the Town estate – for a healthier percentage.

Ronald was another artist with a difficult personality who could drive a hard bargain. A week before Cutts was due to open his first exhibition of his work in 1996, the artist asked the dealer if he could borrow $10,000. Cutts had just bought a house and said no, so Ronald cancelled the show. Cutts was rapidly scrapping together a new exhibition from inventory, when Ronald relented.

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But the anecdote does speak to Cutts’s once piece of advice for himself: “I did get very close with a lot of my artists. I probably should have kept it more professional, you know. In most cases, that worked out okay, but in some cases, being buddies was not a good idea.”

Still, Cutts always liked the social aspect of the job and today represents more than 50 artists and estates.

“I never tell anybody to leave, really. So they have a place to hang their hat.”

Although his stable also includes Ron Martin, Claude Tousignant and the estates of Michael Snow, David Bolduc and Richard Gorman, Cutts has not limited himself to the grand old men of modernism by any means.

He has taken on fresh art school graduates, such as the Toronto artist Shinae Kim whose first major solo show, featuring paintings that mix abstraction and figuration, opened at the gallery last month. Digital printing has allowed him to publish catalogues too: In 2024, he released a monograph on the neglected Paris, Ont., photographer and installation artist An Whitlock.

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And Saturday, which will mark exactly 40 years since he incorporated his business, he will show work by Daisuke Takeya, a Japanese performance artist who also paints high-realist depictions of North American industrial scenes and monuments, including the Parliament Buildings.

Cutts is not finished either: He recently turned 65 but plans to work for another 10 years.

“As long as I can keep the ship running, I like it,” he said.