AGO 's Masereel Exhibition Disappointing

The guide at the AGO last Wednesday night was pleasant and chatty, but a bit confused and I didn't understand why. I'd gone to the House that Gehry (re)Built to see the Frans Masereel exhibit. It had been held over, she told me, for a week past its announced closing and she couldn't quite see why. Well, I thought dismissively, she doesn't get it. Lost Generation Paris still continues to excite and mystify us - as it should - almost 80 years after even the hardiest of the Prohibition-escaping, trust fund-spending tourists had caught the last steamer back to New York. (I know Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney and others remained en place, but they weren't playing at art.) Well, I was a little unfair to my guide. She did get it. The Masereel exhibit was a letdown. It was small, with about 15 works (I neglected to count them) all set off in a side room so obscure the first guide I asked for directions hadn't a clue where it was.

Then there were the works themselves, a mixture of water colours and woodcuts Masereel (Belgian 1889-1972) produced over a long career. I'd gone to the AGO in anticipation of some excitement, some devilry, some new way into a decade that has been pored over - and pawed over. After all, Masereel was in Paris in the 1920s: "...We lived in an atmosphere of euphoria, youth and enthusiasm that can hardly be imagined today" is how the famed German-French art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler described it. Well, none of that euphoria, youth and enthusiasm was evident in the works I was most interested in, those from 1920s Paris. They weren't dull, exactly, but stolid, plodding and one - City Lights 14 July, 1925 - was utterly joyless, no small feat if you've ever been to Paris on Bastille Day. City Lights, incidentally, viewed from 10 feet away reminded me for all the world of some painting by Bernard Buffet (gawd.) Another work - The Followers 1926 - was foreboding: Two men, one with porcine features, the other whose face appeared to be carved in wood, follow closely behind two women, in a dark, shuttered street. Their wives? A pair of prostitutes? The reason for such close proximity? I don't know. I wondered about that going home.

The two works that did engage me, no, neither was Ascension 1968, a banal woodcut reflecting the riots of May 1968 in Paris but saying nothing about their causes or effects, were Swannee River 1926 and Having Tea 1925. The former is the curiously static depiction of a Left Bank jazz club featuring black musicians, although an element of excitement does creep in at last! at last! since the head of the Lost Generation's iconic Bad Girl, Kiki de Montparnasse (lover and model for many an artist including Man Ray), is tucked away in the bottom right hand corner. The latter, again curiously static for such a fluid age, shows a young-ish bourgeois couple at rest if not at peace. His fingers are steepled, but on his lap rather than held upright, a sign of lost authority? High over his right shoulder the sun shines weakly. Could the couple be Harry and Caresse Crosby? These gadabout, mad about Lost Generation swells founded and ran Black Sun Press on Harry's family's banking fortune largely to publish Harry's unremarkable poetry and that of others far more talented and better remembered. I'll get over my disappointment, but my visit was a salutary reminder that art is neither an exercise in voyeurism nor a précis of the past. Oh, and Harry Crosby shot his girlfriend in New York in 1929 and then killed himself.

Queen West Art Crawl

I've been criminally lax about attending the Queen West Art Crawl. So yesterday for the first time I headed down to Parkdale and the Gladstone Hotel because I was intrigued by Being Scene 2010, an exhibition by artists who have suffered mental illness and addictions. The juried exhibition, curated by the Gladstone's Britt Welter-Nolan and produced by Workman Arts for CAMH, was tucked away on the hotel's upper floors, so perhaps that was the reason I saw so few people there mid-afternoon. What a shame.

Two pieces stood out for me, John Molnar's The End, and Lisa Walter's Red Child No. 2. The former, an oil of an old house that in its day could have been used as an asylum, was eerie and unsettling with its lack of life and its walls and fences. The latter, a small ink on paper drawing, was remarkable for its simplicity yet implicit complexity. Further pieces that caught my eye were a fine portrait of writer Austin Clarke (a much younger Austin Clarke) by Danae Chamber and Treese Flenniken's erotically charged etching Horse Chesnut, among others.

Being Scene 2010 is holding a Last Call Show and Sale at CAMH December 2. I'm going and you should too.

A White Night

I'm truly looking forward to Nuit Blanche in a couple of weeks. Our own up all night arts omnium gatherum is one of the better events to have settled in Hogtown over the last few years. The reason is obvious, at least to me: the exhibits that are smart, provocative, original, critical and daring are balanced just about evenly by other exhibits that are juvenile, trite, vapid, pointless, inept and out and out ridiculous. The fun, of course, comes from sorting one from the other, fuelled by cheap Chinese food, a litre or two of coffee, and barely disguised contempt for pseudo-hipsters in their stupid hipster hats pretending in front of this exhibit or that.

I have no idea what to expect this year, except more Chinese food, more coffee, more pseudo-hipsters. Oh, and some delightful surprises and an equal number of less than delightful disappointments. But that's art.