Toronto questions the modernist art canon while Buffalo owns it

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The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto owns one major canvas by the celebrated American abstractionist Mark Rothko. Staff recently pulled No. 1, White and Red out of storage to include in the current Moments in Modernism show. It has been placed reverentially in its own room: You enter as if to a chapel with the call to a higher experience emphasized by a quote from Rothko, saying the colour relationships in his paintings are not the point: “I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.”

And yet, this exhibition showcasing paintings of the sixties and seventies is by no means a predictable exercise in genuflecting before the altar of the New York school. Yes, the big room next door to the Rothko includes four huge colour-field paintings by great American names – Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis and Robert Motherwell – and they do look spectacular. But Moments in Modernism is a canon-expanding exercise that also features works by Canadian and Brazilian abstractionists and includes the figurative painter Alex Colville in its flexible definition of modernism.

Across the border in Buffalo, the local art museum also has a Rothko: Orange and Yellow features a more cheerful colour combination but its paint is in poorer condition. It is hanging at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox) in a reinstallation of the permanent collection that opened in 2023 alongside a whole new building. AKG also has a Frankenthaler, a Louis and a Motherwell. And it has a Jackson Pollock, a Robert Rauschenberg, a Willem de Kooning, an Adolph Gottlieb, an Ad Reinhardt, a Joan Mitchell, a Louise Nevelson, a Jasper Johns, an Andy Warhol and a Roy Lichtenstein, not to mention paintings by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. In Buffalo, the works hang in chronological sequence, an art history lesson carefully tracing the path from European post-Impressionism to American abstraction. Canon-busting may be all the rage these days, but if you actually own the canon you have less incentive to question it. Buffalo can afford to be conservative; Toronto needs to be inventive.

The core of Buffalo’s impressive collection of postwar modernist art was purchased on the advice of Seymour Knox, the philanthropist and collector whose name was added to the museum – along with a previous expansion – in 1962. Knox was a firm believer in modernism and if the low box-like addition of 1962 may now be so dated it has been repurposed for the restaurant, gift shop and community gallery, the collection he helped expand can still make the traditional argument for abstraction as art’s natural evolution. The reinstallation is giving it more room to breathe in the large, refurbished halls of the original 1912 building.

Moving from rooms featuring Gauguin’s Yellow Christ and Piet Mondrian’s Composition No. 11, to confront the massive Pollock and the luminous Frankenthaler, next door to one of Warhol’s first soup can paintings, it’s hard to argue with this collection. Buffalo has collected a few artists in depth – it opened last summer with a show of 33 paintings by Clyfford Still and holds the entire Marisol estate – but it is principally a gathering of greatest hits: Pollock’s Convergence; Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey; an untitled ladder of iron and orange acrylic by the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd.

Around the time that Knox was busy snapping up paintings from New York studios, what was then called the Women’s Committee at the AGO was also hot on art from New York, having found themselves priced out of the European market. So the AGO has its hits too, but what is interesting about Moments in Modernism are the juxtapositions that AGO director Stephan Jost and co-curator Debbie Johnsen have chosen.

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Alongside include the giant portrait Kent (1970-71) by the American photorealist Chuck Close, they hang for comparison’s sake a pixelated self-portrait of 1993-94 by Stephen Andrews, a Toronto artist of the post-modern era.

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They also juxtapose the AGO’s Agnes Martin, a grid of pale pink stripes entitled The Rose, with a string painting by Toronto artist Kazuo Nakamura, where lines were created by gluing string to the canvas. It’s merely a visual pairing that links Martin’s austere and spiritually questing minimalism to Nakamura’s more varied approach, shown elsewhere (in a small separate show following his move from geometrized landscapes to grids of numbers) to be more directly rooted in nature and natural systems.

Meanwhile, Colville would normally be placed outside the main modernist narrative, but his work is cherished by the public, so here he is, represented by paintings from the whole course of his career. They include Woman in Bathtub of 1973 in which she sits naked with her head bowed as a male figure in a bathrobe looms behind her. If anxiety is a typically modern experience, then okay, Colville is a modernist.

Perhaps as a warning to those who might quibble, the show also devotes another side room to the German artist Gerhard Richter. It offers examples of both his paintings based on photographs and his abstractions to reveal the stylistic instability that critics have seen as his retort to the ideology embedded in isms.

As for the dedicated abstractionists, the show includes two important Canadians. Jack Bush is represented by four big canvases of playful colour swatches, prime examples from a career that Clement Greenberg, the chief advocate of abstract expressionism, had championed.

Rita Letendre, a woman of Abenaki and Québécois heritage, should have been so lucky. She emerged forcefully among the mainly male Automatiste movement in Quebec – represented here by her two aggressive Ab Ex experiments – but went on to a highly successful career in Toronto in the 1970s as witnessed by the cooler yet more uplifting passages of luminous stripes that represent her best recognized style.

There were other modernists who stepped outside the lines painted in New York: those working in Brazil. The AGO seldom shows its few examples, acquired in the 1970s from a touring exhibition. This time, the curators have dug deep to offer Rubem Valentim’s bold abstractions incorporating Afro-Brazilian symbols (which also appeared at this year’s Venice Biennale) and Osmar Dillon’s witty and highly modern rendition of landscapes, celestial bodies and weather as flat sculptures of clear acrylic disks and planes.

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The eclecticism on display here complicates the story of modern art’s triumphal march toward abstraction and then explosion into Pop. If you compare that with Buffalo’s more conservative approach, the wisdom of acknowledging complications becomes apparent as you enter the post-modern era. In Buffalo, you’ll leave the 1912 building around 1970 and take a winding glass bridge to the new Gundlach wing, where the chronological survey continues through the 1980s to the present.

But the art collected in those decades was too eclectic, too multimedia and too global to lend itself to this presentation. Crowded galleries feature everything from video art to painting, from minimalist sculpture to Vancouver conceptual photography, and range from a giant pair of googly eyes by sculptor Louise Bourgeois to a cement-filled wooden console, a reference to political violence by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Without categories, Buffalo’s canon now collapses into no story at all.

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Back in Toronto, the AGO show is paying tribute to a more recent philanthropist, Carol Rapp, who died this year, with another side room devoted to her gifts to the AGO. These include The Judgement of Paris (1969) in which the little known American artist John Clem Clarke reproduces the mythical beauty pageant that launched the Trojan War with a photorealist’s eye, painting three naked women as decidedly contemporary babes. It’s an unsettling painting, Pop perhaps, but pointing ahead to the borrowing and repurposing of the post-modern art that would follow. It’s not a pleasant experience, but one that stays with you as it flags the difficulty of dividing art’s story into a tidy progress through agreed-upon movements.

Moments in Modernism and Kazuo Nakamura: Blue Dimension at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto continue through fall, 2025. The installation of the permanent collection at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo is showing indefinitely.