Curating the past of Canadian art for the future

The first room of Ian Dejardin's first exhibition as executive director of the McMichael Collection, The Art of Canada: Director's Cut, evokes a familiar feeling toward the log-cabin repository of Canadian art classics: namely, that you have come inside to marvel at the beauty of Canada's outdoors.

Lined with tree-, hill- and mountain-filled vistas by Group of Seven luminaries Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson, it is as McMichaelian an introduction as one can imagine. It also neatly captures the tension that Dejardin will have to navigate as he takes the helm at the shrine of a particular kind of Canadiana: how to preserve the memory of those beautiful landscapists without encasing the entire institution in amber.

On the one hand, the Group of Seven and their orbit – most notably Tom Thomson and Emily Carr, both of whom Dejardin has previously curated shows on – aren't lacking for champions in this country, even still. As another young wave of Canadian artists starts to fully crest, the continued reverence for a group of dead men with a fetish for empty landscapes can feel like a multigenerational failure to move on.

On the other hand, a mature art culture can't entirely forget its past, and the McMichael is more or less unmatched as a collection of our country's one indisputably dominant art movement. Coming from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, a historic collection – in both the stature and exhibition-practice senses of that word, stocked as it is with baroque pieces and a collection practice even he regards as non-existent – Dejardin would also seem eminently qualified to preserve this status quo while adding just enough of an outsider's eye to find new ways to arrange the collection.

"I think it's all tied up with the special character of the place, this sort of log-cabin building with that feel of Canadiana – the grounds even look a bit like a Group of Seven winter wonderland at the moment," Dejardin explains. "The collection has a real personality. It was never intended to be an encyclopedic collection of Canadian art: It truly reflects the passion of the McMichaels [the late husband-and-wife founders, Robert and Signe] and the people over the years who have donated things they've loved, and so it reflects the nature of Canadian art in a very specific way."

First glimpse notwithstanding, The Art of Canada is already suggesting ways Dejardin might find a harmony even in this tension. One of the gallery's largest walls, for instance, is devoted to oil sketches, the "iPad-sized, en plein air" works, primarily by Thomson, that Dejardin hails as one of Canada's great gifts to the art world.

"This engagement with the wilderness and the use of these small sketch boards, which you could pack in your canoe and set up anywhere – it seems to me to be a particularly Canadian thing," he says, with a note of awe. "I am determined that the rest of the world needs to catch up. If I were to put together another show to tour Europe, it might be of these sketches."

If Dejardin did not use that line in his job interview, he missed a golden opportunity, but in any case, his presentation of the sketches here does pull off the trick of giving iconic-to-the-point-of-wallpaper works a new perspective. Typically seen, if at all, interspersed with the larger works many of them eventually inspired, Dejardin's isolation gives the sketches new life, highlighting both their virtuosity and their vigour, the immediacy of an artist needing to get an image through them.

Dejardin references a similar vitality in his notes on a room full of Indigenous art – most notably a wall of Norval Morrisseau that culminates in his piercing Thunderbird with Inner Spirit – crediting the works with filling in the empty tranquility of the Group of Seven paintings. It's a fair point, although one that would be made far better by not hiving the works off into their own space, an uncomfortable echo of the kinds of Canadian traditions we usually prefer to forget.

There is more promise in some of Dejardin's less-expected choices. Embracing his role as, as he puts it, a "newbie," he unearths some welcomely unfamiliar and overlooked pieces. The best of the former might be L.A.C. Panton: His hypnotizing portraiture ranges from the unsettlingly villainous-looking, obscured eyes of Herbert S. Palmer to the deeply tender Pomona, featuring a woman bathed in light, delicately peeling an apple. A prize place is also given to Christiane Pflug's Interior at Night: The sharp, Alex Colville-esque super-reality of her lines, contrasted with the subtle surreality of images reflected in glass, are a sharp reminder that Pflug is long overdue for a serious retrospective.

Over all, the effect does not shake the foundations of Ian Dejardin's new log-cabin home, but there is enough to suggest that he has an eye capable of seeing fresh perspectives in the venerable McMichael. We'll have to see just how much his next shows bring the gallery in from the wilderness.

The Art of Canada: Director's Cut continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., until Nov. 18, 2018 (mcmichael.com).