Keep in touch, p.8
Keep in Touch, page 8
No records and few notations remain to give evidence of David’s study at the Courtauld. For this information, we must look to the memories of his contemporaries. Canadian artist Donald Andrus, who attended the Courtauld several years after David Silcox, gave information on the program structure: “Unlike North American schools, there were no comprehensive examination requirements; you simply arrived at an agreement with your supervisor as to the actual topic, then off to do the field work and meet on occasion with your supervisor, when necessary. Beyond that, you were very much on your own and you were expected to be buried in your research. There was no interchange with other students, who were largely in the same boat, so to speak.”18
Valuable details shared by Michael Parke-Taylor, a retired Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario and a former Courtauld student, also give a broader glimpse into a 1960s-era Courtauld student’s days: “Courtauld education was what I would call well-rounded, broad and expansive. You could sign up for lectures on various topics and eras, whether they were your main focus or not. Your timetable was set by you.… And then,” Parke-Taylor continues, “there was the proximity of Paris. It was so close and skipping over to the continent to research, study or collaborate was a regular occurrence.”19
David’s own reports of his studies are scant, save his letter to Sam and Ayala Zacks. “I shall be studying the Italian Renaissance, then doing some special 18th century studies with Michael Kitson. This is something which I look forward to very much, as the 18th seems to me to be a captivating period and I have been doing, on my own, some particular research on an architect and sketcher whom I much admire.”20 Tellingly, David’s cursory notations recalling his Courtauld days include virtually no references to classes, instructors, or projects undertaken. Given his people skills, well-honed at Victoria College and Hart House, this is not surprising. His few recorded thoughts highlight extracurricular activities: “celebrating Shakespeare’s 400th birthday, country rambles in the Cotswolds, stately homes and attending Sotheby’s auctions.”21
No doubt to supplement his meager finances, David was also earning a few “bob” doing interviews for the CBC and writing commercially. Before his departure from Canada, he’d contributed freelance articles to the magazine Canadian Art, where old friend Alan Jarvis continued as Editor. He continued his submissions while at the Courtauld, writing several articles under the byline “Letter from London.” They ranged from gossip on which Canadian celebrities were in town — actors Austin Willis and Gordon Pinsent, among other luminaries, and Canadian visual artists Toni Onley and Harold Town, who were then exhibiting in various London galleries. With his cryptic sense of humour intact, David noted that the Onley painting “was seen by thousands of people on their way to viewing the Modigliani and Soutine.”22
Estimates vary as to the length of David’s enrollment at the Courtauld Institute. In an address to a Toronto audience fifty years after his London experience, David blithely stated, “I never graduated from Courtauld. I was there a year but I learned a lot and had a good time.”23 Good times included visiting various London museums, galleries, and art auction houses with tutor Francis Watson. They also encompassed investigative travels to the great museums and art galleries of the European continent.
In a late-in-life reminiscence, David reported remaining in England and France “for four years.” Surely his calculations are mistaken. His departure from Toronto in the spring of 1962 to his documented return in 1964 cuts his estimate in half. In any case, he made a realization: “I was not suited to Courtauld, nor Courtauld to me.”24 He boarded an Air Canada flight for home. At the youthful age of 27, David Silcox now “looked around to see if there was anything I could do that would be interesting for me and that would pay enough to keep active and engaged …”25
Part Five Of Nationalism
(1963–1970)
Chapter Twenty-Three “Making Connections”: Part 1
After his return to Toronto in 1964, volunteer work sufficed to keep David active and engaged for the short term. He fancifully remembered some clandestine leg work for the National Ballet of Canada finding its way into his schedule. “I’d been putting up posters for them in the dark of night, in the midst of avoiding the interference of policemen who do not approve of posters being posted along Toronto streets.” The Silcox volunteer mindset also found him “learning more about the arts organizations: theatres, classical music, modern dance, new choreographic companies.”1
A paying position soon followed. Having earned pocket money before and during his Courtauld residency writing freelance articles for the Globe and Mail, as well as the magazine Canadian Art, David was hired as art critic for the Globe and Mail. He described his gig as “writing short but spicy reviews depending on what was on display at the O’Keefe and various galleries …”2 Globe newspaper archives indicate that between October 1964 and August 1965, the Silcox byline offered reviews on all things art in Toronto, from openings at city galleries to profiles of up-and-coming Canadian artists. In a special in the Globe of January 18, 1964, the cub reporter gave readers a taste of his international savvy as he commented on the widely anticipated opening of an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace depicting four hundred years of portraits of the British royal children — from the Tudor age to Prince Andrew.3 A seemingly unending number of connections provided fodder for the Globe’s peripatetic arts columnist, from Alan Jarvis to Maud Brown (widow of the first National Gallery Director, Eric Brown) and Kathleen Fenwick (Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery).
Shortly after his return home, David also re-established his contact with Douglas Duncan, agent and dealer for the late painter David Milne. David had been inspired and intrigued by Milne’s work during his Hart House days and wanted to dig deeper into the reclusive artist’s life. By now, in the last decade of his own life, Duncan, whom Silcox physically described as “a string-bean of a man, over six feet tall and thin, with wire-rim glasses and shaggy eyebrows,”4 remained mired in the multi-decade process of cataloguing Milne’s work. The young keener volunteered to assist Duncan with the onerous task and was welcomed. Good deeds seldom go unpunished!
“I hadn’t counted on Duncan’s eccentricity and his exceptional gift for procrastination,” David later recalled. “We would set a date; he would change it, cancel; then suggest calling a week from Monday …” Duncan’s methods also led to organizational chaos. “His mail accumulated unopened in the back room of the Picture Loan Society, which he ran for most of his life and lay over four feet deep …” And so, David lamented, “The result was that I never got to see the catalogue … thus did 1964–65 pass.”5 Serendipitously, in early 1965, in what David called “a matter of good luck and timing,” the future came calling. And it was no starter job; it was an invitation to join the Canada Council!
In a 2010 interview with Globe and Mail reporter Diane Jermyn titled “Make Connections, Keep in Touch,” David Silcox, at the time President of Sotheby’s Canada, admits that “Every job I’ve ever had came through lunch or dinner.… I was offered a job with the Canada Council in 1965 over lunch …” In the interview, he goes on to say, as Jermyn reports, “Making connections to get ahead wasn’t part of any specific strategy … far from it. It was more a matter of good luck and timing … it’s just human nature for people to contact people they already know.”6 David’s reminiscence that he was asked to join the Canada Council in a social setting surprises former Canada Council Director Joyce L. Zemans, with whom he would work ten years later at York University. “I would have thought that he had to make an application for the position — maybe even from England, but I expect things must have been less formal, then, regarding protocol.”7
Process and inviter now lost to time, David Silcox, age twenty-eight, was invited to join the Canada Council in the position of Arts Officer. Clearly, the young man’s stated plan, on returning home, to “see if there was anything I could do that would be interesting for me and that would pay enough to keep active and engaged” had been splendidly met.
* * *
A 1951 report carried out by the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Science (popularly known as the Massey Report) revealed a poorly kept Canadian secret. The report identified Canada’s cultural landscape as “unpromising,” with the state of professional theatre “moribund,” musical space for the staging of cultural events “meagre,” and professional artistic ventures “lacking” and “virtually absent outside Canada’s largest urban centers.” A mere fourteen English-language books had been published in 1950. The Commission called for immediate resuscitation.8
Life-saving measures wouldn’t arrive, in fact, for six years. In 1957, on the recommendation of the Royal Commission, the Act for the Establishment of a Canada Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences received assent. Among its stipulations, the Act called for the following:
A full-time Canada Council Director, Associate Director, and council of twenty-one members, including a Chair, from across Canada
An initial allocation of $100 million for the fund, half to be spent on grants to universities for capital projects within a ten-year period and the other half to form an endowment fund, shared equally between the arts and humanities and social sciences, from which only the interest of approximately $3.5 million was to be spent
The awarding of these funds throughout the interdisciplinary and media arts, musical ventures, including opera and theatre, the written word, publishing, and the visual arts
The establishment and operation of the Canada Council Art Bank to provide art rental, as well as an exhibition and outreach program9
David Silcox’s role as the Canada Council’s first Arts Officer would see his work directed toward the visual arts. In an article written for Artforum, he summarizes his mandate: “to meet with artists, groups, institutions … to enhance what was already happening that is providing direct access to individual artists; to provide funds that enable projects to be realized; to connect artists across the country … the care and feeding of art galleries across the country … that is to enhance programs of assistance for art galleries and artists across Canada.”10
Silcox stresses that the artist came first:
The most important person in the field of the visual arts … is the individual artist, the one who produces the goods. Consequently, our first concern is for his needs which we meet in a variety of appropriate ways. Foremost among these, are fairly sizeable grants we call Awards, for accomplished and well-established artists (up to $7,000), and Bursaries, for artists in the earlier stages of a professional career (up to $3,500 and renewable).… These grants are available for almost any purpose.… The artist may wish to travel abroad; he may wish to stop teaching for a year in order to devote all his time to painting or to experimenting with new materials; he may wish only to read or to look at art; or he may just want to relieve financial burdens while he goes on working.11
Keen, knowledgeable, well-connected, and personable, David Silcox and a coterie of assistants (arts council jury appointees) couldn’t wait to begin their work. A 1965 fact-finding (and grant-dispersing) junket to western Canada would be one of his first adventures.
Chapter Twenty-Four And a Buffalo Coat
Less than five months into his role as the Canada Council’s Arts Officer and primed by his friend Alan Jarvis’s report of a “mini Renaissance going on in the studios and galleries of Western Canada,” David Silcox boarded a plane heading west. Travelling with him would be the first Canada Council jury members: journalist Elizabeth Kilbourn and practising visual artists Albert Dumouchel and Ron Bloore. “Three weeks of non-stop meetings, studio visits and assessments,” David delightedly recalled.12
A touchdown in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, would be the first stop on the junket. Eastern Canadian reports on a phenomenon called Prairie Modernism13 were turning heads in the North American art world. The Canada Council wanted to know more, although these reports reverberated little in Saskatchewan itself, which was more interested in hockey championships and rising grain prices. Emerging initially in the 1950s at the University of Saskatoon and at Regina College under the leadership of Professors Eli Bornstein and Kenneth Lochhead, Prairie Modernism was peaking in the mid-1960s. With the establishment of the University of Regina School of Art and the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery, and led by abstract expressionist painter Ronald Bloore, the so-called Regina Five came into prominence. Membership included Lochhead, Bloore, Ted Godwin, Douglas Morton, and Arthur McKay.14 Also creatively thriving under prairie skies were visual artists Dorothy Knowles, Bill Perehudoff, and sculptor Douglas Bentham.
Only fragmentary memories of the initial Silcox-led Saskatchewan junket remain — revealing as much about the officials as they do the visit: “Ronald Bloore; dancing in Saskatoon, parties, and selecting art …” A recollection also survives from one jury member who observed: “No wonder people in these parts have Diefenbaker; they need all the hot air they can get.”15 Fashion (and keeping warm) was also on the arts officers’ minds during this western sojourn. An authentic buffalo coat purchased at an army surplus store in Winnipeg became a cozy souvenir for David. Over the coming years, this “beast” was front and centre at various Canada Council junkets across the country. Artist and Curator Allan Harding MacKay, former Director of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, recalls the burly coat during David’s visit to Nova Scotia: “I can’t remember the weather — it was cold for sure — and David arrived to speak to us in this rather magnificent buffalo coat. It took us down-home Nova Scotians somewhat by surprise. But then we were used to out-of-province folks, especially Americans, arriving — not sure if they were preparing for Arctic weather — in the most outlandish outfits.” Adding that David Silcox was surely “more savvy than that,” Allan viewed the coat as merely a fashion statement. “David was always a snappy dresser.”16
The enigmatic coat also evokes a memory from artist and Silcox cousin Bruce Thompson, then a university student at Victoria College: “David had come to pick me up at home in Ottawa to travel with him back to the University of Toronto. As his red Mini pulled in the driveway, it seemed to be entirely filled with something dark brown and hairy, bulging against the windows. The car door squeaked open and a gorilla-like creature emerged from the driver’s side. It was David, somewhere inside a massive buffalo coat!”17
* * *
Prairie business concluded, it was on to balmy Victoria and the Sixth Festival of Contemporary Arts, taking place at the University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery. David recalls the festival in remarkably spare words: “Knocked galley-west, as they say, by what I found!”18 Delivering the first home run of the western junket was Vancouver-based conceptual artist Iain Baxter’s “Bagged Place.”
For the arts festival opening, Baxter had created a four-room “apartment,” where every object in the domicile — from living room couch, to kitchen toaster, to night-time bed — was bagged in clear plastic. Visitors were invited to tour the site. One of the more provocative corners of Bagged Place was the bathroom, where a plastic-wrapped toilet with fecal matter in situ was on display. It appears that the curiosity delighted Canada Council’s Arts Officer Silcox. In a 2023 interview, Baxter recalled: “David unzipped the fly of his pants and inserted his index finger through the opening and pretended to pee.”19 Clearly, David treasured memories of his first cross-country arts junket and long kept a photograph of himself wrapped in plastic, as well as one of jurists Elizabeth Kilbourn and Albert Dumouchel “lying like two sarcophagi on the plastic-wrapped bed.”20 The Baxter-Silcox meeting was the beginning of a life-long and warm friendship. “David Silcox was one of few people who understood where I was coming from,” recalled the octogenarian Baxter& (ampersand legally added to Baxter’s surname) in 2023.21
The care and feeding of Canada’s art galleries weren’t overlooked in Arts Officer Silcox’s first treasure hunt. As a result of his findings, federal financial assistance for western art galleries was increased. He wrote, “Up to 1966, the Vancouver Art Gallery had received from the Council something in the order of $15,000; this was based on Peter Dwyer’s [David’s immediate superior] theory that all a gallery had to do was open its doors in the morning and lock them at night.… I was soon able to get annual grants up over $100,000 and to find comparable sums for other galleries.” He later referred to himself as “Vancouver’s special messenger bearing good news and money.”22
The western Canada field trip also offered what David referred to as “outside in” support. “So that Western artists could be connected to the rest of the country; inviting other artists and art critics to visit …”23 Under David’s initiatives, the foreign press began to take an interest in the Canadian hinterland, as various articles began to appear in The Times of London about Vancouver artists. Another public relations initiative led to Canada’s participation in the Edinburgh International Festival.
Returning to Ottawa wrapped in his toasty buffalo coat, and with plans aplenty blooming for Canada’s art world, David Silcox basked in the success of his western Canada assignment. “This is what I was meant to do,” he said. “It has astonished me that I get paid to do these things,” he admitted to the Globe’s Jermyn.24 The mandarins in Ottawa were happy, too. A year after his appointment as Arts Officer of the Canada Council, David received a promotion. His new title was Senior Arts Officer.
Chapter Twenty-Five “Bottomless Pockets”
Wearing trousers with deep pockets, the Senior Arts Officer of the Canada Council now broadened his horizons to include assistance to small Canadian publishers. One of the first to feel the love was Stan Bevington of Toronto’s Coach House Press. Almost sixty years later, Stan recalled the circumstances: “We’d just moved our operations from western Canada to the Dundas–Bathurst area of the city of Toronto and set up in an old coach house — hence the name of the company. And one day this very outgoing gentleman walked into the shop and introduced himself as David Silcox. He said he was representing the Canada Council and suggested that I apply to the Council for a grant to jump-start my business.” Stan Bevington’s memory of that first conversation brought a broad smile to his face. “I laughed and told him that I was no artist — that I was a printer and knew nothing about filling out grants for artists. David shot back, ‘Don’t worry; I’ll do it.’ And he did.”25
