Catalogue Raisonne

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catalogue Raisonné
, mixed media, 238 pages excl. cover, provenance unknown. Gift of an anonymous donor.

 

 

The piece comprises 7 weeks in spring, 1984, in Hamilton, Ontario. It is subdivided into 4 sections, with dimensions as follows:

H
ans and I were hanging pictures in the Braithwaite Galleries when Bud came back to tell us that we needed new clothes. Hans checked his hammer mid-swing and let his mouth fall open, as if someone had just told him Berlin was burning. As apparently, when he was nine, someone had.

“It's the bloody eleventh hour,” he said to Bud, without taking his eyes off the grey marks we'd made on the wall.

“Yes, well, er . . . .” Bud blushed, and flicked a glance at me. Then at Peter across the room, making a show of checking the straightness of the little Tanguy he'd just hung. Peter, the gallery's conservator, stood a prim two paces back from the wall, desert boots tight together, perfectly still. All power to the eye. It was the usual pantomime – Hans a level man, Peter confident of his eye; both of them still passionate about the issue, so needing to work well apart – but this time it seemed to help Bud find his voice.

“We've decided you need new uniforms for the opening,” he said firmly, but to me.

I was standing beyond Hans with level in hand, close to the Dali that Neale had leaned in its position. Hans used a two-man system (whereas Peter could hang alone, at least with small works): after he banged in his nails and hung the painting, I leaned in with the level, which Hans consulted as he tugged down on one corner or the other. Then on to the next painting, where he reeled out his tape measure from the floor to the prescribed height, to which I lifted the work; Hans with the level now, we found a preliminary balance; then I pressed, pressed and jiggled a bit to make the grey marks. It worked. But Peter couldn't be disputed when he said he was faster. Hans began hammering.

Bud frowned, then looked over his shoulder to find Walter. The director was in the smaller Braithwaite Gallery, looking at the catalogue
with Neale, his face in quarter profile to us. But he must have had some sense of a disturbance, because he drifted over. Walter's attention was an uncertain thing. He had a drift, a saunter, but also a quick trained eye. He'd taken just one short stroll, his first visit to the show, when Neale was placing the paintings. It might have been respect: Neale had curated the surrealist show, it was his baby, his coup. When Walter was about halfway across the room, Hans stopped hammering. Turned for the first time.

“What's up?” Walter said. As if nothing much really could be.

Bud told him about the new uniforms for the attendants. “Barbara feels the old uniforms are tacky.”

“We-ell. No argument there.” Brief glance at the ones Hans and I were modelling.

“We've still got the whole show to hang,” Hans protested. “Then those changes in the McMahon Gallery you requested. I've got to give the boys at least a few minutes for dinner. Clean-up, then all the Gala preparations. . . .” Hans gestured provocatively with the hammer, but his face looked wan and tired, anticipating rebuff. I watched Bud and Walter hear him out. Bud's fair skin still had some rose in it, but his stiff shoulders had relaxed since Walter's arrival. Seeing the two of them standing together – Walter tall, silver-haired, in a good dark suit; Bud short and cherubic, in brown leather pants and thin leather tie, a yellow shirt – you felt there might be an evolution taking place. Over time, the one could become the other.

“We-ell now,” Walter said. The drawl he brought out when smoothing things was a mystery, since he'd grown up in Thunder Bay. He shot his cuff and checked a silver watch. “There's still four hours till the big opening. Couldn't we have cut it a bit finer?”

Bud and he exchanged a look that seemed to calm Bud further. Hans stared at Walter. Fourteen years of working for him, though he judged him a “good enough director . . . a fair employer,” hadn't helped him to appreciate Walter's irony. Probably nothing could.

“Still plenty of time for a wardrobe change,” Walter said.

Hans snapped. It may have been just strain and tiredness; perhaps it always was, mainly. Hans worked with an immigrant's grateful ferocity, but could also lapse into outraged cursing at the slightest
provocation. The question of his mental state was a common gallery coffee topic, especially among the upstairs people, but perhaps there was nothing really wrong with him besides overwork and being from another place and time.

“No, goddam.” He raised his hammer. “Not this time. With all this work to be done, go and get new clothes. For some bloody Gala. No.”

Walter watched him carefully, not letting more than a gleam in his black eyes betray a desire to fire or kick the man. “It's okay, Hans,” he said.

Hans began gently tapping the nail with his hammer. A prelude or a concession. Anyway, his final answer.

“Where's Ramon, Paul?” Walter asked me.

“Getting the Martin and Rogers, I think.” Just as we'd started hanging the surrealist show, Walter had decided changes were urgently needed in the contemporary Canadian selection hanging in the MacMahon Gallery, our largest viewing space and adjacent to the Braithwaite Galleries. “Need a proper setting for the jewel,” he'd murmured smiling to himself. But while it was true patrons would have to pass through the MacMahon on their way to the surrealist show, it piled on more work at an already hectic time, and made us feel, as we shuttled between Neale and Walter, that we were serving two competing midwives, each determined to focus resources on her delivery.

“Not the Bolduc?” Walter said.

“It's already up.”

“O-kay. All right, then. Round up the others and go over to the mall. Tell Ramon to put it on the gallery's account at Sears.” To Bud: “I assume Barbara's got her colours picked out.”

Bud nodded. And that look – knowing, faintly amused – got exchanged again.

Bud handed me the gallery's Sears card and I turned to go. Hans stopped his tapping – more like actual hammering now – long enough to say, “What about gallery security?”