David Silcox - Essay
by John O’Brian
“Everything I have done in the arts has been driven by the belief that creators are the vital core of any society—the ‘unacknowledged legislators,’ in Shelley’s phrase. Artists prod our senses and stimulate our thoughts. The society that supports the arts, particularly living artists, generously is one that embraces innovation, imagination and excellence. Only such a society is truly alive.”
David Silcox likes to tell of David Milne’s search for patronage in the mid-1930s. During a difficult time in his life Milne appealed by letter to Alice and Vincent Massey, proposing to sell them his entire output of painting at $5.00 apiece. “The aim is to trade twenty-five years of painting that is past,” Milne wrote, “for five or ten years in the future” – shrewdly adding that, “All the millions spent on Holbeins, El Grecos, Rembrandts and the work of other masters after their death did nothing except to move their pictures around a bit.” In the end Milne got less than he was bargaining for from the Masseys, but that is not the point of Silcox’s story. The point is that Milne received funding enough to allow him to keep painting; if “patronage” is to mean anything, Silcox insists in the telling, it must benefit living artists.
David Silcox has spent his career supporting the endeavours of living artists and sparking new initiatives in the arts. These have been his driving passions, fueled by the conviction that Canadian culture ought never to be reduced to the abstraction, “Canadian Culture.” For him Canadian culture is a flesh-and-blood affair that has produced expressive representations of remarkable force. The jury system of the Canada Council, the International Sculpture Conference in Toronto (1978), Cinematheque Ontario, and the huge Toronto Theatre Festival (1981) have been some of his initiatives; Dr. Shirley Thomson (former director of the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council) recalls that when she was writing her MA thesis in the early 1970s he made contemporary art vivid for her. She dedicated the thesis to him in acknowledgement.
Silcox has the air of a politician about him. This has been remarked upon often over the years, but he has never been elected to public office. Instead, he has deployed his political instincts as a civil servant in government and as a professor and administrator in universities to work on behalf of the arts and artists. In the 1960s, when Silcox was the Canada Council’s first arts officer, the artist Iain Baxter dubbed him an “Artoficial,” and produced a lapel button designating his status. Baxter’s moniker for the chair of the Canada Council was “Superficial.” Some forty years on, it may be time for Silcox to move up to the higher echelon.
The evidence of his work on behalf of the arts and artists can be read in a truncated version of his vita: Undergraduate Secretary, Hart House, University of Toronto (1960-62); art critic, The Globe and Mail (1964-65); Visual Arts and Senior Arts Officer, Canada Council (1965-70); Assistant and then Associate Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University (1970-73); Associate Professor, York University (1970-77); Director of Cultural Affairs, Metropolitan Toronto (1974-82); Assistant Deputy Minister (Culture), Department of Communications, Ottawa (1983-85); Deputy Minister, Department of Culture and Communications, Province of Ontario (1986-91); Senior Fellow, Massey College, University of Toronto (1991-); Director, University of Toronto Art Centre (1998-2001); Chair, Canadian Artists and Producers Professional Relations Tribunal (1998-2006); President, Sotheby’s Canada (2001-).
This is to say nothing of the boards and commissions he has served on and chaired. By my calculation, the present total is thirty-four and counting. As in his day-to-day professional activities, the board work has required him to address issues of policy and then to advocate on the organizations’ behalf. They range from the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, to a committee set up by Canada Post to advise on stamp design, to the international editorial board of Studio International, to PEN Canada, to the Museum of Canadian Broadcasting. If he has kept diaries over the years, especially of the kind maintained by Allan Gotlieb (his partner at Sotheby’s) while he was Canada’s ambassador to Washington, his insights into Canadian culture and its developments will prove revealing. Silcox has explored most corners of the country, usually in good company (Pierre Trudeau was a companion on several northern canoe trips), and has demonstrated the same stamina for the affairs of culture as Gotlieb has demonstrated for the affairs of state.
Nor is it to say anything about his activities as a writer and scholar. These began when he was at Hart House and have continued ever since. The Globe and Mail named him “Man of the Year in Art” in 1962, before appointing him its art critic in 1964. In 1977, he and Harold Town collaborated on the first scholarly study of Tom Thomson, The Silence and the Storm, and in 1982 he wrote an important book about Christopher Pratt. In 2003, he published The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. His most significant work of scholarship, however, is Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne (1996), the definitive critical biography of the artist, followed two years later by the splendid and exhaustively researched catalogue raisonné of the paintings, prepared jointly with David Milne Jr. When I was just starting my career the two Davids went out of their way to provide me with material for a book I was writing on Milne, long before they had finished their own work on the artist. They thought it more important that attention be paid to Milne in the present than that they save their research for the future; there can be no other explanation for their generosity.
David Silcox is a rainmaker. For almost fifty years, he has made things happen for artists and the arts in Canada, as many across the county will attest. Christopher Pratt first met him in 1968, wearing RCMP surplus buffalo coat and bearskin hat (minus the chin strap), when he went to Newfoundland to represent the Canada Council and to talk about its activities. Pratt was wary of the message being brought from Ottawa to the island—the Canada Council seemed to him “vague and otherlandish”—but Silcox persuaded him to sit on a jury with Dorothy Cameron and Ulysse Comtois that traversed the country. The experience was transformative for Pratt. He, like so many others, knows whom to credit for enlarging his world.
John O'Brian is Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. His books include David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting, Ruthless Hedonism and Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, which he edited.