The Paul Wells Show - The National Gallery's Fix-It Guy

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

The National Gallery of Canada had a rough year, as they reckoned with shifting attitudes towards culture and representation. Their new CEO, Jean-François Bélisle, joins Paul to talk about how he plans to move forward, and what a national art gallery should look like in the year 2023. This episode was recorded live at the National Arts Centre. FURTHER READING: Turmoil Engulfs Canadian Art Museums Seeking to Shed Colonial Past - The New York Times Subscribe to Paul's Substack for a premium version of this show: paulwells.substack.com

Canada's National Gallery is coming off a rough year. Meet the guy who's been hired to fix it. One of the funny things about the National Gallery is that in a lot of ways I feel like my whole life was preparing me for this position. Today, Jean-Francois Bellil, the new CEO of the National Gallery of Canada. I'm Paul Wells, the journalist fellow in residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. We're in a large room, so I might as well begin by acknowledging the elephant in it. Ten days ago, this headline appeared in the New York Times, turmoil engulfs Canadian art museums seeking to shed colonial past. And as I suspected when I

saw that headline, it was in fact largely about recent events at the National Gallery of Canada. We're mostly going to talk about what happens after. But that is, as we will acknowledge in our chat, the context for the arrival of Jean-Francois Belle-El, who was the CEO of the Musée d'Art de Joliette and has had an extensive career in art going back long before that, and is the new director of an institution that's very important to so many Canadians and especially to so many residents of the Ottawa area. And I mostly just wanted to know, he's got this big truck and I want to know where he wants to drive it. And so, Jean-François Belil, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Thank you so much for the invitation. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you so much for the invitation. What's a National Gallery for? And what do you plan, what are you going to do with it, young man? Very simple, basic question. And maybe to contextualize this answer, but every single answer thereafter, though the appointment came in throughout the summer, I've really been physically, permanently at the National Gallery for about two months. So I still get lost in the building. I still

meet new people on a daily basis. So I don't have the depth of knowledge that I wish I would have to properly answer these questions. But it'll come very quickly so who's the national gallery for for every single canadian and for the art i think that's the heart of it art for everyone and and you yourself just now spoke about how important it is to people in ottawa and and i fully agree but i think our mandate is also much wider than that and you know the the law that set us up is for us to bring art from coast to coast to coast and that's one of the one of the big ones i think that i really drives me in it in every day in everything that we do what i want to do with it i think it's that's a very that's a very far reaching question there are a lot of things that are involved here and hopefully or i'm sure we

will get to expand on that through the various questions but building everything from the art up and from the people up is key in Ottawa but not only in Ottawa you know the National Gallery I think holds a very special position in the landscape of Canadian art and I want the gallery to assume that position and to use that as a mechanism to exhibit, collect, and make known the best of Canadian art even more broadly than it is now, hopefully. Looming on the horizon, a week after we speak tonight, is the opening of a major exhibition of the art of Jean-Francois Rieupeul.

Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul. You'd think I'd have this stuff down by now. What does that entail as far as filling up your week, and what can you tell people about the Riopelle exhibit? It's a really, really, really exciting moment. It's the end of the centennial, and as coincidences would have it, the centennial was opened by an exhibition in Joliet

this past January or February. So it's nice to be closing the Centennial with this exhibition in Ottawa. It's a major, major exhibition. We're talking about 130 plus works, 30 plus lenders from all across the country. A lot of works that have never been showed or very rarely showed. So it's really, really exciting to be able to look at such an important artist a bit from a new perspective, but also from an encompassing perspective, looking at 50 years' worth of art production.

And what does that mean today? What does that art mean today? And how does it relate to the National Gallery today, to art viewers today, to art collectors today? So I'm really, really excited. It's going to be a very busy week. We have a fundraising gala the night before the opening and then a public opening that I hope will be well attended. I think it will be.

Jean-Paul Riappel's art is an art format, and I was talking about this earlier today. One of the amazing things about his art that I've always loved is, well, two things. One, he's an artist that he was not only a witness to history, he actually impacted history. You know, with 15 other people signing the Refuge Global, it was not just witnessing what was happening elsewhere in society. It was actually generating change in society, which is fantastic. That really echoes what type of artist he was throughout his

whole life. He always pushed boundaries a little further. He always changes art practice, always changes medium, his tools to push the envelope a little bit further. And when that happens and you're living with the artists, you perhaps don't see it as much as when you're looking at it 100 years after or 50 years after or whatever it is. And that's, I think, what we're going to see in this exhibition, which is really, really fascinating. You came here from Joliet. Let me tell you, pass along some dinnertime gossip. The day your name was announced, I was out with some friends. And some of them said, basically, this is a story about how I have snooty friends.

They said, this guy's coming from the art museum in Joliet. Jo-what? Yeah, exactly. And honestly, as a guy who grew up in Sarnia, I got a little defensive on your behalf. Thank you. Tell us about the Musée d'Art de Joliet, which fairly recently went through a major expansion.

Yeah, or renovation. Architectural renovation. Yeah, exactly. And is a significant regional center, and I'll let you take it from there. It's a very strange museum. It's a really wonderful museum. Looks beautiful and amazing

because it was fully rebuilt seven years ago now. But the whole thing started with a collection that you would not expect to find in such a small town. You know, to keep in mind, Juliet is a town of 20-some thousand people in a larger agglomeration of about 60,000. And it's kind of a short drive northeast of Montreal, if I'm not mistaken. Exactly.

More or less along the St. Lawrence River, on the way to Quebec City on the north side, about 45 minutes outside the town. And that town has itself a very peculiar and fascinating story. But what created the museum is that there was a religious order in Joliette called the Clair de Saint-Viateur that used to, a bit like the Jesuits, they used to run colleges across the country and across the world. At one point, they ran colleges in 19 countries. And here comes this fantastic, weird, funny professor in the 1930s and 40s that taught visual arts and didn't want to teach visual arts based on badly colored or black and white slides. So he thought, well,

let me get some real art to show different techniques and movements and periods in art history. So he did two things. One, he wrote to his colleagues in all 19 countries where they had colleges. Some of them had been there for hundreds of years. And he said, can you please send me some art? Of course, these amazing things started coming out of, well, I have this Renaissance master from Italy. I have this Roman column. I have this, so all these amazing works of art arrived in Juliet because of that.

And as he was doing that, he also started visiting artist studios in Montreal. And the very first purchase that he did in 1942 was a still life by Paul-Emile Bordura, who was not famous, who was not trending anywhere. And so he kept on doing both, historical pieces through the religious network and contemporary pieces through studio visits in Montreal.

And he built this collection that is really amazing to the point that now it stands at about 9,000 pieces, covers about 5,000 years of art history with some of the best examples of any period that you can think of. So you don't expect to find a collection like that in Juliet. And it's a very well-kept secret that the general public perhaps doesn't know about as much, but in the milieu it's very

well known that this is one of the leading collections in the country and one of the leading institutions in terms of its programming so it was a lot it was wonderful to be able to to have the pleasure and the the opportunity to run that museum for overall seven years and it's a museum that that grew quite a bit also during those years and started before that a few years before me there was a another well-known director by the name of Gaetan Verna that ended up running the power plant in Toronto. And so we had a lot of fun doing these really crazy projects that were perhaps a bit too ambitious for a regional museum, but obviously it resulted in something. As chief curator at a place like that, you basically get three or four dates on the calendar every year to sort of remind everyone that the place is there and to generate interest and to sort of

over time make a case for a certain idea of art what were some of these crazy exhibits that you that you did during that time um tons of really really really fantastic exhibitions that the team and I put together. But I think what we were trying to do for a regional museum without the financial means of a national gallery or a major national institution, we had to figure out a way to access the really exciting international and contemporary artists and historical and crazy collections without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. So what we started doing is looking for emerging artists, but not really emerging people that were just on the cusp

of becoming major international superstars, or so we thought. And we didn't always get it right. There were artists going in all directions in there. And inviting them to live that experience and use the collection as an attraction point, saying, well, you get the chance to come here for a few weeks and play with these amazing pieces that in a lot of other museums you would not be able to work with.

So Kapwani Kiwanga, who will be representing Canada at the Venice Biennale this year in the National Pavilion, Canada's pavilion. I showed her in Joliet in 2018. Shannon Boole, amazing Canadian-German artist living in Berlin that has an incredible international career. We presented her the same year. Matt Shivers, a fantastic English artist that plays with science and new technologies to build or to express them differently through art and ask questions about like where are these technologies leading us. We gave him carte blanche. He decided to put him in contact with a few artificial intelligence

companies in Canada at the time, Element AI, and ended up creating this crazy project where he produced, with the help of the science teams, he produced the first AI-produced sculpture, 3D sculpture, that didn't exist at the time. I still remember when we approached Element AI and we said, the artist has this dream. They said, well, there's no artificial intelligence in the world right now that understands 3D space.

So we're going to have to get like 100 programmers in there to work it out and figure out a way to make it happen it turned into a an extremely expensive project but no one paid because there were so many partners involved doing it for free and it was really a critique about where is artificial intelligence not where artificial intelligence is leading us but how are we as humans going to rely on this medium or not, or this technology or not, which was really, really interesting. Now, something happened near the end of your tenure there that I do want to talk about, which is not something that happened at the gallery. It happened in the community. There was a young Indigenous woman named Joyce Achaquan, who was at a hospital just outside of Joliet, who died in care there.

And just before she died, this is a story that is very well known in Quebec, but less well known outside of Quebec, which is why I'm sort of walking through it. She did a Facebook Live broadcast where one could hear staff members at the hospital verbally abusing her as she was dying. She died very soon after that. There was a coroner's inquest. It was a real moment of reckoning for the community, for the province, for the provincial government. And at some point, you decided that the gallery had to become part of that conversation. How did

you respond to the death of Joyce Echaquan? It was a very difficult moment. When this happened, the gallery had already been involved for a few years with a number of communities that had historically not been very, well, at least had not felt comfortable to come into the gallery. And so we had all these programs to try to work with new docents and new people from different communities and doing all these different projects, the Indigenous community being one of them,

but there were tons of other ones that were recent immigrants, tons of people. And so we had built somewhat of a friendship with these different communities. They were starting to see the museum as a safe space or an ally in whatever they were going through. But it wasn't a very strong relationship. And then this strategy happened.

And the museum, the first thing that happened was that the team at the museum reacted very, very strongly. And I still remember that night when it happened, a few hours after it had happened, I got a bunch of calls and text messages and emails of staff saying, we need to shut down the museum as a sign of protest. We need to unhang all the paintings done by white people. We need to, there are all these crazy ideas. And I said, well, you know what? I don't think it's for us to speak.

I think we need to reach out to our new friends and understand what they want out of this. So we reached out. They said, no, no, no, we want to use this to build bridges and heal wounds rather than create new ones or start a war or anything of the sort. And I said, great, well, take your time and let me know what we can do to walk down that path with you.

And then, as coincidences would have it, that very same week, we were opening an exhibition, two exhibitions. So I think this happened, that very same week, we were opening an exhibition, two exhibitions. So I think this happened, if I remember well, on a Tuesday and on the Saturday, so a few days after, we were opening two major exhibitions, one of 19th century bronze sculptures, a private collection from Toronto,

the fantastic works by Cusart Côté and all the great masters of bronze sculpture in the 19th century, in the early 20th, that had, to say the least, problematic portrayals of Indigenous people in there, as was common in the 19th century. This was not, I mean, it was not shocking to anyone when they were produced. But us showing those pieces in 2022 at the time, I guess, or one,

I thought, how are we going to do this? We have to contextualize this a little bit. So we had, and we had reached out to the Native Friendship Center and we had produced these videos that were part of the exhibition where the pieces were being looked at by Indigenous people saying what they thought of the pieces and the portrayals that were in there. So it was just one component of the exhibition, celebrating the bronzes but also voicing these concerns

and this transformation of society. And so when we opened that exhibition, I showed up on the Saturday morning, and as I usually do a few hours before we opened the public to make sure everything was great, that the setup had worked the night before, and we were ready for the event. And there was a small group of Atikamekw people in the parking lot. And I thought, what are they doing here? What's happening? When I spoke to them, I realized, and they said, well, we don't really know where to go.

We don't know where to come together as a community to just be together in this trying time. And the city, I think, had told them, you can go to a park. We'd reserved a park for them. And they said, we don't want to go to that park. We've never used that park. Why would we go there? But we understand that our friends are on your video screens inside

talking about art. So we thought, we'll come here. So they did. And that turned out to be one of the most memorable, touching days of my life where the whole day was like the gallery, that gallery turned out into sort of a gathering space for people that were mourning the death of Joyce. And the direct result of that,

beyond the beauty and the community feeling and all that, was that our budding friendship with the Native Center became a very strong friendship and had an impact on everything that we did after. Not everything the gallery did, but everything that related to various communities through town benefited from that experience, I think, and everyone in the gallery, and not every staff in the gallery, of course, but every museum visitor as well. So it was a very transformative experience for me. And there's a sort of a rotating showcase

for large pieces of Indigenous art at the gallery, if I'm not mistaken. It's sort of a mural space that... There's mural space so at the front of the gallery there's a big a big wall that faces the river and there's sort of the entrance of the city and good good point because when we asked the native friendship center what do you want to do they said we want to build bridges and great but how what what type of bridges and this is what came out of it. They said, can we create art together that will stay in the gallery? So together we selected an indigenous artist to come and paint this mural in the honor of Joyce Echaquan.

And that mural stayed up for two years. And then murals, you have the question of, like, what are you going to do with it? If you take it down, you can't really save it. If you leave it up forever, does it lose meaning or not does it become part of a history that solidifies or it's so so we together again came to conclusion that we should rotate this every other year we invented a structure where the artist that did the previous mural previous mural would select the next artist to do one so it's sort of a lineage of artists now that is outside of a control i mean obviously the wall is in the gallery and and and we pay the expenses

and we're involved in the project but it's a beautiful thing that has a bit of a life of its own and that has no it doesn't have to be an indigenous artist it doesn't have to be an indigenous theme and i personally hope that it will be something that would somehow alternate or show different perspectives or go in the general direction of building these bridges and not building a silo, which is very much so the desired interest by the community as well. So I wanted to go into some detail about that because my hunch is that this has some kind of context that helps explain how you approach your new role at the National Gallery. Is that a good guess? Well, I think it's definitely one of the factors. I think, you know, I've been in the field for 30 years, so I think there are a lot of other really meaningful moments like that that have shaped who I am, but that's definitely one of the big ones of recent

years, for sure. It says, I read it in the New York Times, so it must be true that there's turmoil as the National Gallery struggles to get rid of its colonial past. There's a strategic plan, which talks about centering Indigenous experience. There is a lot of debate over the last year about decolonization as an idea in art, as an idea in museology. And there's a great big banner on the side of the building from Deanna Bowen, a black artist from Montreal, which is intended to be quite a severe coming to terms with Canada's racist history. Some of the speculation before you got here was,

were you going to leave that Deanna Bowen piece up on the wall when you got here? You sure have. It's been up there now for months. What are you thinking about all this stuff as you arrive? And what do you do next with this huge institution in the context of life in 2023 going forward? Answer that in 30 seconds or less if you can. I'll do it in 20. There's a lot to unpack in what you've said. That's the kind of long question I hate to ask, but now it's your problem.

Well, going back to the New York Times article, I think one of the first things that the article said as well was me expressing the fact that I'm not comfortable with the term decolonization. I'm trying to not use it. A gallery is a gallery. It comes from a colonial past. We're not going to change that. I think there's a way to make our society better, make our galleries better, which this is the part where I'm concerned, is making the gallery better. But what is decolonization? What would it entail? I'm not even interested where I'm concerned is making the gallery better but what is decolonization what would it entail I'm not even interested I'm interested in thinking about it I'm interested

in building something not de-building something so that's the general direction that I want to go moving forward as far as these as the artistic choices you know a gallery program is usually about three years in advance. So what is being put up now and what will be put up for the next little while won't be of my doing. That doesn't mean that I don't agree with it or that I don't appreciate it.

I think there are really fantastic shows coming up that I'm really excited about. As far as that specific piece by Deanna Bowen, I think it's a great piece. I think it's a very meaningful piece. It's not an easy one. It asks some very pointed, very serious questions that are not comfortable, but it doesn't make anything up. I mean, it's picking up original, real documents. Do they represent a big percentage of our history? No. Do they pretend to represent a

big percentage of our history? No. So I think all that has to be contextualized and all that has to be also understood from the point of view of the artist. You know, she's been accused of a lot of things that she has never said, that she doesn't believe in, and that the artwork doesn't say either. But, you you know images can be tough and can hurt and and that's why for instance for that work we're working on a uh and there is already didactic information around the piece and we're working on even more didactic material so contextual material to say well we realize this can hurt some people and we don't want to hurt anyone but we don't want to bury our hands or our heads on the sand either i think burying your hands in

your heads in the sand and trying to forget parts of your history is the best way to repeating them if you're not careful that art raises some some interesting and serious questions but i also think that it has to be occupy a specific space within society no one is pretending as i said that it's a big percentage of our of our history or our reality or the only thing that matters. Quite the opposite. It's interesting art to show. Is it the only interesting art to show? Of course not, not at all. I'm as excited, if not even more excited, by the Ria Pell exhibition coming up next week. And I think that multiplicity of voices is really, really fun and interesting and fascinating. And I think beautiful things happen when you juxtapose and mix different approaches like that. And make sure that your museum is as accessible as possible for everyone.

That's where I want to go with it, is multiplying that accessibility. Not shutting doors, opening them. Not de-building anything, building new bridges and new connection points. I'll continue my conversation with Jean-Francois Belil after the break. People love to talk about their successes, but it's much harder to get them to open up about their failures. I want to tell you about a podcast called The Revisionaries, where Michelle Romano talks to startup luminaries about the times when things went wrong. She asks her guests how they got through the tough times and how those failures led to big breakthroughs. Michelle Romano knows the subject well. Michelle Romano knows the subject well. As a serial tech entrepreneur and one of the stars of Dragon's Den, she's seen businesses struggle and thrive from inside and out. Each episode

reveals what it really takes to make it in business life. Check out the Audible original, The Revisionaries, produced by Antica Productions and available on audible.ca. is it frustrating that there's a three-year lag before exhibitions that you conceive and that you work on with your team are the ones that are coming online is there a sense in which that provides opportunity and are there things that you can do and have been able to do in the first weeks and months to begin to imprint the place with your stamp? Yes and no. Because at the same time, if you, I mean, it's frustrating and not frustrating. It'd be fun to move some things faster.

But at the same time, the three years also apply to you when you leave a position. So you get your full-time worth in there. You get your full-time worths in there. And it allows you, I think it will allow me, and it allows me now, and it has allowed me in the past, to better understand the institution, the lay of the land, the team, and how things land in this or these communities,

which is great. Starting to talk too fast about things that you don't know is not something that I believe in. So that forces you to take the time to really know what you're talking about before you start engaging. That being said, there are exceptions. There are always holes in the calendar. There are things that change, so you need to program some things that were originally planned differently.

And I think the CEO of an institution, even if the project has been running for a year or two, there is room for an impact in there in terms of shaping things and adapting things and making them land as you want them to land in the gallery so there's tons of fun to be had there as well now you come from some distance away with not a lot of experience with the gallery but with a hell of a lot of experience in the art field what's your assessment of the national gallery as an institution as a building as collection? What excited you walking in the building about that place? One of the funny things about the National Gallery is that in a lot of ways, I feel like my whole life was preparing me for this position. It's a bit strange. I mean, I, so I spent quite a few years abroad for, originally for family reasons, then for my

own professional reasons, always sort of looking at and canadian art a bit from a distance the outside in i did my master's degree on the venice biennale that is now under the purview of the national gallery the canadian pavilion that is at joliet i used to tour eight to ten exhibitions across canada every year so trying to connect different provinces together, trying to connect a national scene together, which is one of my great passions, and exporting them abroad as well. So trying to bring Canadian artists to a different art stage.

And I feel like for the past 28 years, 29 years, I've been doing this on my own with limited means. And all of a sudden, I am in a gallery whose mission is exactly those things that I've been trying to fight for on my own. So it's really, really, really exciting to be able to do that. And then coming on board, it was very apparent the first couple of days, the first couple of weeks, that everyone in the gallery shows that desire that dream of bringing the country together and exporting Canadian artists to the international stage so it's extremely motivating and positive for me to land in such an environment and and to be able

to do it on a on an even bigger scale so ever since I've started i mean it's a bit of a whirlwind where i've been lots of traveling lots of meeting new people across the country trying to understand stakeholders throughout the country and shaping or starting to shape some early ideas of things that could be done so it's a whirlwind going in all directions but through the whole thing there is this amazing energy in me at least of like this is amazing this is really really amazing and i i think to me the national gallery is a land of opportunities for canadian artists that is unbelievable and tapping into these opportunities and maximizing their impact is going to be a lot of fun and I think could really make a difference.

Now, before you were at Joliet, you headed a national organization called LAGAC, which is the Association of Contemporary Art Galleries of Canada. The acronym works better in French. And last year, the current leadership of that organization said an important function of an institution like a national gallery is to lead in the whole art ecosystem set directions through its own acquisitions for for what matters in canadian art give cues to a large network of private art galleries across the country can you talk to me a bit about about that sort of ecosystem function of a national institution? It's interesting to see that role from the private galleries, the commercial galleries point of view as Dominique Toutan in this case voiced. And I

think it's very valid, but I think that role also applies to other spheres of the art world, other art galleries, art museums art museums artists run centers production houses and and i tend to see that role as sort of leader among equals where i think we have a responsibility to be a driving force but with partners that are just as important as we are so towards art galleries and collectors for sure i mean we have an important mandate in building a collection. And that mandate goes way beyond the dollar that we spend for an artwork because it has an impact on the galleries, on the collectors, on partly writing Canadian art history.

And that's the first thing that I said when I met my first all-staff meeting at the gallery over the summer. And I said, I don my first all-staff meeting at the gallery over the summer. And I said, I don't know if you realize, but all of us here, hundreds of people, we work every day together to write Canadian art history. How many people across the country can say that? It's an amazing opportunity and a responsibility. And that happens partly through acquisitions and partly through programming and exhibitions that we put up. To go back to that sort of leader among equals,

I think we have to be an institution that will collaborate with other institutions, other galleries, artists from across the country, understand the needs across the country, and help them hopefully go just a little bit further. And in that sense, I'm looking now at different or thinking about different ways of building or beefing up a national engagement area for the museum so that we really help different provinces play with one another and through larger numbers

because we have four or five players on a team then it's a I think a stronger team reaching wider audiences and having a bigger impact. And I think that's one of the really important things. One of the things that I've realized over the years of traveling across the country for these exhibitions is that a lot of times people in Quebec have no idea what's happening in Vancouver. People in Vancouver have no idea what's happening in Ottawa and vice versa, Halifax, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon. And I think it's part of our responsibility to try to change that a little bit.

No other gallery in the country has a national mandate as we do. We do. So how do you make that happen? And not us coming in and sort of imposing things on people and saying, like, this is, like, bringing a show to a new town is great, it's a lot of fun, but it's us talking to people, not talking with people. And I'm really interested in trying to think about and build structures where we will engage

in dialogue. We won't talk to two people. We will talk with people. And I think there's tremendous potential in there. This is an eternal riddle. How does one run a national institution from Ottawa that is truly national? It's a challenge for the National Arts Centre, it's a challenge for you folks, Canadian Museum of History. Are you convinced that the National Gallery building has to be the venue for everything that the National Gallery does? No, no, no, no, not at all.

I think the National Gallery building is really important for the Ottawa community, for tourists, and I think also a national institution like that has to have, I mean, it's a bit like a lighthouse. So it's extremely important. But what we do has to happen all over the country. And different models have been tried over the years.

I mean, if you think back to like the past 30, 40 years of the history of the gallery, you know, the gallery operated satellites, sometimes rooms within other galleries, sometimes fully fledged satellites on their own that were like little national galleries across the country. They were touring programs for exhibitions. A lot of things have been tried. A lot of great things have been done. Oftentimes these things ended because we ran out of money at one point or another. So I'm trying to think, are there other ways that we can do this that are not as financially difficult or constraining and I think the solution to that is working with partners

in other provinces so that our humans and our art can travel but we don't need to like come up with a new envelope every time and if our humans and being the staff or other experts that we would would be you know hired for a specific project or whatever it is and our collection travels or our art travels then it has to be in that dialogue it has to be that we're doing it because someone wants to do it with us and is bringing some to the table as well but to me it's primordial that the national gallery has a presence across the country in a much more regular fashion and that presence to me, it's primordial that the National Gallery has a presence across the country in a much more regular fashion. And that presence, to me at least, can't only be the art. It also has to be the people, the expertise that the National Gallery possesses.

A person and a painting on a wall, that's not a dialogue. If we just send a painting, we're not engaging in the type of dialogue that I want us to engage. How preoccupied are you with getting people into the building? When I was writing about the gallery a year ago, one of my readers did some quick math, divided the annual budget by the number of people that were reported to have gone through it, and said, man, it costs a lot of money

to get each person into that building. Is that something that's on your mind? That type of math is a bit of a shortcut because I think our impact is much wider than getting people through the building. There's a bit of a conundrum there for galleries. If our mandate was only to collect, it'd be much cheaper and easier

to just build a big vault, put it in there, lock the door. You've gotten rid about 50 to 70% of the cost of the gallery. But who does it serve? If all you want to do is get people through the door, much better to not collect and not restore stuff and not do research and then our impact is also a lot wider than just people that come in through the door these projects across the country these projects internationally the type of representation that we do for canadian

artists on the whole planet and if we were to start adding those numbers as well i mean if you want to if you want to just add the visitors to the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year, you add another 600,000 people right there in two seconds, and you've gone from 400,000 to a million. Add the other 200,000 that saw the General Ideas show, and not even 200,000, I think it was 400,000, that saw our exhibition in Amsterdam last week.

You're at 1.4. I can come up with a number upwards of 2 million without too much trouble with direct consequences of what we do at the gallery not like side effects of people direct walk-ins all that being said i think that people walking through the door in ottawa is extremely important i think a national gallery that tries to be active from coast to coast to coast and doesn't have this local sturdy foundation of an Ottawa community, an Ottawa community that believes in what you do and that wants to go to the gallery on a regular basis would be a very fragile construction and I don't think that would be good for anyone. So getting people through the door is extremely important because it's important to me to get the community involvement

and the local community through the door, not just numbers spinning through a turnstile. And that will be one of the things that we will work on in the next couple of years, of course. Do you have a favorite painting or sculpture in that building that you couldn't have named for me eight months ago but something that's grown on you to be honest i don't at the moment because it's only been two months that's an interesting question because usually all the places where i've worked there usually is and i usually i can't tell what painting it is because otherwise it's like

having your favorite child right you're not allowed to talk about that but there usually is a painting that i grow very fond of that i will use as sort of a a safe space or a soothing moment that whenever things get a little rough i'll just go sit in front of it for two minutes and and calm myself down not that i'm ever that not calm, to be honest, but still. But that hasn't happened yet to the National Gallery. And I think, I mean, there are a lot of amazing works in there. I think there are too many finalists on the list for me to be able to pick one at the moment.

But chances are it will happen. What was the work in Joliet? Well, now that I've left, I can talk about my favorite child. It was an Emily Carr piece from 1921, if I remember well. And it was a painting that she did sitting on Vancouver Island, looking south at Puget Sound, across Puget Sound, to the United States. It was impressionistic in its treatment, with amazing, beautiful, rough brushstrokes, all in yellows and blues. It was just the most soothing landscape that you can think of, and I really, really, really enjoyed it.

Jean-François Bellil, you've been very generous with your time, and there's been a lot of curiosity about your plans around town and across the country. So I'm glad that we've begun to learn more about what you have in mind and what you're hoping to do with an important national institution. Thanks so much for joining us tonight. Thank you so much for the invitation. Thank you. you so much for the invitation.

Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. This episode was recorded live at the National Arts Centre. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright

and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.