Bringing Art to Life: A Biography of Alan Jarvis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bringing Art to Life: A Biography of Alan Jarvis Craig Patterson (bio) Andrew Horrall. Bringing Art to Life: A Biography of Alan Jarvis. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2009. xiii, 457. $39.95 When the urbane and cosmopolitan Alan Jarvis arrived in Ottawa in 1955 to become director of the National Gallery at the age of forty, he was hailed in the press and by the public as a brilliant showman and a ‘walking work of art.’ Well-dressed, well-spoken, and supremely well-connected, the Oxford-educated Jarvis seemed like just the man to head an important national institution in a country that was becoming increasingly aware of itself, its culture, and its place in the world. But Jarvis’s moment of triumph would be short-lived: within a few years, he would be forced to resign from his position, and his life would begin a slow, steady decline into alcoholism and irrelevance. Bringing Art to Life, Andrew Horrall’s biography of Jarvis, takes up the difficult task of telling the story of a man whose important achievements were often overshadowed by persistent failures. Horrall’s book attempts to restore Jarvis to cultural prominence, but it rarely ventures far beneath the highly varnished outer layers of a complex persona and never delivers sufficient context to make clear the significance of either Jarvis’s life or his accomplishments. Alan Hepburn Jarvis was born in Brantford, Ontario, but grew up in a solidly middle-class Toronto that was, like Jarvis’s own family, teetotal, sabbatarian, and almost proudly Philistine. As an undergraduate, he studied philosophy, honed his skills as a sculptor, and became the lover of [End Page 767] Douglas Duncan, a wealthy art collector and bookbinder who would add much to the education Jarvis received in the classrooms of University College or the committee rooms of Hart House. A Rhodes scholarship sent him to Oxford in 1938, but the outbreak of war saw him back in North America without having completed his formal studies. Refused admission to the military, Jarvis briefly studied sculpture at New York University before returning to England, where he eventually became private secretary to Sir Stafford Cripps, Minister of Aircraft Production. In the post-war period, Jarvis worked in adult education and engaged in various cultural enterprises, organizing exhibitions of industrial design and heading up a film company (one of a series of ventures that suggested that whatever Jarvis’s talents were, they were not chiefly administrative). By the time he returned to Canada to take up his duties in Ottawa, Jarvis had acquired the imprimatur of Sir Kenneth Clark (‘the handsomest man I have ever seen, a good sculptor, with a wide knowledge of art’) and could bask in the reflected glory of such sophisticated friends as Noel Coward, T.S. Eliot, and Sir Frederick Ashton. (Jarvis was, by all accounts, never shy about name dropping.) Jarvis had bold plans to make the Gallery ‘a museum without walls’ and began an ambitious program of acquisitions that included complex negotiations with European nobles for a number of significant (and by the standards of 1950s Canada, expensive) Old Masters. But disagreements with the newly elected Diefenbaker Conservatives as well as a number of impolitic statements in the press quickly tarnished the image of the once-golden boy, and Jarvis was forced to resign, as much a victim, it seems, of his own administrative imprudence as he was a martyr to Tory fiscal or cultural conservatism. Thereafter, Jarvis was engaged in a number of ambitious and well-intentioned if largely unremarkable ventures, mounting exhibitions, chairing conferences, and sculpting commissioned portraits. By the time of his death in 1972, Jarvis had been broken by years of Gordon’s gin and genteel poverty, but his wide circle of influential friends proudly attested to his influence, and some even spoke boldly of the ‘Jarvis generation.’ Just who that generation was is something that this book ought to have made clearer, and Horrall several times repeats the claim without ever making precise the evidence that might support it. And Horrall seems largely deaf to some of the implications of many of his sources: for example, he several times quotes a...