Art: Beaver’s Greatest Landmark

Beneath the arch formed by two gigantic elms on the grassy southern bank of the St. John River at Fredericton, N.B., some 1,000 art buffs and dignitaries gathered one day last week for the dedication of Canada’s newest art gallery. “This is not the first contribution that Lord Beaverbrook has made to the arts in Canada,” said Master of Ceremonies William G. Constable, onetime curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. “But it is incomparably the greatest.” On the platform behind him, Lord Beaverbrook beamed at the crowd.

The latest gift of famed, splenetic British Publisher Beaverbrook (Daily Express, Evening Standard) to his boyhood province is an expertly lighted, $1,000,000 museum of glazed bricks, white limestone and greyish-white marble. The building is divided into a recessed showroom where the picture-windowed north wall frames the placid river flowing below, a long and large gallery at either end, and a basement that converts easily from exhibition halls into lecture rooms. To cut the glare from artificial lights, all walls are faced with a light beige fabric; grey and brown terrazzo floors are offset by stairways trimmed in green tile.

Critic by Acquisition. Beaverbrook’s biggest donation is not the museum but most of the 300-odd paintings hanging in it. Valued at $2,100,000, Beaverbrook’s collection provides the gallery with a comprehensive sampling of British art from Hogarth to Francis Bacon, representative works of nearly all Canadian artists of stature, plus a scattered few paintings by Europeans. Other Canadian tycoons supplemented the basic collection with gifts of their own. Toronto’s Matthew James Boylen (asbestos, copper and lead mines) presented the new gallery with 22 Krieghoffs; the estate of the late Sir James Dunn (steel and iron ore) added three Sickerts and Dali’s huge Santiago El Grande, whose rearing horse dominates the picture-window gallery. Beaverbrook’s favorite (“because I like it”) is Gainsborough’s Peasant Girl Gathering Faggots, but he also cherishes his own portrait, painted by Great Britain’s Graham Sutherland. “Many people see it as a caricature,” says Beaverbrook, “but I think it is a good likeness.”

Native by Choice. The doughty, peppery publisher was born Max Aitken in Maple, Ont. in 1879, but before he was one year old, his father, a Presbyterian minister, took the family to Newcastle, N.B. After an undistinguished year at law school in St. John, Aitken became a topflight financier and made his first million before he was 28 by shrewd promotions of bonds, consolidations and reorganizations of companies. By 1908, he was commuting to England, struck up a friendship with a fellow New Brunswicker, Bonar Law (later Britain’s Prime Minister). In 1910, he picked up wife and household, moved to England, and won himself a seat in Parliament. Soon after, he became Law’s parliamentary secretary. A busy and effective behind-the-scenes operator in the political arena, he helped form the wartime government of Lloyd George, was awarded a baronage. He served as a cabinet minister in both world wars (as Minister of Information in the waning days of World War I, as Minister of Aircraft Production, Minister of Supply and Lord Privy Seal in World War II). But in 1919 he shifted his chief interest from politics to journalism. Beaverbrook took over the Daily Express, lost $2,000,000 in the first two years, but made his familiarity with the gaudy journalistic practices of William Randolph Hearst pay off. The Express broke even by the third year, has never lost money since.

But for all his personal and financial success in England, Beaverbrook’s heart remained in New Brunswick. So fond is he of the province that he often refers to it as his birthplace,* and almost every autumn pays it a sentimental visit. On one sojourn, the benevolent Beaver gave it a library; on another, a theater and town hall; on still other occasions, a hockey arena, monument, hospital equipment—in fact, so many donations that the whole province began to look like one huge personal monument to Lord Beaverbrook. With last week’s mammoth contribution to Canada’s relatively weak art treasures, the monument seems completed.

* Legally since 1954, when the provincial assembly voted to make him honorary chancellor of the University of New Brunswick, called him “a native son” in the bill’s preamble.