The Art Gallery of Ontario will unveil details today of a major donation from businessman Kenneth Thomson, who is expected to contribute $50-million in cash for a new expansion as well as much of his fabled art collection, said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Thomson donation will be at the core of the AGO's much-anticipated, $170-million expansion and renovation, to be overseen by prominent Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry.
Mr. Gehry, 72, is flying in from his Los Angeles office to attend the announcement. Joining him will be Matthew Teitelbaum, 46, the AGO's director, and Mr. Thomson.
Included among the donated works is expected to be Rubens' The Massacre of the Innocents, which was purchased for the Thomson family for $117-million in London in July -- an auction record for an Old Masters painting.
The addition being announced today and the inclusion of the Thomson collection will vault the AGO into the front ranks of international art institutions.
Currently marking its 100th anniversary, the AGO describes itself as one of the 10 largest art museums in North America.
Mr. Thomson, Canada's wealthiest man and chairman of The Globe and Mail, began collecting art seriously in his mid-20s. He has a wide variety of objects in his art portfolio. They include ship models, small-scale European sculpture from the feudal ages through the 18th century, ivory sculpture, Renaissance jewellery, Old Masters portraits and British landscape paintings.
Among Canadians Mr. Thomson is best known for his long-term commitment to the purchase of works by the Group of Seven, Cornelius Krieghoff, Tom Thomson, David Milne and other Canadian masters.
Last year, he paid $2.43-million for Lawren Harris's Baffin Island, the most ever paid anywhere for a painting by a 20th-century Canadian artist. It is also believed, but unconfirmed, that it was Mr. Thomson who earlier this year bought Paul Kane's Scene in the Northwest -- Portrait, which, at $5.062-million, stands as the most expensive Canadian painting ever purchased at auction.
It has been well-known for at least two years that Mr. Gehry has been involved in designing new facilities for the AGO to house, in part, Mr. Thomson's collection. However, until now, a tight lid has been kept on the details of these negotiations as well as on those with the Ontario College of Art and Design, the AGO's immediate institutional neighbour, various community organizations, the province, city hall and private donors. Earlier this year, the federal and Ontario governments announced they would be giving a total of $50-million to the AGO's capital project.
Mr. Gehry's designs -- such as the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Seattle's Experience Music Project, the American Center in Paris and the Rasin Building in Prague -- have made him one of the most-honoured and talked-about architects in the world.
But Mr. Gehry hasn't done a large-scale signature project in his hometown since he travelled in the late 1940s to Los Angeles, where he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Working closely with Mr. Gehry on the AGO will be Bruce Mau, the Toronto designer who developed the environmental graphics for the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is under construction in Los Angeles. Mr. Mau is no stranger to the AGO: he did the signage and identity strategy for the gallery during its last renovation, completed in 1991.
Ceta Ramkalawansingh, the community activist who helped organize 15 local organizations into the Grange Park Preservation Group that vigorously opposed the 1991 expansion, said the AGO has had "no discussions with the community at all" with respect to its new plans.
The AGO occupies a tight site with little room for on-the-ground expansion.