SYLVESTER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-06-02 published
Collecting art was his passion
British Columbia business leader donated 800 works, worth $5-million,
to Vancouver gallery
Canadian Press and staff files Monday, June 2, 2003 - Page R7
Vancouver -- Vancouver businessman and art philanthropist J.
Ron LONGSTAFFE has died of cancer. He was 69.
While Mr. LONGSTAFFE made his name in business at Canadian Forest
Products and was also a lawyer and a Liberal Party activist,
he will be best remembered for his donation of 800 works of art,
valued at more than $5-million, to the Vancouver Art Gallery.
"One of the things I basically believe in is that art is there
to be seen and enjoyed, not squirrelled away in vaults," the
Ontario-born Mr.
LONGSTAFFE once said of his collection. "I'm
not one of those collectors who, having bought a work, says it's
all mine and nobody else can see it."
Andy SYLVESTER, a partner at the Equinox Gallery, said that over
the years, Mr.
LONGSTAFFE and his wife
Jacqueline donated a major
and significant amount of art to the Vancouver Art Gallery.
"It is almost the core of the [gallery's] contemporary Canadian
art collection," Mr.
SYLVESTER said.
At shows, Mr.
LONGSTAFFE loved to play a little game that involved
picking a work to donate to the Vancouver Art Gallery and another
to keep for a lifetime, Mr.
SYLVESTER said.
Included in the
LONGSTAFFEs' recent gift of 75 pieces of art
to the gallery are works by Robert Davidson, Gathie Falk, Simon
Tookoome, Maxwell Bates, Ann Kipling and Betty Goodwin. There
are also various works on paper by Chuck Close, Richard Hamilton,
Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder.
Over the years, Mr.
LONGSTAFFE, who was at one time executive
director of Canadian Forest Products (now called Canfor), donated
major works to the gallery by international artists such as David
Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Paul-Emile Borduas, Charles
Gagnon and Claude Tousignant.
Born and raised in Toronto, where he attended Upper Canada College,
Mr. LONGSTAFFE went west to attend the University of British
Columbia in the mid-fifties. Even then the pattern of buying
art was already established in his life. His father had provided
all the LONGSTAFFE children with money to buy art starting when
they were 16.
During university, Ron
LONGSTAFFE told The Globe and Mail in
1985, art collecting became a way of "livening up the walls of
my apartment." Over the next decade, it became "a form of addiction,"
one that had seen him buy as many as five paintings a day.
Although he originally found the art world intimidating, he later
counted a number of artists, such as Christopher and Mary Pratt,
as Friends. He said that artists, as a group, are "more stimulating
than a lot of businessmen.... They have a wider range of interests
and are in touch with what young people are doing."
However, he remained deliberately untutored in fine-art history
and found most art criticism "unreadable," and preferred to
go with his gut instinct about work that "challenges me, stimulates
me, and that I like enough to buy."
He said he never bought art as an investment, or simply because
"it matched the drapes or looked good over the fireplace. That
I couldn't house it was no reason not to have it."
In a private tour of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the
LONGSTAFFE
donations at that time revealed a surprising variety that was
rich in contemporary art in general and French-Canadian painting
in particular (including important works by Borduas, Gagnon,
Lemieux and Tousignant). Little preference was shown for any
one artist (except for Hockney and Vasarely, represented by 17
prints each, only a few of which were on display). Sculpture
was rare. "Canada is short of really strong sculptors," he said
at the time.
In the interview he said that, although his tastes changed greatly
over the years, he intended "to collect until the day I die."
In recognition of Mr.
LONGSTAFFE's donations, the gallery's third-floor
exhibition space was named the J.R.
LONGSTAFFE
Gallery in 1983.
Senator Jack
AUSTIN said from Ottawa that he had known Mr.
LONGSTAFFE
since he was a young man in law school during the mid-1950s.
"I was his law teacher in first year -- in contracts," he said.
Sen. AUSTIN said he knew Mr.
LONGSTAFFE as a successful businessman,
an active member of the federal Liberal Party and an art collector.
"He did many things and he did them well," he said. "I can only
wish that there were more British Columbians that took part in
federal politics with his energy and initiative."
In the 1993 federal election, Mr.
LONGSTAFFE managed the campaign
of Liberal Member of Parliament Hedy
FRY, who defeated then prime
minister Kim
CAMPBELL.
His many positions included director of the Bank of Canada, vice-chairman
of the Vancouver Board of Trade, and director of the Royal Winnipeg
Ballet.
In 2001, Mr.
LONGSTAFFE was inducted into the Order of Canada.
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