London Regional Art Gallery

London, Ontario, Canada
I was shunpiking back home to Michigan this summer and decided to test the wares of Ontario's museums, from Saint Catherine west to Sarnia. (Yes, West Virginia, Sarnia has a museum, a honey, on the second floor of its public library.) Canada's so damn quiet about itself, it's either got the biggest diffidence complex on historical record--or, more likely, it doesn't want too many of those rowdies south of the border to catch on to what a good thing it's got going.

And what a Regional Art Gallery they're just got going in London. In May 1980, overlooking the city park on the Thames River, London treated itself to a really exhilarating gallery, reminiscent of Louis Kahn's Kimball in Fort Worth, Texas. But the similarity ends with the barrel vaults.

A local Maecenas and his missus, Mr. and Mrs. John H. Moore, have given the results of their almost forty years of collecting Canadian art to the community which has been so generous to give generations of Moores. Talk about bread above the waters. Almost four hundred Canadian works--the well-known (in name if not in canvas in America) Seven, the playfully entitled post-Seven Eleven abstractionists, and painters entirely new to me--and entirely captivating, the Wyeth-like Ken Danby, the Magritte-mysterious Christopher Pratt, the positively spooky Jack Chambers with his Olga sequence, and the austerely majestic Alex Colville.

London is suddenly a big asterisk on the map of any serious North American student of art or architecture. Don't get the mistaken impression it's nothing but Canuckland. The Moores knew their Matisse, Picasso, Albers, Calder, and sixty-five other non-Canadians in their gift. And a collection of Ensor's etchings graced one of their circulating galleries.

London itself is full of other interesting things, not the least of which is the Cookery, a not-so-fast-food oasis next to the old Talbott Inn, a two-minute hike from the main attraction. (There's also the outstanding gallery of the University of Western Ontario hard by; unfortunately those lazy academics don't keep it open on summer weekends!)

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981