RENAISSANCE CITY: PART 4: HELEN GARDINER
The Collector
It started as 'some yellow china in the living-room cupboard,' Helen Gardiner tells KATE TAYLOR. Now, in the middle of a $20-million expansion, the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art is ready to welcome the world
KATE TAYLOR
Helen Gardiner's condo in Toronto's Yorkville district is decorated with a few choice pieces of antique porcelain -- and located a stone's throw from the ceramics museum that was founded to house the rest of a treasured collection she assembled with her late husband, Toronto businessman George R. Gardiner. You can't, however, see the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art from her windows: The view southward to Queen's Park is blocked by the Four Seasons Hotel. It's the perfect geography for a model benefactor, nicely close at hand with the necessary millions but not hovering possessively over day-to-day operations.
For three decades now, Gardiner, 67, has undertaken an education in collecting, an obsessive pastime that can rapidly turn rich people into philanthropists and private fortunes into public assets. She began in 1978, the year her millionaire husband sent her off to England to study the decorative arts at Christie's auction house so that she could start buying ceramics with authority, and she passed to the next grade in 1984 when packers stripped her house of the 3,000 objects that would establish the new Gardiner Museum. There followed some very hard lessons as the undercapitalized museum struggled financially and had to be taken over by the Royal Ontario Museum, but today it's independent again and booming: Gardiner can now study its $20-million expansion project from a pleasant distance.
"There was a huge learning curve," she recalled in a recent interview. "We had no idea how to run a museum."
Her collecting began when Helen Gardiner, a former media buyer and manager in the advertising industry, first moved in with her husband in the 1970s -- they would marry in 1981, a second marriage for both -- and they started decorating his house.
"My husband said, 'How about some yellow china in the living-room cupboard?' It was that simple. . . . I said pre-Columbian would be great in the basement."
Well, maybe not that simple: The china was the precious 18th-century German Meissen prized for its fine decorations hand-painted on a bright yellow ground; ceramics from the ancient cultures of South and Central America are rare and expensive. George Gardiner was a highly successful financier -- he founded Canada's first discount brokerage and introduced the country to Kentucky Fried Chicken -- and soon found a business angle on the couple's new hobby.
"My husband, being the ultimate businessman, read a thing in Fortune about the best hedges against inflation -- we were going into double digit at the time. The top thing was Oriental ceramics, the second was European."
So, George Gardiner began to put aside millions to buy ceramics, filling every cupboard, every drawer and every room in the house, and soon expanding the collection to include the brightly coloured Italian wares known as majolica. Rapidly, the collection -- which was valued at more than $16-million when it was eventually donated to the people of Ontario -- was taking on a life of its own.
"He said we have all this wonderful stuff. People can't see it, we can't even see it," Helen Gardiner recalls. So, within five short years, her husband was already establishing a public museum as a way of sharing the collection. It would be an alternative to leaving behind a charitable foundation that would disperse his wealth after his death. (George Gardiner died in 1997 at age 80.) Helen Gardiner loves the intimacy of ceramics, and argues they are imminently accessible: "We have all grown up with cups and saucers and plates."
Nonetheless, turning a private collection of rare treasures into a popular public institution proved a much greater challenge than buying the ceramics in the first place. The $6-million Gardiner Museum opened with a skeleton staff in 1984 and went through three directors in its first year. Attendance was sparse and despite an endowment fund, the museum was soon petitioning the Ontario government for operating grants: The long-suffering taxpayers of the 1980s could have been forgiven if they started to look a gift horse in the mouth and ask why they should pay to house the Gardiners' china. Instead, the province forced the institution to merge with the ROM, its big sister across the street, in 1987.
"The government decided we needed the ROM's management expertise. We learned so much from those years," Gardiner said. She adds, however, that the ROM only saw the Gardiner as one collection, while the institution itself increasingly wanted to grow. The next phase began in 1996, shortly before George Gardiner's death, when he bought the museum its independence with a $15-million endowment. Now, it was poised to expand beyond the Gardiners' personal vision: The couple had only collected antiques, but adding contemporary ceramics to the collection would help bring in new audiences and ensure relevancy by establishing relations with living potters. By the late 1990s, the museum had begun to attract other collections -- including the 200 pieces of blue and white Chinese porcelain donated by Ann Walker Bell and Aaron Milrad's contemporary ceramics -- a sign that it now existed as something more than a private treasure trove.
As the collection grew, it needed more space. The original Queen's Park building was so small the majolica and the Dutch Delftware had to be packed away whenever there was a temporary exhibit. The renovation, which adds a third storey and is set to open in June, will increase exhibition space by 50 per cent, add a small research library and expand the basement studio to make room for artists-in-residence and more of the museum's highly popular pottery classes.
Helen Gardiner's final class was in lobbying. In 2002, the Gardiner was added to the list of big cultural projects funded by Ontario's SuperBuild fund; Ontario and the federal government are committed to paying about a third of the budget, with various private donors giving the rest. She herself is down for one last million: both Helen Gardiner and her husband's museum are ready to graduate now.
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