Part 34 (1/2)
”David gets feelings that I never get from pictures,” admits his father, Ken. ”He never misses the technical aspect ofart. He sees when something is well executed and when its not so well executed. He talks about the soul, the true message of a painting and can sort of read what the artist had in his mind when he did it. I'm not that good. I can't figure those things out. He gets signals that I don't even understand. I just get an instant message that's probably much more shallow than David's.” The relations.h.i.+p between the two men is close but not cloying, with the senior Thomson occasionally wondering if his son is tuned in to worldly business realities. ”Our private discussions evoke mixed emotions, but once agreed, we tackle issues with a single-minded tenacity,” David insists. ”I love him deeply, would do anything for him, and I am not alone. Many of my cohorts would defend him to the death.” Of his son, Ken Thomson says, ”He's a fine young man. The same sensitivity that he relates to his paintings, he relates to people and business. It worries him if somebody isn't being treated right and all that sort of stuff. He relates to quality. When he's involved in something he wants it to be the best, but of course we can't always have the very best. In his position, he could have just taken what's coming and enjoyed it, but that would have been more shallow than his thinking. It wouldn't have been as satisfying.”
DAVID THOMSON WORKS on the eighteenth floor of the Thomson Building across the street from Toronto City Hall. A visitor entering the private headquarters of his personal holding company, Lavis Incorporated (after his mother's maiden name), is struck by the sight of three incongruous objects: the large-scale model of a 1920s U.S. Post Office monoplane, painted every colour of the rainbow, that looks as if it had just landed out of a LAST LORD OF THE BAY 563.
Peanuts cartoon; an exquisite, life-sized thirteenth-century French limestone figure that appears to be bending towards its owner in an att.i.tude of gentle benediction; and the dark green seat from a Second World War n.a.z.i Luftwaffe fighter. The office walls are covered with the striking canvases of Patrick Heron, a controversial contemporary British artist who specializes in jarring colour patterns.
David usually works gazing out the window opposite his desk on which are mounted several transparencies. -That one,” he explains, ”is a Constable, an oil sketch he Painted on his honeymoon in November 1816 of Weymouth in Dorset, along England's south coast. These two are by Cy Twombly, the most compelling of modern artists, who left the States in the 1950s and now lives in Rome. That small transparency is a marvellous limestone figure from about 1260 and represents the beginning of sculpture in the full round. One must travel back-wards to pagan times before one encounters full relief sculpture.”
In the same mood he produces out of his desk a coin from the Dark Ages, a Merovingian gold Tremissis struck in Lyons about 675 A.D., modelled after the Roman currency of the Emperor Justinian: ”Hundreds of nioneyers minted crude coinage in the manner of Imperial Rome, inscribing their names and cities on the reverse legend. The effigies are extraordinary in theirvivid line and spontaneous gesture; they evoke a most wonderful sense of expression and power. For me, thev are the beginnings of the small entrepreneur in the history of coinage-they were created amidst the most barbaric circ.u.mstances by a people in constant motion and are amongst the few objects that remain from those distant days.”
Thomson's most valuable acquisition was J.M.W Turner's magnificent Seascape, Folkestone, which Lord Clark, the former director of the National Gallery (who once owned the painting), described as ”the best picture 564 FAREWELL TO GLORY.
in the world.” David bought it at auction in 1984 for $14.6 million, outbidding the National Gallery of Scotland; five years later it was officially valued at $50 million. But his real obsession is with John Constable, the miller's son who with Turner dominated English landscape painting in the nineteenth century. Thomson's first purchase, at nineteen, was a page out of the artist's 1835 Artindel sketchbook, and his current collection of twenty major works and eighty-six of his drawings, as well as oil sketches, watercolours and letters, ranks as the world's finest private representation of Constable's art.
In 1991 Thomson published a lavishly printed and ill.u.s.trated 328-page study, Constable and his Drawings (with text by Ian Fleming-Williams, Britain's leading Constable expert), which has been highly praised by Eng- lish art critics. ”In sharp contrast to formal art history monographs,” he notes, ”one can read this book without having studied fifteen previous works. This is about pure observation, not terribly different to the art itself Constable's sensibility has had a strong influence on my personal philosophy, which I carry forward in all walks of life, including the business. So few people allow themselves to openly see and question scenes and events as he did. All too often subjects are viewed from a narrow perspective, with strong conclusions drawn in advance. Being possessed by imagination, curiosity and such dreamlike qualities doesn't mean one is incapable of pragmatism and tough decision-making. Whenever you lose that sense of idealism, you lose your reason for being. Constable for me has always represented the search for truth.”
THAT SEARCH HAS TAKEN THOMSON into the soggy pastures of existentialism, at least in the sense that he believes men and women are diminished by not meeting the challenges they set for themselves. Intensely LAST LORD OF THE BAY 565.
attracted by war and danger, because those circ.u.mstances force people to harness the peak of their physical and emotional energies, he owns a large library doc.u.menting first-hand experiences of aerial combat and the uses of camouflage (”creating patterns and colour combinations that transformed each aircraft into a work of art”). He often imagines himself in battle. (”I become excited at the thought of measuring myself in varied situations, alongside IA”ellington in India or being in a fighter, attacking a formation of bombers and being vastly outnumbered. It's an interesting way to test yourself because you set your own limits.”) Among his favourite doc.u.ments is one of the last letters written by Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, found beside his frozen body in 1912, that Thomson regularly rereads as an example of an undaunted spirit facing death. ”The existential idea of lifes journey is very important,” he contends. ”It's all too easy to become cynical and to forget that we are all children at heart, that when you leave those youthful dreams behind you leave a great part of your being forever, you abandon your sense of wonder and astonishment, the idea that vou can be spiritually moved by something or someone.'; That sense of wonder is best caught in his house, an architect's jewel on a dead-end street in Rosedale where he finds sanctuary. He lives there with his wife, a preRaphaelite beauty named Mary Lou La Prairie, and their daughter, Thyra Nicole. He met Mary Lou in 1988 at Simpsons where she worked as a fas.h.i.+on buyer for young contemporary women's wear. (”Our love for one another was instantaneous. It was a fairy-tale romance. It has changed my life.”) David drives a 1984 Audi and owns a pied-~-tei-re in New York and a house in the Highbury district of London. His main interest is the collection at his Toronto house, which is less a home than an art gallery with a 566 FAREWELL TO GLORY.
kitchen and some bedrooms attached. Every wall is crammed with paintings.
The total effect is less than the sum of its parts because individual pictures have so little room to breathe; the eye cannot feast on any one canvas without being distracted by those on either side of it. Edvard Munch, Sir Stanley Spencer, Ilya Chasnik, Piet Mondrian, Eugene Jansson, Pica.s.so, Ivan Kluin, Roger Hilton, Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys, Ferdinand Hodier, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mark Rothko, Paul Klee and a dozen other artists of equal international renown are represented. Strangely, except for a small drybrush by David Milne, there are no Canadian paintings. (Not a Krieghoff in sight.) ”I look forward to the day,” he says, ”when I can hang a room of empty frames. What an extraordinary experience that would be. Nothing can be more perfect than a frame and one's perception of balance and s.p.a.ce, within and without its running pattern. This is sculpture. Immediately one thinks of the cla.s.sic argument about what one chooses to leave out as opposed to what one puts back in. As with business, it is what we end up not expending that returns far more in the long run, well beyond any immediate cost savings or profits.”
And then there are his art objects: a rare book on coloured fifteenth-century woodcuts, among the earliest printed and hand-coloured images in the history of art; facsimiles of the original texts of T.S.
Eliot's The Waste Land and George Orwell's 1984, showing the authors'
corrections in ink; a study of fences from the Middle Ages (”one of the finest ways of dating objects and understanding the social order of those times”); an animation cell from Dr Seuss's The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; an Ethiopian book of holy scriptures in hippopotamus-hide binding from the year 1500; an original Schulz cartoon of Charlie Brown; a small woodcut from Lower Swabia, dated 1420; an eighteenth-century African bronze from LAST LORD OF THE BAY 567.
Benin; and a magnificent depiction in wood of the Crucifixion, mounted on its original cross, which was the focal point of an unidentified church in South Germany during the last quarter of the twelfth century.
David and a visitor gaze at this icon. ”The agony of Christ is p.r.o.nounced with the hips slightly tilted,” he explains. ”The profile of Jesus' head is quite spectacular. In this piece, one confronts the beginnings of Gothic carving and the tremendous expressionism of the northern world . . .”
”Look at those nails,” the ovcrwhelmed visitor offers helpfully, ”how honest and raw they are . . .”
”Well, no, actually I put them there myself; they're what the cross is hanging on.”
The gallery is constantly being expanded but its paintings will probably never be exhibited. ”One does not form an art collection to then have a representative of Architectural Digest come by and write an article that invades one's privacy,” Thomson insists. He maintains an intelligence network in New York and London to hunt down the works he seeks. ”The art world has taught me harsh lessons on human nature,” he confesses. ”Money does not open every door. A real collector will rarely sell a work unless he can replace it with something even greater that has more personal meaning. Sometimes the issue can only be resolved by a trade or an exchange. I rely on a few people to update me and avidly peruse books and catalogues. I'll take three or four volumes with me to bed every night.
It's no different from my grandfather reading all those spy and detective novels.”
Almost hidden from view in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Rosedale house are a few exquisitely fine lead-pencil drawings-of a fish pond, an oak tree, water lilies, wrecked cars. These are some of David Thomson's own. He has been drawing to express his innermost thoughts since childhood. One British critic who saw them while 568 FAREWELL TO GLORY.
on a visit noted they were ”very good indeed, highly detailed, well observed,” but they will never be shown. ”I sometimes say to Mary Lou, 'I must draw a tree now,' and go away into my world for several hours. I have to. I am absolutely compelled to follow my feelings, or I forfeit the right to live.”
Thomson makes little effort to separate his pa.s.sion for art from his devotion to business. In his mind, these twin strands are forever intertwined: ”I take art so seriously because it's one of the few pursuits in which I can totally unravel my soul. For me, the act of creation comes through in a better appreciation of business. . . . I measure great achievements in information publis.h.i.+ng [the Thomson newspapers] in the same way as I view a compelling work of art.” lie dismisses the criticism that Thomson newspapers 1111 the s.p.a.ces between their ads with the cheapest boiler-plate copy available as being out of date. Instead, he praises employees such as Peter Kapyrka, publisher of the Barrie Examiner, for furthering his company's organic growth by adding a weekly real-estate supplement.
There is, according to the youthful inheritor, almost no aspect of art that can't be related to some section of the Thomson Organization's operational code. ”If you look at Limoges and Mosan, two of the great French workshops producing art in the twelfth century, you might think, 'What the h.e.l.l does that have to do with business?”' he says. ”Limoges in central France made fantastic reliquaries and chalices for churches and cathedrals with very few variables. But the Mosan craftsmen were different. They worked the market between Li~ge and Cologne. Their representatives sat down directly with the local bishop and asked what he wanted to see in the holy shrine.
They were, in effect, forming the first customer focus groups and producing castings that were far superior to the Limoges enamels. You can't do any- LAST LORD OF THE BAY 569.
thing well in publis.h.i.+ng without a highly developed sense of audience.”
David's spiritual bible is a remarkable book-length essay ent.i.tled Happiness: An Exploration of the Art of Sleeping, Eating, Complaining, Postponing, Sympathising, and, Above All, Being Free, by Theodore Zeldin, an Oxford don who portrays Everyman's journey into paradise, comparing what he encounters with what he expected to find. ”The book,” Thomson summarizes, ”is about having the courage to dream in a highly structured society and the corporate world. It's about having faith in one's intuition, about preserving one's childhood vision and curiosity, about the fact that dissent requires great moral courage, and that failure is as important as success.” He is mesmerized by the fact that in his position and state of development he is free to make mistakes and believes that this may be the greatest privilege bestowed on him by wealth. It's the errors in judgment that really accelerate his learning curve; he takes the correct decisions for granted.
That learning curve received its most valuable spurt during the decade he spent with the Hudson's Bay Company.
DAVID 'rijOMSON'S DEDICATION to the HBC seems incompatible with his artistic temperament and search for mental stimuli. Yet he spent ten years in the service of the Company-between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-four, his most productive business apprentices.h.i.+p-as a full-time retailer, right down to a term of selling socks at The Bay's downtown Toronto department store.
In the summer of 1982, when Ken Thomson took his family on a second northern journey to view the HBCs Arctic kingdom, their guide was once again the 570 FAREWELL TO GLORY.
Company's George Whitman. The party was encamped on the Belcher Islands in the middle of Hudson Bay when Whitman bluntl~ asked the elder Thomson why he had bought the Hudson's Bay Company. When Ken explained that he had a sense of Canadian history and he did not want to see the Company swapped around, sold off, or allowed to disappear, Whitman turned to David and said, ”It would really be nice to hope that someday you might become the Governor. How do you feet about that?” David, who was then looking for a place to light, allowed that he would indeed be interested but that he knew nothing about retailing. Sensing the young mans excitement, Whitman talked for hours about the Company's glorious history and its magical presence in the Canadian wilderness. He suggested to Ken that David not be parachuted into some senior position where he would be usurping the succession of staff climbing through the system but that a comprehensive training program be put together that would expose the young Thomson to the Company's inner workings, and vice versa.
”people were very careful about what they'd say to me and were told to be so, antic.i.p.ating that I would not stay long,” David recalls. ”But this didn't happen because I becarne enthralled with many areas of the Company's then disjointed business potential. I have always been fascinated by how one motivates people in a negative situation. My business focus was entirely retail, and to learn it well I allowed myself no distractions or meanderings. I committed myself to the cause of making the HBC a great Company again.” He began in the main Toronto retail store, then spent a year commuting to Quebec, Saskatchewan, Alberta (where he once forgot his pyjamas in a motel at Medicine Hat) and British Columbia in addition to the fur divisions in New York and Montreal.
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Ken Thomson, David Thomson and George Kosich at the 1988 HBC annual meeting
Probably his most moving experience was the time he spent at a fur-trading post in Prince Albert. ”The juxtaposition was dramatic,” he recalls. ”Onjuly 4, 1980, 1 bid successfully for a Munch woodblock; the following week I was in Prince Albert, and I remember being taken to the post's backyard where ten bear claws were positioned on the cement floor, with fresh bloodstains and tissue intact. One fellow proceeded to demonstrate the various new traps and took me through the back room, where numerous s.h.i.+ny models were hanging. He hinged several in open positions and tossed a branch into the claw. I shall never forget the powerful crescendo of the folding pincers. For one of the first times I enjoyed a completely unfettered response to life, isolated from big cities and the diversions of money. We drove along dirt roads, watched sunsets, merchandised the store, went fis.h.i.+ng and talked of our childhoods. The experience was unforgettable and I developed a deep respect and empathy towards those real people.”
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