Guest Curator and University of Toronto Professor Mark A. Cheetham presented a public talk, titled Getting Some Distance on Likening, at McMaster on October 4, 2017. He led a guided tour of the exhibition he curated, “Struck by Likening: The Power & Discontents of Artworld Analogies”

“Often, for me, the comparisons (between artists) are invalid, foolish or else really, really interesting.”

We’re pleased to now be able to share Professor Cheetham’s Talk accompanied by installation views and images of works in the exhibition – a significant number of these drawn from our permanent collection. Enjoy!
 

 
Struck by Likening” explores commonplace declarations such as “Tom Thomson is the Van Gogh of Canada” and Norval Morrisseau is “the Picasso of the North.” We may call these familiar comparisons “likenings.” Innocent though they might seem, we need to take likenings seriously. They occur with such frequency as to become largely unheard and invisible. They structure not only what we say about art, but literally how we see it. Works for Struck by Likening are drawn from the historical, modern and contemporary collection of the MMA, and loans from the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Museum London and the Corkin Gallery, Toronto. They include works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jack Chambers, George Grosz, William Hogarth, William Kurelek, Wifredo Lam, David Lucas, Norval Morrisseau, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gerhard Richter, Tom Thomson, Harold Town, Homer Watson, and Edward Weston.