Today we visited the Art Gallery of Ontario, along with some wonderful company, to see The Great Upheaval – Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918.

There are plenty of really good paintings to see there – and today there were plenty of people too. I’m happy to see so many people out at the art gallery. Curiously, the exhibition, which features art that was a “great upheaval” in its time is today safe as a church.

I’ve been looking at art for most of my adult life and these artists are mostly familiar to me. I had not previously considered though, just how pervasive cubism was to the leading artists of the day – the phrase that escaped my mouth at the exhibition was “tyranny of cubism”. It doesn’t seem so revolutionary today.

In fact the works I liked best in the exhibition were paintings that were not related to cubism at all, such as Oskar Kokoshka’s The Knight Errant, and some excellent Kandinsky paintings.

I found myself interested in some of the early paintings by artists who later gained their stride with a mature style much different than the works in this exhibition, not so much because the early work was any great shakes as much as because those works reveal a little about how those artists got where there were going.

The Great Upheaval contains quite a few gems and is well worth seeing. Before leaving, we headed downstairs for a look at the Thomson collection of ship models. It’s the only collection of ship models I can recall ever seeing. I quite like them in the same way I like model railroads. I appreciate the obsessiveness of the modelling, and the splendid attention to detail.

When we left the AGO, we walked over to Sin & Redemption for beer and dinner. I totally enjoyed my Bavarian sausages and frites, and the beer was tasty too.