GALERIE ERIC KLINKHOFF

Reminiscences of an Art Dealer by Walter H. Klinkhoff (1993)

CLARENCE GAGNON was a widower when he married Lucille Rodier who was from a wealthy Montreal family.  She had married against her father’s will and lived with the artist much of her married life in Paris.  During the second war they were back in Canada.  Gagnon died in 1942 and after the end of the war Lucille went back to Paris.  Her apartment, left in the care of a neighbour, had remained intact, full of many marvelous paintings and sketches which Gagnon never wanted to sell during his lifetime.  Lucille had stayed for a few years and when she came back to Montreal I went through all the wonderful sketches, taking many hours over it.  Lucille wanted $100 for each and many were real masterpieces.  Shed had given some to Watson and Laing on consignment.  I had to buy them and bought one, mainly so as not to have wasted her time altogether.  The reason I bought only one was that Watson was selling them at that time for $125 each framed.  He probably had them more cheaply.  Over the years, I acquired many more, soon on the same terms as my rivals and long before all the best one were marked “N.F.S.”, not for sale.  Lucille Gagnon and I got along well in our business dealings and one day she casually asked me if I would mind acting as executor for her estate, to which I agreed but soon forgot.

Lucille had never been on speaking terms with the Gagnon family and had very little contact with her own.  She had been disinherited by her father but evidently was reinstated later and inherited most of the estate.  There were no children but one favourite grandniece, Lucille Rodier, a very nice girl, a student nurse.  I was greatly surprised to hear after Lucille’s death that I had been put in charge of selling all the paintings and sketches, the proceeds to be given to the Crown Trust for the benefit of young Lucille.  She had the right to select some paintings for herself but at that time she had no establishment for hanging such valuable works.  She nevertheless chose a beautiful Morrice canvas the Gagnons had bought in Paris.  Later on when she was in Toronto with a young and growing family she sold it to me.  She kept no Gagnons.  A very considerable amount of money, a small fortune really, accumulated for her at the Crown Trust.

I often was told that the Gagnon family had been very upset about the disposition of the paintings and let it be known that had they inherited any, they would have donated them to museums.  There had never been any intimacy or even friendly relationship between Mrs. Gagnon and her husband’s family and the one point Mrs. Gagnon stressed to me on more than one occasion was that she would not want any more of Clarence’s paintings to go to museums.  She had never in all the years had a single visit from a museum curator and they had only reacted negatively to her husband’s work in print and relegated it to the basement.  One had to recognize, though, that this was a period of emerging modernism when artists such as Pellan, Borduas and other abstract artists made much news and temporarily obscured the more traditional predecessors.  Nevertheless, I am quite certain that had a museum director taken a little time and made just one visit, at least one of her great paintings would have been left to his institution.  Her bitterness could easily have been allayed.