Vimy Ridge: A monumental labour of love

The greatest art restoration project in Canadian history is a memorial dedicated to one of the most important events in that history. 'We were working on sacred ground, still running with the blood of these soldiers,' the lead architect says.

For 70 years, the gleaming white monument on the crest of Vimy Ridge has cast its spell on Canadians, stirring our memories, summoning the nation never to forget the horror and sacrifice of an ever distant war.

But almost no one alive today has been so touched by the monument's power as those who laboured on its restoration for the past five years.

Today, Easter Monday, thousands are to gather on the grass below the monument in France, to remember the 90th anniversary of Canada's most famous wartime triumph, and to witness the rededication of the monument following a long and arduous reconstruction.

The rebuilding of the Vimy memorial - the greatest art restoration project in Canadian history - is a story of passion and devotion, and proof that a country that so often ignores its past has kept its solemn promise to the 11,000 Canadians who died in France in the First World War in unknown graves, whose names are inscribed on Vimy's walls.

"The importance of these names is that for these men, this is the only memorial, the only marker anywhere that keeps their identity alive, that allows them to be known by future generations," said Julian Smith, the Ottawa architect who, with a Parisian colleague, oversaw the restoration for the federal government.

Smith is an experienced heritage conservator. He helped restore the Ontario legislature buildings 15 years ago. But he said working at Vimy Ridge was an awakening like no other.

Not only is the monument an artistic masterpiece - Canada's largest piece of installation art outside the country - it is also a sacred place, where the soil still holds the bones of men who died there nearly a century ago.

This became vividly apparent to the restoration workers in the spring of 2005, when the remains of two German soldiers were unearthed during the excavation of a temporary parking lot next to the monument.

"It brought home the fact that we were working on sacred ground, still running with the blood of these soldiers," Smith said.

"Certainly it made it very real for everyone who worked on the project. Even the Belgian contractor said his crew of stone masons - who had worked on many old cathedrals and other cultural sites - never had the kind of emotional involvement as they had at Vimy."

In 2001, the departments of Veterans Affairs and Public Works announced, after a period of alarm and agitation in the media, a $30-million program to restore Canada's 13 First World War memorials in Europe, including eight Canadian sites and five sites honouring soldiers from the then Dominion of Newfoundland.

Two-thirds of the budget was earmarked for Vimy, where decades of wind and rain had eroded many of the names inscribed on the monument, and left its limestone walls cracked and crumbling.

Much of this aging was because of a serious error in the original building of the monument in the 1920s and '30s. Walter Allward, the Toronto sculptor who designed the memorial and poured his heart into its construction, chose to embed the memorial's veneer limestone blocks directly onto the concrete substructure, in accordance with the prevailing technology of the time.

SoCal TV show host pleads guilty in $20M bogus art scam

A satellite TV show host pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges stemming from an investigation into bogus artwork sold through televised auctions that defrauded customers of more than $20 million.

Kristine Eubanks, 49, of La Canada Flintridge pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy and tax evasion. She will face up to 10 years in prison when she is sentenced Sept. 24, prosecutors said.

Eubanks' husband, Gerald Sullivan, 51, pleaded guilty April 2 to one count each of conspiracy and failing to file tax returns. He will face up to six years in prison when he, too, is sentenced in September.

Eubanks' attorney Donald Randolph said outside court that his client "acknowledged her guilt in these actions today."

Authorities said the couple, in their plea agreements, acknowledged duping more than 10,000 customers through their "Fine Art Treasures Gallery" show, which aired Friday and Saturday nights on DirecTV and The Dish Network.

The couple also said they rigged auctions by creating false and inflated bids for art and jewelry sold during the live auctions, prosecutors said.

Authorities believe buyers lost more than $20 million in the scam. Nearly $4 million and various pieces of artwork were seized when Eubanks and Sullivan were arrested during a raid last year.

Learning to love modern art

WASHINGTON -- "You really like that modern stuff? It's so cold and intellectual. Who can even understand what those kinds of artists say?" For an absurdly long time -- the better part of 100 years, now -- lovers of the modern have had to mount a rear-guard action against those kinds of questions. Even Ikea still has to seed its modern displays with spindles and chintz.

But a show that opened this week at the Corcoran Gallery of Art ought to convert even the die-hard detractors. "Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939," on tour from the great Victoria and Albert Museum in London, includes more than 400 stunning images and objects that make the argument themselves: Except perhaps for the time around 1500 in Renaissance Italy, no moment in Western art has had the breadth and depth and simple world-changing greatness of modernism.

A skeptic doesn't have to take an expert's word on this. Just looking at the objects at the Corcoran should do the trick.

I dare anyone to walk into the Corcoran lobby and resist the luscious, aerodynamic sweep of the modernist car that fills it, dubbed the "77A" and made in Czechoslovakia by the Tatra company in 1938. It shows how modernism, born just before World War I as a radical movement in fine art, transformed the way the world around us has looked since. A sleek Acura coupe couldn't exist at all without precedents like the 77A.

Behind the car, marching up both sides of the Corcoran's grand staircase, are a dozen copies of Gerrit Rietveld's "Red Blue" chair, which was perfected around 1923 and is now one of the great icons of modern design.

The Dutchman's chairs register as superb sculpture: They define space using a bare few uprights and horizontals in black, then breach it with slender diagonals -- the slanting chair seat and its back -- in two primal, primary colors. But for all its sculptural impact, anyone who has lived with the "Red Blue" can vouch for its surprising comfort. (I know one amateur woodworker who has copied the chair in every size to seat grandkids of all ages, as well as full size, in pressure-treated lumber, to guarantee the comfort of her garden furniture.) Like all the best of modern design, the Red Blue wants to inspire, but it also wants to work.

Most importantly, even eight decades after its birth, the Red Blue can still energize a space that's as imposing as the Corcoran's neoclassical atrium. A great modernist chair doesn't just fill the room it's in, as decoration, the way most earlier furniture does; even after all these years of familiarity, the Red Blue still has the impact to compete with architecture and change the way any room feels. If it came out tomorrow, the Red Blue would still win big play in the design press.

At the top of that chair-lined staircase, the Corcoran's lovely rotunda has been reserved for a very few of modernism's greatest creations, picked out with spotlights.

There is a room-size model of Vladimir Tatlin's 1920 "Monument to the Third International," which, had it been built, would have been 100 stories tall. Again we see art and design in perfect balance. The Russian's model works as an exciting piece of modernist sculpture: It has an amazing distillation of upward, sideways and spiral thrusts, like nothing ever done before. As an idea for a building, it profoundly rethinks the relationship between a supporting skeleton and the spaces such a skeleton can hold.

In a show on modernism, a movement whose tentacles reached everywhere, even an object as modest as a vase can get big play. Alvar Aalto's 1936 "Savoy" vase, mold-blown in Finland of undulating glass, clearly deserves its spotlighted place in the Corcoran rotunda: It's been in production almost since its birth, and now lives on mantels all around the world. Rather than quoting directly from nature, as the leaves and fronds decorating so many earlier designs had done, Aalto's vase evokes the look and principles of nature, in the abstract. The gently rippled sides of his vessel recall natural processes and forms -- the surf, erosion and tide-washed sand as well as cellular growth and aquatic plants -- without citing any single one of nature's creations.

The themes introduced in the Corcoran's atrium and rotunda play out across the rest of this massive show, which takes up very nearly the entire museum.

After a kind of "antechamber" that highlights the role cubism played in launching the modern movement, we're swept into spacious galleries that set out the full sweep of modernism.

There are rooms devoted to most of the great movements, moments and makers in modernism -- Russian constructivism, Italian futurism, Germany's great Bauhaus school and others.

The show also includes sections devoted to how modernism played out under the political systems of different countries: Swedish socialism, Italian fascism, German Nazism, Soviet communism and American capitalism.

Then there are themed displays, on subjects such as "The Machine, Sitting on Air" (a thrilling wall covered floor to ceiling in experiments in cantilevered seating), "Modernism and Nature" and "Mass Market Modernism."

Anyone who spends the time this show deserves will leave feeling a deep connection with modernism, and a renewed love for it. They may also feel a new affection for the Corcoran, a museum that's been languishing for years. Those who've doubted that new director Paul Greenhalgh could pull this survey off -- this critic was among them -- will have to eat their hats.

And still the show isn't anything like comprehensive. Especially in the fine arts, there's more great modernism out there than any single exhibition could present.

The exhibition makes the standard argument that modernism is really about imagining utopia, then using new design to get us there. That's got some problems. There's the fact that cubism, the home ground of modernism, was hardly a utopian movement -- or no more than any artistic movement that believes it has advanced from what was done before. And that some of Europe's very first minimal, modern abstractions were by dadaists Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp, who were more interested in anarchy and the absurd than in forging a promising future for mankind.

More crucially, it's not clear that such social and political ideas are enough to cause any particular kind of art or design. After all, is bent chrome more inherently utopian than a bunch of floral decoration, straight out of the Garden of Eden? The hand-carving of the Arts and Crafts movement was built on the same utopian ideals as machine-age modernism.

A cause that can have almost any outcome doesn't explain much.

The sheer variety of ideas and warring "-isms" on display in this show reveal that modernism can't be tied down to any one or two or 10 of them. In fact the glory of modernism, like the glory of many watersheds in art, is that it produced a single set of potent forms that could be used to do so very many different things.

That's what this show proves.

Modernism provides a powerful toolbox of possibilities, helping us say and mean a thousand different things.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier once said that a great modern house ought to be considered a "machine for living." The modernism that informs it should be thought of as a great "machine for thinking" -- one of the greatest that we've ever built.

The Corcoran's new show lets us hear it whir.

No nude drawings, no art credit

Muslim student's refusal uncovers debate

Aruba Mahmud, 22, an honours visual arts student at London's University of Western Ontario, drew her friends clothed rather than remain in the classroom with her professor and fellow students who were sketching nude models.

Ms. Mahmud, a practising Muslim who wears a hijab, was allowed to draw her friends clothed as an alternative project to nude-model drawing -- she did stay once in the classroom with a nude model and found it very uncomfortable -- but only in early level courses.

At higher levels of instruction in painting and drawing, the university administration enunciated a clear policy: Draw nudes or don't take the course. Refuse to draw nudes once you're in the course and you fail.

Ms. Mahmud brought a letter from the university's Muslim chaplain stating that prolonged exposure to the nude body of a person who was not one's marital partner was contrary to Islamic teaching. She was willing to take a zero for the part of the course that involved nude drawing.

But the university stood firm.

"That's what really got me," Ms. Mahmud said.

"It seems so very all-or-nothing."

She recalled becoming emotional and starting to cry as she pleaded with her professor and chair of the department to be allowed to take the course without drawing nudes.

In any event, she graduates this spring without nude drawing in her résumé. "I don't think it's such an essential part of the work," she said.

A report on discrimination against Muslim students made public this week by the Canadian Federation of Students calls it "one of the most egregious stories" of a university refusing to accommodate diversity.

Kathleen Okruhlik, UWO's dean of arts and humanities, sees it differently, and takes issue with the accuracy of aspects of the student federation's report. In the past, she said, it has been conservative Christians asking for exemption from certain instruction. Now it is Muslims.

The issue touches on a heated controversy in Quebec under the heading of accommodement raisonnable, or reasonable accommodation, for religious minorities. Premier Jean Charest has created a public inquiry to examine how far the majority should go in a liberal pluralistic democracy to accommodate minorities.

Ms. Okruhlik said the university allows students to do substitute life drawing projects in introductory courses because it is recognized that, if they don't get through the introductory course, they will be barred from going further.

"But for advanced courses for drawing and painting, we decided we couldn't alter the curriculum for Muslim students or anybody else. It doesn't keep anybody out of visual arts. It will keep some people later on out of specific drawing and painting courses. In those courses, drawing from life models is absolutely critical. It's such an important part of the tradition to be able to represent the human body."

Ms. Okruhlik said she and her academic colleagues have dealt with Christian students who don't want to read Henry Miller (who wrote detailed accounts of sexual experiences) or literature that portrays homosexuality favourably.

"And we say to those students, 'No, we value diversity and plurality, but we also value academic freedom. So if you want to take this course, you have to read the assigned reading,' she said.

"It's hard for us to see how equal treatment means we can say to some students, 'No, I'm sorry you have to read that novel that portrays homosexuality in a favourable light -- but, no, you don't have to do that drawing.' "

Art students learn to draw from the human form

A line of charcoal on paper mirrored the curve of Cheri Ewing's bare back. She sat still and naked at the front of the class as art students sketched her.

She felt perfectly comfortable there in her own skin, aside from the tingling sensation she began to get in her foot from sitting on it too long.

It's not about being nude, said Ewing, a Merced native. It's about art. And sometimes the hardest part is just sitting still.

Some people initially react to the idea of nude models with surprise or embarrassment. But local artists and teachers say they are an essential part of learning to portray the human form.

"Artists don't think of it as a sexual thing," said Freda Rasmussen, Merced College arts division secretary. "It's about the beauty of the human body. It's something artists throughout the ages have been doing."

Why do it?

For about 10 years, Ewing has worked as a live, nude model for various art classes in the area, including Merced College, the Merced Multicultural Arts Center and Modesto Junior College.

She began the job while attending Merced College. A photography teacher told her about the school's need for figure drawing class models.

The pay now is about $14 an hour.

"I was slightly hesitant, but not too much because I had been at the other end of the easel," she said.

Ewing also creates her own landscapes and portraits.

Not a particularly self-conscious person, the slim 40-something understood artists' need to see the human form without hindrance.

"Clothing bunches and is not as nice to draw," said Elizabeth Glass, 22, a student who sketched Ewing in Merced College's figure drawing class. "If the model is nude there is more of a sense of the dimensions."

Who can do it?

There is no age or body-type requirement for this kind of work, said Lori diMuro, an artist who teaches the college class to a range of skill levels.

Each week her students sketch a live model, which diMuro says is an essential part of the learning process.

"The most fashionable figure is not necessarily the most interesting to draw," she said. "The more curves, age, makes for an interesting drawing."

But the model must be able to sit or stand in poses for extended periods of time -- from about 30 seconds to 20 minutes -- which can be a lot harder than it looks.

"Most people who try any kind of modeling are surprised by how difficult it really is," said Jamie Brzezinski, the college's arts division chair. "When you start that pose, there might be a slight bit of discomfort, then a raging cramp."

Corina Brazil, 79, has known this for many decades. She began modeling nude for classes at California State University, Stanislaus, around 1964.

"I saw an ad in the art department and I got real brave one day and I went in," said Brazil, a Gustine native now living in Merced. "At first I was nervous, especially when I saw people I knew. But I've never been very self-conscious."

She got paid $4 an hour back then.

She continues to model nude occasionally for classes at the Multicultural Arts Center.

"My son was kind of shocked," she said. "My grandchildren didn't want to see the (pictures) ... but my family is OK with it now."

Modeling became more strenuous for Brazil as she aged, so she does it less than she used to. But she is still comfortable posing nude and believes it to be an important part of art.

"The thing about the human body is that there are so many textures," she said. "It's not like you automatically know how to draw it."

She tries to keep her mind busy while she is posing.

"Sometimes I pray," Brazil said. "Sometimes I plan out my house. A song will go through my head. You don't want to start thinking unpleasant thoughts."

Not just for the ladies

Although women are often seen more in nude paintings than men, it is important to learn how to draw both, diMuro said.

"Men's bodies are obviously different," she said. "It's nice to have a wide variety."

Dave Hill, 46, began modeling while attending college at Washington University. A teacher asked him to pose for a drawing class.

"It sounded like an easy job," he said. "When I got done filling out the paperwork she said, 'You're going to have to go ahead and get undressed.' I didn't know what I thought about that but I did it. It was fun."

Hill, a Hayward resident, continues to model about two times a week for Bay Area art groups, and occasionally at Merced College.

He got over his embarrassment quickly and now considers modeling a relaxing activity, as long as the poses aren't too difficult.

"I think there are three views of male nude models," he said. "One is 'that's really cool.' Second, there are people who are uncomfortable seeing you as an object."

Then there are people who wonder why anyone would do it.

"If you like to be nude, it's a good job," Hill said.

Comfort on both sides of easel

Of course, taking off your clothes for a class can take a lot of courage, say art teachers and models. But people get over their nervousness.

"Apparently they do because no one bolts for the door," diMuro said. "Some don't have any problems with it, some are shy. The atmosphere of the class is very professional -- nothing unseemly is tolerated."

The college is currently looking for more people to pose for the figure drawing class. Regulars still come in, but it's not unusual for a new potential model to sign up and then back out before class.

Ewing is one of Merced College's regular models.

She said taking vocal lessons was a great way to prepare for posing nude.

"When you sing, it's like standing there naked in front of everyone," she said. "You are baring your soul. It's almost more intimidating."

However, student artists often get self-conscious as well, she added. They are also put on the spot when someone else examines their work.

"Some (of the pictures) are flattering, some make me want to go home and work out," Ewing said.

After about 20 students drew her with charcoal or conte crayon, their work sat on easels around the center of the classroom for all to see.

Kerrie Curtis, 21, an art major, said that while it might seem awkward to have the model look at her artwork, it didn't bother her.

None of the students said they were particularly surprised or uneasy about the nudity in class.

After all, it is a figure drawing class and artists sign up to better learn the lines of the human form, Glass said.

Before student David Carrillo, 20, saw a live, nude model in art class, he thought it might be uncomfortable.

"But it was cool and I just went with the flow," he said. "It made me see how other people's figures are all different."

Want to model?