Ian Muncaster takes a seat on the faded couch he moved from the old place, peering at one of the two cats he also brought over from there to make this new place feel homier. “We’ve had cats at Zwicker’s Gallery for over half a century,” he says, wiggling an index finger at the bigger, fatter one. “They’re rescues, though you wouldn’t know it.”
At the moment, the fortunate furballs seem as comfortable as he does. It’s been less than two months since the respected Halifax art dealer settled his affairs and sold his building on Doyle Street, 54 years after he bought it from an old college chum; a mere 59 days since he moved his hundreds of paintings, prints, and sculptures into this spot, a magnificent but smaller and more manageable space in an historic building on Brunswick Street, beneath Citadel Hill’s Clock Tower. “They told me that I have to stop kicking the can down the road.” he smiles. “They said I have to start making some decisions, get my business in order.”
He doesn’t mind. After all, he says, almost puckishly, “I’m 90.” What better place than here, in a room full of cardboard boxes jammed with framed 19th century etchings, to reflect on the things that were and what might have been?
He might have been, for example, a banker when in 1953, at the age of 19, armed with an accountant’s certificate and a few Canadian dollars, he travelled from his post-war-ravaged home in London, U.K., to Canada for a lowly clerk’s job with the Bank of Toronto. He might have been a railroad man when a few years later, he landed a better job at Canadian National in Montreal in the freight traffic department. Indeed, he might have been an advertising executive in 1960, living the high life in Boston, calling Jack and Jackie Kennedy neighbours.
“I was selling liquid Joy detergent for Proctor & Gamble, living right across from them in the Beacon Hill neighbourhood,” he laughs. “But it was a wonderful time to be there. Every evening, I would take my sales returns, and walk across Boston Common, and mail them to the head office. I just loved the job. I loved the people.”
He might even have been an academic, parlaying the undergraduate and MBA degrees he somehow managed to earn from Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Que., and the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., into a teaching job at Dalhousie University, but for a strange encounter in early 1970.
“I actually dropped in to Zwicker’s one day and bought a painting,” he says. “About four days later, I got a telephone call from the owner informing me that my cheque had bounced which, I am afraid to admit, was not uncommon for me at the time. Anyway, he said, ‘Muncaster; now that’s not a very common name around here. Were you, by any chance at Bishop’s in the 1950s?’ He turned out to be Henry Knight, an old classmate of mine from there.”
The gallery had been in the hands of the Zwicker family since 1886, until Knight purchased it in 1968. But after two years, the businessman, whose main line was selling furniture, not Cornelius Kreigoffs, had tired of the rigmarole. He wondered if his old school buddy, with his management background, would become his partner.
“We had lunch and talked it over,” Muncaster says. “I was interested in art, because I was raised in London. My mother used to like to go and shop. I would be parked at either a museum or a bookshop or something like that, while she went to Selfridges.”
Within two years, he and his wife Ann (who died last year at 84) took over the $50,000 mortgage. “In return, I said I wanted the building. Henry ended up living in Paris, working for the International Monetary Fund, living in a chateau.” He grins broadly: “And I ended up living in genteel penury in Halifax.”
In fact, after nine decades and all the “might-have-beens” and “never-would-bes,” Muncaster, who shifts his seat slightly to make room for the cat, is almost astonishingly well-adjusted for someone who spends a lot of time around artists. But, he says, he did have a front row seat to the rise of Atlantic luminaries like Alex Colville, Christopher Pratt, Mary Pratt, and Tom Forrestal to international prominence. He was able to deploy his business acumen to broaden and fortify Zwicker’s suite of services, including custom framing, restoration, and appraisals.
Most of all, he talks about the local, lesser known artists, both past and contemporary, the gallery has helped over the years, people like Anthony Law (1916-1996), the Nova Scotian post-war landscape painter whose work, he says, “we really promoted,” and a young Chris Gorey, “who was sitting on a roadside in Cape Breton trying to sell his really beautiful pieces for $10 each.”
Gorey, who’s now 74 and been been running his own gallery in Ingonish, N.S., and selling his work directly to the public for years, laughs genially when he hears that. “Actually, it was more like $25 apiece,” he says. “And it wasn’t really on the side of the road. But, you know, fair enough... I had been coming up from Massachusetts on camping trips in the summers and I’d fallen in love with the place. In 1975, I was living in a shack, basically a garret... Ian liked my work, so I went to see him, and he took me on.”
In the early days, Gorey says, “We had a number of shows at Zwicker’s that were quite successful.” A fixture on the Halifax art scene even then, “Ian had a policy of buying back any piece of work he believed in if the customer didn’t want it anymore.”
For his part, Muncaster has enjoyed every minute he’s spent promoting Down Home talent. He’s even enjoyed the jousting he’s done on their, and others, behalf. “Years and years ago, we used to take out full-page ads in Canadian Art,” he says. “I was on the board of the Art Dealers Association of Canada, and I remember the editor of that magazine coming down here pleading with us to buy more advertising. But there was absolutely no effort to review anything going on in the Maritimes.”
On another occasion, he recounts, “I was having a coffee with the doyenne of Canadian art, herself, Mira Godard. She turned to me and said something like, ‘God, how can you stand it. It must be so boring where you are. Nothing ever happens down there.’ I almost reminded her that Alex Colville, whose art she represented from her famous gallery in downtown Toronto, was from down here and that he’d made her quite a rich lady.”
He adds: “It’s an attitude. But, you know, that’s always been the way. Culturally, Canada stops at the Quebec-New Brunswick border, right? We fish. We are great to our grandmothers. We’re nice to everyone else. But that’s about it.”
As for the future of art, he can only smile and raise his shoulders. “Back in the late 50s, when I lived in Montreal, after I’d graduated from Bishop’s, it was hard for me to find a job, and I was living hand to mouth,” he says. “I used to go to this little Hungarian restaurant where I could get a meal for $1.25, including a glass of wine. There was a guy I used to see there quite often. Eventually we got to talking, and it turned out he was a factory painter. This chap told me that he could paint about 10 different paintings in one afternoon; $8.50 apiece; 85 bucks for an afternoon’s work.”
Nowadays, he says, “with the change in media, you know, the decline of the newspaper, the print media, the rise of all these sorts of social media,” who knows? “We’re just a small frog in a small pond ... on the periphery, really.”
None of which dampens his enthusiasm for the near future. How does he really feel about 2,400 linear feet of wall space at the gallery’s new digs on Brunswick Street, compared with the original 3,000,on which to display fine, bespoke, often local talent?
“The market has changed so much since 1970, when we bought the building on Doyle Street, we don’t need as much space. The fact is that we’re doing much more servicing, packing and shipping for people. We do a lot of appraisals, we do a lot of restoration, we do a lot of specialized framing.”
What is his secret for the eternal brightness of his spotless mind?
“Maybe it’s my immigrant experience. In many ways, when I came to Canada, those years were kind of special in North America. In the late 1940s, ’50s, and the ’60s, life was pretty good. This country was, for a brief time, probably the world’s fourth industrial power. I feel constantly grateful for coming here. I’ve been very lucky that I came at the right time.”
Maybe, but somewhere in the outer rooms, a phone rings, a door opens, and Muncaster says, “We get a lot of compliments on the new space. To be honest with you, it’s been fun. We are still an art gallery with good people ... and cats.”
And you can’t help feeling that the finest work of art Ian Muncaster has ever curated is his own life.