Pictures on the Wall: Building a Canadian Art Collection

The deeply personal story of a milestone North American art collection.

“There are many ways to collect art, many motivations and points of departure. In my estimation, Michael Audain’s is of the socially beneficial variety: avid and personal enough to cultivate the eye, local and deep enough to generate knowledge. Would that his approach were more common. This generous book shows how it’s done.” (Marc Mayer, C.M., former director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada.)

Michael Audain’s passion for art began when he was a teenager, taping reproductions of Bruegel paintings to his dorm room walls. Over the years, his eye for art developed and together with wife Yoshiko (Yoshi) Karasawa, he acquired one of North America’s most notable collections. In Pictures on the Wall, Audain tells the story of this assemblage: from the first tentative purchases to the collection’s home, today, at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, Canada.

With heart, humour and candour, Audain looks at seventy-five significant works that transformed both his collection and his relationship with art: the Indigenous art pieces that enthralled him from an early age, the Emily Carr paintings that inspired his lifelong connection to the artist, the works of Mexican modernists sought out after his early love of their murals, the paintings of Jean-Paul Riopelle that opened his mind to the power of non-figurative art, and many more.

Accompanying each beautifully reproduced image is a description of the work and how it came to find a place in Audain’s collection. Throughout, Audain’s personal and practical narrative aims to light the way for anyone hoping to begin their own art collection, and to inspire everyone to explore and enjoy their own relationship with the art in their world.

Michael Audain is the founder and chairman of Polygon Homes Ltd., an officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Order of British Columbia. In his personal memoir, One Man in His Time... (2021), Audain expands on his left-wing activism, business leadership, philanthropism and dedicated support for wildlife causes and the visual arts. He lives with his wife, Yoshiko Karasawa, in Vancouver, BC.