Love and Devotion: Leonard Cohen’s life and ephemera shine at new AGO exhibit “Everybody Knows”

“Everybody knows that you love me, baby. Everybody knows that you really do.”

What is it about Leonard Cohen that still inspires such devotion beyond the words and music? His enigmatic persona? That smoky baritone voice? The unwavering gaze smouldering with intensity, or is it the fact that the polymathic artist, poet, author and musician transformed Grandpa’s classic fedora into a weapon of mass seduction?

In the past year alone: there was a documentary dissecting the popularity of Cohen’s well-trod song, “Hallelujah”; Toronto music journalist Michael Posner has just released the third tome in his expansive oral history of the Montreal troubadour, “Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories”; and adding to the canon of posthumous Cohen-mania is the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new exhibition, “Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows,” opening to the public on December 13.

Curated by Julian Cox, the AGO’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, this is the first museum exhibition to present archival materials from the Leonard Cohen Family Trust. With more than 200 photos, letters, instruments, drawings, memorabilia and writing, as well as videos on loan from the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, this show lets a little light in to Cohen’s artistic and personal influences.

“We’ve dipped our toes in various moments from his career, but it’s impossible to look at everything,” says Cox.

The entrance to the expansive second-floor gallery space is painted a deep royal blue, a nod to the Quebec flag and to the Mediterranean seas surrounding the Greek island of Hydra where, in the 1960s, Cohen found a creative refuge among its intellectual community and met his famous muse, Marianne Ihlen.

Organized by chronological episodes in Cohen’s life, the show begins with the artist’s childhood. Born in Montreal in 1934 to a well-respected Orthodox Jewish family, Cohen’s father died when he was only nine, an early loss that would shape his life. Amongst the sorrow, there is still such visceral delight in reading a letter from a young Cohen, excited by the fact that he caught a fish at camp.

This first section establishes the origins of Cohen’s deep Judaic faith, which informed his world view even as he voraciously studied other religions and spent six years during the 1990s sequestered at a Zen Buddhist monastery.

“I think everything begins and ends with the synagogue and his experience going to Shaar Hashomayim,” says Cox. Cohen’s grandfather and great-grandfather served as presidents at the Mount Royal synagogue. It’s where he was buried, in a traditional family cemetery plot, after he died in 2016 at the age of 82. Cohen’s deep connection to Shaar Hashomayim lifted Cohen’s voice even after death, when he posthumously won his only solo performance Grammy in 2018 for his song “You Want it Darker,” which featured accompaniment by the synagogue’s choir.

Cox says that Cohen’s early exposure to services at the synagogue “gave him a sense that language was powerful.” It also formed Cohen’s belief in the value of written documents, which is why the Family Trust’s holdings are so rich in content.

The show offers a peek into the hundreds of pocket-sized notebooks that, over the years, Cohen would always carry with him, writing down ideas for couplets or for songs. Sometimes he would sketch or doodle on a napkin or a piece of cardboard.

“He saved every one of those, they’re all part of the archive,” says Cox. “He returned to them years later to reference them for inspiration, but also to recollect particular passages of his life. It’s a reservoir of material that is part of the ongoing campaign to pursue a life with language at its centre.”

Cox’s background as a photography historian and curator can be felt through the show’s focus on Cohen’s practice of documenting the mundane through Polaroid snapshots. An early master of the selfie, even some of these images hold mystery. For instance, why does Cohen look so hilariously grumpy in the off-centre Polaroid, “Self-Portrait, Angry at 11 pm”?

Cohen also took many photos of domestic items such as salt and pepper shakers and butter dishes. “The everyday moment, activity or object is something that he was very passionate about.” Cox says this act also speaks to Cohen’s devotion to ritualism. “This was one reason why it was easy for him to take himself off to the mountain for six years and live as a monk because he lived in a very smart way, and didn’t care for material things — he had a devotion towards simple everyday objects.”

Some of the photos and writing also speak to the disconnect between Cohen the legend and Cohen the man. In a corner adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling image of Cohen cavorting with his former girlfriend and fellow artist Joni Mitchell — whom he met at the 1965 peace-loving Newport Folk Festival — is a section focused on his fascination with guns, a motif that appears throughout his writing and art.

Cohen’s interest in weapons can be traced back to childhood and to his late father’s First World War service pistol; the first gun he ever saw. He wasn’t a sharpshooter or even a hunter, it was more the machinery that held his interest for decades.

“He was also really fascinated with militarism,” says Cox. “He was a member of the NRA [National Rifle Association]. I mean, he actually was pro-gun. Because he’s not a bohemian, he’s a conservative shape shifter. But all of us hold contradictions, right?”

While the romantic Cohen image tends to be frozen in the folk era of “Suzanne,” he wasn’t always a tea-and-oranges analogue guy. His natural curiosity extended to technology, as seen in a series of prints from the early 1990s, filled with exuberant primary colours and more familiar objects such as doorways and dustpans. In 1992, Cohen met Los Angeles graphic designer Michael Petit, a future collaborator on many projects, including 2006’s “Book of Longing,” which combined Cohen’s poetry with his graphic drawings. In the early aughts, Cohen discovered the possibilities of creating images on the Apple iMac. Some of the art he created with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are also on display in the show.

“Cohen was a very magnetic, charismatic personality, that’s very clear. But I see him as a kind of a chameleon,” says Cox. “There’s consistency, obviously. But he was constantly on the move in a way and had difficulty ever holding a fixed position. That idea of evolution, growth and change underpins everything — never wanting to look back. That’s also what is fascinating about the archive: he was accumulating it in a very mindful way during his lifetime. It was meant to be for posterity.”

After immersing so deeply in his work, Cox says he’s still stunned by how intentional Cohen was with every word he committed to paper. He points out a journal entry where Cohen describes what a walnut looks like in the palm of a hand in four different ways.

“It’s beautiful and it’s funny, and also inspiring,” says Cox. “Each time it is described, you have a different image in your mind. That’s the shape shifter in him. And that’s what I think is his great gift to us, exploring the elasticity of language.”

Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows runs at the Art Gallery of Ontario until April 23, 2023. For tickets and information see https://ago.ca/exhibitions/leonard-cohen-everybody-knows

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