You could see it coming, almost from the day the controversy erupted. Two paintings were bought for slightly less than $4 million in public money, and many people were outraged — even members of Parliament decried such a putatively poor investment of taxpayer dollars. Today, the paintings are worth more than 20 times what Canadians paid for them. And counting.

It’s been just under a quarter-century since the National Gallery of Canada dove head first and ankle deep into the well of American abstract expressionism, with then-unprecedented purchases that thrilled some viewers and left others scratching their heads and asking – and here I helpfully translate into the acronym-crazy internet lingo of today – WTF?

First, in 1990, the National Gallery bought Barnett Newman’s abstract painting Voice of Fire, which raised a chorus of voices of ire.

The huge canvas — 5.5 metres or 18 feet tall, and nothing more than a vertical red stripe between two bands of blue — was created by Newman for Expo 67 in Montreal, where it hung in Buckminster Fuller’s iconic geodesic dome, otherwise known as the United States pavilion.

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By 1990 Voice of Fire had for two years been on loan and hanging, without public fuss, in the National Gallery.

Then news broke that the gallery had bought the painting for $1.76 million and, well, sacre bleu et rouge!

“My kids could paint that” was a refrain from those who don’t appreciate abstract art. Federal politicians played to their base constituencies by demanding that something should be done, while writers of letters to the editor dismissed the painting on the basis of, “I don’t like it, therefore it cannot be art.”

Some opponents at least mounted an argument, saying the money should have been spent on works by Canadian artists — as if national galleries only buy art made by their own nationals. Even the Citizen wrote in an editorial (sigh) arguing the money should have been spent on Canadian art. One would think the gallery didn’t already own tens of thousands of works by Canadian artists, and buy many more every year.

Nothing came of the kerfuffle, and public attention moved onto some other outrage. Then, three years later, those rascals at the National Gallery were at it again; they bought the abstract painting No. 16 by the American artist Mark Rothko, and paid $1.8 million. Cue the indignation from certain quarters. Why, it’s nothing but fuzzy, whitish squares on a red background. Where are the mountain vistas, the golden fields of wheat, the bendy pine trees heroically growing out of a shield of rock? This is not art!

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My favourite salvo was from the letter write who worried about “the gullibility of our National Gallery personnel.”

What wisdom 24 years do bring. Recently, a senior member of today’s National Gallery personnel mentioned to me, off the record, that Voice of Fire is “worth well over $40 million today.”

In fact, earlier this year a Newman painting sold at auction in New York City for $84.2 million US (the currency of international art sales). That doesn’t mean Voice of Fire is worth as much, but it’s very conservative to estimate its value at $50 million US. Not a bad return on $1.76 million CDN over 24 years.

What about No 16?

It’s long been easy to see how extraordinary lucrative this investment of taxpayer dollars has been, as Rothko’s prices have risen exponentially. The gallery paid $1.8 million CDN for the Rothko painting in 1993. In 2005 a Rothko sold at auction for $22.5 million US. In 2007, another Rothko sold for $72.8 million US. Most recently, in 2012, another Rothko record was set when a painting sold for $86.9 million US.

This doesn’t prove that No 16 is worth $87 million US, but the sales cited in the previous paragraph are from the same period and in the same style as is No. 16, so it is conservative to estimate the current value of No. 16 at $60 million US.

Major art galleries don’t talk about the monetary value of their works, so they won’t “influence the market,” as a curator in Ottawa once explained to me. That’s in one way unfortunate, as those taxpayers who don’t “get” abstract art might be won over by knowing their dollars were invested wisely. You don’t have to “get” No. 16 or Voice of Fire to appreciate that less than $4 million CDN has been turned into more than $100 million US, a gain that increases healthily every year.

Gullible is not a word I’d apply to the people who brokered that deal: genius is a better fit.