[Late last year,
I had a chance to spend a few days in Montreal, my first extended visit
to the city. Among the many reasons I loved it was the plethora of compelling
spaces and ways through which the city remembers its social, cultural, and
artistic histories. So this week I’ll CanadianStudy a few such spaces, leading
up to a special post on a few Canadian colleagues!]
On the pavilion
that artistically complements the McCord and Pointe-à-Callière Museums.
Like many fine
arts museums, including Boston’s Museum of Fine
Arts (usually referred to as the MFA, and the fine arts museum with which I’m
most familiar), the Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts is divided up into distinct wings (known in this case as
pavilions) that feature art and objects from across the world and throughout human
history. There are extensive pavilions dedicated to Archaeology and World Cultures,
to both Early to Modern and Contemporary International Art, and to both Decorative
Arts & Design and Photography & Graphic Arts, among other sections. As
a result, it would take multiple visits to truly experience and appreciate all
that the museum features; in keeping with our trip’s Montreal and Canadian
focus, we spent the majority of our time in the Claire
and Marc Bourgie Pavilion, home to the bulk of the museum’s collection of
Quebec and Canadian Art. And I’m very glad we did, as in both its structure and
its specific collections the Bourgie Pavilion offers a unique and compelling
vision of Canadian history and identity.
The pavilion’s
structure (described at length in the sections of this web
page) is particularly striking and engaging. Five of its six floors move
visitors across the region and nation’s chronology: in reverse historical order,
from the ground floor up, visitors move through Expanding Fields (1960s-1970s),
The Age of the Manifesto (1940s-1960s), Toward Modernism (1920s-1930s), The Era
of Annual Exhibitions (1880s-1920s), and Founding Identities (1700s-1870s). The
top floor is dedicated to Inuit Art, a choice that does replicate both the separation
I highlighted in the McCord Museum and the sense of First Peoples as past I
found in Pointe-à-Callière, but one that also allows for an impressively
extensive collection of Inuit works and artists (both historical and
contemporary, I should add). I can’t quite describe the experience of ascending
through those floors and moving back in time across those moments, but it was
most definitely more than just a sum of the parts, offering both compelling
glimpses into the influences and shifts across time periods and a fascinating
method for engaging with a place’s and people’s histories through art.
Because that
overall experience of the pavilion resonated with me so potently, I don’t remember
any individual work or item from any one of those floors with the same clarity.
But the floor and period that struck me the most was the Era of Annual
Exhibitions, which told its own compelling historical story (that of the
founding of The
Art Association of Montreal, a direct precursor to the Museum of Fine Arts
that began presenting annual art exhibitions in the spring of 1880) through
the work of such prominent artists as painter Ozias
Leduc and sculptor Alfred
Laliberté (among many others). Too often, I find that art museums present
individual works and artists relatively devoid of context (other than the
details provided in the accompanying labels); while I understand how that can
allow us to focus on the works themselves, the AmericanStudier in me really
wants to engage with the contexts alongside those works. And if the overall
structure of the Bourgie Pavilion represents one impressive layer of historical
context for Quebec and Canadian art, it also helps create, within an individual
collection like that housed on the Era of Annual Exhibitions floor, a
complementary, more specific and equally engaging such context. All of which
add up to one of the most interesting fine arts museums I’ve encountered!
Next memory
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Sites of collective memory you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment