Review: Two Museums in Montréal

Any art-loving tourist visiting New York City would be remiss in failing to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Guggenheim.  On a recent trip to MOMA, I found myself surrounded by European and Asian tourists who had traveled far to see Picasso and Duchamp. Walking from floor to floor I was more likely to hear Mandarin, Spanish, or German than English.

So when I was a tourist last week in Montréal, I had a guidebook with the top sites to see.  The Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal could loosely be compared to the Met and the MOMA, respectively, and if you find yourself in Québec I highly recommend that you visit both.

The Musée des beaux-arts (Museum of Fine Arts) is the larger of the two, with its permanent collection housed on one side of the street and certain traveling exhibits in a building across the way.  Admission is free.  The 19th century artwork is part of the permanent collection in the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion.

These masterpieces are not only a joy to look at, but they are well presented, too.  The long, thin corridor is a nice comparison to the typical museum’s white open space, and it fits the mood of the Realists and Impressionists.  It really does make a visitor believe she is in a home rather than a museum.  Not any home I’m familiar with, of course.  And coziness could be seen as cramped in another person’s eyes.  But great paintings by Tissot, Courbet, and Bouguereau speak for themselves.  These works are just as incredible two centuries later, and deserve the deep contemplation that a slow walk through this room allows.

I began at the top of the museum and worked my way down, which meant that I next saw the Napoleon gallery, which was a gift of the Ben Weider Collection to the Museum.  This might be a good time to mention that Montréal, and Québec in general, is very French.  The information cards are written in both French and English, but Napoleon was not a subject that my public high school spent a great deal (read: any) of time discussing, so the grandiosity of this gallery may have been lost on me.  It is primarily artwork, not paintings- there is a large case of gorgeous silverware, some intricate clocks and furniture, and the expected “things that Napoleon owned/gave as a gift.”  As a time period room it was more elaborate than I had expected, and a person more historically-inclined than I could have spent a long time lingering over the traditional jewelry and the bust of Josephine.

On the lower levels, things get modern.  Contemporary art, as well as a current exhibit on Surrealism, are housed in the underground levels.  The contemporary art gallery is fairly standard, or as standard as contemporary can be.  There was the required room for geometric art (that plank leaning against a wall, which I’ve seen often and still don’t understand), plus some powerful pieces regarding the recent wars and photographs detailing just how small and mechanized our lives have become.

The museum recently increased its contemporary art space, and one room was for the exhibit “The Earth is Blue Like An Orange”, on display until August 21.  Surrealist and fantastical, these works took the imagination of art pretty far out there.  Erik Parker’s Guru looks like the type of painting a die-hard Hendrix hippie would have over his couch.  There was also an elaborately constructed dystopian city, video plus sound production, and a piece called Gossip, which at first glance looks like The Stepford Wives at dinner, until you see the chunks of skin/scalp/body membrane they are holding.

The real place for contemporary art, though, is the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.  The collection on display in this smaller museum is Déja, for what “propels us right now, or from now on, into a future that is potentially unlimited…” as stated by Josée Bélisle, the Curator of the Permanent Collection, in the brochure and on the entrance wall.  The collection is nine segments in four galleries, and includes some very unique pieces.

The Print and Drawing Room opens up the exhibition galleries, and includes a literal representation of “movable type.”  Charles Sandison’s piece is an electronic page with words that jumble around, fall off the edge, and rearrange themselves.  It makes the words incomprehensible and the page of text meaningless.

There are a great deal of interesting pieces of artwork, photographs, videos, and creations.  But by far the most moving is Shirin Neshat’s 1999 Soliloquy, a 17 minute film played on two screens facing each other.  Both screens within the black room depict an aspect of her life, but one screen is her in Turkey and the other is her in NYC.  Viewing the film occasionally involves moving one’s head like a spectator at a tennis match, but often Neshat is simply staring in one of the screens, somewhere beyond the camera- as if she were also watching herself on the other screen.  The film shows how the woman’s religion in the West makes her an outsider, while her longing for something else won’t allow her to fit in to the East, either.

The floor of the Musée d’art contemporain was covered in small confetti dots thanks to We Were in Kyoto, a large 1997 installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.  The large space is constructed of wood, and visitors walk inside what is meant to be a Zen-like garden and a sensor releases a small puff of this confetti from the roof, creating something unexpected and whimsical.  I found the spare, wooden room to be more creepy than Zen-like, and kind of figured out that confetti was coming from the tell-tale tracks.  I pity the museum’s evening sweeping crew.  Rooms devoted to Feminism, Music, and Archetype were all fascinating (if sometimes disturbing) looks into what contemporary artists are doing with these mediums.

I wouldn’t be able to pick a favorite museum, since they were so different and so distinct.  The 19th century paintings at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal won me over- I do enjoy those classics- but their contemporary art galleries were surprisingly good.  I’m glad they embraced the more recent works.  The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal was well curated and held a lot of surprises in its small space.  The two museums are not within walking distance, and I went on two different days.  But even if you have only 24 hours in Montréal, do go to one of these.  They each had less of a focus on American artists, which meant more Europeans for Fine Arts and more locals for Contemporary.  There was certainly more Canadian art in both, and I enjoyed that aspect, getting away from the centrism on the States if only by a few hours and one trip through customs.

by Danielle Bukowski