VISUAL ARTS: FROM PAINTING TO PERFORMANCE COLLECTIVES

Plans for the facade of the new Art Association of Montréal building, Rue Sherbrooke, 1910
Building inaugurated December 9, 1912
Montréal Museum of Fine Arts.

In the last decade, the visual arts community in Quebec has experienced a surge in momentum. New galleries have opened and are actively reaching out to the Canadian and international art worlds. Successful new festivals have cropped up, putting the province in the arts spotlight. And a new generation of visual artists has begun to make its mark on a city known for its fusion of cultures, its famously affordable studio and living spaces, and its proximity to major arts centres, Toronto and New York. In addition to the new talents emerging from Montreal, the city is home to many established artists like Paul Litherland, a photographer and multi-media artist whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, and Catherine Widgery, an American-born artist whose larger-than-life sculptures dot the landscape from the Université de Montreal to the Rimouski Museum. Meanwhile, the rural regions of Quebec, from the Laurentians to the Eastern Townships and the Gaspé shore, are full of towns and villages where many sculptors, painters, printmakers, and other visual artists work.

Montreal, with its many galleries, workshops, and art studios, continues to be the province's focal point for visual arts. Numerous young artists come for Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts in order to cultivate their skills. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Arts attract thousands of visitors annually, and galleries like Parisian Laundry, DHC/ART and several spaces in the Belgo Building are pushing the contemporary art agenda forward.

Quebec has a long tradition of visual arts and discussions often focus on the Francophone evolutions, such as Les Automatistes and the events surrounding the Refus global, movements that were important to both the province's art community and its nationalist history. Anglo- and Allophone artists have also made significant contributions, and over the last couple decades their stories have begun to surface, adding to the narrative of the province's already rich and provocative artistic past.

Boulevard Saint-Laurent northbound from Rue Vitré (since Rue Viger). May 26, 1921.
Ville de Montréal. Gestion de documents et archives, VM98,SY,SS1,P18.

The seeds of a community

One of the first modernist movements in Quebec began with a generation of Montreal painters that delivered their most important works between 1930 and 1948. Many of these figures were either Jewish or European immigrants, and since the '90s their stories and artworks have been steadily reintroduced to the Canadian public by the prominent Quebecois art historian and current general director of the Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec, Esther Trépanier.

Trépanier has published numerous books and collaborated on many exhibitions in which she documented the significant contributions of early 20 ^th-century painters, including Polish-born immigrants such as Jack Beder (1910-1987) and Louis Muhlstock (1904-2001), and other East Europeans like Alexander Bercovitch (1892-1951), Sam Borenstein (1908-1969), Eric Goldberg (1890-1969), Herman Heimlich (1904-1986), Harry Mayerovitch (1910-2004), and Ernst Neumann (1907-1956). Converging on the Montreal arts scene from European enclaves or Jewish-European roots, many of these artists brought with them a deep appreciation of the 19^th-century schools of French impressionism and post-impressionism.

Jewish Painters of Montreal: Witnesses of their Time 1930-1948
by Esther Trépanier

Collectively, this Montreal school of painters developed a multi-faceted portrait of the city. Painting "the streets of their neighbourhood and the rooftops of the surrounding houses, the harbour area and building sites, or the backyards seen from a studio window was a way of visually appropriating the spaces of their own lives," Trépanier writes in her book, Jewish Painters of Montreal: Witnesses of their Time 1930-1948. They also traveled beyond the city limits to capture the mountainsides, rivers, farms and valleys of Quebec's rural regions. In terms of conjuring a visual definition of what it meant to be Québécois at the time, Muhlstock and company were as culturally significant as the Group of Seven were in defining the Canadian landscape. It was only later on, once Canadian nationalism began to gain a voice in Ontario and Québécois nationalism redefined its history to cultivate a stronger sense of French heritage, that the importance of the Montreal school of the '30s and '40s began to fade out of the narrative.

A recent exhibition at the McCord Museum highlighted the ways in which the Jewish and Eastern-European artists articulated their relationship to Montreal throughout the Depression and World War II. Among the more prominent figures in the Montreal school was Louis Muhlstock, who had immigrated to Canada with his family in 1911, at the age of seven. He started taking evening art classes while attending Montreal High School and later studied at the studio of French painter Louis-François Biloul (1874-1947). Muhlstock returned to Montreal during the Great Depression in 1931 and is probably best known for the work he produced in this era. His drawings of desperate and morose individuals, like the unemployed who would sleep on the grass in "Fletcher's Field", are deeply sympathetic and full of character. His paintings of deserted neighbourhoods are vibrant and express a hollow silence. Not untouched by the Depression, Muhlstock would draw on Kraft paper and use bleached sugar bags as canvases when times were particularly tough.

Unidentified Montreal street, photographer unknown
Library and Archives Canada

In 1939, Muhlstock became one of the first members of the Contemporary Arts Society, which sought to promote public awareness of modern art in Montreal. Founded by painter and art critic John Lyman (who wrote an arts column for The Montrealer from 1936 to 1940), membership was open to any artist of "non-academic tendencies." The original 25 members included the likes of Paul-Émile Borduas, Stanley Cosgrove and Goodridge Roberts, and later would count influential Francophone painters such as Fernand Leduc, Marcel Barbeau and Jean Paul Riopelle among its members. The large size of the group made it easier for them to negotiate with the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), which tended towards the conservative, and also made it less difficult to obtain exhibition space elsewhere. Representing a dynamic group of French-influenced post-impressionist and abstract painters, this organization received little recognition outside of the city and no support from the National Gallery of Canada.

Toronto Daily Star, October 22, 1945, p.19

The National Gallery's director at the time, Eric Brown, was a big supporter of the Group of Seven, who represented themselves as Canada's national school of painting. Brown's open preference drew criticism from a number of people in Canada's arts community, including some members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and prompted artists to organize themselves. One such example was Montreal painter Efa Prudence Heward (1896-1947), an active member of the Contemporary Arts Society alongside Muhlstock and Lyman. Heward was best known for her portraits of women, but she had a fondness for painting Quebec's Eastern Townships, and took many sketching trips along the St. Lawrence River near Brockville and to the Laurentians. In 1933, she was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, which grew to include a number of important artists from across the country. They all joined together in response to the growing concern that the National Gallery's fondness for the Group of Seven would lead to the exclusion of other artists from the collection. The large size of the Contemporary Arts Society gave it lobbying power, but also led to problems of governance. Infighting and disagreement about the Society's direction divided the group and eventually led to its dissolution in 1948.

These days, thanks to the efforts of Esther Trépanier and other curators, major exhibitions of their works are held not only at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, McCord Museum, and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University, but also in museums across the country.

From Impressionists to abstraction and beyond

If the rest of Canada had little idea of the significant talent that was coming out of Quebec's Anglophone visual arts community by mid-century, it was most likely because the very notion of an "Anglophone" hadn't entered into the public lexicon until the ideal of a "Francophone" culture began to take hold in the 1960s. As this distinction entered the public discourse and language politics started to polarize regional issues, Quebec's artistic communities grew more insular.

Victoria LeBlanc, who is currently Executive Director of the Visual Arts Centre in Westmount, recalls something of that isolation when she first got involved in the Montreal visual arts community in the 1960s. "When Harold Klunder (1943-) first came here from Ontario, everybody in the rest of Canada knew who he was. Very few people knew who he was here," says LeBlanc, noting that hardly anybody came to his first show and that only a handful of people attended his first lecture. Primarily a painter and a printmaker, Klunder's works are part of the permanent collection at Montreal's Museum of Contemporary Art. Of Dutch origins and often compared stylistically to Willem de Kooning, Klunder immigrated to Canada in 1952, earning himself quite a bit of notoriety within the Canadian scene. Although that wasn't felt in Quebecois circles until quite some time after he had settled in the province. "A few years later," says LeBlanc, "after he'd been in Montreal for a while, you couldn't get in the door [to one of his lectures]."

Post-war Canadian art was beginning to move away from "non-academic" impressionist portraiture to the abstraction of colour, shape and texture. The composition of the Anglophone visual arts community also began to change, from artists held together by immigration or religion, to those held together more formally by education and style. One of the major factors influencing the shift was the founding of Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts, which opened its doors to students in 1966 at what was then Sir George Williams University. Founded by Arthur Pinsky, the department occupied only a few studios on the seventh floor of the Hall building and was dominated by abstractionist forms of painting. The program has since graduated internationally acclaimed artists like Betty Goodwin and counted renowned artists such as Yves Gaucher among its teachers.

The Montreal Gazette, January 9, 1965, p.26

At the fledgling Faculty, "there was a hard-edged school of abstraction that had much more in common with European abstraction in France and Germany than it did with the American model," says painter and Studio Arts professor Leopold Plotek (1948-), who was also among the first graduates of the program. "Americans had their own sort of hard-edged school, but it was distinctly different from ours. It was sort of brasher and more colourful, and the Quebec model was much more European."

With many aspiring artists coming here to train and practice, and a secondary stream of more established visual artists formalizing their skills into teachable assets, the artistic exchange between Quebec, the rest of Canada and the world began to strengthen. By the 1970s, the hard-edged abstractionism of Klunder's generation and the Concordia Fine Arts programs were also gaining serious representation in the high-end galleries and dealers along Sherbrooke Street, where many artworks by Montreal's top artists are bought and sold.

The style was even more prevalent in the Francophone arts scene. As a result, the linguistic and cultural differences between English and French visual artists were not evident beyond names once the artwork began leaving the province. "If there was an English stream, and there really wasn't a stream as such, there were the Toronto Painters Eleven and other abstractionists in Toronto who did much more informal work that was probably marked more by the New York school than we were over here," says Plotek. "There was a gulf between Montreal and Toronto abstraction. One tended to be more gestural and friendlier to the return to figuration, in Toronto, and here it was pretty pure and lean and abstract and doctrinaire."

If language politics weren't part of the outward presentation of Quebecois art, a different story was brewing behind the scenes. Victoria LeBlanc recalls the significant changes the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts underwent in the '70s. From 1968 to 1978, when Dr. Sean Murphy (a pre-eminent ophthalmologist and son of the Montreal-born artist Cecil Buller) was the President of the museum, the board of directors changed from being exclusively Anglophone to mostly Francophone. "He realized it was all run by the English," says LeBlanc, "and there had to be a change if [the museum] was going to survive, if it was going to have the support of the Quebec government at a time when separatism was very, very much the agenda."

The Montreal Gazette, October 28, 1970, p.8

Furthermore, as abstraction was taking over the canvas, new artists all over the province were cultivating strong work off canvas. In 1972, architectural artist Melvin Charney injected socio-politics into the relatively new field of public art with a massive demonstration known asMontreal Plus Ou Moins, a treatise on urban development. He continued courting controversy with his much-heralded 1976 exhibit, Corridart, in which he set up an eight-kilometre corridor of artwork from Atwater to the Olympic Stadium. Mayor Jean Drapeau had it taken down for its alleged criticism of the city, but the statement registered well beyond the province. The CCA Gardens at René-Levesque Boulevard and Du Fort Street are well-known to any Montrealer who has ventured downtown, though many today wouldn't know that these stone sculptures overlooking the highway are a testament to Charney's lasting creativity.

The Montreal Gazette, October 28, 1970, p.8

Outside Montreal, artists such as Paspebiac's Enid Legros-Wise were beginning to gain attention for works they were creating in Quebec's rural regions. A clay sculptor and potter by trade, Legros-Wise was born in the Gaspé and spent the '60s studying her craft in both Montreal and Paris before returning to regional Quebec, from where she managed to cultivate her international reputation beginning in the '70s. Another prominent Gaspé artist is painter Norman Desjardins who has pursued a successful career in New Carlisle. As a result, these days numerous younger artists like the Eastern Townships' Bernice Sorge feel confident enough to pursue careers in rural regions. The Townships' annual Tour des Arts attracts quite a following, and often features new works by English-speaking artists such as Gordon Ladd and Stanley Lake. The West Quebec region across the river from Ottawa is also home to many artists such as potter/ceramicist Paula Murray.

Inuit and Native artwork has always been important to Canada's national identity and a significant amount of this art comes from the communities of Northern Quebec. By the 1960s, many Inuit communities had set up co-operatives in order to sell their work to the South. Cape Dorset, of West Baffin Island just north of Quebec, became the epicenter of the global Inuit Art trade, which mainly operated in English. As such, many Quebecois dealers, traders and printers were drafted into the industry of delivering Inuit artists from the North to the rest of the world. Entrepreneurial undertakings such as Montreal's Studio PM, founded by printmaker Paul Machnik in the '70s, quickly grew into an instrumental connection between prominent Inuit artists like Kenojuak Ashevak. Machnik (who still travels up to Northern Quebec and beyond to work with the co-operatives and discover new talent) and the broader Inuit art market. Machnik, for example, brings artworks back to his Montreal studio, prints them out in editions, and delivers them to large-scale Toronto dealers like Dorset Fine Arts who sell the artworks as part of the Cape Dorset collection.

Between the '70s and today's current atmosphere of renaissance, however, the ascendance of identity politics would boil over into a powerful separatist movement, and once again overshadow much of the cultural production coming out of the province's English-speaking enclaves. By 1980, the Parti Quebecois called for its first Quebec Referendum, and thus began a period of negotiating toward sovereignty that would culminate in the separatist movement's 1995 razor-thin loss of the second Quebec Referendum. Along the way the province lost over 350,000 of its citizens, most of them English-speaking.

A contemporary identity

Concordia's art programs continue to attract aspiring new talent, and even though a number of these artists leave after they graduate, many stay to carve out a life in Montreal. Some recent graduates have become rising stars in the Canadian and international art worlds. Getting their professional start at the Espace 306 gallery, Carlos and Jason Sanchez (also known as the Sanchez Brothers) have garnered a lot of attention for their large-scale, dramatically orchestrated photographs. Multi-media artist Adad Hannah has become known for using several mediums to inter-textualize present-day concerns with the history of art, rebuilding classic tableaux using elements of video, photography, and performance art. Karen Tam, whose installation work focuses on issues surrounding the Chinese diaspora and chinoiserie in North America, was longlisted for the 2010 Sobey Award alongside Hannah.

Sanchez Borthers, Last Embrace
Inkjet Print, 2009
60" x 108"
Edition of 3 / 2 AP

Adad Hannah, The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) 4
2009, colour photograph
39.5 x 52.5 in. Edition of 5.
20 x 27 in. Edition of 5.

Today's painterly styles are much more fluid than they used to be, though abstraction is still front and centre. The recent city-wide, multi-gallery event, "Extreme Painting," received a lot of attention and gave a compelling presentation of the perceived new frontiers of modern painting and its context. From Wil Murray's colourful and chunky "Run Through Candy Floss Fields Forever" (2005) to Alana Riley's video "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Grey?" (2009-10) where someone mops a large, straight red line on the floor, the extremes of painting in Montreal are pushing the boundaries of the canvas and the notion of painting itself.

In some neighbourhoods, it seems that you can't walk more than a few blocks without passing another new art space. Galleries that have opened their doors in the last ten years, such as Parisian Laundry, DHC/ART, Darling Foundry and Battat Contemporary, are energizing the city's art community with their ambition, and young art spaces like Galerie PUSH are bringing fresh perspectives and new artists to the fore. Alternative art spaces and schools have also played an important role in promoting visual arts in the province.

Artist-run centres are instrumental in sustaining visual art production and exhibitions in Canada, and Montreal is no exception. Centres like articule and Oboro give artists access to exhibition space and career-starting support. Feminist artist-run centres (e.g. La Centrale Powerhouse, Studio XX and GIV) and the artists who have been associated with them since the early 1970s have had tremendous influence on art making in Montreal. Studio XX, now a bilingual centre, was founded by Sheryl Hamilton, Patricia Kearns, Kathy Kennedy and Kim Sawchuck. People like Tanya Mars and Nell Tenhaaf were early directors of the Powerhouse Gallery (before the name change) and helped facilitate the development of experimental visual art, specifically performance art and new media before it was labeled as such. This legacy has influenced Anglophone students and artists in Montreal who work collaboratively, including the likes of WWKA (Women With Kitchen Appliances ) and the now dormant Play Group (Louise Dubreuil, Zoé Kreye, Marnie Macdonald, Taliesin Mcenaney, Marie-Andrée Rho, Karen Spencer, Nathalie Derome, Jessica MacCormack, Marnie Macdonald, Lou Nelson, Christiane Patenaude, Vida Simon, Dagmara Stephan, Nicole Fournier, Victoria Stanton, Rachel Echenberg, Sylvie Cotton and Tagny Duff.)

articule

Non-degree art schools like the Visual Arts Centre (VAC) provide open-access art education. Located in the city of Westmount, the VAC has seen considerable growth in the last 15 years under the direction of LeBlanc. What started off as a small exhibition space buttressing an artisanal boutique has turned into the storefront McClure Gallery and a vibrant art school that takes in almost 4,000 students each year. The school gives everyone the chance to develop their artistic chops and find "a community of like-minded people who speak the same language as they do, the language of visual art," says LeBlanc. Some of the many teachers who share their expertise at the VAC are the PowerHouse Gallery's Pat Walsh and multimedia artists Ian Shatilla and Juliana España Keller.

Among the most prominent of Montreal's new galleries is Parisian Laundry. Located in St. Henri, the building once housed a commercial laundry business that closed its doors in 2001 after nearly 70 years of providing service to the city's hotels and restaurants. Seeing an opportunity, Nick Tedeschi put almost $2 million into restoring the building before re-opening it as a new art space. In the five years since then, Parisian Laundry has become one of the city's foremost contemporary art galleries. Representing nine artists, it has produced acclaimed exhibitions such as art collective BGL's "Posterity" in 2009 and portrait painter Janet Werner's "Who's Sorry Now" in 2010, and often makes excellent use of its unique industrial basement space known as "The Bunker."

 Parisian Laundry

Under the direction of Jeanie Riddle, Parisian Laundry has helped raise the city's visual arts profile. The gallery's mandate is "always seeking critical, international visibility," says Riddle. A painter and conceptual artist in her own right, she cultivates networks with curators and art educators through publication platforms and participation in international art fairs in order to promote her artists and the city. "I think that Montreal is becoming a place. I feel like we are becoming a destination," she says, "and again due to the fact that Parisian Laundry gets out there. I sort of take everyone with me because I want to celebrate Montreal." Alongside BGL and Werner, Chinese-Canadian painter Rick Leong often takes part in Riddle's international promotions.

Some of Quebec's most exciting artistic events are the festivals. The newest one to enter the fray is the Quebec Triennial, whose inaugural show in 2008 was referred to as a "provincial powerhouse" by Canadian Art magazine. Produced and hosted by the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Arts, it focuses on gathering the very best in Quebec contemporary art. Other notable festivals include: the Montreal Biennale, an international festival organized by the Centre international d'art contemporain de Montréal that has previously featured street artist Roadsworth (Peter Gibson), the electroclash stylings of Peaches (Merrill Nisker), and the uniquely bizarre sketches of Marcel Dzama; Mois de la photo, a bi-annual event focused on creativity and innovation in photography; Art Matters, Canada's largest student-run art festival that showcases talents from the university programs; and Nuit Blanche, Montreal's annual all-night party that hosts many public art exhibitions like "Art souterrain," which spans some 4 km of the city's underground corridors and is often a welcome reprieve from the February weather happening above ground.

Wishful Thinking , Roadsworth
© Peter Gibson

As "Art souterrain" cheekily demonstrates, much of contemporary Montreal has been built upon the arts. Thanks to the efforts of various writers and curators over the last couple decades, the Anglophone thread of that history has become more prominent in the cultural conversation. There is no doubt that Anglo artists will continue to play a significant role in Quebec, and with ambitious art institutions and a new generation of emerging talent, la belle province has a very promising artistic future.

Lori Callaghan is a freelance art critic. Her work has been featured in the Montreal Gazette and The Rover, and she has written about graphic novels for the Montreal Review of Books.