From the Lookout atop Mount Royal, we walked down the tree-lined switchbacks and long wooden staircases to the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). Since the MMFA is huge, we decided to focus on just one “pavilion” - Quebecois and Canadian Art.
We walked down a long ramp and through an underground passage to the pavilion. En route, I was intrigued by an unusual installation of vintage suitcases by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.
We started at the top floor and worked our way down, exploring the collections in (mostly) chronological order. A colonial era painting of Montréal as seen from Mount Royal was a fun contrast to the modern-day city we had just seen from the mountain. I also liked the gallery with art from annual exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The next set of galleries had noted examples of Canadian Modernism from the first half of the 20th century. The artists’ names were unfamiliar, but they were clearly influenced by famous movements like Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism.
I was pleased to see this painting by Lauren Harris - I remembered his distinctive landscapes from our 2022 visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Harris was the unofficial leader of the Group of Seven, a collective of Canadian artists who depicted the Canadian wilderness in Modernist ways. I wish the MMFA had exhibited more works by Harris.
Quebecois artist Marc-Aurèle Fortin became a new favorite. His landscapes presented as simplified shapes and his bold use of color really appealed to me. Fortin rode a bicycle across Quebec, sketching landscapes in watercolor and then returning home to paint them in oil. He was very prolific, creating an estimated 10,000 paintings! Tragically, he eventually lost his legs and eyesight to diabetes, and a large number of his paintings were lost or intentionally destroyed.
