Smaller than ever, cut off by three of its four pavilions due to the construction of the future Espace Riopelle, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) has found an introspective reason to remain attractive: the exhibition We.
The program of this new proposal installed at 2e floor of the Lassonde Pavilion — “the only one we have left,” concedes Annie Gauthier, Exhibitions Director — responds to the establishment’s need to renew and redefine itself. It also pushes us, through a series of interrogative statements, to ask ourselves who we are, or how we look at each other.
The design corresponds to what is usually done, with its open and colorful corridors. Except for one element: philosophical questions (“What makes me unique?”, “Is there a difference between welcoming people from elsewhere and welcoming visitors ?”…) accompany almost every work. This exhibition does not hide its educational scope for a school audience. Should they be written in small letters, at ground level?
What “we” are we talking about?
A dangerously pernicious term in a nationalist context — there is us, there are them — “we” is considered here by the MNBAQ as a virtue. He appropriates it to make it the title of this so-called permanent exhibition.
Composed of 69 works, all taken from the house collection, We does not circumvent the question of identity. Rather than tackling it head-on — and in the form of confrontation — the MNBAQ wanted it to be vague and broad, and more inclusive than exclusive.
” [Nous] has the strange virtue of being both a whole and an equation between oneself and the other”, we read in the introductory text. Curators Valérie Allard and Maude Lévesque invite us to see our individualities (and the works) as elements of malleable and changing wholes. Everyone has to find their place, or not.
Dispersed in three more or less porous themes (identities, migrations, territories), the paintings, sculptures, engravings, photographs and drawings parade pell-mell without regard for the time of their realization or for their nature.
Among the successful reconciliations, let us note that around the free canvas of John Heward, Untitled noh 141 (self portrait)from 1990. The circle of this work, which circumscribes without revealing anything, responds to the mirror oval self-portrait (circa 1977), by Alfred Pellan, and the portraits of nuns from the series Unveilings (1999-2001), by Raphaëlle de Groot. “I drew them blind while they, blind, drew a wreath of profession”, states the latter in the cartel of her inks.
These games of perception, or interpretation, make the portrait the dominant genre in the first of the two rooms. There are all styles, from the conventional representation of a 19th century noblee century (Doctor Francois-Olivier Boucherby Jean-Baptiste Roy-Audy) to the series of sharply protesting masks by Eddy Firmin, from 2016. It is the caricatural mosaic of Marie-Claude Pratte, Company portraits (1999-2000), which opens the exhibition with aplomb. Because beyond the stereotypical characters that she (un)paints, from the bourgeois to the junkyit is our judgments that it seems to denounce.
Too small ?
If the exhibition thus draws up through art, caricature or not, the behavior of a society, it also allows the MNBAQ to reassess itself. Forced to do something else with its contemporary art pavilion and to integrate older currents, the museum had to relocate the educational sector, driven out of one of the closed buildings. Wewhich led to the dismantling of the expo From Ferron to BGL, in place since 2016, was born of an unprecedented collaboration between the conservation and mediation departments. Usually, the second is in tow of the first.
The “philosophical journey” to which the public is invited is based on a desire to decompartmentalize the stories. Committed since 2018 to a rereading of the history of art with 350 years of artistic practices in Quebecan exhibition made inaccessible by the construction site, the MNBAQ is part of a current of less doctrinaire discourse adopted by museums.
The absence of a chronological or disciplinary presentation did not make We a story without head or tail. It is rather the desire to show too many works for a limited space that confuses her. Already, the setting up of workshops for school groups and the objective of splitting the floor into several exhibitions — what remains of From Ferron to BGL will eventually disappear — have imposed exiguity.
The neighborhoods are still not happy – the sub-theme of war seems to come out of nowhere – but it is especially the second room, devoted to the territory (s), which lacks air, paradoxically. The occupation of a place and the links that are established between the different forms of life guided the hanging. Major artists (the Riopelle and Leduc of modernity, a more current Altmejd) or now unavoidable (those of the indigenous nations), fetish works (The unicorn rooster1952, by Jean Dallaire) or the ones formerly classified as minor succeed one another, contaminate one another.
Audacious in some cases — from a country scene in oil (earth poem1940, by Maurice Raymond) seems to be leaving a herd of horses (the ride, 1992, by Aline Martineau) — neighborhoods bring together everything to the point of making one dizzy. Like a reflection, voluntary or not, of human encroachment on wilderness.
Jérôme Delgado was the guest of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec.