The curator, art historian and former general director of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec (MNBAQ), Esther Trépanier, has passed away, announced her partner Jacques Tremblay.
“I have the extreme regret to announce to you that my light, my star Esther went out this morning,” Jacques Tremblay said Monday afternoon.
Professor of art history at UQAM from 1980 to 2020, Esther Trépanier led a fruitful career as an exhibition curator and catalog author – Adrien Hébert (1992), The Landscape in Quebec 1910-1930/The Group of Seven (1997).
In 2022, she commissioned an exhibition on abstraction in Quebec in the 1940s, before the arrival of the Automatists, at the Joliette Art Museum.
Read our text on this exhibition
Esther Trépanier was also the general director of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) from 2008 to 2011, succeeding John Porter. Mme Line Ouellet took over in 2011.
Mme Trépanier had obtained a doctorate in art history from the University of Paris I. She also held a master’s degree in arts studies from UQAM and another in philosophy from the University of Paris VIII as well as schooling doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris VIII.