The National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec (MNBAQ) welcomes in its rooms, from February 16 to May 12, 2024, the exhibition Generations. The Sobey family and Canadian art. Imagined and put into circulation by the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, the project includes more than 150 works from one of the most important art collections in Canada: that of the Sobey family.
Among the selected works is a well-stocked panorama of 19th century Canadian painters.e and XXe centuries, including Emily Carr, the Group of Seven, David Milne, Peter Doig, Jean Paul Lemieux, Paul-Émile Borduas, James Wilson Morrice and Cornelius Krieghoff. In addition to these emblematic figures, the interest of Sarah Milroy, curator of the McMichael Collection and co-curator of the exhibition, was to draw parallels between centuries of creation in the country and to allow the emergence of new narratives between the works . Thus, current artists like Annie Pootoogook, Kent Monkman and Ursula Johnson find their way into the exhibition, their contemporary proposals coexisting with those of their predecessors.
Rediscovering the form of display of private collecting
One of the innovative propositions of the exhibition lies in the way in which the curators and curators have chosen to organize the rooms and show the works. As Sarah Milroy relates in the exhibition catalog, it was by visiting the walls of the Sobey family home in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, that the team quickly became seduced by the display devices that highlighted the natural way that so many Canadian works created powerful spatial dialogues together.
“From the outset, we decided that it was necessary at all costs to avoid creating the impression of an inventory crossing the ages with a heavy and predictable step, stepping back only to contemplate the opulence that such acquisitions demonstrate. We were instead inspired by the art of private collecting, in which the pleasure of creating new arrangements reigns supreme. During a visit to Stellarton, I spotted an exemplary case of this art: two small paintings framing the front door of the home of Donald and Beth Sobey. On the left, a painting by Krieghoff, Portage (around 1880) […] ; to the right, Landscape (1948), by Paul-Émile Borduas […]. It was a one-on-one. And there were others. »
If, at Stellarton, the paintings of Krieghoff and Borduas respond to each other in their way of delivering “the moods of the landscape”, other paintings in the exhibition converge in their tones, their motifs, their subjects or even their formats . From one room to another, the exhibitions bear witness to these levels of convergence, even complicity, of which the works are agents. We sometimes find isolated paintings in diptychs or triptychs, as we did at home when two or three works seem to match. Elsewhere, walls of framed paintings welcome us, always favoring effective superpositions of backgrounds and shapes.
Storytelling ability
The themes of the museum rooms are presented as different “scenes” retracing Canadian art from yesterday to today. Rather than favoring a chronology, they work above all to highlight connections between the practices of various artists. One of the most impactful meshes in the exhibition is that of painters Cornelius Krieghoff and Kent Monkman. The first, including genre paintings from the end of the 19th centurye century retraced the colonial daily life of the time, marks a complete break with the second, whose contemporary works take up the codes of the great historical paintings and in which he depicts members of his indigenous nation; they thus recover a form of agency in the Canadian historical narrative.
Through in-depth research into frames, the works are skillfully placed in their historical context, but still manage to convey the new stories suggested by their arrangements with other Canadian works. The exhibition thus tells a new story full of surprises, astonishments and critical comments on the history of art.