The children of an artist who died around forty years ago are appealing to the courts to have one of their mother’s works, destroyed in 2020 by the Cégep de Sainte-Foy due to lack of maintenance, reconstructed.
The metal sculpture The Bird, by the artist Danielle Roux, was erected in 1967 on the grounds of the college on the occasion of its founding. However, in the years that followed, the structure suffered from a lack of maintenance, which initially led it to be moved to a less frequented corner of the CEGEP site.
In December 2019, the Quebec Conservation Center recommended that the establishment dismantle the work so that it could be restored. But during transport, it was so damaged that it broke irreversibly, the newspaper reported in 2020 The sun. Questioned by the capital’s daily newspaper, the Cégep de Sainte-Foy admitted “that there [avait] had a gap in [sa] responsibility for maintaining and restoring works of art on [son] campus in the past.”
“It’s unworthy of a CEGEP that teaches the arts,” deplores film producer and director Richard Lavoie, former spouse of Danielle Roux. The works of art bring beauty to a landscape where the buildings are sad. The fate reserved for Danielle’s work, I find it inconceivable. »
A long fight
Danielle Roux, who donated this work to the Cégep de Sainte-Foy, died in 1981, at the age of 40. When he returned to live in Quebec after an exile in Montreal, around 2008, Richard Lavoie said he discovered the work of the mother of his children in poor condition. From 2016, four years before the work was demolished, he took steps to contact the college so that the sculpture could be restored.
In 2017, he sought the advice of three recognized artists, who concluded that The Bird could be restored at a reasonable cost by the educational establishment. “The CEGEP did nothing,” regrets the man, now 85 years old.
Richard Lavoie speaks today on behalf of the three children born from his union with Danielle Roux, who are the rights holders of the work. The latter filed an injunction in Superior Court on 1er last September in order to force the Cégep de Sainte-Foy to rebuild The Bird. This is the only request from the estate of Danielle Roux. “They don’t want money. They really just want the work rebuilt. This story is ridiculous. It’s been going on for so long,” underlines Richard Lavoie.
According to him, the demolition of The Bird by the Cégep de Sainte-Foy contravenes the Copyright Act, which protects the integrity of an artistic work.
The Cégep de Sainte-Foy reacted late Wednesday evening to the lawsuit filed by the children of Danielle Roux.
The institution indicates that it has made “a lot of effort to find satisfactory common ground”, in vain. “Our desire to find a solution is real, but it must absolutely take into account our responsibility for the sound management of public funds,” we added in a written declaration.