A Museum Visit 25 Years in the Making

 

The first time Will and I traveled to Montréal was in the summer of 1999.  We had just gotten engaged, and we were taking a side trip into Canada on our way to Vermont.  

The trip was planned as very much a union of two vastly different interests: the outdoorsy and the cultural.  As you might imagine, the Vermont part was 100% Will's trip.  I had not been on a bike since I was 12 years old, and I had no idea just how difficult biking 25 miles per day in Vermont would be.  (Now I know.)

And the idea was that Montréal would be my part of the trip: French food, French language, Old Montréal architecture, and the art museum.  Will was happy to eat croissants and crepes and fondu (poor Will, right?) and then try to feign interest as I enjoyed a day of art at the museum.  But as luck would have it--or was it planned all along...?--Montréal Museum of Fine Arts was not open on Mondays, the only full day we would be in the city. 

So, we never made it to the museum in 1999.  Nor ever since, including the 4 months we were here in 2017.

This summer, we decided to correct this wrong.  We booked our tickets online, arranged for parking, and committed to a day of art viewing.  

The special exhibit they were running held some special interest for us since I had visited the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fé a couple of years ago in 2022.  I was also somewhat familiar with Henry Moore since we spent quite a lot of time in Leeds--where Henry Moore went to the art school--when Will was working in England in 2006-7.  Seeing the work of an American painter and an English sculptor in French-speaking province of Canada somehow seemed an appropriate melange.

The special exhibit did a wonderful job of showing similarities in their aesthetics, as you can see in the pictures above and below.

And I always love recreations of artists' studios, like the one below of O'Keeffe's.

Of course, there was other art as well, including another special exhibit on Winnipeg-born contemporary artist Wanda Koop, with the striking and haunting piece below from 2023 (part of Ukrainian Quartet, Power Plant).

All in all, it was a lovely day of art, even if it did take us 25 years to come around to visiting this beautiful museum!