Travel the world

A Visit to Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

One of the first things I do when travelling to a new city is to check out the museums. Today I went to Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal or for the English speakers, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA).

The layout is pretty cool. The museum and its art collection is not just housed in one building, but spread out to five pavilions, which are all accessed via underground tunnels once you enter the main building.

There were two major exhibits going on.

The first one that you come across is Adam Pendleton’s Ce Qu’On a Fait Ensemble or These Things We Done Together. His works explores the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Or what the New York-based artist calls Black Dada.

Untitled (Mask), 2018

The other major exhibit I saw was Nicolas Party’s L’heure mauve or Mauve Twilight – inspired by that fleeting moment when the fading light casts purple hues over the landscape. Party was not only the artist, using the museum as a canvas for his large scale, surrealist murals, but also its curator and exhibition designer. That means he also hand-picked 50 other historical artworks from the museum’s collection to compliment and be featured along with his works.

Tree Trunks, 2021

Portrait with Lawyer, 2021. I recognize Marlene Dietrich’s face when I see it.

Here are some other cool things that I saw:

Karen Tam – Castiglione’s Insect Mimics, 2014-2017

Frank Stella – The Pitchpoling (D-17, 2X), 1990.

Stella’s “Moby Dick” series pays tribute to Herman Melville’s book. Stella produced 138 reliefs to correspond to the novel’s 138 chapters. Pitchpoling takes its title from chapter 84, where Captain Ahab’s ship, the Pequad, hunts down and kills a whale. This artwork, made of bent and painted sheets of metal, transport the viewer to the heart of the action: bloody harpoon, waves, and whale entrails. In the negative spaces, the viewer can see the silhouettes of a seagull and a man.

Jean-Michel Basquiat – A Panel of Experts, 1982

This artwork is believed to allude to a fight between Basquiat’s girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk (nicknamed Venus), and his lover, Madonna (yes, that Madonna). You can see both names in the upper left-hand corner of the painting, above the depiction of a fist fight between the stick figures.

Dale Chihuly – Ruby Pineapple Chandelier, 2013

I’m a fan of Dale Chihuly blown glass sculpture and always appreciate coming across one at museums like I did at Seattle Art Museum, de Young Museum in San Francisco, and the V + A in London.

Fun thing to note: while you’re at the museum, make sure to go to the Mount Royal Observatory or the Glass Court to see an unobstructed view of the towering mural of singer, songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. This is the Crescent Street mural. (Montreal has 2 murals of Leonard Cohen)

Or when you see it from street level on the way back downtown.