Jean-Claude Poitras @ Montreal's McCord Museum

Recently I had an opportunity to attend a tour with the fashion designer Jean-Claude Poitras, as he led a small group through his current exhibition at the McCord Museum.

Poitras was charming, and he told many stories about his youth and his career, which illuminated the designs on display. Poitras was raised by his great-grandmother in a small Quebec town, and going to mass weekly was a treat for him. He loved to look at the parade of ladies in their finery. Some of his early collections even reference ecclesiastical garments.

Poitras admitted to finding inspiration in the fan magazines he loved as a child. The woolen suit on the left, designed in 1977, was inspired by Diane Keaton's androgynous wardrobe in the film Annie Hall. To my eye, the trench coat on the right is a feminine version of one worn by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. 

I can imagine these frocks, shown above, on Italian film stars of the 50's and 60's.

Poitras attracted a celebrity clientele early on. He was enthusiastically endorsed by local "women of influence", like Mila Mulroney, Lisette Lapointe, and Pauline Marois.

One of the companies for which Poitras designed, Franck Imports, had extensive connections in Hong Kong. Twice a year, Poitras would spend two or three weeks in Hong Kong, learning to work with luxurious silk fabrics.

The tunic shown above is cut from mud silk, a fabric made in Guangdong province in south China, since the time of the Ming dynasty. In a laborious artisanal process, silk fabric is first dyed brown with ju-liang root. One side is then coated in iron-rich mud from the Pearl River delta and the silk is left to dry flat in the sun. The mud dyes one side of the fabric black, while also giving it a slight stiffness and lustre.  This method is not adaptable to industrial production.

You can see some Japanese influence in the garments above.

Find out more about the exhibition here. The show continues until April 26, 2020.

"Griffintown" @ Montreal's McCord Museum

This weekend I had the pleasure of touring a newly-opened exhibition at the McCord Museum.

In this show, Montreal photographer Robert Walker shares twenty large-scale photos of Griffintown, a working-class Montreal neighbourhood, now undergoing radical gentrification. Another hundred or so of his photos are shown as projected images. Also on display are historic photos of the neighbourhood from the museum's archive.

Walker often juxtaposes the slick and glamorous "lifestyle" images used to promote the condos with the reality of their construction, and the consequent deconstruction of the neighbourhood. The viewer cannot help but ask:

• what is lost?
• what is gained?
• what is promised?

You can find out more about the McCord's Griffintown photo exhibition here.

For those of you who appreciate the art of urban photography, have a look at this youtube video of Robert Walker on the job, in which he shares his approach and aesthetic considerations.

The show is the inauguration of an ongoing series at the McCord, Evolving Montreal.

"To document Montreal’s ongoing urban transformation, in the next few years the Museum will be commissioning well-known local photographers to explore the changes occurring in a neighbourhood of their choice."

The exhibition Griffintown continues until August 9, 2020.

Landscape Painting Now: from Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism

Published in 2019, this book offers a survey of 21st century landscape painting, a genre often  overlooked in current art criticism. It was edited by Todd Bradway, with an introductory essay by Barry Schwabsky.

Jonas Wood, M.V. Landscape, 2008
oil on canvas, 120 x156 inches

The work of more than 80 artists is presented, divided into six loose categories: Realism and Beyond, Post-Pop Landscapes, New Romanticism, Constructed Realities, Abstracted Topographies, and Complicated Vistas. Each category is defined and explored in a short introductory essay.

The three paintings I have chosen to post here are among my favourites. They are more figurative than much of the work in the book.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Bathers, 2016
mixed media oil on canvas, 35 x 35 inches

A couple of paragraphs introduces the work of each artist, both in general terms and with commentary about the specific paintings chosen to illustrate the artist's approach. Each artist has three or more paintings featured, often in full-page format. The quality of the reproduction is excellent.

Tim Eitel, Reflector, 2015
oil on canvas, 86 5/8 x 126 inches

The book ends with biographical information about all the artists. While most are American, there is a fair representation of international painters.

As I read through Landscape Painting Now, I was reminded how landscape painting can deal with contemporary issues, like social isolation, migration, and environmental devastation. 

I found the book in my local library; it's also available from Amazon.

The Forgotten Female Art Dealer Who Championed Picasso and Modigliani

An article on Artsy, written by Karen Chernick, has introduced me to an intriguing personality. Her name was Berthe Weill, and I had never heard of her.

In 1901, at the age of 36, the Parisienne Berthe Weill opened an art gallery where she sold the work of emerging artists at modest prices. Writes Chernick,

"Weill bought, exhibited and sold Pablo Picasso's work before he ever moved to Paris or painted any of the works for which he's now considered a modernist legend.... She sold his Moulin de la Galette (c. 1900) for 250 francs to collector and newspaper publisher Arthur Huc.

"Huc made another purchase from Weill that year, a still life by Henri Matisse, for the bargain rate of 130 francs, the first ever sale by a dealer for the young Fauve artist."

Moulin de la Galette, Pablo Picasso, now in the Guggenheim Museum

Among the artists she championed during her 40-year career were André Derain, Georges Braque, Aristide Maillol, Kees van Dongen, Maurice de Vlaminck, Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrilllo, Georges Roualt, Raoul Dufy, Robert Delauney and Amadeo Modigliani. Midway through her career she began to dedicate half of her exhibitions to women artists. As the artists became more recognized, they moved on to better-known galleries, and Weill never achieved much financial success.

Portrait de Berthe Weill, Georges Kars, 1933

Sadly, Weill had to close her gallery in 1941. As tough as she was, life had become too difficult for a Jewish businesswoman in German-occupied France. Ten years later, she died in poverty.

There is a local connection to this story: in 2022, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art will stage a show of some 80 paintings that passed through her gallery.

After the storm...

... I took these photos on my iPhone, driving home from Costco.

It was a moment to be reminded of the very special character of the winter landscape, and the singular appeal of familiar places.

Installation at Montreal's new Four Seasons hotel

When I read the article in Westmount Magazine, I knew I had to visit the sculpture that forms the centrepiece of this newly-updated Montreal hotel.

Contemplation, Pascale Girardin

Pascale Girardin, a Montreal artist, has created a breathtaking installation that plays beautifully on the name of the prestigious hotel on Rue de la Montagne. 

"The all-white installation with gilded accents of 24-karat gold is made up of over ninety floral suspensions ranging from thirty centimetres to one meter in diameter, made of lightweight aluminum. These garlands cascade through the atrium from the seventeenth to the eighth floor, evoking the cycles of nature—the blossoms of spring flowers, the movement of petals adrift on a summer breeze, the spill of autumnal leaves and the lightness of falling snow."

The original, site-specific sculpture, titled Contemplation,

"spans nine floors and is 31.5 m high. A multitude of floral rosaries, made up of nearly a hundred flowers and petals, cascade down between the seventeenth and eighth floors. Manufacturing and installation took about nine months. The meticulous installation of each petal and flower was... carried out over a period of three weeks."

We inquired of the hotel doorman about the possibility of seeing the sculpture when we realized it was not immediately visible on entering the hotel. We were referred to the front desk, and then assigned to a gracious hotel staffer, who escorted us to the 8th floor, where we had a good view of the atrium, ascending to the sky.

We were told that lighting is used to create various colour effects on the blossoms. At the time of our visit, some of the aluminum petals had a suggestion of pink reflected light, giving the impression of floating cherry blossoms.

The organic forms of the petals are a lyrical contrast to the grid-like structures of the building's architecture.

Note: A friend who was inspired to visit the installation was told that it is only available to hotel guests. :-(

the entrance to the Four Seasons, on rue de la Montagne

So pleased...

Rue de Buade #2

Delighted to learn that one of my cityscapes in cloth, shown above, has been selected for an upcoming show at the Homer Watson Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario, March 13 - May 31, 2020.

The show, a SAQA Regional Juried Exhibition, will be titled Colour with a U, and will feature 36 works in fibre. All the artists are Canadian members of SAQA. The exhibition coincides with the annual conference of SAQA this March. The conference will be held in Toronto, the first time this international group has staged its conference outside the US.

Those New Yorker covers

"Twilight Avenue", by Pascal Campion

Every now and then I am especially taken with the design of a New Yorker cover. The magazine is proud of its history of original illustrated covers, when so many magazines now rely on  photography.

I'm particularly fond of this recent illustration, and have spent some time analyzing its distribution of darks and lights, the sparks of red and pink amongst all those neutrals, the illusion of wet pavement, and the use of atmospheric perspective.

There are many ways of establishing a sense of depth in a landscape. For example, figures are larger in the foreground, smaller in the background. Overlapping of shapes contributes to the effect. Distant objects have fewer details. That decorative grate on the lower left helps to situate the viewer as apart from the scene. 

"Atmospheric perspective" is the use of lighter, duller colours to suggest items further away. The theory is that the further the distance, the more atmospheric particles separate the eye from the subject, lightening and dulling the distant objects. This effect is readily observed when looking at a series of distant hills.