At the Museum: Visiting Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec
We left behind the mountains of Montréal and drove into Québec City, stopping for an evening visit at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec. It was the final stop on our recent Canada vacation, the part of the trip we were most looking forward to with our stay in the fabled Château Frontenac and the romantic, cobblestone streets of Old Québec I had visited as a child but not returned to since. I am not Québécoise, but I am more generally French Canadian through my paternal grandfather, and I feel a connection to this small piece of the Old World preserved remarkably well inside the old city walls.
At MNBAQ, we viewed five rooms that comprise the 350 Years of Artistic Practices in Québec exhibit. Each room is devoted to one of five themes — Believing, Becoming, Imagining, Feeling, and Challenging — and the journey takes you from the early colonial days of New France through the first half of the twentieth century.
Believing
This breathtaking room holds all of the Old World Catholic splendor. A mass of gold, like a towering Roman temple rises above you, flanked by golden saints, myriad iterations of Madonna and Child, angels with hands raised in exultant gestures. There’s a figure of Saint Gabriel and of Saint Michael slaying the dragon. His left hand lifts what appears to be a barbed palm frond. His right hand holds a chain, leashing the demon to submission. And it does look like a demon. Under the weight of the saint’s Roman sandal, the creature writhes, its red tongue coiled out like a raw piece of flesh, its tail ending in the satanic point of an arrow.
The main gold feature (gold in appearance, not necessarily material, as most of the objects in this exhibit are made of gilded wood) is the temple-like structure in the center of the room, the Old High Altar of Saint Anne de Beaupré. I remember visiting the shrine devoted to her when I was last in Québec. Nuns in full habits climbed the many stairs on their knees.
At the back of the room, before a darkened alcove that holds three paintings, there’s a large, almost life-size crucifix hanging on the wall. His mouth is open so you can see the row of his upper teeth, the hollow space above his tongue. I was surprised by the immediacy of it, his humanity.
Becoming
The next room shifts focus from a unified, outward vision of God and the sacred, something shared and unshakeable, holding a sort of collective power that might be necessary for building a new country on a different continent, to an individual, inward focus on the self. A few paintings of saints, a silver chalice for Eucharistic wine are afterthoughts on the far walls of the exhibit, still binding everyone with a common purpose but secondary to the many individuals in the portraits and photographs.
The daguerreotypes along the front wall look at first like tiny, dull mirrors until you stand square in front of them and can make out the faces, shift them into focus. I see myself, too, in the paintings — see the modern world dressed up and only slightly disguised. There’s a portrait of two sisters in matching blue dresses, their hair curled into the same style of ringlets, a small spaniel resting on their laps. It’s a wonder that almost two centuries ago, their parents dressed them up to match for the portrait just as modern parents coordinate siblings in family photos. There are two brothers as well, in matching black shirts with white collars, a stern woman wearing a brooch around her neck, itself a miniature portrait. There’s another pair of sisters sitting together, a young girl reaching out to hold her father’s pocket watch, a woman whose outfit boasts an intricate detail of lace and a row of red buttons, remarkable in their reflection of light.
Imagining
This room conveyed a sense of struggling, of trying to sort things out, the many frictions of societal upheaval in the nineteenth century. While there are still religious works — a statue of Mary leaning over her child in the manger, of Jesus lying in the tomb, wounds visible on his feet — the focus is elsewhere. The new country has proved prosperous, for some. Alongside heavy upholstered chairs and large mirrors with rich wood trimmings are wall-length paintings of political events, rallies with raised flags. This room holds two series of statues by Louis-Philippe Hébert. To the left, cream and brown-painted plaster figures of important men with royal titles, Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine among them. To the right, a line of bronze statues representing First Nations individuals. There are two of women standing languidly as if after bathing, in a style reminiscent of the Greeks and Romans. Another woman flees a massacre, carrying her two children. A man raises a sickle, preparing a brutal attack.
Feeling
From the conflict of the previous room, we move to the harmony of the next, a brightly lit, well-organized exhibit of Impressionist paintings. Many are idyllic landscapes, peaceful interactions with nature — a woman reading in the garden, her child resting in a pram, a man herding cows. In La Moisson, the young woman holding sheaves of wheat is almost indistinguishable from her surroundings, the same yellow and blue brushstrokes forming her dress as the grass and sky behind her.
One somber part of this room is the alcove. Surrounded by gloomy, austere landscapes and seascapes, a Renoir painting rests sealed in a glass case. There are apples on a plate, and a large burnt patch near the center of the canvas. The display notes that it was stolen and vandalized in 1964.
Challenging
Discord. Nearly chaos. This final room containing art from the first half of the twentieth century holds all manner of objects, paintings, sculptures, furniture, all positioned at slanted angles and with few apparent commonalities. There are silver candy dishes, cabinets and armchairs, a portrait of a doctor in his office with volumes of art books on his desk, geometric paintings, abstract paintings, statues of saints, more flawed and realistic than before. I stop at a large, floor-to-ceiling painting of four religious figures, Saint Jean de Dieu by Jean Dallaire. It is modern and with compassion, like a compromise or reconciliation.
The angel looks quite contemporary, her features not at all stylized but rather familiar. She’s almost like someone you could see in everyday life, if not for her wings, pink and green and blue, soft pastels swept out toward the white-tipped feathers. Saint Mary and the mortal woman are similarly realistic, of flesh. They reach out to Jean de Dieu, gaze softly at him. And he looks to be in peaceful prayer. Above the four figures, clouds part to show thin rivulets of blue sky. As the gaze rises, it looks as though the breaks in the clouds are shaped like doves, or like flocks of geese leaning their long necks toward an instinctive home.
I stop here with a portrait of the sacred tempered by and inclusive of the natural. It seems like a good place to rest.
