History

From the Montreal Art Association to The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Thus began the history of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which came into being in 1860 as the Art Association of Montreal.  In this city, where large numbers of art-lovers and art-collectors were to be found, and where a variety of artistic traditions flourished—some of them dating back to the time of French rule—there was no school of art and no museum, nor even any venue at which exhibitions could be mounted.  And yet Montreal was the most important city in British North America at the time: it was the cradle of the Canadian industrial revolution, the hub of waterway, maritime, and railway transport, and the seat of the country’s great financial institutions.  It was therefore not surprising that a group of wealthy public-spirited Montreal citizens should think of setting up an ‘association’ devoted to the spread of the fine arts, in line with a philanthropic tradition that was very widespread in North America.  Unfortunately, the collectors’ resources fell short of their aspirations, and until 1879 the activities of the Art Association were confined to a handful of exhibitions and the occasional drawing-class.

The real breakthrough was due to a Montreal merchant by the name of Benaiah Gibb.  In 1877, Gibb bequeathed the Art Association a plot of land, a sum of money to be used to build a museum, and a modest collection of European paintings and sculptures which formed the nub of the institution’s permanent collection.  Located in the business quarter, the Art Gallery inaugurated in 1879 was the first building in Canada to be specifically designed to house a collection of works of art.  It consisted of a large exhibition-hall with overhead lighting, a small room set aside for watercolours, and a reading-room.  Every year, the Art Association organized two major events in the gallery: an exhibition of works lent by its members—several of whom owned extensive collections of European art; and a Spring Exhibition, which was devoted to living Canadian artists.  From the 1880s, the Art Association regularly purchased works exhibited at the Spring Exhibition, and also works produced by the best students at its school of art, thus building up a basic collection of Canadian art.

In 1892, John W. Tempest bequeathed to the Art Association some sixty canvases and watercolours, together with a sum of money to be ‘expended in the purchase of foreign pictures only, exclusive of American or modern British pictures which I consider to be too costly in proportion to their merit’.  As early as 1894, the Art Association was able to put the Tempest Fund to use for the purchase of the very fine Interior with a Woman Playing a Virginal by Emanuel de Witte, which is still one of the collection’s major works.  The sum bequeathed by Tempest continued to be the main source of funds for the purchase of European art until the mid-1950s.

In the beginning of the year 1860, a number of the lovers of the fine arts in Montreal, believing that the time has arrived when much good might be done by a combined effort to promote a taste for those arts among the people of Montreal, called a public meeting at which the subject was discussed and a Committee appointed to draft a Constitution and regulations for a Society having that object in view.

— Report of the General Meeting of the AAM , 1865

Even greater in size, the bequest by Agnes and William John Learmont, made in 1909, added 126 canvases to the collection.  These were mostly paintings by artists of the Hague and Barbizon schools, which were very popular with Montreal collectors at this time, plus a few eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English works and a magnificent drawing by Rembrandt.  The Learmont Bequest also included a number of European and Far Eastern ceramics, and these formed the first complement of decorative art-objects in the museum’s collection.

The arrival of the Learmont Collection pointed up the very small size of the Art Gallery’s premises, given that the collection now comprised several hundred objects: paintings, watercolours, prints, a few bronzes, plaster casts, and ceramics.  Having considered extending the existing museum in 1909, the members of the Art Association’s council decided instead to buy a site on Sherbrooke Street, in the heart of the very smart ‘Square Mile’ district—later known as the ‘Golden Square Mile’—where they built a museum consonant with their aspirations.

In line with the wishes of the Art Association’s council, the new museum, designed by the architects Edward and William S. Maxwell, was sober and imposing in appearance.  It had façades in white marble, a high portico with colonnade, a monumental staircase, and discreet decoration in low relief.  The building comprised several large exhibition-rooms with overhead lighting, a lecture-hall, a library, and the art-school studios.

The museum was opened in December 1912 and in the following year it welcomed some 50,000 visitors.  The atmosphere of optimism gave no hint of the impending First World War, which was to commandeer a large part of the country’s human and financial resources.  The British-born families who had supported the Art Association since its foundation were amongst the hardest hit.  The opening of the new museum also, alas, occurred in the decade that saw the disappearance, one by one, of Montreal’s greatest collectors—those magnates who had amassed their fortunes in the previous century thanks to the construction of the Canadian transcontinental railway.  Sir George Drummond died in 1910, James Ross in 1913, Lord Strathcona in 1914, Sir William Van Horne in 1915, and R. B. Angus in 1922.  It was the end of the golden age of Montreal collections, loans from which had made up the bulk of the annual exhibitions of European painting organized by the Art Association.  Several of these collections were dispersed—those belonging to Drummond and Ross were sold off in their entirety at public auction a few years after their deaths—others made their way back, either in whole or in part, to the Montreal museum.  Thus, in 1927, Lord Strathcona’s grandson, Donald Sterling Palmer, made a gift to the Art Association of a hundred or so paintings from the family collection, including Tissot’s famous October.  Adaline Van Horne, who had inherited a quarter of her father’s collection, bequeathed her share to the Art Association in 1941.  It comprised about sixty paintings by both old and new masters: El Greco, Ruisdael, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Tiepolo, Daumier, Renoir, Cézanne, and others.

When the new museum was built, the Art Association’s council had expressed the desire to extend its field of activities to cover the decorative arts—as many other North American institutions were doing at the turn of the century.  The department of decorative arts was created in 1917 and was entrusted to Frederick Cleveland Morgan, who served as voluntary keeper of the collection from 1917 until his death in 1962.  An enthusiastic collector and indefatigable keeper, Morgan is  reputed to have garnered more than 7,000 items for the museum over this period, in the form of purchases, bequests, and gifts. As manager of the decorative-arts section in the family department-store of Henry Morgan & Co., Morgan was called upon to travel all over the world, and he made use of these trips to expand the museum’s collections.

Drawing its inspiration from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Association’s department of decorative arts initially saw itself as fulfilling an educational function and adopted a method of classifying objects based on techniques and materials.  Little by little, however, the collection became more diverse, and from the 1930s it turned into a huge and encyclopaedic panorama featuring every continent and every age.  From its inception, the department had been known as a ‘museum’—a term that can be applied to all kinds of collections, whereas an ‘art gallery’ is generally a museum of painting and sculpture.  Because of the size of the department, however, the institution eventually adopted a name that encompassed all the collections, and in 1948 it became the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.  It was not until the 1960s that the name was officially made bilingual.

During the 1940s, the establishment in Sherbrooke Street was taken over by young painters.  The Spring Exhibitions, which the Art Association had continued to hold every year (the last was to be held in 1967), saw the emergence of a new generation of self-styled ‘revolutionary’ artists.  In some years, the works submitted by these painters, several of whom were members of the Contemporary Arts Society, led by John Lyman and Paul-Emile Borduas, caused such dissension that from 1944 it was necessary to have two panels of judges, one academic, the other modern, the exhibitors being free to submit their works to either.  In 1949, the museum decided to make space on its walls for the young artists, and it opened a room—Gallery XII—devoted to the new painting.

The institution’s new name, and the opening of a room devoted to contemporary art, were only the first signs of the radical changes which the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was to undergo in the decades that followed—in its organization and funding-arrangements as well as in its programs and the development of its collections.  These changes began as early as 1947, with the official appointment of the museum’s first director.  Since its creation, the Art Association had operated on the basis of voluntary input from the council and its members.  And being a private body, it had, up to this time, had no other source of funding except the contributions of its members.  This situation changed in the course of the 1950s, when the Museum of Fine Arts received its first grants from the Montreal authorities and the Canada Council.  At the start of the 1960s, the government of Quebec approved a substantial annual operating subsidy for the museum.

The Museum of Fine Arts none the less continued to receive numerous gifts and bequests, and these were to continue for many years to be the main source of additions to the collection.  From the time of the Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest in 1955, the museum benefited from a substantial acquisitions-fund for the purchase of both foreign and Canadian works.  Several gifts and bequests were made by the heirs or descendants of the great collectors who had founded the Art Association.  Others were made by new industrial magnates such as Joseph-Arthur Simard, who, in 1959, donated a remarkable collection of 3,000 Japanese incense-boxes that had formerly belonged to the French statesman Georges Clemenceau.

The centenary of the Art Association, in 1960, was marked by the publication of a catalogue of selected works from the collection and a guide to the museum.  1960 also marked the start of the ‘Quiet Revolution’, a far-reaching movement of social modernization in Quebec.  That year also saw the death of the Quebec painter Paul-Emile Borduas, an unwitting prophet of this trend to modernity, who was then living in Paris: it was at this time that Gérard Lortie, a collector and a friend of Borduas, made a gift to the museum of the painting The Black Star, considered to be the artist’s masterpiece.  It was also at the start of the 1960s that the museum began a program of exhibitions designed for a mass public (Tutankhamoun, Rodin, Picasso).  They were to be an out-and-out success.  The annual number of visitors to the museum soon exceeded 300,000.

Amongst the vagaries that have marked the museum’s history was the spectacular theft, in 1972, of fifty or so works by, amongst others, Rubens, Rembrandt, Corot, and Delacroix, which were never recovered.  The following year, the museum closed for a period of three years for major refurbishment and extension.  When it was reopened, in 1976, two exhibitions were held which recalled the dual vocation of the museum, bound up as it is with both past and present art.  One of these was Master Paintings from the Hermitage, and the other Forum 76, which brought together works by various contemporary artists.  A new guide to the collections was published in 1977.  That same year, five years short of its centenary, the school of art closed its doors for the last time.

The 1980s marked a turning-point in the institution’s history.  In 1984, the Museum of Fine Arts joined with the Petit Palais in Paris to organize an exhibition of works by William Bouguereau.  This was the prelude to a series of events which were to bring the institution to international prominence. They included, most notably: Leonardo da Vinci, Engineer and Architect (1987); The 1920s: Age of the Metropolis (1991); and Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe (1995).  From the late 1990s, several exhibitions organized either by the Museum of Fine Arts itself or by the latter in collaboration with other museums, went on tour abroad.  These included: Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avant-garde (1999), in Barcelona and Venice; The Triumph of the Baroque (1999), in Venice, Washington, and Marseilles; Hitchcock and Art (2001), in Paris; and Picasso érotique (2001), in Paris and Barcelona, Édouard Vuillard, Post-Impressionist Master (2003), in Washington and Paris, Ruhlmann, Genius of Art Deco (2004), in New York, Right under the Sun, Painting in Provence, from Romanticism to Modernism (1750-1920), (2005), in Marseilles. In parallel with these international events, the museum organized large-scale retrospectives of Canadian artists: Morrice (1986); Borduas (1988); Riopelle (1991); Ozias Leduc (1995); Jean Paul Riopelle (2002); Edwin Holgate (2005).

The 1991 Riopelle retrospective was the first exhibition to be held in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ new building—a major expansion-project completed with the assistance of governments, the business community, and numerous benefactors.  The building stands on the south side of Sherbrooke Street, facing the one built in 1912.  To design it, the museum called upon the renowned international architect Moshe Safdie, creator of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec.  Safdie wanted to give the new entrance to the Montreal museum a monumental appearance that would match that of the Maxwell brothers’ neoclassical portico but at the same time signal a radically different concept of the museum.  The 1912 portico frames a set of heavy oak and bronze doors that stand as a bulwark protecting treasures contained in a temple to art.  Safdie’s great arch in white marble, on the other hand, opens onto an entrance-hall flooded in light from a huge glazed roof.  This transparent entrance is located at street level and affords a view of the internal to-ings and fro-ings—a continuation, as it were, of the movement in the street.  The bulk of the new building, for its part, blends into the urban surroundings, thanks, amongst other things, to the incorporation of façades built at the beginning of the century.  The north and south buildings are linked by a series of vaulted underground passageways housing collections devoted to Ancient cultures.  Having doubled the amount of exhibition space available to it and having relocated its collections on either side of Sherbrooke Street, the museum is now able to welcome more than 500,000 visitors a year.

In January 2000, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts received one of the most impressive  gifts made to it in its history: the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, comprising some 5,000 items of decorative art dating from the end of the 1930s onwards.  The whole collection of the former Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, one of the most important in North America, thus entered the museum.  When they began the collection in 1979, the Stewarts were amongst the first to show an interest in ensuring the survival of post-war international design.  The Museum of Fine Arts’ collection of paintings also benefited from the generosity of Michal and Renata Hornstein, another couple of outstanding collectors and patrons of the arts.  The very many gifts they have made since the 1980s have considerably enriched, in particular, the collections of seventeenth-century Dutch, Italian, and French masters.  The Hornsteins also made a gift to the museum of more than 300 drawings by the Swiss symbolist Ferdinand Hodler—the largest collection of graphic works by the artist in the world.

The spirit that moved the founders of the Art Association in 1860 has never yet failed the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, as is eloquently demonstrated by the indefatigable support given by its members, sometimes over several generations, and by the generous assistance provided by numerous patrons.  At the beginning of 2001, following an extremely fruitful fundraising campaign, the museum was able to announce a substantial increase in its acquisitions-fund, and also the creation of an exhibitions fund, which will enable it, over the coming years, to pursue its ambitious program of international exhibitions.

Text based on  the book "The Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Fondation BNP Paribas, 2001"