Canadian Art: Alexandre-François Desportes
Montreal has terrific museums. The McCord, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Musée d'art contemporain, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts—together they present an impressively wide range of objects and images that feed curiosity across art disciplines and histories. They also account for much of the critical mass that gives Montreal its discerning cultural identity. Over the past year, they became a home away from home during the time I spent in the city working towards this special issue of Canadian Art. So different in mood and space from one another, they were a restorative, regular habit, especially the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In the 1960s, as a high-school student, I remember walking into an installation lit by black lights and strobe lights in an exhibition there. Soon, such lights were pretty common in teenage suburban basements, but the MMFA had them first. This year, there were no strobes or black lights, just the usual floods and spots. Under one, on an upstairs permanent-collection floor, was this painting by Alexandre-François Desportes. Desportes worked as painter of the hunt for Louis XIV, France's Sun King. Whether it was the king's pet or his own, Desportes' cockatoo had ended up sharing a room with a Poussin, in a city where the temperature can dip to -30ºC. Desportes painted a startled bird, a split second of arching wings and flared feathers. It hung in a gold-leaf frame that rhymed with the bird's movement and carried it across time into the museum. In its fragile elegance and sophisticated presentation, the painting seemed a perfect extension of the contemporary art I had been seeing in the city. It was intimate, dramatic and timeless in its concerns, and a bit surprised by an outside gaze.
Winter 2003
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