MMFA 2019: A Model in the Studio

A MODEL IN THE STUDIO

MONTREAL 1880-1950

NEW ACQUISITIONS

January 29 – May 26, 2019

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' (MMFA) exhibition A Model in the Studio, Montreal 1880-1950: New Acquisitions, illustrates the development of live model representation in works by Montreal's leading artists.

Drawing life models was traditionally taught at the old masters’ studios and later at art schools as an indispensable study of the body’s proportions, poses, musculature, as well as the model’s overall compartment, including action, mood and even the emotion expressed through the bodily spacial gesture. It no longer seems to be viewed as fundamental in present day art teaching settings. Yet, I recently visited a school of animation art where nude model drawing techniques are taught and diligently attended by the future video games and futuristic films artists.

At the end of the 18^th and the beginning of the 19^th centuries, at the Montreal art academy, only men were permitted to enrol into nude drawing classes. The female students were only allowed to draw models with their private parts covered, even when working with female models. There was also big difference between works executed by the academy students and the more daring posing from the artists’ own studios, whose drawings were rarely exhibited before the 1920s.

Additionally, nude images were censured in the art books of that time by either blackening them completely, or by inserting white strips to cover anatomically correctly depicted private parts. The visitors will have a chance to see example of such censorship at the exhibition.

Of the 70 works chosen for this show, most have never been exhibited before or are recent acquisitions. They demonstrate the creative impact of the nude drawing training process that was once the foundation of all representations of the human body. From the quick sketch to the completed drawing, not only the model but also the artist’s personality is revealed in the lines he or she created.

The exhibition features a number of graphic artworks, several pochades (the type of sketches used in painting) and sculptures, all executed between the late 19th century and mid-20th century. They were made by some thirty artists – including five women – who worked in Montreal: Louis Archambault, Ernest Aubin, Henri Beau, Fritz Brandtner, William Brymner, Edmond Dyonnet, Clarence Gagnon, Pierre Gauvreau, Henri Hébert, Louis-Philippe Hébert, Prudence Heward, Edwin Holgate, Alfred Laliberté, Ozias Leduc, Jean-Onésime Legault, Arthur Lismer, John Lyman, Mabel May, Rita Mount, Louis Muhlstock, Ernst Neumann, Moe Reinblatt, Jori Smith, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté and Lilias Torrance Newton.

Included is also a single contemporary work in a different medium: photography. In this black and white image that very much resembles a pencil drawing, the artist Donigan Cumming sought to provide some perspective for the timelessness and universal value of a nude body study of an ageing couple.

Jacques Des Rochers, the MMFA’s curator of Quebec and Canadian art before 1945 and also curator of the exhibition, explains the motivations for the show:

“Everyone recognizes the importance of representing the human body; it is such a cliché that we often fail to study its development in the studio, which is taken for granted. Although in the Western world it is associated with academicism and modernism, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the way in which it evolved in the Montreal context, with the help of recent acquisitions.”

The MMFA and live models in Quebec and Canada

The MMFA possesses an enviable collection of representations of live models by Quebec and Canadian artists. Interestingly, the Museum’s first academic nude, Eve, an 1879 painting by Wyatt Eaton, was only acquired in 1922, in the decade that gave rise to the modern nude. Then, in 1932, the Museum was offered its first modern nude, titled Studio Scenes No. 2: The Rest Period by Ernst Neumann.

The Museum’s recent major acquisitions include most notably Kneeling Nude in Profile or Sleeping Muse, 1921, and Discouragement, 1924, by Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté; a group of drawings by John Lyman, Prudence Heward, Pierre Gauvreau and Louis Archambault, as well as bronzes by Louis-Philippe Hébert, Henri Hébert and Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté.

The Art Association of Montreal

The creation of an art school was among the goals the Art Association of Montreal (AAM, today’s Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) set itself when it was founded in 1860. However, twenty years went by before the school’s first spaces were opened and an advanced course was offered. The art school, directed in 1883 by Robert Harris and then by William Brymner from 1886 to 1921, offered students an academic type of instruction modelled on that of the Paris studios in which Brymner had trained. From its inception, the AAM’s art school presented an annual exhibition of its students’ academic drawings and awarded prizes to them. As of 1912, the AAM was housed in a new Sherbrooke Street building, where the art school occupied three huge studios—the very ones where Edwin Holgate would give lessons in drawing in the 1930s. In 1940, Arthur Lismer agreed to be the director of the school, which became the School of Art and Design in 1943. In the years following World War II, many artists who were resistant to academicism, including Louis Archambault, joined the school as teachers and offered other perspectives. A number of the artists who taught at or attended the school are represented in the exhibition

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The exhibition is located at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Graphic Arts Centre, Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion – Level S2 

For more information about the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibitions and activities, visit the museum's website.