MMFA 2025: Bad Giirls Only

BAD GIRLS ONLY

Women and the Seven Deadly Sins

Rarely seen works from the MMFA's collection of prints and drawings

March 26 – August 10, 2025

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) presents to the public close to 30 works from its collection by some of the biggest names in art history. The prints and drawings on display date from the Early Modern period (late 15th through the 17th century). They depict female allegories of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, sloth, wrath, envy, greed, gluttony, and lust. Bad Girls Only exhibition tells the story of how women became associated with sin, the role art played to propagate that idea, and how this might still show up in our lives today.

Since the Middle Ages, the Seven Deadly Sins have been traditionally represented as female allegories, each with their own identifying physical characteristics and attributes. This Christian morality code formally established in the 6th century had a particularly strong impact on the lives of women, who were viewed as naturally inclined towards sin and generally lacking in physical and moral stature. By turning our gaze on the role these images played in society, this exhibition examines the underlying reasons why the female body – often eroticized – was used to illustrate sin. Did the male artists of that era used female subjects to project their own sinful desires outside of themselves onto women to justify their own sins? 

Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Chief Curator at the MMFA. Stated about the exhibition:

"Visitors will leave Bad Girls Only with a vivid snapshot of a fascinating and ever-relevant period in history. The exhibition reveals the exceptional quality of the Museum's collection of works on paper, and helps us to better understand the codes and conventions that shape the way we navigate the world around us."

Chloé M. Pelletier, Curator of European Art (before 1800) at the MMFA. elaborated:

"These historical depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins merit appreciation, not only for what they can tell us about women's lived experiences in the past, but also for their originality and the remarkable skill it took to create them. The diversity, expressiveness and rich detail of the exhibited works will captivate audiences."

The exhibition features two prints by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) as well as an impressive series of preparatory drawings by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). These highlights of the MMFA's drawings collection will be shown for the first time since 1980 alongside Jacob Matham's (1571-1631) prints made after them. Additional works by Matham and a series by Hieronymous Wierix (1553-1619) enrich the exhibition.

 
Engaging didactic materials – including a vitrine of materials and a process video featuring a local artist – help audiences understand the technically and artistically sophisticated process of translating drawing into print.

 
Bad Girls Only concludes with an interactive wall featuring question cards that invite visitors to reflect on the ways that rhetoric around the Seven Deadly Sins shows up in our daily lives. The goal of these questions, ranging from profound to playful, is to identify and then reframe the sense of shame that is naturalized in so many of us around these seven traits deemed sinful by society over a millennium ago.
 

CREDITS

An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
It is curated by Chloé M. Pelletier, Curator of European Art (before 1800), MMFA.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Public Partners: Conseil des arts de Montréal and the Government of Quebec
Official Sponsor: Air Canada, Air Canada Cargo and Denalt Paints
Media Partner: La Presse

All photos @Nadia Slejskova

Visit the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts website to check on the opening hours and to purchase your tickets online.

Divina Dali

 

DIVINA DALI

AT GRAND QUAY

OF THE PORT OF MONTREAL

July 16 - October 31, 2021 

  

This exhibition is a journey into Dante Alighieri’s the beyond world, passing through Dali’s surrealism. Thes exhibition presents more than100 works that celebrate the Spanish artist Salvador Dali as well as the Italian writer Dante. It also features Dali’s monumental work he created n 1945 that had never before been exhibited. Additionally, there are several large scale photos.

Dali’s  works on display are his original watercolour illustrations of the Dante Alighieri’s narrative poem The Divine Comedy written between 1308 and 1320. Allegorically, the poem represents a state of the soul after death, including the divine justice, punishment or reward. According to the Western church's postulates established at about those times, both Dante’s poem and the exhibition are divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatory and Paradiso. The Divine Comedy is considered to be the pivotal work in Italian literature. It helped to establish the Tuscan language in which it was written as the standardized  Italian language.

When planning Dante’s 700th birthday celebrations in the early 1950s, the Italian government commissioned Salvador Dali to create 100 illustrations for a commemorative edition of the Divine Comedy. They considered Dalí’s hyper-realistic, bizarre, and nightmarish imagery the perfect pairing to Dante’s visions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. However, the public outcry against the commissioning of a Spanish artist to accompany the work of an Italian cultural hero forced the Italian government to revoke its support for the project. Undaunted, Dalí worked with a French publisher to have 100 wood engravings (one for each of The Divine Comedy’s verses) made after his watercolours which were completed and published in 1963. Those same original watercolours are presently exhibited in Montreal.

Divina Dalí offers visitors a unique opportunity to travel through three imaginary worlds: Hell, the Purgatory and Heaven. It represent a return, an encounter, seven centuries apart, between the literary work of Dante and the pictorial talent of Salvador Dalí.

The exhibition was based on an original idea from LaGirafe en feu. It was conceived in a spirit of innovation and even driven by some current issues. It twill allow visitors to experience a more intimate and often overlooked dimension of Salvador Dalí's creation by becoming familiar with Dante's major work Divina Commedia, one of the prominent humanist treatises in literature.

This is the exhibition's premiere. It has never been presented anywhere else in the world. It was curated by Raynald Michaud.

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ABOUT

LaGirafe en feu plans, designs, scripts and produces exhibitions dedicated to the work of Salvador Dalí. Embodying Dalí's very spirit of surprising and creating events, it initiates unusual collaborations with current artists; drawing on Quebec know-how and genius, without ever losing the essence of the works of the Catalan master.  Divina Dalí is an original idea from La Girafe en feu.

Raynald Michaud - the Commissioner Artistic director, author, director and designer of exhibitions, shows and events in public and private cultural enterprises. Developer of innovative animation concepts and collaborator of numerous cultural bodies including the Pointe-à-Callières Museum, Space for Life and the Just for Laughs Museum. Recipient of many prestigious awards.

Visit the DIVINA DALI website.

To buy tickets.

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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Hover you mouse over images for description  and credits.

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.

MMFA 2028: From the Hands of the Masters II

FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS II: 
FROM PARMIGIANINO TO MATISSE
April 10 – August 12, 2018

On April 13, 2018, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) unveiled 55 drawings from a Montreal private collection that span from the 16th to the 20th century. As part of this exhibition, the MMFA also presented some twenty other master drawings from artists including Delacroix, Greuze, Ingres and Romney that were recently given to the Museum by the anonymous collector.

FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS II: FROM PARMIGIANINO TO MATISSE brings together works on paper by François Boucher, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Juan Gris, Katsushika Hokusai, Victor Hugo, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Amadeo Modigliani, Gustave Moreau, Berthe Morisot, Parmigianino, Camille Pissarro, Giorgio Vasari, James McNeill Whistler, and Antoine Watteau.

The exhibition also features a selection of 20 drawings by François Boucher, Eugène Delacroix, Ciro Ferri, Charles de la Fosse, Théodore Géricault, Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, le Guerchin, Charles-Nicolas Cochin le Jeune, Michel Corneille le Jeune, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacob Jordaens, Carlo Maratti, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Domenico Piola, Sebastiano Ricci, George Romney, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Orazio Samacchini, among the artworks given to the Museum by the same anonymous Montreal collector. Many of them are being displayed at the Museum for the first time.

The subjects range from studies for religious compositions to sensuous female nudes, from the Virgin to a ballerina, from male portraits to battling Japanese warriors. Also on display are a variety of landscapes, from a wintry sixteenth-century Northern European village scene to a lush tropical jungle in Venezuela, from the rocky coast of Guernsey to the fields of Normandy and an Impressionist vision of the countryside near Paris, and even the picturesque crossing of an arched bridge in nineteenth-century Japan. Still-lifes from the early period of Cubism also are presented, as is a black paper cut-out of an eagle by the renowned French author Victor Hugo.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is the repository of one of the most important graphic arts collections in Canada, encompassing prints, drawings and photographs that survey over five centuries of graphic achievement and include masterpieces by a broad diversity of artists spanning the history of European and North American art.

Click on images to enlarge them.
All photos above by Nadia Slejskova.
The last image in this article below courtesy of MMFA.

The exhibition is located at the MMFA's Graphic Arts Centre
Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, Level S2 

This exhibition is a successor to a MMFA 2013 exhibition. You can read about the original FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS  here.

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), Study of a Man Gesturing on a Barrel,
Supported by Another Figure for The Raft of the Medusa, 1819,
pen and ink, heightened with gouache on blue paper.
On loan from a private collection.

MMFA 2017 - Adel Abdessemed

CONFLICT

February 16 - May 7, 2017

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is presenting an immersive work by Franco-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed entitled CONFLICT. Surrounding visitors on all sides, this installation features a group of 31 black chalk drawings of life-sized military figures with their guns drawn.

An additional drawing, Cri (2007) - see just above to the left - was created by the artist especially for this project. It was inspired by the Nick Ut’s famous Vietnam War photograph of the “Napalm Girl” taken following a napalm attack in 1972. 

That Nick Ut's photo shown just above has won World Press Photo competition acclaim. The naked running girl burned by the napalm and screaming from pain is Kim Phuc. She is presently a UNESCO’s Goodwill Ambassador, and has been living in Canada since 1994.

In his work, Adel Abdessemed question violence and the symbolism of war images. The artist conjures from our memories an iconic photograph and allies himself with civilian victims of war and refugees. “I don’t talk, I don’t write, I scream,” he declared.

The work attempts to put a visitor into a situation when a civilian would feel total terror of being encircled by aggressive-looking, armed solders. But the true realism of such a setting is not conjured sufficiently realistically or strongly, and it remains largely an intellectual experience. It lucks the immediacy of visceral horror that people must feel in similar real situations. Nevertheless, the installation succeeds in making people to ponder on such situations and to feel a true aversion towards war, aggression, and any atrocity. 

This installation is part the Year for Peace at the Museum, a vast programme of activities and exhibitions launched in November 2016.

About Adel Abdessemed

A French national, Adel Abdessemed was born in 1971 in Constantine, Algeria. He trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Batna, then in Algiers and Lyons. His work has been shown at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Parasol UnitFoundation for Contemporary Art, London. In 2012, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, hosted a major retrospective of his work. In 2015, he took part in the 56th Venice Biennale. His work can be found in prestigious collections, including the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fondation François Pinault in Venice and the Fondation Yuz in Shanghai.

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Hover your mouse over images for description and credits.

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

MMFA 2016: Recovery of Antiquity

THE RECOVERY OF ANTIQUITY:

FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO NEOCLASSICISM IN FRANCE AND ITALY

January 12 - June 26, 2016

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ upcoming exhibition Pompeii: A Roman City provided the MMFA with an opportunity to present The Recovery of Antiquity exhibition as an opening act-preview of antiquity for the Pompeii exhibition. The MMFA is putting on view for the public a number of Neoclassical drawings from their permanent collection. This exhibition reveals the keen interest of artists from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century for antiquities.

Although the Ancient Greece and Rome had long served as an inspiration for artists, the works on paper at this exhibition reveal that the discoveries and excavations at the Herculaneum and Pompeii in the eighteenth century renewed that interest. 

The selection of graphic works from the Museum’s collection features over fifty prints and drawings, including several new acquisitions. The visitor will see works works by French masters like François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Anne-Louis Girodet, as well as several Italian artists. Some of these works are being exhibited for the first time.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover you mouse over images for description and credits.

For more information, visit the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts website.