The following videos and DVDs are available for viewing in our Documentation Centre:

François-Marc Gagnon
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Lecture Series
Maxwell Cummings Auditorium
May / June 2005
Spirituality in Canadian Art:

1) Spirituality in First Nations Art
This lecture discusses West Coast First Nations art and the problematic nature of using European religious concepts in its analysis.

2) Art and Religion in New France
This lecture opens with a detailed analysis of the Ursuline painting, France Bringing the Faith to the Hurons, and the problems that occur when images are used by religious missionaries. We will also examine ex-votos and church paintings to investigate how the needs of recently converted Amerindians influenced the religious iconography of New France.

3) The Religious Paintings of Ozias Leduc
Ozias Leduc painted church interiors on many occasions throughout his career including those of the cathedral in Joliette and the Church of Notre-Dame-de-la- Présentation in Shawinigan. In general, however, art critics have failed to show much interest in these works. Leduc’s church paintings deserve a closer look because they display the same inventiveness and mastery found in his secular work.

4) Lawren Harris and Emily Carr
While Harris advocated theosophy, Carr opted for a more diffuse religious feeling in tune with the spirituality of the First Nations. How did these beliefs inform their work?

5) Faith or Folklore?
Many modern English-speaking artists were influenced by the writings and activities of the folklorist Marius Barbeau. This asks the question whether their paintings expressed a perception of Catholicism as a kind of peasant folklore.

6) Jacques Hurtubise and Psychedelic Art
At first glance there seems little in the work of contemporary painter Jacques Hurtubise to convey spirituality. But some of his works, particularly those that evoke great spell-binding masks, indicate the various paths the artist has taken in the quest for his inner self.

François-Marc Gagnon
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Lecture Series
Maxwell Cummings Auditorium
May / June 2004
The Human Figure in Canadian Art:

1) Four Portraits of Nuns by Antoine Plamondon
These four portraits figure among the artist’s masterpieces and reveal an understanding of the human figure that is completely defined by religious art.

2) The Habitant in the Work of Suzor-Côté
These remarkable portraits of pioneers painted by Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor- Côté were strongly influenced by “agriculturalist” thinking. They convey a ruralist view of Quebeckers attached to the land, their language and their religion, and present an image that subsequent generations would strongly challenge.

3) The Last of the Hurons by Antoine Plamondon
The figure of the Indian in the nineteenth century is not so much representative of another culture, but rather a pretext for a lament on the fate that awaited French Canadians in light of Lord Durham’s Report that advocated the union of the two Canadas.

4) Pellan, Borduas and the Human Figure
Neither Pellan nor Borduas was renowned for his handling of the human figure because of their association with abstract art. Nevertheless, they were both interested in the human figure at crucial points in their careers.

5) Françoise Sullivan and the Figure in Motion
The work of Françoise Sullivan, recently featured in an exhibition at the Museum, is highly diversified, ranging from dance to sculpture and conceptual art to painting. However there is a common thread that unites her work in all of these disciplines: the figure in motion.

6) Michael Snow’s Walking Woman
From 1962 to 1971, Toronto artist Michael Snow lived in New York and was celebrated for a series of works collectively entitled Walking Woman. The image would become a Pop Art icon for the active modern woman;  but does this association really do justice to Snow’s intentions?

François-Marc Gagnon
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Lecture Series
Maxwell Cummings Auditorium
May / June 2003
Painting Reality: From Krieghoff to Colville:

1) Cornelius Krieghoff and the Image of the Other
Cornelius Krieghoff has been criticized for painting a romanticized view of Native people and a pejorative view of French Canadians. Is it time to re-evaluate these perceptions?

2) Paul Kane: Reporter or Reconstructionist?
Paul Kane viewed himself as a historian of Canada’s Native cultures. His paintings are in part the result of observations made on his travels, but the majority are the fruit of his imagination.

3) Ozias Leduc and the Trompe-l’oeil Tradition
Ozias Leduc’s scrupulous faithfulness to appearances in his still-life painting does not preclude his symbolic intentions and makes our most “realist” painter also the most representative of the concerns of the symbolist movement.

4) Emily Carr: Seeing the Other through his Own Eyes
Emily Carr’s paintings focus less on Native people than on what remains of their art. Compared to Paul Kane’s approach, Carr’s could be described as a genuine Copernican revolution.

5) Alfred Pellan: Cubism as a Form of Realism
In Pellan’s work, we can explore the limits of the Cubist view of realism, since he himself practiced many other forms of realism.

6) Alex Colville and Magic Realism
This talk will explore the problems of hyperrealism and the fascination of realism as presented in the paintings of Colville? Is there more to it than meets the eye?

François-Marc Gagnon
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Lecture Series
Maxwell Cummings Auditorium
May / June 2002
From Landscape to Abstraction:

1) Lawren Harris: From Landscape to Abstraction
Lawren Harris is the only member of the Group of Seven to have progressively changed to a more abstract form of painting toward the end of his career. This lecture will look at the influence of theosophy upon his artistic development.

2) Marian Scott: Technique, Science and Abstraction
Marian Scott’s artistic development is unique. She begins by painting urban scenes and her concerns are social and not spiritual. Later in her career, she paints the biomorphic and crystalline forms of science, not sensation, and this culminates in a distinctive form of abstraction.

3) Borduas: Surrealism and the Non-Figurative Other
Borduas painted a few landscapes at the start of his career and took many photographs, particularly of the Gaspé region. It was his discovery of surrealism and automatic writing, however, that resulted in his exploration of the “inscape,” or the subconscious. This experience led him to a form of Automatist non-figuration.

4) Riopelle: From Abstraction to Figuration
Riopelle frequently declared that the debate between figuration and abstraction was useless and he supported this viewpoint throughout his career by frequently switching from one mode to the other. This lecture will examine some of the problems caused by such frequent changes in style, especially in terms of his later and most controversial works, where he also uses aerosol paint.

5) Fernand Leduc: From Lyrical Abstraction to Geometric Abstraction
A member of the original group of Automatists, Fernand Leduc began by painting a type of surrealist landscape. This evolved into a form of abstract landscape painting, influenced by the French painter Jean Bazaine, and the lyrical abstraction movement. He then practiced a form of plasticist painting and together the two approaches in Leduc’s career give us the opportunity to review the era’s principal styles of non-figuration.

6) The Plasticiens and Non-Referential Art
The two waves of Plasticiens (Jauran, Toupin, Belzile and Jérôme for the first; Molinari and Tousignant the second) put forward a style of painting that maintained certain elements of nature and three-dimensional space, at the same time as the artists were attempting to reject these elements in order create painting that was free of any reference to nature and celebrated the flatness of the pictorial surface.

François-Marc Gagnon
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Lecture Series
Maxwell Cummings Auditorium
September / October 2001
Landscape in Canadian Art:

1) The Tree in the Painting of the Group of Seven
In this lecture, special attention will be paid to the significance of the tree in the work of Tom Thomson, Fred Varley and A.Y. Jackson.

2) Lawren Harris and the Canadian North
Lawren Harris hoped that his paintings of the Canadian North would promote Canadian unity.  We should remember that Harris’s theosophical ideology influenced his artistic development. For another perspective, his landscapes will be compared with those of Emily Carr.

3) David Milne, Goodridge Roberts and the Sublime
The Group of Seven was influenced by the notion of the sublime.  Conversely, Milne and Roberts preferred painting places where their art could take center stage, instead of being subservient to an ideology.

4) Stanley Cosgrove, Marian D. Scott and the Essence of Landscape
Stanley Cosgrove was influenced by painters like Maillard and Orozco, but his purified landscapes seem to have nothing in common with their socially conscious works.  By comparison, Marian Dale Scott searched for the essence of landscape in biology, making fossils and cells her favorite theme.

5) Jean Paul Lemieux and the Metaphysical Landscape
Following a trip to Europe in the mid 1950s, Lemieux began to see the Canadian landscape in a way that no other painter had seen it before, complete with new aesthetic possibilities.  Are Lemieux’s paintings quiet affirmations of the Quebec nationalism that was flourishing at the time, or do they have a metaphysical dimension?

6) Paul-Émile Borduas and the Inscape
Borduas’s Automatist work retains the format and composition of the landscape.  It can therefore be described by the term “inscape,” first used in discussions of the work of Sebastian Matta.  The same structural considerations are found in the paintings of Borduas’s disciples, in particular those of Riopelle.

VIDEOS

Image and Imagination
September 2005: UQAM and Canadian Centre for Architecture
Conference held in conjunction with Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal
http://www.moisdelaphoto.com/index_2005.html

Sam Borenstein and His Milieu
Summer 2005: De Sève Cinema, Concordia University
Lecture series held in conjunction with the exhibition at the MMFA
http://www.samborenstein.com/lecture.html

Untold Histories
October 2004: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Annual Conference Series
[See Schedue of Presenters]

Defining the Portrait
November 2001: Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery
Tour of the exhibition by curator Sandra Paikowsky
http://ellengallery.concordia.ca/archive/oct2001.html

Art Historical Detective Work: Cherchez la Femme
September 2002: Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery
Speakers: Janice Anderson, Lynn Beavis, Cynthia Hammond and Kristina Huneault