A fantastic museum
Jan. 3rd, 2004 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackI've now been in Montreal for a bit over a week; today I went with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zorinth and bluejo to take redbird to the station for her return to NYC, and then went with zorinth to the McCord Museum of Canadian History (very graphic-heavy website; don't bother on dial-up).
This is a medium-sized museum near McGill university; three floors, a couple of exhibitions per floor. One about Scottish settlement in Quebec and Nova Scotia, for an audience who hadn't been within three thousand miles of Scotland. One of heating and snow-clearing technology - gorgeous fur mittens warm even to look at. One of ways Montrealois had found to have fun, with lovely pictures of the full-size turreted ice palaces that were built biannually in the 1880s, and a cool table-ice-hockey machine where the players moved and spun as you pulled and rotated the control rods - would that the puck dispenser had not been removed, though the machine would doubtless no longer be intact in that case.
An intriguing collection pairing 1890s photos of Montreal with ones taking in as-close-to-possible the same position and lighting in 1999 - the churches and the fancier municipal buildings stay the same, all else changes, the river narrows substantially thanks to landfill, the great multi-masted sailing ships are gone.
And an utterly superb exhibition of Canadian paintings from the two World Wars.
The art I'd associate with the first world war is poetry; I may have seen British paintings as asides in the Imperial War Museum, this is the first time I recall seeing masses of such things gathered together. There's a great mixture of styles, from van-Gogh-like seascapes in thickly-applied oils to art of a kind I'd call "inter-war German" with smooth airbrushed gradients; chiaroscuros trying to show the effect of the star-shells illuminating an artillery battle at sea; nearly-Socialist-Realist massively-muscled artillerists; portraits; pale lifeboats of pale men on a pale sea; and an incredibly effective painting of D-day (it looked like Saving Private Ryan because Saving Private Ryan looked like it ...) whose artist had made little sketches in glycerine-enhanced watercolours as his squadron stormed the beach.
Absolutely marvellous.
zorinth and bluejo to take redbird to the station for her return to NYC, and then went with zorinth to the McCord Museum of Canadian History (very graphic-heavy website; don't bother on dial-up).This is a medium-sized museum near McGill university; three floors, a couple of exhibitions per floor. One about Scottish settlement in Quebec and Nova Scotia, for an audience who hadn't been within three thousand miles of Scotland. One of heating and snow-clearing technology - gorgeous fur mittens warm even to look at. One of ways Montrealois had found to have fun, with lovely pictures of the full-size turreted ice palaces that were built biannually in the 1880s, and a cool table-ice-hockey machine where the players moved and spun as you pulled and rotated the control rods - would that the puck dispenser had not been removed, though the machine would doubtless no longer be intact in that case.
An intriguing collection pairing 1890s photos of Montreal with ones taking in as-close-to-possible the same position and lighting in 1999 - the churches and the fancier municipal buildings stay the same, all else changes, the river narrows substantially thanks to landfill, the great multi-masted sailing ships are gone.
And an utterly superb exhibition of Canadian paintings from the two World Wars.
The art I'd associate with the first world war is poetry; I may have seen British paintings as asides in the Imperial War Museum, this is the first time I recall seeing masses of such things gathered together. There's a great mixture of styles, from van-Gogh-like seascapes in thickly-applied oils to art of a kind I'd call "inter-war German" with smooth airbrushed gradients; chiaroscuros trying to show the effect of the star-shells illuminating an artillery battle at sea; nearly-Socialist-Realist massively-muscled artillerists; portraits; pale lifeboats of pale men on a pale sea; and an incredibly effective painting of D-day (it looked like Saving Private Ryan because Saving Private Ryan looked like it ...) whose artist had made little sketches in glycerine-enhanced watercolours as his squadron stormed the beach.
Absolutely marvellous.
