Montreal Museum of Fine Arts reimagines its eclectic design collection

There’s delicate antique silver from France, a bright yellow Bombardier Ski-Doo snowmobile and a host of iconic modernist chairs. Those who know the remarkable design and decorative arts collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts may be pleased to recognize some old friends as it reopens the Liliane and David M. Stewart Pavilion, which closed for renovations in 2022. And newcomers to the most important collection of its kind in Canada are in for a treat.

This eclectic reinstallation also includes recent acquisitions and pieces long hidden in storage. A quarter of the 800 objects now on display in the Stewart Pavilion have never been shown before.

The collection dates back to 1916 when curator Frederick Cleveland Morgan, a dollar-a-year man whose family owned a Montreal department store, began collecting fine furniture, ceramics, metalwork and textiles for the museum. The collection expanded greatly in 2000, when it acquired the holdings of the former Museum of Decorative Arts, founded by the Stewarts, a couple who believed that postwar modernist design was underrepresented in museums.

It has kept growing with recent acquisitions and donations, including the continuing gift of silver from Britain, France and Quebec by former senator Serge Joyal, now displayed in its own sunlit room with windows on two sides.

The design galleries, housed in a classic brutalist box tacked on to the back of the original Sherbrooke Street building in the 1970s, were last reinstalled in 2012. The rethink was partly made possible because other shifts in the museum collections opened up extra space in this wing.

Guest curator Rachel Gotlieb, a Toronto design specialist who has worked previously with the Design Exchange and the Gardiner Museum, has replaced what was mainly organized by medium and chronology with a display that is now mainly thematic.

Over two floors, open to each other through wide staircases, Gotlieb has established two principal areas, the first given over to aesthetic considerations (abstraction and figuration specifically) and the second devoted to function, but the installations are varied and full of surprises.

The collection is anchored by two set pieces that span both floors in areas of double-height ceilings. One is Dale Chihuly’s yellow sunburst, a crowd-pleasing glass sculpture recently restored and brought indoors to protect it from the weather. The second is a display of modernist chairs, built on the concept of cantilevered form – those S-shaped and zigzag chairs that magically achieve stability without four legs.

That’s a fine example of how focused these installations can be, but the approach is also sweeping. The ground floor covers abstraction, with classic geometric pieces such as a storage unit by the American furniture designer Charles Eames and rectilinear De Stijl chairs first created by the Dutch designer Gerrit Thomas Rietveld at the beginning of the 20th century.

This aggressive geometry is juxtaposed with figuration, whether that is inspired by the softer lines of nature or the human form itself: A line of vases, dating from ancient Greece to the present, remind the viewer that a vessel with a foot, body and neck is a form that mimics ourselves.

Nearby, a rapid walk through the history of design offers a few rare 15th-century pieces, to 19th-century furniture and ceramics from both Europe and Quebec, to the British Arts and Crafts movement, Art Deco and beyond.

While the displays are usually international, there is also a strong concentration on Quebec design. The timeline section includes work associated with Montreal’s influential École du meuble – a mid-20th-century applied arts school eventually folded into Quebec’s CEGEP system – including an impressive cherrywood desk designed by one of the instructors, Henri Beaulac, for the office of the school’s founding director Jean-Marie Gauvreau, and made by the students.

A nearby video features an interview with Julien Hébert, who designed the logo for Expo 67’s theme, Man and His World. Otherwise graphic design is only lightly represented and while some textiles soften many of the displays, fashion itself is barely present at all.

Instead, the second floor is devoted to the use of materials – paper lamps, the spread of the new plastics, the rise of aluminum appliances – and to functions: bikes, phones and typewriters. Every one of these is a remarkable example of design, from the lowly Good Grips potato peeler of 1989 to early examples of the Blackberry phone and the Dyson vacuum, along with a bespoke 10th anniversary version of the smart car from 2009.

Like the car, many of these rare items are luxury goods or, even if originally intended for the mass market, objects that have become valuable collectibles. This paradox was particularly acute in the Arts and Crafts movement whose practitioners believed working people had a right to well-crafted things but proceeded to design items that only the wealthy could afford. The problem persists: Good design can be expensive.

The installations make social and political points such as this quietly. They include a 1787 anti-slavery stoneware medallion from England’s Wedgwood factory showing a chained man. A nearby didactic panel points out that materials for European luxury goods were often made by enslaved Africans or low-paid labourers in Asia, while harvesting mahogany for European furniture in the Caribbean and South America was particularly dangerous work.

Indigenous artists merge form and content at National Gallery of Canada

A display case contains some odd objects created by settler artists appropriating Indigenous motifs, including ceramics painted in a West Coast style by Emily Carr and a totem pole lamp by Edwin Holgate. Legitimate Indigenous work includes an early 19th-century wood and quillwork box – probably made by a Mi’kmaq artist for the tourist trade – as well as a black Puebloan earthenware jar with the carved image of a serpent made by the Tewa ceramicist Mary Tafoya in the 1930 or 1940s, and a new kayak made by students in Nunavik, Que.

To do justice to such works, including an impressive piece of Samoan bark cloth dating to the 1950s, one must recognize that today’s museums make less and less distinction between art and craft.

One of the particularly astute aspects of these new design installations is the subtle inclusion of fine art. A display of bicycles includes not only one of the original Bixi bikes produced in Chicoutimi but also Greg Curnoe’s image of his favourite Mariposa 10-speed silkscreened on Plexiglas (a particularly poignant artwork considering the London, Ont., artist died in a bicycle accident.)

A clunky 1930s telephone is juxtaposed with a 1931 Laurentian snow scene by A.Y. Jackson, a winter landscape where he dares to include something that his predecessors had often edited out: telephone poles.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these interventions is in the materials section, where modern designers of plastic and metal chairs experiment with transparency and voids. The clear plastic inflatable Blow armchair, a 1967 pop favourite designed in Italy, and American chairs made from grids of steel wire seem to wish materiality away. They sit across from Canadian sculptor Susan Edgerley’s I Hear Your Whisper, a delicate text-like grid of flame-worked glass rods whose calligraphic shapes give transparency symbolic meaning.

The distinction between fine art and functional design holds, but only as two sides of one coin. This exciting reinstallation is packed with artistry.