Québec City, Quebec, Canada
If I went to all the museums along the way when I’m
traveling, I could easily make my trips twice as long and spend almost all my
time inside. So in the same way I try to be selective about which mountains I
climb or trails I hike, I’m choosy about which museums and historic sites I go
to. Being kind of an art geek, I usually go to significant art museums.
Quebec City’s art museum is the Musee National de Beaux Arts
de Quebec. The “National” in the title is the same as the “National” in the
name of most of the provincial parks in Quebec. They’re all only national in
the sense of Quebec being an ethnic nation rather than having anything to do
with the government of Canada. That’s OK, though, I’m quite interested in
regional art. This museum, though, is a little odd in consisting of three
completely unrelated buildings connected in a park by underground passages, one
for historical art, another for modern art, and a third for design and
contemporary art. My luck was not good. The building housing the historical art
collection is closed this year for renovation.
I do quite like much “modern art”, modern being that from
the first half or so of the twentieth century before abstraction became too
extreme and art became completely disconnected from aesthetics or talent. The
modern wing primarily featuring the paintings of four top Quebec artists, the
of whom I hadn’t heard of before, was actually quite interesting. The fourth
and most famous, Jean Paul Riopelle, I had heard of, the creator of some of the
most abstract stuff in the collection. I guess he lost me with his most famous
work housed in the museum, a multiple panel work titled “Tribute to Rosa
Luxemburg”. I don’t care if Luxemburg was killed by right-wing Freikorps
militias in the early Weimar years, she was still a Communist unworthy of
adulation regardless.
The contemporary building is a very glassy modern contrast
to the two older buildings and is actually quite nice as display space. I was
glad there was more decorative and design objects and modern Inuit art in it
than what we mostly see around as contemporary these days.
Interestingly, the museum’s three buildings encircle the
monument to General James Wolfe, set at the spot where the victorious British
general in the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham is believed to have died.
2025-05-23