Climate activist throws paint on Picasso painting at Montreal museum
MONTREAL - A climate activist group says one of its supporters sprayed pink paint this morning on a Pablo Picasso painting at a Montreal museum.
Last Generation Canada says an activist smeared washable paint on the 1901 painting L'hétaïre at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
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Toronto Star
a day ago
- Toronto Star
Climate activist throws paint on Picasso painting at Montreal museum
MONTREAL - A climate activist group says one of its supporters sprayed pink paint this morning on a Pablo Picasso painting at a Montreal museum. Last Generation Canada says an activist smeared washable paint on the 1901 painting L'hétaïre at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Cision Canada
27-05-2025
- Cision Canada
Audain Art Museum to Exhibit Rare Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada's Vault
WHISTLER, BC, May 27, 2025 /CNW/ - This summer, the Audain Art Museum (AAM) is proud to present Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault, a landmark travelling exhibition offering a rare glimpse into the hidden art treasures of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). On view from June 14 through October 13, 2025, the exhibition features over 130 works on paper and canvas by 84 artists, revealing centuries of artistic innovation and storytelling to AAM visitors. Featuring graphite sketches alongside delicate ink, pastel, and watercolour renderings, Gathered Leaves offers a wide range of techniques and styles by internationally celebrated artists. The exhibition highlights renowned figures such as Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall, and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as powerful contributions by historically underrepresented women artists, including Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Elisabetta Sirani. "This exhibition is a unique opportunity for audiences to connect with the immediacy and intimacy of drawings by many of Europe's most celebrated artists—many of which have been hidden from public view for decades," says Dr. Curtis Collins, Director & Chief Curator of the Audain Art Museum. "We are proud to collaborate with the National Gallery of Canada in presenting these extraordinary pieces to Whistler residents, as well as visitors from across Canada and around the world." "A collection more than a century in the making. Many exciting discoveries await visitors to the exhibition. Gathered Leaves is the Canadian debut of international historical drawings recently acquired by the National Gallery of Canada, alongside lesser known but significant works straight from the vault. This exhibition and its accompanying award-winning catalogue celebrate the centennial anniversary of our Department of Prints and Drawings, established in 1921 – the first curatorial division created at the NGC," says Jean-François Bélisle, Director and CEO, National Gallery of Canada. "In light of our national mandate to make art accessible to all Canadians, we're delighted that visitors to the Audain Art Museum will also have the rare opportunity to view remarkable drawings that for conservation reasons are usually kept in the dark." The NGC collection has grown to include an extraordinary range of national and international works spanning the 15th to 20th centuries, including master drawings from Italy, France, Germany and Spain dating to the 1600s. From preparatory studies to vivid pastel compositions, Gathered Leaves offers a compelling look at the diverse roles drawing has played across time, geography, and artistic movements. Gathered Leaves celebrates the national institution's century-long commitment to collecting and preserving works on paper. The exhibition also includes the NGC's recent acquisitions, expanding the narrative and offering fresh perspectives on art history. Accompanying the exhibition is a beautifully illustrated publication, Discoveries from the Drawings Vault. Authored by Sonia Del Re with Kirsten Appleyard, with contributions by Erika Dolphin, the catalogue commemorates the 100th anniversary of the NGC's Department of Prints and Drawings and highlights new research and curatorial insights into this significant collection. Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault is organized by the National Gallery of Canada. This exhibition is supported by Government Partner, The Resort Municipality of Whistler, and Hotel Partner, Fairmont Chateau Whistler. The accompanying catalogue is made possible with support from Getty though its Paper Project Initiative. About the Audain Art Museum Established in 2016, the Museum was founded via a major philanthropic gift of Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa. The Permanent Collection is focused on the art of British Columbia, exemplifying the richness of cultural difference in Canada. Highlights include hereditary Haida Chief James Hart's The Dance Screen, an exceptional collection of historical and contemporary Indigenous art, a comprehensive selection of paintings by Emily Carr and a brilliant range of works by Vancouver's photo-conceptualists. The Museum hosts numerous special exhibitions per year that feature artists and collections of national as well as international significance. About the National Gallery of Canada Founded in 1880, the National Gallery of Canada is among the world's most respected art institutions. As a national museum, we exist to serve all Canadians, no matter where they live. We do this by sharing our collection, exhibitions and public programming widely. We create dynamic experiences that allow for new ways of seeing ourselves and each other through the visual arts, while centering Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Our mandate is to develop, preserve and present a collection for the learning and enjoyment of all – now and for generations to come. We are home to more than 90,000 works, including one of the finest collections of Indigenous and Canadian art, major works from the 14th to the 21st century and extensive library and archival holdings.
Montreal Gazette
15-05-2025
- Montreal Gazette
Montreal artist and ‘extraordinary mentor' Rita Briansky has died at 99
Montreal artist Rita Briansky, whose work is featured in the permanent collections of institutions including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Vancouver Art Gallery, has died. She would have been 100 in July. Briansky, who died April on 24, had long been recognized for her career as a painter, printmaker and etcher. She is remembered also as an adored teacher who inspired many other artists over decades in classes at the Visual Arts Centre, Saidye Bronfman School of Fine Arts and at Cummings Centre. 'She was an extraordinary mentor, a coach,' Gina Roitman, a Cummings Centre student, said of Briansky. 'She never instructed: She always kind of led you.' In one of dozens of tributes accompanying Briansky's obituary on the Paperman website, another student observed: 'Rita knew how to talk to her students with total respect for them and for their artistic efforts, whether they were rank beginners or skilled painters. She drew the best out of each of us.' Class with Briansky was 'more like a workshop: Everyone worked at their own level,' Cummings student Phyllis Deitcher said. 'Rita was full of stories and full of wisdom and humour. The class became like a family. We all loved her. She was a warm, wonderful, passionate person — and she cared about each of her students,' Deitcher said. 'She felt anyone could become an artist. Her favourite expression was: 'Be yourself: everyone else is taken.'' It was always clear to Briansky that she wanted to be an artist. 'Before I could write, I could draw,' she said in a 2020 interview. 'I was the one as a little kid who took chalk from the blackboard and drew on the sidewalks,' she recalled in the 2018 documentary by Janet Best and Dov Okouneff, The Wonder and Amazement — Rita Briansky on Her Life in Art. Briansky was born in Grajewo, Poland, in 1925 and arrived in Canada in 1929 with her mother and two older sisters to join her father in Ansonville, a northern Ontario pulp and paper town. She remembered small, sweet, strawberries to snack on, wild roses along the roadside and the northern lights in the sky, she told the filmmakers. 'I was very much involved with nature.' The family moved to the northern Quebec mining town of Val d'Or in 1939 and in 1941 to Montreal, where they lived on Parc Ave. and Briansky's mother took in boarders and roomers. The family struggled financially and her parents wanted her to leave Baron Byng High School before graduating to find work. But she wanted to study art. The Yiddish poet Ida Maze championed her, got her babysitting jobs and introduced her to her first art teacher, Alexander Bercovitch. 'I felt so awed by meeting this great artist,' Briansky recalled. 'In many ways he was my best teacher — because he acknowledged me.' In her early 20s, she moved to New York City to study with the Art Students League, taking various jobs in the evenings to support herself. On her return to Montreal in 1949, she met fellow artist Joseph Prezament, a Winnipeg native; they married five months later. The couple had two daughters, Anna and Wendy. 'I loved being a mother,' Briansky told Best and Okouneff. She worked from home, making etchings that sold well. 'I was the only mother they knew who had a printing press in the living room.' Her work, which used portraiture, still life and landscapes, addressed diverse subjects and themes but was rooted in her own experiences. 'Practically everything I have drawn or painted has been something familiar to me,' she told the filmmakers. In 1983, Prezament died of a brain tumour. He was 60. A few years later, Briansky began to travel alone to destinations including India, Israel and Mexico. 'I was brave,' she recalled. Briansky, who had lost relatives in the Holocaust, felt 'an unyielding urge' in 1995 to return to the country of her birth. She visited memorial sites and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Viewing a field of red poppies, she realized that 'this beautiful landscape was fertilized by human ashes.' On her return, she produced the Kaddish series — her reflection on the trauma of the Holocaust: Its 18 works are on permanent display at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Westmount. In 2006, Briansky contacted the Art for Healing Foundation — the not-for-profit foundation collects and installs art from prominent artists and benefactors in hospitals and other health-care institutions — about donating paintings by her late husband. A number of works by Prezament hang at the Maimonides Geriatric Centre. She began to donate some of her own work: Paintings from her Carousel series, for instance, hang in the Montreal Children's Hospital. 'Rita loved donating her art,' said Earl Pinchuk, co-founder with Gary Blair of the Art for Healing Foundation and its executive director. 'She was a lovely person — and strong-minded. I was in awe of everything she did.' Briansky's work was featured in 2008 in the group exhibition Jewish Painters of Montreal: Witnesses of Their Time, 1930-1948, at the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec and later at the McCord Museum. Group members included Jack Beder, Sam Borenstein, Eric Goldberg, Harry Mayerovitch, Louis Muhlstock and Moe Reinblatt — and she was its last surviving member, as Michael Millman observed. The West End Gallery, started by Millman's mother in 1964, was a fixture on Greene Ave. for 50 years; Briansky was represented in its opening and final exhibitions and several solo shows in between. She would start her weekly classes at Cummings with a brief lecture on art history relevant to what her students were working on. 'By teaching, I am learning. I am proving that getting older doesn't mean you have to stop growing: I am challenging them and they take up the challenge and I feel that, from week to week, they are growing.' Patricia Kehler, supervisor of the Cummings fine arts and crafts department, said Briansky was its most popular teacher. The last class she taught was in March, weeks before her death. When Kehler visited her in hospital, 'she asked about registration for her spring classes. I just felt she was going to live forever.' Briansky, who in addition to her husband was predeceased by her devoted partner, Eddie Klein, and by two of her sisters. She is survived by her daughters, her younger sister and by nieces and nephews. A celebration of her life is planned for a later date. This story was originally published
