Latest news with #MontrealMuseumofFineArts
Montreal Gazette
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- 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
Montreal Gazette
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Brownstein: Late, great filmmaker Peter Pearson will get the memorial service he deserves — in a movie theatre
By Bill Brownstein The decision by his son Louis would have left Peter Pearson smiling — or more likely chortling, in his own inimitable fashion. An acclaimed Montreal director, film executive and fierce advocate for the arts, Pearson died last month at 87 at the long-term Ste. Anne's Hospital in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue following a three-year struggle with the devastating effects of dementia and Parkinson's disease. Louis Pearson decided the best way — the only way — to honour his dad would be to hold his memorial Friday morning at, appropriately, a movie theatre: the Cinéma du Musée, inside the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 'This was the only fitting place for his send-off,' says Louis Pearson, a TVA exec. 'Our place of worship was the movie theatre. The way some would convene at their place of worship, we would go the movies every other week. He had such a passion for film. He had such a passion for life.' In December 2023, with support from friends like Margaret Atwood and Ken Dryden as well as Louis, Peter Pearson was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada for his 'groundbreaking contributions as a filmmaker and for his tireless advocacy of Canadian film and television.' 'It brings tears to my eyes. … I'm very moved,' Pearson told me at the time. 'It's such a surprise and honour to be in such rarefied company. I don't know if I deserve this.' He did. Pearson served as president of the Directors Guild of Canada, executive director of Telefilm Canada and chair of the Council of Canadian Filmmakers. And when he decided to retire from the film business, he set up the Cinémagique club for local cinephiles, providing close to 1,000 members with premières of everything from arty Euro to highly touted American indie to homegrown Québécois fare, followed by analyses from the films' writers and directors. Pearson's contributions as a filmmaker were groundbreaking: among them, The Best Damn Fiddler From Calabogie to Kaladar (1968) — which won eight Canadian Film Awards, including best picture, and launched the career of his close pal Margot Kidder — and Paperback Hero (1973), winner of a slew of honours and featuring Keir Dullea, star of Stanley Kubrick's monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In addition to the nearly two dozen films he made for the National Film Board of Canada and others, Pearson made his mark on the small screen as a producer of CBC's This Hour Has Seven Days in the 1960s and as producer-director of CBC's much-lauded six-part series Ken Dryden's Home Game (1990), based on the latter's bestseller The Game. Pearson and Dryden became great buddies as a result of their collaboration on the series, which took them everywhere from Montreal to Moscow. 'Peter was immersed with life,' the legendary Habs netminder notes in a phone interview. 'He tried to make sense of life and he also tried to make nonsense of it. He was interested in so many things and always had a fascinating take on things. He was funny, smart, a great storyteller — just great company. 'He was very much a character, but a real character, a compelling character, not a self-focused character. He was a performer, but he wasn't self-indulgent.' Dryden, who lives in Toronto, recalls taking in a Canadiens game at the Bell Centre with Pearson, in what was one of the filmmaker's last public outings. 'Peter was struggling physically at the time, but, as usual, he was never not interesting, still adept at capturing the essence of it all,' Dryden says. 'His joy was always enjoying the moment.' No doubt about that, as those of us who had the privilege of spending time with him can attest. Prior to his illnesses, Pearson, gregarious and forever with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, was always the life of the party and never held back from voicing his opinions on everything from hockey to politics to culture and, of course, film. He had no use for cheap sentiment. 'He was one of a kind,' says Louis, married and the father of two. 'Apart from his love of film, he also had a passion for opera, standing on chairs and belting out arias at parties, sometimes even in the proper key. He had a passion for baseball, and was a fervent Expos season-ticket holder. He could even recall the opening-day lineup for the Cleveland Indians — in 1948! And he had a passion for storytelling and embellishing it from time to time for dramatic effect.' Close friend Peter Raymont was always blown away by Pearson's love of life. 'I loved his passion for life, for people, for film, for everything. He had such enormous energy and gusto,' says Raymont, director of Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (2004), co-director and producer of Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word Is Power (2019) and executive producer of Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band (2019). Raymont will be singing the Phil Ochs tune When I'm Gone in tribute to Pearson at Friday's memorial. 'The point of the song is do it while you're alive, and Peter certainly did that,' Raymont says. 'What Peter did for me and so many others was to inspire us to be our best. He was very supportive of me and so many others in our careers. I'm so forever grateful to him.' Ever cognizant of Pearson's accomplishments and passions, Louis points out what to him was his dad's greatest attribute. 'He was also the greatest dad. We went on all kinds of amazing adventures together, catching sports events and operas. He came to my baseball games. He coached my hockey team,' points out Louis, before taking on a more wistful tone. 'As an adult two decades back, when I had cancer, he picked me up for every treatment. He was so attentive, shepherding me through the whole ordeal. 'Really, he shone his light wherever he was in his life.'
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Take two Van Goghs daily: the growing popularity of museum prescriptions
It was about six years ago that Nathalie Bondil heard of doctors prescribing outside the boundaries of traditional medicine, scribbling out orders to walk, cycle or swim, or sending their patients into nature. As she made her way through the halls of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, however, she was certain that its collection of Inuit art or paintings by Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro, could also be just what the doctor ordered. 'The museum is such a special place; it's an escape from our stressful, daily life,' said Bondil, who at the time was the museum's general director. 'And art is something that is interesting to the brain.' Her resolve gave rise to a pilot programme billed as a world first – in which thousands of doctors in Montreal were given free passes to prescribe to patients in the hopes of alleviating everything from depression and anxiety to diabetes and high blood pressure. Years after the pandemic sharpened issues around mental health, the practice has boomed, with doctors prescribing visits to museums from Montpellier to Massachusetts as a complement to more traditional treatments. This year doctors in the Swiss town of Neuchâtel became the latest to start handing out passes to their patients to peruse either museums or the city's botanical gardens. It's a shift from 2018 when the Montreal museum announced the idea, said Bondil. At the time, calls came pouring in from media around the world. 'We were really surprised. It was such a simple idea.' But there was seemingly little enthusiasm from other cultural institutions to take up the idea. 'People thought it was an interesting idea, but there was nothing more.' The pilot project in Montreal was, in some ways, a natural follow-up to a trend already playing out in the UK where some doctors were embracing 'social prescriptions' that advised patients to take part in sports or social activities. 'But this is different,' she said, describing museum prescriptions as the fruit of a formal agreement between at least one museum and healthcare institutions. Research has since backed the idea, suggesting that spending time in museums can reduce stress and loneliness, improve mood and boost mental health. For many healthcare providers, the prescriptions are a tool to tackle issues that they had no way to address before, said Tasha Golden, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Florida's Center for Arts in Medicine. 'For example, imagine a provider whose patient is profoundly lonely, and it's leading to depression. What's a typical provider able to do about loneliness?' The often carefully curated spaces of museums are well-equipped to fill this void, she noted. 'Research tells us that simply being in these types of aesthetic environments can positively shift how we feel, think and behave,' Golden said. 'We also know that museums can provide opportunities for social interaction, which can reduce loneliness and isolation.' And then there are the objects – whether art installations or antique cars – that are on display. 'Of course, exhibited items themselves – and the process of placing attention on specific pieces or collections – can elicit interest, curiosity, wonder, learning, mindfulness, which can all be beneficial for mental health.' The growing popularity of museum prescriptions, she said, 'reflects a growing recognition that humans evolved to make and share art and stories, histories and cultures', and how this evolution has helped humans to survive. Ultimately, what's on offer to visitors is a glimpse of the bigger picture. 'It's part of how we make meaning of our lives, bear witness to our lives, expand and develop our lives, process and share our lives.' However, Golden, who recently evaluated a Massachusetts pilot programme that included prescribing museums, said that it wasn't a one-size-fits-all solution. A small number of people described the experience as negative; some opted not to visit a museum due to concerns they would not feel comfortable or welcome, while others were left reeling after they were sent to museums that excluded or denied their history or culture. Their experiences reinforced the need for any prescriptions to be highly personalised, she said. 'You wouldn't want to recommend a car museum to someone who'd strongly prefer to see paintings, and you wouldn't want to prescribe a museum visit to someone who'd strongly prefer a different type of cultural experience,' said Golden. About 400 prescriptions were issued to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 2018 to its pandemic-induced halt in 2020. The museum said in a statement that it was currently developing a new version of the programme that would focus on group activities rather than self-guided tours. Pointing to the lingering aftershocks of the pandemic, Bondil, who is now a director at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, said she had little doubt of the growing need for doctors to hand out these sorts of prescriptions. 'We're in a moment where people are experiencing a lot of anxiety,' she said. 'So I do think that museums and art can help us more than ever.'
CBC
16-03-2025
- Health
- CBC
Montreal university uses art museum visits to improve medical trainees' observation skills
Classes on disease and anatomy are par for the course in traditional medical training, but a new program at a Quebec university is making visits to the art museum a mandatory part of the curriculum for physicians in training. Through portraits and sculptures, medical students at Université de Montréal are sharpening their observation and communication skills so that they can better care for future patients. Aspasia Karalis, professor in the department of pediatrics, said the point isn't for medical students to brush up on art history but to better understand the "full picture" of a patient's case, and details they may be overlooking. "Should we be looking to assist them in other ways than just healing their fracture?" So far, some 400 first-year students from the university's Montreal and Trois-Rivières, Que., campuses have visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or Raymond-Lasnier Exhibition Centre in Trois-Rivières. Divided in small groups and guided by an art educator, the medical students are asked to respond to three questions: What is going on in this work? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can we find? The pre-selected artworks are linked to themes discussed in the classroom, such as communication problems between a doctor and a patient. After students share their interpretations, a doctor who accompanies them explains how their previous discussion on art can be applied to medicine. For instance, a doctor might have to negotiate competing viewpoints on a patient involving health experts from different disciplines, such as physiotherapists and therapists. "That process seems very simple and intuitive, but doing it in front of a work of art without having an actual factual, correct medical answer to come to, leads us to have more insight into how we process, and … attribute sense or meaning to what we see," Karalis said. Mélanie Deveault, director of learning and community engagement at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, said some of the artwork students are asked to interpret is more realistic, like Lyonel Feininger's yellow Street II, while other pieces are more abstract. One of the selected works in Trois-Rivières, a painting by Canadian artist John Der, depicts a bustling scene of people in front of a tramway car. Marie-Andrée Levasseur, director of visual arts with Culture Trois-Rivières, which oversees the medical student workshops at the city's exhibition centre, says students are asked to look at the painting and justify their observations. For David Tremblay, first-year medical student, the experience was unusual at first. However, he said he and other students quickly shook off misapprehensions. The workshops helped him reflect on his own thinking processes when diagnosing, he said. "It really helps with patients because nothing is actually black and white as we see in the textbooks," he said, explaining that the workshop helped him better appreciate a past experience with a patient who had bladder cancer but who didn't have typical symptoms.
Gulf Today
25-02-2025
- Health
- Gulf Today
Now doctors are prescribing museum visits to patients
In a fast-paced tech-driven world, where pressure is on many professionals to constantly raise the bar on performance and churn out innovative ideas to keep pace with developments, overall wellbeing is the need of the hour. Workplace pressure can take a toll on health in the long run, particularly among millennials striving to stay ahead in the rat race. High blood pressure, heart issues, anxiety and stress, and mental illness are the expected casualties. In such cases, overall wellbeing is the proverbial need of the hour. To combat the fallout from such stress-related issues, physicians have been offering a range of solutions. Nature has turned out to be an effective remedy. Since 2018, doctors in Shetland, the Scottish archipelago in the Northern Atlantic, have been prescribing taking recourse to the outdoors to curb a range of illnesses. In the UK, books are another salvation for patients. Doctors in Bristol have been recommending self-help books which patients can collect from the library, according to a report. Now as a feelgood healing factor, doctors in some countries have been asking their patients to learn from the world of culture, prescribing visits to the museum in the process. In Neuchâtel, Switzerland, physicians have been allowing residents to visit museums as part of their healthcare plan. The initiative aims to promote mental and emotional well-being through cultural experiences. However, the Swiss are not the first in starting such a trend. In Canada, a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is now on the prescription books of many medical practitioners. Doctors in one of Brussels' largest hospitals have also been giving 'museum prescriptions. For more than a decade, the French city of Lille's Palais des Beaux-Arts has deployed a kind of 'museo-therapy' that uses the museum space and the treasures held within it to help treat patients from local hospitals. But in September 2023, it signed a pact to offer 140 museum art therapy sessions over a year to patients who have been given a 'museum prescription' by doctors.
