Du coq à l’âme: L’art populaire au Québec by Jean-François Blanchette

Abstract

Reviewed by: Du coq à l’âme: L’art populaire au Québec by Jean-François Blanchette Philippe Halbert Blanchette, Jean-François– Du coq à l’âme: L’art populaire au Québec. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2014. Pp. 338. The whimsical charm of “folk” or “popular” art has long captivated collectors and laypeople alike as an authentic reflection of a given society or geographic region. Nuancing the work of professional craftsmen and academic artists, pieces made by the self-taught have held audiences’ attention and delight using geometric shapes, vivid colours, symbolic iconography, and experimental materials and techniques. The formation of collections at the Shelburne Museum, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Winterthur Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts by the 1960s attests to the longstanding interest in these highly original and varied artistic traditions in the United States. Following an exhibition sharing the same title and also organised by Jean-François Blanchette at the Canadian Museum of History (then the Canadian Museum of Civilisation in Gatineau, Québec) in 2008-2009, this iteration of Du coq à l’âme: L’art populaire au Québec is a welcome scholarly addition and cultural counterpoint to the often Anglo-centric narrative of North American folk art. Blanchette’s title, a play on the French expression “du coq à l’âne” (literally “from the rooster to the donkey” but denoting that which passes from one thing to another), recalls the diverse variety and quality of Québec-made pieces held in public and private Canadian collections. The volume’s catalogue covers an astoundingly large range of artistic media including devotional objects, furniture, metalwork, painting, sculpture including models and miniatures, textiles, and toys. These and other pieces provide an aesthetic meeting point for the proud Gallic rooster, the Canadian beaver, the maple leaf, and even the Québec-born celebrity strongman Louis Cyr and prime minister of Québec Maurice Duplessis. Blanchette never truly defines folk art in any specific way, relying on a more abstract, interdisciplinary approach that explores various material objects and more impermanent media such as graffiti in relation to themes such as family, religion, and rebellion. His consideration of “popular art” within a trajectory of contemporary expression and developing notions of self-identity in Québec is especially notable. The volume introduces seven prominent living Québec folk artists, all interviewed by Blanchette, including Léon Bouchard, Michel Fedak, [End Page 199] Clémence Lessard, Raymond Massicotte, Fleurette Solomon, Jacqueline Tremblay, and Michel Villeneuve. Biographical, connoisseurial, and historiographic in his analysis of archival materials and the production of Québec folk art past and present, Blanchette casts the art objects themselves as a symbolic bridge between tradition and modernity. Noteworthy works include a number of Tremblay’s eggshell and vegetable paint works on canvas, such as the 1979 Les bûcherons (collection of the Canadian Museum of History), a scene that depicts traditional hand axes and horse-drawn sledges used alongside chainsaws. Among the volume’s greatest contributions is its comprehensive treatment of the visionary Canadian folk art connoisseur Nettie Covey Sharpe. Born in Saint-Augustin-de-Woburn near Lake Mégantic in 1907, the bilingual Covey Sharpe focused her scholarly and collecting efforts on the traditional arts of Francophone Québec beginning in the 1930s. Following on the heels of Marius Barbeau and a contemporary of Jean Palardy, she sought out antique objects of the sort often relegated to attics, tossed in the street, or even destroyed by their owners. Eager to preserve, share, and valorise the artistic heritage of Québec, she regularly loaned parts of her collection to institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum. Covey Sharpe’s biography is made all the more endearing through excerpts of a 1983 interview conducted by Blanchette in her eighteenth-century home at Saint-Lambert, a staging ground for the formation of her collection. Covey Sharpe’s foresight ultimately led to the Canadian Museum of History’s acquisition of part of her extensive collection of historic and contemporary Québec art in the 1970s. The rest, along with her house, was acquired by...