Lightning Trip - the Special Exhibits

I believe I hinted that the weekend before the long weekend, I made a special trip.  I flew to Ottawa on Friday, saw the National Gallery, then caught the train to Montreal and wandered around for the day, then caught the train to Quebec City, which was my first time there.  I'll have a bit more to say about the different cities, but I want to focus on the special exhibits at each museum, since they will be closing shortly.

Running through this weekend only (Sept. 9) at the National Gallery is Impressionist Treasures.  This is a special collection of Impressionist works from the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen.  In a way, this sort of closed the loop for me, as I visited Copenhagen once and visited the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, which is an art museum a bit closer to the center of Copenhagen.  While that was a nice visit, it was disappointing that their Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings were all off view, and I had to settle for a small catalogue.  But the two collections are almost identical in their focus on Renoir and Gauguin with a Cezanne masterwork or two.  Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek has a slightly stronger emphasis on Van Gogh, but otherwise the two collections are quite similar.

In addition to these paintings, the Ordrupgaard Museum sent along quite a few Danish paintings, including a number of slightly eerie interiors by Vilhelm Hammershøi.
 

I'll have to circle back in a later post on what else I saw at the National Gallery, but on to Montreal.  Montreal had a Picasso exhibit, which drew mostly from the Picasso Museum in Paris, as well as the ethnographic museum, Musée du quai Branly.  The focus was primarily on how Picasso drew inspiration from African art.  This exhibit runs through Sept. 16, and I imagine it will be fairly crowded these last two weekends.  It's not the best Picasso exhibit I've seen, but it is focused and does what it sets out to do well.  Again, I'll write more about it later, but here are my two favorite paintings in the exhibit.  One which is a still life (which also contains a portrait of his mistress at the time) and one seems to be a tribute to Matisse, who had died shortly before.

Finally, I ended my trip to Quebec City at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.  The special exhibit there is Bethe Morisot, an under-appreciated Impressionist painter.  This exhibit runs through Sept. 23, so there is a bit more time if you are thinking of making the trip.  This was my favourite painting in that exhibit, but there were quite a number of nice images.

Berthe Morisot, At the Ball

I'll try to round out the description of the trip within the next day or two.