Works by ‘Michelangelo of Montreal’ at risk: group
A collection of works by the prolific religious artist Guido Nincheri (1885-1973), known to some as “the Michelangelo of Montreal,” is in danger of deteriorating because of water infiltration and improper storage conditions, says an open letter by members of a newly formed group of nine calling itself the Committee to Protect the Château Dufresne.
The artwork, which includes works on paper and cardboard, is stored in the Château Dufresne, a Beaux-Arts mansion built between 1915 and 1918 in what is now Hochelaga-Maisonneuve for brothers and wealthy entrepreneurs Marius and Oscar Dufresne.
Nincheri, who came to Canada from Italy in his late 20s, was primarily a religious artist: His frescoes, murals and stained glass windows decorate more than 200 religious buildings in Canada and New England, including the Church of Saint-Léon-de-Westmount and the Notre-Dame-dela-Défense Church in Montreal. But in a secular departure, he was responsible for the interior decor of the Dufresne mansion, including wall murals, frescoes, ceiling paintings and stained glass, in the 1920s and 1930s.
The committee of nine, which includes art historians and other academics in some way connected to Nincheri’s work, is calling on the city of Montreal, which owns the building, to have the collection removed quickly to stop deterioration and stored in a place appropriate for works on paper: The Nincheri collection is made up of more than 1,000 drawings and sketches documenting the trajectory of Nincheri’s career. It also wants the city to stop delaying what it says are much-needed structural repairs to the building.
The city acknowledges that there has been water infiltration in the basement of the Château Dufresne, where the work of other artists as well as Nincheri is stored; it is working on plans and quotes for urgent work to correct the situation resulting from the infiltration, among other things, said city spokesperson Linda Boutin on Wednesday. The work is to be carried out at the beginning of 2018 as part of a major action plan involving levelling of the land outside the building, roof work and work on the interior finishes, she said.
Committee member Paul Carvalho said the committee is speaking out now because “we got reports that the situation is affecting some of the works in the basement.”
Carvalho made a documentary about Nincheri called Windows to Heaven and, as part of a series of five films about Montreal’s history, one on Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and the Dufresne brothers.
“Guido was our Michelangelo; he was exceptional and stands up to anything done in Europe,” he said.
Château Dufresne director Manon Lapointe, who has been in the post since the end of June, acknowledged there is work to be done on the building, but said the art collections are not endangered. Furthermore, the problems at the Château Dufresne “are not recent,” said the former director of the Montreal Museums Society.
Storage conditions at the museum are less than ideal and “there is work to be done,” she said. It is common knowledge in the museum community that storage conditions are not always what they should be — “We all know it,” she said — but conditions at the Château Dufresne “are not worse than elsewhere.”
WATER INFILTRATION
Ginette Laroche, a Quebec Citybased art historian and Nincheri expert who has worked on exhibitions for the museum as well as a tablet app for the museum, said that when she was working in the museum’s basement storage areas in 2015, she reported seeing traces of water infiltration on the wall.
“They said there were problems, but they were dealing with them,” the committee member said in an interview.
Laroche speculated that the infiltration was caused when the ground around the building moved during dynamiting for the widening of Pie IX Blvd.
The water infiltration goes back years, Carvalho said, and “the city made only cosmetic repairs to things that should have been looked at seriously.” He said one section of the basement is closed off, with nothing stored there, and dehumidifiers have been in the basement for months.
Water infiltration causes mould growth — and mould threatens the art stored in the basement as well as works elsewhere in the building because mould spores circulate between floors, Laroche explained.
Work that has been affected by mould has to be cleaned properly to be decontaminated or it deteriorates and loses value, Carvalho said.
He is not qualified to make a knowledgeable comparison between the situation at the Château Dufresne and elsewhere, but “I have heard underfinancing horror stories, particularly in small museums across Quebec,” Carvalho said.
In its letter, the committee laments the “flagrant underfinancing ” of the building ’s assets and the
They said there were problems, but they were dealing with them.
absence of a plan to permit, among other things, proper storage facilities for the Château Dufresne’s collections.
The city has begun analyses of the quality of the air in the building and its contamination by water infiltration, Boutin said. She said more must be done to ensure that storage conditions correspond to proper museum storage conditions. The city plans decontamination work to take place at the beginning of 2018, she said, “followed by an upgrading of museological equipment to endow the Château Dufresne with adequate storage.”
Owned by the city since 1957, the Château Dufresne housed the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art from 1965 to 1968. The building was subsequently boarded up for seven years and, during that time, damage caused by vandalism and a lack of maintenance included the theft or destruction of several of Nincheri’s stained glass works and significant damage to many of his murals, the committee says.
“Miraculously saved” when the philanthropist David M. Stewart injected several million dollars to restore it, the building was the home of the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts from 1976 until its move to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1997. Were it not for the “determined intervention” of Stewart and the Macdonald Stewart Foundation, the committee said, the building would have been torn down to make way for parking space in the run-up to the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976 — the same year the Quebec government named the Château Dufresne a historical monument.