COHEN MURAL, TIMES TWO
When Leonard Cohen died on Nov. 7, 2016, the question was not if, but how Montreal would honour his legacy as one of our city’s most revered and influential cultural ambassadors.
And there was certainly no shortage of tributes, big and small: from impromptu public singalongs of Cohen’s classics to contemporary art exhibitions to dance shows set to his music to a star-studded memorial concert at the Bell Centre.
But the tributes that loom largest over the city are the two giant murals of Cohen that went up within weeks of one another in decidedly different neighbourhoods.
Just off St-Laurent Blvd., not far from Cohen’s old abode in the Plateau, a mural by artist Kevin Ledo went up on the side of the ninestorey Cooper building as part of this past summer’s Mural Festival. (It was the largest mural drawn in the festival’s five-year history.)
Across town in September, up went the official, city-sponsored mural: an even bigger, 8,500-square-metre portrait by Montreal artist Gene Pendon — a.k.a. Starship — and American artist El Mac on the side of a 20-storey building on Crescent St., big enough that it could be seen from Mount Royal.
Both murals quickly become fixtures of the Montreal cityscape, popping up on countless social media feeds and in news reports here and abroad.
Are two murals overkill though? For anyone else, perhaps. But Mural Festival co-founder André Bathalon put it best when he told the Montreal Gazette: “There really can’t be too many tributes for this awesome man.”
Postscript: Not everyone loves Cohen looming over Crescent. Our own columnist Bill Brownstein, for example, thought it an ill-fitting tribute.
“Crescent was not Cohen’s street,” Brownstein wrote. “Rest assured Cohen was never out there guzzling back bubbly with F1 aficionados or gazing lustily at the Ferraris lining the street during Grand Prix festivities.”