A look at Montreal à la the New Yorker
MONTREAL— It is the dream of most every illustrator and cartoonist to draw the cover the New Yorker, one of the world’s best known news magazines.
The publication can make an artist’s career, but the style and tone of the front page over nearly a century has helped to grow the aura around the city for which the magazine is named.
That latter aspect was what organizers of a recent exposition were aiming for in commissioning 55 artists to draw an aspect of Quebec’s largest city for the cover of the fake magazine, Le Montréaler.
The result is humorous, nostalgic, classic and sarcastic. The covers feature bagels, orange construction cones, strippers, snow and a good number of skylines with Montreal’s iconic bridges and buildings.
“It gives a good idea of Montreal in all of its diversity, its patchwork quality,” said Jimmy Beaulieu, a Quebec City-born cartoonist who has lived in Montreal since 1998.
“There are many different approaches, styles and tones, and that’s Montreal too.”
Paris first gave itself the New Yorker treatment, with a 2013 art show dubbed Le Parisianer. It was replicated with The Tokyoiter in Japan’s largest city.
Marion Arbona, a French illustrator who was living in Montreal at the time, knew an organizer of the Parisian exposition and set about exporting it to Canada.
“What we wanted was to have a personal portrait and vision of Montreal and to get away from the clichés of the city and find a scene of daily life: what Montreal means for each person,” said communications consultant Nicolas Trost, who worked with Arbona and editor Renaud Plante to put on the show.
Agathe Bray-Bourret’s drawing was a fantastical version of the subterranean network that many tourists arrive in the city anxious to explore.
She conjured up a secret four-level world filled with the mysteries, myths and misconceptions. There are stores and restaurants, but also exotic dancers, reptiles in business suits, lush gardens, polar bears and a beach where scantily clad devils sunbathe next to a tranquil sea of magma.
“I wanted to celebrate, in a way, the vice even though it’s not true. It’s a city that’s really calm, where people are really nice, but in the last few years with the scandals of corruption we get a bit worried about what people think of us,” she said.
Simon Thibault, an illustrator from Matane, a town along Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, drew Montreal’s distinctive Olympic Stadium, a building that makes locals grumble no matter how proud they are of having hosted the 1976 Games. But he drew its sloped tower as the head of a serpent turning against its people.
The building fascinated Thibault as a boy. It still intrigues him today.
“Montrealers love it and hate it at the same time, and I wanted to recreate that with the illustration,” he said. “I knew there would be many homages and pieces showing the positive side (of the city). I wanted to counterbalance that with something more crunchy.”
There is humour in pieces, such as Diane Obomsawin’s cover showing the red-brick Molson building puffing on a cigarette. And many agree there is something distinctly Quebecois captured in Aurélie Grand’s cover depicting a late night kitchen party with piles of wet boots at the front door.
If there is a weakness in a project seeking to capture all diverse views of Montreal, it is the thin showing of the city’s ethnic palette. A shop window in Chinatown with hockey paraphernalia, a few Hasidic Jews, a church fresco in Little Italy and a woman with a Montreal Expos pin attached to a black niqab are a bit thin for a city as diverse as this.
The exposition does do a good job of depicting Montreal’s recent history.
The idea to draw a vintage version of the massive ball that houses the Gibeau Orange Julep restaurant came to Quebec City illustrator Paul Bordeleau in a flash. His family always drove past it on the highway on the way to visit relatives.
“We always passed beside it but never stopped. I don’t even know if it’s any good, but the idea of this big orange circle was like a big sun shining in concrete Montreal,” he said. At the same time, his stylized drawing of a young woman sipping orange juice was a tribute to the illustrators of an earlier era who made the actual magazine such a distinctive product.
“I was really thinking of the vintage New Yorker,” he said. “For me, it was class.”
Beaulieu also delved into the past with a depiction of the 1976 fire at the Biosphere, which was the home of the American delegation when Montreal hosted Expo 67 almost a decade earlier. It’s a fairly accurate representation of the blaze, but could also pass for a sci-fi film poster about Earth being invaded by aliens.
“I wanted to do something catastrophic,” he said, explaining that his contribution was also a comment on U.S. President Donald Trump and the political anxiety south of the border.
“When we’re in Montreal or Cana- da and we look at the United States and look at what’s happening . . . it’s a sense of powerlessness with what’s happening there.” En Scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: awoods@thestar.ca