Artistic recognition in the metropolis and the regions, from divergence to convergence: Around the exhibition Les chroniques du Québec by Arthur Villeneuve (1972)
In 1972, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented Les chroniques du Québec by Arthur Villeneuve. The first retrospective devoted to the work of the “barber painter” from Chicoutimi, this exhibition was very well attended and received wide media coverage, as does any cultural manifestation that succeeds in becoming an event. To understand the sources and effects of this phenomenon, the author examines the visual arts in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the place given to them in Montreal, on the one hand, and in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, on the other. With reference to reports from the national and Saguenay press, he shows that Villeneuve’s artistic recognition was based on the mediatized encounter between two distinct cultural spaces, namely the metropolis and the outlying region. As a generator of otherness, this face-to-face between the here and elsewhere favoured the convergence of initially divergent opinions on the painter and his art. This turnaround crystallized during the 1972 retrospective, and was appropriated by politicians and actors of the art world.