Nicolas Party, a Master in Pastel, Captivates at the Montreal MFA

Anti-scholarship rants in the catalogue undermine a lovely show.

M ontreal, one of my favorite places, isn’t far from my home in Arlington in southwestern Vermont. It’s an easy, pretty drive by the Adirondacks. I had an unprogrammed day Tuesday, so I did the rare and, for me, positively aberrant thing. On an impulse, and little old Burkean me is anti-impulsive, I went to the Great North to see Nicolas Party: L’heure mauve (Mauve Twilight), at the Museum of Fine Arts. Swami Blackface, Canada’s Castro-lite prime minister, closed the country during the Covid mass derangement. What good’s power, after all, if its disuse leaves the public unoppressed? Canada’s lockdown was so intense that the country seemed to disappear. During its brief open window last year in December, I visited Montreal to write about the MFA’s very nice Karsh portrait exhibition.

Party, born in 1980, is a Swiss artist based in New York. His work is seductive and beautiful. He’s a master in pastel, an unusual and daunting medium, and he’s also both original and a smooth amalgamist. Montreal’s MFA is a great place. Its calling card is visionary exhibitions. Mauve Twilight is one more trip to heaven courtesy of Party and the MFA’s exhibition philosophy.

Party’s big landscapes, still lifes, and portraits anchor Mauve Twilight. His forms are bold. They’re pastels — powdered pigments mixed with gum or resin for density and fixity — but banish the thought of delicate color. His palette has attitude. Artists, I know, hate it when critics, academics, dealers, and the public say their work “looks like” this other artist or that, and I don’t fault them. When I saw Landscape, a nocturne, I first thought about Maxfield Parrish. Then I thought about Burchfield, Max Klinger, and Klimt, before deciding, “This is very beautiful.” Cave, which could be its pendant, left me thinking about Odysseus. It’s a hot red picture and, to me, evokes getting in and out of jams.

Party is from Lausanne, so he’s French by instinct. He went to the Glasgow School of Art, which offers a worldly art education. It’s clear to me that he looks at everything, old and new, absorbs it, and then does something uniquely his.

Party’s imaginary portraits of women are intense. Their stares drill yet their faces are opaque, like the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin. For a second, I looked at his big still lifes and thought about Botero, since the forms are bulbous. I overdosed on Botero years ago on my first trip to Palm Beach to visit donors. Everyone had a Botero. The longer I looked, though, Party’s still lifes seemed like a harem of odalisques. Yes, they’re gourds, squashes, pumpkins, and pears, but they’re pliable and languid.

So, that’s Party. Since I’ve just been to the Biennale in Venice, and the anchor show, Milk of Dreams, is about contemporary Surrealism, that’s where I’d put Party if I need to assign him to a movement. He’d probably call himself a modern Symbolist.

Party got carte blanche to borrow from the MFA’s very good collection and to juxtapose these works against his own. The point of departure and reference in Mauve Twilight, insofar as the MFA collection is concerned, is Ozias Leduc’s L’heure mauve, from 1921. Leduc (1864–­1955) was a Québécois painter, very Catholic, who decorated churches but also did landscapes and portraits. His L’heure mauve depicts gnarled branches, twigs, and oak leaves at twilight set against a snow-covered ground. Twilight, to him, invests the natural world with a gauze that’s mauve.

There’s lots of Group of Seven paintings and some Old Masters. Each gallery has chairs from the permanent collection, often placed in the middle. They’re not for public seating. They’re design elements underscoring shapes in the art. There’s also a group of Party’s figure sculptures.

The exhibition is in the MFA’s old Beaux Arts building, starting at the top of its grand staircase. Party created the pastels, of course, and the sculptures, and selected the MFA’s art. He also designed the exhibition and the handsome catalogue. He’s the curator. The entrance has drama and verve. Party painted murals on many of the walls in the show. Front and center in the premiere space is a massive painted head in high-density polyurethane foam. It’s part mannequin but part Russian religious icon or ancient Egyptian monolith, except it looks Art Deco and French. It’s set against an abstract view of a waterfront and mountains.

The introductory panel is both straightforward and cryptic. Party presents “a set of poetic meditations” on art history, which are fine to ignore, as I hate poetic meditations. They’re vacuous, trivial, sentimental, needy blather, and that’s not Party. They’re about the relationship humans have had with nature. That’s always a good, though very general, topic. Other topics are “the locus of original sin” — worrisome since original sin is a specific, religious, and doctrinal thing — “territory to be conquered, wasteland, untouched space, field of desire, expanse of chaos, and theater of transformation.”

My experience is that exhibitions about everything are really about nothing, but here, that’s fine. Party’s a wonderful artist. I take the intro panel as an invitation to enjoy the art and don’t fret about content. Party once said in an interview, “I’m not part of the school of art that thinks things should be hard. If you’re visually amused, that’s fine with me.” He values beauty and makes beautiful art.

The panel ends with the dire pronouncement that “central to the exhibition are some of our era’s most pressing questions, those of a planet that has reached its twilight, its heure mauve.”

Danger, risque, péril, mauvais pas, perdition, terrain glissant, Will Robinson. All of a sudden, it’s the end of the world? And I’m in freakin’ Canada, excuse my French? At least I’m in Montreal, not Ottawa. Best to ignore the introductory panel and enjoy a gorgeous exhibition. There’s no more interpretation in the show. I felt safe from rants.

Each gallery is gorgeous in its own way, and delectably, provocatively different. Party picked the wall colors. He’s got flair. In the first gallery, the walls are forest green, and he painted a mural of bare green, red, yellow, and cream trees. His Cave and Portrait with Mushrooms are there. The first picture is one that Party owns, a sottobosco, or “forest floor” painting, Forest Floor Still Life with Three Snakes, Lizard, and Toad, from 1663, by the great, mostly unknown Otto Marseus van Schrieck. The genre depicts plants and critters living in a dank, dark forest floor, some in undergrowth and some near water. No, it’s not a symbol for Washington. Cockroaches thrive indoors. There’s a small, Arcadian Poussin in this gallery, too.

The next gallery, painted red, stars pictures of tree trunks by Party, a striking, small Giacometti portrait of his mother, and The Woodcutter, a good, big painting by Ferdinand Hodler from 1910. I was getting the drill now: The first gallery is about a virgin world, next is a tree hugger’s nightmare.

The third gallery, with walls in a soft, key-lime-pie green, features Party’s cave mural with an Otto Dix portrait of the lawyer Hugo Simons, from 1925, hanging on it. There are two imaginary portraits by Party. Portrait with Lawyer and Portrait with Ruin are pictures of mannequin-like women with a touch of 1930s movie-star glam filling the top half. The bottom half of the first is a riff on Dix’s portrait. A scene of ruins is the lower half of the other.

A big gallery, in a dazzling indigo, juxtaposes Party’s large landscapes against works including Lawren Harris’s Mount Temple, from 1925, Arthur Lismer’s Cathedral Mountain, from 1928, and Leduc’s L’heure mauve. Harris and Lismer are Group of Seven artists — Canada’s great landscape painters, from their Hudson River School but in the ’20s and ’30s. To me, the gallery is about grandeur, excepting Leduc’s painting. His painting is 36 by 30 inches, not small, but its view of twigs and branches is a fragile one. Party’s work here is narrow, vertical, and big, done in saturated colors. The Group of Seven paintings show austere mountains. Leduc’s picture is a landscape vanitas.

Whither the chair motif, you wonder. Does it seem silly? Since I don’t take the End Times line in the introductory panel seriously, and look at the exhibition as a display of high design and chromatic style, the chairs intrigue. The ones in the indigo gallery are chaises longues from the 1940s to 2014. Like the art on the walls, they’re expansive. I was in Vienna a few weeks ago, visiting the MAK, the city’s design museum. It’s chair-heavy. I see them as a whimsical touch on Party’s part.

There’s a still-life gallery and an apocalypse gallery. Party’s Red Forest is a forest-fire scene and fabulous. I don’t think I’ve seen a fire picture in pastel. The powdery, chalk look of pastel delivers. Fire and smoke obliterate contour as well as sharp focus. Pastel is pure color, so getting the tonal shifts in Party’s work shows extraordinary finesse. Party is a good portraitist, as least in work such as Woman with Mushrooms and Portrait with Ruin, but he’s good with the human figure, too. Two works called “Creases” show parts of flexing human bodies.

A final gallery with dark purple walls displays more sculptures — a dozen heads and headless, kneeling polyurethane-foam sculptures, all painted a fleshy yellow, some with little butterflies, some with snakes, some with snails. I suppose they’re a reference to the sottobosco picture in the first gallery. The headless humans, I assume, are beyond thought and reason. They look like the kinds of sculptures we’d expect to see emerging from a long-lost tomb of an Egyptian big shot. The gallery suggests a gathering of a cult, too.

I didn’t read the catalogue until I got home. There’s rant galore. It’s full-throttle, full-moon, butterfly-net environmental kookery. “How can we look at ancient, Baroque, classical, or even modern art without being overcome by today’s environmental crisis?” one of the two short essays asks. Ugly American as I might be, I can look at it just fine. I’m looking at Party’s art. Everything springs from that. The two essayists, and the essays are only four or five pages each, start with a set of notions. These notions explain all art. Every work of art is shoehorned into their views. They’re both art historians. They don’t serve the art, though. The art serves them.

The essays, one by the museum’s director, linger on environmental murder, “sixth extinction” loony-bin talk, the cultural genocide of First Nations, “the heinous pillaging of nature,” crushing heat domes, and, above all, melancholy and final endings. Blah, blah, blah. Boris Johnson, one foot out the door, said it best when dealing with the recalcitrant French over who-knows-what. “Donnez-moi un break.”

The catalogue, which, by the way, is beautifully, even sumptuously, illustrated, isn’t to be taken seriously as scholarship. It’s disingenuous, which means the exhibition is disingenuous. The book is an integral part of the show. Mauve Twilight’s introductory panel hints at ecological apocalypse ever so obliquely. Party deserves something better than a screed.

I don’t read the show as a disaster exhibition, the Poseidon Adventure of pastels. There are vanitas moments where Party, especially in the still-life section, contemplates the fate of every living thing, which is death. A country guy from the Green Mountain State, Quebec’s neighbor, I see the forest gallery and the landscapes by Party and the Group of Seven as awesome. They’re majestic and magical. Book of Revelations material? Je crois que non.

I’m not sure what happened here, but I’ll give it a guess. A marketing ploy is at work. Party’s work is beautiful. It’s decorative in the best sense of the word. It’s interior art that resonates with the soul. It’s most evocative.

Dealers tell me that their most discerning buyers want soul food in art. Less discerning buyers want a message. Critics, or at least the so-so ones and those who aim at the chattering class, want a message. There’s a crop of academics who want a message, especially those who find form, color, mastery of a medium, and the art of dreams boring because these are things they don’t understand. The last thing I would call Party is an environmental artist, and the second-to-last thing I’d call him is an apocalypse artist. He’s not a message artist. He’s better than that.

I liked the exhibition a lot. Party is one of our best artists. It all looks divine in the MFA’s galleries. It’s a Happening. There’s a music component, too, with each gallery having a theme song. In one, it’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” by Pete Seeger. Suffice to say, I’ve had my fill of teary ’60s hippie tunes. But Party and Debussy? Une parfaite harmonie.

I left the exhibition enchanted, not thinking about the climate hoax, a big corporate boondoggle if there ever was one. Party can take the same work he did for this show, juxtapose it against a set of Impressionist paintings, or Fragonards and Bouchers, or Coles, Churches, Kensetts, and Bierstadts, and take us in entirely different directions. His art is that elastic. As always, I loved my visit to the museum, look forward to the next, and look forward, too, to Party’s next chapter.