Museum curation analysis by Alex Chohan

achohan3439 — 2025-04-02 16:23:38 UTC

Early to modern international art is a collection of artworks ranging from early Neoclassical pieces to expressionist pieces of the contemporary era.

achohan3439 — 2025-04-02 16:24:36 UTC

The collection starts with older artworks in smaller, separate rooms. The wooden floor and roof give a rustic, more classical aesthetic. The frames of the art themselves are extravagant and gilded in gold. I believe the curator chose these frames intentionally to reference the purpose of the artworks, which, at the time, was a show of wealth and status. Additionally, for the artists, their artwork was a show of technical skills, as realism was valued the most during the period.

achohan3439 — 2025-04-02 16:25:12 UTC

The artworks themselves were paired in separate rooms. The room on the left focused on landscape and still life, which belong to realism, impressionism, and romanticism. Additionally, the rooms on the right had historical scenes of neoclassicism. This room had blue walls and a high vaulted ceiling, possibly indicating that the curator wanted to show that neoclassicism was the high-class artwork of the time.

achohan3439 — 2025-04-02 16:25:37 UTC

As you progress through the halls, the artwork becomes expressionist, borders get thinner, and images get larger to put more emphasis on the artwork’s meaning, which reflects on trends of the time, as art moved away from a display of status and technical skills to a way of expressing ideas, the focus was on what the image represents, but not the image itself. The size of the room also gets progressively larger in one connected room. Larger rooms can be interpreted as the scope of art getting larger, from a narrow, strict selection to almost anything, such as abstract paintings, sculptures, etc.

achohan3439 — 2025-04-02 16:27:41 UTC

Stargazing is a collection in the Montreal fine arts museum that starts in a dark blue room with lighting on the ceiling in a constellation pattern. On the wall, there’s writing that asks what you see when you look at the stars. The curator set up the room to evoke the experience of being in space. This room is juxtaposed by the second room, which has light blue walls, natural lighting and a question asking what freedom means to you.

achohan3439 — 2025-04-02 16:28:11 UTC

Taking the writing into account, the first room represents a childlike modern interpretation of freedom, which is being able to explore the world as an astronaut. The second room represents a more primitive definition of freedom, which is living and breathing the natural world. This is shown by the choice of artwork where there’s a painting of multiple dead birds pinned to the wall. This represents the freedom of being alive in the natural world, showing that there are different interpretations of freedom based on culture and time period.

achohan3439 — 2025-04-02 16:41:35 UTC