Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

One is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And amazingly, one is in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

right here on Sherbrooke Street, where you can go and see this amazing statue.

In the late 1880s, Rodin decided to make large versions of the Thinker a pantograph was used and this basically is a device that consists of linked arms that can be moved to trace the statue or in fact a drawing or anything else that can then be scaled up through the use of these arms.

We were staying, uh, um, at, uh, this, uh, friend called, uh, Laura.

She's the curator for Asian arts and archeology at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and it was, uh, very nice to talk with her [laughs] every day, and, uh, to, yeah, share knowledge and just, uh, talk about anything.

She also had, uh, a beautiful, uh, c- c- cat called Aru, and every time that I was calling Aru, I thought always about Aru, the Sardinian, uh, rider, the Italian rider.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And by the way, wearing the right outfit could get you into places for free because twice in the last two weeks I have gone to an art exhibition, I happened to be wearing a, a Liverpool kit, and both times I got free admission.

Once to the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and then just literally today at the MoMA in New York.

Both times I got free admission just for having the right jersey.

So, you never know, bro.

And so I identified that missing beaver hunt painting, uh, to be representative of, you know, how North America was becoming more absent in his mind.

And, um, so I made a painting at that, around two thousand eleven for the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, which was Les Castors du Roi, The King's Beavers, and it was to stand in for that lack of, um, prioritization of the, this whole continent.

So, [lips smack] um, when I, um, was thinking about this piece, I was thinking, kind of imagining that this beaver lodge was the, the, the bronze sculpture that Louis XV never commissioned for Versailles, but I wanted it to feel like it, it could belong in Versailles and also, you know, for, for viewers when they come across it, I wanted them to think, "Oh, this, maybe this has been here for three hundred years," and, uh, but at least it would get people thinking about these histories of, you know.

And, uh, as people come from different parts of the world, there's an opportunity to experience something kind of joyful, but there's also the history.

Anyway, this is a case I'd definitely like to hear your theories on, and as you may have been able to gather, I've fully gone down the rabbit hole on this mysterious disappearance.

A few days after Labor Day in 1972, the security director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts got a phone call from a man with a vaguely European accent.

The caller sent him to a phone booth at Sherbrooke and Metcalfe, a short walk from McGill University.

Inside a box, there was a 17th-century Spanish pendant that had been sitting in one of the museum's display cases the previous weekend.

Alison Bremner is a Tlingit artist born and raised in Southeast Alaska.

Her work is included in the permanent collection of, among others, the Burke Museum in Seattle, the British Museum in London, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, Canada, and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth.

With that said, let's jump into this conversation with Alison Bremner.

[gentle music] Alison Bremner, thank you so much for joining me on "Five Plain Questions." It's really great to have you here.

There's so much to do.

I mean, like I said, I would send them to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

I would have them check out the oratory, go to Mount Royal.

Like all the iconic stuff I think is good to do.