Enjoying a rare moment of rest in the gallery café in May, Cogeval was to be found quietly feasting on a plate of smoked salmon, gathering his thoughts for the challenging hours ahead. The exhibition Jean Cocteau: Enfant Terrible was set to open that evening, and the show was still in its garters, but he just shrugged philosophically when I asked him if he was panicked. A subtle confidence prevailed; the staff were up to the challenge.
This was not the only iron in the fire. The following afternoon he was due to receive the Légion d'honneur in recognition of his more than 20 years of service to the French art world -- first as a curator in the education department of the Musée du Louvre, then as a professor of 19th-century art in the École du Louvre, and finally as the director of the Musée national des Monuments Français in Paris, a position he held until taking the reins of the MMFA in 1998.
Cogeval's grace under pressure was particularly notable, on this pre-Cocteau afternoon, if you know a little bit about his life -- such as the fact that he almost forfeited it two years ago to a bout of intestinal cancer, which brought him to the brink of death. Yet during those dark days, he managed to complete the three-volume catalogue raisonné on the French fin-de-siècle artist Edouard Vuillard, to oversee last year's ground-breaking exhibition devoted to the artist, and the monumental catalogue that accompanied it -- all of it steered to fruition from the depths of his medical confinement.
"When I was in the darkest days of my chemo," he told me on the phone last week, "I thought -- if I make it through this, the first thing I am going to do is go to Paris and sit in the gardens of the Tuileries. And I did. I am a very stubborn man."
Guy Cogeval in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: 'In Paris now, they call me le Canadien.' (Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail)
With death no longer at his doorstep, Cogeval gives the appearance of a cat settling into his next eight lives with undisguised relish. Just a month ago, he announced his cross-appointment with the Réunion des musées nationaux in France, where he has signed on to steer the exhibition program of the Grand Palais in Paris -- a formidable assignment. He has assumed this role in a consulting capacity, while continuing his directorship in Montreal. Asked to explain the arrangement, he says simply, "I thought my job was not done here."
This is happy news for the Canadian museum world. Under Cogeval's tenure, the gallery has set a high standard for exhibitions that combine scholarly depth with superb showmanship -- such as Hitchcock and Art, Picasso Érotique, Richelieu: Art and Power and, of course, Édouard Vuillard, a definitive exhibition that provided an intimate view of the artist's deepest artistic motivations.
Vuillard has a special place in Cogeval's world. Until he was 5, Cogeval grew up in a Paris apartment on the Place Vintimille, between L'Opéra and Sacré Coeur. The property remained in his family until the 1970s. Across the park was the former Vuillard family home. "Many of Vuillard's painting's show the balcony of my grandmother's apartment," Cogeval says with obvious nostalgia.
Like the great French painter who lived there so many decades before him, Cogeval too enjoyed a childhood of lilac-scented female attention. His father was an estate agent with a passion for Old Paris, and his mother was an Italian-French translator, but it was his grandmother, Piera, who opened the floodgates of his imagination. "She taught me to be afraid at night," he says with affectionate reverence. "She taught me that there were silent presences around us. She had a taste for the fantastic, and an incredible spirit of invention."
He still recalls one of their visits to the Musée national des Monuments Français, where he discovered the third floor and its inventory of Gothic paintings of hell. "I ran back down the stairs," he recalls. Years later, he would return to run the museum, he says laughing, but he maintains that he never went back up there again.
It was his flair for the uncanny and macabre that enlivened Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the 1995 exhibition that Cogeval organized in a freelance capacity, with fellow Parisian Jean Clair. (The MMFA was then under the directorship of Pierre Théberge.) Lavish, encyclopedic, theatrical, decadent, Lost Paradise had all the hallmarks of a Cogeval extravaganza.
Robert Rosenblum, a much-revered professor of fine arts at New York University, recalls: "Lost Paradise was remarkable for its internationalism, and for the way that it included photography, tapestries, you name it. He shook everything up so that it looked like it had just been discovered." Like Cogeval's earlier shows in Europe (such as Debussy and Symbolism), it was path-breaking. "What distinguishes him is that his range is so wide -- movies, opera, art, instrumental music. These days, specialists don't dare to move out of their corners, but he does so with élan."
Three years later, when Théberge departed to head the National Gallery of Canada, Cogeval left Paris to take up the director's chair in Montreal himself, a move he now describes as the best decision he ever made. "In Paris now," he says, "they call me le Canadien." This summer, he will be applying to add Canadian citizenship to his list of attributes. Some day, he says, he will return to Europe, but not yet.
In the meantime, there's work to do. His current dream show is a mammoth exhibition devoted to the theme of art and history, a multinational show combining painting, sculpture, propaganda and film. ("I want to show Delacroix beside Eisenstein!" he says.) He's also thinking about a major exhibition on Walt Disney.
Closer to hand are the shows slated for the next few years, such as Catherine the Great: An Imperial Patronage (being developed in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario) and a survey exhibition about painting in Provence from the mid-19th century onward. Like many of the best things he's done in Montreal, this last show takes advantage of the fact that Cogeval's European connections can bring a quality of art work to Canada that would have been almost unthinkable a decade ago, and at a competitive price.
It's a strategic advantage that he says is increasingly difficult to capitalize on, given the ongoing grant freezes in the Quebec museum world. "I don't think the politicians understand the opportunity we have here," he said to me over lunch on the day of the Cocteau opening, a flicker of weariness surfacing just for a moment.
"I am a fiscal conservative," he added delicately, "and I know you can't just go on spending money you don't have. But there is a point below which you simply cannot go. And most of the time we are negotiating in euros. You can imagine." The museum's current grant from the province sits at just $12-million, a drop from the $16-million level in the mid-1990s, and staff remains cut back from 270 to 200 people.
Despite the threadbare finances, the mood inside the museum is upbeat.
"He has a beautiful mind, amazing," says one admiring MMFA employee who was embarrassed to be named. "He's a very complex individual. He can be infuriating in the morning and utterly charming in the evening," sometimes driving the staff to the breaking point.
"But I would say he is more inspiring than exhausting. He has enough ideas to fuel 10 museums. Right now, thank God, he's only running two."
Jean Cocteau: Enfant Terrible continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until Aug. 29 (information: 514-285-2000).
