To round off Women’s Months, we went to see the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ new exhibition-Bad Girls Only. As bad girls go, all Montreal women (and Montrealers, some of whom can also be described as bad girls) will love it.
In French, it’s Présumées Coupables: les femmes et les sept péchés capitaux. It opened today and runs at the museum until August 10, 2025. It’s a small exhibition, bringing together 28 European works – drawings and engravings – from the early modern period (late 15th century to early 17th century), but it’s extremely rich.
Firstly, it’s a collection that is very rarely seen – and the different series of engravings are very rarely brought together in one place. These are small works, and you have to get up close to appreciate the details. We came across lots of girls and women laughing at pointy chins, monstrous boars, deflated breasts, leaning towards each other.
It’s a very interesting exhibition, too, because in the prevailing masculinist climate (Musk, Tate and the success of the English series Adolescence, which explores young men and boys falling for the rabbit hole of masculinists on social networks), we’re being explained and shown a vision of women that is demonizing, objectifying and grotesque. And, like today’s masculinists, they’re afraid of women, their power and their intelligence.
But, it has to be said, the works are also extremely beautiful, detailed and interesting in their level of technique, talent and detail. We can appreciate both, can’t we?
The original Bad Girl
The exhibition opens with Albrecht Dürher’s beautiful and well-known Adam & Eve (The Fall) , and is accompanied by a reflection on the woman, who has been referred to as the original “sinner”, a body inhabited by the 7 deadly sins. The first being, as it is written in the Catholic Bible, Eve biting into the apple of the knowledge tree when she had been told not to.
The Witch Hunt
In the exhibition, you can also see the famous (and very rare) Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), an A+B “guide” written by men who claimed to be hunting witches. How to recognize them, how to torture them, how to annihilate them. This was in the years around when the (caricatured) drawings in the exhibition were made, because witch-hunting began at the beginning of the 16th century, in Germany.
The fear of women is crystallized in these pages, and it’s almost funny for the girls who come to see the exhibition – on the first page of the book, women are described as “[…] nature’s evil painted in light colors!”.
The seven deadly sins
The seven deadly sins –Pride, Avarice, Envy, Anger, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth – come into play . It’s in the three series of engravings and drawings on view here that women serve as allegories for the sins, depicted somewhat like gargoyles, or idols.
Each sin has its own specific iconography, which recurs in all three series: a bear and a sword for Anger, a mirror and a peacock for Pride, a goat for Lust, etc.
“Rethinking shame
We’ll leave you to discover the series, which is as beautiful as it is excruciatingly afraid of women. In The Fall, Gillian Anderson’s character says “men are afraid of being ridiculed by women, and women are afraid that men will kill them”. The theme of shame in women, forced, hammered home for generations by representations like those seen in Bad Girls Only, is explored in depth in the exhibition’s extremely detailed boxes.
And at the end, there’ s a wall and a choice of 7 types of card, stamped with the seven deadly sins, for visitors to fill in. On an Envie card, printed with the question “What’s your most enviable characteristic?”, one woman has written my confidence and another, my wild curly hair.
We recommend this exhibition to everyone – for the message, for the rarity of the works, for their beauty, and for the smile you get when you leave the Musée des Beaux-Arts. It’s snowing, and we’re feeling a little allegorical.
When? March 26 to August 10
Where? at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke Street West
How much? Free for children under 25, $30 for over-26s (except Wednesday evenings, when it’s $15), and free for all Quebec residents on the first Sunday of the month. It’s a good idea to book online before you go!
Enjoy your visit!