Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts hosts unique naked tour

They say nudity is art and around 85 people put that saying into practice Thursday night at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Participants and got to know each other over drinks in the museum’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion before they stripped -keeping only their shoes- to tour Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibit: Focus: Perfection.

It was only appropriate as Mapplethorpe is renown not only for his celebrity portraits, which include Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and Isabelle Rosellini, to name a few, but also for his provocative black-and-white nude photographs that invite guests to reflect on questions of gender, identity and sexuality.

“The notions of identity, self-representation and affirmation of the body, which Robert
Mapplethorpe expressed so compellingly, inspired us to create this unusual visit,” Thomas Bastien, head of Education and Community Programmes at the Museum, said in a statement.

“With this type of activity, we are again demonstrating that difference has its place at the Museum,” Bastien added.

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Gallery: Naked tour of the MMFA, Thursday October 13, 2016. Warning: it contains nudity

Similar visits have taken place at other museums, including the Leopold Museum in Vienna, for the
exhibition Naked Men in 2012-2013, as well as the National Gallery of Australia in 2015, in
connection with the James Turrell retrospective.

Mapplethorpe’s exhibit will be stationed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until Jan. 22, 2017.