The Heart Called "After the Flood"

The Museum’s sculpture collection has been enriched by American Pop artist Dine’s monumental The Heart Called “After the Flood,” which symbolically marks the reception area of the Promenade of the Studios Art & Education Michel de la Chenelière. This unique work echoes two other sculptures by the artist located on both sides of Sherbrooke Street—Twin 6’ Hearts, now in front of the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion entrance, and Three Hearts on a Rock, on the Avenue du Musée corner of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion.


Specially commissioned by the Museum, the blue bronze heart is plastered with a collection of objects familiar to the artist, in particular tools such as screwdrivers, pliers, and hammers, as well as clearly visible Pinocchio figures. Given the sculpture’s evocative title, it is as if all those objects had just washed up after a natural disaster of biblical proportions. Here, Dine, at the height of his creative powers, brings together all the symbols of his own life as an artist: the heart, long synonymous with his work; the tools his father sold in the family hardware store as well as those he uses as a sculptor, painter and printmaker; and, finally, Pinocchio, a character on which he has been working since 1964, and whose story is itself a metaphor for art. Quite literally laden with the effort and illusions of an entire life spent making art, this highly allegoric sculpture preserves the feeling of lightheartedness, humour and philosophical detachment that best characterizes Dine’s work.