Montreal, that serene and congenial city, is an unlikely host for an immense exhibition dedicated to the historical origins of the urban maelstrom. Yet “The 1920s: Age of the Metropolis” has been a hit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where it was up all summer and continues into November.1 Both the locals and the tourists seem to enjoy going through this extended tour of Berlin, Paris, and New York in the years after World War I at the Museum of Fine Arts one can gawk at images of the cafés and cabarets of more than half a century ago, with their pig-faced sugar daddies and transvestite performers, or study the plans for multi-level glass cities that one is now quite sure nobody would ever be happy living in. And after one’s visit is over one can go out into a middle-sized city where modern buildings live on easy terms with old ones, where McGill University and quiet residential neighborhoods and huge office towers are cheek-by-jowl, where office workers can actually take a lunch break on a blanket on the grass. Montreal is a sane city: this is what makes it such a dramatic setting for a show about a period when a lot of sophisticated people would have rather died than admit to being totally sane. While the Berlin, Paris, and New York of sixty years ago were undoubtedly more livable than the same cities are today, the fact is that after World War II
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 10 Number 1, on page 136
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