Montreal cross sculpture still controversial 40 years after mayor ordered it destroyed
MONTREAL — Pierre Ayot’s sculpture La croix du Mont-Royal stood for just a few days in 1976 before the mayor of the day, Jean Drapeau, ordered it and the rest of the Corridart exhibit along Sherbrooke Street destroyed on the eve of the Olympics.
“Too many works exhibited in Corridart presented unfavorable images of the city, its population, its education,” Justice Ignace Deslauriers would later write in rejecting the artists’ lawsuit against the city. “Art should not insult people.”
Forty years after Drapeau’s notorious assault on art, a project to temporarily remount Ayot’s work depicting the Mount Royal cross leaning on its side has hit a last-minute roadblock because the current mayor, Denis Coderre, is worried people might take offence. [...]