{"id":10686,"date":"2026-01-12T03:52:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T08:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fondationguidomolinari.org\/en\/?p=10686"},"modified":"2026-03-06T15:28:02","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T20:28:02","slug":"fernande-saint-martin-and-guido-molinari-a-life-in-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fondationguidomolinari.org\/en\/fernande-saint-martin-and-guido-molinari-a-life-in-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Faire \u00e9cole. Fernande Saint-Martin and Guido Molinari: A Life in Teaching<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With works by: Lucio de Heusch, John Fox, Charles Gagnon, Marc Garneau, Yves Gaucher, Jean Goguen, Betty Goodwin, R. Holland Murray, Jocelyn Jean, Harlan Johnson, Sophie Lanct\u00f4t, Guido Molinari, Henry Saxe, Marc S\u00e9guin, Fran\u00e7oise Sullivan.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guido Molinari (1933-2004) passionately collected the works of artists he admired throughout his life, supported by his partner, Fernande Saint-Martin (1927-2019), herself a woman of keen observation and spirit. Together, they amassed an assemblage of nearly 800 works by Quebec, Canadian, and international artists. These works, bequeathed to the Foundation\u2019s permanent collection, help to reveal, among other things, the importance of teaching in their lives, and offer an understanding of how they made a difference, each in their own unique way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faire \u00e9cole<\/em> gathers archives as well as a selection of works created by their colleagues and students at UQAM and Concordia University, where they worked respectively. Guido Molinari was one of a group of artists who formed the basis of Concordia\u2019s Faculty of Fine Arts, where he taught from 1970 to 1997. He forged strong relationships with some of his former students, whom he continued to support by helping them to exhibit or even purchasing their works. Those who had the privilege of attending Molinari’s painting classes speak of their former professor as a generous, dynamic, and insightful mentor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Fernande Saint-Martin relinquished the directorship of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain de Montr\u00e9al in 1977, she devoted herself to pedagogy and research. First a professor at Universit\u00e9 Laval (1979-1980), she subsequently taught at UQAM from 1979 to 2002. There, Saint-Martin co-founded the doctoral programme in Semiology \u2014 the science of signification \u2014 and developed within the Research Group on Semiotics of Visual Arts a semiology of visual language that came to be known as the \u201cQuebec School\u201d of visual semiotics, influencing an entire generation of young Quebec researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n