Place Ville Marie, 1963

“Now I want badly to get to work. I would like to do something with Place Ville Marie and the girls who flock there at noon” Surrey said in August of 1963.

Place Ville Marie completed in 1962, and the celebratory atmosphere of this important building complex inspired a series of four of what are among Surrey’s most sought after large format paintings. 

This work relates directly to a large format Surrey painting identified as Place Ville Marie l, a view of the plaza along Dorchester (now Rene Levesque), looking west toward the Sun Life Building. 

The plaza at Place Ville Marie was originally designed as a place where people could congregate and enjoy the pleasures of the outdoors at lunch time in the city centre, just outside the office. Philip Surrey, ever the observer of others, was inspired by the opportunities for composition there. “In the day”, and inoffensively, this plaza was a super spot for lunchtime people watching. The evolution of the plaza today to a space interrupted by atrium type structures allowing light into a large food court below is in part due to the nature of the dance of the three graces Surrey has captured here. As beautiful as the space was it created a wind tunnel effect and had limited usage. The cold and snow of Montreal’s winter compounded the obstacles of lounging about on the Plaza.

When John McConnell, publisher of the Montreal Star [Weekend Magazine] an admirer of Surrey’s art, liberated Surrey from his work with the Star, he agreed to pay him for the ensuing 12 years. It is recorded in his “autobiographical notes” that Surrey was excited, enthusiastic and uplifted in his spirits with this transition. At the same time, Montreal was undergoing a transition of its own, kind of a rejuvenation. Plans were underway for Canada’s centenary with what was to be Expo 67, construction of new highways and byways to the city centre from new suburbia developed in almost every direction, and in the downtown core, a competition between two office towers being built concurrently, the CIBC building and Place Ville Marie.