Matthew Purvis’ The Pornographic Delicatessen won the 2025 Bookseller/Diagram prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.  The eyebrow-raising title comes courtesy of Montreal poet Denis Vanier, who used it for a 1968 book and also plays a key role in Purvis’ study.

The Pornographic Delicatessen
Midcentury Montréal’s Erotic Art, Media, and Spaces
Matthew Purvis

Concordia University Press
$59.95
paperback
440pp
9781988111599

Montreal has long carried a reputation for being a horny city. Thanks to Purvis’ deep (and lively) research, we now get a clearer – and more entertaining – sense of how it earned it.

The mRb talked to Purvis about some of the themes in the book.

mRb: If the medium is the message (à la Marshall McLuhan), and if the city of Montreal is to be understood as the medium, as you note in the book, what function does Montreal serve in relation to eroticism when compared to the rest of Canada? In what ways is it unique, and why?

Matthew Purvis: The erotic art that developed in Montreal was substantially different from that which contemporaneously existed in Toronto or London, for example. There were numerous reasons for this. Among them was the province’s relationship to French surrealism, which placed a fairly specific set of notions about eroticism at its centre, particularly as conceptualized by André Breton and Georges Bataille. 

Another was the city’s commercial sex milieu, alongside which much of its art evolved. Both developed out of the Duplessis era, which, despite its repressive reputation, had allowed for a world-renowned red-light district and burlesque scene, most of which was eroded or erased by the Quiet Revolution and liberal reform. Both regimes were very mixed bags for anyone interested in eroticism and played roles in influencing how it could be publicly articulated. The easing of censorship restrictions in the late sixties, for instance, contributed to the boom in the production of sex films (films de fesses) in the province, which was foundational in establishing a commercially viable feature film industry in the province.  

mRb: As a born-and-raised Montrealer, I was unfamiliar with the genre of ti-pop you identify in the book. This may be because I am bilingual – an anglophone with francophone tendencies – but could you offer readers a brief introduction to the concept?

MP: Ti-pop is a term coined by Pierre Maheu and Pierre Théberge to describe what a specifically Québécois pop art would be. It was an under-theorized term, but one that generally indicated a deliberately paradoxical sense of intimate distance or affectionate alienation toward the material sensibility of the Duplessis era and its aftermath. The term was taken up more broadly in the press and given a wide array of meanings, but it tended to suggest a low-class or outmoded sensibility. It was used to describe things as varied as communist utopian fantasies, cheap Catholic folk art, the work of Jacques Godbout, the symbolic value of Pepsi, nightclub decor, or the films of Jean Pierre Lefebvre.

mRb: You discuss the rise of “girl-watching” that took shape downtown, particularly around Place Ville-Marie, and the role the miniskirt played in this development. Could you elaborate further on this phenomenon, and comment on the ways in which voyeurism did – or did not – play a role in this performance?

MP: Girl-watching was a practice found in urban environments across North America. Basically, it meant that men, either singly or in clubs, would go to different areas and watch and photograph women they expected would be scantily clad in the latest fashions. In Montreal, it reached a kind of crescendo during the Expo period as the city was swamped with tourists. Locally, the emergence of girl-watching more or less coincided with the decline of burlesque. If downtown became a free catwalk, the burlesque house seemed antiquated. 

A variety of other voyeuristic and exhibitionistic practices emerged at the time, including the development of exotic dancing, erotic discos, and the fad for topless restaurants. Some of these fads morphed and lived on. Until a few months ago, you could still be served breakfast by waitresses in lingerie at Les Coquines Resto-Sexy on Hochelaga.

mRb: In your conclusion you write, “While the extensive history of contemporary art in the city, as an institution and practice, relies on intentionality and the presumption of the sociocultural construction of meaning, I have attempted to stress a rival development of the same underlying themes, one not in line with the utility of the institutions but the inutility of the erotic.” What do you mean by this inutility of the erotic?

MP: Controversies around eroticism in the period had less to do with sexual content in itself than with whether it could be socially redeemed. The drive to create contemporary art in the city, which included different levels of government and some arts groups, teachers, critics, etc., tended to be rationalized in terms of the professionalization and socialization of art. Art was supposed to have a redemptive function, whether as a type of pedagogy or the symbolic expression of community. 

mRb: It sounds like the debates weren’t really about sex itself. They were more about whether that kind of art could be justified or made respectable. City officials, governments, and art-world people wanted to build a serious contemporary art scene, and art was expected to “do good” – to teach, improve people, or represent shared community values – rather than just exist for pleasure or provocation. Is that right?

MP: Yes, these are still the normative frames commonly employed by institutions like the MAC and UQAM. But most of how eroticism was conceived at the time, largely thanks to the legacy of surrealism, was as something that radically undermined conscious meaning and use value, and which demeaned the credibility of social representation and significance.

mRb: I found the section on Gai-Kébec particularly illuminating, especially in noting the significance Montreal held during the rise of Queer movements, particularly as a proxy for our American neighbours. You explore this topic through the erotic press and specific publications; if print is dead, is Montreal’s erotic print also dead?

MP: More broadly, this question points to something else that distinguished Quebec from the rest of Canada. The province possessed a comparatively rich market for local tabloids and yellow press, which spanned from scandal sheets to pornography, straight, gay, and so on. There were cheap and more luxurious variations of this, and they overlapped in interesting ways with the counterculture press in the city. They also overlapped, in theme and content, with the trend for affordable prints and art books that emerged when artists were targeting a wider consumer base. This hasn’t gone away. Artists still make erotic prints and paintings, and Montreal is a significant centre for pornography, if more substantially on the business end.mRb

Image: Gilles Boisvert, Québec libre, 1969. Acrylic and transfer on canvas, 167.6 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist.