Celebrating the strength and diversity of the museum’s drawing collection, which includes gouaches, sketches, watercolors, and collage, “How Artists Draw: Toward the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center” will present a selection of The Menil Collection’s most significant drawings in combination with exceptional works on paper from private collections.
From early on, The Menil Collection assembled important groups of works on paper by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters. Acquisitions continue to be made as the museum begins to formally introduce its plans to form the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, with a new focus on collecting, researching, and exhibiting drawings. In the last five years, for example, major groups of drawings by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, Michael Heizer, and Robert Gober have expanded the collection. This exhibition will highlight the museum’s long commitment to the medium, while facilitating a public discussion about the new initiative within Houston and the broader art community. It effectively lays out the conceptual framework for envisioning the future of this long-term initiative.
Anchored by works from the above artists--as well as from others with an in-depth representation in the collection, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly--the exhibition will encourage the type of intimate encounters that from the beginning have guided the curatorial philosophy of The Menil Collection. Unexpected treasures from the collection by Georgia O’Keeffe, Odilon Redon, Marcel Duchamp, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others, will punctuate constellations of work by single artists, not only highlighting the specific techniques and processes that define the unique qualities of the medium, but also marking the changes within it over the course of more than a century. The show will also suggest the direction of the future center by culminating in large-scale works by Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt.
The exhibition is generously supported by SYSCO Corporation, Houston
Endowment, Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Allen, Baker Botts, L.L.P., Mike and Diane Cannon, Sotheby's, Clare Casademont and Michael Metz, Jesse H. Jones II, Janie C. Lee and David B. Warren, Leslie and Shannon Sasser, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, William F. Stern, Michael Zilkha, The Wortham Foundation, and the City of Houston.
Pablo Picasso
Violon sur une table (Violin on a Table), 1912 (Paris, autumn)
The Menil Collection
© Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
C. Lee, in memory of James A. Elkins, Jr. © The Willem de Kooning
Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Hester
+ Hardaway
