The Menil Collection’s mission-driven publishing program strives to contribute to the interpretation and history of art, and to provide intellectual contexts for works of art on exhibition or in the collection. Gallery guides are crafted to inform viewers during and after a visit. Books of many sizes and shapes extend the museum’s reach and engage many around the world. New forms being explored on this website seek to engage digital visitors, many of whom may never come in person.
Books are ambassadors for the museum, documenting temporary exhibitions and projects as well as permanent holdings, and especially since the early 2000s and the contraction of commercial book publishing, museum publications have become prominent vehicles for new art historical research and critical insights. Long before the museum opened in 1987, founders John and Dominique de Menil were active producing exhibitions and catalogues with various Houston arts organizations. National attention came with two exhibitions organized by their Institute of the Arts at Rice University, 1969’s Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, initiated by John de Menil, and the Yves Klein retrospective of 1982, curated by Dominique de Menil and circulated to Chicago, New York, and Paris.
In fact, Menil publishing began in the 1950s when John and Dominique de Menil organized exhibitions at the University of St. Thomas with the art historian and curator Jermayne McAgy. A massive research project called The Image of the Black in Western Art was begun in 1960 by a question of Dominique de Menil. If recast in today’s language: Have Africans and diasporic Africans always been treated so poorly as they were in the Jim Crow American South in the mid-20th century—what does the record in art say? This soon led to a research office in Paris and then one in Houston: the Image of the Black project http://imageoftheblack.com/ was brought to completion in 2014 at Harvard University, resulting in 10 books spanning 5,000 years in almost 4,000 pages and 2,200+ illustrations.
The Menil is unusual among museums in undertaking catalogues of artists’ complete bodies of work, or catalogues raisonné. John de Menil initiated this enterprise by commissioning that of René Magritte, begun in 1969 and completed by David Sylvester with Sarah Whitfield in 1994 (addendum 2012), while that of Max Ernst is nearly finished. We are currently engaged in compiling and publishing a multivolume catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Jasper Johns http://jasperjohnsdrawings.menil.org/. An office in New York has been working nearly five years on research, examining drawings, and acquiring photography of more than 750 drawings, and publication is slated to follow the opening of the sponsoring Menil Drawing Institute.
For a listing of Menil publications currently available, please go to the page for the Museum Book Store.