Get reacquainted with the Menil
Seven ways to explore new installations in the renovated museum
Visitors have many reasons to appreciate the refurbished Menil Collection, which reopens Saturday after a sixmonth closure. Though every public nook and cranny of Renzo Piano’s modest landmark building has been refreshed, the spirit of discovery that the late Dominique de Menil wanted to achieve appears stronger than ever.
Menil regulars have long felt they could drop into and out of the galleries quickly when they needed a moment of quiet inspiration. It’s still that place. But the new installations also encourage lingering to examine the many works that have not previously been shown at the museum or haven’t appeared in years. Going to the Menil has never felt like more of an experience; it’s enough to make an art lover downright giddy.
Director Rebecca Rabinow and the curators let the objects dictate the design. For the first time since the museum opened 31 years ago, everything on display belongs to the Menil or is a promised gift. The deep dive into the Menil’s vaults enabled the curators to play up some under-known aspects of the collection, such as its depth of Fernand Léger and Victor Brauner works. Although the collection has nearly doubled since de Menil died in 1997, the displays honor her distinctive, slightly quirky perspective.
Most of the works will be up for a year, until temporary shows are inserted here and there; and Rabinow said permanent displays will never be static. Here are a few ways to start exploring.
1. Look for vistas.
“You can walk through one way and have one experience, turn around and have a different experience,” Rabinow said. “Everything you see in one room speaks in some way, whether art historically or formally, to the works you see through into the next room.” For example, viewers can see the symbiotic flow from Picasso’s Cubism (“a pivotal decade that sets the stage for work to come,” senior curator Michelle White said) to the development of abstraction and Abstract Expressionism. Down the other corridor, people standing in the small, dark Byzantine icon room may think they’re inside a chapel when they look out onto Francois
2. Breathe it in.
The new installations make the Menil feel bigger than it is, giving ample elbow room to monumental masterpieces. Yves Klein’s “Blue Rain,” which has never been shown with its pit of pure blue pigment at the Menil, puts a “wow” factor in the entry to the postwar and contemporary galleries. Richard Serra’s “Two Corner Cut, High Low,” which was commissioned by the museum in 2012, fills a madeto-spec room where the scent of oil stick is discernable. Cy Twombly’s massive “Treatise of the Veil” has a wall to itself. The signature Surrealism galleries open with a spacious room devoted to Max Ernst’s forestthemed works, hinting at another strength: The Menil owns the largest collection of works by Ernst.
3. Find surprises.
“I want a secret niche!” White said when she discovered the nook created behind a new, open gallery carved into the east-wing corridor. The antithesis of the giant canvases across the hall, a Bering sea ivory carved in the shape of a head — no bigger than an inch or two — lives there in the space created by curator of collections Paul Davis. The artwork’s open mouth reflects the “singing” expression of a much larger, 18th-century mask by the Nuu-chahnulth peoples that hangs out in the open nearby, Davis pointed out. And White did build in a surprise, installing a small, lit model by Christo within one of the walls of the post-war and contemporary galleries.
4. Salute female artists.
The de Menils did not collect the works of many female artists, but the museum has purposefully worked to represent women better with its later acquisitions. White is especially proud of an abstract mosaic from 1950 by Jeanne Reynal, a friend of Arshile Gorky who has been “completely unknown in the history of art,” she said. Giving women much-deserved cred within view of powerful canvases by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, this room also includes masterful drawings by Perle Fine, Lee Krasner, Sonia Gechtoff, Toni LaSelle and Hedda Sterne. Across the museum, Niki de Saint Phalle, Louise Nevelson, Suzan Frecon and Roni Horn hang with the post-war and contemporary guys. And Leslie Hewitt is the first person to be featured in the “Contemporary Focus” gallery devoted to living artists; her elegant, powder-coated steel sculptures speak fittingly to erased histories. The theme of women even gets a nod in the African galleries, where Davis has installed a selection of sublime fertility figures.
5. Rethink history.
The Guyana-born Frank Bowling’s complex “Middle Passage,” on view at the Menil for the first time even though it was commissioned by the de Menils in the early 1970s, sets the tone in the foyer. Other major works by artists of color hang opposite those of famous white men to present a more inclusive version of contemporary art history. The museum still doesn’t put didactic text on its walls. Grab a gallery guide to learn more about the complex stories conveyed in the liminal space devoted to de Menils’ “Image of the Black in Western Art” project, a counterpoint to works from Central and West Africa. One fine example: Gabriel Mathias’ Grand Tour-style, 18th-century portrait of William Ansah Sessarakoo as a European gentleman has a fascinating backstory. It was created in London after Sessarakoo, the son of a prominent African slave trader, was himself kidnapped and sold into slavery before being rescued by his father.
6. See what floats.
Many small, previously unshown objects appear now, thanks to some low-tech but updated display work. About 60 new, barely-there mounts hold treasures in glass enclosures so they can be viewed from all sides. “It’s a classic museum problem,” Rabinow said. “How do you display works of art so you can show the bottoms of things?”
7. Chuckle.
Everything doesn’t have to be serious. “Claes Oldenburg and the Geometric Mouse,” the first in a series of “Collection Close-Up” mini-shows that will explore museum holdings in depth, makes me grin from — well, ear to ear. This room of drawings, sculptures and posters shows how inventively the American conceptual artist played with ideas about Mickey Mouse’s geometric potential in the 1960s and ’70s, including concepts for his proposed “Maus Museum.”