The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Filmmaker shares monster art collection
Director Guillermo del Toro has opened part of his monster collection to the public for viewing.
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has a fascination with darkness and an eye for detail.
His visually striking movies include the ghost story “Crimson Peak,” the fantasy “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the science fiction action pic “Pacific Rim,” but he doesn’t stop seeking out new things when he leaves the film set. The director has amassed a collection of sculptures, paintings, books, artifacts and curiosities that he keeps at a Los Angeles home office and workspace he calls Bleak House. In the quiet suburban residence, he spends time with his treasures and works on upcoming endeavors.
Del Toro’s loaned a good chunk of his collection to “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters,” a traveling exhibit, which will be at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Aug. 1-Nov. 27. The retrospective also will include items from LACMA’s holdings.
“To find beauty in the profane,” del Toro said in a LACMA press release. “To elevate the banal. To be moved by genre. These things are vital for my storytelling. This exhibition presents a small fraction of the things that have moved me, inspired me and consoled me as I transit through life. It’s a devotional sampling of the enormous love that is required to create, maintain and love monsters in our lives.” Selection process LACMA has presented a number of film-related shows, but choosing what of del Toro’s to display was a challenge. Britt Salvesen, “Monsters” exhibit curator and department head of the Wallis Annenberg photography department and the prints and drawings department at LACMA, began actively working on the show in 2014 and met with del Toro at Bleak House five times. During her first visit, del Toro gave her a tour and orientation to the logic of the place. Subsequent visits became more detailoriented, discussing specific objects, making notes and taking photographs, slowly narrowing down the items the filmmaker would loan out. All told, there are nearly 500 pieces on display in “Monsters.”
Big picture
“One thing I decided early on was I would not do a filmography, whichwould be one gallery on each film, one leading to another, but instead responding to the way del Toro talks about his work and the way he organizes his house,” Salveson said. “He says, like a lot of other filmmakers, he’s making the same film over and over again, which means that he’s always returning to the same core ideas even though they take on so many different forms.”
At LACMA, the arrangement of “Monsters” is reminiscent of a labyrinth or clockworks, both ideas that are important to del Toro, Salvesen said.
“Even though his films may seem at some level sometimes chaotic with energy, they’re very precise in their organization and their visual detail,” Salveson said. “Often you’ll see clockwork motifs within the films, and with del Toro that stands for a whole larger interconnected system that he sets in motion.”
‘Childhood’ and beyond
There are eight main sections within the exhibit, beginning with “Childhood and Innocence,” reflecting del Toro’s films that have child protagonists who drive the story while also being vulnerable to harm and fear. Next is “Victoriana,” which incorporates the style and furnishings of the Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian ages and the atmosphere of ro- manticism conflicting with modernization and the industrial revolution, another theme in his movies, Salveson said. An example is “Crimson Peak,” and three costumes from the movie are on display.
Within “Victoriana” is a subset on insects, which are also prevalent in del Toro’s works.
“He’s very fascinated with insect physiology, but also with the way we have so many people respond in this very visceral way to insects, a fear response, even though if you look objectively as he does they’re very great examples of nature’s design,” Salvesen said. “I think he likes to trigger those deep-seated reactions so lots of his monster designs relate to insect physiology in some way.”
Another subset is del Toro’s notebooks in which he records his ideas, especially for his creatures, both in writing and drawings. The notebooks are displayed open to set pages, but there are also digitized versions to look through.
“Monsters” features a lot of framed artwork from del Toro’s collection.
“In looking closely at these drawings and prints, original art, you can see how del Toro has drawn on art history, especially Victorian and symbolist art,” Salvesen said. “There’s some discoveries to be made there of illustrators like Arthur Rackham from the Victorian period or Mexican symbolist artist Julio Ruelas.”
Del Toro is enamored of Frankenstein, as the creature is a combination of parts put together to create something symbolically rich, Salvesen said. A section is devoted to “Frankenstein and Horror,” as well as a life-size sculpted tableau of Boris Karloff being made up as Frankenstein by makeup artist Jack Pierce.
Perhaps the most intriguing and inspiring aspect of “Monsters” is the re-creation of some of the features of del Toro’s Bleak House, including his workspace, which features a false window, special effects and a sound system so there is always a “rainstorm” raging.
‘Monsters’ will travel
After “Monsters” closes at LACMA, it will travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. The show will differ at each location, as the venues will add in objects from their own collections.
Salvesen hopes that the exhibit will travel to other places as well.
“I think there will be interest, but ultimately we have to respect whether Guillermo can live without his things for that long of a period of time,” Salvesen said. “It would by then be a couple of years, and he may want to have them back, so I’m going to leave that decision to him.”