Scholarship

Photo: Anthony Flores

90 pages 44 color illustrations Hardcover

224 pages 260 color illustrations Hardcover Cy Twombly (1928–2011) engaged with mythological and poetic source material, setting him apart from other American post-war artists. In 1970, during a short period of focused creativity, Twombly created a monumental painting—Treatise on the Veil (Second Version)—on a 33-foot-long canvas, along with more than a dozen related drawings. The sweeping work, his largest single canvas, and one of his most austere compositions, is a culminating statement from this important moment in his career. This handsomely produced oversize book features three essays that examine these works in relation to Twombly’s oeuvre, contemporaneous explorations of time, the Orpheus myth, and a musical composition that Twombly cited as an influence. Contributors include Michelle White, Senior Curator at the Menil Collection; Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; and Sarah Rothenberg, a pianist specializing in French modern music and Artistic Director of Da Camera of Houston.

Photo: Anthony Flores

Drawing Is Everything: Founding Gifts of the Menil Drawing Institute

Featuring outstanding 19th- and 20th-century drawings promised or bequeathed to the Menil Collection, this elegant volume was published on the first anniversary of the building that now houses the Menil Drawing Institute. The drawings come from the private collections of well-known connoisseurs Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney, and include works by Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Bruce Nauman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. The Drawing Institute’s chief curator, Edouard Kopp, profiles its nature and scope, and noted scholars John Elderfield and Richard Shiff discuss historical aspects of drawing, while Terry Winters muses from an artist’s viewpoint. Edouard Kopp is the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator at the Menil Drawing Institute. John Elderfield is Chief Curator Emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Terry Winters is an artist who works across a wide variety of media.

Photo: Sara Beck

128 pages 112 color illustrations Flexibound

Think of Them as Spaces: Brice Marden’s Drawings

In 1979, Brice Marden (b. 1938) asked that his drawings be thought of “as spaces,” reflecting the idea that drawing is a medium that is much more than its two physical dimensions. Looking closely at six series of drawings that span nearly the entirety of Marden’s ongoing career, this luxuriously illustrated presentation features works spanning from 1975 to 2019, including the never-before-published Letters from Borobudur of 2010. In addition to rarely seen early monochrome works, three groups of 1979–80s drawings—Mirabelle Addenda, Shell, and Cold Mountain Studies— foreshadow the artist’s mature linear work and highlight the process of invention and permutation that occurs as Marden thinks and draws on paper. Kelly Montana, Assistant Curator at the Menil Drawing Institute, gives a concise overview of Marden’s drawing practice and investigates the geographies and methods that inform his work, while an artist interview by Josef Helfenstein offers insight into how Marden uses the medium as a means of exploring the creation of spaces on drawing surfaces.

Library

The Menil Library added more than 700 new books, periodicals, and digital resources to its collection during Fiscal Year 2020. Materials from the Menil Library’s Special Collections were featured throughout the Menil’s galleries, particularly as a part of the exhibitions Collection Close-Up: The Graphic Work of Dorothea Tanning (June 8–October 12, 2019) and Photography and the Surreal Imagination (February 5–November 29, 2020).

The Menil Library Special Collection’s copy of Huit jours à Trébaumec by George Hugnet, as installed in the exhibition Photography and the Surreal Imagination. Photo: Paul Hester

Successful renovation projects during Fiscal Year 2020 increased the storage capacity in the Archives by nearly 500 linear feet. Improvements include specialized storage for architectural drawings, oversize materials, and standard archives boxes. Photo: Menil Archives/Lilly Carrel The Menil Archives was founded in 2000 to collect, organize, preserve, and provide access to the history of the Menil Foundation, the Menil Collection, and the de Menil family. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Archives, the Menil launched a new oral history initiative in 2020. A series of recordings captured peer-to-peer conversations with current and former Menil staff and individuals with strong personal or professional connections to the Menil. During fiscal year 2020, the Menil Archives accessioned 95 linear feet of documents and 323 GB of digital records from 11 Menil departments. In addition, the Archives fielded 350 internal and external inquiries, ranging from documentary film projects to exhibition research. Prior to March 2020, when in-person appointments were suspended, the Archives hosted 124 onsite research visits. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Archives staff continued to facilitate remote research, duplication, and permissions requests, ensuring vital access to archival collections.

Since the museum’s opening in June 1987, the Menil Collection has installed more than 200 temporary exhibitions across all five art buildings on campus. Photo: Sara Beck

Collection Management

The Menil’s Collection Management Department consists of Registration, Art Services, Collection Database Administration, and Imaging Services. Registration oversees all documentation related to the acquisition, exhibition, and storage of the more than 17,000 artworks in the permanent collection. The team coordinates all exhibitions and gallery rotations as well as incoming and outgoing loans. Registrars manage contract negotiations, fine-art insurance, packing and crating, shipping, couriers, and electronic and physical file management for all projects. In Fiscal Year 2020, Registration arranged 129 shipments containing 1,112 objects. Art Services professionally installs and dismantles all Menil exhibitions and rotations. The team is responsible for packing and crating incoming and outgoing loans, monitoring storage areas, tracking location moves, and couriering outgoing loans with complex installation requirements. In Fiscal Year 2020, Art Services moved 6,822 objects. The Collection Database team continually uploads data on artworks from the permanent collection to the Menil’s internal database and website (www.menil.org). More than a thousand entries are currently available to the public, 136 of which were added in Fiscal Year 2020. Imaging Services supervises all new photography of collection objects, archival materials, and rare books for the Menil. Imaging staff manage analog object photography and digital imaging collections, license images to outside scholars and publishers, and secure reproduction rights for publications. In Fiscal Year 2020, 490 objects from the permanent collection were photographed with support from a multiyear grant from Houston Endowment, many of which are now publicly available on menil.org.

Screenshot from In Dialogue: Dan Flavin’s Light Sculpture. Since 2007, the Vivian L. Smith Foundation has generously supported a fellowship at the Menil Collection for a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Donato Loia, the 2019–20 fellow, studied art history and cultural studies as an Erasmus student at Copenhagen University before earning an MA and BFA from the Sapienza University of Rome. Loia’s dissertation, provisionally titled “Beyond the Light: Visual Studies on the Senses of the Sacred in the Absence of God,” examines the intersections of the religious and secular in art. After the 2020 Vivian L. Smith Foundation Symposium was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Loia organized a virtual program with Professor James Elkins from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their conversation focused on Dan Flavin’s work on view at the Menil and the relationship between art, religion, and spirituality in the twentieth century.

Senior Curator Michelle White, Associate Objects Conservator Kari Dodson, and Assistant Objects Conservator Meaghan Perry interview Glenn Ligon for the Artists Documentation Program. Photo: Anthony Flores

Artists Documentation Program Fellowship

Since 1990, the Artists Documentation Program (ADP) has recorded interviews with contemporary artists in a gallery, museum, or studio setting. Conservators ask artists about their materials and techniques as well as the preservation and presentation of their art. In January 2020, Glenn Ligon participated in an ADP interview in the main building galleries. Curators and conservators inquired about his neon work Untitled (Orpheus and Eurydice), 2013, an addition to the Menil’s permanent collection in Fiscal Year 2019.

The Collection Management team regularly rotates the artwork from the permanent collection on view. Photo: Sara Beck

Tae Smith places the cape on its new mount in the Menil conservation lab. Photo: Menil Collection Conservation Department The Menil Collection invited New York-based textile and costume expert Tae Smith to treat a Hawaiian feather work cape for exhibition in Collection Close-Up: Of Heaven and Earth. A damaged mount was removed in order to hand-stitch a supportive silk-crepe lining into the cape. A new custom shoulder form allows the cape to be displayed as worn, rather than as a flat object hanging on the wall. The Menil Collection received a $115,000 grant from the Getty Foundation’s Conserving Canvas initiative. The project was an important opportunity for the Menil to share best-practices in the reversal of wax-resin linings through the focused treatments of Georges Braque’s Large Interior with Palette (Grand intérieur à la palette), 1942, and Mark Rothko’s The Green Stripe, 1955. In 1987, Land Art pioneer Michael Heizer sited and installed Isolated Mass/Circumflex (#2), 1968/1978, on the lawn in front of the Menil Collection’s main building. Over time, corrosion scale developed on the exposed steel, necessitating an in-situ treatment. Menil conservators developed a protocol that included cleaning the sculpture by hand and sandblasting corrosion off of the surface. In addition, the compacted volcanic-ash fill material was excavated and replaced with argillite, a sedimentary rock composed of lithified clay that better promotes drainage.

Matter/Framer Mina Gaber and Conservation Coordinator Sarah Thompson carefully secure the feathered textile to a new lining. Photo: Menil Collection Conservation Department