Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975
The Menil Collection, Houston
October 29, 2021 - March 13, 2022
Roy Lichtenstein
Steak, 1963
Graphite and crayon on paper
16 1/8 × 24 1/2 in. (40.9 × 62.2 cm).
The Menil Collection, Houston
Purchased with funds provided by an anonymous donor
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo: Paul Hester
The Menil Collection presents Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952–1975. The exhibition features over thirty drawings that upend the traditionally assumed connection that drawing has to the hand of the artist. Featuring works primarily sourced from the Menil’s permanent collection, along with select loans from local Houston collections, Draw Like a Machine is on view at the Menil Drawing Institute.
The exhibition focuses on drawings made during a time when gestural and expressionistic mark-making was considered increasingly outmoded, and artists were actively experimenting with images and processes borrowed from advertising and mass media. The resulting artworks bridge the seeming contradiction between the manual and the mechanical.
Highlights of the exhibition include Andy Warhol’s series of six drawings of Gene Swenson completed in 1962, the year before Swenson’s iconic ARTnews interview with Warhol, which centered on the broad inquiry, “What is Pop Art?” In response to the question, Andy Warhol declared his intention to “be a machine” and “machine-like” in his art practice, a quote that inspired the current exhibition’s title. Warhol sought to create works that intentionally resembled printed reproductions using a blotted line technique that combined drawing and printmaking strategies. The exhibition also includes a number of Andy Warhol’s drawings from the 1950s, highlighting a range of techniques he employed.
Rebecca Rabinow, director of the Menil Collection, said: “Draw Like a Machine highlights a strength of the museum’s collection, including more than a dozen important drawings originally collected by John and Dominique de Menil. We are grateful to a handful of enthusiastic local collectors who have allowed us to borrow their works to add to this focused presentation.”
Draw Like a Machine spotlights a generation of artists in the United States who bridged fine art and industrial design, including Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Idelle Weber. Certain works in the exhibition foreground the alluring visual advertising strategies developed by leading marketing firms to direct and encourage consumer spending in the postwar era, with strong examples by Tom Wesselmann and Marjorie Strider. In California, artists such as Ed Kienholz blurred the lines of art and commerce even further.
Kelly Montana, Assistant Curator, Menil Drawing Institute, said: “Informed by an era in which art was increasingly integrated into popular culture, artists exploited graphic strategies harnessed by the working creatives of the day such as admen, illustrators, and sign painters to critique and subvert the prestige of drawing.”
Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975 is curated by Kelly Montana, Assistant Curator, Menil Drawing Institute.
THE MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON
Menil Drawing Institute
1533 Sul Ross Street, Houston, Texas 77006
