Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975 @ The Menil Collection, Houston

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

www.menil.org

Warhol @ The Menil Collection, Houston, TX

Andy Warhol's Sunset
The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
Through January 8, 2017

ANDY WARHOL

Film still from Andy Warhol, Sunset, 1967.

16mm film, color, sound, 33 minutes.

© 2016 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

The Menil Collection presents Sunset – a film by Andy Warhol commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil in the mid-1960s for a proposed ecumenical chapel at the 1968 San Antonio World’s Fair. The presentation of the film, organized by Curator Michelle White, includes a daily screening in the museum’s east temporary gallery at 6pm every evening the museum is open.

The de Menils asked Andy Warhol to create a work of spiritual significance to be displayed in a contemplative space, a concept similar to what they were establishing for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. In response, Warhol shot a sunset over the Pacific Ocean in California. Recorded on 16mm film, the real-time footage is a slow and colorful shift of atmospheric light at dusk over the course of thirty-three minutes as the sun sinks into the horizon. It is overlaid with the deep voice of singer Nico—then working with the Velvet Underground—reading poetry off screen.

Curator Michelle White said, “In the film, there is such a subtle and poetic shift of saturated colors. The variations of hues operate much like an abstract painting and the film has been compared to the work of Mark Rothko. Meditating on temporal and everyday phenomena, the real-time footage provides such a wonderful opportunity to slow down and experience the magic of the day’s end.”

The World’s Fair chapel project was never realized, and the film remained virtually unknown until it premiered in 2000 as part of The Andy Warhol Film Project, begun in the 1980s to research, catalogue, and preserve the artist’s massive and relatively unknown body of work.

In the 1960s, the de Menils formed a deep, personal relationship with Warhol as both an artist and filmmaker. Over their lifetimes, the de Menils collected a number of important works by Warhol. In addition to the film project, the de Menils repeatedly invited him to the University of St. Thomas and later to Rice University. One result of their relationship was the influential exhibition Raid the Icebox 1 for which the de Menils asked Warhol to choose items from storage at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) museum. The exhibition, presented at both RISD and Rice University, is considered to be one of the first shows featuring “museum intervention” by an artist.

Director of the Menil Collection Rebecca Rabinow said, “Sunset is an engaging yet little known example of the de Menils’ interest in the spiritual impact of contemporary art. By commissioning Warhol, an artist better known for his acerbic and dry approach to the world, the de Menils once again proved their acumen as visionary benefactors.”

On select Wednesdays throughout the run of the film, the Menil will host After Sunset Sessions – a series of short programs that respond to Warhol’s work. These presentations includes a music set inspired by the Velvet Underground, films from the Menil Archives, a meditation, and a poetry reading. The Menil encourages filmgoers to share photos of sunsets on Instagram and Twitter using #menilsunset.

This exhibition is generously supported by Pelican Builders; Janet and Paul Hobby; Anne and David Kirkland; Harry and Karen Pinson; Susanne and William E. Pritchard III; Mark Wawro and Melanie Gray; Michael Zilkha; and the City of Houston.

THE MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON
www.menil.org

Picasso @ The Menil Collection, Houston, TX

Picasso The Line
The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
September 16, 2016 - January 8, 2017

Supremely gifted as a draftsman and fascinated from an early age by the highly linear art of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Pablo Picasso made line drawings during each stage of his career, from the Blue and Rose Periods to Cubism to his Classical Period and beyond. The Menil Collection is the first museum to provide a full-scale exploration of this distinctive aspect of his art, in the exhibition Picasso The Line. Picasso’s work convinced John and Dominique de Menil where other modern art failed. Initially reluctant to engage with the art of their time, as Mrs. de Menil stated, “The reservations that at first tempered admiration vanished before the genius of the greatest artist of our time.”

Presented exclusively at the Menil Collection, where it will be on view from September 16, 2016 through January 8, 2017, Picasso The Line is organized by guest curator Carmen Giménez, founding director of the Museo Picasso Málaga, whose previous exhibitions have included the groundbreaking Picasso and the Age of Iron (1993) and Picasso Black and White (2012-13) for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Clare Elliott, Associate Curator at the Menil Collection, has managed the exhibition on behalf of the museum.

Said Menil Director Rebecca Rabinow, “We are pleased to continue the Menil Collection’s tradition of seeking new ways of looking at and understanding the work of twentieth century masters like Pablo Picasso. With Carmen Giménez’s expertise we have assembled a carefully selected group of drawings that condenses Picasso’s vast output into an approachable and beautiful installation.”

David Breslin, the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, added, “Carmen Giménez has created a thrilling exhibition that is retrospective in scope yet incisive in its focus. Picasso The Line brings together line drawings from all of Picasso’s most important periods and shows the extraordinary range of media in which he made these works, from pen and pencil to charcoal and papier collé. The Menil Collection has a longstanding commitment to drawing as a distinct art form, and this exhibition demonstrates the conceptual and material richness the medium affords. ”

Picasso The Line will present more than 90 works on paper from public and private collections in the United States and Europe, dating from 1901-02 (shortly after Picasso settled in Paris) through 1970, not long before his death in 1973. The exhibition includes seldom-seen drawings by Picasso from the Menil’s holdings, as well as works on loan that have never before been exhibited in the United States.

Exhibition curator Carmen Giménez said, “Picasso has long been recognized as a master across disciplines and one of the most accomplished draftsmen of the last century. This exhibition will explore how he followed up on the groundbreaking lesson of Ingres, trying to resolve the three dimensions of form with merely a linear arrangement, thus relinquishing perspective. The first exhibition to fully examine Picasso’s line drawings, it will convey the critical position that these powerful works hold within his oeuvre.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated, 176-page scholarly catalogue with essays by Carmen Giménez, David Breslin, and Clare Elliott. With 130 illustrations, this new book provides an insightful reevaluation of the role of line in the work of Picasso, offering new insights into his vision and working methods and illuminates his contributions to the evolution of art in the twentieth century.

THE MENIL COLLECTION
www.menil.org