Menil Collection Research Articles

Commander of the Cool: Translating the Art of an African Woman Excerpts from Robert Farris Thompson’s Final Keynote Address

Commander of the Cool: Translating the Art of an African Woman Excerpts from Robert Farris Thompson’s Final Keynote Address Robert Farris Thompson (bio) Delivered Saturday, October 15, 2011, at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX “What is translation? Why don’t we start with bad translation? Bad translation is when John Wayne says, “Give me a shot of red eye,” and it comes out, “Dubonnet s’il vous plait.” Another bad translation: when John Wayne says, “Drinks all on the house. I’m feelin’ loose as a goose.” Subtitle in Zurich: “Cognac fur alle.” What an elegant cowboy! Imagine the late and great Humphrey Bogart kissing the forever great Lauren Bacall. He pushes her against the wall and they kiss, languorously. Lauren says, “I’ve never been kissed like that in my life.” Spanish subtitle: “Muchísimas gracias.” So, how do we avoid such catastrophes? The German theorist Walter Benjamin has an answer for you. He says, “You cannot translate anything—French into German, Japanese into Mandarin—unless you love the other language as much as your own.” And I’m here to tell you that I love Yoruba, maybe even more than English, who knows? Imagine yourself coming in from the Eighth Galaxy and your mission is: “Check the planet. Send us back a message. Is there life?” You send a zap to Paris and it picks up by luck John Coltrane on recording. Then you hit Rio [samba drumming sounds]. Then you hit the South Bronx: Mambo! And so forth. So you send back to Eighth Galaxy: “Your Highness, I have probed the planet. There is definitely life and to judge from the sounds I am getting: they baaaad!” The point being the extra-terrestrial listened to so many forms of black music that he’s even beginning to talk black. The big triumph is that the airwaves of our planet belong to black people. No matter where you are you’ll pick up black music. Or maybe you are in Manila and you pick up: boom-chi-boom-chick. That is, of course, Habanera sped up to become Reggaeton. Wherever you are, what’s the secret of the black conquest of the airwaves? They have something that no other musical tradition has and that’s multiple meter: 4/4, plus 2/4, plus 6/8, plus 12 and a half, plus whatever you got. Multiple meter—you can see it happening centuries ago in the fifteen hundreds in Benin [pointing at an image] . . . you can see there is one being struck with the hands in the middle drum, you can see a person is striking a counter beat with a stick on the side of the drum, and then you got another drummer. At least three different beats. Cut to Brazil today in 2011, and you’ll see the same combination of drums, each [End Page 999] one with a different texture or different metrical pattern. Multiple meter. That’s one of the powerhouses behind the black conquest. And that conquest leads to the great invention of the classical music of our nation: Jazz. What do you do under drum fire? How can you function when you are bombarded by multiple meter? And that leads us to something else here that we have to translate: cool. That is to say, a collectiveness of mind. You are under drum fire, in which you keep your mental gyroscope and what you do is internalize the beat. You’re no longer afraid of dancing because you are a beat of your own. If there’s anything that black people have taught me is that people are art. Even to me Payton, the great running back who invented the stutter-step, or brought the stutter-step into NFL football, he’s a work of art, just as much as Malcolm X or John Coltrane. Just as much as “Lady Day,” AKA Billie Holiday. Diaspora to me is a magical word. It means the impossible. It means that you recreate Africa right in the middle of the USA. [End Page 1000] Robert Farris Thompson Robert Farris Thompson is The Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of African & African American Art at...

In the wake of trauma: visualising the unspeakable/unthinkable in Marie Darrieussecq and Hélène Lenoir

In the course of the last thirty years trauma studies has been one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields. Arising in part as a result of renewed medical interest in the effects of traumat...

Representing Africa in American art museums: a century of collecting and display

In recent years, the critical study of museums has emerged as a major focus of scholarly inquiry across various disciplines, bringing into greater focus the effect that museum practice has on the formation of meaning and the public perception of objects. Representing Africa in American Art Museums is the first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art museums. Chronicling more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art in thirteen American art museums, from the late 1800s to the present, the book considers the art museum as a lens for understanding the shifting visions of African art that are manifested in institutional practices of collecting and display in the United States. Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in a selection of American art museums: the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke offer a review of the history of collecting and displaying African art in American museums and identify important issues that are raised by the essays: defining aesthetic criteria for African art and for its display; breaking free from the monolithic rubric of primitive broadening perceptions of what constitutes African art; and formulating a place for context and culture in understanding and presenting African art. Representing Africa in American Art Museums concludes with an afterword that anticipates the direction for the collecting and display of African art in the twenty-first century, including the ethics and legalities of collecting; the deconstruction of a singular and authoritative museum voice in interpreting works of art; the interests and engagement of local African American and African communities that have a stake in how collections are represented; and how, if, and where to include contemporary art from Africa in museum collections.

Art and activism: projects of John and Dominique de Menil

This lavishly illustrated book is the first to examine the significant contributions of John and Dominique de Menil to art, architecture, film, and the civil and human rights movements. The de Menils, who moved to Houston from France in 1941, amassed one of the world's great private art collections and became passionately involved in the cause of human rights. The volume includes a discussion of the building of the de Menils' art collection; their patronage of modern architecture in Houston; their embrace of modernism; their leadership in Houston's civil rights movement and in human rights projects worldwide; their commissioning of works of art; their involvement in early film education and documentary filmmaking; and their establishment of the Rothko Chapel, the Menil Collection, the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Dan Flavin Installation, and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. Vintage photographs, including those taken by Henri Cartier Bresson and Eve Arnold, previously unpublished correspondence with artists, and an illustrated chronology all add to this textured tribute to the de Menils' extraordinary achievements.

The Menil Connection: Louis Kahn and the Rice University Art Center

Stephen James tells the story of a great unrealized project in The Menil Connection: Louis Kahn and the Rice University Art Center. Kahn, Rice, and the art collectors John and Dominique de Menil collaborated in this unusual venture, which, among other things, would have housed the de Menil art collection on the Rice campus. The project embodied Kahn's approach to designing an institutional landscape, interwoven with the smaller spaces that he judged were essential for teaching and learning. Its abandonment was the genesis of the independent Menil Collection, for which Kahn also prepared a design, but which was ultimately built by Renzo Piano.

Is Reconciliation Possible? Non-Western Objects at the Menil Collection and the Quai Branly Museum

Is Reconciliation Possible? Non-Western Objects at the Menil Collection and the Quai Branly Museum

Kristina Van Dyke, ed. African Art from the Menil Collection. Houston, Tex.: Menil Foundation, 2008. Foreword by Josef Helfenstein. Distributed by Yale University Press. 239 pp. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Works Cited. Index. Contributors. $65.00. Cloth. $45.00. Paper.

Kristina Van Dyke, ed. African Art from the Menil Collection. Houston, Tex.: Menil Foundation, 2008. Foreword by Josef Helfenstein. Distributed by Yale University Press. 239 pp. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Works Cited. Index. Contributors. $65.00. Cloth. $45.00. Paper.

Museum Laboratories: Where Art Meets Science

Museum Laboratories: Where Art Meets Science

Art and Power in the Central African Savanna: Sculpture of the Songye, Luba, Luluwa and Chokwe Peoples. The Menil Collection, Houston, September 26, 2008–January 4, 2009; The Cleveland Museum of Art, March 1–June 7, 2009; The de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, June 27–October 11, 2009

<b>Art and Power in the Central African Savanna: Sculpture of the Songye, Luba, Luluwa and Chokwe Peoples</b>. The Menil Collection, Houston, September 26, 2008–January 4, 2009; The Cleveland Museum of Art, March 1–June 7, 2009; The de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, June 27–October 11, 2009

African art from the Menil Collection

Bamana masks and headdresses, Lega ivories, Dogon sculpture, and Benue bronzes are among the many exquisite African artifacts found in the renowned Menil Collection. This stunning book--the first comprehensive catalogue on the de Menils' collection of African art--features 115 of the museum's finest pieces. Dating primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries, these works come from North Africa and the Sahel, Coastal West Africa, and Central and East Africa. An essay by scholar Kristina Van Dyke discusses the formation of the collection, which was inspired in part by its relationship to modernist works and by the couple's interest in human rights. This insightful text also explains how the de Menils' visionary spirit was influenced by African art and places those objects within the context of the whole of the de Menils' collection, in which works from ancient, Byzantine, medieval, modern, Oceanic, and Native American cultures speak to the universal struggle for human understanding. Entries for the selected works were written by leading scholars in the field and are grouped into sections based on regions.

Eight Sculptures

Seven Sculptures Sharon Kopriva (bio) Sharon Kopriva Sharon Kopriva is a sculptor and painter who lives in Texas and Idaho. She has had a solo exhibition of her work at the Menil Collection in Houston, has participated in a major show at the Smithsonian in Washington, had an exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Art in July 2006, and a solo exhibition of her mummy-like sculptures at the Museo de Nation in Lima, Peru, in September 2006. After a 1981 visit to Peru, Kopriva felt that the graves of Nazca and the Inca rituals had an ongoing influence on her paintings and sculptures. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries on four continents. Copyright © 2008 Johns Hopkins University Press and its Authors

A modern patronage: de Menil gifts to American and European museums

In the early 1940s, John and Dominique de Menil began to acquire art. Collecting in an intuitive and personal manner, the de Menils gathered things in which we believe, as John phrased it, and proceeded to develop an inspired collection that would eventually find a permanent home at The Menil Collection in Houston. In addition to building their own collection, the de Menils were committed to extending their vision to major museums in America and Europe. This beautifully illustrated book showcases some fifty works that the de Menils collected over the decades, including pieces by such major 20th-century artists as Lee Bontecou, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Rene Magritte, Jackson Pollock, Jean Tinguely, and Andy Warhol as well as an important group of African, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian works. Published on the 20th anniversary of the founding of The Menil Collection, the book reproduces and examines works held in that museum and gifts in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. To complete the volume, the contributing authors examine the circumstances that inspired the de Menils' collection and generosity, the relationships they developed with legendary museum directors, and the gifts that were selected for each museum.

The Menil Collection: Houston, Texas

1 Exterior view of The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. Designed by Renzo Piano, the museum opened in 1987. The building's scale is based on the bungalows in the surrounding neighborhood. Its modest size is intended to leave visitors feeling energized rather than fatigued by their encounter with the works on view. Galleries are filled with natural light, which is diffused through a system of elegant concrete baffles. PHOTO BY HESTER + HARDAWAY W ^ _ hen asked in 1982 about the collection she and her late husband, John, had formed, Dominique de Menil stated, What characterizes my collection? Maybe a passionate curiosity for the past and also a vulnerability to poetry ... poetry of images revealing the beauty and mystery of the world ... [I] am very moved by ... art that ... expresses the tragedy of man's ephemeral condition (de Menil 1983:50). At the time, Dominique de Menil was working with Renzo Piano on plans for The Menil Collection, the museum that would house the couple's collection and manifest its poetry (Fig. 1). Thoughtful and meticulous, Dom inique de Menil labored over every detail of the design and, when construction was complete in 1987, the installation of the collec tion as well (Fig. 2). Her goals were clear: I would like my collec tion to be displayed in such a way that it opens new vistas, that it reveals 'Terra Incognita'-islands (ibid.). The Menil Collection, with its 16,ooo objects, is but one out come of this French couple's vision and philosophy. Intertwining art, social activism, and a profound spirituality, the de Menils left an indelible mark on their adopted city of Houston, both in the campus that houses their museum and related galleries and cha pels, and in the effect their philanthropic projects had on various institutions in the city. Through their political action and sup port of museums and scholarly projects, they also affected a world beyond Houston and it is within this dynamic framework that the significance of their African art collection can be understood. The African holdings at The Menil Collection number close to 1,000 objects, ranging from a miniature Kongo ivory finial (Fig. 3) to a near life-size Mboi figure from northeastern Nigeria (Fig. 4). There are concentrations of objects from Mali, including Dogon sculpture (Fig. 5), Bamana masks and headdresses (Fig. 6), Inland

Possession: Intimate Artifice at The Menil Collection

The catalogue to The Menil Collection, The Menil Collection: A Selection from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era (1987), reproduces on its frontispiece Max Ernst's Portrait of Dominique [Figure 1], commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil in 1934. This was the painting they had left behind wrapped in brown paper on top of a closet when they left Paris during the war, not liking it sufficiently to ship it to their new home in Houston or to leave it in the care of friends. Indeed, before that, it had languished for more than a year at the frame shop since no one had cared to collect it and no delivery address had been left. It was not until the framer finally put the painting in his store window that a neighborhood priest recognized the image to be of Dominique and the portrait was claimed (de Menil 1964). Long since redeemed from its ignominy, the painting now forms the heart of what has become internationally one of the most significant collections of the work of Max Ernst, which itself forms a part of the 15,000-piece Menil Collection. Acquired over a period of 45 or so years, The Menil Collection is the formerly private collection of Dominique and John de Menil [Figure 2], open to the public since 1987 in the form of a purpose-built museum, designed by Renzo Piano. Considered a very important collection of New York School painting and among the most significant Surrealist collections in the United States, its holdings include pieces from an array of cultural and historical traditions. They have an antiquities collection; a very well regarded collection of Byzantine icons; Oceanic and African art; colonial art from the New World; and the European moderns, including Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Miró, and [End Page 765] Click for larger view Figure 1 Max Ernst, Portrait of Dominique, 1934, Oil and graphite on canvas, The Menil Collection, Houston.

Multicultural Modernism

American ÏGVÏGW" De Santis continuedfrom previous page Becoming an African American ScholarActivist," in which he distinguishes himself from theorists like Paul Gilroy as an "African Americentric scholar and critic"; the long first chapter that elucidates the critical and theoretical assumptions of the study; and the briefconclusion, which generally repeats information that appears earlier, there are thus only three chapters (about 132 pages) of entirely new material on the contemporary African American novel. Bell covers an impressive array of writers and subgenres in these pages, convincingly arguing through perceptive close readings how writers such as Paule Marshall, Leon Forrest, Gloria Naylor, Samuel Delany, Jr., Octavia Butler, and many others demonstrate authenticity, authority, and agency by working within a tradition highly influenced by the Du Boisian concepts of double consciousness and double vision and by residual oral forms including oratory, myth, legend, tale, and song. Of the seventeen writers granted extended treatment in chapters six through eight of The ContemporaryAfrican American Novel, only two—Trey Ellis and Colson Whitehead— were born after 1960. Missing here are writers such as Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Randall Kenan, Danzy Senna, Tananarive Due, Jake Lamar, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Jeffery Renard Allen, Shay Youngblood, and many other young African American novelists, all of whom surely merit acknowledgment for their contributions to and shaping of the tradition of the African American novel. Bell's failure to cover younger novelists is problematic, as is his dismissive attitude toward writers such as Trey Ellis, who, in his essay "The New Black Aesthetic" (1989), uses the term "cultural mulattoes" to describe many AfricanAmerican artists ofhis generation. Bell writes, "Anthropologically, then, because the beliefs and values of Ellis's cultural mulattoes were fundamentally shaped by immersion during theirformative years in predominantly white middle-class communities , their acculturation and identity formation could be reasonably viewed as less authentically black than those of contemporaries who were raised in predominantly black communities" (my emphasis). Such a comment tends more to curtail conversation than it does to open up inquiries about the dynamic tradition of the African American novel and how contemporary novelists are both participating in and revising that tradition. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches is a significant achievement inAfricanAmerican literary studies, but it does have its limitations. At the present time it is the definitive work in the field and an important reference tool, though additional studies are needed that offer a broader, more inclusive approach to the contemporary African American novel. Christopher C. De Santis is associate professor of AfricanAmerican andAmerican Literature atIllinois State University. Multicultural Modernism Charles Russell Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse Edited by Josef Helfenstein and Roxanne Stanulis Krannert Art Museum and The Menil Collection Distributed by University of Washington Press http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/ 208 pages; paper, $40.00 Bill Traylor and William Edmondson are "major figures in American and African American art history." What do we mean by this? What constitutes "major" and are American and African American art history quite the same? What criteria do we apply? Who constitutes this "we" that are doing the judging ? Normally, the determination of who is a "major " artist or what is meant by important art is the result of the collective opinion developed over time by members of the "mainstream" art world: the white critics, museum personnel, and academics who dominate the discourse about what is considered "fine," hence significant, art in our culture. This discourse is largely determined by a single narrative focus—the European-based art historical tradition of elite art traced from Greek classical art through the European Renaissance and to the emergence of modernism and now postmodernism. All of us who have attended college or watch PBS are well familiar with the tale. The story, however, has long excluded many types of artistic activity not grounded in this specific historical tradition and which, consequently, have been shunted off to separate art "histories," such as "African American," or to various subcategories of "lower" arts: e.g. craft, design, commercial, popular, folk, and "outsider" art. When artists relegated to any ofthese sub-groups have been deemed worthy ofnotice by the fine art world, it has largely been...

Disembodied Spirits: Spirit Photography and Rachel Whiteread's Ghost

The contemporary art world is—metaphorically speaking—haunted. In just the last two years, evidence of haunting, if not the specters themselves, could be found at the 2002 Whitney Biennial in the works of Jeremy Blake, Archive, Zoe Beloff, and Leighton Pierce. In the same year, Adam Fuss released his beautiful book My Ghost, a series of photographs that were also on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Gregory Crewdson introduced his new body of work, whose figures implied that the paranormal exists deeper in the suburban unconscious than we might have imagined. Anna Gaskell found herself commissioned by the Menil Collection to create a series of photographs and video depicting a haunted young woman, which she titled half-life, basing the work on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

Rauschenberg’s Photographies

Review| April 01 1998 Rauschenberg’s Photographies Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain November 20 , 1998-February 26, 1999Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany June 27-October 11, 1998 The Menil Collection Contemporary Arts Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas February 13-May 17, 1998Guggenheim Museums, New York, New York September 19 , 1997-January 7, 1998Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective by Walter Hopps essays by Trisha Brown, Ruth Fine, Billy Kliiver, with Julie Martin, Rosalind Krauss, Steve Paxton, Nancy Spector and Charles F. Stuckey, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997 632 pp./$75.00 (hb), $45.00 (sb) Ingrid Schaffner Ingrid Schaffner Ingrid Schaffner is an independent curator and critic. Her exhibition “DEEP STORAGE: Arsenale der Erinnerung” will be held at P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York, July 4-September 7, 1998. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1998) 25 (5): 15. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1998.25.5.15 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ingrid Schaffner; Rauschenberg’s Photographies. Afterimage 1 April 1998; 25 (5): 15. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1998.25.5.15 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1998 by The Regents of the University of California1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Braque: the late works

This volume is the catalogue for the spring 1997 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and at the summer 1997 exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston. The exhibition focuses on Braque's late works including the Interiors, Billiard Tables and the late Bird paintings.

The Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection: A Conversation

The Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection: A Conversation

The art museums of Louis I. Kahn

The art has become a prestige commission for contemporary architects, and for several decades reference has been made to a museum building boom. Among these new museums, those of Louis Kahn are especially admired. This significant American architect, who ranks in this century with Frank Lloyd Wright both as a creator and as an influence, has made a special contribution to the architecture of museums and has helped create a subtle but telling change in the concept of what a late twentieth-century building should be. After a brief look at the development of a tradition in architecture, this study examines Kahn's three art museums: the Yale University Art Gallery, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art. It traces the development of each through through its various stages: the background of the institutions and the commissions, the programs for the buildings, their designs and evolutions, their constructions, and the evaluations of the completed buildings. Material on Kahn's plans for a for the De Menil collection, begun shortly before his death, is also included. Accompanying the text are illustrations of the buildings, including Kahn's personal sketches, architectural plans and sections, and presentation perspective drawings. Photographs of the finished buildings present the transformed vision of the architect in tangible form, showing that the museums, while related, are individualized accomplishments. This is the first comprehensive study of Kahn's museums.