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Surrealism at the Menil Collection will introduce audiences to the museum’s extensive collection of Surrealist art and discuss the collecting practices of John and Dominque de Menil, the museum’s founders.
John de Menil (1904–73) and Dominique de Menil (1908–97) began to collect Surrealism in earnest in the late 1940s. In the ensuing decades, they amassed the most significant holdings of works by Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, and René Magritte in the United States. They also funded and initiated the catalogue raisonnés of Magritte’s and Ernst’s oeuvres. Today, the Menil Collection continues to be a center of scholarship on Surrealism. In addition to the permanent collection galleries, which are regularly reinstalled to ignite new conversations, the museum hosts conferences, lectures, and public programs devoted to exploring Surrealism and its legacies in the present day.
The meeting will be in English and takes place remotely on Zoom. Participation is free. Registration is required.
Natalie Dupêcher, PhD, is the Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection, Houston, where she oversees the museum’s landmark holdings of historical Surrealism. Most recently, she co-curated Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, the first-ever major transatlantic retrospective of the artist, co-organized by the Menil Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunstmuseum Bern.
The Menil Collection is a museum and neighborhood of art spanning 30 acres in the heart of Houston, Texas. The main gallery building anchors the campus and is surrounded by four additional museum buildings: the Menil Drawing Institute, the Cy Twombly Gallery, Richmond Hall, which features an installation by artist Dan Flavin, and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. The collection is displayed in two-thirds of the main building and often rotated. It is built around several types of art loved and collected from the 1940s to the 1990s by John and Dominique de Menil, the museum’s founders. The permanent collection highlights arts of Africa, the Americas and Pacific Northwest, the Pacific Islands, arts of the ancient world, drawings, Medieval, Byzantine, Modern and Contemporary art, and Surrealism.