Modern and Contemporary

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The Menil Collection’s modern and contemporary holdings encompass a vast array of movements, materials, and styles, spanning the late 19th century to the present. Currently on display are more than forty paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs from the collection, alongside important loans. Recent acquisitions on view include works by Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel, and Lynda Benglis.

Included in the presentation is John Chamberlain’s monumental American Tableau, 1984. First installed outdoors at Seagram Plaza in New York City, the structure is comprised of fourteen components, made from the sculptor’s signature material of scrap metal auto parts. When the Menil opened its doors in 1987, American Tableau was among the twenty-three sculptures by Chamberlain on display in an inaugural exhibition.

In their lifetimes, the de Menils were avid collectors of modern and contemporary artists. Many of the works in the collection reflect the couple’s dedication to cultivating close relationships with those artists, including Andy Warhol, Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yves Klein. The museum continues to actively expand its holdings in this area, and the current display includes noteworthy new acquisitions.

Installation view at the Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Caroline Philippone

Artist Talk: Deborah Roberts

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Artwork Spotlight: John Chamberlain's “American Tableau”

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Related Artworks

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Two Acrobats, 1929

Alexander Calder

Julie, The Beautiful Cyclist (Julie, la belle cycliste), 1945

Fernand Léger

Untitled, ca. 1964

John Chamberlain

Untitled (Night Blooming), 1951

Robert Rauschenberg

Crucifixion and Reflection, 1951

Robert Rauschenberg

$A pioneer in abstract art, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) fully realized his purified pictorial language, which he called Neo-Plasticism, while living in Paris in the early 1920s. Following a revelatory encounter with Cubism in that city in 1912, Mondrian spent World War I in the Netherlands, gradually transforming the logic of Cubism’s fractured and interpenetrating planes into non-representational modular grids. However, he soon came to see those checkerboards as overly symmetrical, and so lacking the tension that he sought. On his return to Paris, he created works such as Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Blue-White, 1922. As in his paintings from the late 1910s, this one contains only primary colors (here, yellow and blue), primary values (black and white), and strictly horizontal and vertical lines. Crucially, however, Mondrian now arranged these elements into a balanced, asymmetrical composition, with each component seemingly held in place by what he called a “dynamic rhythm.”$

Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Blue-White, 1922

Piet Mondrian

Composition with Yellow, Red, and Blue, 1927

Piet Mondrian

Reims, 1962

Niki de Saint Phalle

Gray Alphabets, 1956

Jasper Johns

Voice, 1964\/1967

Jasper Johns

Big Campbell's Soup Can, 19¢ (Beef Noodle) [Nineteen Cents], 1962

Andy Warhol

Ulysses, 1952

Barnett Newman

Discarded Descartes, 1954-1956

Joseph Cornell

Composed (formerly Dark As I Am), 1968-1974

Sam Gilliam

Hurting the Word Radio #1, 1964

Edward Ruscha

Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 42), 1960

Yves Klein

$\r\nYves Klein had no formal training as a painter but was a serious student of judo and the esoteric spiritual discipline Rosicrucianism. He pursued a radically philosophical rather than material goal, seeking to discover the absolute through the investigation of pure color. Fascinated with myth, legend, and ritual, Klein lived his life almost as an artwork in itself. He began to produce monochromes in 1954, eventually restricting himself to three colors: blue, pink, and gold. This untitled Monogold is a shallow relief created from plywood, sanded to produce indentations of varying sizes and depths, and covered with gold leaf; it was then burnished, creating a highly reflective surface. Klein brought forth gold’s formal and symbolic properties—expensive, fragile, radiant, sacred—in an object that appears simultaneously archaic and ultramodern. \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nClare Elliott$