The Animals, Monsters, and Creatures from the Collection display in the Menil Collection’s west hallway takes its inspiration from Constant Companions, an exhibition curated by Dominique de Menil and Jermayne MacAgy for the University of St. Thomas in 1964. The show explored monsters in art— “ambivalent, protective, or threatening,” as Dominique wrote in her introduction to the catalogue. She brought a particular interest to animal-human hybrids, their iconography and “complex and ambivalent” meaning. Crossing time periods and geographies, Constant Companions encompassed 300 objects, from paintings, bronze sculptures, and carvings to book illustrations, icons, and vases.
The exhibition was met with wide acclaim, covered by NBC News, The New York Times, Vogue, Art in America, and Newsweek, which deemed it “one of the year’s best off-beat shows.” Several outlets noted that it opened to the public one day before Halloween—mounting, in the words of a Houston Chronicle reviewer, “an artistic contribution to these days of black cats and cauldron bubbles.”
For the dramatic installation, the gallery space was painted black and partitioned like a maze, with artworks brightly spot lit in cave-like vestibules. Writing to a friend in advance of the opening, John de Menil described it as “an exhibition of monsters, evil or endearing, from 1,000 B.C. to yesterday morning, from Egypt to Peru, from Italy to Siberia.” According to the Houston Post, it became known among locals as simply “The Monster Show.”
Paying homage to the 1960s show, this display brings together a selection of paintings and objects that highlight artists’ perennial fascination with fantastic and monstrous creatures.
