When the long-awaited Menil Drawing Institute building opens Nov. 3, a new chief curator won’t be far behind.
The Menil Collection has hired Edouard Kopp, curator of drawings for the Harvard Art Museums since 2015, to lead its drawing institute. Kopp will begin his post in January as the fourth chief curator in the MDI’s 10-year-history, with the mission of shaping the new facility’s programs. He has big plans, but so did his predecessors, who didn’t last too long despite helping to plan the new building.
Founding MDI curator Berenice Rose, who lives in New York, retired early into the enterprise but is editor emerita of the catalog. The Italian scholar Allegra Pesenti resigned for personal reasons in 2014, less than a year after she arrived. Her successor, David Breslin, spent just 18 months on the job. During much of his tenure, the Menil was undergoing a top leadership transition. Breslin left to become a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art soon after current director Rebecca Rabinow arrived.
The turnover prompts the question: Will Kopp be here long enough to see his visions for the future come to life? Well, he has the support of Rabinow. And one clue could be his feelings about the new building, which he called “ravishing.”
“It’s intimate in scale. Incredibly thoughtful. The architects (Johnston/Marklee) felt deeply about the functionality and how the building should serve the drawing medium,” he said.
Situated on the south end of the Menil’s campus in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, the MDI is the only freestanding facility in the nation purpose-made for the study, conservation and display of artworks on paper, a medium many consider the root of artistic process.
The institute’s curatorial, registration, conservation and art services staff moved into their new offices in late August. Later this month, they will begin hanging the first exhibition, “The Condition of Being Here: Drawings by Jasper Johns,” which opens to the public on Nov. 3.
The show coincides with the publication of the project that gave rise to the MDI: A six-volume, nearly 2,000-page catalogue raisonné that documents about 820 drawings the now 88-year old Johns created from 1954 to 2014. (It’s due out in mid-November.)
Now it’s time to activate the interior. And for that, Kopp brings to the role everything an institute could hope for, Rabinow said. “One of the reasons I am convinced he’s the right choice is that the drawing institute is not simply an exhibition space. It’s also very strongly devoted to teaching and being a resource for the study of works on paper.”
Kopp said he is excited to help expand the institute’s scope. “It’s a continuation of what I’ve been doing at Harvard — teaching, studying and curating,” he said.
Rabinow said she wants Kopp to create “a really vibrant, creative center with an international profile.”
“He said the MDI will be a work in progress. One of his first tasks will be organizing two MDI fellowship programs — one for an academic researching drawings to complete a doctoral thesis, and one to support artists or educators from various disciplines who are inspired by drawings. Kopp also hopes to develop programs with area universities, and he is eager to educate the general public about drawings through lectures and seminars.
He also expects to help grow the MDI’s collection, which currently consists of about 2,000 works on paper. And he aims to produce as many publications as possible, at least one a year to accompany exhibitions. Whether that could mean anything else on the scale of the Johns catalog will depend on resources.
“That’s a monumental piece of scholarship,” Kopp said.
A native of Lyon, France, Kopp worked seven years at the Getty in Los Angeles before taking the Harvard post. He plans to move to Houston in December with wife Frauke Josenhans, a curator of modern and contemporary art who will be leaving her job at the Yale University Art Gallery. The couple has an infant son, Léandre, who might be the key to forecasting Kopp’s time at the MDI.
“We have heard Houston is a wonderful place to raise a child,” he said.
molly.glentzer@chron.com
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