The Menil Collection

In a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood of 1920s and 30s bungalow-style homes in Houston's Montrose district, lies a gathering of buildings, both museums and private residences, that constitute The Menil Collection, also known as "a neighborhood of art."

This museum, perhaps rather surprisingly, has one of the country's best collections of surrealist art. It's infamous (for all the right reasons) in Houston, and a must-see!

One of the USA’s largest private art collections is housed in Houston and free for the public to view from Wednesdays through Sundays. It’s an amazing collection that covers painting, rare books, prints, sculptures, and photographs from some of the most important artists of the 20th century, including Magritte, Man Ray, Matisse, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Even the museum itself is a work of art, designed by Renzo Piano, who created the sensational Centre Pompidou in Paris.

One of the largest and most critically lauded private art collections in the world, the Menil Collection is the brainchild of John and Dominique de Menil, who started collecting in the 1940s, and ended up with over 10,000 paintings—including many important treasures of the Surrealist movement. Artists on view at the collection's changing-but-permanent Surrealist exhibition space include Ernst, Magritte, Giacometti, Klee, Picabia, Joseph Cornell, and Dorothea Tanning; photography includes prints by Brassaï and Man Ray. A special delight is the collection's "Room of Wonders," which contains a "cabinet of curiosities" with exotic artifacts that inspired the Surrealists. The building housing the Menil Collection is also noteworthy, as the American debut by Renzo Piano. In the words of Dominique de Menil when she explained the impetus for the museum, "We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine."