Wes Anderson is a filmmaker that is truly one of a kind. There’s really no other way to describe his films other than Wes Anderson-ian. Well, a more superficial description would be to call his various projects “quirky.” So, that being said, when you hear that Anderson, along with his wife Juman Malouf, curated a special exhibit in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, you’d have to imagine that it’s very Wes Anderson-ian. And boy, you’d be right.
According to a report from Artnet (which includes pictures), Anderson and Malouf’s exhibit “Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures” (which really should be a title for one of his films, right?) is just as quirky and unique as you’d guess an art exhibit curated by him would be. The exhibit is named after the “Spitzmaus” mummy, which is a tiny 4th century BC tomb, roughly the size of a shoe box, that contains the remains of a shrew.
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“[The ‘Spitzmaus’ is] like chubby ballerina who can’t dance very well having her one night as the white swan,” says Jasper Sharp, an adjunct curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum.
Sharp says this because the tomb, as well as just about everything else comprising the 430 works in the exhibit, was hand-selected by Anderson and Malouf after the duo bypassed all the major works of art to focus on the underseen, and sometimes stored away in closets, pieces that have never really shared the spotlight previously.
“Their favorite part of the museum was the things that are sleeping softly on white cushions on shelf number 42 on the third floor of a storage room,” says Sharp.
He continued, “These are things that would not normally be shown.”
So, how did the filmmaker and his wife select pieces for their exhibit? Well, according to the report, the exhibit is comprised of “boxed-off, color-coded ‘rooms’” that are “set up like self-contained tableaux.”
One room has three large portraits of Petrus Gonsalvus and his family, who all had hypertrichosis, leaving them covered from head to toe in hair. In another room, which was dedicated to “vessel-like objects,” contained only the suitcase for a war robe of a Korean Prince. And in a completely other room, there are 22 busts arranged by size, not by context or chronology.
One senior curator told Artnet about what it was like working for Anderson and Malouf, “We would get an email from Wes asking, ‘Do you have a list of green objects? Could you send us a list of everything you have that is yellow?’ Our data system does not have these categories.”
Of course, Anderson is well-aware that the museum didn’t know what to expect with his exhibit and were skeptical of his choices. In his opening statement, he said, “One of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s most senior curators […] at first failed to detect some of the, we thought, more blatant connections; and, even after we pointed out most of them, still question their curatorial validity.”