"Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse” officially opens at LACMA

By

Chenu Alexis

Published
Apr 25, 2022

Eleven years after the last exhibition about Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a new event dedicated to the English designer started last Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the Resnick Pavilion.

"Mind, Mythos, Muse," the first McQueen exhibition on the West Coast of the United States, interprets the designer’s work through nearly 200 objects connected with LACMA’s paintings, sculptures, prints, costume and textiles, and photographs that inspired him, making use of the same curatorial principles as at the recent “Yves Saint Laurent aux musées” exhibition in Paris.
 
The exhibition also highlights a substantial gift from Los-Angeles based collector Regina J.Drucker that has greatly enhanced LACMA’s collection of works by McQueen, which is the largest held by a public institution in North America.

The exhibition is organized into four thematic sections: Mythos, Fashioned Narratives, Technique and Innovation and Evolution and Existence, and is showing some of the rarest treasures of McQueen’s collections such as the womenswear ensemble with ruff and gold beading from The Widows of Culloden collection, Fall-Winter 2006-2007, that echoes the lace collar and scrolling metallic-thread embroidery in Frans Pourbus II’s Portrait of Louis XIII, King of France as a boy (1616). 

Similarly, another look from “The Dance of the Twisted Bull” collection Spring-Summer 2002 is placed opposite the work of the 18th century Francisco Goya evoking the themes of Spanish flamenco and the Spanish bullfight. And the dress from the Scanners collection, Fall-Winter 2003-2004, is presented beside the 17th century Tibetan trunk which has inspired McQueen.
 
“This is not only the first McQueen show on the West Coast, but also the first to display objects that link his work to specific moments in art history from which he drew inspiration,” said Clarissa M.Esguerra, associate curator of Costume and Textiles.
 
The McQueen exhibition at LACMA will run until October 9.