MoMA opens the Quay Brothers’ ‘multiplex’

From August 12 through January 7, New York’s Museum of Modern Art will host the first major retrospective of identical twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay, the prolific stop-motion animators, filmmakers and graphic designers whose handcrafted surreal visions are the stuff of unforgettable nightmares and dreams. This morning, the press got an advance look at the exhibit, whose floor plan was overseen by the brothers themselves as a combination labyrinth and series of screening rooms spanning all facets of their career (which the show’s curator, Ron Magliozzi, called “the Quay multiplex”). The Quays were also on hand for a Q&A session conducted by Peter Reed, MoMA’s senior deputy director of curatorial affairs.

The exhibit begins with the twins’ earliest paintings (done at age eight) and film clips from their early 20s before paying tribute to some of their formative influences: illustrator and naturalist Rudolf Freund, an exhibition of Polish poster art at the Philadelphia College of Art, and the experimental shorts of Polish filmmakers Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk. The Quays made their first films while design students in Philadelphia and at London’s Royal College of Art, and struggled to make a living in the commercial design world; their most prestigious commission at the time was a series of drawings for the American edition of Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Testament or Enderby’s End.

The Quays’ first foray into stop-motion puppet animation was a case of “sheer bluff,” Stephen confessed during the Q&A. Though they knew nothing of that craft, it seemed like a smart way to make a film with little money, and the intimate nature of the tabletop work appealed to them. Within a few years, they were crafting some of the finest examples of the genre, including the 1986 short “Street of Crocodiles,” which Terry Gilliam has called one of the ten best animated films of all time.

Magliozzi noted that “the complete history of the Quays has been untold,” and indeed fans of their animated and live-action work (like 1995’s Institute Benjamenta) may be surprised by their range: artworks both commissioned and “hypothetical,” commercials, music-videos, set designs for operas and dramas, and displays of miniature décor boxes. (The miniature boxed environments viewed through special magnifying lenses in a gallery outside MoMA’s Titus Theatre 1 are especially wondrous and perception-defying.)

Like MoMA’s blockbuster Tim Burton exhibit, the Quay Brothers show is not the work of “gallery artists,” as Magliozzi explained, but the result of discoveries unearthed from the private working collection of singular visual artists. Their early paintings and design commissions are striking and evocative, and peering into one of their miniature sets or studying one of their puppet models close-up is a privileged experience.

Stephen Quay said the maze layout of their MoMA tribute is appropriate, since the brothers’ career has followed “no predictable route.” Their various commissions, he noted, “bend you in a direction you hadn’t planned.” Stephen also pointed out that the retrospective (accompanied by twice-monthly screenings of their films and videos) was all the Museum’s idea. “We should be dead” before receiving such an honor, he joked. Visitors to this eye-opening and bountiful new MoMA show are bound to disagree.