The Cinema 4 Pylon: Guillermo Del Toro: At Home with Monsters at LACMA 2016, Pt. 1

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Guillermo Del Toro: At Home with Monsters at LACMA 2016, Pt. 1

The inside entrance to At Home with Monsters, guarded by the
Angel of Death from Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

It was a long enough wait, and October 29th finally rolled around today. My brother Mark, his wife Marci, and my teenage nephew (and burgeoning rock star) Aerin were in town from the north part of the state to join Jen and I at the Guillermo del Toro exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (aka LACMA). We had planned this excursion a few months earlier in July and I, like many horror and fantasy fans in the area, was just beyond waiting any longer to go see it.

Titled At Home with Monsters, the exhibition, curated by Mr. del Toro himself, was meant to do multiple things. First was to celebrate the art and films of the man himself; second, to pay tribute to the influences – from art to literature to cinematic or otherwise – that have influenced del Toro since his childhood days and straight through his remarkable career in film; and third, to give us a glimpse into what his inner sanctum is like, in this case, his home base (though it is not his actual home) in Los Angeles that he has named Bleak House after a favorite Dickens novel. (He has so much crammed into Bleak House, that he has a sequel house already called Bleak House 2.) Most of the contents of this exhibit, from paintings to sketches to models and even the life-sized statues of figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Frankenstein's Monster, and Johnny Eck (from Freaks) take up space in this place that also houses his working office, art studio, and research libraries.

I have decided to split this photo essay in two. This first part will feature photos of costumes, figures, and props related to Del Toro's own films; the second part will be exclusively devoted to objects in the exhibit portraying the wide range of influences on his talent and career.

The Faun from Pan's Labyrinth.

The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth.

In addition to the full-sized figures such as the characters above and below, many of the rooms had video screens on the walls that played montages (in loops) based around common themes in his work, such as Death and Resurrection, Monsters, or Beauty and Brutality. There were also several stations spread throughout the vast exhibit that allowed you to push buttons to select different pages that had been scanned from his working notebooks, to get a sense of how devoted he is to his craft at seemingly every moment of his life.