02-05-2025
Inside the Wes Anderson exhibition at the Design Museum: ‘fans will be blown away'
Somewhere in Kent, on the edge of a field, stands a warehouse full of old props from Wes Anderson films. Ahead of the launch of the new Wes Anderson exhibition at the Design Museum this November, curator Johanna Agerman Ross got to do what many lifelong fans could only dream of: she rifled through the director's storage unit to find the best items to put on display.
'It's as you would expect any storage facility to be,' Agerman Ross tells City AM. 'With racks of shelving and utility crates that you can safely store objects in. it's quite anonymous in a way, it's not necessarily a space that speaks of Wes Anderson's artistic work, but it's not trying to.'
You can't help but picture the director pottering about, lifting up items and gently suggesting they may be interesting to include in his first ever retrospective. 'Such a picture would not be a correct picture,' says Agerman Ross. 'We don't work side by side with him, it's more of an exchange, us going about our business as curators and museum people, not necessarily sitting in the archive together selecting the objects. He has a team through American Empirical Pictures who work with him on all his films, it's the same team who look after the props.'
Though, of course, Anderson was involved. 'His expertise and insight into his own archive is bar none, so we're relying on his memory and his stories in order to bring this to life.'
Featuring over 600 items used in his film catalogue, including the original scale model of The Grand Budapest Hotel used in the film, and props from Asteroid City, The Royal Tenenbaums and The French Dispatch, the exhibition offers fans a closer look at Anderson's creative process.
There will be particular emphasis on his collaborative skills, and graphic designers, set designers, puppet makers and prop makers all contributed to the conversation about which items, including storyboards, notebooks, costumes, and backdrops, are included. 'It really isn't just Wes, it's so many people that he's gathered throughout the years and continues to collaborate with. When you're on the outside looking in it's easy to associate it with just one person, but I think that idea of collaboration is such a strong thread through everything he does.'
Agerman Ross says she and her co-curator Lucia Savi have been able to build 'a very cohesive picture of how he works,' and believes visitors will be surprised by the 'vast amount of time and effort' that goes into creating Wes Anderson's universes. 'That's not something you necessarily gather from looking at a film. A film is one way of experiencing an artwork.'
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As an example, Agerman Ross describes models from feature film The Isle of Dogs that break down the process of stop motion animation. 300 different dog faces, 'or face plugs as they're called in puppet making,' were used to create each separate character in the film. 'That kind of extreme attention to detail to make sure a story comes to life, that's something I certainly marvel at and I'm sure other people will marvel at that too. Also the extreme beauty of the objects. It's something you can't really experience or understand through the medium of film but when you see it in the exhibition. It really comes to life in a different way.'
Wes Anderson: The Archives follows the Design Museum's The World of Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition in celebrating the life's work of one filmmaker with a singular creative vision. The Kubrick exhibition became the museum's most successful exhibition in terms of ticket sales, and the Burton exhibition was the most pre-sold in the venue's history.
It comes amid a challenging period for some of the capital's museums and gallery spaces, such as the Tate Modern and National Gallery, which have experienced drops in football. Analysts suggest the rise in experiential cultural events like the Squid Game exhibition and the Bubble Planet show may be detracting audiences from more traditional in to access your portfolio
