The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

Reaching over twenty-five feet into the air and nearly thirty-two feet across, the Menil Collection’s Bygones, 1976, has been installed in a park adjacent to the museum since its opening in 1987. Constructed of two steel girders and a rectangular steel plate, Bygones exemplifies the I-beam construction for which the artist became known. The diagonals of the three elements lend an energetic dynamism to the work, tempered by the stabilizing triangle formed at its base. Di Suvero chose to use weathered steel still bearing the stamps and scars of its manufacturing. As a material, it gradually develops a protective patina when exposed to the outdoor climate’s wet and dry cycles. Dynamic yet poised, monumental in scale yet elegant in proportion, Bygones embodies di Suvero’s command of materials, engineering, and geometry. As Dominique de Menil herself noted in a letter of 1984, “Mark di Suvero’s Bygones is one of the great sculptures of its time.”