One Fine Show: “Wes Anderson, The Archives” at the Design Museum in London

Alfred Hitchcock’s notion of “pure cinema” drew on his education in the era of silent films, but you can see it resonate across his filmography. He thought that a movie should be able to be enjoyed on mute, because the key images—the birds flocking on the telephone wires—tell the story as much as the dialogue. You can imagine what he would have thought of the films of Wes Anderson, in which every scene in every movie involves two people telling very clever jokes at each other while moving as little as possible.

“Wes Anderson: The Archives” at the Design Museum in London is the first major museum show devoted to the filmmaker, and offers a context for appreciation outside of his movies. The exhibition features over 700 pieces of ephemera related to his films, including costumes, props, stop-motion puppets, miniature models, paintings, Anderson’s own spiral-bound notebooks and storyboards. These are drawn from a personal archive he has built up since Rushmore (1998), when he started writing into his contracts that everything made for his films would belong to him, following the sale of certain items from Bottle Rocket (1996). The exhibition is a collaboration with la Cinémathèque française in Paris, where it premiered last year, and has been expanded by some 300 additional objects for London.

It makes sense that Anderson’s archive would be so vast because a great deal of work goes into the objects that build his universe. The painting Boy with Apple is a MacGuffin in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) by a fake artist called “Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger.” In fact it was painted by a fellow named Michael Taylor, but art directed by Anderson down to the kind of fur that appears on the costume and the mysterious piece of paper in the background. A London dancer was the model for the boy but his hand position on the stem is lifted from the 16th-century Fontainebleau School portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées holding her sister’s nipple. There are enough bespoke idiosyncrasies for it to read as a pretty believable portrait of a young Renaissance noble, even in a brief flash onscreen.

I’ve heard the argument that Anderson’s best films are the ones more explicitly for children and the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) allowed Anderson to animate his fetishes. Mr. Fox is just one foot tall, a ball and socket puppet covered in mohair, alpaca and goat hair, but like the rest of Anderson’s objects he is convincing. His corduroy suit is tailored the same way a human’s would be and his face is malleable for acting. The same is true for the dogs in Isle of Dogs (2018), though the heads of the humans were swapped.

The location for Asteroid City (2023) is described in the catalogue as “not a city, but rather a grand-scale artwork moonlighting as a hamlet on the edge of the Arizona desert (‘Pop: 87’).” If conceived of as a giant installation with moving parts, a.k.a. people, then its engines might be the bespoke vending machines that offer anything from real estate to martinis. The catalogue also notes how the research for these involved looking at real vending machines for meat, bread, stockings and eggs from the early post-war years. The result is a series of personality-filled props that entertain as they exude profound Americana. Anderson may control his actors rigidly but his objects are afforded great range.

“Wes Anderson: The Archives” is on view at the Design Museum in London through July 26, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• What’s Left to Learn from Marcel Duchamp?

• In Dancehall and Reggaetón’s Evolution, MCA Chicago Charts a Global Awakening

• Our Take On “Lucas Samaras – Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago

• Cy Twombly’s Drawing and Discovery

• Why You Should Catch “Bellezza e Bruttezza” at Bozar in Brussels