The world of Bert Menco
Singular works from a lifetime of imagination. Explore Bert Menco’s original paintings and etchings, and add the works you love to your basket.
Originals €105,000–€150,000 · Prints €10,500–€12,000
Three bodies held in one quiet balance — light, reflection and the ground beneath our feet. Painted in the stillness of the Ragdale woods, it carries the calm of someone who looked up at the sky and saw a family. To live with this canvas is to keep a small cosmos in your home: warm, watchful, and endlessly turning.
She stands as a heron stands — patient, elegant, slightly apart from the world. Bert loved the moment where a person becomes something else, and here grace and wildness share a single body. A painting for someone who knows that true elegance is always a little strange.
A figure caught in the turning, where motion becomes prayer and dizziness becomes joy. The colours spin outward like a skirt in mid-whirl. It is one of the most joyful things Bert left behind — a reminder that surrender can be its own kind of freedom.
Painted late in his life, Ablaze burns with a heat that refuses to fade. There is no hesitation in it — only colour, conviction and the urgency of a man who still had so much to say. Hung on a wall, it changes the temperature of a room.
Every one of us carries a picture of home that no address can match. Bert, who crossed an ocean and returned again, painted his as a place of the heart rather than of bricks. Tender and a little wistful, this is a work to be lived with, not merely looked at.
A light held up in the dark — for whom, we are never told. Beacon is among Bert's final paintings, and it feels like a message left on purpose: keep looking, keep searching, someone is watching over the way. A singular piece for a collector who believes in signals.
Two lives, tied by something neither can name. Bound speaks of the closeness that both shelters and constrains us — love, family, history. Now held in a private collection in Chicago, it remains one of Bert's most intimate meditations.
Faces that seem to have drifted in from memory, gathered together as if waiting to be remembered. For an artist born into a family that survived the war, the presence of souls was never abstract. This quiet, haunting canvas now lives in a private collection in Amsterdam.
Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting — the scientist who studied how we smell painted the wonder of perception itself. Senses is where Bert's two worlds met: precise curiosity and pure imagination. It is held today in a private collection in Chicago.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter — a whole year folded into one luminous surface. Like the music it echoes, it moves from lightness to gravity and back again. A celebration of time passing, now cherished in a private collection in Amsterdam.
The one in the corner, the one wearing the paper hat — Bert always had a soft spot for the misunderstood. Funny and sorrowful at once, Dunce asks who the fool really is. It belongs today to a private collection in River Forest, Illinois.
An ancient image of tenderness, transplanted to the open American plains where Bert made his life. Painted largely at the Ragdale Foundation, she is serene, protective and unmistakably his. The family has chosen to keep this painting; it is not offered for sale.
Twenty-seven plates, one for each letter, each inked by Bert’s own hand. A child of a family that survived the Holocaust, he returned again and again to the alphabet that carries memory. Here the letters become living creatures — playful, ancient, and unafraid. To own it is to keep a small library of his heart.
Two figures, one breath. Bert inked each colour onto the plate by hand, à la poupée, so no two impressions are ever alike. It is a tender, slightly mischievous meditation on how we belong to one another — the kind of quiet humour his friends still remember him for.
Balance, as Bert understood it, was never still. Light leans into dark, laughter into sorrow. Inked colour by colour by his own hand, this print holds the scientist’s curiosity and the artist’s tenderness in one small, perfect circle.
Made in 1996, in the years he lived between laboratory and studio, this etching asks who pulls the strings. Its figures are bewildered yet defiant — a reminder that Bert never stopped questioning the forces that move us. Each colour was laid by hand; each impression is its own.
Twenty-five plates. Two ancient figures, long set against each other in stone, meet here as equals. For a man whose family carried the weight of history, this was a work of reconciliation — patient, luminous, and deeply personal. A print of rare ambition, made to be lived with.
Among the last plates Bert ever made, in 2025 — the year his life ended. Three regal figures stand together, dignified and watchful, as if guarding the world he left behind. There will be no more. To hold this impression is to hold one of his final words.
A single question, asked with a raised eyebrow and a smile. That was Bert: the colourful clothes, the humour, the gentle refusal to accept easy answers. Inked by hand, this etching invites you to keep asking — long after the conversation has ended.
Twenty-three plates bring the puppet of Russian folklore to life — the clown who longs to be loved. Bert felt deeply for the outsider, the one who is laughed at yet feels everything. This is one of his most intricate prints, and one of his most tender.
Two myths of struggle and gaze, folded into one. Bert drew on the great stories of antiquity the way others draw on breath, and gave them back to us with colour inked by his own hand. Powerful, haunting, and unmistakably his.
The Egyptian cat goddess, protector of home and joy. Bert gave her a knowing look and a soft, watchful grace. Inked by hand, colour by colour, she becomes a guardian for the home she enters — just as he hoped his art would be.
The leap of death — the acrobat’s somersault with no net below. Bert knew that every act of creation is such a leap. Graceful, daring and slightly absurd, this print captures the courage behind his whole life’s work.
What we lose, we lose forever. Bert the scientist knew it; Bert the artist mourned it. This 1999 etching is both elegy and warning, its creatures rendered with a tenderness that makes their absence felt. Today, its title carries a second, quieter meaning.
A star-covered hat, a warm yellow world, and little figures held high as though imagination itself had become a companion. There is playfulness here, but also something tender: the wish to keep those we love close, even in a world that will not stand still. Seen alongside Bert’s life story, this image invites us to hold on to humour without letting go of feeling.
Three panels open like three chapters of a remembered dream. A bowed crowned figure, a blue face holding smaller figures close, and a sun-like presence cradling a child bring vulnerability and care into the same quiet space. Bert described this work as another Madonna variation; its intimacy lies in the way tenderness passes from one panel to the next, never quite leaving the room.
Three faces gather close, each carrying a different colour and a different silence. One looks outward, one meets us directly, and one rests behind closed eyes; above them, playing-card symbols turn the darkness into a small theatre of possibility. Their closeness feels like a portrait of belonging — the extraordinary comfort of being together without needing to be the same. It is a tender way to remember the imagination Bert left with us.
At the centre, a seated figure folds into a moment of stillness while little green-clad figures circle a delicate yellow enclosure. The surrounding movement makes that solitude feel all the more human. Perhaps we recognise the private room each of us carries within: a place where memory, company and longing continue to move, even when we are quiet. This reading of the image keeps Bert’s world close without claiming to resolve its mystery.
A woman in red meets a blue figure whose world has quite literally turned upside down. Between their lifted hands, surprise becomes a kind of conversation, suspended against a purple field scattered with gold. The image offers a gentle, mischievous thought: closeness need not depend on seeing the world in the same way. In the spirit of Bert’s enduring story, difference becomes an invitation rather than a distance.
Understanding the work
Bert Menco created an unmistakable artistic universe — mysterious figures, powerful symbolism and deeply human stories. His paintings are not trends or decoration; they are decades of original artistic expression, held in a single hand.
Beyond his career as a neurobiologist at Northwestern University, Bert built an internationally recognised artistic practice. His work received awards and entered public collections — a documented artistic legacy that stands entirely on its own.
With Bert’s passing in 2025, his artistic output is finite. Each original painting is an irreplaceable part of his life’s work. Selected major works are held at prices that reflect their individuality, their significance, and their place within that completed legacy.
We are not simply offering a painting. We are offering an original piece of Bert Menco’s extraordinary artistic legacy — a vision that can never be created again.