One Fanfare Art doesn''t call for marble floors nor pedestals. It is part of our life, our emotions and our delights. It can be deeply moving but never stuffy. --John de Menil The sweltering summer afternoon of June 4, 1987, was the official opening of the Menil Collection, and seventy-nine-year-old Dominique de Menil stood in front of her new museum. Her adopted hometown of Houston, Texas, had seen oil prices plummet in the mid-1980s as the rest of the country recovered from recession. With 70 percent of the city''s wealth tied to the oil industry, Houston construction stagnated, unemployment soared, banks failed. At elegant La Colombe d''Or, a few blocks from the museum, the price of a three-course lunch had been slashed to the going rate for a barrel of crude, which had gone as low as $9.06.
The inauguration of the Menil Collection at this particular moment only further underscored the staggering artistic, civic, and philanthropic contributions that Dominique and her husband, John de Menil, had been making to the city for nearly half a century. Designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Fitzgerald & Associates, the building was a bold, graceful two-story structure of white steel, clear glass, and gray cypress siding with an interior of pristine white walls, glistening black wood floors, and walls of windows that opened onto lush tropical gardens. Inside was one of the largest and most important private collections of art assembled in the twentieth century: Paleolithic bone carvings, Cycladic idols, Byzantine relics, African totems, and Oceanic effigies as well as modernist masterpieces from Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Magritte, Ernst, Calder, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Johns. The day before, thundershowers had swept through town, flooding streams, sweeping cars off roads, and throwing funnel clouds out over Galveston Bay. But the two thousand invited guests were not deterred by a touch of weather. At 5:00 p.m., just in time for the local news, all eyes were fixed on the new museum.
"The event is grabbing the attention of the art world and getting word out that Houston has more to offer than cowboy hats and pickup trucks," announced one local reporter. " The New York Times says the collection could make Houston a center for the visual arts," suggested a newsman. "That''s a switch--just a few years ago, that newspaper said that Houston had a few nice buildings but they were surrounded by 2,000 gas stations." As Dominique de Menil stepped to the lectern at the entrance of her new museum, surrounded by the blocks of modest bungalows that she and her husband had bought over the years, all painted the same shade of soft gray, she was determined to focus on what really mattered. "Artists are economically useless and yet they are indispensable," she said with conviction. "A political regime where artists are persecuted is stifling, unbearable . We need painters, poets, musicians, filmmakers, philosophers, dancers, and saints." And at a moment when she might have been expected to make a case for patronage, she went the other way.
It was a small but significant sleight of hand. "The gifted artists are the great benefactors of the world," Dominique announced. "Life flows from their souls, from their heart, from their fingers. They invite us to celebrate life and to meditate on the mystery of the world, on the mystery of God. Artists constantly open new horizons and challenge our way of looking at things. They bring us back to the essential." Instead of being a monument to the collectors, the Menil Collection was intended to be a celebration of the artists. The building did not house a café, because that would be seen as disruptive.
The bookstore, a profit center for most museums, had been banished to a bungalow across the street. "No boutiques and no blockbusters," she said of her ethic. The walls surrounding the art were free from any explanatory text or curatorial remarks, except for the name of the artist, the work, the year, and the medium. There would be nothing here to interfere with the emotion that the art could inspire in the viewer. The names of major donors, often given great prominence on the walls inside other museums, were to be placed outdoors, on a bronze plaque, under a Michael Heizer stone sculpture. Even the name of the museum was spelled out in white letters that were affixed to the outside of the glass. The interior was reserved only for the purpose of art. It might have seemed a surprisingly strong message for the woman who stood at the lectern, an elegant widow who was almost eighty.
Dominique looked not unlike many women of a certain age who could be found on the streets of her native Paris, if rather more distinguished and slightly more modern. She wore a chic pale yellow waffle-weave dress that fell just below the knee, designed by her daughter Christophe, with a black sash, dark stockings, and sensible shoes with low heels. Her long silver hair was pulled up into a chignon. Dominique could certainly be severe, even imperious. "She was very warm but very determined, as the ladies in this family tend to be," said Henriette de Vitry, the daughter of her older sister, Annette, and a noted Paris psychoanalyst. Dominique was interested in the opinions of others but only up to a point. Walter Hopps, the founding director of the Menil Collection who was there that day as she spoke, learned the limits of her patience. As he explained, "If I came up with an idea that she found challenging or she didn''t understand, she would say, ''I don''t think so, but let me think about it.
'' That gave me the clue that I could come back to her again. I always had the chance to come back to her twice, but that was it." Hopps realized that after the third try he had better drop it. And Dominique abhorred small talk. Ralph Ellis, whom she had hired to oversee the thirty acres of real estate that she and John had acquired over the years in the neighborhood around the museum, would often greet her with "Good morning." Dominique always replied cordially. But if he asked, "How are you?" she just looked at him. Susan de Menil, the wife of Dominique''s son François, once phoned her mother-in-law from New York and, as one does, asked how she was.
Silence. "Don''t ask me how I am when you call," Dominique replied. "It was so shocking to me," Susan de Menil remembered. "Do you ever even think about that? But she was angry. And she made it very clear that going forward it was to be, ''Hello, Dominique,'' then we would begin the conversation." A decade after the opening of the Menil Collection, in April 1997, the final year of her life, there was a dinner in Dominique''s honor at the museum. One of the two hundred guests was the theater director Robert Wilson. When Dominique, not feeling well, left before the end of the evening, he walked with her to the museum entrance.
"I gave her a hug, which was not something easy to do," Wilson remembered. "And I said, ''Good night, have sweet dreams.'' She looked me in the eye and said, ''I do not want to have sweet dreams.'' " * At the time of the museum opening, Dominique de Menil had been working in the world of art for more than two decades, beginning with the taking over, in the mid-1960s, of the art history department of the University of St. Thomas, a nearby school run by the Basilian order. At this tiny institution, with its de Menil-funded campus buildings designed by Philip Johnson, she curated and installed a series of nationally and internationally significant exhibitions of art. One of her students at St. Thomas, Fredericka Hunter, described Dominique in those years: Her presence was charismatic.
Her personality was unconventional as far as intellectual drive and curiosity. Extremely articulate, extremely curious, loved mystery, was very involved with the idea of the soul and God and art as an expression of the ineffable. She was also authoritarian and demanding and quixotic and could change quickly. I got chewed out by her more than once, and it was quite something. She was tenacious and acquisitive, and admitted to it. Everything was really no-nonsense; it was to the point. It wasn''t frivolous; everything was sort of a matter of life and death. Didn''t like idiots--she didn''t suffer fools well.
She was pretty hard on women; she adored men. She could be coquettish--very sensual, very sexy. Women came in for a harder time. But she would be respectful if you were intelligent and forthright. She accorded each of us, if you could stand up to it, your own respect. I never felt condescended to; you either went along and kept up or you didn''t. Many present for the dedication of the museum were aware of the contradictions of Dominique''s character. "She was turned toward others in a way that was quite moving, but she was also extremely determined, with a personality that you could not make deviate from her intentions," said Alfred Pacquement, director of the Pompidou Center, who was in from Paris.
"There was a mix of generosity and determination to the point of almost ignoring advice other people might have. It was a mix that was quite striking, and it was all lit up by what was, without a doubt, an enormous intelligence." A leading curator from the Pompidou Center, Jean-Yves Mock, had known Dominique since the 1950s. "Madame de Menil was never arbitrary; her decisions were always built on principles," Mock explained. "She did not have a cold way of thinking, nor a brutal, knee-jerk kind of reaction." Mock was effusive about Dominique''s flair for the installation of art exhibitions. As he said, "I have known three people who really knew how to mount exhibitions, meaning conceive and hang them: Erica Brausen, Ale.