Encountering the de Menils
Walter Hopps

I first met Dominique de Menil in 1971 at The Museum of Modern Art opening for their Barnett Newman retrospective. Dominique was with her husband and life collaborator, John de Menil. I had met John when he visited exhibitions I organized at the Pasadena Art Museum and then at the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. It was the only time I saw them together—John would die two years later. The next time I saw Dominique was when she summoned me to Houston for an interview in 1979.

Previously I had come to know the de Menils through Cristophe, their eldest daughter, and Francois, their younger son (everyone in the family, including all five children, collected art). At the time John and Dominique had one of the great private collections of Surrealist art in the world. I also knew that after moving to Houston, they brought in the Contemporary Arts Museum’s first professional museum director, Dr. Jermayne MacAgy, one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in art history in the United States. She became an important mentor for them and a close friend. I was familiar with MacAgy’s work from her thematic exhibitions held in the late 1940s through the mid 1950s in San Francisco, beautiful assemblies of far-flung art and artifacts that had knocked my socks off. I knew as well of the de Menils’ engagement beyond art with spiritual matters and human rights activities, which eventually led to their commissioning of the Rothko Chapel.

Dominique had picked up the reins of the Menil Foundation and its future plans upon the death of her husband, John, in 1973. Possessing one of the great collections in the country still without a museum base, she was mounting exhibitions at a facility that John had built called the Rice Museum on the Rice University campus. She hired me to be director of this facility. Earlier John had commissioned Louis Kahn to do a design for a new museum, but later rejected the proposal, which was for a series of pavilions. When Kahn and her husband died within a year of each other, Dominique shelved the plans for a while. She was courted by many museums around the world, but she always planned to have the museum here: Houston was home to her and John was buried here. Eventually the acclaimed Renzo Piano-designed museum, built to house their collection, would open in 1987.

However, between 1980 and 1984—the first four years after I started in my new position, when I was commuting back and forth from Washington, D.C.—I lived and primarily worked in Dominique’s house, often staying there for the better part of a month at a time. She had converted the garage into what she called the Collection Rooms. She had a small staff to maintain the records of the collection, anticipating her museum to come. While art was installed in her Houston house and in the de Menils’ New York townhouse, the great bulk of it was stored in secure rooms at Rice University.

My sleeping and working facility was in Francois’ former bedroom: a very modest room holding a bed, desk, telephone, sofa, closets, and cupboard. In the equally modest bedroom next door, Dominique ran the entire Menil Foundation from a card table she had set up next to the desk belonging to her longtime assistant Elsian Cozens. There were a number of phone lines coming into the house: Dominique never wanted to miss a call or be blocked from making an outside call. She had similar arrangements in her New York townhouse, where she worked from a desk in her bedroom, and in Paris, where she worked from her dressing room. Bulletin boards were also important for Dominique. She would have clippings of art reproductions, world events, and family photographs pinned up wherever she worked.

Living and working in the house with Dominique de Menil was a once in a lifetime experience. I’m a night person, and often when I worked late, she would come in the kitchen, having woken up around two in the morning. We would share a snack and watch late CNN—she was a serious news watcher. Then when I turned in, she would go back to bed, often waking very early in the morning to read for an hour or two before breakfast. I never could beat her to the eight-thirty breakfast.

One day, Dominique asked me what I had been reading recently. I launched into a discussion of black holes, from an article I had seen in The New York Times science section. The idea that a phenomenon in space could suck in not only all matter near it, but even light itself seemed disturbing. She asked, “How do such things exist?” And I said, “One theory is that they occur after a supernova, when a star has lived out its life and explodes.” Dominique looked stricken. She said, “Do you mean our sun might eventually explode?” I said, “It’s possible in about forty billion more years.” Now looking appalled, she said, “But what’s to become of all our work?” I later suggested that with advances in miniaturization of data we might theoretically get all knowledge about earth into a microchip database that could be propelled, like seeds, out into space well beyond the sun, which seemed to relieve her.

It seems significant that Dominique and I met at an exhibition of Barnett Newman’s art, which I admired and had exhibited. It is certainly among the most challenging art of our lifetime, and the de Menils’ love of this glorious but publicly difficult art underscored the tone of what they collected and would pursue. While they concentrated on French modernist and Surrealist art, they were also among those who believed that tribal art, beloved by the Surrealists, was related to those interests, and so they collected it as well.

Antiquities formed a whole other area that always interested Dominique—what she referred to as “art from the cradle of civilization.” The Menil Collection has a bone carving from 15,000 B.C. from Lascaux, as well as Cycladic and Anatolian work; you would have to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the J. Paul Getty Museum to find comparable pieces from antiquity. Dominique would eventually move beyond tribal art and antiquities to Byzantine art, now a major part of The Menil Collection. It interested her a lot aesthetically—the pre-Renaissance flatness has a resonance with the modern art. The spiritual quality also appealed to her. Dominique felt there was a higher degree of Christian faith in the East than in the West, and sometimes despaired over the lack of great religious art.

Of all the Surrealists, Dominique most loved the work of Max Ernst; one of her favorite paintings in the collection was Ernst’s The Sky Marries the Earth. The first modern painting that she and John acquired in Paris before they moved to the U.S. with the advent of World War II was an Ernst portrait John commissioned of Dominique. The painting was sent to a framer, and in the tumult of the oncoming occupation it was lost. After the war, when the de Menils were back in Paris, a local priest mentioned that he had seen in a shop window a picture that resembled Dominique: the framer had put it in his window to be rediscovered or sold. It is now almost always on view at The Menil Collection. A show of Ernst’s late works was one of the many projects put on hold after her death in 1997.

When I began working there, the collection had very little modern American art. I went to bat for the new Americans: Newman, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Both de Menils were interested in all of these artists.

The last painting John de Menil acquired was a Johns work, and the last painting Dominique acquired was a major Rauschenberg. I also loved photography, and when I realized John had commissioned work from Henri Cartier-Bresson, I suggested pairing it up with a great set of photos by Walker Evans. I added to the Joseph Cornell holdings, starting with a wonderful base thanks to MacAgy. For the most part, I brought mid-century and contemporary American works into the collection.

In turn, Dominique’s passion for antiquities led me to think more and read more in that area. I also acquired an interest in Byzantine art, though Dominique’s pursuit of the thirteenth-century frescoes now in the chapel designed by Francois de Menil was dangerous: this was one of the three times in my life I’ve had a gun pointed at me. The negotiations took years and involved the President of Cypress, dealers, lawyers, diplomats, and thieves. I once asked Dominique, “Don’t you think we should just give up and turn the project over to the Getty Trust?” She replied, “I don’t want my frescoes to go to the Getty.” In the end, the chapel formed a nice parallel to the simple, small Byzantine sanctuaries that were once commissioned by wealthy families. It also created an intriguing counterpoint to the Rothko Chapel. No place else in the world can one walk from the height of thirteenth-century Christian faith to mid twentieth-century iconoclasm—spiritual sanctuaries separated by almost seven hundred years.

It’s an amazing array of achievement when one considers what John and Dominique de Menil brought to Houston. Through their efforts and that of others, the city has become an important art center. Dominique once described their arrival in Houston in the 1940s as like landing on another planet: culturally there wasn’t much here. So the de Menils became actively engaged with the visual arts culture, serving on the boards of the Contemporary Arts Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Not only did they bring in Jermayne MacAgy, but they also were instrumental in bringing the distinguished director James Johnson Sweeney to the Museum of Fine Arts. And in addition to commissioning Phillip Johnson to design their house, the de Menils assisted in his receiving the commission to enlarge the University of St. Thomas campus.

John and Dominique de Menil also shared a keen interest in civil rights, which extended to sponsoring community leader Mickey Leland for political office. John staged the unique Deluxe Show, an extended exhibition of well-known contemporary artists, both black and white, in an abandoned theater in Houston’s Fifth Ward. Believing that African and black art should be studied, he instigated the multi-volume Black Iconography Research Project to trace the appearance and disappearance of black influence through history—many objects were collected for that reason, and the de Menils tried to get the subject into the curricula in schools. Dominique kept waiting for a special occasion to show the big Nubian funerary masks at the Menil, another of her unrealized projects.

Over time, the Rothko Chapel became the focal point of those interests, not only as an ecumenical spiritual sanctuary, open to everyone of all faiths (even “honorable non-believers” as she referred to me), but a center for human rights conferences and activities including the Carter/Menil prize. It joins The Menil Collection, the Twombly Museum, the Byzantine Chapel Museum, and the Don Flavin installation at Richmond Hall in forming an impressive compound near the University of St. Thomas.

It was always extraordinary to be around Dominique de Menil, as well as John, to the extent that I knew him. In Houston they set the highest standard for quality in art while pursuing their special passions from within art’s historical realms. They never intended to have a public museum collection that would be comprehensive, something of all things for all people. With their insistence that all fine art is ultimately spiritual, their intellectual curiosity, and their concern for human rights, they established a unique standard for enlightened patronage in our time.

Copyright©2000 Walter Hopps