Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil
784
Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil
784Hardcover
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Overview
The first and definitive biography of the celebrated collectors Dominique and John de Menil, who became one of the greatest cultural forces of the twentieth century through groundbreaking exhibits of art, artistic scholarship, the creation of innovative galleries and museums, and work with civil rights.
Dominique and John de Menil created an oasis of culture in their Philip Johnson-designed house with everyone from Marlene Dietrich and René Magritte to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In Houston, they built the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and underwrote the Contemporary Arts Museum.
Now, with unprecedented access to family archives, William Middleton has written a sweeping biography of this unique couple. From their ancestors in Normandy and Alsace, to their own early years in France, and their travels in South America before settling in Houston. We see them introduced to the artists in Europe and America whose works they would collect, and we see how, by the 1960s, their collection had grown to include 17,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, rare books, and decorative objects.
And here is, as well, a vivid behind-the-scenes look at the art world of the twentieth century and the enormous influence the de Menils wielded through what they collected and built and through the causes they believed in.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780375415432 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/27/2018 |
| Pages: | 784 |
| Sales rank: | 1,153,367 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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, Alexandre Iolas, and Dominique de Menil.”
Her engagement with art, at least in part, was an intellectual exercise. Primarily self-taught, she was a perfectionist who was fascinated by the act of learning. Her interiors, whether in Houston, New York, or Paris, were always packed with books: art tomes in English, French, or German as well as major works of history, archaeology, theology, poetry, and fiction. Volumes that she and John acquired early in their marriage and always remained in their library in Houston included Yves Congar’s Divided Christendom: A Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion (1937), a treatise on Catholic ecumenism that had been an essential text for the de Menils; Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (1923); André Breton’s Le surréalisme et la peinture (1928); and De Van Eyck à Bruegel le Vieux au Musée de l’Orangerie (1935), the catalog for the first important art exhibition they had seen together in Paris. When she traveled, Dominique often took with her an exquisite edition of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire (Oeuvres complètes, 1954), with notable poems and prose that she had meticulously marked with a single line in pencil on the outside margins.
•
How this complex, sophisticated Parisian came to live in South Texas had to do with her father, Conrad Schlumberger. When Dominique was still a young girl, he had an idea that electricity could be used to chart what lay below the ground, and Schlumberger Limited, the company that he formed along with his brother Marcel, soon became the largest oil services firm in the world. In those years, it was estimated that Schlumberger logged 70 percent of the world’s wells. On the day the museum opened, the company had fifty thousand employees and, although the numbers were down due to the oil slump, annual revenues of $4.7 billion.
Dominique and her husband, John, had moved to Houston during World War II because it was the U.S. headquarters for Schlumberger. John, a key figure in the development of the firm, was the first to oversee issues relating to finance, management, personnel, and marketing, putting the systems in place that allowed Schlumberger to become a huge multinational. He even coined the company slogan: “Wherever the drill goes, Schlumberger goes.” By the time he retired in 1969, at the age of sixty-five, he was chairman of the board.
In attendance at the opening of the museum were dozens of members of her family, including Dominique and John’s five children in from New York: Christophe, Adelaide, Georges, François, and Philippa, who, in 1981, had converted to Sufism and changed her name to Fariha. The year before the museum opening, the significance of Dominique and her children as collectors and patrons was made clear when they were the subjects of a cover story in The New York Times Magazine titled “The de Menil Family: The Medici of Modern Art.”
Also over from Paris were Dominique’s two sisters, Anne Gruner Schlumberger, or Annette, and Sylvie Boissonnas. The extended, international family was impressive in its own right. In those days, of the twenty wealthiest people in France, nine were from the Schlumberger family. And all nine were from Dominique’s branch: sisters, cousins, nieces, and nephews. The generation that followed hers, the grandchildren of Conrad and Marcel, were said to be worth a total of $3.7 billion.
Inspired by the example of Dominique, many in the family had supported the arts. Her older sister, Annette, was a discerning collector and patron who gave a host of works to the Pompidou Center and, at her estate in the south of France, Les Treilles, had important antiquities, nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, and major sculptures by Giacometti, Dubuffet, Ernst, Laurens, and Takis. Dominique’s younger sister, Sylvie Boissonnas, donated essential works to the Pompidou Center by Mondrian, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Miró, Braque, and Picasso. Sylvie and her husband, Eric Boissonnas, hired Philip Johnson to build a house in New Canaan, six years after he had finished the de Menils’ in Houston. Once Sylvie and Eric returned to Europe in the 1960s, they had Johnson create an even more spectacular villa on Cap Bénat, a protected enclave of more than six thousand acres on the southern coast of France between Hyères and St.-Tropez. And it was Sylvie and Eric who commissioned Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer to design Flaine, a bold, brutalist ski complex in the Alps. Flaine also included an ambitious center for the arts, a concert hall, and monumental outdoor sculptures by Dubuffet and Picasso.
The de Menils, though they were moving toward opening their own museum for some time, were spectacularly generous to other institutions, from the Pompidou Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “John and Dominique gave extraordinary things to the Museum of Fine Arts, including the only work they had by Jackson Pollock,” noted Walter Hopps. “When the Centre Pompidou was being formed, Dominique offered a spectacular later Pollock, The Deep, that Sam Wagstaff had owned. I mean, how many people have given away Jackson Pollocks, twice, for heaven’s sake?”
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Part 1 The Museum Imagined
1 Fanfare 3
Part 2 The Old World
2 A Family Château 33
3 A Protestant Dynasty 48
4 Return to France 58
5 Foreign Affairs 78
6 Honor and Sacrifice 89
7 Monsieur le Baron 110
8 At First Sight 127
9 Une Jeunesse 135
10 Horizons Broadened 148
11 A Shared Life 162
12 Engaged 185
Part 3 War
13 Drôle de Guerre 205
14 The Debacle 215
15 Landings 249
16 Postwar 289
Part 4 New Frontiers
17 Home 327
18 Nail Hit This Time 367
19 The Sky Is the Limit 396
20 A Big Splash 422
21 Worth the Candle 457
22 Nothing and Everything 475
23 Faith Can Be Alive 493
Part 5 A Very Strong Woman
24 Aftermath 519
25 What Now? 527
26 Other Voices, Other Lands 537
27 Toward a New Museum 545
28 Global Visions 554
29 A Museum with Walls 574
30 From Civil Rights to Human Rights 588
31 Byzantium 601
32 A New Generation 618
33 Un Acte Final 634
Notes 659
Bibliography 719
Illustration Credits 727
Index 731