“What I Admire I Must Possess”
For a great collector like Dominique de Menil, the problem isn’t acquiring what pleases you. It’s giving it away.
(Page 2 of 7)
Until the late thirties, the family held an exclusive patent on Conrad’s invention, a sonde that could be suspended by cables in a borehole to send up electronic, sonic, or nuclear analyses of the makeup of the hole. They were in a position like that of the Hughes Tool Company with its famous drill bit — anytime anyone drilled an oil well anywhere in the world, the Schlumberger company was called in. Within ten years of its founding, it was a huge global concern, and the Schlumbergers were on their way to accumulating another great fortune. Schlumberger now gets plenty of competition from Halliburton (which, with the help of Standard Oil, broke the monopoly in 1938) and Dresser Industries, among many others, but the process of well-logging is still called “running a Slumberjay” in the oil fields, no matter whose equipment is being used.
The Schlumbergers were sophisticated, educated, and hardworking people. Dominique received an advanced degree in mathematics from the Sorbonne. She rode her horse in the Bois de Boulogne every morning and vacationed every summer at the family chateau in northern France. But her parents did not spend money lavishly. “We had no fine rugs, no antiques, no rare books, no great art in our home,” she says. “Spending money was frowned upon. We entertained only once or twice a year, and that was only for family. My parents were very strict, puritanical Protestants.”
It was not until her marriage in 1931 to Jean Menu de Menil and her conversion to his Catholicism that Dominique began to leave behind the restrictions of her parents’ values. John de Menil (he changed his name to “John” and dropped all his names between “John” and “de Menil” when they took American citizenship in 1962) was an ambitious, charming, and driven young man who, having twice failed to pass his baccalaureate exams, decided to make a career for himself in banking. John’s father was a career army officer, the bearer of the title of baron thanks to Napoleon’s having conferred it on the family in 1813, but a man of very modest means. John, determined to make his own way in the world, for years resisted going to work for his wife’s family. But when Conrad Schlumberger died in 1936, he joined the company.
The young de Menils had moved into an apartment near the Schlumberger offices when one day, out of the blue, the portrait by Max Ernst was delivered to their door. As it happened, Ernst had sent his wife to the framer with the painting; she had left it there without supplying the name or address of its owner. The framer had hung it in his window, and there it stayed for years, until the parish priest, whom Dominique de Menil had visited only once, recognized her face in the painting and arranged for it be sent to her. Mrs. de Menil had unfortunately not grown any fonder of the portrait during its absence, so she wrapped it in brown paper and stuck it on top of an armoire.
She forgot to take it along when she and her family evacuated Paris at the start of World War II, so there it was when the Nazis burst in to ransack the house, looking for valuable drilling information. John de Menil had joined the Resistance and gone to Rumania, where he was sabotaging railroads and destroying Schlumberger equipment to keep it from failing into Nazi hands. He worked his way east through the Orient and finally took a steamer to South America. Mrs. de Menil and her three young children escaped from Europe on a steamer out of Spain to Cuba and then New York, where the family was reunited. From there they took a train to Houston, where Schlumberger had opened an office in 1935. The de Menils bought a saltbox house on the edge of the city, and John went to work supervising South American operations for Schlumberger. The Ernst portrait remained in the old apartment in Paris.
It was not until the late forties, when she returned to Paris to retrieve her belongings, that Dominique de Menil found the portrait once again. It was still on top of the wardrobe, wrapped in brown paper. In the years since she had seen it, she had learned a great deal about art. Two mentors — a Dominican priest in France named Marie-Alain Couturier and an Egyptian-born New York art dealer named Alexandre Iolas — had tutored the de Menils in the wonders of modern art and persuaded them to begin buying some of it, including works by Ernst. Mrs. de Menil was beginning to feel the Eye developing within her; she could judge a painting, appreciate it, feel its magic. Now, when she opened the package containing her portrait, her breath was taken away by the beauty of the painting’s colors and the originality of its composition. She suddenly realized, staring at the canvas — and she relates this with the fervor one might use to describe a religious awakening — “how much my eyes had been opened.”
It remained only for her to want to have as much as she wanted to see, and for that, Texas was responsible. “I would never have started collecting so much art if I had not moved to Houston,” she explains in heavily accented, graceful English. “When I arrived in Texas there was not much you could call art. Houston was a provincial, dormant place, much like Strasbourg, Basel, Alsace. There were no galleries to speak of, no dealers worth the name, and the museum…” she trails off helplessly. “That is why I started buying; that is why I developed this physical need to acquire.”
Part II
The Benefactors
When the de Menils arrived, Houston was only a little over one hundred years old, with a population of 385,000. Very old Houston money was agricultural, like the cotton fortunes of Anderson, Clayton & Company and of William Marsh Rice (his funded the Rice Institute in 1912). John Henry Kirby, who started the Houston Oil Company and the Kirby Lumber Company in 1901, was the city’s first industrial millionaire. The families of the founders of Humble Oil (organized in 1917) were old oil money — the Blaffers, Fondrens, Wiesses, Farishes, and Sterlings. Those families were the first patrons of the arts in Houston; along with oilman and developer Joseph Cullinan they founded the Museum of Fine Arts, dedicated in 1924, and they formed the nucleus of support for most other institutions of culture in town. As for the other arts, Houston didn’t get a major theater company (the Alley Theatre) until 1947, or an opera company until the mid-fifties. In the late thirties the symphony rehearsed and performed in a dilapidated auditorium next to the fat stock show, and when the cattle came in, the symphony had to clear out.
As in any city, patronage of the arts in Houston was considered both a civic duty and a source of prestige within the ranks of the wealthy. Each family’s contribution was a challenge to every other guardian family of culture. When the de Menils came on the scene touting their incomprehensible art, the guardian families closed ranks. “Well,” says Jane Blaffer Owen, daughter of a Humble Oil founder, “if they thought they were going to teach us about art…”
“I remember John’s going to the Museum of Fine Arts and begging, pleading with them to let him hang some modem art,” says private investor Aaron Farfel, an old family friend. “He would have taken space anywhere; he begged them to let him have the basement even, but he was refused every single time.”
Nonetheless, benefaction was the natural course for the de Menils to follow, rich and cultured as they were, and follow it they did. In the span of fifteen years, they made major commitments, in rapid succession, to three important cultural institutions: the University of St. Thomas, the Contemporary Arts Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts. But with almost the same speed, they withdrew their largess whenever it became clear that they were not going to be able to run things their way. Perhaps, as many de Menil supporters suggest, Houston was not ready, or did not care enough, to join the big leagues of the art world, and that was why the de Menils were frustrated. Or perhaps the donor class was unwilling to let one family, Medici style, lord it over them. Whatever the reason, as benefactors they were extremely generous but never, over the course of twenty years, entirely satisfied.
In the late forties a small catholic university struggling to find a toehold in the secular city caught the de Menils’ attention — and held it for nearly two decades. Run by the Basilian Fathers, a Canadian order, the University of St. Thomas was founded in 1947 with a staff of eight teachers for about forty students. Classes were held in a mansion built in 1912, previously occupied by the Lee family; the school graduated its first class in 1951.
St. Thomas badly needed help if it was to survive. In order to become fully accredited, it had to find more faculty, more students, more space, and, for all of those, more money. That, the de Menils could provide. St. Thomas excited them as an untapped resource; it was young, unencumbered by an entrenched board, and as for its religious commitment — well, Catholicism could mean many things to many people. The de Menils approached the school with a plan of action that was beyond the fathers’ wildest prayers. Unlike most patrons, they were not content to donate money for a building or to fund a chair. They wanted to mastermind the university’s growth; they had a sustaining vision of all that the school could achieve-a vision, it would become clear, far grander than that of the Basilian Fathers themselves.
But that was later. For years the de Menils had the blessing of the university. Seeing that the school needed space to grow, they began to campaign among wealthy Houstonians for funds to buy land. They came away empty-handed and determined to press on by themselves. They drew up a detailed plat of the neighborhood around the Lee mansion and color-coded it to distinguish “For Sale” from “Under Negotiation” from “Not Available… Yet. “They began to buy plots one by one, buying their way slowly through the long blocks, until finally their chart began to take on one hue — the color of “Sold.” Once they had acquired enough land, they proposed to donate it to St. Thomas and cover an architect’s fees, if the fathers would approve their choice of architect. Their choice was Philip Johnson, the chief American disciple of Mies van der Rohe, the father of modern architecture. The fathers approved.
Johnson designed a campus that could grow in increments, a Jeffersonian mall defined by open-air walkways that would eventually make up a rectangle several blocks long into which buildings could be plugged over the years. Two were completed in 1958: Jones Hall, with a small lecture hall and a gallery, and Strake Hall, to be used for classrooms.
My Library
