“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.
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In 1959 Welder Hall, the student commons and cafeteria, went up. It was the jewel of the set: a beautiful, large, luxurious, open space with ceilings two stories high and a balcony on three sides. The de Menils installed in it enormous paintings and as a centerpiece hung a huge Alexander Calder mobile. They even began to talk about building a chapel in which they could hang more art, as their mentor, Father Couturier, had done in France.
The de Menils subsidized professors of theology, economics, and art history to staff the new classrooms. Within a few years St. Thomas grew to five hundred students. The Basilian Fathers began to have trouble getting anyone else to support the school, because everyone, with few exceptions, assumed that the de Menils had the territory covered; and after all, what more did the fathers need that they could not get from the de Menils? Their generosity was dazzling, their pride and enthusiasm contagious. They had led the school out of its childhood and were poised to fall into the role of overbearing parents at its first blush of adolescent rebellion.
When the de Menils tried in the late forties to get the only public institution in Houston to acknowledge the existence of modern art, they had been ignored. So when Robert D. Straus, a collector of American art, asked them to join a small group of people who had also become disenchanted with the Museum of Fine Arts, they were ready. In 1948 the Contemporary Arts Association (now the Contemporary Arts Museum, CAM) was chartered, and the de Menils were provided with an institutional vehicle for modernism.
The association was to be staffed entirely by volunteers. Members of the exhibition committee would suggest shows, the general membership would approve them, and volunteers would be called on to put them up in a new building on Dallas Street. Almost from the beginning there were disagreements. Should the association show art by local artists? Art by nationally or internationally known artists? Painting and sculpture? Or the democratic art of good design in mass-manufactured household objects? The de Menils always wanted to do things on an international scale; most of the other patrons of art in Houston preferred to be less grand and more attuned to what would please the local artists and public.
John de Menil took over the leadership of the board in 1950, and immediately exerted his influence. He put on one-man shows that featured non-Houston artists, like Lyonel Feininger and Christian Bdrard. A few of the founding members resigned in protest; one-man shows were a big risk and therefore a luxury, particularly when they gave short shrift to the local talent. The de Menils plunged ahead with the most ambitious show Houston had ever seen: an exhibition of the paintings and drawings of Vincent van Gogh, which at the time had been shown in New York, Chicago, and Paris alone. And the hit parade went on: Calder came to Houston to install his works in an exhibit with paintings by Joan Miró; Ernst came to Houston and made a drawing for the pamphlet that was to accompany his show. Another founding member resigned in protest. In 1953 the New York Times noted cryptically, “There is a schism within the CAA, based on many factors: personality clashes, fear of domination by an individual, differing philosophies of professionalism versus cooperative endeavor.”
The de Menils pressed on: now it was time for the CAM to hire a professional, full-time director. The Museum of Fine Arts didn’t even have a full-time director. It took three years and the resignation of a few more board members, but in 1955 the de Menils got their way — a director, chosen by them, her salary guaranteed by them, with the money and the freedom to put on shows the likes of which Houston would never see again.
Jermayne MacAgy came from the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, where she had been the youngest museum director in the country; she was known for her unusual and provocative installations. She immediately staged shows featuring surrealists, which inspired several Houston collectors to invest heavily in that period. She showed fifteen of the fuzzy, multicolored rectangles by Mark Rothko, who had up to then been shown solo only once, in Chicago. She put on an exhibition of contemporary portraiture and another called “Collage International: From Picasso to the Present.” In all her shows she placed works on high pedestals, hung them in windows cut out of mysterious walls that rose up out of nowhere, hung others at ground level. On a minuscule budget of $20,000 a year she created a staggering 29 shows during her four years as director and brought the little museum to national attention.
But that didn’t win her the friendship of the CAM board, in whose eyes she was too completely her own woman — or perhaps the de Menils’, but certainly not anyone else’s. “The problem in Houston was that everyone wanted to run the association,” Mrs. de Menil recalls. “The board would appoint a chairman for each show, and MacAgy would do all the work without credit. And she was constantly fighting to keep inferior works out of her shows, not always with success. Sometimes I would spot some terrible thing and ask her what it was doing there. She would tell me about Mr. So-and-so who had threatened to withdraw all his support if she didn’t indulge him. There were too many people in Houston who thought of themselves as great curators.”
MacAgy’s crowning success was the inaugural exhibit in 1959 for the cavernous Cullinan Hall at the Museum of Fine Arts, designed by Mies van der Rohe and donated by Nina Cullinan with the stipulation that modern art be exhibited there occasionally. Brought in as a guest curator, MacAgy put on a show called “Totems Not Taboo.” She gathered up more than two hundred rare tribal works and placed them on pedestals, some close to the ground, some soaring up into the hall; these were lined up along a balcony and staircases that were also covered with works. Tropical plants were everywhere. Still more works were placed on small islands of gravel. The staid museum was showing a little of the de Menil touch.
Just as the show opened, the Contemporary Arts Association announced that it would not renew MacAgy’s contract because of lack of funding. The statement was a marvel of thinly veiled diplomacy; in fact, MacAgy was being fired by those directors who were tired of the domination of the CAM by the de Menils and their like-minded friends. The de Menils were less upset than might have been expected; they had other plans for MacAgy. As Mrs. de Menil says, “In those days, we figured that since the CAM was such a difficult place, why not use St. Thomas?” Jermayne MacAgy was soon ensconced as the chairman of the art department. For years to follow, the shows held there outshone those at the CAM.
In the meantime, the de Menils had begun to turn their attention to the institution that had eluded them upon their arrival in Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). With the completion of Cullinan Hall, there was an opportunity to give modernism its due at the conservative museum. John de Menil had a seat on the board when it undertook the task of finding a director who could handle Mies’ intimidating open space. When he heard that James Johnson Sweeney had resigned his post as director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, John de Menil picked up the phone, and within a short time Sweeney was settled in Houston.
Well, almost settled there. Sweeney seemed to prefer spending time in New York or Paris or at his house in Ireland and therefore wasn’t in Houston as much as some thought a museum director should be. But the de Menils were Sweeney’s champions. They supported his extravagant expenditures in the name of quality, even when it meant he had to send to Manhattan to have his catalogs printed or his shirts laundered. Sweeney was in a hurry to move the MFA “out of the provincial ranks,” as Edward Mayo, registrar at the museum, puts it, and he brought in works by Picasso, Miró, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Georges Braque, and John Tinguely. But — fatal flaw — he could not bring himself to court the guardian families of culture.
The de Menils were in step with Sweeney; his ambitions matched theirs exactly, and so did his tastes. There began to be grumbling, just like the earlier grumbling at the Contemporary Arts Association, about how much control the de Menils were gaining, though as always the exercise of their power was accompanied by great generosity. During Sweeney’s tenure, they donated some of the museum’s most important gifts: a Calder mobile, a classical bronze figure of an emperor, and Jackson Pollock’s Painting Number 6 Other patrons continued to give — or at least tried to. And that was what cost Sweeney his job.
Museum policy had always been to accept gifts, some of questionable value, from the Blaffer family. In 1967 Sarah Campbell Blaffer presented the museum with a Fragonard, and Sweeney refused it, saying it was a fake. Blaffer, furious and insulted, took back her painting, and the Blaffer family turned their attention to the college of their choice, the University of Houston. Sweeney was fired.
With Sweeney went the de Menils. Clearly the next director, Philippe de Montebello, was not one of “their” people. He had the temerity to tell a reporter that one of the de Menils’ gifts, abstract orbs designed by Italian sculptor Lucio Fontana, could stay at the South Garden entrance because they made “good receptacles for chewing-gum wrappers.” The de Menils gave their last gift, Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Soft Fan, to the MFA the year of Sweeney’s departure. From then on they would give some money, service on the board, and nothing else.
St. Thomas was left as the place in which the de Menils had the most at stake — the most to gain in terms of control and the most to lose in terms of how much time, money, thought, work, and love they had invested in it. They were not competing with other patrons for control of a board; in fact, they could not even sit on the board, since it was composed only of the fathers. But the board seemed completely receptive to its patrons.
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