“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 the late fifties, hiring Jermayne MacAgy was asking a lot of the Basilian Fathers, as she was a controversial figure in the city. Her first show in Philip Johnson’s gallery at St. Thomas, lit by candles for the opening, was a ravishing display of surrealist paintings by Yves Tanguy, Rufino Tamayo, Ernst, René Magritte, Mark Tobey, Léger, and others, which she had grouped with medieval sculptures.
“Two days later,” Mrs. de Menil says, “a nut walked into the office of the president and said, ‘Father, you must take the show down. It is communistic’. This man, a Houston citizen of the highest order, said so many crazy things. It was unbelievable — hammers and sickles hidden in the paintings, things like that.” The de Menils and the fathers protected MacAgy from such lunacy, and within St. Thomas she was becoming the object of near-adoration. But in 1964, while she was working on a show to be called “Out of This World,” she suffered an insulin attack (she was diabetic) and died of it. “I felt as if the floor had opened up under my feet,” says Dominique de Menil. “I finished her shows and tried to keep things going, and that was when I was led to my career, the installation of shows. MacAgy had never let me see how she was doing things; she always wanted the openings to be a surprise. I had to learn all the little tricks of installing, and there are plenty of them, for myself.” Mrs. de Menil took over the art department herself.
The de Menils became more deeply involved at St. Thomas than they had been anywhere else. They underwrote salaries, set up a fund for “faculty improvement,” and began pushing to hire more professors in the social sciences. More and more talented students were attracted to the school, and new buildings were added to the mall. Philip Johnson began designing a chapel, and Mark Rothko was commissioned to paint fourteen large, meditative canvases for it. At the end of every year the de Menils wrote a check to cover the school’s deficit. They hired St. Thomas graduates to work for them. They started a media department and screened trendy films in the student center, joking about what the nuns might think of the latest Andy Warhol picture.
The art department was truly their domain; it grew all out of proportion to the rest of the school. People muttered that its budget was bigger than that of the entire university. Mrs. de Menil started an art collection for St. Thomas and donated many fine pieces; her standards for it were so unbending that when Jane Blaffer Owen tried to donate a tapestry, history repeated itself. Mrs. de Menil refused the gift on the grounds that it was not of a high enough quality, and Mrs. Owen wrote an angry letter. “If a child brings a gutter flower to its mother, and tells her it is an orchid, should the mother throw the flower away because it isn’t?” she asked. Mrs. de Menil apologized, but as far as the tapestry was concerned, she was unmoved.
The de Menils started an extensive art library, and Dominique de Menil put on remarkable shows, publishing detailed catalogs with each. She often wrote lucid, straightforward introductions to guide visitors through the difficult works. She even taught an art history course, pausing now and then to leaf through a large dictionary looking for a word in English or pulling out of her handbag some priceless object to share with her students.
John de Menil, for his part, had decided that St. Thomas had to become a world-class institution. It had everything going for it: a home in a booming city, lots of money, land, and contacts. There was only one hitch, and that was the Catholicism. Though the de Menils were themselves devout, they were also fervent ecumenicalists, if that was not an impossible paradox. They believed excellence at an academic institution could be achieved only if it was open to the study of all faiths. John de Menil urged Father Patrick Braden, the university’s president, to put in place a board of laymen that would have the authority to elect St. Thomas’ presidents. But ecumenicalism was not the critical issue to the de Menils. Liberalism was.
In 1967 the Basilian Fathers decided to put lay people on their governing board. That did not solve the de Menils’ problems; they wanted control over who those lay people would be. The Basilian Fathers wanted their loyal former trustees on the board, and the de Menils wanted their own allies: people like Aaron Farfel, developer Gerald Hines, and a liberal Protestant Republican woman with oil money named Vale Ackerman. Or as St. Thomas’ current president, Father William Young, says, “They wanted a bunch of Northeasterners to come down and run the place like — Ted Sorensen [special counsel in the John F. Kennedy White House and since then a New York lawyer]: he didn’t know St. Thomas from a hole in the ground.” There were even rumors that the de Menils intended to ask John Cage (the modern composer) and Buckminster Fuller (the visionary engineer) to join their board and that John de Menil had his eye on the presidency.
It was finally all too much for Father Braden. He refused to go along with the de Menils and reaffirmed the school’s commitment to conservative Catholicism, and as a result the de Menils refused to go along with Father Braden. In 1969, after months of careful negotiation, the de Menils folded their tents and moved the caravan to Rice University. John de Menil had everything he had ever given St. Thomas reappraised, then wrote out a check to buy back most of the art collection and the art library. Even students and faculty followed the de Menils from St. Thomas to Rice. They gave the school some of the land they had purchased, but they kept most of it. That was when all the little cottages got their distinctive coats of paint, as if to show whose side they were on.
The divorce was painful for everyone. Today Mrs. de Menil will say only that it happened inevitably because they outgrew St. Thomas. She has never reconciled herself entirely to being cut off from the school. When several of the trees she had chosen for the mall recently began to die, she marched up to the president’s office in the Lee mansion, dragging a large dead branch up the staircase, and shouted indignantly, “Look what you’ve done to our trees!” Then she had an irrigation system installed.
The wounds healed slowly. St. Thomas was forced to develop a broader base of support, and it soon began to have financial troubles. In 1978 the fathers, unable to afford the luxury of a large student center, converted Welder Hall into the Cameron School of Business. Instead of paintings and mobiles suspended in an airy room, there are two floors crammed with offices. But what the fathers need more than anything else nowadays is not money but land, land for more housing, classrooms, parking, and a university chapel. And all the land west of their campus — the only direction in which they can grow — is owned by Mrs. de Menil.
The deal struck between Rice University and the de Menils was tailored to sensitivity on both sides about the debacle of St. Thomas. The de Menils’ reputation as dominating people preceded them to the bargaining table, but then again so did their reputation for generosity, at a time when Rice was struggling to establish an arts program. The negotiations were complicated and protracted. Eventually the de Menils created an entity called the Institute for the Arts, which would operate under the aegis of Rice (though not, of course, independently of the de Menils). They donated their art library to Rice (to this day many volumes are still stamped “Property of St. Thomas”); they paid the salaries of the art history professors who left St. Thomas for the Rice faculty, and started the Media Center with faculty members from St. Thomas. The Institute for the Arts would run the Rice Museum, which the de Menils would start and fund.
Rice did demand some concessions to its ordinary operating procedures, like job descriptions for everyone who came to the institute from St. Thomas. But that was not how things were done with Mrs. de Menil; her people did whatever needed to be done. Yes, the sculptor Jim Love was on the payroll, listed as a technician; no, he didn’t keep regular hours; yes, they paid him for the work he did whenever they needed a special pedestal or Wall constructed for an installation. Job descriptions? Cynics thought “minions” sounded about right.
Rice was building its own gallery, Sewall Hall, for which John de Menil made no secret of his disdain. He had grown increasingly incapable, over the years, of summoning up patience for the ponderous movement of academics. “John,” he would say to John OπNeil, the chairman of the art department, “go tell the president to stop construction on that hall. We could easily put up a better building than that.” Conversely, when the Rice people saw the plans for the de Menils’ art gallery, they were outraged. Designed in portable sections as a temporary structure, it was nothing more than a huge, shiny corrugated metal shed. Mrs. de Menil was in a big hurry to get it up because it was being built to accommodate a show that was coming to Houston from the Museum of Modem Art in March 1969. Rice stuck the building way off in a comer of the campus, and in eight weeks it was up. Homeowners nearby complained so much that it was painted a neutral color to cut down the glare. Now, fourteen years later, the temporary art barn and its twin, the Media Center, are still standing. The outstanding shows Mrs. de Menil created for them have traveled to major museums worldwide.
Then in 1974 the de Menils brought architect Louis Kahn to Rice to talk about building an arts center. There began to be rumors that they were going to donate their entire collection to Rice. But Kahn died having completed only preliminary sketches, and the project went into limbo. Mrs. de Menil didn’t trust Kahn’s office without Kahn. Meanwhile the City of Houston, in the persons of Mayor Fred Hofheinz and architect S. I. Morris, approached her about building a museum on city land near the Museum of Fine Arts, but she turned the offer down. It seemed by now that Mrs. de Menil had realized that the only way to get what she wanted was to create, and so, while she continued to give generously to local institutions, it became less and less likely that she would entrust the bulk of her art to someone else. She was a collector above all, and so she would have to find a way to hold on to her collection.
My Library
