“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 5 of 7)
Part III
The Collectors
In the late sixties John de Menil, by now chairman of the board of Schlumberger, learned that he had cancer and that it would eventually take his life. In the time he had left he redoubled his odd mixture of efforts as an ultraliberal corporate executive — a man of great compassion for the unfortunate and great impatience for the failings of those around him. In June 1973 he died at the age of 69. Funeral services were held in the late afternoon at St. Anne’s, a large Catholic church near River Oaks.
The funeral became the occasion for a reunion of the entire de Menil circle — the people from the worlds of art, business, politics, religion, science, architecture, and education whom the de Menils had collected about themselves with as much urgency as they collected art.
The church was jammed with mourners. In the front pews sat the family and their closest friends. Behind them sat the rich and the powerful of Houston, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris. Behind them were ranked the local members of the Black Panthers, in full uniform, holding their berets, and behind them were hundreds of friends and admirers from all over the world.
Six months before he died, John de Menil sent a memo to his children and his closest friends explaining, down to the minutest detail, how he wanted his funeral to proceed. And so, in accordance with his wishes, his son François, his young political protégé, Mickey Leland, and several other people found themselves, one hot summer day, driving to the Ross Mortuary on Lyons Avenue in the Fifth Ward to meet the proprietor, Burnett Ross.
“When Mr. Ross saw us walk in,” Leland recalls, “he thought he had landed himself some big pigeons, and he started showing us his top-of-the-line, pink tufted satin caskets with brass designs and things like that.” The group explained that Mr. de Menil wanted a simple wooden box; Ross was unable to find one (his clientele did not share Mr. de Menil’s simple tastes), so they had to troop out to the warehouse. They put rope handles on a pine coffin they found there and asked Ross to come around to the de Menils’ River Oaks home.
Back on San Felipe Road, John de Menil, rich oil executive, had been lying in state in his bedroom, wrapped only in a sheet, in the old peasant tradition. On the day of the funeral, his body was carried to St. Annes in a tan Volkswagen bus that had been used to carry de Menil art back and forth across Houston.
When everyone was seated and the music started, there was an audible gasp from the congregation. John de Menil had had quadraphonic speakers installed in the sanctuary, and they were blaring Bob Dylan songs — “Girl From the North Country” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” — so loudly that you would have sworn Dylan himself was in the choir loft. The funeral ceremony was then recited by a black Baptist preacher, a rabbi, and several lay readers including a Muslim who read from the Koran. A Lebanese Catholic priest performed a requiem mass — a fitting end to John de Menil’s lifelong devotion to world ecumenicalism.
It was pitch-black outside when the church doors were opened, disorienting at six-thirty on a summer evening. Suddenly the sky was rent by a violent streak of lightning, which lit up an enormous bank of clouds hanging low over the horizon. Then the rain came down, as heavy as anyone could remember rain being. Roberto Rossellini, the film director, turned to his companion and said, “So speak the prophets. This funeral is attended by the gods.”
The de Menils held court, if you will, for more than thirty years in a house they built off San Felipe Road on some land that had once been a pig farm. That house explains a lot about its owners, more than most houses do. It set the tone for the de Menils’ lives — you had to see it to understand their values, their tastes, their working style. The house wasn’t simply a backdrop for a collection of art: it became an integral part of the collection, in much the same way the people who collected in it did. The house on San Felipe, functional, simple, and yet beautiful, turned out to be a sort of laboratory for the museum that Dominique de Menil is building.
Philip Johnson took his first trip to Houston in 1948 when the de Menils called him. Together they launched into what would be the first of many episodes in which the de Menils would demonstrate — with infallible but idiosyncratic good tast — their uncompromising drive for control. Client and architect got along well, but neither was particularly easy to please. The de Menils instructed Johnson to design a house based on the assumption that half their lot would one day be sold and another house built on it. They also insisted that it be completely functional, for they were raising five children and intended to give them full range of the house. There was, at the time, no art collection to worry about. There was instead a tight budget — $75,000. Accordingly, Johnson came up with a plan whose pieces fit, like a Chinese puzzle, into a nice, neat box. Mrs. de Menil was delighted.
But she had one or two quibbles. Johnson designed a solid brick facade; Mrs. de Menil did not like having a windowless kitchen, so she punched a long row of high windows out of the wall. Johnson designed high ceilings, but not high enough; she raised them several feet. Johnson designed a terraced garden that he thought she could enjoy year-round (he was naive about the climate); she covered it over and turned it into a dense, unruly tropical atrium — a Rousseau garden, she calls it, after the jungle landscapes of Henri Rousseau. Johnson designed a dining room in front of the children’s quarters; she insisted that the children be able to use it as a playroom. He made the back wall of the living room entirely out of glass; she fretted for months about how exposed to the elements she would feel. He didn’t understand the kind of construction necessary for Houston’s humid climate, and the walls got moldy and the flat roof leaked; she hired two young local architects — Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry-who spent years patching up his errors. And, as a final blow to Johnson’s ego, she asked him not to design the interiors; she was going to have them done by her couturier, Charles James, an American whose elegant and dramatic costumes appealed especially to actresses and society women in the forties and fifties.
Against the austere lines of Johnson’s glass and brick box James’ designs were nothing if not eccentric. Curving sofas curled along the length of the understated blond-wood-paneled walls. James broke wide expanses of space into small conversation areas and punctuated them with nuttily dignified modular furniture. Instead of buying modern chairs, he helped Mrs. de Menil find unusual antiques, and these he covered in vibrant velvets and rich linens and silks. He did away with the doors between some rooms and instead draped heavy, plush velvet curtains in theatrical folds from ceiling to floor. He covered some walls with panels of red velvet, and next to those he stretched panels of flaming rose felt. Still other walls he painted a rust-brown color or the color of a mossy forest bed. In the dressing room off the master bedroom, James painted each of at least a dozen cabinet doors one of three colors — sweet, muted green, gray, or blue.
Everyone wanted to eyeball the weird new house, but very few were prepared for what they saw; some thought it looked like a crematorium. The entrance was nondescript in an oddly arresting way, standing as it did in the neighborhood of neo-Gothic and Tudor phantasmagoria that was River Oaks. The glass doors and row of windows carved out of the pink brick facade gave it a masklike mien. People driving around to ogle mansions didn’t venture too far up the de Menil driveway, and to this day truckers making deliveries don’t hesitate to pull right up to the front door, bewildered about service drives and disbelieving that this could be the entrance to a rich man’s house.
As it turned out, the house aged gracefully, accommodating the burgeoning art collection effortlessly. It is a warm and elegant place. But Philip Johnson, while eternally grateful to the de Menils for taking a chance on him and for steering many other commissions his way — he says they are “the most important people in my career” — 7 has repeatedly refused to include the house in any collections of his work; after all, neither did Frank Lloyd Wright include in his portfolios the houses whose interiors he had not overseen. Johnson insists that the reason is that he doesn’t like his design for the de Menil house; the front is “terrible” and the floor plan “simpleminded” because of the budget restrictions. “Mrs. de Menil is a very strong woman,” he says. “I was young then and easily pushed around. Now I am not so unprepared for the strong-minded.” He chooses to ignore the James interiors and says rather that the house is wonderful only because of Dominique de Menil’s perfect taste. “No decorator could do what she does, the way plants are everywhere, the way she leaves books and papers lying around all over the place. The strong and haunting sense you get from that house is a miracle.” Is he being catty? Or perhaps he is growing fonder of his house. Perhaps. “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” he asks levelly, “to strip the whole house down and see what it really looks like?”
The fifties and sixties were times of intense collecting for the de Menils; their treasure was added to almost daily. Most visitors to their home have a story to tell about the arrival of an unwieldy crate that contained a new sculpture by Ernst or a small pouch that held a little oil by Forrest Bess. The de Menils bought works by de Chirico, Picasso, Magritte, Matisse, Miró, Cezanne, Rodin, Rothko, Paul Klee, Legér, Braque, Tinguely, Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. They bought pre-Columbian art, African and Oceanic pieces, Egyptian art, ancient Near Eastern and Far Eastern art, and Aegean, Etruscan, Hellenistic, Roman, Early Christian, Byzantine, Coptic, and Islamic art. They bought paintings from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries and sculpture, ceramics, glass, jewelry, collages, carvings, toys, and rare books bound in crumbling butter-soft leather. Sometimes they just bought things that were eye-catching or a pleasure to hold.
My Library
