“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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People scouted for them and sent word back to Houston about a treasure in this or that remote corner of a faraway continent. James Johnson Sweeney caught an interesting show of Tinguely pieces in Rome and wondered if he might pick out a few for them. “BUY WHOLE SHOW,” they cabled back. Leo Castelli, the famous New York art dealer, had an important Jasper Johns in his gallery; snapshots had to be sent to the de Menils. Alexandre Iolas spotted a Picasso that would fill in a critical gap; they bought it. The house and then warehouses and vaults began to fill up with art.
Even the children, by the seventies grown and with their own families and households, began collecting art. Adelaide, a photographer who lives in New York City, has a collection of Northwest Coast and Eskimo art. Philippa runs her own arts foundation in Manhattan called DIA, which sponsors enormous works — filling entire rooms or covering large fields — by artists such as Walter de Maria and, Don Judd, who is working in Marfa. Christophe is a patroness of avant-garde composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. François and Georges both collect modern art; Georges is an economist and Francois a sometime movie and theater producer.
The house on San Felipe was beginning to attract an astonishing collection of people as well. The staff did not stop with the usual assortment of governesses, maids, and cooks. Mrs. de Menil hired dozens of intelligent young men and women over the years to help her with her service to museum boards around the world and countless other projects. Her secretaries and aides-de-camp became devoted to her, often serving long terms of duty, and though the de Menils were a source of obsessive fascination to those in the inner sanctum, they guarded her — and their own reflected status — zealously. “We are custodians of her privacy,” says one woman who stayed with her for several years. “So many people want her for so many things. She’s got to be protected.”
The de Menils were Radical Chic long before it was considered chic in Houston. If anything, it was a complicated feat. While on one hand they were giving dazzling dinner parties for the likes of Magritte, Warhol, Oldenburg, Ernst, Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Norman Mailer, on the other hand they were trying earnestly to get their friends to begin to appreciate modernism. They started a print club, offering at cost — $5 to $200 — works by Roy Lichtenstein, Ernst, Robert Rauschenberg, and Warhol to their friends. They organized a group of twelve wealthy Houstonians (including Bank of Texas chairman George Butler, tobacco and real estate magnate Henry J. N. Taub, and Lloyd Bentsen, then with Lincoln Consolidated holding company) to participate in a partnership called Art Investments at $10,000 a share. As general partners, the de Menils used the money to buy nine works of art, which were distributed to members’ homes and rotated every three months. “I know that some people kept their art hidden in a closet during their three months,” says Aaron Farfel. People called from Dallas and San Antonio and even New York to find out how to start such a club, but no one else had the de Menils.
Editors and scholars and curators were enlisted all over the world to research arcane subjects for exhibitions, catalogs, and books. One, called The Image of the Black in Western Art, is a lavishly illustrated series that has been labored over by scholars, photographers, writers, editors, and translators for fifteen years; two volumes have been published, and another will appear in 1984.
The image series is an indication of a second great passion of the de Menils’ that grew along with their passion for art after they came to Houston and found its expression in similar ways: the history and the rights of blacks. As early as the mid-forties, Mrs. de Menil was giving luncheons to which she invited black businessmen, educators, and religious leaders along with her society friends; through the fifties and sixties many a dinner party erupted into arguments, some ending in fistfights, over “the race question.” The de Menils gave, with no fanfare, to the campaigns of liberals and blacks running for the then all-white and segregationist school board. Over the years they supported liberal candidates for other local offices, most notably mayors Fred Hofheinz and Kathy Whitmire. They gave generously to the American Civil Liberties Union and to Amnesty International. They set up funds to put black students through college and graduate school. They supported black radicals, such as Jeferree James and Lee Otis Johnson. When Johnson complained to Mrs. de Menil that the police regularly tried to frame him by lying about his activities, she hired a “witness” (whom he later married) to follow him around.
In 1971 Mrs. de Menil installed a show in the Rice Museum called “Some American History.” It was a collaborative effort, masterminded by artist Larry Rivers and meant to show scenes of black life in America by several different artists. Rivers himself created the set piece of the show, Lynching: four life-size plywood cutouts of black men stuck onto coffinlike boxes and dangled by heavy rope nooses. Sprawled beneath them on a bed, legs spread, was a construction of a very pink and blond heavy-breasted woman in black stockings, black garters, and pointy spike-heeled shoes. At the glittering opening of the show, Rivers walked around tape-recording the (mostly white) audience’s reactions. They were not altogether pleasant. “I really objected to that show, blacks being hung, Aunt Jemima with a machine gun, slave ships,” says Jane Blaffer Owen. “The de Menils were sympathetic with the poor blacks, but so were we. I was a Southerner, but my family fought the KKK. My daddy’s family had slaves, but he was kind and wonderful to them. That show was terrible.”
If rich white folks were suspicious of the black-power sympathies of the de Menils, so too, at first, were black radicals. One in particular, Mickey Leland, a 25-year-old who had dropped out of the Texas Southern School of Pharmacy to help run a black minister’s campaign for a seat on the school board, was taken completely by surprise when the de Menils began to befriend him in 1969. The de Menils had decided to open an art gallery in the Fifth Ward. They asked Leland to be a liaison between them and the ward leaders, who were incredulous of the whole idea.
They rented an abandoned, run-down movie theater, once the grand Deluxe Theatre, where Leland had gone as a boy. (In his mother’s generation in Houston, Leland recalls, black people were allowed to sit in the balcony of any picture show. In his generation, they weren’t even allowed to go into the same houses as whites.) The de Menils hired a painter named Peter Bradley to be the show’s curator. He gutted the interior of the Deluxe Theatre, put in new floors, walls, and lighting, and in three weeks turned it into a gallery. Bradley asked nineteen artists, among them painters Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons and sculptors Michael Steiner and Richard Hunt, to contribute work, with the proviso that they need not use it to make explicit political statements.
The Deluxe Show was an enormous success. People poured in from all over town; certainly it was the first time that most of River Oaks had ventured into the Fifth Ward. It was held over for months, and then the space was turned into a museum that stayed open for several years, to which the de Menils lent dozens of African objects, masks, and sculptures.
After the Deluxe Show, Mickey Leland’s relationship with the de Menils took on a new intimacy. Leland was exactly the sort of man John de Menil prized in his retinue; he was young and bright and cut an extremely dashing figure with the ladies. He would be a leader no matter what he did. Finding the young Mickey Leland was, in terms of the de Menil Eye, not too unlike spotting the unknown Max Ernst.
John de Menil began to counsel Leland on the course of his life. He urged him to finish school and donated $50,000 to Texas Southern for a program in clinical pharmacy so that his protégé could study it. Whenever the de Menils entertained someone who might someday be useful to Leland, they asked him to join them. When Leland needed a new car, they bought him one. When he decided, finally, to run for the Legislature in 1972, they were at his side with money and campaign advice. They were his Pygmalions.
“I was a rough and crude personality, and they polished me,” Leland says. “People tend to think in terms of what the de Menils have done financially; that’s not right. What the de Menils did for me was to turn me into a sophisticated human being who happened to make a career in politics. They did not know what I would end up doing, and they helped dozens and dozens of people the same way.”
When Leland became depressed about George McGovern’s candidacy in 1972 and disillusioned about his own future in politics, John de Menil offered to send him on a trip to think things over. Leland suggested California. No, said de Menil, that wasn’t far enough. Leland suggested China. John de Menil sent him to Africa. The two set off together and went first to Los Angeles, then to New York, then to Paris. From there Leland went off on his own; he spent three months traveling all over Africa. When he returned, John de Menil was in the hospital, dying of cancer. He lived to see Leland win his seat in the Texas House but died during his first year in office.
In his office on Capitol Hill, Congressman Leland is surrounded today by reminders of the de Menils. The massive tomes of The Image of the Black prominent in his bookcase. On the walls are large color prints made from plates in the book; he proudly points out Moses with his first wife, Zipporah, an Ethiopian. “I can’t even begin to repay their kindness,” he says. “ But someday I will. I will.”
The generosity that the de Menils showered on Leland was not especially unusual for them, but most of their protégés were of the world of culture, not politics, and so the world into which they were drawn by the de Menils was much smaller. Leland had elections to win and other politicians to work with, but most members of the de Menil circle had only the de Menils. Architects Howard Barnstone and Gene Aubry, who were in the most intimate circles of the de Menil retinue in its early years, had never seen anything like them before. “The de Menils were so worldly, charming, wonderful, open, ambitious, free from prejudice and rigidity, and generous,” says Barnstone. But not everyone was taken by the de Menil charm, and not everyone was treated to it either. John de Menil in particular could be shockingly cruel and imperious. “I have seen him write a check for a quarter of a million dollars and ask someone to take it and get out of his life,” recalls a friend. “He believed that if you had a cancer, you should cut it out with a sharp, quick stroke.
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