“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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For all the people who were hurt or bewildered by the de Menils, there were more who adored them. Life with them became a rich, dense mesh of professionalism and intimacy. People who worked for them became their closest confidants, drawn inextricably into the tangle of their many projects. Barnstone, for example, had been employed to correct Johnson’s oversights at the house, but he also house-sat when the de Menils went on summer vacations or took trips abroad. He designed the Schlumberger house organ, Intercom, for which John de Menil spared no expense. Barnstone could assign Eve Arnold or Inge Morath or Henri Cartier-Bresson to photograph Schlumberger operations. But then Barnstone and Aubry were expected to help the de Menils decorate their tree and wrap presents at Christmas — and willingly they went. Each year the de Menils set out beautiful gifts and gave the young architects pick of the lot before they started wrapping.
“Life with the de Menils was always so nice, so seductive,” says Gene Aubry, now a successful designer of big office buildings in Houston. “Mrs. de Menil’s generosity was astonishing, and everything she did was according to very high standards. The people around her were always referred to as her court, never to her face, of course. Their lives were completely wrapped up in her life, and in a way, to their detriment. I think they were subtly held back. The guys who really want to get ahead do not sit around waiting for the crumbs. I saw what was coming, and I got out. But still, life with her could never be awful.”
The paintings by Mark Rothko that the de Menils had commissioned in 1964 were intended for a chapel that would be a joint monument to modern art and modern religion; Mrs. de Menil was convinced that, as she wrote of the chapel later, “only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.” When Rothko completed the paintings in 1966, a site for the chapel still had not been chosen. For five years it moved all over the St. Thomas campus and then to the Texas Medical Center and finally to the property the de Menils owned in Montrose. As it moved, it shrank. Philip Johnson, hired as the chapel’s architect, wanted it to have high ceilings and an 85-foot tower with a skylight at the top that would filter the light that entered, because Houston light was so much stronger than the light that filtered through the soot-covered skylight in Rothko’s New York studio. But then the ceiling height came down, and the tower was lopped off. No one now can agree on why that happened; some say Rothko hated the tower, some say Mrs. de Menil hated it, perhaps because it gave the chapel a traditional look that was unfashionable in the years following Vatican II.
If Rothko and Mrs. de Menil agreed about the tower, it would have been a rare moment. Gene Aubry, who was brought in to work on the chapel, says that Rothko made his paintings for a Catholic sanctuary, not a nondenominational place; he had intended that there be crosses and altars in it. Rothko had not wanted artificial lighting either. He wanted people to see his subtly mottled purplish-brown canvases as the sun came up, as it crossed the sky, and as it set, after which they would disappear into the gloom. But the de Menils intended to use the chapel for services and lectures on dark days and evenings, and Johnson thought it was simply ridiculous not to light the paintings. Round and round it went. Rothko wanted the walls to be painted a pale ivory, with a slightly yellow cast; Mrs. de Menil had them painted a soft gray color. Eventually Johnson, with Mrs. de Menil’s blessing, resigned from the project. Rothko died suddenly and mysteriously in his studio in New York in February 1970; he never saw his chapel.
Barnstone and Aubry were brought in to carry on when Johnson left. Aubry built a half-scale model of Johnson’s distinctive octagonal shape without the tower, painted miniature purplish-brown Rothkos, built small benches and guard rails, hung those paintings in the little chapel, and then crawled around inside studying the light.
“We drove ourselves to distraction over it,” Aubry says. “We made about eight miniature chapels, each time incorporating some new scheme Dominique came up with. She would have us set up these models, and then she would call in architects from all over the world to give her ideas on how to make it work. What a circus. . . . She had a romance with the idea of architects but not with the reality. I don’t know why she bothers to hire architects for her projects anyway. She certainly doesn’t listen to anything they say.”
The lighting in the chapel is a curse to this day. It was dedicated in February 1972, and the sunshine pouring through a skylight cast such a glare on the dusky colors of the canvases that they were invisible. Later on, a shield was constructed under the skylight, and now the paintings look murky because the light is so poor.
In front of the chapel, in a large reflecting pool, stands an impressive metal sculpture by Barnett Newman called Broken Obelisk. The de Menils had intended to donate the piece to the city with the understanding that it be dedicated to Martin Luther King. Mayor Louie Welch refused the gift because of that, and when a city official called for an alternative inscription, John de Menil suggested a quote from the Bible: “Forgive them; for they know not what they do.” The city was unmoved. And so the sculpture found its way to Montrose, where it adorns the first institution created entirely by the de Menils and thus perhaps the first to be entirely to their liking.
For years there had been talk in Houston, and all over the art world, about where the final resting place of the de Menils’ great collection would be. There were rumors that it was going to New York or Paris or Los Angeles or, broken up, to all of those places; on everyone’s tongues, the collection flew around and around the world. But as early as 1970 the de Menils were discussing with friends ways of keeping it in Houston. “Why bring coals to Newcastle?” says Mrs. de Menil. “What do New York and Paris need with another museum?” It would of course require its own institution: “No one could exhibit the collection the way I want it to be exhibited. No museum has the curatorial staff for the kinds of shows I want. “ A budget was drawn up — $10 million for construction, another $20 million for an endowment — and, after some artful hinting by the Menil Foundation that it was not absolutely set that the museum be in Houston, local donors, chiefly the Cullen and the Brown foundations, put up $5 million each. Walter Hopps, formerly director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Pasadena Museum in California, was chosen to run it. He adds up the museum to-be’s holdings at 10,000 pieces and says it is one of the five most important privately held collections of twentieth century art in this country.
Mrs. de Menil spent years searching the world for an architect to realize her vision of the museum. Pontus Hulten (who will direct the new Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, on whose board Mrs. de Menil sits) introduced her to Italian architect Renzo Piano, who with his partner Richard Rogers had designed the high-tech Pompidou Center — known as the Beaubourg — in Paris. In Piano Mrs. de Menil decided she had found her architect; she passed up everyone in Houston (Howard Barnstone felt the snub most keenly) and, for that matter, everyone in the United States, including Philip Johnson (who remarks cheerily, “She will get what she wants.... She is afraid that an architect might build a monument to himseIf. She knows, I guess, that Piano will do what she tells him to”).
What Mrs. de Menil wants seems to be as far from high tech as possible, at least in appearance. The model of the museum, constructed in the same workshop in which Barnstone and Aubry labored over their scaled-down Rothko Chapel, shows a long, low, unassuming building. It will range over about four hundred feet of a block in Montrose. Set back from the front and floating on columns will be a second story that will be used for offices and storage. The museum will be clad in wooden clapboard, as are most of the cottages in the area, and it may be painted what might as well be called Doville gray. It is in danger of looking a little like a lovable old beached whale.
If museums look like their owners or, rather, since Mrs. de Menil is in no danger of looking like a beached whale, if museums reflect their owners’ personalities — as do the austere, muscular Frick in Manhattan, the gentle, eccentric Isabella Gardner in Boston, and the gracious, bourgeois Phillips in Washington — then it is how the museum works that will capture the style of a woman who chooses to wear her mink inside out. She has never seemed to care much about appearance for its own sake.
The museum will be large, but inside it should feel warm, intimate. It is being designed to avoid giving its visitors museum fatigue. Some galleries will be large enough for many paintings; other rooms may contain only one piece of art and a comfortable sofa. Generally, very little of the collection will be on display at any one time. Galleries on the lower level will open onto a long promenade, so that visitors can go to any room without crossing through another. There will be gardens in glass niches throughout the building.
Mrs. de Menil has decided that heating and cooling units should send air up from the floors rather than down from the ceilings; an intriguing idea, theoretically, but her engineers have been stumped as to how to leave enough air space between the wooden floorboards for ventilation but not so much that women will be lurching around, their high heels caught in the cracks. This time around, there will be no skylights. Piano has devised a system whereby light will enter through a glass roof and reflect off the curved sides of immense concrete slats, or leaves, that double as beams to support the roof. The museum, happily, will also rely heavily on light bulbs.
The upstairs level of the museum will be what Mrs. de Menil calls her treasure house. It will be divided into several storage rooms, thematically organized, where the art will be densely displayed. A student of Ernst’s paintings, for instance, will find dozens of canvases stored on the wall, rather than in bins and vaults. Most of those who are able to gain access to the treasure house won’t have known its owner, but at that point they’ll be close enough to enter, in a sense, the de Menil circle and so be able to get a sense of her. Perhaps, looking at the mass of priceless paintings there, they’ll see that she was idiosyncratic, mysterious, elegant, and unpretentious, and that what pleased her more than anything was beautiful things, pure and unfettered-hers.
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