“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.
The neighborhood west of Montrose Boulevard was once a peaceful place, with little more to distinguish it than the stodgy Lee mansion at the corner of West Alabama, saluting the world as it passed faster and faster each year. The Lee mansion became the University of St. Thomas, and then it became a foil for the modernistic fortress of a campus that sprouted behind it. Long black bones of skeletal arcades and severely edged pink brick boxes, built with their backs to the streets, mock the finicky angularity of the old house. Around the school the sidewalks still have a quiet, small-town feeling to them. But tucked into the center of the neighborhood is a circle of little cottages all painted the same distinctive deep gray, almost green, color, surrounding an entire block of mud. Bulldozers churn over the sidewalks here; red ribbons flag odd clumps of trees that are to be spared the ax. A few surviving houses are up on massive girders, waiting to be moved, with black plastic shrouds for windows and sorry piles of rubble for fireplaces and front stoops. An arty, minimalist fence has been put up. It is made of skinned posts, spotted with moss, into which three boards have been nailed, and it wouldn’t keep even the most timid dog out of trouble. All it says is “Look sharp! Something important is going on here.”
The initiated — a collection of lucky painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, architects, photographers, scholars, and editors screened from a long list of applicants to rent the gray houses refer to this part of Montrose as Doville. “Do” is an affectionate nickname for Dominique de Menil, whose domain Doville is. Of course, most people never call it Doville, or her Do, to her face. That would presume an intimacy not befitting the relationship of courtiers to their patroness.
But the name has stuck, and it is a clever one, too. It sounds like “Deauville,” the fashionable seaside resort on the English Channel in northern France, which is for several months of the year as gray as the gray of these houses. Since Dominique de Menil is from France, the connection is not too farfetched. Then again, Doville also sounds like “Doughville,” for all the money one would have to have to own more than half a dozen blocks of property in a part of town that is reentering fashion. Being the daughter and niece of the men who founded Schlumberger, Ltd., Mrs. de Menil has a lot of dough — more than $100 million in Schlumberger stock alone — and as her husband, John, once told a friend, “If you think I’m rich from Schlumberger, you’re only half right. I am a much wealthier man because of our art.” Doville will soon come to be known as the site of a new museum in Houston that will display one of the most significant collections of modern art in this country — hers. The museum will be called, straightforwardly, the Menil Collection. It will easily be as important as the major museums in Texas and will rank nationally with the great private collections: the Frick in New York, the Phillips in Washington, D.C., the Gardner in Boston.
Mrs. de Menil is an extraordinary collector. Many wealthy people buy art only to give it away for the tax deductions, or they ask stylish dealers to sweep together instant, high-status collections or to find paintings to match fabric swatches. But the Menil Collection grew out of a real passion for art. Mrs. de Menil found out early in her life that she had “the Eye,” an ability to see past the commonplace, the temporal, to the ineffable quality that makes something art, that makes its creator an artist. She understood the importance of modernism long before most Americans did, and any sign of modernism in Houston today — the glass towers of the skyline, the abstract paintings in museums and galleries, the new music and dance in concert halls — is there largely because of the battle the de Menils waged to challenge and push forward the tastes of the city.
And Mrs. de Menil is as good at spotting talent in a person as she is in a painting. In a sense, the Menil Collection contains much more than art. It is full of people — devoted friends and flunkies, artists, scholars, politicians, filmmakers, architects — who are part of the vast and illustrious circle with which the de Menils have surrounded themselves. Their colony of people ranges from Philip Johnson, the best-known architect in the country, whom they helped launch and whose buildings now dominate the Houston skyline, to Congressman Mickey Leland, the highest-ranking black politician in Texas, to Laura Furman, one of the leading younger writers in Texas, who spent seven years working on de Menil projects and then wrote what many consider a roman à clef about them, to literally hundreds of others. They have had a profound effect on virtually every major cultural and educational institution in Houston — indeed, on the whole fabric of life in the city.
Mrs. de Menil also has an unusual single-mindedness. The urge to acquire is a deep, human one, but few people even dream of indulging it on the level that she has been able to — not only because of her wealth but also because she does not have to obey the physical or social bounds that restrict most people. And when you can meet anyone or have anything in the world, what, in the end, do you do with it? While the de Menils have been extremely generous with their fortune, it is said that the true collector never really wants to give anything away, and so it has been with them. Over nearly every gift they have given, they have wanted control. So they ended up collecting institutions along with everything else. The Rothko Chapel, the Rice Museum, the Media Center, the University of St. Thomas, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston have all been wooed by, wed to, or born of the de Menils — and have split with them over the issue of control.
Mrs. de Menil’s own museum is the ultimate expression of her generosity and possessiveness. For all she has given to the city of Houston, she will be remembered for what she has kept. Her collection will be made public in that it will be displayed in a museum. But it will be in her museum, run according to her wishes by her people trained in her style.
Part 1
The Eye
“What I admire, I must possess,” says Dominique de Menil, talking about how her collection came to be. “I call myself covetous. I have an enormous appetite for whatever turns me on.” As she talks, she caresses a nineteenth-century black Wedgwood inkstand, points to a striking red and mauve oil by Max Ernst, strokes the highly polished surface of an old and beautifully crafted zebrawood writing table. Her long white hair is pulled low in a bun at her neck; her clothing, of fine, soft wools and silks, is simple. At 75 years old, Mrs. de Menil is an attractive woman with startling blue eyes and delicately chiseled features. Her wedding diamonds are loose on her finger nowadays; a recent bout with pneumonia has left her looking fragile. Every once in a while a terrible cough rattles through her, and she clearly hates that sign of human frailty.
Unlike most wealthy people, she is fundamentally an intellectual, and most of the time her mind is faraway from the quotidian details of life. She is ethereal. In Houston in the fifties and sixties, she showed up at fancy art openings in the same black strapless gown time after time, wearing mismatched shoes, one green, one blue, because their mates had been abandoned in a closet in some other city. She wore her mink coat inside out because she liked the warmth of the fur against her skin. She would invite people to dinner, then greet them blankly at the door, asking, “May I help you?” and send them away with an invitation for another evening. She could be as absent-minded as she was alert, as abrupt as she was gracious, as close as she was generous. When bored, she would drop her chin to her chest and take a nap in the middle of a dinner or a concert or a lecture. “She could sleep standing up,” says one friend. “She was from another world.”
There is a portrait of the young Dominique de Menil painted by surrealist Max Ernst around 1934. The painting shows just her head, in three-quarter profile. Her short blond hair waves around her ears, her skin is pale and unlined, her eyes are focused on the distance, and an enigmatic smile plays about her small mouth. The head floats on a strange orange, red, and deep blue background, and ambiguous curled shapes hover around it; they look like edges of seashells or shards of crockery.
At the time the portrait was painted, Dominique de Menil was in her mid-twenties and newly married. She and John lived in an apartment in Paris. They were by no means art collectors; they were simply trying to decorate a large, empty wall in their dining room when a friend suggested that they ask Max Ernst to paint a mural for them. “We were told he did wonderful birds,” she recalls. “When I saw the kinds of birds this fellow did, I hated them. But since he was expecting something from us, we suggested he paint a portrait of me.”
Mrs. de Menil sat for Ernst several times in his studio and later went to see the results. “I did not like the painting at all,” she says. “I thought I looked very stiff.” She left instructions for it to be delivered; when many months passed and the portrait did not arrive, she wasn’t sorry.
Dominique De Menil was born Dominique Schlumberger in 1908 in Paris, the second of three girls. To avoid having to become citizens of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, her family had immigrated to France from their home in the border province of Alsace, where they had made a fortune in the textile industry. Her father, Conrad Schlumberger, was a physics professor at the Paris School of Mines; her uncle Marcel was a mechanical engineer.
Dominique’s father was obsessed with an invention that he worked on in every spare moment: a device that could identify minerals by their degree of resistance to electrical current and that he later refined to identify fluids, such as water and oil, by the amount of spontaneous electricity they generated. His experiments were fully launched after World War 1, when his father decided to finance them with the money he had made by selling his shares of the family textile business in Alsace. In 1927 Conrad and Marcel went into business selling the services of the measuring device to drilling companies.
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