January 1997
Whose Art Is It, Anyway?
In February two stolen frescoes paid for and restored by Dominique de Menil will be unveiled in a new Eastern Orthodox chapel in Houston. The issue of whether they belong in Texas is controversial—but the story of how they ended up here is downright Byzantine.
ON A HOT JUNE DAY THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, Dominique de Menil flew to Munich to meet a Turkish businessman named Aydin Dikmen who wanted to sell her two Byzantine frescoes. Mrs. de Menil was a charming and elegant woman with a large fortune and social connections that stretched around the globe; Dikmen had a sketchy background, was neither charming nor elegant, and would later figure in a scandalous trial that would capture the attention of the art world. But Mrs. de Menil didn’t know anything about Dikmen at the time, and that afternoon, she and several of her associates piled into two Mercedes that he had arranged for and set off to look at the frescoes. Based on photographs that she had been shown, Mrs. de Menil anticipated that the Turkish businessman was going to show her work of unusually fine quality.
Dikmen led the caravan from the center of Munich to a shabby working-class neighborhood on the edge of the city. The members of Mrs. de Menil’s party were nonplussed by this, as they had expected a more fashionable destination, but Dikmen explained that he was using an address in the neighborhood as a cheap place to store the frescoes temporarily. He then led Mrs. de Menil and the others up a flight of stairs and into an apartment where they encountered an extraordinary scene: The only illumination in the place came from two candles (Dikmen explained that the apartment had no electricity), and by their dim light, the group could make out two segments of plaster, propped against a wall. One featured the image of an angel, and the other depicted John the Baptist. The priceless frescoes had been crudely broken into several dozen pieces—the rest of them were packed in a huge crate. Mrs. de Menil was sickened by what she saw. “The pieces were too much chopped up to derive any impression of beauty,” she said recently. “It was like a miserable human being that has to be brought to the hospital.”
And so she decided to rescue the frescoes. Over the last decade, Mrs. de Menil has subsidized a painstaking restoration of the works, and she commissioned her son, Francois, who is a 51-year-old architect, to design a chapel in Houston to house them. When the Byzantine Fresco Chapel opens to the public in February, she will unveil what is perhaps the most significant example of Byzantine art to be found in this country.
But she doesn’t legally own it. In the months that followed her strange trip to Munich, Mrs. de Menil learned that Dikmen had lied to her about the origin of the frescoes—and that in fact they had been stolen. When she decided to buy them anyway, the issue of where they belonged became a dilemma. Because of the care she has lavished on the frescoes, many people in the art world view Mrs. de Menil as the savior of the works and see no harm in her wish that they remain in Houston. In culturally sensitive times such as these, however, the purchase of another country’s stolen patrimony is a touchy issue, and she has been subjected to an uncomfortable degree of scrutiny from people who believe that the art should be returned to its homeland. Mrs. de Menil, who took care not to break any laws by acquiring the works, deeply resents any criticism of her actions. When asked why she felt it was important that the frescoes remain in Houston, she said, “The Byzantine tradition is a great tradition. You cannot see such an important example of the Byzantine tradition in America or in most parts of Europe.” But while the other parties with a claim to the frescoes have gone along with her wishes for the time being, the question remains: When the moment comes to settle the frescoes’ fate permanently, will everyone agree that Francois’ chapel is their rightful home?
THE UTTER INCONGRUITY OF THAT AFTERNOON IN MUNICH—OF someone like Dominique de Menil meeting with a fly- by-night character in such a seedy setting—was driven home to me when I visited her at her airy, modern house near Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood in October. Mrs. de Menil is 88 years old, white-haired and fragile, but age has not diminished her strength of character. When we met, she was dressed in a cream silk blouse, black cardigan, checked wool pants, and brown leather sandals with socks, and she eased herself gingerly into one of the chairs in her living room.
Mrs. de Menil was born in Paris into the Schlumberger family, which had built a fortune in the textile business; in the twenties her father, Conrad Schlumberger, invented a tool that tested the contents of newly drilled oil wells, leading the family to amass an even greater fortune. As a child, she collected stamps, matchboxes, and fossils; later on, with her husband, Jean de Menil, a Parisian banker who eventually became an executive with the Schlumberger companies, she began collecting art.
First the couple collected modern art, then they got into African artifacts, and then objects from other parts of the world. “I’m interested in everything,” she told me. “I was born curious.” Most of the art Mrs. de Menil owns (her husband died in 1973) is now housed in the Menil Collection, a stark, minimalist gray building on Sul Ross Street that was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. The museum is small, but the work it contains is of international stature.
Although her family was Protestant, Mrs. de Menil converted to Catholicism after her marriage, and eventually she became absorbed in the art of the Eastern Orthodox church of Byzantium. With her purchase—through a London art dealer named Yanni Petsopoulos—of the private collection of a British real estate dealer named Eric Bradley in the early eighties, she became the owner of one of the finest collections of Byzantine art in this country. Highlights of her Byzantine holdings are displayed to the public on the ground floor of the Menil Collection, but the bulk of them is kept upstairs in a locked room, where rows and rows of som-ber Greek Orthodox icons and colorful Russian Ortho-dox icons stand on shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling.
The antiquities trade is a shady business in which articles frequently pass through the hands of disreputable middlemen before they wind up in the hands of reputable dealers, and once Mrs. de Menil got into the market for ancient art, it was inevitable that she would be presented with an artifact of questionable provenance. In the spring of 1983, Bertrand Davezac, the curator of antiquities at the Menil Collection, heard that Yanni Petsopoulos had a client who was looking to sell a Byzantine artifact of major significance. Aside from icons, which are commonly found on the market, other Byzantine works are typically part of the architecture of buildings—they are often mosaics or frescoes—and because they are fixed in place, they rarely come up for sale. Davezac was going to Europe in June anyway—he was scheduled to join Mrs. de Menil in Paris to help her take a group of Houston collectors on a museum tour—and it would be easy to include a stop in London. But when Davezac arrived at Petsopoulos’ offices and inquired about the major work that was supposed to be for sale, Petsopoulos did not know what he was talking about. The dealer pointed to an icon of John the Baptist that was hanging on the wall behind him. “You mean this?” he asked.
“Well, that is very beautiful,” Davezac said, “but my understanding was that you had something very out of the ordinary, an object of some kind for which you thought the ideal place would be the Menil Collection.”
“Oh, yes,” said Petsopoulos. “The frescoes that a Turkish collector owns.” The following day, Davezac arrived in Paris with photographs of the Byzantine frescoes that Petsopoulos had passed along. They showed the interior of a tiny medieval church. Painted across its dome was a Byzantine figure of Christ known as a Pantokrator (the ruler of all things) and a ring of angels and saints; painted across its apse was a depiction of the Virgin Mary flanked by two archangels. The photographs were poor, and the frescoes looked as if they had deteriorated with age, but when Davezac showed them to Mrs. de Menil, she was struck by the power of the work. “Fresco is a very difficult art,” she told me. “You paint on fresh plaster, and you have to go fast. So I could see from the photographs that we were dealing with a master. The swing of the drapery, the way the fingers were made, all denoted a master.”
Nothing in Mrs. de Menil’s Byzantine collection approached the significance of the two frescoes, and she immediately arranged to see the objects themselves. They were in Munich, where Aydin Dikmen was living at the time, and Mrs. de Menil and Davezac arrived in the German city the next morning, where they rendezvoused with Walter Hopps, the director of the Menil Collection, and Elsian Cozens, Mrs. de Menil’s longtime assistant. That afternoon, the de Menil contingent met Yanni Petsopoulos in a downtown hotel, where he introduced them to Dikmen, who appeared nervous, as well as to an associate of the Turkish businessman’s whose name nobody can recall. “I expected perhaps to meet a gentleman, probably a classy individual, and then be taken to his house, where he would show us a beautifully displayed piece of Byzantine art,” Davezac told me. “That was extraordinarily naive of me. When we saw those two characters, my heart sank. They looked so seedy. We knew we weren’t dealing with decent people.”
Nobody in the de Menil party spoke any Turkish or German, the only other language that Dikmen knew, so the afternoon’s conversation took place in a cumbersome, convoluted fashion, with Dikmen’s acolyte translating from Turkish into Greek, and Yanni Petsopoulos translating from Greek into English. In this roundabout manner, Dikmen informed the de Menil group that he was in the ship-scrapping business but dealt in antiquities on the side. He also told them that he had found the frescoes when he dug up a little basilica while excavating the site of a new spa in southern Turkey—a story that struck his listeners as improbable.
Although Dikmen presented the de Menil party with an official export permit from the Turkish authorities to back up his claim, they suspected that it was not legitimate. Beyond that, the damage that had been done to the frescoes, the poor light in which they were being shown, and the centuries of dirt and soot that obscured the images rendered the objects far less impressive than Mrs. de Menil had imagined they would be. But at Davezac’s urging, she agreed to pay Dikmen some earnest money (the de Menils won’t say how much) to secure the right to buy the frescoes at some point in the future and arranged to have them sent to London, where experts working for the Menil Collection could inspect them more thoroughly. If the experts were satisfied with their quality, Mrs. de Menil agreed, the Menil Foundation would pay an established sum of money into an escrow account in Switzerland. Again, the de Menils declined to specify the amount.
