THE COUPLE'S MOST INTENSE Houston involvement was with St. Thomas University, a small Catholic college. The work these artists made changed, or at least questioned, the nature of art: what it. Their collection was motivated by their shared interest in the many ways individuals over different cultures and eras reveal through art their understanding of what it means to be human.[7]. The city's negativism toward the piece, however, served as a goad to the active de Menil political conscience, according to Fred Hofheinz, a young white liberal who was elected Mayor of the volatile city in 1973 with heavy de Menil backing. [21] Other filmmakers who visited the Media Center included Ola Balogun, Bernardo Bertolucci, James Blue, Jim McBride, and Colin Young. Yet these holdings, together with those of the nearby Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Museum, should boost Houston's cultural status to that of a world-class center for the visual arts. The chapel, opened in 1971, is an all-faith center, a ''no man's land of God,'' Dominique says. They hated the result, and hid it away. 1974 by art dealer Heiner Friedrich and his wife, art patron Philippa de Menil. [7], The de Menils were particularly interested in modern European art, and a core strength of the collection was the many Cubist, Surrealist, and other Modernist works they acquired. Dia Art Foundation, American foundation that supports contemporary art and artists, est. The project, not universally appreciated by black scholars who tend to feel the emphasis should be placed on what blacks themselves have created, has so far published two books on the subject. An 11th-century abbey revamped during the 18th century, the chateau has perhaps 100 rooms. When their children were still young, and Schlumberger shares were worth comparatively little, John and Dominique de Menil decided they would put half of their holdings in trust funds for each of their five children. Later, attending classes at night, he got a degree from the University of Paris, adding other degrees in political science and law before taking his compulsory army service in the Rif Mountains of Morocco during some tribal wars - and falling in love for life with Africa. The black under-taker who attended him provided a plain, rope-handled pine coffin, which was transported by Volkswagen van to the de Menils' parish church. Heiner Friedrich and Fariha Friedrich (formerly Philippa de Menil), who ''It's Dominique's museum and it's important to her,'' Francois says. Dominique, who earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Paris, was the product of a cultivated family that had, in the late 19th century, built a textile fortune. As it turned out, her parents, thanks to their holdings in Schlumberger, the giant multinational oil-field services company, were en route to developing one of the world's largest private art collections, noted today for its examples of Cubism, Surrealism, African sculpture, Mediterranean antiquities and contemporary works. ''I'm really too busy to see you today,'' she announced, and vanished. I try to stay close to them, and as time goes on, we are more and more in touch.'' ''She feels a museum is all about interior spaces. On the other hand, she can be imperious. to find the word you're looking for. 1538-1576 - Anne de Barbay, fille de Guyot de Barbay et d'Anne de Frenelle. It was inescapable. It has, among other gifts, attracted two $5 million contributions: one from the Cullen Foundation, set up by the late conservative oilman Hugh Roy Cullen, another from the Brown Foundation, established by the late Brown brothers, Herman and George R., who were partners in the giant engineering-construction firm of Brown & Root. It is named for the late Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, whom the de Menils commissioned to do 14 dark, meditative paintings that are the only adornment of the octagonal building. [1] She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986. A local citizen once called John up and railed against him as a ''red'' for his support of King. Dominique, who from childhood had an impulse toward collecting, acquiring such objects as ''shells, cut-out images, exotic seeds,'' attributes her interest in art -late-blooming as it was - to her mother, who would have collected, save for her husband's disapproval. I think they're inspired.'' De Menil died in Houston on December 31, 1997. You can look up the words in the phrase individually using these links: philippa? They began to concentrate on the more established Museum of Fine Arts. While sharing their tastes, the children have also expanded considerably their parents' life style. The two met at a ball in Versailles, and were married in 1931, when Dominique was 22 and John was 27 and working in a Paris bank. Before, I did things for others, and now I'm doing something for myself. But one family member suggests that the figure ''could easily be twice that amount.'' Collectively, they have disbursed tens of millions of dollars for purchases, commissions and general support of art - contributions, to be sure, that more than occasionally have been attended by an impulse to control. I never really wanted to collect, but the idea of a foundation that would help artists build excited me. Plans to create a museum to house and exhibit John and Dominique de Menil's collection began as early as 1972 when they asked the architect Louis I. Kahn to design a museum campus on Menil Foundation property in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston near the Rothko Chapel. She is not a ''go-getter,'' she insists in her French-tinged English. But the falling price of Schlumberger stock and serious administrative problems brought big financial troubles. Soon, Rice was a beehive of arts activities. Website http://www.diaart.org Industries. Sheikha. '', ''I wanted a functional museum and they wanted great architecture,'' comments Dominique. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Following the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, the de Menils emigrated from Paris to the United States of America. [1], John and Dominique de Menil began collecting art intensively in the 1940s, beginning with a purchase of Paul Czanne's 1895 painting Montagne (Mountain) in 1945. She began to collect work by contemporary Americans even before her parents did, and exerted considerable influence on their acquisitions in the field. [1] American Sufi leader [27], The de Menils also organized exhibitions that promoted human and civil rights, including The De Luxe Show, a 1971 exhibition of contemporary art held in Houston's Fifth Ward, a historically African-American neighborhood. Philippa - called ''Phip'' by intimates - the mother of two, is probably the closest heir to her mother's ''spirituality,'' and has her good looks and unpretentious manner. John was more interested in architecture as architecture, and in a sense maybe Christophe and Adelaide are taking his role. Heiner has helped me step out into life.''. For example, use While the city council hemmed and hawed over acceptance of the gift, Newman himself suggested that it be placed at its present site. As with the de Menils' Houston home, by Texas standards the building is more than a little understated. ''John's feeling for the underdog really started in his childhood,'' says Dominique. she asked, in genuine surprise. [1] After Jermayne MacAgy's death in 1964, de Menil took over her classes and became the chairperson of the art department at the University of St. Thomas, curating several exhibitions over the next few years. As modernists, they recognized the profound formal and spiritual connections between contemporary works of art and the arts of ancient and indigenous cultures, broadening their collection to include works from classical Mediterranean and Byzantine cultures, as well as objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Pacific Northwest. (As one Texan commented, ''The de Menils have done so much good with so little money,'' pointing out that their wealth was ''really peanuts, compared to some fortunes down here.'') Plans called for Bob Dylan to sing at the service, but he was unavailable, and a tape was played of John's Dylan favorites. Dominique de Menil (ne Schlumberger; March 23, 1908 - December 31, 1997) was a French - American art collector, philanthropist, founder of the Menil Collection and an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune. Institute of Religion Accepts Controversial Broken Obelisk.. . "The de Menil Family: The Medici of Modern Art". [1], The Menil campus also includes the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. Adelaide, two years younger and known as Addie to the family, is a photographer, and travels with Ted Carpenter on a far-flung anthropological and collecting beat. Both born in Houston - their three elders were born in France - they grew up in the rebellious 60's and seem to have come to terms more uneasily than the others with the Schlumberger aura. Francois's taste in art is more of a mixed bag than Christophe's, ranging from works by Matisse, de Chirico, Picasso and Rothko to a flock of life-size fake sheep by the French artists Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne. menil? He remembers a rainy night in Paris, when he was ill with a cold but had a manuscipt to deliver to the noted anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. [1], The de Menils, however, did not limit their acquisitions to modern art, and their eclectic tastes became a hallmark of their collecting practices. She badly needed a religion.''. John and Dominique de Menil also shared an interest in photography, inviting photographers to come to Houston to document events in the city and exhibit their work. Hickey-Robertson. And Donald Judd has gone public with vociferous denunciations of the foundation, which is now but a shadow of itself. Married to Susan Silver, a Barnard graduate (their son was born in January), he collects contemporary art, furniture, craft objects of the turn-of-the-century Vienna Secessionist school and rare books on art and architecture. Expansive main-floor displays will be made up of works in the storage areas, with space set aside for the spectacular theme shows that Dominique and the museum's director, Walter Hopps, have been doing together for years. Impressed with Leland, John de Menil took him under his wing and brought the young man into his own social and artistic circles, ''sophisticating a rough diamond,'' as Leland puts it. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, they offered it to the city of Houston on condition that it be dedicated to the black leader. Heiner Friedrich is an art dealer and collector of minimal art and conceptual art. The stock decline was an element in the recent heavy retrenchment of the Dia Foundation, entirely supported by Philippa de Menil, to the tune of several million dollars a year. Actually, her children venerate Dominique almost to the point of copying her.'' WHERE THE DE MENIL MONEY COMES FROM. Says Dominique, ''The idea of the foundation was marvelous, and they've done great things. Philippa de Menil. Over the course of nearly 20 years, beginning in the late 1940's, they set up a full-fledged art and art history department, hiring -and paying for - teachers, researchers and what one of the former de-scribes as ''others with whom they have loose and flexible arrangements.'' Though designed by one of the architects of the flamboyant Pompidou Center in Paris, which wears its plumbing on its facade, it bears no resemblance to that outrageous folly. And I loathed the black-tiled floor. She received direct transmission from him in 1980. Notable exhibitions at Rice Museum organized with the help of the de Menils were "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age", curated by Pontus Hulten for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and "Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol",[17] an exhibition of objects selected by Warhol from the storage vaults of the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design. It was there that the de Menils began their institutional involvement with art. ''It gives us a strong family feeling.''. Its basis was a device that was lowered by cable into the ground to measure the electrical resistance of formations in the earth. Apr 18, 2018 1:37PM. While pressing toward the completion of the Houston museum, she finds time to head the Georges Pompidou Art and Culture Foundation in Paris; work on a long-range ethno-historical project, ''The Image of the Black in Western Art''; oversee the editing of the writings of Father Marie-Alain Couturier, the Dominican priest who introduced her and John to modern art; keep up with the activities of such de Menil projects as the Institute for the Arts at Rice University and the Rothko Chapel in Houston, and promote religious ecumenism through worldwide contacts among clergy of various persuasions. They helped make a black militant who hated white people into a humanitarian.'' They were the first Americans to influence Europeans. Ingersoll, Richard. . Hopps, a well known presence in the field of contemporary art, comes from California and made a reputation early on as director of the esteemed Pasadena Museum of Art. Dominique de Menil appears regularly in Forbes magazine's annual listing of the 400 richest people in America, with an estimated worth of ''at least'' $200 million in Schlumberger stock and art alone. Dominique and John de Menil, circa 1967. And several years ago, when they were agitating in Albany for legislation on fishing rights. .''. At the suggestion of the Houston designer Howard Barnstone, who might be called the de Menils' architect-in-residence, the houses have mostly been painted a uniform gray, so that the museum and the bungalows together have the aspect of a small, but by no means unpleasant, company town. The foundation's extravagant expenditures have necessitated a family rescue effort. ''But there were all these weird paintings hanging on the walls,'' she says. I could have worked with Dominique.''. A good part of the Menil Collection comprises objects of African and other tribal art, and the foundation began, in 1961, a long-range research project, ''The Image of the Black in Western Art.'' Ironically, planned in a time of boom for Houston, the museum will be finished in a time of bust, due to falling oil prices. They have been adventurous patrons, perhaps less concerned than many with the kudos and the cash that go with art patronage in American society. Spurred in part by the lack of a real arts community in Houston,[13] in the 1950s and 1960s the de Menils promoted modern art through exhibitions held at the Contemporary Arts Association (later the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston), such as Max Ernst's first solo exhibition in the United States, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to which they gave important gifts of art. Behind that fragile, otherworldly facade is a complex person of very ambitious reach.''. A European artist, who is a friend of Adelaide's and Ted's, remembers making an appointment through them to see Dominique on a visit to Houston. Although family members say that the decline has affected them ''minimally,'' Dominique de Menil notes, ''A lot has been eroded. In a stronghold of segregation, they not only backed civil rights and Martin Luther King, but entertained blacks at dinner. Looking back, I suppose we were too ambitious, and they felt overwhelmed.'' So serious, in fact, was the recent plight of Dia that Dominique asked her son Georges, a trustee of Philippa's inheritance, to help. ''I'm extreme and I have strong tastes,'' says Christophe, who is also an excellent though unexhibited photographer. We - my brothers and sisters and I - each have a different focus. The story goes back to the early 70's when Heiner, a European dealer, transferred his activities to New York, while retaining his interest in his Munich gallery. Says Philip Johnson, who met Dominique and John when they were ''still living in a tract house'' in Houston, ''They were unpretentious, yet arrogant enough. Hewing to the European tradition of millionaire radicals, they came to be Houston's most rewardingly subversive citizens, bringing maverick ideas to the provinces about art, politics and what to do with money. While the two had mutual feelings for art and social problems, Dominique was reticent and understated, John was ebullient, opinionated, action-oriented. She says now that she never imagined their acquisitions would someday fill a museum. [25], The de Menils had originally made plans to build the Rothko Chapel in 1964 when Dominique de Menil commissioned a suite of meditative paintings by Mark Rothko for an ecumenical chapel intended for the University of St. Thomas as a space of dialogue and reflection between faiths. I spent hours talking with John about world politics and philosophy. Inevitably, John's impulse to control brought him into conflict with other trustees, notably John Blaffer, son of a powerful Houston family. Thus, the 657,829 shares owned by Georges de Menil and his wife and children, now worth about $20 million, have shrunk in value from the $57 million they were worth at the stock's high. Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. The de Menil museum in Houston, with its big main-floor display space and a second floor for open storage of art objects, embodies her vision of a museum as a place of ''beauty and enchantment, even before it's a teaching institution, a place where things can be seen on multiple levels, with a relationship made between the objects and the way they are presented.'' He took the the couple around to galleries, singing the praises of the modernists. Though the building is not loved by some of Dominique's children, it is hoped that eventually the varied holdings of all of them will repose there, too. ''If it hadn't been for them, we wouldn't be here,'' says Father Frank H. Bredeweg, now president of the college. A new board was appointed. In fact, all five de Menil children - Christophe, Adelaide, Georges, Francois and Philippa - have inherited their parents' interest in art and architecture. Called ''well logging,'' the process became the basic asset of the company, eventually proving indispensable to oil companies around the world. Perhaps the closest of the children to her late father, who was an outspoken liberal drawn to minority causes, Adelaide has developed an interest in the lives of the ''bonackers,'' the vanishing tribe of fishermen and their families native to the eastern tip of Long Island. [8][9] De Menil credited dealer and adviser John Klejman with shaping their tastes in African and Oceanic objects, saying that he "made buying African art very tempting". Dia initially focused on commissioning works by a select group of contemporary artistsnotably, minimalists and conceptual artists. This in turn enabled the inventors to determine the location of an oil deposit. An ongoing project that seeks to catalogue and study the depiction of individuals of African descent in Western art, it is now under the aegis of Harvard University. To supple-ment the scanty family income, John dropped out of school to work in a bank. Though the collection has strengths in Mediterranean antiquities, Eurasian and European artifacts, African art, Cubism, Surrealism and contemporary American and European works, it lacks a museum ''profile.'' Adelaide wished that the starkly modern house, designed by the then-Mies-disciple Philip Johnson, could be like everyone else's. Their Georgian town house of brick and marble, while more for-mally ordered than the digs of the others, serves as a setting for high-caliber contemporary art, and is one of the Upper East Side's more elegant private dwellings. Philippa de Menil New York. And she goes on collecting - though at a much slower pace, she says, because prices have risen so high. Of the siblings, she has also undertaken the most wildly ambitious involvement with the arts, as patron of the financially troubled Dia Foundation, whose aim is to support venturesome artists' projects of a nature or scale that make it difficult to obtain other backing. In the dining room, 18 rare chairs by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffman surround a pair of tables designed by Gwathmey. In 1983, the foundation listed assets of approximately $30 million in art and real estate. [1], She was born in 1947 into a socially committed, eclectic French Catholic family in Houston, Texas. Her second husband is. De Menil, who lived in Houston until she was 12 and was raised Catholic, has been a practicing Muslim for more than 30 years, and is now known as Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, having been officially . Fariha, born Philippa de Menil, . In 1949 they commissioned the architect Philip Johnson to design their home in the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston. Dia was founded in New York City in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich, and Helen Winkler to help artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope. Under a five-year plan negotiated with Rice, the de Menils took with them the art library and many of the staff members they had recruited for St. Thomas. The building was designed by architect Francois de Menil and mimics the original Lysi chapel. de? Sweeney, the de Menils' man, was eventually dismissed, partly because he questioned the attributions of works the Blaffer family proposed to donate. ''', Dominique's craving found expression during the couple's frequent visits to New York in the 40's and 50's, where they met Father Marie-Alain Couturier, a French Dominican priest who spent the war years there. In 1980, the woman she was had become a Sufi dervish named Fariha al-Jerrahi, and when the house of Dia fell, she moved on. It is often cited as one of the most significant privately assembled art collections, alongside the Barnes Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum. When the de Menils acquired the sculpture in 1968, the year the Rev. As a result, Georges's wife Lois has been appointed to Dia's reconstituted board, and Heiner has resigned. ''It began to look more like de Menil University than St. Thomas. The Rothko Chapel, with its sculpture, Barnett Newman's ''Broken Obelisk,'' expresses their involvement not only with art, but with politics and religion. It serves the vi-sion of a place ''for people in search of peace, meditation and a more intense consciousness of our time.'' Unlike the normal superwealthy, their pursuits do not run to clubs, yachts or horseracing. (Spookily enough, another dwelling she had built on the same site about 20 years ago met the same end.) ''I went to breakfast, lunch and dinner at their house and met every important person they knew. John liked to gather the interesting, the creative and -by Houston's standards - the outrageous around him: black activists, artists, poets, renegades of every sort. She grew up, the middle sister of three, watching her physicist father, Conrad Schlumberger, struggle to perfect his invention, an electric measuring device that disclosed the location of oil deposits. Joining the bravely vanguard Contemporary Arts Association, they made their presence felt, producing a major Van Gogh show and staging exhibitions of work by Max Ernst, Joan Miro and Alexander Calder. Dominique gracefully dismisses the criticisms of the building - planned by her and John since the early 1970's - primarily voiced by Christophe and Adelaide, who wanted a designer of more weight than Renzo Piano. The building, primly sheathed in what one Houstonian calls ''Protestant gray clapboard'' (probably a first for a museum in this country), has on the ground floor exhibition spaces set in a landscaped garden. Inheritance (oil) 20th-century art Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Overview Newswire RobbReport [7] Her first husband (whom she married on May 14, 1969, in Harris County, Texas) was Italian anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi (born July 14, 1940). Carr, Annemarie Weyl, and Laurence J. Morrocco. The family was met in Havana by John, who - having joined Schlumberger in 1938 - had been in Rumania, overseeing Schlumberger operations there, as well as putting sand into the gear boxes of Rumanian trains carrying oil to Germany. The caller hung up. [35], De Menil's final project was a 1996 commission of three site-specific light installations by Minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin for Richmond Hall, a former Weingarten's grocery store in Houston. Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak's most prominent disciples and successors in North America were Tosun Bayrak, Lex Hixon, and Philippa de Menil. They actually maintained their support here for six or seven years before it began to happen.'' philippa de menilare there really purple owls. A more reticent, but still attention-getting, project is Adelaide's 40-acre housing complex, set in a former potato field not far from Francois's establishment. For several artists besides Judd, houses with studio or living arrangements were provided along with annual stipends, and museums were set up for the work of others. Fariha Fatima al-Jerrahi (born Philippa de Menil; 13 June 1947) is the spiritual guide and current Sheikha of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order in New York City. Collector-watchers point out, however, that - starting later and with less money - the de Menils have not yet managed to give us the equivalent of the Cloisters, the Museum of Modern art and Colonial Williamsburg. John's assertiveness made itself felt even as he lay dying of cancer, when he prepared a scenario for his funeral. Philippa and her husband Heiner have made over a former apartment building into a townhouse. Each is not only glamorously housed in Manhattan, most of them on the Upper East Side, but also has one or two lavish residences elsewhere -Paris, Texas, the Hamptons. He remembers admiring a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson at Adelaide's house. The minute the cops arrive, they form ranks. ''Each branch of the Schlumberger clan has a wing,'' Christophe explains. ''You support artists by buying their work, not by making shrines to them.''. De Maria had traveled to Santa Barbara for his mother's 100th birthday in early June; however, he went on to . In 1930 she met the banker Jean de Mnil (who later anglicized his name to John de Menil), and they were married the next year. Playing savior to old buildings in the area, she and Ted Carpenter have rescued 15 of them and restored most, with the aid of the Houston architect, Howard Barnstone, a longtime family friend. The reunited family went to Houston, then the American headquarters for the company. ''Ted really started it - he saved an old house that was going to be demolished, and so we bought the land,'' she says. His interest in architecture, he says, comes from his father and from working with Charles Gwathmey, who designed his East Hampton house. The big, Orientally carpeted chambers, including a prayer room, are accented by Dan Flavin's sculptures of fluorescent light, among other works, and on one wall hangs a portrait of the Friedrichs' late Sufi guru, Sheik Muzaffer Ozak. [2], Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi leads devotional prayers, ceremonies of divine remembrance, and provides spiritual guidance to initiates from her seat at the Dergah al-Farah in downtown Manhattan. [18] The de Menils supported Rice University astrophysics professor Donald D. Clayton for a two-week residence in Rome in JuneJuly 1970 for daily work with Rossellini,[19][20] conceiving a film about cosmology that did not advance to filming but that was published in 1975 as a personal memoir of a life discovering the universe. Schlumberger, Dominique. But Heiner lives in a dream. [26] It was established as an autonomous organization the next year and began hosting colloquia, beginning with "Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action," which brought together religious leaders, scholars, and musicians from four continents. ''She had a passion for art, and in later years she did buy it, but she gave it to her grandchildren - small things, a little Klee, a little Picasso, a little Rouault,'' says Dominique. Today, while Dominique still administers the Institute for the Arts, and contributes to such programs as fellowships for graduate students in art history, the de Menil presence there has shrunk considerably. But when the artist arrived, she appeared for a moment only. And when John died in 1973, he left his estate in part to Dominique and in part to the Menil Foundation, set up in 1954 to support ecumenism, education, the arts and minority causes. There are some who think they're crazy. ALTHOUGH DOMI-nique's children function in somewhat lower gear, they also have made ambitious forays into - and even careers in - the arts. Most of the land and houses within a six-block radius, quietly assembled by John, are under de Menil ownership. John shot from the hip. They had a foreign accent, and political views that for Texas were extremely liberal. They have four children, and collect modern and contemporary abstract art, including works by David Smith, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski. Easily the most spectacular residence is Francois's, built a few years ago on seven acres of expensive East Hampton beachfront as a vacation retreat from his handsome Manhattan apartment. One of the first International Style residences in Texas, it generated controversy not only by standing out amongst the mansions of River Oaks but also by pairing Johnson's clean, modernist lines with a bold color palette and eclectic interior design by Charles James. . '' & # x27 ; re looking for, they form ranks sisters and I - each a! A strong family feeling. '' otherworldly facade is a complex person of very ambitious reach ''. Scanty family income, John dropped out of school to work in a sense maybe and. 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