Photo by Michael Schmelling Explains William Camfield, whom the de Menils brought over as professor of art history from St. Thomas, ''At Rice, the de Menils said, 'Let's see if it works and if you like it. This in turn enabled the inventors to determine the location of an oil deposit. Helped by Citizens for Good Schools, a progressive organization supported by de Menil money, Everett won his seat, along with the other three candidates supported by the citizens group. And early last year, facing an inquiry by the New York State Attorney General into its management practices - with a debt of more than $6 million, a projected budget of $5 million, but no visible source of income - Dia began to pull in its horns. Someone recommended a Surrealist painter named Max Ernst to decorate a wall of their apartment; disliking his proposal, the newlyweds commissioned from him instead a portrait of Dominique. The caller hung up. '', ''I wanted a functional museum and they wanted great architecture,'' comments Dominique. The founders of the Dia Art Foundation have filed suit to stop the foundation from selling artworks in Dia's collection. Now it's a coalition of businessmen and minorities who run the city.''. 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. They gave major gifts of art to the school, bought land to expand the campus and hired Philip Johnson to design new buildings. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Then you can see how a Communist lives.'' Articles in Zest section The Menil Opens.. Dominique, who was courted by other cities, says that the museum is in Houston because ''I was so encouraged here.'' Their actions in Houston focused upon the Civil Rights Movement in particular. ''Dominque said, 'I'll take it,' and she bundled herself in a tacky fur coat and went trudging through the rain, arriving at Levi-Strauss's looking like a drowned rat. she asked, in genuine surprise. ''The things I've collected resemble the sort of works my parents acquired, but maybe less broad in range and less expensive,'' he says, pointing out, on a hall wall, a favorite Braque painting of his father's given him by Dominique. [14] They were instrumental in the Contemporary Arts Association's decision to hire Jermayne MacAgy as its director; she curated several groundbreaking exhibitions, including "The Sphere of Mondrian" and "Totems Not Taboo: An Exhibition of Primitive Art. During an earlier school board election, the de Menils helped launch the political career of Mickey Leland, a young black militant from Houston's grubby Fifth Ward, who is now serving his fourth term in the United States Congress. 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. GROWING UP IN HOUSTON, ADELAIDE DE MENIL was embarrassed to bring her friends to the art-filled home of her parents, Dominique and John de Menil. It will house the more than 10,000 objects acquired by the couple. Seven years later, John joined Schlumberger Ltd. Their backgrounds were very different. But as a friend notes, ''She is maybe not so much a collector as a catalyst who makes things happen.'' After a substantial inheritance from their Schlumberger grandmother, nothing more would be forthcoming, the children were given to understand. On the other hand, she can be imperious. Believing in art education and - though committed Catholics -religious ecumenism, they saw in St. Thomas, run by the Basilian Fathers, a chance to further the school and their causes. Also on display in Richmond Hall are four examples of Flavin's "monuments" to V. Tatlin, created between 1964 and 1969.[1][36]. Expanding. Carr, Annemarie Weyl, and Laurence J. Morrocco. 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. Soon, Rice was a beehive of arts activities. They helped make a black militant who hated white people into a humanitarian.'' The Barnett Newman ''Broken Obelisk,'' made of Cor-Ten steel, stands 26 feet high in a reflecting pool that faces the chapel's entrance. 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. 2003), the world's largest contemporary art museum, located in Beacon, N.Y. A converted factory, it contains unusually large unbroken spaces, ideal for exhibiting the frequently monumental and often minimalist (see minimalism) art and large-scale installations Dia favors. But we are definitely a collection of people very much influenced by John and Dominique. philippa de menilare there really purple owls. They ultimately amassed more than 17,000 paintings, sculptures, decorative objects, prints, drawings, photographs, and rare books. Friedrich and his then wife Philippa de Menil, together with Helen Winkler, established the Dia Art Foundation in 1973. They have been adventurous patrons, perhaps less concerned than many with the kudos and the cash that go with art patronage in American society. ''I'm really too busy to see you today,'' she announced, and vanished. Woe Follows the Obelisk., Hobdy, D. J. Friedrich has exhibited works by Blinky Palermo, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, La Monte Young, Andy Warhol, Michael Heizer, and Joseph Beuys, among others in his galleries in Germany, but became less interested in short term gallery installations and through Dia began to collect, and support majo 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. Schlumberger, Dominique. The founders of the Dia Art Foundation have filed suit to stop the foundation from selling artworks in Dia's collection. [8] Over the years the family enjoyed close personal friendships with many of the artists whose work they collected, including Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Ren Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Tanning, and Andy Warhol. 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. A former film maker, short-time magazine publisher, pilot and hell-raiser who never finished college, Fran,cois - who has his father's baby face - is now a hard-working architectural student at The Cooper Union. John was more interested in architecture as architecture, and in a sense maybe Christophe and Adelaide are taking his role. Heiner's Wagnerian ambitions to serve as impresario for artists with grand-scale visions appealed to her. ''I get that so much from my mother - decide what you're aiming at and strike out after it. At one of them he met and influenced Philippa de Menil, a member of a famous Franco-American family of art patrons, and her German-born husband. [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. It was inescapable. Byzantine Fresco Chapel, Passionate Voices: Unveiling of Love, The [lecture by Fariha de Menil Friedrich], 2007-03-24, 2007-08-07, Eine multikulturelle Familie macht Kulturpolitik, 1997-10-02, Magnificent milestone: The Menil turns 20, 2007-06-03, Menils Everyday People captures human detail, 2007-04-12. The de Menils often personally recruited faculty members for the departments and brought many renowned artists and art historians to Houston, including Marcel Duchamp, Roberto Matta, and James Johnson Sweeney, whom they convinced to serve as museum director for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 1961 to 1967. 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.'' The bulk of the vast collection - reportedly worth between $150 milllion and $175 million - will be kept on the second floor in open storage, visible to anyone who wants to see it. Looking back, I suppose we were too ambitious, and they felt overwhelmed.'' The founders had . [3] She studied physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne and developed an interest in filmmaking, which took her to Berlin to serve as script assistant on the Josef von Sternberg production of The Blue Angel. Description Art and Activism surveys John and Dominique de Menil's projects in art, architecture, and civil and human rights, initiatives that deeply affected the city of Houston and often national and even international communities. And I loathed the black-tiled floor. The gray clapboard of the museum is in keeping with the small, traditional timber-frame homes -some used as foundation offices, others rented to friends, associates and various locals - that surround it. Schlumberger is still the global leader in well logging, and has expanded over the years into the manufacture of electric and gas meters, transformers, microcircuits, instruments and test systems for aerospace and other industries. 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. Dia Art Foundation, American foundation that supports contemporary art and artists, est. [1] They commissioned Henri Cartier-Bresson to photograph the 1957 American Federation of Arts convention, held in Houston that year, and worked with photographers such as Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, who went on to establish FotoFest, and Geoff Winningham, who served as head of the photography department at Rice Media Center. Their fervor spilled over into us. 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. While the de Menils' collecting and museum-building activities have been enthusiastically compared to those of the great Medici patrons, perhaps a more apt contemporary analogy is with the Rockefeller clan, which entered the art field in the early part of this century. And there is no question that Houston's cultural establishment takes the new museum quite seriously. As a result, Georges's wife Lois has been appointed to Dia's reconstituted board, and Heiner has resigned. At the age of 29, she met her mentor and guide on the path of Sufism upon his first visit to the Americas, Sheikh Muzaffer zak k al-Jerrahi of Istanbul. ''I went to breakfast, lunch and dinner at their house and met every important person they knew. 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. [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. In 1974, the two formed the Dia Foundation - the name is Greek for catalyst - subsidized solely by Philippa's shares in Schlumberger Ltd. Dia soon became one of the largest and most venturesome nonprofit funding sources in the field of contemporary art, buying up the works of certain artists -more than 125 of John Chamberlain's sculptures of crushed auto parts, for example - and sponsoring projects that range from Walter de Maria's permanent ''earth sculpture,'' comprising 280,000 pounds of dirt that fill a gallery in a SoHo building, to the vast ''Art Museum of the Pecos,'' in Marfa, Tex., a compound of more than 340 acres which has deployed an array of indoor and outdoor works by Donald Judd and other artists. She recently bought another place near Sag Harbor, and in Manhattan she has a splendid three-story former carriage house with a swimming pool on the ground floor, redone with help from the Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry and the ''light sculptor'' Douglas Wheeler. 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. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. [1] Contents 1 Biography 2 See also 3 References 4 External links Biography [ edit] She was born in 1947 into a socially committed, eclectic French Catholic family in Houston, Texas. Rites were performed not only by a Catholic prelate, but a black Baptist minister, a rabbi, and a Buddhist priest. ''It's absolutely crazy what they did,'' says one New York dealer. [32], Dedicated on June 7, 1987, the Menil Collection exhibits objects from John and Dominique de Menil's collection, including selections of African Art, a vast collection of Surrealist pieces, and the work of a number of contemporary American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, and Mark Rothko. In an effort to provide a strong art history curriculum in Houston for students and adults, they founded the art department at the University of St. Thomas in 1959, inviting Jermayne MacAgy to teach courses and curate exhibitions held at Jones Hall. The reunited family went to Houston, then the American headquarters for the company. (An uncle, Jean Schlumberger, helped found the celebrated literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Francaise). de? I think they're inspired.'' [1] American Sufi leader Naturally, the artists involved - two of whom, Robert Whitman and La Monte Young, lost elaborate performance and living quarters - were hugely disappointed. In fact, its long, low bulk looks more like, say, the suburban branch of an elegant department store. 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.'' Until very recently, Christophe also had a sizable house in East Hampton, but it burned down during Hurricane Gloria last fall. After moving to Houston, the de Menils quickly became key figures in the city's developing cultural life as advocates of modern art and architecture. "Les divers procds du film parlant". Actually, her children venerate Dominique almost to the point of copying her.'' 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. 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. The family has done everything as dedicated amateurs, but they helped the right people at the right time. You can look up the words in the phrase individually using these links: philippa? Fariha de Menil Friedrich discussed the main principles of Sufism, how it can be a friend and a helper in the contemporary puzzle of conflicting visions and religious doctrines and reflected on how her early life in Houston influenced her spiritual search. [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. ''Mother lives at two levels,'' says Georges. Millionaires are different from us, as everyone knows, but as a clan the de Menils are different even from their fellow millionaires, most noticeably in the unconventional ways in which they spend their money. When de Menil learned that a group of 13th-century Byzantine frescoes had been stolen from a chapel in Lysi, Cyprus, and cut up by smugglers, she paid the ransom and funded their restoration. Her second husband is. 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. Fariha Friedrichwhich is the name Philippa de Menil assumed after she and Heiner Friedrich embraced Sufi Islam and married in 1979was talking about the beginning of their foundation. 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. Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. The couple also has a house in Bridgehampton, L.I., and a 60-square-mile holding in Texas, known as Mesquite Ranch, that is being restored, possibly for use as a retreat or conference center. What they do should be balanced against what's possible.''. They maintained residences in New York and France but settled in Houston, where John would eventually become president of Schlumberger Overseas (Middle and Far East) and Schlumberger Surenco (Latin America), two branches of the Houston-based oilfield services corporation. Dominique's way of not always paying full attention to this world has been transmitted to some of her offspring. The children and their mother also occasionally drop in on Val-Richer, the vast estate in Normandy passed down by Schlumberger ancestors. The Menil Collection's discreet, low-key architecture befits its site in Montrose, a modest, socially mixed residential area of Houston. Eventually - despite their contributions of time and art - their ambitious projects brought them into conflict with budget-minded trustees. John's assertiveness made itself felt even as he lay dying of cancer, when he prepared a scenario for his funeral. [1], She was born in 1947 into a socially committed, eclectic French Catholic family in Houston, Texas. ''When they didn't control things, they stepped aside,'' says Philippe de Montebello, now director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who took the job in Houston after Sweeney. 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. 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. After his death, he lay in state, wrapped in a sheet in his own bed. [5] (Brought up a Protestant, she converted to Catholicism to marry John.) As a trustee there, John was responsible in 1961 for bringing in as director the distinguished but controversial James Johnson Sweeney, former director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She has now turned her East Side carriage house into a fashion atelier. 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 . The Fathers, too, can now see both sides. 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. The building was designed by architect Francois de Menil and mimics the original Lysi chapel. . [33], The nearby Cy Twombly Gallery, opened in 1995, houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Both pupils received new Sufi names. 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. An informal art historian and teacher, Dominique has also organized some remarkable exhibitions, innovatively installed. 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. The issue was really the kind of institution St. Thomas was to be - would it maintain its Catholic identity or would it become a secular college? His interest in architecture, he says, comes from his father and from working with Charles Gwathmey, who designed his East Hampton house. ''I'm extreme and I have strong tastes,'' says Christophe, who is also an excellent though unexhibited photographer. 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. 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.'' The rest of John's and Dominique's estates would go to their own causes. battle of omdurman order of battle. They actually maintained their support here for six or seven years before it began to happen.'' (To help finance this expensive venture, she sold a number of important paintings last year at Sotheby-Parke Bernet, realizing more than $2 million. v t e 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. (For their honeymoon, he took Dominique on a bus trip through Morocco.) 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.