[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. '', ''I wanted a functional museum and they wanted great architecture,'' comments Dominique. . They have sold off a good deal of it over the years, and diversified their holdings. .''. [11] Influenced by the teachings of Father Couturier and Father Congar, the de Menils developed a particular humanist ethos in which they understood art as a central part of the human experience. [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. For the marriage, Dominique converted to John's Catholicism, a move that at first shocked her clannish family. By the 1960s the de Menils had gravitated toward the major American post-war movements of abstract expressionism, pop art, and minimalism. 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. ''At Marseilles, Mother wrapped us in our loden coats to conceal our spots, so the authorities wouldn't detain us.'' 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. 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. [6], "Shaykha Fariha al Jerrahi | WISE Muslim Women Shaykha Fariha al Jerrahi", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fariha_al_Jerrahi&oldid=1096401510, This page was last edited on 4 July 2022, at 07:16. 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. Today, Dominique says, her relationship with the still-small institution is ''very friendly. While the city council hemmed and hawed over acceptance of the gift, Newman himself suggested that it be placed at its present site. They also set up a media center, an undergraduate film school whose instructors included the film directors Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni. Both pupils received new Sufi names. 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. ''I get that so much from my mother - decide what you're aiming at and strike out after it. He was my particular nemesis. It also features temporary exhibitions. ''He made us greedy,'' Dominique says, remembering that the priest once appeared for lunch with a Rouault painting under his arm. Their actions in Houston focused upon the Civil Rights Movement in particular. Their fervor spilled over into us. 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. ''What I inherited was my mother's craving. ''For instance, there was a big purple and yellow canvas by Leger, and I hated to take my friends through the hall where they could see it. [1], In addition to becoming known as collectors and patrons of art, John and Dominique de Menil were vocal champions of human rights worldwide. 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. Adelaide wished that the starkly modern house, designed by the then-Mies-disciple Philip Johnson, could be like everyone else's. (Dia, the Greek. Christophe, for example, was once chided by an East Hampton hostess for not showing up at a party. Meanwhile, grandiosity and the Schlumberger stock slide have caused the serious foundering of the Dia Foundation, established by Philippa and Heiner Friedrich, to support the ambitious projects of several hand-picked artists. Why Not Dedicate Art to King, De Menil Asks City Council., Richard, Paul. 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.'' Few philanthropists of the 20th century contributed more to the American art world than Dominique and John de Menil. ''The funny thing is, how it came out in me after my parents' collecting,'' says Philippa, a fresh-faced blonde who has her mother's unpretentious manner and good looks. Philippa de Menil (now Fariha Fatima al-Jerrahi) ominously reflected on the passing of her spiritual guide saying, "His death seemed to herald many new changes." [5] The new board began slashing at Dia contracts and real estate to get the budget under control with projects being dropped and dismantled at a fast rate. And the approaching actuality still surprises her: ''It's a long way from my early days as a young wife and mother. They helped make a black militant who hated white people into a humanitarian.'' 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. Dominique de Menil, the daughter of Conrad Schlumberger and his wife, Louise Delpech, was born in Paris on March 23, 1908. It will house the more than 10,000 objects acquired by the couple. "Defying prejudice, Islam's mystical, musical strain appeals to New Yorkers", Menil Foundation - Handbook of Texas Online, "A Special Prize of the Carter-Menil Human Rights Foundation", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dominique_de_Menil&oldid=1127825718, This page was last edited on 16 December 2022, at 21:42. So hooked were they that, ''We went crazy,'' says Dominique. I'M VERY PROUD OF them,'' Dominique says of the children, ''and gratified that they have John's and my interests. [1], She was born in 1947 into a socially committed, eclectic French Catholic family in Houston, Texas. 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. The Dan Flavin installation consists of two horizontal green fluorescent lights on the eastern and western sides of the building's exterior, two sets of diagonal white lights on the foyer walls, and a large work in the main interior space featuring pink, yellow, green, blue, and ultraviolet lights. I never really wanted to collect, but the idea of a foundation that would help artists build excited me. She studied mathematics and physics at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1927-28 . Shortly thereafter, she gave him a book of Cartier-Bresson photographs, inscribed to him by the master himself, who had been staying with her for the weekend. Schlumberger Ltd. - tHE Source of the de Menil family's fortune - was established in 1934 by Conrad Schlumberger, Dominique de Menil's father, and Marcel Schlumberger, her uncle. Called ''well logging,'' the process became the basic asset of the company, eventually proving indispensable to oil companies around the world. '', AT 78, DOMINIQUE IS A HANDSOME WOMAN OF frail, unassuming presence, whose ''spiritual'' mien and austere garb evoke the image of a medieval saint. Then you can see how a Communist lives.'' 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. 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. Dominique's way of not always paying full attention to this world has been transmitted to some of her offspring. Philippa De Menil Bio Details Full name Philippa De Menil Gender Female Age 71 (approx.) 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. 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. . 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 de Menils' involvement with blacks has not only been on the political level. ''He reminds me of my father,'' she says, ''with his strong idealism and willingness to undertake certain things that others wouldn't. For starters, in a locale where the ideal home was a formal white-pillared mansion, the de Menils got Philip Johnson to do them a sprawling, one-level house. (The two recently returned from a trek to western Tibet to take in the ruins of an 11th-century Buddhist temple.) In 1974, Fr The Fathers opted for Catholic identity, and after much soul-searching on both sides, the de Menils departed, reacquiring much of the art they had given, trading it for land purchased by them for St. Thomas's expansion. The middle child is Georges, an elegant and articulate - if slightly stuffy -scholar of 45 who more or less oversees the family's financial matters. Her second husband is. Behind that fragile, otherworldly facade is a complex person of very ambitious reach.''. Inheritance (oil) 20th-century art Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Overview Newswire RobbReport Dominique de Menil, Quoted in Browning 1983, 37. 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. 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. De Menil's largesse had created a kind of refuge from the speculative market in art then taking shape in New York, and a new canon of monumental, spiritually charged epics: a SoHo gallery floor buried, permanently, wi th black ear th; a hollowed-out volcano, transformed into a science-fictional archaeo-astronomical laboratory for perceptual flight; a Promethean bed of nails poking dangerously into the desert sky, awaiting some gargantuan penitent. '', Because Dominique saw ''collecting'' as pretentious, she was reluctant until recently to use the term. After Sheikh Nur's passing, she would take on the guidance of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order and it's circles of dervishes around the world. 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. ''It's Dominique's museum and it's important to her,'' Francois says. she subsidized a lobbying effort on their behalf. 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. There, surreal-looking dress dummies and women assistants with pins in their mouths share space with art by Cy Twombly, Yves Klein, Ralph Humphrey and John Chamberlain as well as furniture by the late Charles James, Dominique's favorite dress designer. Since its 1980 high of 87 1/8 a share, the Schlumberger stock has slipped to its present $30 or so, due in part to the sluggish oil market. [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. Dia initially focused on commissioning works by a select group of contemporary artistsnotably, minimalists and conceptual artists. 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. And Adelaide herself now has a home or two not like everyone else's, in which the art is at least as ''weird'' as that owned by her parents. ''Before that it was the old Bourbon alliance, blue-collar whites and white-collar businessmen. He did. The de Menils' Catholic faith, especially their interest in Father Yves Marie Joseph Congar's teachings on ecumenism, would become crucial to the development of their collecting ethos in the coming decades. ''You support artists by buying their work, not by making shrines to them.''. Designed by Renzo Piano, the permanent gallery echoes some of the architectural features of the Menil Collection, such as the use of diffused natural light, while retaining its own, separate identity. Before, I did things for others, and now I'm doing something for myself. Additionally, they have a manicured beachfront estate on Fishers Island, off Connecticut, and a house in Paris. 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. 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. I think they're inspired.'' John's assertiveness made itself felt even as he lay dying of cancer, when he prepared a scenario for his funeral. 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. Until very recently, Christophe also had a sizable house in East Hampton, but it burned down during Hurricane Gloria last fall. His accomplished wife, Lois, a political historian with a Ph.D. from Harvard, is writing a book on a prominent 19th-century Schlumberger ancestor, Francois Guizot, Premier of France under Louis Philippe. One of the world's largest corporations - its stock was worth nearly $10 billion at the end of 1985 - it employs some 73,000 people in more than 100 countries. The Rothko Chapel, with its sculpture, Barnett Newman's ''Broken Obelisk,'' expresses their involvement not only with art, but with politics and religion. (Spookily enough, another dwelling she had built on the same site about 20 years ago met the same end.) ''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. With the guidance of the Dominican priest Marie-Alain Couturier, who introduced the de Menils to the work of artists in galleries and museums in New York, they became interested in the intersection of modern art and spirituality. 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. Small wonder that in Houston, a city where, as a local gadfly once observed, ''it's easier to be rich than interesting,'' the de Menils are something of a legend. philippa de menilare there really purple owls. She received direct transmission from him in 1980. Raised in a code of stern Protestant morality, Dominique is quite prepared to give a million to a worthy cause, but not to spend money on such frivolities as taxis, according to Edmund (Ted) Carpenter. (An uncle, Jean Schlumberger, helped found the celebrated literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Francaise). There was a moral obligation to get involved with their involvements. The founders had . Congressman Mickey Leland, it was one of the first racially integrated art shows in the United States.[28]. She began to collect work by contemporary Americans even before her parents did, and exerted considerable influence on their acquisitions in the field. And she was surrounded by accomplished relatives. Institute of Religion Accepts Controversial Broken Obelisk.. ''', 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. With Francois and Georges, she is also making a film about her father, who carried on his venturesome art and community activities while functioning as a key executive in the development of Schlumberger Ltd. ''She is painfully shy, but generous and thoughtful,'' a friend says. ''She feels a museum is all about interior spaces. Like the other children, he realizes fully that his parents are a difficult act to follow. 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. I could have worked with Dominique.''. 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