A Challenge of Spirit

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Frick Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Phillips Collection, the Norton Simon Museum. In the public consciousness, the passage of time has all but obliterated the particular personalities, passions and biases of the art-loving patrons whose names these museums carry, leaving behind institutions whose characters are now determined by bureaucratic teams of senior staff and boards of trustees.

But in this city, the spirit of Dominique de Menil, the strong-willed collector and founder of the art museum and foundation named for her family, is still palpable eight months after her death, of pneumonia, at age 89. She even is still spoken of in the present tense by some of the staff at the Menil Collection, the modest two-story gray wooden building that displays, in various configurations, portions of the 15,000 objects Dominique and her husband, John de Menil (who died in 1973), collected over six decades--from tribal arts and antiquities to Surrealist works by the likes of Max Ernst, Man Ray and Rene Magritte, to 20th century masters like Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg, to pieces by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Dominique de Menil’s personality is present, too, in the hushed and contemplative ambience of the cool, spacious galleries. On a recent visit, the almost eerie silence was interrupted only by the footsteps or cough of the occasional visitor, leaving one in an intimate relationship with the art and free to focus on what was De Menil’s collecting mantra: that the highest aspirations of humankind be represented through art. For Dominique de Menil, art represented a spiritual bridge for understanding man’s place in the universe. That link is even more explicit in the satellite buildings she commissioned surrounding the museum: the somber Rothko Chapel, which holds 14 of the late artist’s large, dark, brooding paintings; the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, which features precious frescoes ransomed from thieves; and the Cy Twombley Gallery of tough works from one of contemporary art’s most controversial masters.

But, as lofty as this legacy might be, those who worked closely with her say it is her less placid side that they will miss the most about the French-born Schlumberger oil heiress who emigrated with her husband, when he came to Houston in the 1940s to lead the family company.

“We argued about everything,” says Paul Winkler, the current director of the museum, whom Dominique De Menil brought to Houston in 1980 along with Walter Hopps (the onetime controversial director of the Pasadena Museum of Fine Art) and curator Bertrand Davezac--to join her in creating the Menil Collection.

“Dominique was this strong, passionate person, with an exquisite eye for art, full of extraordinary information and wonderfully strong-fisted. She listened to all your opinions, made you defend them, and then was not afraid to make the hard and tough decisions herself.”

Indeed, the death of Dominique de Menil last New Year’s Eve, and the loss of her ability to engender projects--which she made come to fruition through her vision, her generous pocketbook and her unique sense of spontaneity--presents some new and formidable challenges for the staff and trustees who must now move the museum into the 21st century without her.

“The Menil Collection always had this free spirit about it, that made it different from all other museums,” says Peter Marzio, director of Houston’s nearby Museum of Fine Arts, an encyclopedic institution. “Because they were unencumbered with a lot of bureaucracy and administration, they were able to put the highest premium on originality.

“While you have enormously talented people there like Walter [Hopps] and Paul [Winkler], Dominique was the captain of the ship, the radar that took the [museum] there. Now, with her gone, for better or worse, there will have to be a more ‘normal governance system’ put into place, budgetary accounting and management mechanisms and structures. How do you do that without losing the freshness and stimulating shimmer that she brought to it?”

While “Mrs. D.,” as she is often called in Houston, was actively involved in the collection until the very end of her life, Winkler says the transition to a new generation had actually been under discussion for the past three years and has been made smoother by the fact that those involved in the talks are all people who, like him, had been intimately connected with the De Menil family and their collection for many years. With little concern about hierarchy, Winkler says, the team has always worked together in a way that avoided turf wars.

“We discussed many times that it would be terrible if the museum were ever frozen in concrete--Dominique would hate it, John always loved the new, so let’s push forward,” says the tall, imposing Texas-born director who succeeded Hopps in the top administrative position seven years ago. (Hopps remains as a consulting curator along with Davezac and Susan Davidson.)

Winkler’s small, unassuming office is in one of the many gray bungalows surrounding the museum in the quiet Montrose neighborhood where the De Menils carved out a duchy of real estate in the 1960s. The four-block enclave offers shelter not only for the collection and administrative offices, but also provides below-market housing to Houstonians from all socioeconomic strata, a social experiment launched by the politically liberal couple. Adds Winkler, “Our key now is to preserve the sensibility of the core work that was done [by the De Menils] and continue to grow, and I just don’t see it as that difficult of a task because we were all a part of it early on.”

The De Menil sensibility began to form in 1934, when Jean (he would later Americanize his name to John) and Dominique, then newly married and living in Paris, paid a visit to the studio of Max Ernst. Their interest in art accelerated in the 1940s when Jean came back to Houston from a business trip with a small Cezanne. After moving to Houston, they helped import a coterie of arts experts and surrounded themselves with connoisseurs. Under the tutelage of such art experts as dealer Alexander Iolas, scholar Jermayne MacAgy and James Johnson Sweeney, a former director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as well as Hopps, the De Menils eventually became a powerful force in bringing sharp, aggressively challenging art to Houston. Their range was broad, but it had focus: primarily Surrealism; focused areas of contemporary painting and sculpture; ethnographic art, from Paleolithic to post-Classical; Byzantine and medieval art; and the art of tribal cultures of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas.

In the ‘40s, Houston was a sleepy backwater town, and its leading citizens were mystified by the Modernist home the couple built, designed by architect Philip Johnson, as well as by their strange collection of guests, which included such artists as Larry Rivers, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, and filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini. (Dominique de Menil further stunned the doyennes of her upscale River Oaks neighborhood by her complete indifference to fashion--she appeared frequently in the same simple black cocktail dress and mismatched pair of shoes.) But by the time her radically understated museum opened in 1987, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, Houstonians had become accustomed to the shock of the new in art, largely due to the De Menils’ trailblazing efforts. These had included launching adventurous, generous art programs--not always entirely appreciated--first at the University of St. Thomas, a small Catholic institution near the museum, and then at Rice University, where Dominique de Menil herself would organize shows.

“They [the De Menils] brought a level of understanding of contemporary art unlike anything we had ever seen in Houston, with their lectures and intellectually stimulating exhibitions,” says Louisa Sarofim, the Houston-born socialite whom Dominique de Menil handpicked as her successor as president of the Menil Foundation board. “They raised the consciousness of the importance of art in one’s life. It wasn’t a luxury, an extra; it really belonged.”

Indeed, the Menil Collection--which is open Wednesday through Sunday--is free to the public and offers no tour guides or docents, though staff has been known to freely answer questions from any visitors or school groups. Says Winkler, “The De Menils had a sensibility that a real work of art confronts you, puts you on the spot, makes you respond. We still really believe that the art is always there to speak first, which is counter to a lot of what has been happening in the art world in the last 15 years, this whole didactic approach. So what we’re looking to do is preserve and then to expand on the possibilities of these experiences for the visitor.”

Winkler says that a “semi-moratorium” has been declared on new acquisitions while the trustees and staff regroup and take stock of the museum’s financial status. It’s in fairly good shape by all reports. The major beneficiary of De Menil’s will is the Menil Foundation, the funding arm of the museum as well as such other social and intellectual activities such as the Artist Documentation Project, an archival repository, and artist Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses, started with seed money from the foundation. Lowe has helped renovate an inner-city Houston neighborhood into sites for rotating installations, and helped create a community and day-care center where local residents can learn new skills.

Winkler estimates that the foundation’s endowment should stand at approximately $170 million in the near future.

There are no specific plans yet, says Winkler, as to how these funds are likely to be disbursed. Staff and the foundation board generally agree that some parts of the collection need to be upgraded in terms of quality, as well as to provide the public with a more comprehensive overview of the artists already a part of the collection. “We will never be encyclopedic,” he says, “but we’re concentrating on certain artists’ holdings from mid-century forward, working on a room of Rauschenbergs, a room of Johnses, so that when you come, you have a fuller understanding of what an artist is trying to do, rather than just a sense of a certain period of his work.”

Those “rooms,” to some extent, parallel the balkanization of the collection outside the museum. In October, Richmond Hall, an exhibition annex two blocks south of the Menil Collection, will open as an installation site. Once a grocery store, the space will become the permanent home of a light installation by Minimalist Dan Flavin, the last work completed by the sculptor before his death in 1996 and, coincidentally, the last piece to be commissioned by Dominique de Menil.

The museum is also planning to explore the interrelationships between Flavin and the late Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd in an exhibition curated by Marianne Stockebrand, director of the Chinati Foundation, which Judd established in remote Marfa, Texas, with the help of De Menil’s daughter Philippa, initially as part of Dia Foundation. Another exhibition in the works is one exploring relationships between the work of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, curated by Hopps.

While Winkler says that the museum is looking at other “potential long-term near-permanent installations” in the neighborhood, with such artists as James Turrell and Doug Wheeler, he warns that an over-saturation of such satellites could make such a “village of art” somewhat questionable.

Winkler is reluctant to say how, if at all, the collection is likely to move into areas that the De Menils eschewed, such as German Expressionism or work by women artists. (Given her own immense drive and ambition, Dominique de Menil oddly disparaged the contribution of women to the history of art.) Winkler says it would be “disingenuous” of the museum to collect German Expressionists or Kandinsky because the De Menils never showed any interest in their work, but he would like to see such artists as Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse represented in the collection.

Another way of expanding the collection, suggests Winkler, would be through donations from board members. Among the power brokers on the 12-member board are three of the younger De Menil generation, all of whom are collectors themselves. Christophe, a fashion designer, prefers American contemporary art; Adelaide, a photographer, and her husband Ted Carpenter, an anthropologist, got her parents interested in tribal art; and Francois, an architect, collects modern art but also is interested in film. (There are two other children: Fariha, born Philippa, who with onetime art dealer Heiner Friedrich, now her husband, co-founded and helps to run New York’s Dia Center for the Arts, and Georges, a New York-based economist who collects Modern art.)

In fact, Winkler suggests that the younger generation, who have long been eclipsed by their mother, may now emerge “with a greater voice.”

Conceding that his parents, especially his mother, were very dominant personalities, Francois De Menil said in a phone interview that it would be impossible either to replace their formidable energies or to second-guess what they might have wanted for the museum’s future--other than that the institution be financially sound. “You can’t really legislate from the grave,” he said. “We all participate in bringing our input to acquisitions and exhibitions, but I don’t see that any one of the children would, even if so inclined, assume a secondary founder role. It’s just not that kind of place. No one can operate like the founders, not the children or whomever may come in the immediate future, so our charge is to be very careful how we proceed.”

Francois adds that such major expensive projects as the Rothko Chapel or the Byzantine Fresco Chapel would probably not happen now since their creation was tantamount to “acts of will” by his mother. “We wouldn’t be able to act as she did, because now, as a body, we must build consensus and there’s always dissenting voices.”

Perhaps the most immediately visible departure from the way things have been in the past, according to foundation board president Sarofim, will be the addition to the foundation of more business-oriented people who can strengthen the organization’s fiscal arm. She also believes that a more aggressive marketing strategy must be adopted, quite a break given the fact that Hopps once puckishly suggested to a reporter that the success of the place would be measured in the declining--not growing--numbers of visitors, because that, presumably, would indicate a more sophisticated, serious audience.

“Marketing is not considered the De Menil style at all,” says Sarofim, noting that many Houstonians still are not familiar with the museum. (Attendance in 1997 was a comparatively low 70,608 for the Menil Collection, 21,017 for the Twombley Gallery.) “It’s a challenge, but I think it can be done with vision and without compromising the spirit of the place. After all, Mrs. De Menil said in her opening speech, ‘If you have something so wonderful to treasure, you want to share it with people.’ ”

Indeed, fiscal concerns as well as marketing were light years away from Dominique de Menil’s almost ethereal vision of the place of art in life. After all, this is a woman who once wrote, “Through art, God constantly clears a path to our hearts.” Such emotion and deeply held missionary zeal may well be what is lost first, in her absence.

“She expressed it in everything they did, and you can’t replicate that,” says Winkler. “But, hopefully, that [spiritual] part will be reflected in what a visitor sees and how it’s done. You walk through the collection and see a beautiful Micronesian figure, or a Cycladic idol, or in the folk art exhibit a penitente figure of Christ sitting beside the cross, and you realize in some small village some Santero did this, and it’s fantastic. It always comes down to the idea of the plight of a single individual and what man strives for in existence. That’s what this museum will always be about.”