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. And I loathed the black-tiled floor. For the marriage, Dominique converted to John's Catholicism, a move that at first shocked her clannish family. 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. ''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. In, Donald D. Clayton, "The Dark Night Sky: a personal adventure in cosmology" Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. (New York 1975), Richard, Paul. An economist, with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has taught at Princeton and is founding director of the economics research division of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, where he is a professor and where he spends time teaching each year. Schlumberger, Dominique. 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. ''Life had been tough for him, and he saw how hard it was for some others.''. 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.'' [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. A big show of the family's art collections was held at the Grand Palais in Paris two years ago. BUT, AS DOMINIQUE likes to point out, she and John didn't start out rich. 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. 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. I wanted a wooden one.''. [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. The artists previously collaborated with the Dia Art Foundation, which was founded by Philippa de Menil (Dominique and John's daughter), to realise their monumental immersive light installation. Photo by Michael Schmelling 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. 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. [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. (Spookily enough, another dwelling she had built on the same site about 20 years ago met the same end.) In the dining room, 18 rare chairs by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffman surround a pair of tables designed by Gwathmey. They have sold off a good deal of it over the years, and diversified their holdings. by Paula Newton November 11, 2013. by Paula Newton November 11, 2013. While the two had mutual feelings for art and social problems, Dominique was reticent and understated, John was ebullient, opinionated, action-oriented. And Donald Judd has gone public with vociferous denunciations of the foundation, which is now but a shadow of itself. The foundation operates Dia:Beacon (est. 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. 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. [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. The work these artists made changed, or at least questioned, the nature of art: what it. 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. Beyond the family, their influence has been substantial, too. She is not a ''go-getter,'' she insists in her French-tinged English. 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. 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. 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. ''It began to look more like de Menil University than St. Thomas. 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. Indeed, shuttling among residences in Houston, New York and Paris, Dominique has a heavy agenda. 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. I'M VERY PROUD OF them,'' Dominique says of the children, ''and gratified that they have John's and my interests. 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.'' Additionally, they have a manicured beachfront estate on Fishers Island, off Connecticut, and a house in Paris. [30], In the 1980s de Menil again began looking for an architect to design the museum, eventually commissioning Renzo Piano, a renowned Italian architect known for his provocative Centre Georges Pompidou building in Paris, to come up with a design that would fit her vision for the museum. In 1981, on the chapel's 10th birthday, awards of $10,000 each were given to a dozen exemplary figures working in the cause of human rights -ranging from Tatiana Velikanova, a Russian mathematician, to Ned O'Gorman, a poet who founded the Children's Storefront in Harlem. Inheritance (oil) 20th-century art Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Overview Newswire RobbReport News Dia Sues Dia: Founders Try to Stop Art Auction. 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. 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. Whitman brought a suit against Dia, which is pending. In fact, all five de Menil children - Christophe, Adelaide, Georges, Francois and Philippa - have inherited their parents' interest in art and architecture. 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. 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. 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. The Rothko Chapel, with its sculpture, Barnett Newman's ''Broken Obelisk,'' expresses their involvement not only with art, but with politics and religion. (Brought up a Protestant, she converted to Catholicism to marry John.) Leland, a civil-rights and antiwar activist who was studying to be a pharmacist at Texas Southern University, had dropped out to run the campaign of a black minister, D. Leon Everett, who sought a seat on the then-all-white board. So serious, in fact, was the recent plight of Dia that Dominique asked her son Georges, a trustee of Philippa's inheritance, to help. After undergoing revisions by several architects, including Philip Johnson, Howard Barnstone, and Eugene Aubry, the non-denominational Rothko Chapel was dedicated on Menil Foundation property in 1971 in a ceremony that included members of various religions. 1538-1576 - Anne de Barbay, fille de Guyot de Barbay et d'Anne de Frenelle. Pianissimo: The Very Quiet Menil Collection., Holmes, Ann, and Patricia C. Johnson. 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. But we are definitely a collection of people very much influenced by John and Dominique. [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. And she goes on collecting - though at a much slower pace, she says, because prices have risen so high. Heiner Friedrich is an art dealer and collector of minimal art and conceptual art. John shot from the hip. Their associates tend not to be other superrichlings, but artists, film makers, poets, anthropologists, activists, professors, priests and - in the case of Philippa, who is involved with Sufism, an Islamic philosophy - sheiks and whirling dervishes. Carr, Annemarie Weyl, and Laurence J. Morrocco. You can look up the words in the phrase individually using these links: philippa? While sharing their tastes, the children have also expanded considerably their parents' life style. tion in 1974, run by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich and Helen Winkler. Giovannini, Joseph. [33], The nearby Cy Twombly Gallery, opened in 1995, houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. 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]. ''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. Indeed, Adelaide has recently given the museum an important piece from her collection. [1] She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986. Ironically, planned in a time of boom for Houston, the museum will be finished in a time of bust, due to falling oil prices. 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. They were compelling.'' For example, use But when the artist arrived, she appeared for a moment only. 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. He wanted me to be exposed to every aspect of their life that would give me a chance to do things for my community. He was my particular nemesis. battle of omdurman order of battle. His interest in architecture, he says, comes from his father and from working with Charles Gwathmey, who designed his East Hampton house. 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. . Though John was born to a titled military family, he grew up poor, thanks to the efforts of his father to pay off a relative's debt. The enigmatic Friedrich quit New York, disappeared into a wandering, art-mad exile; Philippa de Menil, the embattled heiress, had long since ceased to exist. 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 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. ''They came as intellectuals to an intellectual void,'' says Isaac Arnold Jr., chairman of Houston's Museum of Fine Arts and also of Quintana Petroleum. 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. 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. 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. Later in his life, spending more time in New York, he would give lavish dinners for them and make the rounds -in a chauffeured limousine -of poetry readings, performances and parties, bestowing gifts on those who interested him. Georges and Lois de Menil have not lagged behind. The Menil Foundation is contributing not only the art but about $8 million. For years, she has quietly but wholeheartedly backed the work of such performance artists, dancers and musicians as Robert Whitman, La Monte Young, Robert Wilson, Twyla Tharp, Philip Glass, Trisha Brown and Terry Riley. 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. Yet for all her protests, her modest, low-key bearing conceals the drive of a captain of industry, and one of her associates says, ''The phrase 'steel butterfly' was coined for her. 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. Essays and short texts describe the de Menils' collecting; their patronage of modern architecture; their promotion of film as an art form; their struggles . ''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. 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. 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. Notes Dominique's younger sister, Sylvie Boissonnas -also an art collector and patron, who lives in Paris, ''My father was of Gide's atheist generation, and Dominique was very spiritual. Dominique and John de Menil, circa 1967. [1] American Sufi leader 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. [5] 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. I spent hours talking with John about world politics and philosophy. It is often cited as one of the most significant privately assembled art collections, alongside the Barnes Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum. They have been adventurous patrons, perhaps less concerned than many with the kudos and the cash that go with art patronage in American society. (Such involvements were not confined to Houston, however; among other affiliations, John was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Primitive Art in New York.) Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak's most prominent disciples and successors in North America were Tosun Bayrak, Lex Hixon, and Philippa de Menil. to find the word you're looking for. 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. An 11th-century abbey revamped during the 18th century, the chateau has perhaps 100 rooms. Hugetz, Edward, and Brian Huberman. ''We didn't really buy art, because we didn't have the money and we didn't think of it,'' says Dominique, whose scientist father considered spending money on art frivolous. 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. De Maria had traveled to Santa Barbara for his mother's 100th birthday in early June; however, he went on to . ALTHOUGH DOMI-nique's children function in somewhat lower gear, they also have made ambitious forays into - and even careers in - the arts. Flowering, in a way. 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. Dia initially focused on commissioning works by a select group of contemporary artistsnotably, minimalists and conceptual artists. 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. 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. He took the the couple around to galleries, singing the praises of the modernists. 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.'' Christophe, a tall, graceful woman, who has a long history of supporting ''difficult'' art projects, began designing costumes for Robert Wilson in 1981. And the approaching actuality still surprises her: ''It's a long way from my early days as a young wife and mother. [31] The result was a museum that appeared "small on the outside, butas big as possible inside". The founders of the Dia Art Foundation have filed suit to stop the foundation from selling artworks in Dia's collection. Fariha, born Philippa de Menil, . 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. 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. 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. ''He reminds me of my father,'' she says, ''with his strong idealism and willingness to undertake certain things that others wouldn't. 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. THE DE MENILS' IN-volvement in the Houston art world began in the 1940's - an inevitable consequence of Father Couturier's evangelism. And several years ago, when they were agitating in Albany for legislation on fishing rights. In return for her efforts, the Holy Bishopric of Cyprus allowed the works to remain in Houston on a 20-year loan. 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. John listened patiently to the telephone tirade and then said, ''Listen, my friend, why don't you come to my house for a drink? 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. At the sale, Dominique bought a Barnett Newman and Adelaide picked up her first de Kooning.) In 1986, de Menil deepened her involvement in social causes, establishing the Carter-Menil Human Rights Foundation with former president Jimmy Carter to "promote the protection of human rights throughout the world". This in turn enabled the inventors to determine the location of an oil deposit. [1] They had five children: Marie-Christophe (who was married to Robert Thurman and was the grandmother of artist Dash Snow), Adelaide (a photographer who is the widow of anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter), George de Menil (an economist), Franois (a filmmaker and architect), and Philippa (co-founder of the Dia Art Foundation[5] and the leader of a Sufi order in Lower Manhattan[6]). '', ''I wanted a functional museum and they wanted great architecture,'' comments Dominique. 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. (The two recently returned from a trek to western Tibet to take in the ruins of an 11th-century Buddhist temple.) "[8] Piano's understated design for the Menil Collection echoed the architecture of the surrounding bungalows, which had been painted gray by the Menil Foundation, and featured a roof of canopy leaves that allowed filtered natural light to fill the galleries. And next month, Dominique de Menil, the family matriarch (her husband John, ne Jean, died in 1973), will see the completion in Houston of a new $21 million museum known as the Menil Collection, minus the de, in the interest of simplicity. 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. [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. [22], Their most controversial action on behalf of civil rights was their offer of Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk as a partial gift to the city of Houston in 1969, on the condition that it be dedicated to the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.[23] The city refused the gift, sparking a controversial debate[24] that ended only when the de Menils purchased the sculpture themselves and placed it in front of the newly completed Rothko Chapel. ''Dominique and John were entirely separate people who worked not so much together but in parallel ways,'' suggests Fred Hofheinz. [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. ''Once the children had the disposal of their own fortunes,'' Dominique says, ''John and I never wanted to interfere.'' (Box, page 38.) Why Not Dedicate Art to King, De Menil Asks City Council., Richard, Paul. 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