WHERE THE DE MENIL MONEY COMES FROM. 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 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. ''In the here and now, with great acuity and effectiveness; but also, at a moment's notice, in the Kingdom of Benin or the Byzantine Empire.'' 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. [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. The work these artists made changed, or at least questioned, the nature of art: what it. There are some who think they're crazy. But Heiner lives in a dream. 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. While the two had mutual feelings for art and social problems, Dominique was reticent and understated, John was ebullient, opinionated, action-oriented. Adelaide wished that the starkly modern house, designed by the then-Mies-disciple Philip Johnson, could be like everyone else's. Dominique Isaline Zelia Henriette Clarisse Schlumberger. 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. I think they're inspired.'' ''Ted really started it - he saved an old house that was going to be demolished, and so we bought the land,'' she says. 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. 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. 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. [1], She was born in 1947 into a socially committed, eclectic French Catholic family in Houston, Texas. Institute of Religion Accepts Controversial Broken Obelisk.. The conflict, as is the case with most de Menil disagreements, actually reveals the strength of the family's ties, according to Ted Carpenter: ''It's like an Italian family arguing over the pasta. She spoke at the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, inaugurating the Passionate Voices series, celebrating the 10th anniversary. '', See the article in its original context from. 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. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Says Dominique, ''The idea of the foundation was marvelous, and they've done great things. The most conservative of the children, and the most involved with family tradition, he uses - in France - his title, Baron, bestowed on the de Menil family by Napoleon. He met Philippa through Helen Winkler, an employee of the Menil Foundation. Dia Art Foundation, American foundation that supports contemporary art and artists, est. ''He reminds me of my father,'' she says, ''with his strong idealism and willingness to undertake certain things that others wouldn't. 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. . 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. In the dining room, 18 rare chairs by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffman surround a pair of tables designed by Gwathmey. Heiner Friedrich and Fariha Friedrich (formerly Philippa de Menil), who When they arrived there from Paris in the early 1940's, they were not yet as wealthy as they would become, but they were almost too interesting. A new board was appointed. [2][3][4][5] Sheikh Muzaffer also gave direct transmission to fellow American dervish Sheikh Nur al-Anwar al-Jerrahi, who envisioned a radical and illumined path of the heart which he called Universal Islam. Soon the couple was on a collecting spree, venturing from Cezanne to Braque to Picasso, then - under the influence of the dealer Alexander Iolas - heavily into Surrealism. ''She feels a museum is all about interior spaces. Christophe, who at 53 is the oldest (and a grandmother of three, by her daughter Taya) has always been attuned to the avant-garde. (To help finance this expensive venture, she sold a number of important paintings last year at Sotheby-Parke Bernet, realizing more than $2 million. Dominique emphasizes that it's a very ''personal'' assemblage, ''idiosyncratic,'' with major gaps. Initially the stated aim as written in its first report was to "plan, realise and maintain public projects of artists. Although family members say that the decline has affected them ''minimally,'' Dominique de Menil notes, ''A lot has been eroded. 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. As a result, Georges's wife Lois has been appointed to Dia's reconstituted board, and Heiner has resigned. An informal art historian and teacher, Dominique has also organized some remarkable exhibitions, innovatively installed. "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. Until very recently, Christophe also had a sizable house in East Hampton, but it burned down during Hurricane Gloria last fall. 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. THE DE MENILS' IN-volvement in the Houston art world began in the 1940's - an inevitable consequence of Father Couturier's evangelism. * In the early 1990s Dia became a 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. [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. [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. She received direct transmission from him in 1980. At the sale, Dominique bought a Barnett Newman and Adelaide picked up her first de Kooning.) The Fathers, too, can now see both sides. 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. [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. [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. 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. They have also come to the aid of liberal-left politicians and Islamic religious groups, avant-garde music and counterculture films, archeological digs and art education, Long Island fishermen and anti-Vietnam activists. [10] They bought more than two hundred pieces from Klejman's New York Gallery. 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. Georges and Lois de Menil have not lagged behind. 1584-1586 - Franoise du Chtelet. He took the the couple around to galleries, singing the praises of the modernists. 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. Fariha, born Philippa de Menil, . Philippa De Menil Bio Details Full name Philippa De Menil Gender Female Age 71 (approx.) Seven years later, John joined Schlumberger Ltd. Their backgrounds were very different. They had a foreign accent, and political views that for Texas were extremely liberal. 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. But the falling price of Schlumberger stock and serious administrative problems brought big financial troubles. ''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. (Spookily enough, another dwelling she had built on the same site about 20 years ago met the same end.) They ultimately amassed more than 17,000 paintings, sculptures, decorative objects, prints, drawings, photographs, and rare books. 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. 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. Designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, co-creator of the high-tech Pompidou Center in Paris, the museum is so favorably looked upon by Houston bigwigs that more than half of its building costs are being met by local money. 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 [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. Early in 1969, the de Menils transferred their patronage from St. Thomas to Rice University, a secular, science-oriented school then beginning to branch out into the liberal arts. [1] She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986. 1529-1538 - Philippa de Ligniville, fille de Jean de Ligniville et de Jeanne d'Oiselet. Raised a Protestant, Dominique converted to Roman Catholicism in 1932. 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. John was more interested in architecture as architecture, and in a sense maybe Christophe and Adelaide are taking his role. Hugetz, Edward, and Brian Huberman. (An uncle, Jean Schlumberger, helped found the celebrated literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Francaise). ''Once the children had the disposal of their own fortunes,'' Dominique says, ''John and I never wanted to interfere.'' .''. After being met with increasing resistance by the more traditional Basilian clergy at the University of St. Thomas, in 1969 the de Menils moved the art departmentincluding the art history facultyand Media Center to Rice University, where they founded the Institute for the Arts to manage the exhibition program at Rice Museum. THE DE MENILS' civil-rights activities earned them epithets ranging from '''radical chic'' to ''Communist.'' I try to stay close to them, and as time goes on, we are more and more in touch.'' And then, you can move in and we can move out.' Dominique, who was courted by other cities, says that the museum is in Houston because ''I was so encouraged here.'' 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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