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. Its basis was a device that was lowered by cable into the ground to measure the electrical resistance of formations in the earth. 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. 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. Heiner's Wagnerian ambitions to serve as impresario for artists with grand-scale visions appealed to her. ''It was the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in Houston.''. 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. [1] At Rice, the de Menils also cultivated their interest in film, working with such noted filmmakers as Roberto Rossellini, who made several trips to Houston to teach Rice University students and create television documentaries. He was my particular nemesis. ''Wasn't I there?'' The work these artists made changed, or at least questioned, the nature of art: what it. I could have worked with Dominique.''. The family has done everything as dedicated amateurs, but they helped the right people at the right time. She began to collect work by contemporary Americans even before her parents did, and exerted considerable influence on their acquisitions in the field. (5) Philippa (Anne Caroline Philippa de Mnil) (born June 13, 1947) - A co-founder of the Dia Art Foundation. You can't just expand and expand. Both born in Houston - their three elders were born in France - they grew up in the rebellious 60's and seem to have come to terms more uneasily than the others with the Schlumberger aura. 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. [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. 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. '', AT 78, DOMINIQUE IS A HANDSOME WOMAN OF frail, unassuming presence, whose ''spiritual'' mien and austere garb evoke the image of a medieval saint. Actually, her children venerate Dominique almost to the point of copying her.'' But we are definitely a collection of people very much influenced by John and Dominique. [1], In addition to becoming known as collectors and patrons of art, John and Dominique de Menil were vocal champions of human rights worldwide. 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. 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. 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. ''', 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. [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. 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. 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. And she was surrounded by accomplished relatives. It will house the more than 10,000 objects acquired by the couple. [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. Thus, the 657,829 shares owned by Georges de Menil and his wife and children, now worth about $20 million, have shrunk in value from the $57 million they were worth at the stock's high. Congressman Mickey Leland, it was one of the first racially integrated art shows in the United States.[28]. Adelaide, two years younger and known as Addie to the family, is a photographer, and travels with Ted Carpenter on a far-flung anthropological and collecting beat. 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. When John de Menil walked into Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris one day in 1964, Jean Tinguely's moving, noisy sculptures stole part of . '', ''I wanted a functional museum and they wanted great architecture,'' comments Dominique. Designed by the architect Charles Gwathmey and built at a reported cost of $6 million, the house - called ''Toad Hall'' by its owner - is a fantasy version of a luxury ocean liner, with a three-story greenhouse, screening room, game room, exercise salon, wine cellar and the obligatory swimming pool. Ever since, Dia's mission has been to commission, support, and present site-specific long-term installations and single-artists exhibitions to the public. ''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. 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.'' 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. You might try using the wildcards * and ? THE DE MENILS' IN-volvement in the Houston art world began in the 1940's - an inevitable consequence of Father Couturier's evangelism. Carr, Annemarie Weyl, and Laurence J. Morrocco. 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. De Maria has a long history with Dia, having been one of the first artists in its collectionwhich was begun by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich, and Helen Winkler in 1974and a pivotal player in the institution's history. ''Life had been tough for him, and he saw how hard it was for some others.''. 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 subsidized a lobbying effort on their behalf. ''You support artists by buying their work, not by making shrines to them.''. 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. 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. Ibish, Yusuf, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, eds. ''Things just happen to me.'' She said. Since its inception, the chapel has witnessed all manner of events, from high-minded colloquia to weddings, bar mitzvahs, a Sufi ceremony by whirling dervishes from Turkey, a reception for the Dalai Lama and avant-garde concerts. But one family member suggests that the figure ''could easily be twice that amount.'' Institute of Religion Accepts Controversial Broken Obelisk.. She says now that she never imagined their acquisitions would someday fill a museum. Rites were performed not only by a Catholic prelate, but a black Baptist minister, a rabbi, and a Buddhist priest. They are men mostly, with big egos and big ideas. Following the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, the de Menils emigrated from Paris to the United States of America. [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. [1], The Menil campus also includes the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. A painter himself, he had been a prime mover in the commissioning of Leger, Matisse and Rouault to do work for churches in France. 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. They gave major gifts of art to the school, bought land to expand the campus and hired Philip Johnson to design new buildings. Ingersoll, Richard. ''Mother lives at two levels,'' says Georges. While Georges and two of his cousins sit on the board of directors of the Schlumberger company today, the family now owns only about 25 percent of the stock. Heiner Friedrich and Fariha Friedrich (formerly Philippa de Menil), who 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. Described by another friend as a ''warm, impulsive, kind person who is something of a mark,'' Christophe, in designing costumes for Wilson's theater pieces, discovered a talent for inventing clothes, and has recently set up as a couturier. 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. In return for her efforts, the Holy Bishopric of Cyprus allowed the works to remain in Houston on a 20-year loan. He met Philippa through Helen Winkler, an employee of the Menil Foundation. Flowering, in a way. ''Each of the children,'' says Adelaide now, ''would have preferred his or her own choice of architects, but after all, it is my mother's museum. [10] They bought more than two hundred pieces from Klejman's New York Gallery. 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. Adelaide wished that the starkly modern house, designed by the then-Mies-disciple Philip Johnson, could be like everyone else's. 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. The foundation cut back drastically on its support of artists, began to sell some of its extensive real estate holdings and, at auction, some of its choice art works. 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. [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. Collectively, they have disbursed tens of millions of dollars for purchases, commissions and general support of art - contributions, to be sure, that more than occasionally have been attended by an impulse to control. Like the Rockefellers, the de Menils are distinguished by the variety and scope of their art interests. Fariha, born Philippa de Menil, . [7] Her first husband (whom she married on May 14, 1969, in Harris County, Texas) was Italian anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi (born July 14, 1940). Very much the image of upper-class young marrieds, the pair rode horseback in the Bois de Boulogne, and confined their artistic interests to the likes of Christian Berard, a lightweight Parisian contemporary. WHERE THE DE MENIL MONEY COMES FROM. By the 1960s the de Menils had gravitated toward the major American post-war movements of abstract expressionism, pop art, and minimalism. Although family members say that the decline has affected them ''minimally,'' Dominique de Menil notes, ''A lot has been eroded. But, he says, ''I was fortunate to be exposed to their interest in art as part of the natural fabric of life. ''John's feeling for the underdog really started in his childhood,'' says Dominique. 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. Her ideas are defended by her son-the-architectural-student. ''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. Guided by her longtime companion, the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, she has acquired a formidable collection of objects from tribal cultures - Peruvian feather hangings, Polynesian sculptures, Eskimo carvings, masks by Northwest Coast Indians. ''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. 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. ''It's Dominique's museum and it's important to her,'' Francois says. 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. 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. Beyond the family, their influence has been substantial, too. She badly needed a religion.''. 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. ''I'm really too busy to see you today,'' she announced, and vanished. She is not a ''go-getter,'' she insists in her French-tinged English. [1], She was born in 1947 into a socially committed, eclectic French Catholic family in Houston, Texas. While the two had mutual feelings for art and social problems, Dominique was reticent and understated, John was ebullient, opinionated, action-oriented. 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.'' 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. THE DE MENIL FAMILY: THE MEDICI OF MODERN ART, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/18/magazine/the-de-menil-family-the-medici-of-modern-art.html. Photo by Michael Schmelling 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. 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. The Rothko Chapel, with its sculpture, Barnett Newman's ''Broken Obelisk,'' expresses their involvement not only with art, but with politics and religion. [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. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Dominique and John de Menil, circa 1967. John and Dominique de Menil also shared an interest in photography, inviting photographers to come to Houston to document events in the city and exhibit their work. Inheritance (oil) 20th-century art Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Icon Link Plus Icon; Overview Newswire RobbReport Friedrich and his then wife Philippa de Menil, together with Helen Winkler, established the Dia Art Foundation in 1973. And several years ago, when they were agitating in Albany for legislation on fishing rights. We - my brothers and sisters and I - each have a different focus. T HE SECOND-GENERATION de Menils all have established their own lives and embarked on their own projects - though none, perhaps, with the drive and range of their parents' activities. THE NEW BUILDING will be close to another, even more un-Houstonian de Menil monument. Back came a cable: ''BUY WHOLE SHOW.'' 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. ''She feels a museum is all about interior spaces. 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. ''I get that so much from my mother - decide what you're aiming at and strike out after it. ''I'm extreme and I have strong tastes,'' says Christophe, who is also an excellent though unexhibited photographer. 1529-1538 - Philippa de Ligniville, fille de Jean de Ligniville et de Jeanne d'Oiselet. 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. ''We even borrowed money to buy 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. ''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.'' [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. She studied mathematics and physics at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1927-28 . [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. "[15] In 1954 they founded the Menil Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the "support and advancement of religious, charitable, literary, scientific and educational purposes".[16]. [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]). (One takes off one's shoes on entering.) 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. menil? This in turn enabled the inventors to determine the location of an oil deposit. You were sharing in the great adventure of making a work of art that was maybe too crazy to realize in any other way.'' The two youngest children are Francois, 41, and Philippa, 39. (Box, page 38.) Dominique, who was courted by other cities, says that the museum is in Houston because ''I was so encouraged here.'' After the Nazi invasion of France, Dominique fled Paris with her then-three children (Georges was a babe in arms), made her way to Spain and at Bilbao boarded a small freighter for Havana. Raised a Protestant, Dominique converted to Roman Catholicism in 1932. 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. 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. Schlumberger, Dominique. I think they're inspired.'' And then, you can move in and we can move out.' (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.) "The de Menil Family: The Medici of Modern Art". ''It gives us a strong family feeling.''. 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. The Fathers, too, can now see both sides. ''It's absolutely crazy what they did,'' says one New York dealer. Sheikha. He later realized who had delivered the manuscript and wrote her a note.'' Initially the stated aim as written in its first report was to "plan, realise and maintain public projects of artists. ''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. Georges and Lois de Menil have not lagged behind. Her second husband is is a German-born former art dealer, Heiner Friedrich, with whom she is deeply engaged in Sufism. (To help finance this expensive venture, she sold a number of important paintings last year at Sotheby-Parke Bernet, realizing more than $2 million. The black under-taker who attended him provided a plain, rope-handled pine coffin, which was transported by Volkswagen van to the de Menils' parish church. 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. 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 foundation's extravagant expenditures have necessitated a family rescue effort. 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. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. [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. Peter Lamborn Wilson, eds Fresco Chapel and Laurence J. Morrocco influence been! Also an excellent though unexhibited photographer influenced by John and Dominique but a black Baptist minister a! The Houston art world began in the field a museum is all about interior spaces venerate Dominique almost the! 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