The Menil in The Wall Street Journal

What Dominique de Menil Wrought

The museum she built for the works she and her late husband collected turned Houston into an art mecca

By ANNE S. LEWIS
June 9, 2007; Page P16

Houston

Houston in the 1940s was not exactly an art destination. Nor -- when they settled there, fleeing wartime Paris -- would John and Dominique de Menil have been considered art collectors. This, after all, was a couple who'd casually left behind -- still in its original brown wrapping and stashed ignominiously on a shelf somewhere in their Paris apartment -- Max Ernst's "Portrait of Dominique." (They weren't that pleased with it.)

But Houston was the site of U.S. operations for Schlumberger, the French oil field services giant that Dominique's family had founded and whose world-wide operations John was to direct. And over the next decades, the de Menils evolved into serious art patrons, eventually assembling more than 16,000 works spanning antiquities, Byzantine art, the arts of tribal cultures and contemporary art. (And yes, they did subsequently retrieve that Ernst portrait -- only the first of many Ernsts and Magrittes in a collection that would become known for its strong Surrealist holdings.)

Understated, illuminating, personal. Architect Renzo Piano's Menil Collection offers a unique environment for experiencing art.

Before Mr. de Menil died unexpectedly in 1973, the couple had spoken with Louis Kahn, among others, about designing a museum to house their collection. Mrs. de Menil eventually hired Renzo Piano, the Genoan architect whose sole claim to fame at the time was the outré 1976 Pompidou Center (the Beaubourg) in Paris that he designed with British architect Richard Rogers. In a long, storied collaboration, the architect and his exacting, opinionated client would fine-tune the design of a building that, when it opened in 1987 -- 10 years before Mrs. de Menil's death, at age 89 -- attracted international attention and acclaim.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Menil Collection -- the actual date was Friday. In an era of monumental museums whose architectural pyrotechnics sometimes detract from the art inside, Mr. Piano's Menil is a masterpiece of understated, deferential elegance: a museum that, with a light, respectful touch, facilitates and enhances the experience of the art while also illuminating and remaining true to the sensibility of the collectors.

Passing through the tree- and bungalow-lined area of Montrose, just minutes from downtown Houston's exhibitionist skyline, one comes upon the Menil almost by accident. The long, prim-looking, gray rectangular box, with its horizontal cypress siding, white steel frame and "ruffled" wrap-around portico, sits far back from the sidewalk on an unmanicured, well-trodden lawn with huge live oaks and an occasional sculpture. The museum takes up one block of a 30-acre arts-related neighborhood compound owned by the Menil Foundation; a short walk away is the Rothko Chapel with Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" in front; across the street is the later-built, Piano-designed Cy Twombly Gallery; beyond that, Richmond Hall's Dan Flavin installation.

Visiting Houston for the Menil's 20th-anniversary celebration, held two months early in April, Mr. Piano recalled the early first steps of his collaboration with Mrs. de Menil: "One of the first things Dominique said to me was 'Renzo, I don't like Beaubourg.' What she wanted was a building that looked small on the outside but was big on the inside." "Big on the inside" meant a space conducive to the private, contemplative, spiritual experience of art that Mrs. de Menil cherished. Too many masterpieces vying for attention induced what she called "museum fatigue."

The solution, the two concluded, was to rotate the Menil's collection, exhibiting perhaps 10% of it at one time -- hung generously spaced and at eye level -- while the remainder "rested" upstairs, in accessible storage. Works would wait in the wings for their next call-back, a chance to be hung with a fresh curatorial idea, a new juxtaposition with other works, and always the possibility of deeper understanding.

Mrs. de Menil wanted her art to be experienced under the changing conditions and moods of natural light, as it fluctuated with the seasons, the movement of the clouds and the sun. Mr. Piano's solution was an overhead system, in most of the nine galleries, of ferro-cement louvres, or leaves, which bounce, reflect and filter light into the gallery. Taking a page from Mrs. de Menil's residence, the African and Oceanic art galleries also have enclosed gardens whose natural light adds a brilliant mise-en-scène realism to the setting.

One enters the Menil through a tall, spacious foyer with floor-to-ceiling windows. The space is unfurnished save for a huge brown suede ottoman in the middle of the room, and a small desk off to the side. The loudest sound is the clack of footsteps on the floors of ebonized pine, a soft wood chosen for the stories its wear patterns would tell. There, one might find oneself in the middle of a dialogue between three works of art triangulated on three walls. Or be struck by the presence of, say, a rare, billboard-sized painting by Walter de Maria, "The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth" (1968). A Rothko canvas hanging in the foyer during a recent "Klee in America" exhibit was a subtle curatorial nod to the mutual admiration between those two artists.

To walk the nine galleries -- grouped by period but arranged nonchronologically -- emanating from a single long hallway with a huge John Chamberlain crushed-car sculpture at one end, is to re-experience the quirky trajectories of the de Menils' art sensibilities, as influenced over the years by four pivotal art dealers, scholars and curators, including the Menil's founding director, the late Walter Hopps.

The couple's early forays into modern art led to an appreciation of the links it shared with the art of ancient and indigenous cultures. Thus, galleries move from Cycladic and other ancient figures to Egyptian mummy masks, pre-Columbian art, Byzantine icons and golden medieval reliquaries, and onto the creations of African, Oceanic and Northwest Coast peoples. Then -- finally -- the large Modern and Contemporary galleries, with their deep holdings of living giants Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, to name but two.

Works are exhibited without explanatory wall notes, identified only by title, artist, medium and date; more information is available in brochures and catalogs. "Here is one of the few remaining refuges where you can come and have an experience of your own without being told what you have to feel or have to do, or what you have to buy," says the nuseum's current director, Josef Helfenstein, adding that the bookstore and gift shop are in a bungalow across the street.

Visitors come and go freely -- literally. There's no admission charge, an absence of post-9/11 package-checking, and parking is easy. So accessible is the museum that visitors make regular impromptu stops -- a few therapeutic minutes on the way home from work, perhaps, or for a second, fourth or 10th look at a single work. All exactly as Dominique de Menil wanted it.