Dominique de Menil - Plans For A Museum

Plans For A Museum

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 Hoston near the Rothko Chapel. Kahn did produce some preliminary drawings, but the project was suspended in 1973 after John de Menil's and Kahn's deaths less than a year apart.

In the 1980s Dominique 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. "I dreamed of preserving some of the intimacy I had enjoyed with works of art," she wrote. "We would show only portions of the Collection at a time, but displayed in generous and attractive space... The public would never know museum fatigue and would have the rare joy of sitting in front of a painting and contemplating it... Works would appear, disappear, and reappear like actors on a stage." 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. The result was a museum that appeared "small on the outside, but...as big as possible inside."

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. It also features temporary exhibitions. It is often cited as one of the most significant privately assembled art collections, alongside the Barnes Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The nearby Cy Twombly Gallery, opened in 1995, houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. 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.

The Menil campus also includes the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. When Dominique 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. In return for her efforts, the Holy Bishopric of Cyprus allowed the works to remain in Houston on a long-term loan. The frescoes—a dome with Christ Pantokrator and an apse depicting the Virgin Mary Panayia—are currently installed in a reliquary-like space interior. The building was designed by architect Francois de Menil and mimics the original Lysi chapel.

Dominique 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. The Dan Flavin installation consists of two horizontal green fluorescent lights on the eastern and western sides of the building's exterior, two sets of diagonal white lights on the foyer walls, and a large work in the main interior space featuring pink, yellow, green, blue, and ultraviolet lights. Also on display in Richmond Hall are four examples of Flavin's "monuments" to V. Tatlin, created between 1964 and 1969.

Dominique de Menil died in Houston on December 31, 1997.