Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/956427
T he week of November 17, 1980 was not a particularly unusual one in the life of Dominique de Menil. She had been in Paris for ten days, attending a meeting at the nearby house of her older sister, Anne Gruner Schlumberger, having dinner with a spiritual advisor, Father André Scrima, working on an Yves Klein exhibition that would take place at Rice University in 1982. On Tuesday morning, November 18, Dominique drove out to the western suburb of St. Cloud to the house of French artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud. There she purchased a modernist work of black and white stained glass. In the afternoon, she returned to the apartment that she and her husband John de Menil had renovated in 1931, the first year of their marriage, in a quietly elegant 19 th century building on the rue Las Cases on Paris' Left Bank. Then, at 5:30 p.m., Dominique had her first meeting with the architect Renzo Piano. It was a fateful encounter that almost did not take place. Although she was intently in search of an architect to design a museum she hoped to build in Houston to contain the family collection of over ten thousand works of art, she had been reluctant to meet with Piano because of how she felt about the architecture of the Pompidou Center, finished just three years before, which he had co-designed with Richard Rogers. The museum's founding director Pontus Hultén had suggested him before. Seeing that she had not been able to find someone else, Hultén finally insisted. "Why don't you talk to him," he said to Dominique about Piano. "He's a great humanist, he's willing to listen and I know that you have very specific ideas about what this is to be." The endorsement from Hultén, a museum director she admired greatly, was finally key for Dominique. She left a phone message at Piano's Paris office. And then silence. "We got the call from this lady and nobody understood that it was Dominique de Menil," Renzo Piano explained. "I called back maybe a few weeks later—I felt so stupid—it was very impolite. I called because I finally understood that this was Dominique de Menil, the lady in Houston, Texas." So, Piano went over to the rue Las Cases, to the supremely classical building in white limestone where Dominique Schlumberger had been born and raised. He climbed the two flights of a grand stairway, with polished bannisters and red carpet. He walked into to the apartment that Dominique and John had designed with the French architect Pierre Barbe, across the modernist entrance corridor in light grey and into the living room with its mix of historical furniture, 1930s original designs and the eclectic, astonishing collection of art. "I sat," Piano recalled. "And she watched me." Her opening line to the architect was certainly not encouraging. "Before we begin," Dominique said, "I have to tell you, Monsieur Piano, that I don't like the Pompidou Center at all." Piano remained silent. Dominique insisted that the earlier design was far from what she had in mind for her museum. She did say, however, that she respected the fact that an attempt had been made, that something new had been created. "It was almost like saying, 'It was a dirty job but somebody had to do it,'" the architect said. "Not quite that, she was extremely articulate. So I said, 'Fine. Fair enough. I am used to people saying that they don't like this or they don't like that.'" Then they began the conversation in earnest, speaking about art, his experience with artists and her concepts for a museum. One of the ideas she suggested that afternoon became a design mantra. "I want a building that is small on the outside but big on the inside," Dominique said to Piano. "She articulated it quickly and it sounded a bit funny at the time," he recalled. "But she explained, 'I want a building that is not monumental outside, not big, not aggressive, not pretentious. But, at the same time, I want a building that when you are inside you feel the sense of space, and you feel the light.' So, that was a constant from that first conversation: natural light." The meeting lasted only 45 minutes. That night, in her datebook, Dominique recorded her personal thoughts on the meeting with Piano: "Work session. Everything will be done based on real criteria studied in the most minute detail. C'est lui—he's the one!" Double Vision COMES TO PRESS AFTER A DECADE OF HEROIC RESEARCH AND WRITING, AUTHOR WILLIAM MIDDLETON RELEASES THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF DOMINIQUE AND JOHN DE MENIL, THE LATE COLLECTORS WHOSE EYES AND MINDS ASSEMBLED THE PITCH-PERFECT WORKS OF ART THAT FILL THE MENIL COLLECTION. IN AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM THE NEWLY PUBLISHED KNOPF BOOK, MIDDLETON SHARES THE STORY OF HOW RENZO PIANO, CHARLES JAMES, AND FRANK STELLA CAME TO PLAY ROLES. Dominique de Menil in the living room of the Menil House in Houston, 1979 BELOW: PHOTO DAVID CROSSLEY, COURTESY MENIL ARCHIVES, THE MENIL COLLECTION. 66