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"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." —William Middleton's Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil 67 D ominique and John de Menil had been trying for years to find the right architect to design a museum for their collection. In 1967, Dominique curated an outstanding exhibition at the University of St. Thomas, Visionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu (October 19, 1967 to January 3, 1968). The show included almost 150 drawings and watercolors by the trio of 18 th century and early 19 th century French architects, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu. For Visionary Architects, the de Menils brought the great Louis Kahn to Houston to deliver a lecture, entitled The Architecture of the Incredible. They had been aware of Kahn's work for years and it had been suggested, in the early 1960s, that he should design the Rothko Chapel. In January 1967, Dominique and John went out of their way to visit Kahn's Erdman Hall Dormitories at Bryn Mawr College. And they entertained the architect at dinner at their townhouse in New York. By the time the de Menils moved to Rice University, in the fall of 1969, they had increased their contact with Louis Kahn. In the spring of 1970, when he was working on the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, they went to visit him at his office in Philadelphia. In November 1972, when John was in ill-health, they brought Kahn to Houston for several days to work on a design of a building for their collection. The idea the de Menils developed with Kahn was for what they thought of as a "storage building" for the collection: "A gallery with open storage, a concept more reminiscent of the open stacks of a library than a traditional museum." The architect developed site plans, west and south of the Rothko Chapel, and architectural drawings. As the work was in progress, however, John died, on June 1, 1973; in fact, Kahn was scheduled to arrive in Houston again the following day. Dominique and the architect continued to work together, intending the finished building to be part of John's legacy. In February 1974, Kahn made another trip to Houston to meet with Dominique. The following month, Kahn died unexpectedly of a heart attack. In the following years, Dominique was deluged with ideas about architects. She met many, studied their books, went around the world to look at buildings. The couple's daughter Christophe de Menil had advocated for the great Mexican architect Luis Barragán, bringing Dominique copies of his books. Contacts were made and plans drawn up but Dominique demurred. With her son François, Dominique had a conversation about Peter Eisenman, "the theorist of contemporary architecture," as she noted. Alexandre Iolas, the great dealer who played such a leading role in building the de Menils' collection, made a case for I.M. Pei, suggesting that he could do much better than the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., which she felt was too strong of an architectural statement. "He has excellent taste and is very sensitive to painting," Iolas said of Pei. The next month, Dominique met with I.M. Pei. Nothing came of it. By the late 1970s, Dominique had the two members in place to help her build a museum. Paul Winkler had been an art history student at the University of St. Thomas and then at Rice. After school, he moved to Santa Fe where he worked with the noted collector Alexander Girard on what is now called the Girard Wing of the International Folk Art Museum, a grouping of over 100,000 folk objects including toys, miniatures and textiles. As she moved towards constructing a new museum, Dominique hired Paul Winkler to help. "I moved back because I could tell a serious effort was being made to get this done," Winkler recalled. "So my role was to be liaison with the architect, if we ever found an architect." Since the late 1950s, Walter Hopps had been one of the most exciting figures on the American art scene. He began his career in Los Angeles, organizing a series of innovative shows then launching, with artist Edward Kienholz, the Ferus Gallery. In 1962, he became director of the Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon Museum, making him, at thirty, then the youngest museum director in the country. There he curated the first important survey of Pop Art, a significant exhibition of Joseph Cornell and a legendary retrospective of Marcel Duchamp, which included a game of chess between the artist and the writer Eve Babitz, who chose to play nude. From California, Hopps moved to Washington D.C., first as director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art then as curator of 20 th Century American Art at what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In June 1978, the curator was in Paris to dismantle and pack the Jasper Johns exhibition at the Pompidou Center. Dominique had a dinner with Hopps. By early November, back in Washington, Hopps received a phone call from Dominique asking him to visit Houston. "She explained she wanted to do a new museum, was keeping that very quiet, and she wanted me to be the founding director," Hopps recalled. "And I was thrilled to go west again." Dominique de Menil in the early 1950s, in a Charles James evening gown, with the designer's Lips sofa in the Houston house (continued on page 68) TOP RIGHT: COURTESY MENIL ARCHIVES, THE MENIL COLLECTION.