Dominique de Ménil

Dominique de Ménil (1908 – 1997) was a French-American art collector and museum founder who was an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune.

A daughter of French scientist Conrad Schlumberger, she married a French banker, Baron Jean de Ménil (a.k.a. John de Menil), in 1931; he died in 1973. They had five children, including daughters Christophe (who was married to Robert Thurman), Adélaïde (a photographer who is married to anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter), and Philippa (co-founder of the Dia Art Foundation). The artist Dash Snow is Dominique's great-grandson.

Fleeing Nazi-occupied France, the Ménils immigrated from Paris to New York and later Houston, where Schlumberger had significant operations. For over forty years the Ménils collected some 10,000 objects. Their namesake institution, The Menil Collection, is a private museum in Houston and is often cited as one of the most significant privately assembled art collections, alongside the Barnes Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The collection includes primitive and tribal African Art, a vast collection of Surrealist pieces from artists such as René Magritte and Max Ernst, modern European artists, as well as the work of a number of contemporary American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, and Mark Rothko.

An important collection of Twombley's work is now housed in its own permanent gallery at the Menil Collection, the Cy Twombley Gallery. Mark Rothko's work also has its own sanctuary, the Rothko Chapel, an interfaith chapel. Facing the Rothko Chapel is the Broken Obelisk, a monument to Martin Luther King sculpted by Barnett Newman. Also on the grounds of the Menil Collection is the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, a "reliquary" designed to house Byzantine murals originally from a chapel in Lysi, Cyprus.

Dominique de Menil spearheaded annual gifts to recipients of the Rothko Chapel Awards honoring individual efforts on behalf of human rights. Every two years she offered an award named for murdered El Salvadoran Catholic Bishop Óscar Romero.

Her final project was a commission of three site-specific light installations by Dan Flavin for Richmond Hall, a former Weingarten's grocery store in Houston, Texas in 1996.

She died in Houston on 31 December 1997.

ee also

Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize
Menil Collection
Rothko Chapel
Broken Obelisk
Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum
Dia Art Foundation

External links

* [http://www.menil.org/home.html The Menil Collection]