- 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 toRobert Thurman ), Adélaïde (a photographer who is married to anthropologistEdmund Snow Carpenter ), and Philippa (co-founder of theDia Art Foundation ). The artistDash 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 theBarnes Foundation and theJ. Paul Getty Museum . The collection includes primitive and tribal African Art, a vast collection ofSurrealist 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 asJackson Pollock ,Barnett Newman ,Clyfford Still ,Robert Motherwell ,Willem de Kooning ,Cy Twombly , andMark 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 theBroken Obelisk , a monument toMartin Luther King sculpted by Barnett Newman. Also on the grounds of the Menil Collection is theByzantine Fresco Chapel Museum , a "reliquary" designed to houseByzantine murals originally from a chapel inLysi ,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 Salvador anCatholic BishopÓscar 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]
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