A storied history
John and Dominique de Menil, ‘the first family of Houston art,’ get a book as big as their lives
Dominique and John de Menil are the focus of a biography 16 years in the making.
The house grabbed him first, with its heady whiff of historical significance.
Virtually untouched in the three years since Dominique de Menil had died, Philip Johnson’s low-slung, rigidly lined modern structure on San Felipe in Houston was filled with curvaceous Charles James furniture and astounding art inside and out.
But William Middleton also had questions as he stood inside that architectural and design masterpiece for the first time: Why had the creators of this extraordinary place centered their world in a city so remote from centers of cul-
William Middleton conducted thousands of interviews and reviewed decades’ worth of letters to capture what drove John and Dominique de Menil, whose Menil Collection is considered the soul of Montrose and whose art-world influence is still felt the world over.
ture? And why did they stay?
Few if any other patrons of the 20th century possessed the rigorous reach of John and Dominique de Menil, the founders of the Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection. The museum they established holds one of the finest private assemblages of art anywhere, with works dating from the Cycladic era to the present. That building is the bedrock of a 30-acre campus that many people think of as the soul of Montrose, and perhaps all of Houston. The de Menils, who also played a significant role in the development of other Houston cultural institutions and museums from Paris to Los Angeles, also influenced heads of state, civil and human rights leaders, academics and artists across the globe.
Middleton was writing a Harper’s Bazaar story about the couple’s primary home in 2000. He was visiting Houston for the first time and knew the city only from the perspective of an erudite international journalist wrapped in the whirl of high society and design. He was living in New York, after about a decade in Paris as the bureau chief of W and Women’s Wear Daily magazines.
Middleton had never written a book, but when he learned that the New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf wanted a biography of the couple, he wrote a proposal and got the job.
Although aspects of the de Menils’ history have been told for decades, Middleton aimed to bring all the disparate elements of their lives and work into focus, and put everything in context. Sixteen years later, “Double Vision, The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil,” is finally out. The book contains 657 information-packed pages, plus a lengthy bibliography and an index whose references begin with Dore Ashton’s book “About Rothko” and end with ZZ Top.
Last Tuesday, the release date, the 56-year old Middleton exuded an air of accomplishment and relief as he sat down with a bottle of Topo Chico at Brazil, a Montrose coffee shop. “It’s a big book,” he admitted. “But the size of the book was dictated by the size of their lives.”
After a book launch event that night at the Rothko Chapel, he was headed to Dallas, Austin and Marfa for signings. He’ll appear twice this week in Houston.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston director Gary Tinterow, who hosts a public talk with Middleton on Tuesday, said he was impressed by the quick pace of the book, even as it covers a century of Franco-American history and a half-century of Houston’s emergence from backwater to cultural powerhouse. “It reveals equally interesting insights on all of Houston’s major players, from mayors and university presidents to curators, community leaders, socialites and social activists,” he said.
Pete Gershon, the Houston art historian whose second book is due this fall, notes that the standard de Menil reference book until now has been “Art and Activism,” which documents the couple’s work. “It should be on the shelf of anyone with an interest in art history or Houston history,” he said. “But there is a difference in a book like that and a biography that delves into characters as endlessly fascinating as the de Menils. They were the first family of Houston art.”
Gershon said he limited mention of the de Menils’ work at Rice University in his forthcoming “Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 1972-1985” because he figured Middleton would cover that ground, and he didn’t want to be redundant. He signed off on his final proofs with Texas A&M Press a few weeks ago, capping a five-year effort to give the city its first history of contemporary art.
Middleton could relate, if he and Gershon knew each other. (They’ve not yet met.) He toiled full time on “Double Vision” for the last decade. Another world opened to him four years ago, when he was granted full access to the massive Menil archives. Before that, he only had access to about 300 letters — all handwritten, in French.
“It took a while to make the family feel comfortable,” he said.
The de Menils wrote letters all their lives, documented everything they did and kept their archives prodigiously organized, fully aware that their lives mattered. Middleton read about 200 books and compiled about 3,000 pages of transcripts from interviews, but the archive yielded 3,000 letters and 10,000 photographs that provided a more intimate sense of the de Menils’ personalities.
His quest became a legend of its own across Houston’s art community. His advance from Knopf amounted to only about five weeks of his previous pay.
He was ready to abandon the book to make a living in 2008, when he connected with the Houston Artists Fund, an umbrella organization founded by CPA Jody Blazek that sponsors individual projects by providing a transparent, managed funding mechanism akin to nonprofit status. Middleton raised more than $500,000, mostly from Houston foundations and individuals, through the fund, handling the solicitations himself — a job he found more painful than wrangling his reams of material into a coherent narrative.
“What really kept me going is the idea that the de Menils are the kind of people we need to be reading about,” Middleton said. “They had a tremendous fortune and felt the fortune brought responsibility to make the world a better place, more intelligent and more beautiful. Today, more than ever, that lesson is important. … The de Menil story is a corrective to a lot of what’s going on in the art world and in society.”
He found more information about every element of the narrative he wanted to tell — from the de Menils’ three years in Venezuela to their early years in Houston and friendships with international artists, curators and museum directors — than he had room to share.
“Double Vision” opens in familiar territory, describing the opening of the Menil Collection in 1987 — Dominique’s crowning achievement, years after John’s death. Their story really begins in the 1930s, but Middleton’s next chapters go to the very, very beginnings, when the DNA that drove the de Menils was still forming among their ancestors. Both came from prominent French families, but Dominique’s, especially, were pillars of French history, society and industry.
“The more you understand where they came from, the more you understand why they did what they did when they got here,” Middleton said. He also happens to love history and unpacks it smoothly.
The layers of intellectual and humanistic activity that shaped Dominique’s sensibilities are almost too deep to fathom. Middleton reached back to the Revolution, the era that birthed her great-grandfather, Francois Guizot, a famous 19th-century statesman who served as prime minister to Louis Philippe, the only elected King of France. Guizot also was one of France’s greatest historians, the author of landmark books. His daughter, the powerful Marguerite, found- ed the feminist movement in France, married into the Schlumberger family of uberwealthy textile industrialists from Alsace-Lorraine and kept Guizot’s scholarly traditions alive at Val-Richer, the family’s communal home in Normandy, which Guizot built from the ruins of an 11th-century abbey.
By the time Dominique arrived, writer André Gide (later a Nobel Prize winner) was a lively presence at Val-Richer, a confidant of her colorful uncle Jean Schlumberger. Her father, Conrad Schlumberger, and his other brother, Marcel, advanced the oil industry via the nascent technology of electricity to locate underground reserves. Their company, today’s global giant Schlumberger, multiplied the family’s wealth many times over.
Dominique, nicknamed Dodo, was the strong-willed, inquisitive “smart sister” of Conrad’s three daughters, a daddy’s girl destined to lead. After flirting with a career in filmmaking, she was working for Schlumberger when she met the handsome and adventurous John de Menil, who came from a family with less money but an aristocratic title and an illustrious military history. John, never afraid of grand gestures, would join the company and become a key figure in its worldwide growth.
From the start, they had war experience in common. They grew up during World War I and were married in 1939, shortly before World War II.
Spirituality also looms large in the de Menils’ narrative, from her discreet, Protestant nature to her lifelong fascination with Byzantine Christianity and their shared Catholicism and interest in Eastern philosophies.
Middleton never met the de Menils. He mostly lets others describe their dynamic and sometimes difficult personalities. Middleton reveals how Dominique refused to answer anyone who greeted her with a “How are you,” preferring to cut to the chase with a simple, “Good morning.”
Excerpts of the couple’s letters reveal the most. They were a rare kind of soul mates.
In 1965, when John was home in Houston and Dominique was in Tuscany with the kids, he confessed that he had been tempted to pursue Simone Swan, their beautiful, younger publicist from New York, but also appeals to his wife to pay more attention.
“I need to love and be loved, not like a companion in arms in a shared struggle and adventure, one who esteemed, but as a man. I need to be understood as much as I need to understand. … I would like to be able to say, from time to time, ‘We had a really great time,’ ” John writes. He explains how his temptation will be “eliminated definitively” because Swan is getting married, finishing with the salvo, “You see, Dominique, that I love you and how much I love you. ... Oh, Dominique, let’s have a week unimpeded by anything else. … I like our life with its fullness and its accomplishments. I would like to ‘live’ with you a little, before we die.”
Dominique answered tenderly: “Jean, I am with you. I cry; I kiss you; I console you tenderly. You have lost nothing. The love we have transcends everything and will transcend death.”
For decades, many Houstonians have referred to Swan as John’s mistress. In interviews with Middleton, Swan denied the affair, and another long-time family friend said he “didn’t believe for a second” that John was unfaithful.
And what of the de Menils’ decision to build their life together in Houston? They could have lived anywhere.
Thirty years of datebooks make their international travels sound “awfully enticing” to Middleton. “And yet they always come back here to do everything,” he said. “Because they felt like they were needed here.”
He thinks their home on San Felipe was one of their most important gestures. They made a modernist statement with its design, to inspire others in Houston because the city had no significant architecture in the late 1940s. Their own aesthetic vision came into focus there as well, as they filled the home’s rooms over several decades with art from around the world. And they kept it lively with extraordinary visitors who helped to shape the city’s intellectual life.
“They made Houston exciting,” Middleton said.