Collections - Overview

“The Menil Collection is indeed an imagined museum…
the American embodiment of Malraux’s mythic ‘museum without walls.’”

Bertrand Davezac, former curator of
Byzantine and Medieval Art

The Menil Collection, which is operated by the Menil Foundation, Inc., opened to the public in June 1987 as the primary repository of John and Dominique de Menil’s private collection. One of the most significant of the twentieth century, the collection consists of nearly 15,000 works dating from the Paleolithic era to the present day. Although historically vast, it uniquely resists the conventional museum model of the encyclopedia. Instead, within the four areas that largely define the collection—Antiquity, Byzantine and Medieval, Tribal, and Twentieth-Century Art (with a concentration in Surrealism)—one finds a selective approach to acquisition that yields depth with regard to particular areas and artists.

John and Dominique de Menil collected through serendipitous encounters and deep inclinations. Fleeing Nazi-occupied France in 1941, they settled in America where John managed Schlumberger, Ltd., founded by Dominique’s father and uncle. Here, they met three influential figures—Father Marie-Alain Couturier, a Dominican priest; Alexandre Iolas, owner of the Hugo Gallery; and Dr. Jermayne MacAgy, a progressive scholar. With their guidance, the de Menils began to collect modern art. Throughout the years, their interests expanded into other areas now represented in the collection, with an increasing focus on sacred objects. Also somewhat modestly collected was the art of sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the colonial New World.

As early as 1950, the de Menils began curating and lending works to critically acclaimed exhibitions. It was not until nearly twenty-five years later that the desire to permanently install their collection arose, stemming in part from an increased disillusionment with conventional museum practice. In 1972, the de Menils engaged the architect Louis Kahn to design a building for the collection, but his plans were abandoned after John’s death in 1973. Yet Dominique did not relinquish the idea and continued to pursue it on her own. Commissioned in 1980, Italian architect Renzo Piano responded to her singular vision to preserve the unmediated intimacy she had enjoyed with the works. The result is a museum both spiritual and organic. Of human scale, yet spacious, it is at once self-effacing and sanctified.

Several other important spaces accompany the museum. In February 1995, the Menil Collection, in collaboration with the artist Cy Twombly and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, opened the Cy Twombly Gallery, an exhibition annex designed by Renzo Piano housing a permanent installation of Twombly’s art. Since November 1998, Richmond Hall has housed one of only two permanent Dan Flavin installations in America; this installation was Dominique’s last commission before her death in 1997. The Rothko Chapel, founded by the de Menils, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate, nondenominational sanctuary. The chapel was designed by Howard Barnstone based on an earlier design by Philip Johnson and houses fourteen Mark Rothko paintings. Finally, designed by Francois de Menil and opened in February 1997, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel is a repository for the only two thirteenth-century Byzantine frescoes in the entire western hemisphere.