Menil Collection

The Menil Collection is an art museum in Houston, Texas, that houses the collection assembled by John de Menil and Dominique de Menil. Opened to the public in 1987 in a building designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, it is frequently ranked alongside the Frick Collection in New York, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., as one of the great private museums in the United States. The museum is owned and operated by the Menil Foundation, Inc., a tax-exempt nonprofit public charity, and also receives public funds from the City of Houston, the State of Texas, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

John de Menil, born Jean Marie Joseph Menu de Ménil, and Dominique Schlumberger met at a ball at Versailles in 1930. Dominique was the daughter of Conrad Schlumberger, a founder of the oil-drilling equipment company Schlumberger, whose family fortune exceeded $100 million. Dominique converted to Catholicism, and the couple married in 1931. They settled in Houston in 1941 to escape the Nazi occupation of France. Their most important mentor was Dominican priest Father Marie-Alain Couturier, who introduced them to modern art with a spiritual dimension and advised them to use their wealth to acquire art for public benefit. By the time of John de Menil's death in 1973, the couple had collected 10,000 art objects. The Menil Foundation, Inc. was established in 1954 to promote understanding and culture through the arts. Dominique de Menil served as its first president and ran the museum until her death in December 1997. The Renzo Piano-designed museum opened in June 1987, with Walter Hopps as its first director. Rebecca Rabinow replaced Josef Helfenstein as director in 2016. In 1984, the collections were featured in a major exhibition, "La Rime et la Raison," at the Grand Palais in Paris.

The Menil Collection now holds more than 25,000 objects, though only about 5% is exhibited at any given time, a rotation policy that was one of Dominique de Menil's primary goals to keep the public's experience fresh. The collection spans antiquities, Byzantine and Medieval art, African and indigenous American art, and modern and contemporary works. The modern and contemporary holdings are particularly strong in Surrealism, with over 1,000 examples of Max Ernst's oeuvre and significant works by René Magritte. The collection also encompasses Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, as well as self-taught artists and documentary photographs. The African collection totals more than 900 works, primarily from West and Central Africa, with some pieces acquired as early as the 1930s in Paris; the majority was assembled between the 1950s and 1970s. The indigenous Americas collection contains more than 800 works, with strengths in Mesoamerica, South America, the Pacific Northwest, and the Arctic, reflecting the founders' years living in South America. A distinctive feature is A Surrealist Kunstkammer, conceived by anthropologist Edmund Carpenter and opened in 1999, which presents found objects, natural objects, ethnographic materials, and Surrealist works as an interpretive matrix for understanding human psychology.

The museum's Surrealist holdings include major works by Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Its modern and contemporary collection features Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Cy Twombly, among others. The sculpture collection on the grounds includes works by Mark di Suvero, Michael Heizer, Jim Love, Tony Smith, John Chamberlain, Max Neuhaus, and Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The collection also includes five mobiles by Alexander Calder and conceptual works by Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein. Late nineteenth-century holdings include Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon, extending through Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Piet Mondriaan, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and Joseph Cornell. Objects from the Rock Foundation, founded by Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil, are on long-term loan.

The main museum building was designed by Renzo Piano and was his first commission in the United States. It opened in June 1987. The campus has since expanded to include four satellite galleries: the Cy Twombly Gallery, also designed by Piano and opened in 1995 to house thirty works by the American artist; Richmond Hall, a converted 1930 Weigarten's Grocery Store opened in 1996 to display Dan Flavin's light installations; the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, opened in 1997 and designed by Francois de Menil, the son of John and Dominique; and the Menil Drawing Institute. The Rothko Chapel, founded by the Menils and now operating as an independent foundation, was built in 1971 with Philip Johnson in the International Style. The Menil Foundation began acquiring bungalow-style homes in the surrounding neighborhood in the 1960s, painting each gray to establish visual cohesion. The museum building was painted the same shade, now known as "Menil gray," to coordinate with the bungalows. In 2013, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh redesigned the grounds.

The Menil Collection is located in the Houston Museum District in Houston, Texas. It is owned by the Menil Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt public charity corporation formed under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. The museum continues to serve as a public institution, funded in part by municipal, state, and federal support, and maintains its commitment to rotating exhibitions drawn from its extensive permanent collection.