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Modernism/modernity 13.1 (2006) 765-785



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Intimate Artifice at The Menil Collection

The catalogue to The Menil Collection, The Menil Collection: A Selection from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era (1987), reproduces on its frontispiece Max Ernst's Portrait of Dominique [Figure 1], commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil in 1934. This was the painting they had left behind wrapped in brown paper on top of a closet when they left Paris during the war, not liking it sufficiently to ship it to their new home in Houston or to leave it in the care of friends. Indeed, before that, it had languished for more than a year at the frame shop since no one had cared to collect it and no delivery address had been left. It was not until the framer finally put the painting in his store window that a neighborhood priest recognized the image to be of Dominique and the portrait was claimed (de Menil 1964). Long since redeemed from its ignominy, the painting now forms the heart of what has become internationally one of the most significant collections of the work of Max Ernst, which itself forms a part of the 15,000-piece Menil Collection.

Acquired over a period of 45 or so years, The Menil Collection is the formerly private collection of Dominique and John de Menil [Figure 2], open to the public since 1987 in the form of a purpose-built museum, designed by Renzo Piano. Considered a very important collection of New York School painting and among the most significant Surrealist collections in the United States, its holdings include pieces from an array of cultural and historical traditions. They have an antiquities collection; a very well regarded collection of Byzantine icons; Oceanic and African art; colonial art from the New World; and the European moderns, including Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Miró, and [End Page 765]


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Figure 1
Max Ernst, Portrait of Dominique, 1934, Oil and graphite on canvas, The Menil Collection, Houston.

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Figure 2
The Menil Collection, Houston, Exterior View, North Entrance, Michael Heizer, Charmstone (1991), Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston.
[End Page 766]

Klee. In 1995, it opened a freestanding gallery solely for the permanent exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly, and in 1997, construction was completed on a chapel built to house thirteenth-century frescoes (the dome and apse of a Cypriot church) that were bought and restored by the collection. Since November 1998, Richmond Hall, an adjacent building formerly used for storage and occasional temporary exhibits, has been opened to the public, housing three site-specific works by Dan Flavin—which was to be Dominique de Menil's final commission.1

Each of these initiatives furthers an intricate moral, political, religious, and aesthetic agenda to which Dominique and John de Menil had given early expression in their 1964 commissioning of the Rothko Chapel, the Philip Johnson-designed, non-denominational chapel named for Mark Rothko whose paintings were commissioned for it.

Ethnography of Aesthetics

The narrative of the rejection and subsequent rehabilitation of Portrait of Dominique has become the story that is told repeatedly to conjure the extent to which the sensibilities of the de Menils were transformed.2 It is presented specifically as the story of Dominique and John de Menil's aesthetic conversion, but more broadly it offers an account of the redemptive character of art. As I will show, this idea of the efficacy of art, specifically in the rehabilitation of modern sensibility, is central to the project of The Menil Collection. The art object for Dominique de Menil is richly imbued, not merely a plastic form, nor just the conveyor of symbolic meaning. It is at once an embodiment of the artist's sensibility, a catalyst for certain modes of experience, and as such it may serve as an instrument of spiritual restoration (though conversely it may foster the kind of moral or spiritual degradation that she observed around her).

Alfred Gell, in his essay "The Technology of Enchantment," addresses the way in...

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