Perfection in Houston, Courtesy of the Menil Collection

Or, near perfection, since I’d ditch its DEI hogwash

T oday I’ll write about the Menil Collection, which I always visit when I’m in Houston. “How do I write about perfection?” I thought, and why do I call it perfect? The art is the best of its kind, and, as a totality, the collection is bracing. And there’s no sheep bleating here. The exhibitions I saw were original and intellectually coherent. The building’s divine. A few years ago, I read William Middleton’s Double Vision, the authorized biography of husband and wife John (1904–1973) and Dominique de Menil (1908–1997), the founders, funders, and collectors who made the Menil. Both were charismatic and compelling.

The Menil still expresses their vision and goals, unlike many nonprofits whose masters shred their founding philanthropists as their corpses cool. The Menil’s production values are high. These are among the ingredients in that museological dish we call perfect. I recommend Double Vision for its lifestyles-of-the-rich-and famous vibe, though a smart, observant one, and also for its dive into the oil business in which John was a titan.

This past weekend, I wrote about Bayou Bend, the historic house where the Houston Museum of Fine Arts displays its splendid collection of American furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, and textiles from the days of the Puritans and the old Dutch settlers to the American Centennial in 1876. If Bayou Bend is the Winterthur of the South, the Menil Collection is its Barnes or Guggenheim. The Menil is the serene, intimate, and commodious home for art bought by the Menils, she of the Schlumberger oil-equipment fortune, he a French baron and top Schlumberger executive.

Based in Houston, the Menils collected French Cubism and Surrealism in depth but also a mix of African, Pacific Islander, and American Indigenous art and Cycladic, Egyptian, and Etruscan antiquities. Toss Pollock, Rothko, Warhol, and Barnett Newman into the mix and we have a unique, eclectic take on art and only the best. The museum opened in 1987. The Menils weren’t missionaries — the suave and debonair rarely are — but in the 1950s, in Houston, they were the beacon lights of modern art.

There are about 20,000 objects in the collection, most bought by the Menils, but the museum has added lots of art. Yes, there are plenty of marquee works. A 1910 Picasso nude; de Chirico’s Hector and Andromache, from 1918; Magritte’s Golconda, from 1953, and more Magritte and more Magritte; Yves Klein’s People Begin to Fly, from 1961; Gray Alphabets, by Jasper Johns, from 1956, when Johns actually did something new; and Miró’s Magic of Color, from 1930 — all are fantastic. A Greek pot depicting the Gigantomachy, from 515 b.c., is a very rare thing in shape — it’s a psykter, a tall foot supporting a bulbous pot used to cool wine — and, as a topic, the battle between the gods and giants is always rousing. The Menils liked abstract, ancient forms, whether from the Mediterranean world, the Asante peoples in Ghana, or Easter Island.

Everything looks good in the galleries. The building was designed by Renzo Piano and is both his first and his best American museum, though it’s Dominique de Menil’s vision. She wanted an understated, quiet space, human-scale galleries, and camaraderie between the museum and the modest, leafy neighborhood of bungalow-style homes in which it’s set. There’s no better space to look and ponder, one-on-one, art and visitor. It’s so tranquil, so demure that an open mind can thrive. The building seems like a home, an old white church, and an antidote to big, booming, ever-richer, forever-growing Houston. Dominique and Piano flew a helium balloon on the site of the museum to gauge a height they felt was simpatico with the buildings that had been there since the 1920s. The interior light, natural in most galleries, is delicate and lovely. The museum’s architecture invites the enigmatic and the poetic, so it’s perfect for the Menil’s art.

I liked but didn’t especially love A Surrealist Wunderkammer, a gallery packed with 200 objects from different parts of the collection and in different media. A Wunderkammer, or wonder room, was a small space, or it could be a cabinet, packed with curiosities like bizarre jewelry, stuffed critters, old rocks, very small or very fine objects, religious relics, automata, and tusks. Surrealism is many things but, visually, it’s the irrational juxtaposition of objects. The Wunderkammer is a confection of conflations, so the genre makes sense for the Menil, though the museum is short on oddball things like saintly body parts, shrunken heads, a bestiary, or a stuffed crocodile, which the best Wunderkammern have.

The exhibition program is balanced, offbeat, rarefied, and unique to Houston, all good and precious qualities. It’s not predictable, and it’s certainly not boring. And as it should be, it’s also tied closely to the permanent collection, either highlighting objects in the collection to contextualize them, or exploring topics adjacent to the collection. Andean material culture, the art of Cameroon, a Tacita Dean survey, drawings by Robert Motherwell, and a Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s exhibition together present streaks of gravity and fun. Reading the annual reports, and seeing what was on view when I was there, taught me the specific Menil philosophy. The place commits to art that most of us don’t know, keeps the topic laser-focused, and arranges art with a confident, cool sensibility.

The curatorial agenda isn’t blinkered. The Menil likes variety, but it likes it consistent with the history of the museum. It’s not, for example, going to do a Barbie show or a Star Wars show or Picasso Meets Hannah Gadsby. I don’t furrow my brow, thinking “Why is it doing this dumb show?” when I’m there. By and large, its exhibitions are small. Blockbusters won’t suit. When it goes big, like the Meret Oppenheim show it took from MoMA, it keeps faith with its character.

Oppenheim, a Swiss Surrealist, is a minor part of the Menil collection, though the Menils liked her work a lot. She went in many directions and, active until she died in 1985, was both an edgy and contemporary Surrealist. Hers is an intimate format, which is very Swiss, so it works beautifully at the Menil.

The Menil Collection’s endowment is about $450 million, a heap of money producing enough income to limit its fundraising heavy lifts to capital campaigns. In 1995, the Menil built a freestanding suite of galleries showing the work of Cy Twombly (1928–2011). In 2018, it added the Menil Drawing Institute dedicated to the primacy of drawing in contemporary art. I’m all for art that’s elusive, but Twombly’s lovely calligraphy — and his scribbles, swirls, and splatters — are so self-aggrandizing and stagy that they’re hard for me to love, like, or take seriously, much less consider great. Still, the Menil’s Twombly Gallery, which opened in 1995, is well worth a visit. Filling the nine galleries are paintings, sculptures, and drawings from 1953 to 2004, so it’s comprehensive. Walking through these spaces, looking at Twombly’s enormous paintings with titles drawn from Greek and Roman myths, I saw in him less Monet and Turner and more Whistler.

Twombly’s history and myth pictures are essences, not narratives but hints and specters. Whistler paints forms as harmonies of color. Twombly does it with color, too, but mostly with line, as if he’s showing us the skeletons of the past. And his work is far from harmonious. Twombly is like the Austrian composer Webern. Webern’s music sounds like what would happen if I took my two cats, opened a piano lid, put them in, closed the lid, and listened. Abstract, asymmetrical, discordant, unhappy sound, and angst as a sixth sense, would fill the room. That said, I like the Menil’s Twombly Gallery. It made me look and engage and think. There’s nothing wrong with depth. The space is one of the reasons I tell people there’s no place like the Menil.

The Menil’s Drawing Institute is unique as well. Living artists do indeed draw, as have good artists through the centuries, as preparation and for the joy of pencil, chalk, and crayon on paper. Drawings tend to be small — perfect for the Menil — and demand close looking, which means connoisseurship. The Menil is serious about using its drawings to train young art historians in the art of looking, something most art-history graduate programs neglect, alas.

The building, which opened in 2008, has plenty of walls and a rotating program of big wall drawings. Ronny Quevedo’s 36-foot triptych called CARAACARA, from 2024, is gorgeous. It starts with dressmaking wax paper pressed against walls using heat, creating designs that Quevedo augments with chalk and mica. It’s lots of different blues — cerulean, cobalt, indigo, Persian blue, and more — so the look is celestial.

The Menil’s mission statement, values statement, and diversity and inclusion statement are all odd, given how little concerned they are with art. Rather, art, scholarship, and public education all seem to serve political activism, topped with a dollop of preening. To its founders’ great credit, the Menil is free, and have I said enough that the collection and the campus they gave us are fabulous? Alas, as we’ve seen — endlessly — these days, it’s possible to bollix even the best. The Menil’s mission statement is topped with the announcement that “art is essential to human experience.” Good to say, but it’s too broad a statement, and it hangs without elaboration, so it’s a bit of bombast. In 1776, “all men are created equal” would have been a rhetorical plume, too, were it not followed by a thousand words of grievances and goals.

Aside from “art is essential to human experience,” the Menil prizes transparency, kindness, accountability, professional standards, respect, understanding — and diversity, equity, and inclusion, of course, since they’re sacred, and combatting racism and injustice.

Some of this goop comes from the Menils, fabulously rich Paris expats who initially thought that Houston was Mars, Jim Crow–style. They arrived there in 1941 when Schlumberger moved most of its operations to America as Nazis marched across Europe. They were authentic, sincere limousine liberals, “Kennedy Democrats” as John called himself. The Menils offered to buy a sculpture near Houston’s City Hall honoring Martin Luther King after his death. That took chutzpah. “You can’t do that,” the mayor told them. “It’ll never go through.” It didn’t, and, today, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, from 1963–67, is by the Rothko Chapel. The Menils were very much involved in the civil rights movement in Houston and supported black politicians running for offices that had always been barred to them by the establishment, party machines, or the law.

Whether it was hosting the Dalai Lama or Roman Catholic charities, or sponsoring a human rights prize with the Jimmy Carter Center, well intentioned but bound to flop given their fool of a partner, the Menils were aware of social woes. I have nothing against a museum that fights bias, racism, and injustice, but everything it does has to grow from art and scholarship. These fights also have to come from the museum’s founding mission rather than from current fads and the staff’s fancies.

Yet the Menil’s three statements sprout from the Pussy Hats and Black Lives Matter world, not John and Dominique de Menil’s. Piano, writing about the museum’s architecture, said he wanted to build something “discreet, intelligent, welcoming, and elegant, like Dominique.” The Menils, especially Dominique, were passionate about public access, to be sure, but their art-collecting had little to do with their social and political views. That’s obvious in looking at the collection.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion” is poison, however dressed in marketing syrup and HR lingo. I’d start from scratch and develop mission and values statements grounded in art, scholarship, and the enrichment and education of the public. Of course, I’d ditch the DEI statement, which, in practical implementation, means race-based hiring and mediocrity. The Menils prized excellence, not entitlement. I would redo the mission and values statements to emphasize the Menils’ aesthetic philosophy, tailoring it to the care, development, and interpretation of the collection. The Rothko Chapel has an explicit social justice agenda. But the Menils, I’d wager, wanted to keep their art and museum in a very separate sphere.

So, with the MFA, Bayou Bend, and the Menil, sprawling, bustling, dynamic Houston is for art lovers, too. I hear the city is getting snow this week, creating, no doubt, a profile in chaos. Best not to go now, or during summers described to me as equatorial, though there’s still no more effective place to steam, boil, and bake human flesh than a New York subway platform in August.