Christophe de Menil, Art Patron and Designer, Is Dead at 92

New York Times

20 hours ago

Christophe de Menil, a costume designer, oil heiress, philanthropist and financier of scores of the world's leading figures in art, design and architecture, died on Aug. 5 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by her brother George de Menil, who said she had been bedridden with arthritis.
Ms. de Menil, a tall, graceful, even regal woman, lived a life of extraordinary wealth and artistic involvement, not unlike that of her parents, John and Dominique de Menil, who used their immense fortune from the Schlumberger multinational oil-field services company — her mother was a Schlumberger — to amass one of the world's largest private art collections and to finance the building of museums.
For two decades, Ms. de Menil was a costume designer for the avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, who died on July 31. An art collector herself, she was a patron of Willem de Kooning as well as the choreographer Twyla Tharp. She introduced the Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry to New York as the designer of her Upper East Side carriage house in Manhattan. And as a society grande dame she was an inveterate party giver whose guests included Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Susan Sontag, John Cage and Patricia Kennedy Lawford.
Hers was a privileged life that began in Paris between the world wars. Her father came from a titled but relatively poor family and worked as a banker. Her mother, a mathematics graduate of the University of Paris, was the principal heiress to a family textile fortune accrued in the 19th century before her own father and a great-uncle formed the Schlumberger enterprise.
The parents met at a ball in Versailles, married in 1931 and, as an upper-class young couple, rode horses in the sylvan Bois de Boulogne in Paris.
Marie-Christophe de Menil was born in Paris on Feb. 5, 1933, her parents' eldest child. With the onset of World War II and invading Nazis arriving in Paris, the mother fled to Marseilles with Marie-Chistophe, her sister Adelaide and her baby brother George. In Marseilles, the two girls contracted chickenpox, and their mother wrapped them in loden coats to conceal their spots.
Making their way west to Bilbao, in northern Spain, they boarded a small freighter for Cuba. In Havanna, they were met by the children's father, who had arrived from his base in Romania, where he had run the Schlumberger company operations. They went on to Houston, the company's American base, and it was there that Christophe grew up and another brother, Francois, and a sister, Philippa (known as Phip), were born.
The de Menils led an opulent, cultured life in Houston. Today, the city is home to the Menil Collection, a museum that houses the extensive art holdings accumulated by Ms. de Menil's parents. In New York, where they also maintained a residence, the family's social circles included artists, architects, poets, playwrights and Black activists.
Each child was endowed with a formidable financial legacy, thanks to their grandfather Conrad Schlumberger, a physicist, and the great-uncle, Marcel. Together the two men pioneered well-logging, which, using the electrical resistance of the earth, determines with considerable accuracy the location of oil deposits.
When the five de Menil brothers and sisters were still young, their parents placed half of their Schlumberger company shares in trust funds for them.
At her debut in 1952, Ms. de Menil was already showing an unconventional if not eccentric side. She wore a white four-leaf clover gown by Charles James, a renowned designer for society women. The dress weighed nearly 15 pounds but allowed her to glide effortlessly across the ballroom floor. Beneath it, she wore pedal pushers.
In the spring of 1959, she married Robert Thurman, who was eight years her junior and who would enter Harvard that fall. He dropped out two years later with wanderlust and headed toward India by way of Turkey and Iran in search of enlightenment through Buddha. He left behind his infant daughter, Taya, as well as his wife, who, he was quoted as saying, was 'nervous, scared of the whole thing.'
Ms. de Menil maintained for years that it was not India where he had been headed but the mountains of Mexico, where he proposed to camp and explore mind-altering drugs, neither of which she felt was appropriate for an infant. The marriage ended in divorce, and Mr. Thurman, who became a distinguished scholar of Buddhism and a monk, later married a German-Swiss model who had divorced Timothy Leary, the proponent of LSD. One of their children, born in 1970 in Mexico, is the actress Uma Thurman.
In 1963, Ms. de Menil entered Columbia University to study religion and launched her 'Midsummer' series of parties and exhibits in the Hamptons, showcasing artists like Ms. Tharp, the avant-garde composer La Monte Young and the multimedia artist Robert Whitman. There she got to know de Kooning while working as a sound coordinator on Hans Namuth's documentary about him. She eventually became a collector of de Kooning's works.
Ms. de Menil married for a second time — to Enrique Castro-Cid, a Chilean artist — in 1971. They divorced three years later, and she never remarried.
By 1976, Ms. de Menil was ensconced in New York and a country house on the East End of Long Island. In Manhattan, she purchased a three-story Georgian townhouse with a lap pool on East 69th Street that had been a carriage house.
She hired a young up-and-coming Frank Gehry to redesign it, but the relationship ended in tears when she fired him over a glass of champagne, unhappy with his idea of gutting the townhouse and creating two buildings, one for Ms. de Menil and one for her teenage daughter, with a bridge connecting them. 'I think she was afraid of it,' the architect Paul Lubowicki, an associate of Mr. Gehry's, told The Los Angeles Times in 1998.
To finance her transformation of the house into what became effectively a fashion atelier, she sold more than $2 million worth of major paintings at a Sotheby Parke Bernet auction in 1965, a sum equivalent to about $20.7 million today. Ms. de Menil sold the house in 1987 to the art dealer Larry Gagosian and moved to a Park Avenue apartment.
By then she had developed a talent for creating clothes and jewelry and had been discovered by Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater director. He started turning to her for costume designs in 1980 and would continue to do so for the next two decades or so. Among his productions she worked on was 'The Golden Windows' and his 12-hour opera, 'The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down,' with music by Philip Glass.
Her fashion creations were less design than invention. She delighted in shocking people, as she did with a gown of ivory foam rubber that she wore to a waltz in 1984.
That was the year she presented her first major collection, called XS. The fashion reporter John Duka of The New York Times pointed out that the name could be read as ''Excess,' in case anyone missed the point.'
'I'm extreme, and I have strong tastes,' Ms. de Menil told The Times in 1986. 'I get that so much from my mother — decide what you're aiming at and strike out after it. Before, I did things for others, and now I'm doing something for myself. Flowering, in a way. Expanding. Now I have a vocation and much better bearings.'
At the same time, she was using her considerable fortune to back a stable of artists, including Mr. Glass, Mr. Young, Ms. Tharp, the choreographer Trisha Brown (for whom she also designed costumes) and the composer Terry Riley.
It was funds from Ms. de Menil that allowed the Metropolitan Museum of Art to purchase Michael Heizer's 46-ton Guennette sculpture, created from warm pink granite, originally for the plaza of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue.
In addition to her brother George, she is survived by another brother, Francois de Menil; two sisters, Adelaide de Menil Carpenter and Fariha de Menil; a daughter, Taya Thurman; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A grandson, Dash Snow, an artist whose work was shown at the 2006 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, died of a drug overdose at 27 in 2009.
Ms. De Menil was briefly in the news again in 2021, when Alina Morini, who said that she had been Ms. De Menil's longtime live-in companion at her recent Manhattan home, on East 81st Street, sued Taya Thurman, contending that Ms. De Menil, who was ailing at the time, had been subjected to 'forced and currently ongoing isolation' at the hands of her daughter. Ms. Morini said that she herself had been 'falsely arrested' on trespassing charges and detained by the authorities for 30 hours. The suit was dismissed in New York State Supreme Court the next year.
Beyond promoting the careers of artists, Ms. de Menil prided herself on her own creative work, her fashion and jewelry designs, and saw it as rivaling that of her more celebrated peers. When she made her debut presentation in 1984 before a who's who of fashion and society, including Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Bianca Jagger, Mr. Duka wrote in The Times, 'When Miss de Menil descended the stairs to greet her audience, she may have thought she had joined the ranks of Carolina Herrera and Jacqueline de Ribes.'
Years later her self-confidence remained intact. At a society event in East Hampton in 2012, a young blogger posed with Ms. de Menil and asked her, 'Who is your favorite designer?'
'Alexander McQueen,' Ms. De Menil answered. 'And also myself.'
Adam Nossiter and Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.