Dominique de Ménil
| Dominique de Menil | |
|---|---|
Dominique de Menil
|
|
| Born |
March 23, 1908 Paris, France |
| Died | December 31, 1997 (aged 89) Houston, Texas |
| Spouse(s) | John de Menil |
Dominique de Menil (March 23, 1908 – December 31, 1997) was a French-American art collector, philanthropist, founder of the Menil Collection and an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986.
Dominique de Menil was born Dominique Isaline Zelia Henriette Clarisse Schlumberger, the daughter of Conrad and Louise Delpech Schlumberger. She studied physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne and developed an interest in filmmaking, which took her to Berlin to serve as script assistant on the Josef von Sternberg production of The Blue Angel. She also published articles on film technology in the French journal La revue du cinéma.
In 1930 she met the banker Jean de Menil (who later anglicized his name to John), and they were married the next year. Raised a Protestant, Dominique converted to Roman Catholicism in 1932. The de Menils' Catholic faith, especially their interest in Father Yves Marie Joseph Congar's teachings on ecumenism, would become crucial to the development of their collecting ethos in the coming decades. They had five children: Marie-Christophe (who was married to Robert Thurman and was the grandmother of artist Dash Snow), Adelaide (a photographer who is married to anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter), George de Menil (an economist), François (a filmmaker and architect), and Philippa (co-founder of the Dia Art Foundation and the leader of a Sufi congregation in Lower Manhatten).
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