Christophe de Menil, a collector, designer, and patron who forged long-lasting connections with many key artists of the past century, died in New York on August 5 at 92. The New York Times first reported her death on Monday.
She was a member of the wealthy, mega-collecting Menil family; her parents, John and Dominique de Menil, had significant art holdings in their own right and founded the Menil Collection, a museum in Houston, Texas. In part because of her family’s social circle, she was afforded an unusual level of access to famed artists of the 20th century.
Christophe considered Merce Cunningham, Andy Warhol, and Willem de Kooning to be among her close friends. In a W magazine profile from 2010, she even recounted attending a talk by a European mystic, then racing over to tell Jasper Johns about it during a Cunningham performance at Lincoln Center. “I was sitting in a box next to Jasper, and I said to him: ‘Oh, my God. I just heard this rather interesting talk—and I think we are the divine,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, you almost got it.’ It was so huge!”
Her art connections even extended to her personal life. After her first husband, Robert Thurman, left her, she married the artist Enrique Castro-Cid. Her grandson was Dash Snow, an artist who died at 27 in 2009, just as his career was taking off. (With Thurman, she had one daughter, Taya.)
Partly as a result of those connections, she was also granted the ability to start a collection of her own. Alongside other members of her family, she ranked three times on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, from 1990 to 1992. Included in her collection were works by René Magritte, Barnett Newman, and many more.
Occasionally, she sold art from her collection in public-facing ways. The Times reported that, in 1965, to fund a revamp of her home, she told $2 million worth of art at Sotheby Parke Bernet. In 1985, she sold Barnett Newman’s Ulysses (1952) at Sotheby’s. The painting—which sold for $1.59 million, setting a record for Newman—has since entered the collection of the Menil Collection.
Marie-Christophe de Menil was born in Paris in 1933. As the Nazis rose to power, the de Menils fled France for Spain before heading to Havana and then to Houston, where Schlumberger, the oil company John de Menil helped run, had its American operations.
During the ’50s, Christophe de Menil made forays into the world of fashion, famously donning a “Clover Leaf” dress designed by Charles James. Then, in 1963, she began attending Columbia University, where she studied religion.
Having sold $2 million in art in 1965, de Menil properly launched her fashion career, turning her home into an atelier. Starting in 1980, she acted as a designer to theater director and artist Robert Wilson, whose productions often featured her clothes. And in 1984, she began designing garments for private clients. (A red “evening robe” by her, from a 1992 collection, is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
At the same time, de Menil was working on a renovation of her New York home, which she brought on Frank Gehry to do the redesign, with the Light and Space sculptor Doug Wheeler on hand to oversee the lighting. In 1987, she sold the house to Larry Gagosian, two years after the dealer expanded his Gagosian gallery to New York and relocated to the city.
In her later years, her collecting acumen did not dim. She continued buying art by artists such as Gedi Sibony and Daniel Arsham. “Gedi Siboney reminds me of [American abstract expressionist] Barnett Newman and Daniel Arsham is better than any Magritte,” she told Nowness. “It just takes people a while to see.”
