Christophe de Menil, the Parisian-born fashion designer and renowned art collector, died at age 92 last week at home in New York. Her brother, George de Menil, told The New York Times she had been incapacitated by arthritis.
Christophe was the eldest child of John and Dominique de Menil, legendary art patrons who helped put Houston, Texas on the map as a fine art destination after fleeing France following the outbreak of the Second World War. They settled in Houston, the headquarters of Schlumberger Limited, the oil company that Dominique’s family founded. It was there Christophe’s parents built one of the largest private art collections in the world based on their varied taste, today housed in a museum, the Menil Collection. They also commissioned the nearby Rothko Chapel, featuring 14 monumental canvases by Mark Rothko in a non-denominational setting.
In terms of the impact the family had on Houston’s culture, the de Menils were compared to the Renaissance-era Medicis. "They came as intellectuals to an intellectual void," Isaac Arnold Jr, the then-chairman of Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, told the Times in 1986. "Not only were they considered radical, but really different. They had a foreign accent, and political views that for Texas were extremely liberal."
The family was known to have welcomed Black guests to their home in the upscale River Oaks neighbourhood at a time when Houston was still racially segregated. It was in that atmosphere that Christophe was raised, between Houston, a townhouse in New York and an apartment in Paris. According to the Times, the de Menils placed half the Schlumberger company shares in trust funds for their children when they were young. This economic freedom and access to her parent’s social connections allowed Christophe to pursue creative endeavours. Her personal art collection included work by René Magritte, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Max Ernst and Kenneth Price.
After a brief marriage to the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman—the two together had Christophe’s only child, Taya Thurman—she began studying religion at Columbia University and organising her Midsummer event series in the Hamptons, which featured performance artists like Robert Whitman and the choreographer Twyla Tharp. “The Hamptons were very different then,” she told W magazine in 2010. “It was like a big family of artists.”
Christophe married the Chilean artist Enrique Castro-Cid in 1971, but they divorced three years later. She began working as a costume designer for the experimental playwright and director Robert Wilson in 1980. A red silk evening robe she designed is part of the Costume Institute collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
She first tapped the architect Frank Gehry to renovate her carriage house apartment on East 69th Street, though the arrangement ended badly and she fired him. In 1987 she sold the home to none other than the dealer Larry Gagosian, who overhauled the space. (“I’m heartbroken that it was completely destroyed by Gagosian, totally,” she told W. The architect behind a renovation of the house appears to have been her own brother, Francois de Menil.)
Christophe was close with her grandson Dash Snow, the artist who shunned his wealthy background in favour of a grungy, downtown persona. He died of a drug overdose just days before his 28th birthday in 2009; Christophe described the two as “soulmates”.
In recent years, Christophe was in headlines after friends claimed her daughter Taya Thurman was holding her mother against her will in her own Upper East Side apartment. In 2021, a woman who described herself as Christophe’s friend filed a lawsuit against Taya, saying she previously lived in the townhouse but was thrown out as part of a “well-orchestrated scheme” to isolate Christophe and control her finances. The suit was later dismissed.
