The Menil Collection
Renzo Piano gallery of around 17,000 works, set in a leafy campus of small museum buildings.
John and Dominique de Menil, heirs to the Schlumberger oilfield fortune, assembled some 17,000 works ranging from Palaeolithic objects and Byzantine icons to Surrealism and post-war American painting. Dominique commissioned Renzo Piano, in his first American museum, for a long grey cypress-clad building that opened in 1987. Its ferrocement 'leaves' filter Gulf Coast daylight into the galleries, and the low horizontal form deliberately matches the scale of the surrounding bungalows.
The main building sits in a campus of about thirty acres in Montrose. Nearby are the Cy Twombly Gallery of 1995, also by Piano, a Dan Flavin light installation in Richmond Hall, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel and the Menil Drawing Institute of 2018 by Johnston Marklee. The Rothko Chapel, with fourteen paintings by Mark Rothko, stands on adjoining ground under separate management. Admission to all Menil buildings is free, a condition set by the founders.
Highlights
- Piano's daylight 'leaves' filtering sun into the main galleries
- Surrealism rooms with Magritte, Ernst and Man Ray
- Cy Twombly Gallery, a separate pavilion of 1995
- Dan Flavin's permanent light installation in Richmond Hall
