Christophe de Menil (1933–2025)
226Aug. 21, 2025
Collector, fashion designer, and art patron Christophe de Menil died August 5 at her home in New York. She was ninety-two. Her brother George de Menil told theNew York Timesthat she had been bedridden with arthritis. Heir to an immense oil fortune, she poured her money into supporting the arts, championing many future stars early in their careers. Among those who benefited from her patronage were painter Willem de Kooning, choreographers Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp, architect Frank Gehry, and experimental composers Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. De Menil was also the grandmother of Dash Snow, whose louche Polaroids, prolific graffiti writing, and use of his own semen in collages gained him art-world renown before his untimely death of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven in 2009.
Marie-Christophe de Menil was born in Paris on February 5, 1933, the eldest child of John and Dominique de Menil, he a banker and she an heir to the Schlumberger oil equipment fortune. During World War II, as the Nazi invasion threatened France, the family fled to Houston, where Schlumberger was headquartered. The de Menils, avid art collectors who also maintained a home in New York, would go on to found the Texas city’s Menil Collection, which houses their trove of thousands of contemporary works. Raised amid a cultured milieu and endowed, like her four siblings, with a commodious trust fund, young Christophe evinced a taste for the unconventional at an early age, making her society debut in 1952 clad in a fifteen-pound ball gown under which she sported a pair of clamdiggers.
A brief marriage to Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman produced her only child, daughter Taya. Following the couple’s divorce, de Menil in 1963 enrolled at Columbia University, where she studied religion, devoting herself otherwise to hosting a series of parties and exhibitions in the Hamptons, then the locus of a lively arts scene and soon the site of her country home. She married Chilean artist Enrique Castro-Cid in 1971, divorcing him three years later. De Menil purchased a town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and hired Gehry, then an unknown, to design it, but the pair fell out over his vision for the property. She eventually sold the building to Larry Gagosian, but not before hiring Light and Space artist Doug Wheeler to design its lighting.
Around 1980, she began putting her talents as a designer to work in a professional capacity, creating clothes for productions mounted by avant-garde theater director and playwright Robert Wilson. She would continue to design for him for the next twenty years. In 1984, she launched her own fashion line, cheekily titled XS and including minimally structured gowns with such bold details as straps resembling lightning bolts or a cape that floated like a sail from the neckline, only to be drawn back in at the bottom, where it connected to a panel on the front of the dress. She also designed jewelry, such as a pair of earrings shaped like a lobster’s sternum (“It really looks like a pussy!” she toldW Magazinein 2010. “But I think we’ve overcome it by putting a jewel in the slit.”) At the urging of her grandson, Dash, she launched an online store when she was well into her seventies.
De Menil’s philanthropy was consistent, though it took many forms, ranging from the purchase of a group of chairs from the set of Wilson’s acclaimed playEinstein on the Beach(“Bob asked me to buy them; he was broke,” she told theWall Street Journalin 2014) to the funding of the acquisition of a massive granite Michael Heizer work by the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York.
In addition to her brother George and daughter, she is survived by another brother, Francois de Menil; two sisters, Adelaide de Menil Carpenter and Fariha de Menil; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Till very late in her life, she continued to boost the careers of young artists, in recent years purchasing works by Daniel Arsham, Tona Pellizzi, and Gedi Sibony. “People trust me,” she toldW.“I have no ulteriors.”