Dominique de Menil

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Dominique de Menil (1908 – 1997) was an American art collector and museum founder who was an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune.

A daughter of scientist Conrad Schlumberger, she married a banker, Baron Jean de Ménil (a.k.a. John de Menil), in 1931; he died in 1973. They had five children, including daughters Christophe (who was married to Robert Thurman) and Adelaide, a photographer who is married to anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter, a tribal art specialist. One of the Menils' grandchildren is the artist Dash Snow.

Fleeing Nazi-occupied France, the Menils immigrated from Paris to New York and later Houston, where Schlumberger had significant operations. For over forty years the Menils collected some 10,000 objects. Their namesake institution, The Menil Collection, is a private museum in Houston and is often cited as one of the most significant privately assembled art collections, alongside the Barnes Foundation and the Getty Center. The collection includes primitive and tribal African Art, a vast collection of Surrealist pieces from artists such as René Magritte and Max Ernst, modern European artists, Mediterranean, as well as the work of a number of contemporary American artists, in particular that of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Cy Twombly, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, whose self-described "religious" and "meditative" paintings provided the inspiration for the Menil’s ecumenical chapel, which was designed by Philip Johnson, who also designed the Menils' residence.

Dominique de Menil spearheaded annual gifts to recipients of the Rothko Chapel Awards honoring individual efforts on behalf of human rights. Every two years she offered an award named for murdered El Salvadoran Catholic Bishop Óscar Romero. She also founded the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum in Houston. The museum, designed by her son architect François de Menil, houses 13th century Byzantine murals from Lysi, Cyprus. The grounds of the Menil Collection also hold a monument to Martin Luther King and the Cy Twombly gallery, entirely devoted to site-specific installations of Twombly's work.

Her final project was a commission of three site-specific light installations by Dan Flavin for Richmond Hall, a former Weingarten's grocery store in Houston, Texas in 1996.

She died in Houston on 31 December 1997.