THE MUSEUM BOOM

Everybody's doing it, from Paris to Venice to Cologne to Los Angeles to Houston. Everybody with $10 million to rub together is opening a museum of modern and contemporary art. Are the four American newcomers a generous bequest to the increasingly art-conscious nation? Or are they temples of ego—the pyramids of the eighties? evaluates the collectors and the curators

STEPHEN JAMAIL

Buildings steel; trustees, educators, the but and public, museums are collections curators, politicians, who made are donors, come of made brick are made to scholars, of see artists, and people—directors, what mortar, of works journalists, administrators, all the glass of and fuss and art; is about. Get the right mix and great things happen. Four new structures housing modem and contemporary art—opening in Houston, Los Angeles, and New York—present an opportunity to reflect on the individuals who give them life.

The Menil Collection in Houston, which after several postponements will open in June, is quite literally a reflection of its creator. Dominique de Menil is a question mark followed closely by an exclamation point. "Remember," a prominent Houstonian told me, "she's a woman who wears her mink coat inside out." Now, for all I know, Mrs. de Menil may not even own a mink coat, but she is perceived to be someone who would wear it inside out if she did.

She is perceived to be many things. The Schlumberger (oil-drilling equipment, not jewelry) heiress who met her brilliant baron at a ball at Versailles. The sophisticated Frenchwoman who chose to live deep in the heart of Texas. The multi-multimillionairess who values only the products of the human spirit. The proud matriarch of a clan of five enlightened philanthropists/patrons. The fragile widow with a will and ambition as strong as the ferro-cement of the building which will house her collection. The Believer—Huguenot, Catholic convert, ecumenist. She is all this and more. If one were to cast her life as a film, perhaps only the subtlety of Sir Alec Guinness en travesti would do for the role.

Henry Geldzahler affectionately refers to Mrs. de Menil as "an art nun—she had the children and then went back to preaching the gospel." In a way, her plans for the Menil Collection are an attempt to create a secular monastery devoted to the mysteries of creation—not God's but man's, or perhaps God's through man's.

MENIL THE MENEL COLLECTION

Remember, Dominique de Menil is a woman who wears her mink coat inside out."

LACMA LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF AIWS ROBERT 0. ANDERSON BUILDING

There's oil under the La Brea Tar pits fossils and Lacma Could benefit from it someday

Indeed, Dominique and her late husband, John de Menil, started their collection after their own conversion on the road to Damascus. Their encounter was with a Dominican priest named Marie-Alain Couturier. His medieval appearance— white hair cropped tightly to the skull, black horn-rimmed glasses, white cowl robe and black cape—belied his passion for contemporary art. Father Couturier, whom Janet Flanner described as "a missionary in Paris intellectual circles," was the catalyst for contemporary art in French contemporary churches, including Matisse's Chapel le du Rosaire at Vence, Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame-duHaut at Ronchamp, and Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grace at Assy with works by Rouault, Leger, Braque, and Lipchitz.

John de Menil re-encountered Father Couturier in the forties in New York. The de Menils were refugees from the war, living in Houston, the American headquarters of the Schlumberger family business. (John had joined the business several years after their marriage in 1931.) Under the spell of the distinguished cleric, over the next three decades they amassed a unique collection of modem and contemporary art, and "the threads of civilization" leading up to it.

They also aligned themselves with almost every cultural and educational organization in their adopted community— "to the benefit of us all," says Linda Cathcart, director of Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum. Their critics say that they lost interest in any institution which they could not control, and moved on to the next. But along the way they helped to transform the cultural life of the city.

Socially and politically progressive in an ultraconservative Texas town, they were conspicuous outsiders. When asked in the sixties how he could live in Houston, John de Menil answered with a smile, "It's easy. First they wouldn't talk to me, and now I won't talk to them." Even their house set them apart from their neighbors. One block off River Oaks Boulevard stands a sober brick-and-glass structure built in 1950 by Philip Johnson. Unlike the faux French Chateaux, Southern Plantations, and Mediterranean Villas that surround it, the house is not meant for public display—it is barely visible from the street. In sharp contrast to the discreet exterior, and typical of her original frame of mind, Mrs. de Menil chose the flamboyant American couturier Charles James to design the interiors.

MET THE METROPOLITIAN MUSEUM OF ARTS LIIA ACHESON WALLACE WING

FAIRY GODMOTHER

The Met will be giving MOMA a run for its pledge money, its donors and their pictures.

The architectural concerns of their house were later reflected in her concerns for the building to house their collection, which is also domestic in scale. Over the years, the de Menils purchased nine city blocks in Montrose, a modest residential area of Houston dating from the twenties. Mirroring the work of their mentor in France, the first structure of their art complex, dedicated in 1971, was the Rothko Chapel. The octagonal building is simple and stark. It has four benches and black squares of carpet with round pillows on a stone floor. Fourteen paintings by Mark Rothko are the only adornment. They are primarily black, though there are dark areas of ecclesiastical violet and burgundy. There are no images, only paint on canvas. There is a certain amount of texture and a kind of rhythm in the way the paint is laid on the canvas, but basically these are blank pages for the faithful to meditate upon. And that is the purpose of the chapel— to allow one to turn in on oneself. The walls have no windows. The chapel too is turned in on itself.

On a recent visit I observed a young man sitting on one of the benches, c*o+ntemplating one of the paintings. He was in the same position when I left twenty minutes later. As I was noting some ecumenical publications at the desk in the vestibule, four French-speaking tourists came in. They signed the visitors' book and proceeded quietly, respectfully, into the chapel. They came out almost immediately, tittering. Once outside the door they were laughing uncontrollably. The attendant turned to me and said, "Well, I guess you can't please everyone."

After John's death in 1973, Dominique continued their mission. In 1981, she announced the formation of the Menil Collection (dropping the "de"), to be housed in a building near the chapel. It was deliberately not called a museum, with that word's connotation of monumentality and ego.

Mrs. de Menil's choice of Renzo Piano as architect for the new building was just as deliberate. Best known for his work on the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) in Paris, he is as much an engineer as he is an architect—not only a designer of buildings but also a builder of concepts. The result of their collaboration is a tour de force of light and technology masquerading as a warehouse in the middle of a neighborhood park. It may be so sophisticated a structure that it will be taken for what it appears to be rather than for what it is. There are already those who refer to it as the "Empress's New Clothes." Mrs. de Menil charged Piano to produce a structure which was small on the outside and big on the inside. His solution is a largely one-story building with a second story stepped above in back. The lower step includes the public galleries, where temporary exhibitions will be installed and the permanent collection shown by rotation. Much of the space is illuminated from above via a unique system of ferro-cement "leaves" which filter sunlight by multiple refraction. Like the leaves of a shade tree, God's gift to man in the heat and light of south Texas, they will provide protection from the elements and reveal the character of the changing seasons. The upper step is the "treasure-house," where the permanent collection not on public view will be kept in open storage—paintings hung, objects displayed on shelves—available on appointment to be seen by students, scholars, and others interested in some particular aspect of the collection.

MOCA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

This non-museum museum, the chapel, and what will be a sculpture garden are parts of what Piano calls a "zone of culture." The overall architectural plan carefully maintains the scale of the neighborhood, incorporating many of the nearby small houses as satellite structures—present and future offices, staff housing, a planned bookstore and cafe. In effect, they have annexed a part of Montrose and created "Menilville."

From Paleolithic to Pop and beyond, the Menil Collection's estimated 10,000 or more paintings, sculptures, prints, books, and photographs encompass all the major movements of twentieth-century art—Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal, et al.—as well as sculptures from Cycladic Greece and Asia Minor, Byzantine icons, post-Renaissance European paintings, pre-Columbian and Colonial art of the Americas, primitive and tribal objects of Africa, Oceania, the American Indians, and Eskimos. It has never been seen in its totality, though over the years Mrs. de Menil has herself organized and installed a number of highly acclaimed exhibitions of material from the collection at various locations around Houston, and has lent to exhibitions all over the world. "The best curator the Menil Collection will ever have is Mrs. de Menil herself," says the Met's Bill Lieberman. "She has both an eye and a point of view," adds Henry Geldzahler.

There have been persistent rumors that Mrs. de Menil has attempted to lure Pontus Hulten to Houston as director of her collection, but she would seem to have the perfect partner in Walter Hopps. A joke circulated a few years ago that when the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was being organized, the members of the board of trustees, including Mrs. de Menil, put two names in a hat and drew. Mrs. de Menil got Hopps and MOCA got Hulten. Hopps, an enigmatic figure who might have been invented by Marcel Duchamp, is an art-world legend. The labels people stick on him depend on their point of view: "genius" or "flake"; "sensitive" or "erratic"; "mercurial" or "pathological." The stories about him, apocryphal or otherwise, would fill a book. It is said that he only initiates phone calls, he never accepts them. He has been known to disappear for weeks at a time, sometimes completely, other times checking in with his secretary twice a day for messages. At one institution, he was finally put on "contingency pay," receiving his salary only when he showed up. A former boss, when asked why he put up with such behavior, answered, "If I could find him, I would fire him." Hopps is also habitually tardy, and one Los Angeles artist had buttons made up which read, "Walter Hopps will be here in twenty minutes." Perhaps the ultimate Walter Hopps anecdote is that of the British artist spotted at the Los Angeles airport about to board a plane. When asked why he was leaving the city just as his career was beginning to take off there, he replied, "I cannot live in a city where I have to hear one more Walter Hopps story."

In seven years MOCA has gone from not even a hole in the ground to a $29.5 million endowment fund.

Jim Elliott, former director of the Wadsworth Atheneum and now director of the University Art Museum, Berkeley, says that Hopps "was the first person I ever encountered who treated artists of his own generation as equals of the artists of the past." He has taught that lesson to many and is revered by artists for doing so.

In the sixties, Hopps was director of the Pasadena Art Museum—PAM in the battle of the acronyms—for part of its brief pre-Norton Simon existence as a museum for contemporary art. PAM was the prototype that failed. An established museum in very conservative, very rich Pasadena was transformed into a center for contemporary art—admittedly an unconventional location for such an institution, but in the sixties anything could happen in Southern California. Fred and Marcia Weisman were on the board—the first Jewish trustees in a nest of Wasps. They were, and are, major collectors of contemporary art. Marcia Weisman's brother is Norton Simon, and, whatever the sibling rivalry, they are collectors whose tastes run in opposite directions. Mr. Weisman was at one time Norton Simon's business associate, trafficking in tomato ketchup (Hunt Foods), and is now the leading distributor of Toyotas in America. He survived two and a half hours of cranial surgery in 1966, after he was hit in the head by a telephone allegedly thrown by Frank Sinatra, who was celebrating Dean Martin's birthday at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Norton Simon, whom one museum director referred to as "the grocer's son," made a lot of money, trained his eye, bought a superb collection of French Impressionists, sold it and bought an even greater collection of old masters, and then started his own museum. Except he didn't exactly start it: he acquired PAM, then desperately in debt, and made it his own with the same hostile-takeover tactics he'd perpetrated on Hunt's and other companies. PAM's modem art went to storage or to the auction block, Norton Simon's old masters went onto the walls, and PAM became the Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena. In Los Angeles, they like to refer to it as their "Frick," though there are those who remember the late PAM and what might have been.

Mr. and Mrs. Weisman were not part of the coup d'etat and withdrew their support (it is said that Mr. Simon is still trying to force the Weismans to give a million-dollar pledge they withdrew). Walter Hopps says that Mrs. Weisman's home became the city's "museum of contemporary art"— the place where the art could be seen and the people passionate for it could meet, mingle, and maneuver.

Then one night in 1979, Mrs. Weisman was seated next to Mayor Tom Bradley at dinner. She mentioned to him that Los Angeles needed a new museum of contemporary art. He said that they already had an art museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That was that—until sometime later when Mrs. Weisman received an Alice-in-Wonderland telephone call from the mayor, asking if she didn't think Los Angeles needed a new museum of contemporary art. The inevitable committee was formed and the result was MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. For a long time it was called "Marcia's Museum."

About the same time, Dr. Earl A. Powell III (a.k.a. Rusty) was named the new director of LACMA. Adjoining the La Brea Tar Pits (there's oil under all those fossils and the museum could possibly benefit from it someday), it was established in 1965 as an encyclopedia of the arts, like the Metropolitan Museum in New York. However, its activities in the field of twentieth-century art were limited—sporadic exhibitions, the occasional major acquisition. The only excitement seemed to involve a controversial curator with something like civil-service status, who was praised by some as an idea man and attacked by others as indifferent to contemporary art and more interested in cultivating the local maitre d's than in cultivating the local artists. The situation remained fairly constant until the end of the seventies brought it spectacularly to life with the arrival of the vibrant Dr. Powell, and a new potential competitor, MOCA.

Mrs. Weisman and others have posed some rhetorical questions. Would LACMA's new Robert O. Anderson Building exist if it were not for MOCA? Or, more precisely, would it be devoted to twentieth-century art if it were not for MOCA? Few presume to answer, but none hesitate to ask. LACMA, however, can demonstrate that it made its plans well in advance of MOCA's, not responding to a challenge but providing for the natural growth of the institution.

When LACMA was first established, the committee appointed to select an architect for the original building wanted Mies van der Rohe. But Howard Ahmanson, who pledged the money to construct the building and whose name it would bear, allegedly vetoed its choice. He eventually eliminated every other name on its list, too, except for one local architect, William Pereira, purportedly on the list as a gesture to the local architectural community. The result was not one but three ugly buildings. It seems that Mr. Ahmanson's contract with the museum defining such vital issues as the size of his name on the building also required that any additional building which touched his walls would also be called Ahmanson. To circumvent this, the expanded architectural plans had three freestanding pavilions. Or so the story goes.

Enter Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates of New York, who were commissioned in 1981 to develop a master plan for LACMA'S future growth. One result is the Robert O. Anderson Building, named for the former executive-committee chairman of ARCO and, reportedly, the largest landowner in the U.S.A. He didn't actually give all the money needed for the building, but as chairman of the company that pitched in the major part, he reaped the benefit. "We used the new building," Rusty Powell says, "as an opportunity to rethink the entire museum." Besides providing an excuse for thought, and space for the permanent collection of twentieth-century art and for special exhibitions, this ternpie of limestone, green terra-cotta, and glass blocks on Wilshire Boulevard also hides those three ugly buildings. Meanwhile, at MOCA, Pontus Hulten had been named director, giving the project instant legitimacy and worldwide attention. Hulten made his reputation as director of the Museum of Modem Art in Stockholm, and then, from 1973 to 1980, as director of the Beaubourg. From Paris to Los Angeles turned out to be too much of a jump for him. In 1982 he resigned. His friends and supporters speak of betrayal by members of MOCA'S board, and interference in aesthetic judgments which he felt were his domain as director, MOCA'S staff and trustees enthuse over Hulten's contribution as "founding director" and explain his frustrations there as the result of his inexperience with the bureaucracy of American over "founding director" and explain his frustrations there as the result of his inexperience with the bureaucracy of American museums. (Though what could possibly be more bureaucratic than a French national museum?) The bottom line seems to be that he had no particular inclination to bewitch, bother, and bewilder the rich out of the vast sums of money that are needed to build and operate a large institution like MOCA, and no patience with trustees who want to be directors. He moved on to the Palazzo Grassi project in Venice, which was largely funded by Fiat and the Agnellis, who work their own magic.

Hulten's deputy director, Richard Koshalek, succeeded him and was all the trustees could hope for: reaching out to the community, acting as a symbol and spokesperson for the institution, and going for the dough. In seven years, MOCA has gone from not even a hole in the ground to both Frank Gehry's Temporary Contemporary (not so temporary anymore, since the city gave it a fifty-year lease) and a new permanent building by Arata Isozaki (a red sandstone cluster of geometric shapes which spreads horizontally in the vertical canyon of downtown L.A.), the beginnings of a collection (including eighty works of art purchased for $11 million from Count Dr. Giuseppe Panza di Biumo), 20,000 members, and a $29.5 million endowment fund.

Their announced goal is to raise $38 million, though $50 million is the number heard privately, so perhaps the widespread rumor that Mr. Koshalek is looking for a position elsewhere is not unfounded. After all, the first millions are surely a lot easier to raise than the last. Count Panza, for example, was very upset when a board meeting dared to discuss the possibility of selling off some of his eighty works (which he claims he sold to them as a job lot for a bargain price). And there is also Max Palevsky, another big-bucks L.A. businessman, who had been a driving force in the formation of MOCA and had committed $1 million to the building project. When the architectural committee accepted the Isozaki design, Mr. Palevsky balked. But, unlike Mr. Ahmanson at LACMA, he was unable to get the committee to change its decision. He withdrew his $1 million pledge, and he wants back the half-million dollars he had already given.

Construction has been held up for a year to observe the flight of the wild canary so that the building's location would not affect its migratory patterns.

Adding fat to the museum fire, Marcia and Fred Weisman are now divorced and have divided their collection. Mr. Weisman—who at one time tentatively established a relationship with LACMA, then later allegedly committed his collection as a gift to MOCA but called that deal off a half-hour before it was to be announced by the mayor—has now decided to form his own museum. He has already hired a director, Henry Hopkins, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art, and he has been negotiating with the city of Beverly Hills to house his collection for eternity in the Greystone Mansion. If all goes well, it will open in 1988. (In 1969 Joseph Hirshhom proposed to display his collection at Greystone and was turned down. He made a better deal with President Johnson, and you can now visit his collection on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The Beverly Hills pols will doubtless keep this fact in mind as the negotiations proceed.)

Mrs. Weisman has a different approach to the ultimate disposition of her collection. Like many collectors one speaks to these days, she views herself as merely the custodian of the works she owns, and feels an obligation to make them available to others during her lifetime. She does the conventional thing of lending to exhibitions, but she also gives guided tours of her own house, charging a fee, which goes to MOCA. In addition, she gently twists the arms of artists and dealers for donations of works of art to make Cedars-Sinai hospital a more pleasant place to be sick. And she has an original plan for her collection. Aware of gaps in the collections of many institutions, she would like to fill some of them, thus becoming the Lady Bountiful to cities and towns all over the country.

There's a new face in town. The Lannan Foundation has gone west and established an office in Venice. The foundation, which received between $80 and $90 million from the estate of its founder, J. Patrick Lannan, will be required under federal law to spend between $4 and $5 million a year on its programs. A building in Marina del Rey will be renovated to house more than five thousand contemporary pieces in "study storage," available to students and scholars. (This is not intended to be a museum; the present one in Lake Worth, Florida, will continue to operate.) The foundation will lend to institutions all over the country and organize its own traveling exhibitions. It will continue to acquire works of living artists, and will give grants to institutions.

Then there are other characters waiting in the wings. Count Panza is reputedly shopping around for a museum to buy the five hundred or so works left in his collection and keep them together in perpetuity. Another Southern California art institution is said to be very interested. Donald Bren of the Irvine Company (Orange County, California, and what used to be the Irvine Ranch are practically synonymous) is eyeing the Newport Harbor Art Museum as the object of his affections. Edward Broida, whose plan for a museum of contemporary art in New York turned out to be too expensive a proposition, is said to be likely to establish his museum in Los Angeles. And there's also talk of a new museum in downtown San Diego. Perhaps the most significant on dit is that there are negotiations going on for the Getty and Norton Simon Museum to merge, or at least for "the Great Getty" to adopt those contemporary works that Simon put in storage.

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The Museum Boom

Another important Los Angeles collector, Douglas Cramer, has no plans to build a museum for his increasingly significant collection, but he is building a structure on his ranch near Santa Barbara to display the art and make it available to the public, a la Charles Saatchi. Construction has been held up for a year because the flight of the wild canary had to be observed to ensure that the building's location would not affect its migratory patterns. As he is also planning a new house in town, he is considering sending a large part of the collection out on the road as a loan exhibition to a number of prestigious institutions. Mr. Cramer, who produces The Love Boat with Aaron Spelling, is good-naturedly aware of those who feel he has an obligation to compensate for pandering to the American television-viewing public.

Reader's Digest, the Love Boat of magazines, was founded by DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, one of the greatest benefactors in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before her death in 1984, Mrs. Wallace was responsible for the renovation of its Fifth Avenue Plaza and Great Hall, the permanent endowment for the fresh flowers, and the complete reinstallation of the Egyptian collection. She took an almost maternal interest in her myriad philanthropic projects all over the city of New York and elsewhere (e.g., Monet's gardens at Givemy). A golf cart was kept at a Met back entrance to allow her to tour the work sites. She gave lavish parties for workmen and staff to celebrate each project's various stages of completion.

This month, the Met begins previews of its own "museum of modem art," the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. The building, a discreet cliff of stone and glass, rises unobtrusively from Central Park on what was once a parking lot. The site has a checkered past.

The museum's 1970 master plan gave it to a proposed South West Wing, which was to house in part the Department of 20th Century Art, which Thomas Hoving had put in the hands of Henry Geldzahler. Money was scarce until 1976, when media mogul Walter Annenberg (TV Guide, Seventeen, Daily Racing Form) pledged $20 million to build the wing and another $20 million for ten years' operating costs of his pet project, which would also live there. The Fine Arts Center of the Annenberg School of Communications at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to give it its full title, would help the masses understand art through television (Ambassador Annenberg loved Kenneth Clark's TV series Civilisation). Uproar. There was widespread and vociferous opposition to the idea of a quasi-independent educational facility being housed in space intended to display art. Annenberg withdrew his offer and the cement foundation lay scarring Central Park for years, a symbol of the frustrations even the Met faces in raising money. Finally, the Met's fairy godmother, Lila Acheson Wallace, waved her wand and $ 11 million was committed to the project. Further funding was arranged from the New York City Capital Budget by Henry Geldzahler, by then N.Y.C.'s commissioner of cultural affairs. (When he left for the government job in 1978, he said, "After seventeen years at the Met, it's a great relief to be getting out of politics.")

William Slattery Lieberman (Bill) became chairman of the Met's Department of 20th Century Art in 1979. He is known as a fellow who one day grabs a quick sandwich in the "staff caf" with the sows-curators, secretaries, and maintenance people, and the next day entertains Mme. Pompidou in the executive dining room. Lieberman is Baldassare Castiglione's Courtier set down in the public palace of America's merchant princes. During his tenure, the Met has acquired a series of gifts remarkable in quality and in quantity. Alfred Barr, MOMA'S first director, once teasingly referred to Lieberman as "the curator of collectors," and, though much more, he has certainly proved himself to be that. His much discussed eye for the installation of paintings and sculptures promises a provocative installation of the permanent collection and the new wing's opening show on Robert Rauschenberg. "Remember," Lieberman has said, "people are always going to criticize the way contemporary art is or is not shown, whether it's in New York or Squewdunk."

Before coming to the Met, Lieberman had worked his entire professional life—thirty-four years—at the Museum of Modem Art, first as an assistant to Barr, and later as curator or director of the Departments of Prints, Painting and Sculpture, and Drawings. His knowledge of MOMA'S collection is probably unsurpassed by anyone currently on its staff. It is ironic that Barr's protege has ended up as the Met's 20th Century chairman, rather than as the Modem's director. He knows that no institution could begin to match MOMA'S fifty-seven-year cache of historic modem treasures. But he has no restrictions (except limited funds) on acquiring the best of the work produced today, and he has begun to do just that. The contemporary-art crowd all over the country is astounded by some very nontraditional acquisitions recently made by the very traditional Met. "I'm simply following Alfred Barr," says Lieberman. "His acquisitions were really, so to speak, hot off the easel. When curators say they can't make qualitative judgments on contemporary works, I don't think they should be employed. It's their job to make choices, and one's judgment doesn't just stop, say, with the year 1970."

The Met's collection is weakest in the areas where MOMA is strongest—the great European masters of modem art— but it is beginning to fill the gaps, mainly by gift and bequest. Lieberman sees the 20th Century collection of 1,178 paintings, 373 sculptures, and thousands of works on paper and design objects as a logical extension of the museum's other collections. "Whenever we make an acquisition, I can't help but think, How does it fit into the whole?" He instances an Odalisque by Anthony Caro. "This museum has some of the great Odalisques of all time. The Caro would seem to have a natural place here amongst all the others."

Lieberman is probably the best friend MOMA could hope to have at the Met. He has consistently refused gifts previously promised to MOMA, and he intends to avoid competition as much as possible. He cites the Met's design collection. "We've been getting the prototype rather than the work as manufactured. The prototypes, I think, tell a bit more about the creative process of the designer. The Modem collects the finished product. Our collection shouldn't try to imitate theirs."

With the completion of the new wing, the Met will be second only to MOMA in terms of exhibition space in New York (outdistancing the Whitney and the Guggenheim for now). There's nothing like space in the most prestigious museum in America as an enticement for a potential giver—"and here's where your collection will hang." No question about it, the Met will be giving MOMA a run for its pledge money, and a run for its donors and their pictures.

What are the implications of these four new museum structures? First, education. Visitors will come because they are interested in art, or because they should be interested in art, or because they have heard there is a new place they should visit, or because they happen to be in the area and are looking for something to do or a place to have lunch. Anyway, some will be drawn to come again and look more closely. Inevitably, there will be increased activity in the art market, resulting in economic gain for artists, dealers, auction houses, etc., and, of course, pleasure, edification, and social gain for the collectors and patrons who make the museum world go round. The great art museums of America, which are thought of as bastions of the elite, have, in fact, been levelers of society. A secretary, manicurist, or airline stewardess marries her millionaire and uses his money to educate herself and develop an eye. She then donates generously to the institution of her choice, is invited to become a member of this or that committee, makes herself indispensable, and ends up on the board of trustees. The grocer's son or the Hollywood producer or the merger mogul amasses a collection and his social origins become irrelevant.

Why does a mega-millionaire collect art and then use it to create a monument to himself? It goes beyond mere social ambition. Like a pharaoh, he builds a tomb—or finds an already existing one— to house his treasures, lest he enter the world beyond forgotten by God and man.

The irony is that, ultimately, the works of art are the only monuments (millions of people walk through the Met every year and few notice the marble inscriptions to Morgan or Altman or Lehman), and they are monuments to their creators and to the spirit of creation in every man and woman. Perhaps a collector or builder is expressing that same instinct in his activities—it is not as sublime as the act of creation, but it too is a gesture of defiance in the face of death. Even the Menil Collection is the monument Mrs. de Menil has indicated she does not want. One could say that if she were really worried about monuments she could have called it the Houston Center for Art Research or something like that, but it would still have been a monument in some deep mythic way. It is her dream, her achievement.

Mrs. de Menil is right, after all. The place has to be called something, and years from now that may only be a way of telling where you are going or where you have been or how to get somewhere. "Turn left at the Menil Collection."