“Living to Create: A Memoir”

The times were always right, so right

it was as if they had been waiting

to happen. The places, too, were right

for us. We were four and we were

complete in all these times and places,

they two and we two, together.
 

Houston. A giant Quonset hut

has traded its military drab for

a mantle of miracle: the colors of

visual art. Could it have forgotten

its purpose, changed its mind about

war's way to change the world?

No bomber lurks in this cathedral

space. Here there is no more war.

War is sad and has no color. These

walls bloom with paintings. Colors
riot, soar, and spin. Sculptures
claim the cement floor. Another
world has entered here. Another
world invites you in.

 

Two imaginations become as one:

John and Dominique de Menil

have found a way to hold the artists'

vision like a mirror up to the gazers'

eyes that they might see, along with

so much else, themselves not as they

were before. The Menil Collection is

born. This is our south, a little exotic,

a little antebellum, eloquent...

An evening at Miss Ima's, where

sunset's glare competes with lighted

candelabra in all eight windows.

Such times gather us, they two

and we two, four to be complete.
 

Our Huismes, France, sees Dominique

under wisteria's white clusters—not

unlike Miss lma's candelabra.

In New York, we are again four, they

two and we two to be complete,

John telling us about the big business

world he finds himself sharing with

its tough-talking tycoons. "They don't

paint pictures, carve stone. They

don't even put a bicycle wheel on

a pedestal," he assures us. And in Paris,

at l'Orangerie (did it ever grow oranges?)

John and Dominique have masterminded

a Max Ernst exhibition. How to realize

everything is beautiful when you're in it?

Other times, other places. Provence:
The old chateau eyes red-tiled roofs,
along with our hill, olives, lavender.
They two have come for a pair of days.
Here moments of exhilaration
last for hours. We are still miraculously
four complete, as if forever.
Yet again on San Felipe Road,
John, quiet and knowing so privately
that he will leave us all, not to be
four anymore, or even three
for soon, oh, too soon, Max will be
gone, and we are just two to
continue, each in her own domain.
 

Finally, in the wide gray nest,

so startling in its unpretentious

elegance, Dominique with her

artists and her architects will have

achieved the ends and permanence

of what they two had begun together.

Always consorting with those who live

to create, so they created their own

masterpiece. It is all here. Spanning

ages, gods, icons, totems, and isms.

(A tribal something made of nothing

is as immediate as this very moment

and as fraught with content...or portent.)

 

Here she is, easy among her painted

canvases, carvings, marbles, bronzes,

wood, paper, and, yes, even cloth,

transformed by the artist's hand

and eye to reveal what she called

"a truth of sight." Had they two not

sought such truths all their years together?
 

Drifting away, Dominique left

her starlight to those who are here,

to those who are not here, and

to the ones who will come. Stars

do that: leave trails of themselves

along the way and, you, Dominique,

perhaps, a faint footprint

of your passage.