Patron and Designer Christophe de Menil Dies at 92

By Elaine YJ Zheng – 13 August 2025, New York

Christophe de Menil, the collector, designer, and member of the mega-collector Menil family in Houston Christophe de Menil has died.

She passed away last week at the age of 92, with The New York Times first reporting the news on Monday. De Menil was living in New York City at the time of her death.

Marie-Christophe de Menil was the eldest daughter of patrons John and Dominique de Menil, who founded the Menil Collection museum in Houston, Texas. Opened in 1987, the museum holds over 25,000 works, ranging from antiquities to contemporary art.

Sisters Adelaide and Christophe de Menil at the gala opening for the Menil Collection (3 June 1987). Courtesy Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: David Crossley.

John and Dominique, an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil fortune, left Paris during the Nazi occupation of France. They eventually settled in Houston, home to the company’s American headquarters, which John helped run.

The pair started collecting in the 1940s with an interest in art and spirituality. They invited artists like Andy Warhol and René Magritte to the Texan oil town and staged avantgarde performances with contributions by Jasper Johns and John Cage.

‘I was just given the opportunity to look a lot when I was growing up, and then finally I started to look by myself,’ de Menil told Nowness.

The patron had a close relationship with many modernists, including Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning, and reportedly introduced Robert Rauschenberg to her parents—a survey of his work is set to open at the Menil Collection on 19 September 2025.

Art equally trickled into her personal life: after divorcing Buddhist writer Robert Thurman, she married artist Enrique Castro-Cid, and her grandson, Dash Snow, was an artist collected by Dakis Joannou and Charles Saatchi.

De Menil launched a fashion career in the 1960s, serving as a designer to theatre director Robert Wilson for two decades before pivoting to private commissions. An evening dress of hers is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

From 1990 to 1992, she was listed in ARTnews’ top 200 collector ranking, with a holding that included work by Magritte and Barnett Newman.

Contemporary artists like Gedi Sibony, Tona Pelizzi, and Daniel Arsham, whom she collected in her later years, had ‘real grace’, she told Nowness:

‘It just takes people a while to see.’ —[O]