Disclosing a Transfer: Art and Religion in the Notebooks of Dominique de Menil
In: International Journal for History, Culture and ModernityAbstract
The art collector and educator, Dominique de Menil (1908–1997) has mostly been remembered as a pragmatic orchestrator of high-profile commissions in the art world. However, little attention has been paid to her role as a thinker. This article seeks to address that lacuna in the literature by attending to an overlooked source in the Menil archives, de Menil’s notebooks, which were written between 1974 and 1994. By analysing de Menil’s use of metaphor in the notebooks, we place them within the trajectory of de Menil’s intellectual development stemming back to her 1936 article: ‘Pour l’unité du monde chrétien’. The first part situates the metaphors which de Menil employed in the notebooks from the 1970s in the intellectual context of her inception of these figures of speech in Montmartre, Paris in 1936. The second part unpacks a central metaphor which grounds de Menil’s conception of tradition. The third part compares de Menil’s art historiography vis-à-vis other models which sought to reinvigorate the avant-garde art scene via pre-modern sources. The Coda critically assesses de Menil’s art historiography against other prevalent views on the relation between pre-modern and modern works of art.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Baring, Edward . “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 77 (4) (2016), 567–587.
-
Baring, Edward . Converts to the Real. Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2019).
-
Baudrillard, Jean . The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London and New York: Verso, 2005).
-
Baum, Gregory . “Attack on the New Social Gospel.” The Ecumenist 17 (6) (1979), 81–84.
-
Blair, Ann . “The Rise of Notetaking in Early Modern Europe.” Intellectual History Review 20 (3) (2010), 303–316.
-
Blumenberg, Hans . Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (New York: Cornell University Press, 2010).
-
Boersma, Hans . Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology. A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
-
Bosschaert, Dries . “A House with Many Mansions: The Anthropological Turn in Louvain Theology (1942–1962).” Church History and Religious Culture 95 (2015), 293–314.
-
Bosschaert, Dries . “A Great Deal of Controversy? A Case Study of Dondeyne, Grégoire, and Moeller Integrating Phenomenology and Existentialism in Louvain Neo-Thomism.” In: So What’s New About Scholasticism?, eds. Rajesh Heynickx , and Stéphane Symons (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 131–157.
-
Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle . “A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries).” Intellectual History Review 20 (3) (2010), 377–400.
-
Boym, Svetlana . The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
-
Burkhardt, Astrit Schmidt . “Shaping Modernism: Alfred Barr’s genealogy of art.” Word and Image 16 (4) (2000), 387–400.
-
Chappel, James . “The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe.” Modern Intellectual History 8 (3) (2011), 561–590.
-
Chappel, James . Catholic Modern. The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 2018).
-
Cheetham, Mark E. The Rhetoric of Purity. Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
-
Clifford, James . “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 189–214.
-
Cohen, Joshua I. “Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern ‘Primitivist’ Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–8.” The Art Bulletin 99 (2) (2017), 136–165.
-
Collins, Randall and Guillén, Mauro F. “Mutual Halo Effects in Cultural Production: The Case of Modernist Architecture.” Theory and Society 41 (6) (2012), 527–556.
-
Congar, Yves . Chrétiens désunis (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1937). Translated into English by Bousfield, M. A. Divided Christendom (London: Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, 1939).
-
Congar, Yves . “The Reasons for the Unbelief of Our Time: A Theological Conclusion Part i.” Integration: A Students’ Catholic Review 2 (1) (1938), 13–21.
-
Congar, Yves . “The Reasons for the Unbelief of Our Time: A Theological Conclusion, Part ii.” Integration: A Students’ Catholic Review 2 (3) (1939), 10–26.
-
Congar, Yves . “Ecumenical Experience and Conversion: A Personal Testimony.” In The Sufficiency of God. Essays on the Ecumenical Hope in Honour of W. W. Visser ‘t Hooft, Doctor of Divinity, first General Secretary of the World Council of Church, eds. Robert C. Mackie , and Charles C. West , (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1963), 71–87.
-
Crumlin, Rosemary ed. Modern Art and the Religious Imagination (Melbourne: The National Gallery of Victoria, 1998).
-
Davies, Katherine , and Garfitt, Toby , eds. God’s Mirror. Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Pour l’unité du monde chrétien.” In La Vie intellectuelle 40 (3) (1936), 383–388.
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Remarques sur une chapelle.” L’Art Sacre (Feb. 1937), 91.
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Leçons d’une chapelle japonaise.” L’Art Sacré 18 (1937a), 117–119.
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Impressions américaines en France.” L’Art Sacré 7–8 (1953), 2–32.
-
de Menil, Dominique . Ten Centuries that Shook the West: Greek and Roman Art in Texas Collections (exhib. cat.) October 15, 1970 – January 3, 1971 (Institute for the Arts, Rice University).
-
de Menil, Dominique . “To Recapture the Voice of Père Couturier.” In Sacred Art, ed. Dominique de Menil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 9.
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Forward,” In The Menil Collection: A Selection From the Palaeolithic to the Modern Era, ed. Dominique de Menil (New York: Abrams, 1997), 7–9.
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Oradour-sur-Glane by Jean Fautrier.” In The Menil Collection: A Selection From the Palaeolithic to the Modern Era, ed. Dominique de Menil (New York: Abrams, 1997a), 248–253.
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Address at the Opening of the Rothko Chapel” (February 27, 1971). In The Rothko Chapel. Writings on Art and the Threshold of the Divine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 20–23.
-
de Menil, Dominique . “Dedicatory Address for Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk” (February 28, 1971). In The Rothko Chapel. Writings on Art and the Threshold of the Divine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010a), 24–25.
-
Derain, André . Lettres à Vlamick suivies de la correspondance de guerre, ed. Philippe Dagen (Paris: Flammarian, 1994).
-
Dohoney, Ryan . Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
-
Douglas, Frederic H. , and D’Haincourt, René . “Indian Art of the United States (1941).” In Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, eds. Jack Flem and Miriam Deutch , (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003), 261–266.
-
Eliade, Mircea . The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Williard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
-
Fabien, Johannes . Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
-
Flam, Jack , and Deutch, Miriam , eds. Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art (Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003).
-
Flynn, Gabriel . Yves Congar’s vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004).
-
Foster, Hal , Krauss, Rosalind , Bois, Yve-Alain , and Buchloh, Benjamin . Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Post Modernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004)
-
Gauchet, Marcel . Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
-
Gikandi, Simon . “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference.” Modernism/modernity 10 (3) (2003), 455–480.
-
Golding, John . Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000).
-
Goldwater, Robert . Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass. & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1986).
-
Hay, Louis . “Pour une semiotique du mouvement.” Genesis 10 (1996), 25–58.
-
Helfenstein, Joseph , and Schipsi, Laureen , eds. Art and Activism. Projects of John and Dominique de Menil (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).
-
Heynickx, Rajesh , and Symons, Stéphane . “Into Neo-Thomism: Reading the Fabric of an Intellectual Movement.” In So, What’s New About Scholasticism? eds. Rajesh Heynickx , and Stéphane Symons (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 3–16.
-
Holsinger, Bruce . The Pre-Modern Condition. Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
-
Kantor, Sybil Gordon . Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 2002).
-
King, Mike . “Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art and Science.” Leonardo 31 (1) (1998), 21–31.
-
Krauthausen, Karin . “A Writer Looking for His Writing Scene: Paul Valery’s Procedures in His Notebooks around 1894.” Science in Context 26 (2) (2013), 305–343.
-
Martin, David . Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge Mass. : and London: The MIT Press, 2011).
-
Mettepenningen, Jürgen . Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican ii (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2010).
-
Middleton, William . Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).
-
Moyn, Samuel . Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
-
Nichols, Aiden . Yves Congar O. P. (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1989).
-
Nord, Philip . “Catholic Culture in Interwar France.” French Politics, Culture & Society 21 (3) (2003), 1–21.
-
Norman, E. R. Christianity and the World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
-
Palti, Elías José . “From Ideas to Concepts to Metaphors: The German Tradition of Intellectual History and the Complex Fabric of Language.” History and Theory 49 (2) (2010), 194–211.
-
Panofsky, Erwin . Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York, 1957).
-
Salmon, André . “The Fauves” (1912). In André Salmon on French Modern Art trans. Beth S. Gersh-Nesic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
-
Schloesser, Stephen . Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
-
Seay, Scott D. “For the Defense and Beauty of the Catholic Faith: The Rise of Neo-Scholasticism Among European Catholic Intellectuals, 1824–1879.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 5 (2002), 131–146.
-
Sgarbi, Marco . “Preface: Translatio Studiorum and Intellectual History.” In Translatio studiorum: Ancient, medieval and modern bearers of intellectual history, ed. Marco Sgarbi (Leiden: Brill, 2012), ix–xv.
-
Shorthall, Sarah . “Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights.” Journal of the History of Ideas 79 (3) 2018, 445–460.
-
Smart, Pamela G. “Possession: Intimate Artifice at the Menil Collection.” Modernism/Modernity 13 (1) (2006), 19–39.
-
Smart, Pamela G. Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
-
Stuart, Susan . On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993).
-
Surman, Jan , Stráner, Katalin , Haslinger, Peter . “Nomadic Concepts – Biological Concepts and Their Careers beyond Biology.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 9 (2) (2014), 1–17.
-
Taylor, Mark C. Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
-
Tuchman, Maurice ed. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986).
-
van Dyke, Kristina . “The Menil Collection: Houston, Texas.” African Arts 40 (3) (2007), 36–49.
-
Wedig, Mark . “The Fraternal Context of Congar’s Achievement: The Platform for a Renewed Catholicism at “Les Éditions du Cerf” (1927–1954).” U. S. Catholic Historian 17 (2) (1999), 106–115.
-
Williams, Raymond . Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1976).
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 390 | 90 | 13 |
| Full Text Views | 11 | 4 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 14 | 4 | 2 |
Disclosing a Transfer: Art and Religion in the Notebooks of Dominique de Menil
In: International Journal for History, Culture and ModernityAbstract
The art collector and educator, Dominique de Menil (1908–1997) has mostly been remembered as a pragmatic orchestrator of high-profile commissions in the art world. However, little attention has been paid to her role as a thinker. This article seeks to address that lacuna in the literature by attending to an overlooked source in the Menil archives, de Menil’s notebooks, which were written between 1974 and 1994. By analysing de Menil’s use of metaphor in the notebooks, we place them within the trajectory of de Menil’s intellectual development stemming back to her 1936 article: ‘Pour l’unité du monde chrétien’. The first part situates the metaphors which de Menil employed in the notebooks from the 1970s in the intellectual context of her inception of these figures of speech in Montmartre, Paris in 1936. The second part unpacks a central metaphor which grounds de Menil’s conception of tradition. The third part compares de Menil’s art historiography vis-à-vis other models which sought to reinvigorate the avant-garde art scene via pre-modern sources. The Coda critically assesses de Menil’s art historiography against other prevalent views on the relation between pre-modern and modern works of art.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 390 | 90 | 13 |
| Full Text Views | 11 | 4 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 14 | 4 | 2 |