Marie-Christophe de Menil, costume designer, patron and heiress of the de Menil art collection and oil fortune, has died.
De Menil’s parents founded the eponymous collection in Houson, Texas. They also commissioned the Rothko Chapel, featuring 14 vast canvases by Mark Rothko.
Marie-Christophe inherited a fifty percent share of Schlumberger Oil as a trust fund, allowing her to continue collecting art. Works by René Magritte, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Max Ernst and Kenneth Price were part of her private holdings.
For two decades from 1980, she was costume designer for the theatre director Robert Wilson. She sat on the board of trustees to the De Meni foundation and museum from 1976 to 2009.
De Menil was married twice, briefly to the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, with whom she had a child, Taya, and then for three years to Chilean artist Enrique Castro-Cid. The artist Dash Snow was born to Taya in 1981 and died in 2009.
