0.18 Karl kilian, b. 1943  (Page 3/4)

Jerry invited people to hang around. She loved being the center of attention. She had these two dachshunds that were with her all the time; Jerry and the dachshunds, being carried usually. Jerry would hold court at lunch. Conversation was welcome. She really encouraged you to do it, and there was a game she did. I hadn’t been there long enough to take a couple of her programs, but one of the classes that was taught was called The Art of Painting. The book that she used was Albert Barnes’ book of that very name—and she talked about and used Barnes’ terms like “plastic” and all that. It was a big deal to get into that class…there were only three or four people. I asked her if I could sit in, and she said, “Yes, but you’re not allowed to say anything.” She devised this game where she would be painting and you were supposed to guess what it was. In this game you would say, “If you were a symphony what would you be?” Or, I can remember one day it was a Rubens painting—a wonderful painting called The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus—and I think Fred finally got it. But the question that gave it away to him was, “If you were a piece of furniture, what would you be?” And she said, “A piece of bentwood furniture,” and that was perfect for Rubens. There had also been a piece of music, or, “If you were a play….” I mean, she was encouraging a sort of open-mindedness, a sort of free play of the brain in every way she could.

I don’t know if Jerry and Mrs. de Menil collaborated on theme ideas for exhibitions. I imagine they had the sort of business meetings in which Jerry would go to Dominique and say, “I’d like to do an exhibition of flowers. Here’s some of the pieces that I’ve thought about.” And the de Menils traveled so widely because they were buying a lot for themselves. I think that they helped pick out things—suggested that Jerry [could use] what they could buy. I’m thinking for example of an exhibition that she did on cubism called Art Has Many Facets in which there’s a set of very cubist—if you could call them that—playing cards made of whale bone or something. And also these sort of very M.C. Escher looking things…the two intertwining wooden staircases…I think it might have been bought for that. Similar things, too, things that were decorative or everyday arts—Jerry was very interested in geometry.

But it was as magic to Mrs. de Menil as it was to everybody else when the carts with cases began to arrive, and she stood there and stuck her head in front of everybody else who was watching Jerry install the exhibition. I think that she was very attentive. She had sort of an eye herself, Dominique did, and she had been working for many years, looking, buying, working with Jerry, working with John de Menil, and her inspired sort of imagination, her visual instincts—she honed them watching Jerry.

While Jerry was installing she became very serious, very quiet. She didn’t mind you being there, but you didn’t touch and you didn’t ask questions and you gave her a lot of room. I think that was probably because she had this great visual instinct and memory so that she just collected images the way somebody might do on a much less professional level: you choose the colors you wear, you choose things for the way they look—a piece of furniture or whatever. I mean, Jerry was all about arrangements. She saw everything in terms of arrangements. Her house was an interesting mix of things that reflected in many ways her friendships and her economic status. Jerry would collect something that was a shape that maybe reminded her of a Cycladic piece, or reminded her of a tribal arts piece that she then either couldn’t afford, or whatever—but these other things, it’s not that they were surrogates, it’s just that in their way they had the same beauty that these other things did and probably for very similar reasons. In the catalog that Dominique wrote to commemorate MacAgy after she died, she talks about MacAgy as if she was an alchemist. Having been in California with her then-husband Douglas, Jerry knew Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb and some others, and she brought some very interesting early work by those artists to the Menil Collection. It was a kind of divine clutter in a way.