Art space city

I’d been trying to find a way to visit Houston for several years, to the amazement of my art-travelling friends who, never having been there, dismissed it, mumbling about an impossibly hot, clammy climate and locals who drove everywhere between scattered high-rises and ate only steak. Oh, how wrong they were.

My chance came when I was in Dallas, pre-COVID. The four-hour Greyhound bus ride south delivered me to downtown Houston. Over the next three days, I disproved all those Houston myths. In balmy, low-humidity sunshine, I walked through parks and avenues shaded by mature live oaks and blossoming magnolias, overdosed on quality art and buildings, took the occasional local bus (yes, there is public transport), and paused at funky cafes and bars to top up my energy.

In truth, I arrived with only one goal. On my first visit to Art Basel, I had had the transformative experience of spending a day at Fondation Beyeler. Ernst Beyeler’s choice of Renzo Piano to design the museum for his collection had been inspired by Piano’s Menil Collection, which is in Houston.

Now here I was at the source. Dominique de Menil, heiress to the Schlumberger oil-equipment fortune, and her husband John arrived in Houston from war-torn Paris in 1941. It was a boomtown, yet still provincial, and surprisingly liberal and international. The Menil’s ideas of art as fundamental to personal development and spiritual consciousness fell on fertile ground. When they started a club for buying art, sourced by themselves, the Menils nurtured new collectors. As pillars of the Museum of Fine Arts, they fostered expansion and, in 1961, brought in James Johnson Sweeney, founding director of the Guggenheim Museum, as director. On the campus of Rice University, they parked a mobile home where they staged shows on Cubism and Surrealism – today, near that spot, I joined locals of all ages at sunset to enjoy Twilight Epiphany, one of James Turrell’s ‘Skyspaces’, a mesmerising meditation in floating colours that responding to the naturally fading sunlight.

Installation view of the Cy Twombly Gallery

Dan Flavin Installation at the Menil Collection

The Menil Collection

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The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The 30-acre campus set up by the Menils is one of the world’s classiest art parks. Piano took their commission for a building ‘small on the outside yet large on the inside’ and flew with it. Behind his quiet, elegant exterior, I found a maze of interconnecting, small galleries displaying a cross-section of the 17,000-piece collection. Roaming the 20th-century galleries, I landed on work by Matisse, Klee, Kelly and Tiebaud, a welcome painting by Frank Bowling, and then found antiquities and Byzantine, medieval and tribal art. The freewheeling Menil traits were especially apparent in two smaller buildings: Cy Twombly’s installation in a Piano-designed gem and Dan Flavin’s rolling rainbows – Dominique de Menil’s last commission before she died in 1997.

But it was the expansive Menil Drawing Institute, opened in 2018 to display the collection and loan shows, that amazed me. Designed by architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, it follows on from Piano’s main building and, dare I suggest it, exceeds it: galleries, courtyards and planting are deftly and meticulously intermingled, the works on display exquisite.

My goal achieved, it was time to see more of Houston’s art, funded by an abundance of millionaires and their philanthropic widows thanks mainly to oil, the Houston Ship Channel and the Texas Medical Center. I walked and walked and took a few buses, hungry to see as much as possible. I sought out Yoshio Taniguchi’s Asia Society building, its fizzing water sprays creating a living cloud-filled image evoking a painted Chinese scroll. I lingered in two house-museums full of decorative arts and set in lush gardens: Bayou Bend has 28 American period rooms, those in Rienzi are European. I found interesting art shows in the 1936 Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, built to bring drinking water to the city, as well as at Hiram Butler Gallery, in its serene garden, and the new Jack Rabbit Gallery. I checked out Sawyer Yards, where disused warehouses are being repurposed as artists’ studios. And in Third Ward, an African-American neighbourhood, I learnt how Project Row Houses is protecting around 40 wooden houses, some still in family use.

Each day I took a long draught of art nourishment at the Museum of Fine Arts’ formidable maze of buildings, its own quartier in the city centre. Frequented by locals whetting their curiosity, chatting, smiling, I loved the informality and open enjoyment of art, contrasting with reverential silence in most encyclopedic museums. My highlights: the astounding Islamic collection; dazzling gold from myriad cultures; and the new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, which displays the MFAH’s 20th-century art, completing a 28-year plan of rethinking and expanding. My friends may not believe my reports of Houston, but I shall be back for more – not least the Rothko Chapel, built around 14 of the artist’s black canvases, and now reopened after a $30 million clean-up.

Louise Nicholson is a contributor to Apollo and Fine Art Connoisseur.

When in Houston...

Where to stay:
Central Houston really is walkable, a rare treat in the US. (If you are not a keen walker, though, there are buses and cabs.) So hotel choice is as much about location as level of accommodation, and it seems a good idea to be near one of the art hubs – the Menil Collection campus or the MFAH quartier. ZaZa, [pictured above] a contemporary hotel with a good restaurant and bar, sits between the MFA and Hermann Park. For an upscale boutique hotel opposite the Menil, Modern Bed and Breakfast fills five townhouses in residential streets, so you can feel you are part of the city. Not far from here, the 23-suite La Colombe d’Or [pictured below] started life as a 1920s Art Deco mansion. Lovingly and extravagantly renovated before and during lock down, it is ready to open in 2021.

Where to eat:
I find looking at art stimulates the appetite and, once I’m hungry, paintings of food invariably appear on gallery walls, which just aggravates my plight. I don’t want to go too far – I want to eat something nourishing, get back to the art and save the lingering for cocktails and dinner. So, for breakfast, lunch and a laid-back dinner, Bistro Menil, which is right opposite the Menil’s main building, does it all; slightly further away, Camerata at Paulie’s, whose name is inspired by a group of artists, musicians and intellectuals in Renaissance Florence, serves wine, beer and Italian food at the behest of operator Paul Petronella. At Asia Society, Pondi Café takes its inspiration from Pondicherry, a French colony in southern India. Sawyer Yards has open studios and a market on the second Saturday of the month with stalls that offer crafts, artisanal foods and barbecue, while locals gather at Buffalo Bayou Brewing Company [pictured below] to discuss the home-brewed beers, such as Crush City IPA and Dream Sicle. MFA has a new restaurant and café in the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. L.N