Lois de Menil
Lois de Menil (born Lois Ames Pattison, 15 May 1938) is an arts administrator and co-founder of the Center for Khmer Studies in Cambodia.
Early Years[edit]
Born in New York as Lois Ames Pattison, de Menil grew up in Garden City, New York. She played violin to a professional level as a child, taking classes at The Juilliard School and performing Bach’s Double Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall.[citation needed]
After graduating from Wellesley College in 1960, she travelled to Paris under the Fulbright program, receiving degrees in law and political science at the Faculté de droit de Paris and Sciences Po and a fellowship to study law at the Hague Academy of International Law. She completed her PhD at Harvard University, supervised by Stanley Hoffman. Her PhD thesis was published in 1978 as the book “Who Speaks for Europe? The Vision of Charles de Gaulle.” [1]. She then taught international law and political science at Harvard College and Princeton University. She married the economist George de Menil in August 1968, with whom she had four children.
Patron of the Arts[edit]
In 1981, she co-curated an exhibition of American art at the Grand Palais in Paris, titled "L'Amerique aux Indépendants". [2] She served on boards of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the School of American Ballet in New York [3], the Dia Art Foundation, the “Festival d’Automne” in Paris, the Harvard Art Museums, the World Monuments Fund [4], and The Andy Warhol Museum[5] in Pittsburgh, which she helped to establish. Her tenure as vice-chair saw the organization stabilize its finances and open its collection to the public.[6] [7]
In 1996, de Menil moved to Bucharest, Romania, where she became adviser to the Romanian Minister of Culture on protection of the national patrimony. Together with a group of Romanian colleagues, she advocated to preserve the Sculptural Ensemble of Constantin Brâncuși at Târgu Jiu, most noted for its “Endless Column.” [8] In addition, she supported the drafting of legislation to preserve historical monuments, so as to prevent further destruction of the sort ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu. She coordinated the reopening of the National Museum of Art of Romania, closed by fire during the revolution against Ceaucescu. In recognition of her contributions, de Menil was named to the Romanian Legion of Honor in 2000, and in 2001, she joined the Executive Committee of the Romanian national heritage trust called the Pro Patrimonio Foundation.
Center for Khmer Studies[edit]
As a trustee of the World Monuments Fund (1989–present) [9] she became involved with their in Cambodia, where the organization was conserving the Preah Khan temple, part of the temple complex at Angkor.
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime had targeted institutions of higher learning between 1975 and 1979, killing intellectuals and leaving little prospect of a new cadre of professionals coming to fill the gap. She sponsored the founding by the World Monuments Fund of the Center for Khmer Studies in 1999, with seed funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Sainsbury Foundation. Today, the Center is home to two libraries, one for researchers and one for younger students, and a conference center set on the premises of a Buddhist monastery, Wat Damnak, in Siem Reap, and serves as an academic hub for both foreign and Cambodian students and scholars, offering seminars and publishing books in Khmer together with an annual scholarly journal ["Siksacakr: the Journal of Cambodia Studies"]. In addition, it has sponsored the online cataloguing of the inventory of the National Museum of Cambodia with funding from the Leon Levy Foundation.
References[edit]
- ↑ “Who Speaks for Europe”, St. Martin’s Press, 1978
- ↑ 91st exhibition. L'Amérique aux Indépendants. Grand Palais, 13 March-13 April 1980
- ↑ Bob Colacello, “Remains of the Dia” Vanity Fair September 1996. http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/09/colacello199609
- ↑ New York Times Letter to the Editor, March 8, 2008 “The Dia Art Foundation” [1]
- ↑ Photo of Lois de Menil from the Warhol Foundation http://aiolasfdn.com/lois-de-menil-and-alexandre-iolas/.
- ↑ Bob Colacello, “Remains of the Dia” Vanity Fair September 1996. http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/09/colacello199609
- ↑ “The Medicis for a Moment: The Collapse of the DIA Dream” Phoebe Hoban New York Magazine - Nov 25, 1985, pp52 and following on google books https://books.google.com/books?id=0MMBAAAAMBAJ
- ↑ Alexandra Parigoris, “The Endless Column Restored” (February 2012). See footnote 5. http://coloanafarasfarsit.ro/en/2012/02/endless-column-restored/
- ↑ World Monuments Fund Fact Sheet and Board Members http://www.wmf.org/downloads/WMF-Fact-Sheet.pdf
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