Marie-Christophe de Menil

De Menil is said to be worth more than $100 million along with her siblings, all of whom are heirs to a massive Schlumberger oil fortune. Her parents were John and Dominique de Menil, art patrons who, thanks to Dominique’s family fortune (she was born into the Schlumberger oil dynasty) created the Menil Collection in Houston, a Renzo Piano–designed museum brimming with pieces ranging from antiquities to contemporary works. Christophe passed the art gene on to her offspring, which include a granddaughter, budding writer and actress Caroline Snow, and grandson Max Snow, a photographer (and, incidentally, an ex-boyfriend of Mary-Kate Olsen’s). Best known, though, was her eldest grandson, Dash Snow, a high school dropout whose controversial and highly publicized art included newspapers encrusted with semen, Polaroids of raucous parties and “nests” made by trashing hotel rooms. Such heavyweight collectors as Dakis Joannou and Charles Saatchi bought Snow’s pieces, and the artist was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial before dying last July of a drug overdose at age 27. The loss hit de Menil hard; she and Dash, she says, were “soulmates.” De Menil’s rapport with the art world started as a child surrounded by masterpieces but began in earnest after her divorce from Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (father of Uma), with whom she had her only child, daughter Taya. Newly single, de Menil enrolled at Columbia University in 1963 to study religion and organized a series of “happenings” in the Hamptons. The program, called Midsummer, featured such artists as Robert Whitman, Twyla Tharp and La Monte Young. In 1980 de Menil teamed up with avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson and served as his costume designer for the next 20 years. Four years later she started making clothes for private clients (she also launched a short-lived retail line in 1990). de Menil married for a second time in 1971, to Chilean artist Enrique Castro-Cid, before divorcing three years later. De Menil’s re-embrace of her artistic side through design (she sells her jewelry and jumpsuits on her Web site, christophedemenil.com) seems to have given her some respite from grieving Dash’s death. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s worldwide head of contemporary art, and his partner, private art consultant Mark Fletcher, collect Dash’s work and know de Menil. De Menil has stayed close to Dash’s partner, Jade Berreau, and their two-and-a-half-year-old flaxen-haired daughter, Secret Midnight Magic Nico Snow. The doting great-grandmother recently began printing out old and new family photographs and taping them to the walls of her kitchen. Sitting at the table, one is surrounded by Dash, Jade and Secret; de Menil as a radiant twenty­something with infant daughter Taya cradled on her lap; family matriarch Dominique. The idea was to give a sense of security to the youn­gest Snow.