One of the art shows of this Houston summer doesn’t have the clout of a blockbuster attached to it. Nor is it a crowd-pleaser highlighting art-historic stars or those dramatically rediscovered. Instead, the enigmatically titled “The Space Between Looking and Loving: Francesca Fuchs and the de Menil House” is installed in a small gallery at The Menil Collection near spaces devoted to ancient and African art.

Discreet and profoundly moving, the exhibition demands close examination — like many of the works in The Menil’s collection.

“The Space Between Looking and Loving” also requires the viewer’s ability to follow an intuitive narrative that unfolds across five decades and two continents, as time and space collide in the personage of one of the most private artists in Texas.

British-born Fuch’s bio belies her modest demeanor and soft-spoken vibe. This is especially true when one knows her history and accolades. She was raised in Tübingen and Münster, Germany. Her academic cred includes a BA, Bristol University; BFA, London’s Wimbledon School of Art; and postgraduate study with renowned sculptor Tony Cragg at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She arrived in Houston in 1996 for a Core Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Glassell School of Art — and never left. Part of the early Core Fellows crop who stayed on to become part of the cultural ecosystem of their adopted hometown.

Since 1997, Fuchs has taught at her Glassell alma mater, where she is known for her inspiring and popular classes. She was appointed to her current position as department head of 2-D art in 2006. That same year, the good fortune of winning the inaugural $50,000 Hunting Art Prize in Texas propelled the understated Fuchs to further recognition.

The award made possible the acquisition of her current studio, located in a historic retail center in The Heights. In 2018, Art League Houston bestowed Texas Artist of the Year honors on her, and she is currently in the Houston stable of power dealer Inman Gallery and represented in Dallas by the respected Talley Dunn Gallery.

Fuchs is known primarily as a painter who can work on any scale. Domestic life is often her focus. Subjects range from mammoth canvases of a mother breast-feeding her child to more modestly sized works depicting trees of Christmas past or intimate paintings showing a child’s clumsy sculpture. Her palette has a subdued hue, and some works often seem to fade away, a metaphor perhaps for memory.

All these qualities — from Fuchs’ aesthetics, respect in the community, and international and Texas exhibition history to her gift for sensitive and deep looking — made her a natural for this Menil exhibition, which unfolded in a unique and talismanic way.

An Ancient Torso, Three Elusive Photos, a Time-Traveling Letter

Images of the artist in studio illuminate Francesca Fuchs’ practice, which parallels the ethos of The Menil Collection and its founders Dominique and John de Menil: quiet, contemplative, scholarly, and filled with reverence for artists of the day and from civilizations across time.

The catalyst for this current Houston exhibition was the discovery, when Fuchs was going through her late archaeologist father’s effects, of three black-and-white photographs of a Roman male torso taken by the late collaborators Blaine Hickey and Ogden Robertson. The back of each photo bore the photographers’ names, as well as an inscription reading “the Menil Foundation Collection on extended loan to the Institute for the Arts, Rice University.”

Celebrated Houston-based photographers of art and architecture, Hickey-Robertson were the preferred lensmen of the de Menils, who also enlisted the pair to document artworks for the series “The Image of the Black in Western Art.”

Francesca’s father Werner Fuchs (1927 to 2016) chaired the department of archaeology at Münster University. He also held visiting professorships that brought the family to America. His specialty was classical Greek and Roman sculpture, yet he had never been to Houston.

Determined to learn more, Fuchs reached out to the Menil, where she connected with curator of collections Paul Davis, who solved part of the mystery of the Hickey-Robertson photographs. Back in the day, typed business letters usually bore carbon copies. This was the case in the meticulously kept Menil archives. Davis soon supplied a copy of the original letter mailed to professor Fuchs. It came from the desk of John de Menil, dated January 7, 1970: an inquiry as to the subject of a Roman marble torso sans limbs and head, circa 1st or 2nd century CE. Was it of Apollo or Dionysos?

This 50-year-old missive sparked a conversation that began two and a half years ago between Fuchs and Davis. Soon they were meeting weekly for coffee, and Davis invited Fuchs to visit the de Menil House. Over time, the idea for this show was hatched.

“The Space Between Looking and Loving” amounts to a call-and-response between objects the de Menils lived with and loved, many of which ended up in the nascent museum collection as it was formed. It has been said if one wants to understand the raison d’être for The Menil Collection, its DNA lies in the de Menil House.

Diving Into de Menil House

Provided rare access, Fuchs pored over vintage photographs while doing a deep dive in the archives. She photographed original photos of works the legendary art patrons lived with, then made sketches from those. Revelations emerged, including the case of the red Matisse gouache cutout in the kitchen, which was gifted to one of their children on their wedding, then replaced with a green Matisse, which later ended up in the museum. Mrs. de Menil missed her Matisse, Fuchs conjectures.

William Steen, an artist who worked at the Menil as the museum’s framer, made a replacement for the kitchen, which he signed so as not to be confused with the original. The original green Matisse, Steen’s inspiration, and Fuchs’ ode to both the red and green all make it into the show.

In “The Space Between Looking and Loving,” echoes abound between the artist’s upbringing in Germany, especially the way her family lived with objects, and the manner in which the de Menils resided with their treasured artworks alongside ephemera in their Philip Johnson-designed modernist home, with jewel-toned, fabric-swathed interiors by American couturier Charles James. These range from the rarefied (ancient, medieval and modern masterworks) to beloved creations by the de Menils’ grandchildren, which are elegiacally hung on a restored pin board from Dominique de Menils’ dressing room, displayed as it was at the time of her passing.

Correspondingly, there are photos of both the Fuchs’ and de Menils’ living rooms, with objects from each included, from the artist’s childhood sculptures to the de Menils’ 14th-century French Statue of the Virgin and Child. Fuchs writes of the parallels between the museum patrons’ and her own family’s interiors:

“I grew up with my father’s collection of antiquities, not thinking much about the stele in our entry. It was just there. I would touch the figures as a welcome home. We had prints on the walls — Piranesi, Biese, and a ceramic owl I made for my father when I was a child.”

Poignantly, this early Fuchs sculpture, circa 1974, is included in the exhibition.

A Moving Letter

The gallery guide to this intricate, deeply layered exhibition contains a moving letter from Francesca Fuchs to John de Menil that will not be answered in this earthly realm. Responding on behalf of her father — there is no record that he ever replied to John de Menil’s query — she writes: 

Dear John,

    It was strange to find — years later, in the museum archives — that you had sent my father a letter. I found the three photos of the male torso in his effects wondering why he had them. A tiny connection across time, the letter from 1970. I visited the house with Paul Davis — your house, Dominique’s house. It was in no way pretentious or big. . . I sat with Elsian Cozens, your personal assistant at the time, on the green upholstered settee of your home as we realized that she had typed the letter to my father, her initials on the bottom. I held her hand to touch her — a physical connection across 55 years.

     I wondered which pieces you and Dominique really lived with, truly loved. I looked through the photos in the archives, responding to pieces I love and things I found mysterious. I worked from photographs, rephotographing sections from the images wherever I could see a repeat, the same painting or object in a new location, looking for things lost, replaced, things in the bedroom and your private spaces. I wanted to include the notes Dominique pinned to the felt door next to her bedroom desk — reminders, cards by her grandchildren — ephemeral and unimportant and things that matter deeply.

     I think about the ways we spend time with things in our home and they with us. I tried to paint my love for the things you lived with.

     The serendipity of writing you this letter five decades later astonishes me.

Sincerely, Francesca

“The Space Between Looking and Loving: Francesca Fuchs and the de Menil House” is on view now at Houston’s The Menil Collection through November 2. Learn more here.