A Private Collection With Soul

HOUSTON — Ground control to Major Tom. . . . Houston has had its troubles recovering from an oil-glut recession and NASA's travail after the Challenger disaster, but plucky Houstonians have gone ahead with expensive cultural projects dreamed in palmier days. Recently the city launched the new multimillion-dollar Wortham Theater Center downtown and last weekend orbited the Menil Collection, a permanent $24-million museum to house a legendary private collection amassed since the 1930s by Dominque de Menil and her late husband John.

The couple immigrated here after the Nazi invasion of France and eventually became heirs to a fortune amassed by Mrs. De Menil's family, who made a device to test for the presence of oil deposits marketed through their company Schlumberger Ltd. (Mrs. De Menil pronounces it Schloom-bear-zjay , as any good Frenchman would.)

Like the Ewings of Dallas, the De Menils became a dynasty. But unlike the TV family, they and their five children pursue ideals rather than more money. Mom and pop promoted civil rights and ecumenical religion in conservative Houston, building the all-faith Rothko chapel, among other things. All the children collect and involve themselves in aspects of the arts. Philippa, probably the best known, is immersed in Islamic religion and sponsored the visionary Dia Foundation along with her husband Heiner Friedrich. The foundation subsidized artists' large-scale projects such as Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field," but had to be reorganized after running huge deficits and aggravating such well-know protege artists as Robert Whitman and Donald Judd.

Opening the Menil Collection ends speculation and dashes hopes cherished by museum directors who longed to have all or part of it for their institutions. (Mrs. De Menil, incidentally, sits on the board of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art.)

Establishing the collection in Houston certainly cheers up the locals and bolsters boosters' pride in those who insist on viewing city and state art holding as some sort of cultural Grand Prix.

(The score is skewed and the odds are stacked, but evidently Texas now regards itself as racing California for second place, with Chigago trying to regain its lost eminence in that position.)

More significant than this adolescent sense of competition is the question of whether the trend to establish private museums such as this, Chicago's recently opened Terra Museum of American Art, London's Saatchi Museum or Cologne's Ludwig Collection, is a good idea.