God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(27)

Dominique commissioned Renzo Piano to design a serene museum to house her vast art collection, his first American building. The museum is cool and gray and perfect. Nearby is the de Menils’ most memorable contribution, the Rothko Chapel, a meditative space that provides a brooding counterpoint to the headstrong city. In front, there is a Barnett Newman sculpture, Broken Obelisk, which was intended to grace the Houston City Hall, but when the de Menils insisted that it should be dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., the city turned the gift down.

“Houston is a major philanthropy center, and they were the start of that,” Tommy Napier, the assistant communications director of the Menil Collection, told me, as he took Roberta and me through the de Menils’ home, which is now used for museum events. Designed in 1950 by Philip Johnson, the house is a flat-roofed, pale-brick, one-story affair, with a nearly windowless front, which some Houstonians initially mistook for a dentist’s office. “It was the first modern house in Houston,” Napier said. Certainly it provides a flagrant contrast to the antebellum-esque mansions of River Oaks. Across the back of the house is a long bank of windows, which in the Houston climate were fogged over like a shower stall. The furnishings, by the fashion designer Charles James, are riotously lush, not at all in keeping with the austere Johnson style. The dark living room has black Mexican floor tiles and a vivid yellow Rothko that nearly jumps off the charcoal-gray wall. The bar is a kind of enlarged Joseph Cornell box, filled with colored highball glasses and stuffed birds on a shelf under a Matisse and a Max Ernst. There is a phone booth with a schoolteacher’s pencil sharpener on a tiny desk, along with a Sunday missal and books of poetry by Anna Akhmatova. The door to Dominique’s bedroom is covered with red velvet, and yet the room itself is like a cloister. The de Menil aesthetic is informed by a monkish devotion to simplicity and an absolute rapacity for beauty.

The best museums in Texas are in Fort Worth. The Kimbell, gracefully designed by Louis Kahn—his last and maybe finest work, using parallel concrete vaults that ingeniously reflect natural light—is one of the most acclaimed buildings of modern times. It set a standard for the future, which was matched by Tadao Ando’s exquisite Modern Art Museum. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (designed by Philip Johnson) houses a distinguished collection of Western art. These buildings showcase the artistry of Level Two and its power to elevate a culture; and yet the walls are practically bare of any great Texas artists.

There is a third level in my analysis, which is when a culture matures and, having absorbed the sophistication of Level Two, returns to its primitive origins to renew itself. One night recently in Houston, I had dinner with friends at One Fifth, a new restaurant opened by Chris Shepherd. He grew up in Tulsa and came to Houston to culinary school. Captivated by the diversity of cultural influences, he began prowling through the city markets and cafés, discovering a mix of cuisines that were all a part of the city around him. Shepherd was drawn to what he called the “underbelly” of the vast city. Just driving west on Bellaire Boulevard is like taking a world tour, through Central America, Thailand, Korea, and the Philippines. Suddenly the street signs are in Chinese characters. In 2011, Shepherd opened a restaurant in a former lesbian nightclub that he calls Underbelly. He subtitled it “The Story of Houston Food.” The menu changes every day, depending on what is available from the local farms, Vietnamese bakeries, the catch that day from the Gulf, and the whole animals that are brought to his in-house butchery. His wine list is annotated by the local rapper Bun B. He folds all of these influences into a cuisine that reflects the city that Houston is now. “I wanted to go from simple regional cooking to hyper-regional,” Shepherd told me.

Shepherd is a bear-sized man with bristling brown hair and an expression of intense concentration. His new restaurant, One Fifth, reflects the restlessness and imagination that he brings to re-creating a native cuisine. “I wanted to do the corners of Texas,” he said. “You’ve got East Texas, which is Creole, with the field greens and okra. In West Texas you have the Hispanic influence and the chiles. North Texas, you had the cattle drives. In the south and the Gulf, I wanted to give the sense of a true Southern fishing camp. Then in Central Texas you have the Czech and German influences.” To accomplish all that, he decided that he would reinvent the restaurant each year.

Its current incarnation was a steak house. We had ordered the chef’s board, which was brought to us by two waiters and stretched across the entire table—crispy pork shoulder, lamb Wellington, brisket, collard greens and bacon, sweet potato au gratin. I have to say that my favorite part of the meal was dessert—apple pie, cooked in a wood-burning stove so that the crust was slightly charred but the apples were still firm.

Transcendence is always rare, and the best examples of Level Three tend to be origin stories. Beyoncé’s album Lemonade absorbed the street talk and country music and the church choir of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Houston, and enlarged the tablet of popular music. The National Wildflower Research Center, in Austin, quotes the limestone arches and tin-roof barns of the countryside to create an environment that is both familiar and new. One can look at the jubilant choreography of Alvin Ailey’s masterwork Revelations, for instance, which is a sumptuous re-creation of Ailey’s experiences in a black Baptist church in the flyspeck Central Texas community of Rogers. It is as if the artist had split the atom of consciousness and released its energy into the universe. Robert Rauschenberg, who studied pharmacy at the University of Texas before discovering himself as an artist, used the images of his native Port Arthur—windmills, derricks, even a bubbling tub of oil-field mud—to give a new language to modern art. He commented on the recession in Texas in the 1980s, caused by the crash in oil prices, to create what he called “gluts”: tire tracks, crumpled gas-station logos, and highway signs riddled with bullet holes, the detritus of the car culture that rules—and despoils—America. “I think of the Gluts as souvenirs without nostalgia,” Rauschenberg commented. This is what Level Three is all about: returning to one’s roots with knowledge, self-confidence, and occasionally, forgiveness.