One might imagine the house of a grocery store billionaire is filled with overflowing pots of rubies and emeralds, golden staircases, and spa-like bathrooms. And who knows, maybe Charles Butt’s house does look like that.
But amongst all the deluxe decor you’re envisioning is a very real and vast collection of incredible works of art. Butt, the chairman of H-E-B, has shared more than 80 artworks that hang in his home with the Blanton Museum of Art in “American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection: From Edward Hopper to Alma Thomas.”
The exhibit is on display at the museum, which sits on The University of Texas at Austin’s campus, through Aug. 2 before it moves on to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio.
“Charles Butt’s vision as a collector reflects his deep belief in expanding access to art and education—a mission we share at the Blanton. We look forward to sharing these remarkable works, many of which have never been seen outside his private collection,” “said Simone Wicha, Director of the Blanton Museum of Art.
The exhibit. (Kelsey Bradshaw/City Cast Austin)
The first display you’ll see when you visit is a salon-style gallery wall that works as, “a nod to the personal, domestic spaces they normally enhance,” the museum says. Pieces by Mark Rothko, Marguerite Thompson Zorach, and Winslow Homer dot the exhibit entrance wall, letting you know you’re in for something cool inside.
You’ll be wowed with the names the collection drops — Georgia O’Keefe, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollack — and it might make you jealous that Butt gets to fill his home with such great stuff.
Broken up into seven sections, the exhibit explores cubism, abstraction, precisionism, and more as it relates to the growth of the American modernism movement.
Pieces included in the show span from the late 19th century through the 1970s and feel distinctly American. You won’t find elaborately decorated, Catholic-inspired triptychs or old Greek sculptures here. Instead, you’ll get a collage Madonna and child made in a Black art collective in New York, and O’Keefe landscapes of her New Mexico backyard.
If you go, you’ll find portraits, sea-themed scenes, collages, and something you’ll wish you could take home. And that might be the mark of a great show.
Two pieces in the collection. (Kelsey Bradshaw/City Cast Austin)
