American Art History in a Nutshell: Inside Charles Butt’s American Modernist Collection

At the mouth of the Blanton Museum of Art, a cluster of paintings spanning technique and medium welcome you into Charles Butt’s colorful and curious tour of American modernism, currently on its first-ever public run.

“This is a nice little smorgasbord of the range of things that Charles Butt collects,” says Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Collections Carter Foster, gesturing to the 10 handpicked paintings. A bold, blue Rothko, a wind-swept sea rendered in watercolor by John Marin, and a minimalistic sailboat rendition by Arthur Garfield Dove share wall space with familiar ease.

“We wanted to do a salon hang to nod to the fact that the work lives in a domestic setting,” Foster says. 

A taste in groceries and local philanthropy may be what made the Butt family their fame and fortune, but the H-E-B magnate also proves to have exquisite taste in American modernist paintings. Beside the salon-style, candy-box assortment at the exhibit’s entrance hangs another painting on its own: a scene of man in his rocking chair, looking peacefully out at a surrealist, encroaching sea. Its placement is an homage to Butt himself, a sailor whose fascination with the ocean can be seen in much of his artistic collection. 

The curation of roughly 80 paintings is a delightfully digestible lesson in art history, tracing the movements of cubism, abstractionism, and modernism at large with an eye toward the unnoticed.

“He owns things that are gaps in the other museums because he’s got a curious mind,” surmises Foster. “This guy’s not trophy hunting. He’s collecting in a much more interesting way to me,” he adds, pointing out a grain elevator depiction by little-known landscape painter, Dale Nichols, as an example.

More recognized names also appear in the eclectic assemblage, including master of urban malaise Edward Hopper and abstractionist icon Jackson Pollock – but their selected works here stand out from their best-known paintings. Hopper’s Portrait of Guy Pene du Bois immortalizes the titular fellow student, whose own intriguing snapshots of New York City life hang beside the portrait. The Pollock piece is even further from his canonical oeuvre: a rural landscape that reflects his time as a student of Thomas Hart Benton, a painter and muralist whose work Butt collected more extensively. 

Incorporating prolific, self-taught painter Bill Traylor and “artist’s artist” Marsden Hartley, alongside Mexican portraitist Rufino Tamayo and realist virtuoso George Wesley Bellows, the walk through the gallery reveals a diversity of American perspectives communicated through color, brushstroke, and subject matter.

“American iconography is developing [through] these artists,” says Foster. He gestures to sections of the display focusing on rural landscapes, which gained popularity in the 20th century and have remained a recognizable cultural fixture of American painting. Other sections expound on precisionism, a geometrically focused, surreal movement that grew out of cubism and the industrial revolution, and cubism proper. 

A mental rolodex of American painters is hardly required to enjoy the exhibit. The spirit and character captured in these pieces hold something for everyone and the variety of artistic approaches make for an enjoyable, choose-your-own-adventure viewing experience, letting visitors pick out favorites from different movements in the curious spirit of the exhibit’s collector. On display at the Blanton until Aug. 2, the private collection is on its second of four stops throughout Texas before it returns to the Butt family’s walls and halls.

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