American grocery billionaire Charles Butt shows 90 works by O'Keeffe, Pollock in Houston

More than 90 paintings, watercolors and prints from the private collection of American billionaire Charles Butt, the chairman of Texas grocery chain H-E-B, go on show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Sunday.

"American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection" runs through Jan. 18 and brings together works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Jacob Lawrence, Thomas Hart Benton, Mark Rothko, Romare Bearden and Alma Thomas, along with Texas artists Mary Bonner and Everett Gee Jackson. Most of the pieces hung in Butt's homes for decades and had never been shown in public before the exhibition began touring the state last year.

The Houston stop is the largest version of the show so far. Earlier showings at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, which organized the tour, and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin had about 80 works. Houston adds a section of seven watercolors by Charles Burchfield, as well as a monoprint and a suite of lithographs by Jasper Johns.

"Less known, until now, is his discerning eye and passion for American art," said Gary Tinterow, the museum's director. Alison de Lima Greene, who co-curated the Houston presentation, described it as "more than a textbook survey of American modernism."

What is in the show

The exhibition is arranged in five sections. One is built around the sea, a subject that runs through the collection and reflects Butt's childhood near the Gulf of Mexico in Corpus Christi. It includes Andrew Wyeth's "Sea Legs" from 1984 and Thomas Moran's "Smoking Ships at Sea," a 1907 watercolor that was only recently discovered.

Other highlights include O'Keeffe's "My Backyard" from 1945, Hopper's 1904 portrait of the painter Guy Pène du Bois, and Maurice Prendergast's "Festival, Venice" from 1899. A landscape section includes nine of John Marin's "Weehawken Sequences" from around 1916. The final section is given over to abstract work by Ellsworth Kelly, Rothko and Thomas.

Butt bought in depth rather than chasing famous names. He collected Marin, Marsden Hartley and Benton in large numbers and often chose works that show an artist in transition. "It wasn't like a trophy collection," said Carter Foster, chief curator at the Blanton. The collection leaves out European modernists and postwar stars such as Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.

The tour moves to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, H-E-B's home city, in the spring of 2027. Butt has promised to give Rufino Tamayo's 1925 painting "The Family" to the Amon Carter museum.

The grocer behind the collection

Butt, 88, is the grandson of Florence Butt, who opened the family's first grocery store in Kerrville, Texas, in 1905. He became president of the company in 1971 and built H-E-B into a privately held chain of more than 400 stores in Texas and Mexico. He is worth about $11.1 billion.

He has spent much of his philanthropy on Texas public schools. In 2017 he pledged $100 million to create the Holdsworth Center, a training institute for school leaders named after his mother, and he signed the Giving Pledge in 2018. After the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, his family and H-E-B gave $10 million toward a new elementary school there.

Butt has rarely spoken about his art. "Art helps to balance life, and it's a great stress reliever," he said in a 1991 interview.