What type of art does the chairman of the Texas supermarket giant H-E-B collect?
Pieces from Romare Bearden, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe are just a few of American billionaire Charles Butt’s private collection of 20th-century art that he’s sharing for the first time in a new Fort Worth exhibition.
“American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection” at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art features over 80 pieces from the early 1900s through the end of the 1970s, ranging from paintings to works on paper. The Texas tycoon is known for cherishing his privacy. However, he wanted to share his portfolio with a wider audience.
Art curator Joan Wyatt, who manages Butt’s collection, said that became a reality with the Carter’s organization of the exhibition.
The Fort Worth museum was granted free range to browse through more than 150 artworks in Butt’s collection to select pieces that best spotlight his admiration of various modern art styles.
“This exclusive work reveals major areas of Charles Butt’s artistic interests, including a section of the sea and his support for modern abstraction,” Scott Wilcox, interim director of the Carter, told guests during a Sept. 4 tour.
The Fort Worth show opens to the public Sept. 7 and runs through Jan. 25.
The exhibition is debuting in North Texas before making Texas stops at Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and McNay Art Museum in San Antonio.
If you go:
What: “American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection”
Where: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth
When: Noon-5 p.m. Sunday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday
Admission: Free
Approach to collecting artwork
Butt, 87, is the grandson of H-E-B’s founder Florence Butt, who opened the family’s first grocery store in 1905.
Charles Butt, who became the president of the supermarket chain in 1971 before later transitioning the chairman, has been quietly building his art collection for more than 60 years.
In an interview with the Carter’s former executive director Andrew Walker, Butt said his fascination with art began after visiting the Louvre and other major European museums at 15. He didn’t start collecting until his first year in college when he purchased a print on cardboard for $1 — a piece he still has.
Butt said his approach to acquiring artworks has always been about what appeals to him, never with the intent of being part of a collection. In recent years, Butt has focused on diversifying acquisitions to include more Black artists, he added.
“I have made a concerted effort to expand my collecting and appreciation to include voices long left out of the art historical canon,” he told Walker. “It has been a pleasure to see how a new piece can strengthen and challenge the others.”
When asked what drew him to American modernism, Butt said the early 20th century marked the emergence of the United States as the dominant global leader, shifting the art world’s center from Paris to New York.
Glimpse into the exhibition
Guests get an early look at the Charles Butt exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art Sept. 4, 2025. (David Moreno | Fort Worth Report)
Stepping into the exhibition on the second floor of the Amon Carter, visitors are immersed into the chairman’s diverse artistic taste across four thematic sections.
The first gallery, labeled “Intimate Perspectives,” spotlights the role of intimacy and trust in artmaking by pairing works from artists who had close relationships. Featured pairings include friends Edward Hopper and Guy Pene Du Bois, and Thomas Hart Benton and his mentee Jackson Pollock.
In the following room, “The Language of the Sea,” takes center stage. The sea is a major influence in Butt’s collecting practice, since the H-E-B chairman spent some of his childhood in Corpus Christi. The section concentrates on several artists’ connection with America’s coastlines and highlights symbols often found in marine paintings, including sailboats and crashing waves.
“Charles is a seaman, so his passion for the sea comes through these works,” Shirley Reece-Hughes, curator of paintings, sculptures and works on paper at the Carter, said during the recent tour.
The “Land Progressions” portion of the Carter exhibition spotlights how American modern artists reimagined traditional landscapes, including the dry climate of New Mexico and the terrain of Maine. Other works in the gallery reflect the influence of industrialization and its impact on American land in the early 1920s.
In the final gallery, Butt’s fascination with geometric paintings becomes abundantly clear. Reece-Hughes pulled paintings from his collection to curate a space that hangs abstracts next to artworks depicting post-industrial scenes, including factories, farms and machinery.
Blanche Lazzell’s “Abstraction” from 1925 — which the Carter used as the central painting for the marketing of the exhibition — hangs in the corner of the gallery.
Shirley Reece-Hughes describes the colors and forms artist Blanche Lazzell used for her painting “Abstraction.” The Carter museum used the artwork’s yellows, greens, blues and reds as the primary colors of the exhibition walls. (David Moreno | Fort Worth Report)
Reece-Hughes hopes visitors leave the exhibition with a rich, more complex understanding of how the 20th century influenced American culture.
“The American modernist narrative is crucial to the Carter’s own collection, and this exhibition will both reveal new perspectives on some of America’s most well-known artists and introduce lesser-known artistic voices to our visitors,” she said.
David Moreno is the arts and culture reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at david.moreno@fortworthreport.org or @davidmreports.
Disclosure: Amon Carter Museum of American Art has been a financial supporter of the Fort Worth Report. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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