FORT WORTH — The first two words in “American Modernism From the Charles Butt Collection,” the key phrase in the title of the new exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, indicate its position as a bridge between two approaches to art: the traditional (exemplified by the holdings of the Carter’s next-door neighbor, the Kimbell Art Museum) and the modern (as in the Carter’s other neighbor, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth).
While much traditional art relies on inherited symbols and references that identify a work as belonging to a particular cultural tradition (for example, “American”), modern art’s concern with direct visual experience de-emphasizes such references and traditions.
The works included in the show span the full range between these two poles, from beguiling genre scenes by Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth that could fit in well at the Kimbell, to gorgeous abstractions by Alma Thomas and Joan Mitchell that could hang in the Modern.
Andrew Wyeth’s “Sea Legs” sits on the traditional end of the spectrum in “American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection.” The exhibition also includes more abstract works.
Scott Martin/Collection of Charles Butt / Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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This is the first public exhibition from the collection of Charles Butt, 87, who is chairman of H-E-B and grandson of company founder Florence Butt. While American patrons in an earlier era (the generation of Morgan, Frick and Gardner) looked to European art as the pinnacle of taste, Butt, like his fellow retail magnate Alice Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, has taken wealth amassed by catering to the appetites of the American consumer public and used it to support the art of his country.
Ahead of next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there is no shortage of questions about what it means to be American. But one lesson of this show is that the main tendencies of American art have always been skewed toward the “modern” side of the opposition described above — less oriented toward ancient, mythical and religious subjects than the art of many older, more tradition-bound cultures.
Instead, the magnificent natural scenery of the North American continent has been as central to this country’s visual iconography as anything else. This is evident in that two of the exhibition’s four thematic sections are dedicated to nature: landscapes and seascapes. (The other two are “intimate perspectives” and “geometric utopias/dystopias.”) Together, these four themes are capacious enough to take in an assortment of disparate material; the Carter’s Shirley Reece-Hughes, who organized the show, was given a free hand in choosing works from Butt’s substantial holdings.
My impression is that the collection has been built more from individual judgments of personal taste than from any predetermined curatorial agenda (for example, focusing strictly on a specific movement, artist or period). As Butt stated in a rare interview with the Carter’s then-director Andrew Walker, “Collecting what I love and trusting my instincts have been my approach.”
The New Mexico buttes of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “My Backyard” make the 1945 oil painting one of the standouts of the exhibition.
Scott Martin/Collection of Charles Butt / Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The result is a wide cross section of work dating roughly from the turn of the 20th century through the 1970s. The landscapes and seascapes are particular standouts, from Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico buttes and Everett Gee Jackson’s lakeside vista at Chapala, Mexico, to George Bellows’ Maine coast and John Marin’s Weehawken, New Jersey (across the Hudson River from Manhattan).
Another curiosity is Jackson Pollock’s early-1930s depiction of the oil boom in Borger, Texas, done while Pollock was still under the influence of his Regionalist teacher Thomas Hart Benton (one of whose works hangs just below the Pollock) and over a decade before Pollock went fully Freudian and abstract, achieving global fame for his splatter paintings as “Jack the Dripper.” No one would guess, just by looking, that early Pollock and late Pollock were the same painter; every artist contains multitudes, and such epiphanies are always just around the corner.
Among the most interesting pieces here are the Precisionist paintings that exploit the tension between abstraction and representation, hovering somewhere in the middle. Examples include Charles Sheeler’s ravishing treatment of a 1790 Massachusetts Shaker warehouse that decomposes the building into a grid of overlapping lines, planes and angular fragments, and Ralston Crawford’s astounding shipboard Bora Bora II, in which a few lines and triangles are enough to suggest an entire ocean.
Charles Sheeler’s 1956 oil-on-canvas work “On a Shaker Theme” exploits the tension between abstraction and representation, hovering somewhere in the middle.
Scott Martin/ Collection of Charles Butt
If Sheeler or Crawford had turned the stylistic ratchet a few clicks farther toward full abstraction, it would have yielded a style like that of late Piet Mondrian or Ellsworth Kelly. Instead, their works remain between the real and the abstract — a stimulating position to be in.
After its run at the Carter, “American Modernism” will travel to museums in Austin, Houston and San Antonio. It is, in a way, Butt’s “love letter to Texas,” in the words of Reece-Hughes.
With the Carter heading into a new era after the somewhat abrupt departure in late August of longtime director Walker, the question of the Butt collection’s ultimate destination, as it travels on what might resemble an audition tour, will no doubt be of great interest to many in the Texas arts community.
John Marin’s 1916 painting “Weehawken Sequence” offers an abstract view from Weehawken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Scott Martin/Collection of Charles Butt
Details
“American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection” continues through Jan. 25, 2026, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Free admission. For more information, call 817-738-1933 or visit cartermuseum.org.
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