#charlesbutt — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

I went to the Blanton Museum on the UT Austin campus to see the exhibition "American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection: From Edward Hopper to Alma Thomas ".

Butt is the grandson of the founder of the HEB grocery chain and one use to which he put his considerable fortune is the collecting of American modernist art.

The one room exhibition reflects Butt's idiosyncratic interests. The titles of the seven sections of the exhibition hint at these preferences: Breaking Form: Cubism and Its Legacy, Urban Encounters, Intimate Perspectives, Precisionism, The Language of the Sea, Land Progressions, and Edges of Abstraction.

The human figure is seen only in a minority of the pictures here, and I sensed that the seascapes, landscape, and precisionist buildings have been Butt's central passion. From these to the impressive Alma Thomas and Ellsworth Kelly works hung next to each other seems a natural progression.

I was particularly struck by his Alice Neel not being a portrait but a depiction of a fire escape.

I spent the most time looking at some of the seascapes and the handful of hard edged abstraction works, one of which I have attached to this post.

The exhibition plots the history of American modernism only in the narrowest and most formalistic sense. As such, it cannot be taken as at all representative of the art of US modernity.

Of course, such a representation was not the objective of the exhibition. So what is the point of the show? I took a glance at the catalog, which seemed to be thin on art historical scholarship. Perhaps the collection's tour of just four museums, all in Texas, suggests that the exhibition is connected with possible institutional beneficiaries of the now aged collector's bequests.

If you happen to already be in Austin, it's worth dropping in, but unless you have a burning desire to see second tier American modernist work, don't make a special trip.

#BlantonMuseumOfArt #Texas #Art #Modernism #American Art #CharlesButt #TwentiethCenturyArt

Image: Abstraction -- Blanche Lazzell -- (1878–1956) -- c. 1925 -- oil on board