American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection

Featuring touchstones of modernist art and showcasing many never-before-published works by American icons.

American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection recontextualizes touchstones of American art and showcases never-before-published works by Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Alma Thomas, among others.

For the first time, Charles Butt—CEO of the H-E-B supermarket chain—shares his passion for modernist art in an exhibition that will travel across Texas from 2025 through 2027 and in this accompanying catalogue. The more than eighty paintings and watercolors from the first eighty years of the twentieth century reveal an influential Texan’s personal vision of the creativity of modern American art. The collection includes both intimate figural scenes and dynamic landscape paintings, and illuminates various approaches to representing and interpreting this country’s land and seas. With color plates and essays by curator Shirley Reece-Hughes and art historian Erika Doss, as well as an interview with Butt by the Carter’s director, Andrew J. Walker, American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection offers a rare glimpse of an unparalleled collection of American imagination.