The late Texas philanthropist Anne Marion, who accrued her $1.1 billion net worth by expanding her family’s oil and ranching empire, amassed an era-defining collection of American postwar art, and it will soon head to auction. “She had a great eye and she had no hesitation when she saw something that she liked,” Marla Price, the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art director of 30 years, recently told ARTnews. “She understood immediately when something was great or important.”
One of the country’s top arts patrons, Marion is remembered principally for her role in founding the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1990s, together with her husband, John Marion, a former Sotheby’s chairman and the house’s top auctioneer for decades. A longtime supporter of the Kimbell Art Museum, Marion was also the primary backer of a $65 million expansion of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The couple’s collection included works by blue-chip American postwar artists such as Andy Warhol, Clyfford Still, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, and Kennth Noland, as well as those by Old Masters. When its lots are auctioned by Sotheby’s New York this spring, the collection is expected to fetch a collective $150 million at Sotheby’s. Below, some highlights from the Anne Marion collection.
