This series of lecture are held on Fridays at 1:30 p.m. and repeated on Saturday at 4 p.m. in the Brown Auditorium Theater. A reception to meet the speakers follows each lecture.
June 7-8: "The Life & Legacy of Audrey Jones Beck"
When Audrey Jones Beck passed away in August 2003, a report in the Houston Chronicle noted that "she was best known for the namesake Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and for her personal collection of Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings, which she donated to the museum." But there is much more behind the name Audrey Jones Beck. In this lecture, Steven Fenberg, author of author of Unprecedented Power: Jesse Jones, Capitalism and the Common Good, shares many insights about Beck, a civic-minded Houstonian, philanthropist, animal lover, homebody and wife of John A. Beck and granddaughter of Jesse H. Jones.
June 14-15: "Sarah Campbell Blaffer and the MFAH"
Born in Waxahatchie and raised in Lampasas, daughter of a founder of Texaco and married to a founder of Humble Oil, Houston philanthropist and art lover Sarah Campbell Blaffer (1885-1975) contributed to the presence of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1947, she founded the Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Collection at the MFAH in honor of her late husband, donating signature works to the museum, including Renoir's Still Life with Bouquet, Cézanne's portrait of his wife and two Canaletto views of Venice. James Clifton, director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and curator of Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the MFAH, explores Sadie Blaffer's life and legacy, her love of art and the museum, and her epic battle with the IRS.
June 21-22: "Manfred Heiting's Passion for Photography"
Manfred Heiting began his professional life as a designer, a skill most recently employed in his exhibition and book design for the MFAH's 2011 exhibition and catalogue, Helmut Newton: White Women. Sleepless Nights. Big Nudes. Heiting's work on a marketing campaign for the Polaroid Corporation's SX-70 camera brought him in contact with not only the major 20th-century photographers, but also new talent. Over the next 25 years, his collection grew to over 4,000 images which range from one of photography's inventors, William Henry Fox Talbot, to Polaroids by Helmut Newton, and radical experimental and conceptually diverse contemporary photographers. During this illustrated lecture, Anne Wilkes Tucker considers the photographs in Heiting's collection acquired by the MFAH in 2002 and 2004.