Audrey Jones Beck

Audrey Jones Beck (March 27, 1924 – August 22, 2003) was an American art collector and philanthropist who donated her personal art collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The John A. and Audrey Jones Beck Collection included impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, and the museum named its Audrey Jones Beck Building in her honor.

Life Audrey Jones Beck was born in Houston, Texas, on March 27, 1922. She was the granddaughter of Houston entrepreneur Jesse H. Jones. Beck was a founding trustees of the Houston Grand Opera, the Houston Ballet, and a trustee of the Houston Symphony Society. However, Houston did not have a strong tradition of philanthropy in the visual arts at that time and there were few examples for her to follow. "The earliest wealthy people here just didn't collect painting and sculpture." said Peter Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH).

In her later years, Audrey Beck rarely ventured out, but often entertain friends at her home. It is one of several buildings on the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston campus, and one of the three primary exhibition spaces open to the public. The Beck building is joined to the Kinder Building with 20th-21st century art, and the Wiess Law Building of Asian, African, oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art, by an underground tunnel featuring the permanent installation of James Turrell's, The Light Inside (1999).

The Beck collection Vincent van Gogh, The Rocks (1888), is one of well over 150 works of art that Beck donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Beck collection is an important foundation of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's permanent collection. The collection predominantly includes late 19th and early 20th century art, with a focus on impressionism, post impressionism, early modern French painting, and the School of Paris. Examples of Egyptian antiquities, Asian porcelain and decorative arts, antique American silver, and early to mid 19th century American photography are also included.

Artist and art movements in the Beck collection include representative examples of realist and en plein air painters such as Eugène Boudin, and Honoré Daumier. Impressionist painters include Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and others. A gallery of neo-impressionism (pointillism) exhibits the paintings of Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and several other members of the movement. Post-Impressionists include Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Vuillard, and many others. The Fauvist collection is near encyclopedic, including paintings by Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and more. A few examples of symbolism (e.g. Odilon Redon), expressionism (e.g. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner), Cubism (e.g. Georges Braque), are also included in the collection, as are works by Marc Chagall, Alexej von Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Rouault, Henri Rousseau, and Chaïm Soutine.

Audrey Jones Beck Papers and Memorabilia The Audrey Jones Beck Papers and Memorabilia are archived at the Woodson Research Center, Rice University, Houston, Texas. The archives include of family records, photographs, artifacts, correspondence, documents on philanthropy, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston records, spanning from 1860 to 2004.