Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1387796
close friendship with Meredith Long brought opportunities that shaped his collection and concurrently shaped Long and Company … Fayez Sarofim and Meredith Long were true partners in collecting American art, a friendship perpetuated in the Long-Sarofim Gallery in the Museum's Audrey Jones Beck Building." I myself was there — as a junior staff member at Meredith Long & Company from 1989 to 1991 — to observe Mr. Sarofim's famous Saturday visits to the gallery, where he and ML (as we called Mr. Long) drank tea and talked art. The fruit of these two-person salons is now on view at the MFAH in works by George Inness (a landscape painter of the 19th century who was a touchstone of the gallery), John Singer Sargent (represented by 13 canvases), Burgoyne Diller (America's Mondrian), George L. K. Morris (a founder of American Abstract Artists), and Color Field and ab-ex luminaries Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Motherwell. Alongside these masterpieces acquired from Meredith Long, this 220-work survey of the Sarofim collection encompasses Egyptian pharaonic sculpture and Coptic textiles, bowing to the collector's heritage, as well as ancestral Pueblo pottery (circa 950 – 1400); 19th- century Navajo blankets; El Greco's dramatic The Crucifixion, 1575-1580; a jubilant Childe Hassam flag painting depicting the end of World War I; and works by Uruguayan founder of School of the South Joaquín Torres-García. Compelling canvases by Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassatt, and Joan Mitchell underscore the inclusiveness of the Sarofim collection, which one hopes will permanently grace the walls of the MFAH one day. Through September 6; mfah.org. Faye Toogood Clockwise from top left: Joan Mitchell's Then, Last Time I, 1985. © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Kenneth Noland's Quid, 1960. © 2021 The Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NYC. William Merritt Chase's An Artist's Wife, 1892. Ancestral Pueblo's Socorro-Type Jar, circa 950-1400. John Singer Sargent's Madame Ramón Subercaseaux, circa 1880-1881. Lee Krasner's The Green Fuse, 1968. © 2021 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ARS, NYC. Mary Cassatt's In the Park, circa 1894. Page 32: Winslow Homer's The Woodcutter, 1891. All artwork images Fayez S. Sarofim Collection. 33