Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America

Law, Caroline Wiess, 1918-2003

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role Collector Patron
dates 1918-2003
city Houston
stateTX
other citiesBeaumont, TX; Washington, DC;
sex F
historical notes Law’s collection included work by Picasso, Kline, Hofmann, Joan Miró, Warhol, Lucio Fontana, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Alexander Archipenko, Jean Arp, Roy Lichtenstein, Gustave Courbet, Henri Matisse, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Agnes Martin, Jackson Pollock, and Gerhard Richter.

Law attended Kinkaid School, Ethel Walker School, and Sarah Lawrence College. Her first husband was William Francis, a partner at the law firm that would become the Houston power broker Vinson & Elkins; he died in 1958 while serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration. Two years later, she married her second husband, Theodore Newton Law, founder of Falcon Seaboard Drilling Co. and Mid-Continent Airlines. Before his death in 1989, the Laws bought the city block on which now rests the museum’s Audrey Jones Beck Building. In addition to the MFAH, Ms. Law was a generous supporter of the Houston Ballet, the Houston Grand Opera, the Houston Symphony, Baylor College of Medicine, and UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, both of which will receive $25 million from her estate.
decades
of activity
1950-1960
1960-1970
1970-1980
1980-1990
1990-2000
updated 03/22/2024 12:09:30
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