The ranch was celebrated for its Black Angus cattle and winning quarter horses, and thanks to oil strikes there, the family’s wealth grew. President Theodore Roosevelt, famous Western actors, and many other illustrious figures were regular visitors to Four Sixes. Yet, like her great-grandfather – who, in spite of having built himself ‘the finest ranch house in Texas’, always chose to sleep in the backroom of the supply house – Anne remained firmly rooted in the realities of her family ranch and their businesses.

She herself learned from the cowboys on her ranch how to ride and work cattle and was a fierce pioneering advocate of cowboys’ employment rights, being one of the first in the ranching industry to provide her staff with health insurance and retirement plans. Anne Marion never forgot the impact of her upbringing, her time with cowboys, and her love of ranch-life, recalling “The most important thing that ever happened to me was growing up on that ranch. It kept my feet on the ground more than anything else.”

Mrs. Marion was not only inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame, but also the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame (2005), the Great Hall of Westerners (2009) and the Great Women of Texas (2003); following her death, she was honored with an extended cattle drive in Fort Worth - attended by cowboys from all the region’s leading ranches. In the words of President George W. Bush following her passing: “She was a true Texan, a great patron of the arts, a generous member of our community, and a person of elegance and strength. Texans have lost a patriot, and Laura and I have lost a friend.”

Philanthropist
Over the course of her life, Anne Marion donated many works to museums, and oversaw, through her charitable foundation, the distribution of more than $600 million worth of grants to a variety of institutions and causes, many of them in her native Texas. She was a trusted board director and benefactor of the Kimbell Art Museum for four decades, and a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was also a principal benefactor of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the driving force behind its $65 million expansion, selecting Tadao Ando as architect for its new home, which opened to high acclaim in 2002. Very fittingly for such a dynamic and successful woman in her own right, Anne Marion founded, together with her husband John, America’s first museum dedicated to a female artist - Georgia O'Keeffe - in Santa Fe.

Continuing Anne Marion’s unwavering lifelong dedication to philanthropy and decades-long commitment to cultural patronage, a number of major additional works from her collection will be gifted to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and to the Kimbell Art Museum, further details of which will be announced at a later date.

The Collection
While the heart of the Collection is devoted to giants of twentieth-century American art – Warhol, Still, Diebenkorn, Kline, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Hofmann, Francis, Noland, Louis and many more – it also spans Old Masters (all of which were displayed in Mrs. Marion’s palazzo-like home in In Indian Wells), Jewelry, and a sensational abstract by Gerhard Richter. The sale of the Collection of Mrs. John L. Marion will launch with an 18-lot dedicated evening auction in New York in May.

AMERICAN VISIONARY: THE COLLECTION OF MRS. JOHN L MARION MAY 2021

The masterworks that formed Anne Marion’s Collection took pride of place within the Marions’ Fort Worth, Texas home. Commissioned by her mother (Anne Burnett Tandy), their home was the first of only three private houses ever designed by I.M. Pei, the architect of the Louvre Pyramid, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and many other major public buildings.