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Art Beyond Isms: Masterworks from El Greco to Picasso in The Phillips
Collection will travel as Phillips anticipates construction of new modern
art sudy center
Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party and 54 other European greats will
travel to five venues over 18 months, while the museum presents a series
of special exhibitions and other highlights from its collection in the Main
House.
Washington, D.C. April 10, 2002 - For only the second time in nearly 15 years,
Auguste Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party will be seen outside of The
Phillips Collection when the exhibition Art Beyond Isms: Masterworks from El
Greco to Picasso in The Phillips Collection travels nationally to five venues
beginning this fall. Anticipating construction on its new center for studies in
modern art to begin in early fall, the Phillips will send 55 of its greatest
European masterworks, including works by Cézanne, Courbet, Daumier, Degas, van
Gogh, Monet, and 27 others, on tour across the country, beginning with The
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, this September, and proceeding to the Phoenix
Art Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, the Denver Art Museum, and
closing at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, in winter 2004.
This masterworks tour is the latest in The Phillips Collection's long
tradition of sending exhibitions to diverse venues. "The Phillips is
committed to sharing great works of art with broad audiences," explained
director Jay Gates. "Since we anticipate the need to remove artwork from
the Goh Annex during the period of construction, we are thrilled by the
opportunity to build on this commitment by taking great works of art,
including the Boating Party, to new audiences across the country, rather
than putting them in storage, away from public appreciation, for 18 months."
The Phillips expects to begin construction of the center for studies in modern
art early this fall and to open the center and an enlarged Goh Annex in the
winter of 2004. The museum will continue to present a series of special
exhibitions and other highlights from its collection in the Main House during
this time.
The Phillips Collection, whose commitment to sharing great works of art with
ever-growing audiences stems back to its founder Duncan Phillips, has sent
exhibitions of paintings from its collection to venues all over the world,
including, in just the last two decades, London, Madrid, Tokyo, and Frankfurt,
and over 30 cities across the United States. Its exhibition of Masterworks from
The Phillips Collection, shown at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas
last year, was a groundbreaking venture that introduced brand-new and diverse
audiences to one of the country's most beloved collections of modern masterworks.
With the exception of the Chicago Art Institute's 1998 Renoir's Portraits exhibition,
Beyond Isms marks the first time in nearly 15 years that audiences outside of
Washington, D.C., will view firsthand Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party.
This monumental work, arguably Renoir's greatest, last traveled when a series
of exhibitions from The Phillips Collection were sent to 15 venues internationally
from 1981 to 1984 and 1987 to 1988, while the museum's Goh Annex underwent renovation.
Exhibition Overview
By the time he purchased Renoir's celebrated Luncheon of the Boating Party, Duncan
Phillips already was committed to gathering and interpreting the art of the modern age.
Art Beyond Isms: Masterworks from El Greco to Picasso in The Phillips Collection will
comprise over 50 of the European modern masterworkds he collected, including works by
van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Degas, Picasso, Bonnard, Gauguin, Klee and more. The exhibition
will reflect Phillips' personal understanding of modern art and his approach to collecting
and interpreting it. Phillips saw modernism not as a break with the past, but as a
continuation. His goal was not to create an encyclopedic collection, but rather to
assemble groups of works that would resonate off one another, revealing the visual
harmonies that tied together historical masterworks with the art of his own time.
Art Beyond Isms will present modern masterworks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
alongside works by earlier masters that Phillips felt anticipated the modern movements,
such as Delacroix, Ingres, El Greco, and Chardin.
Highlights of the exhibition include The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), which
Phillips called "the only Renoir I need," and now is the cornerstone work in The Phillips
Collection: van Gogh's Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles (1888), which Phillips
purchased in 1930 to mark the occasion of giving his entire house over to the museum;
Cézanne's Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears (1890-93), believed to have once been
given to Claude Monet as a gift from the artist; Picasso's The Blue Room (1901), which
demonstrates Picasso's mannered, exaggerated way of presenting a figure and his monochromatic,
blue palette characteristic of his Blue Period paintings; and Paul Klee's Picture Album
(1937), one of 13 Klees in The Phillips Collection that have served as inspiration to
artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Kenneth Noland, and Marc Tobey, since Duncan Phillips
assembled them between 1938 and 1948. Earlier masterworks such as El Greco's The Repentant
St. Peter (c. 1600-05, or later), Chardin's A Bowl of Plumbs (c. 1728), Delacroix's Paganini
(1831), and Ingres' The Small Bather (1826), will add to the comprehensive examination
of the evolution of modern art as seen through signature works from The Phillips Collection
and the special vision of its founder, Duncan Phillips.
History of the Collection
Duncan Phillips devoted his life - in his writings, in his friendships, and most notably
in his creation of a remarkable art collection - to bringing the joy and delighted
understanding he had of art to greater audiences. In 1918, responding to his brother's
death just 13 months after the death of their father, Phillips decided to create a museum
in memorial to them. Through his extensive writing about art, Phillips had already discovered
his passion for acting as "interpreter and navigator between the public and the picture...
to emphasize the function of the arts as a means for enhancing and enriching living."
Sharing this personal understanding of artists and their work with the public was central
to the vision for his museum.
By the time of the museum's opening, in two rooms of his family's Washington, D.C. home,
in 1921, Phillips had acquired nearly 240 paintings. Presenting French paintings by Monet,
Sisley, and Fantin-Latour and works by contemporary American painters Ryder, Whistler, Luks,
and Hassam, Phillips created the first museum in the United States to emphasize modern art
and the work of living artists. Some of the museum's greatest works were collected in its
earliest years. Two early acquisition lists reflect Phillips' early tendencies, counting
works such as Chardin's A Bowl of Plumbs, and Monet's The Road to Vétheuil, and 19 works
by Americans, including Julian Alden Weir, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and John Henry Twachtman,
among his favorites. The Luncheon of the Boating Party was acquired in 1923, Daumier's
Uprising and Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire in 1925.
Duncan Phillips did not begin, however, as a prescient collector, nor did he set out to
define a canon of modernism. His collection was, above all, a product of his own tastes
including his love of color and belief in the universality and continuity of art across
time and nationality. As written by Robert Hughs,"Phillips was in fact the compleat optical
collector. He craved color sensation, the delight and radiance and sensory intelligence that
is broadcast by an art based on color. Color healed; it consoled; it gave access to Eden."
Phillips was appalled, for example, by the 1913 New York Armory Show, the first North American
exhibition of cubism, fauvism, impressionism, and post-impressionism, which he described
as "stupefying in its vulgarity." But his response to the modern expression in art was an
evolving one, and his ultimate receptivity to the post-impressionists and especially Cézanne,
in fact, ultimately refined and educated his eye and brought him to a broader understanding
of modern art. By 1930, among the more than 600 paintings in the collection, were two major
works by Cézanne, the first seven of the collection's substantial Bonnard holdings, the first
Picasso to enter the collection, as well as contemporary American works representing The
Eight and artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz.
Phillips continued to enrich the collection over the next several decades with considerable
purchases of European and American paintings that reflect his continually evolving aesthetic
sensibilities. What unites the collection is Phillips' overriding understanding of the
"vision of the whole" and the concept that color was the essential structural element. By
the late 1950s, responding to the overwhelming emotional power of color in the work of Mark
Rothko, Phillips purchased four works by the artist and, in 1960, decided to make it the
focus of an installation in the new adjoining museum building. Intended as a meditative
respite, the Rothko Room has since served as a model for similar presentations of the artist's
work.
Center for Studies in Modern Art
The Phillips Collection continues to be guided by its founders' vision to put people in touch
with great works of art in ways that are life enhancing. The tour of the Phillips' European
masterworks Art Beyond Isms was conceived of by the museum's director, Jay Gates, as a way to
keep great artworks on view to the public during the construction of the expansion to the
museum and the addition of a center for the studies in modern art.
"As The Phillips Collection prepares to move forward with plans to develop additional ways
to bring the collection to a wider and more diverse audience through interactive programs on
the Internet, more comprehensive teacher-programs, and new publications and CD's, we remain
committed to sharing the Phillips' great works of art with the public," stated Jay Gates.
"This tour allows this art to be viewed by a diverse national audience that might otherwise
not have been able to experience these paintings first hand."
For more information about The Phillips Collection, call (202) 387-2151 or visit the Web
site at www.phillipscollection.org
With the support of:
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