"That little circus rider was on top of this horse that was such a powerful steed that it was racing out of the canvas. The Phillips Collection, © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Pierre Bonnard's Circus Rider (1894, oil on academy board) was acquired in 1947. Stressed, strapped for money, nervous about teaching, she spotted a small 1894 Bonnard - Circus Rider - that gave her strength. On NPR she told me it happened when she was 34, divorced, "a migrant poet" she said, on a fellowship in Washington. The writer Julia Alvarez found courage at the Phillips. Again, creativity reaching our moods and hearts. He decided art was a way to pull out of his depression. In his grief, he decided their Memorial would be a museum - free, open to the public, in his own home. (One definition of a masterpiece: it speaks to the ages.)ĭuncan Phillips created this museum of marvels from tragedy: the deaths of his father and brother. It's the star of the exhibition - "Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century." The show skips through decades' worth of old and new masterpieces. Duncan Phillips bought it 2 years after he opened the museum.
Phillips collection full#
That gleaming Renoir - the only painting I ever wanted to be in - full of sun-kissed friends and family finishing lunch on a porch near the Seine. Well, the Phillips has lots of pretty pictures, too. On the Phillips' 90th anniversary Molina told me on NPR that he didn't "get" Rothkos when he first saw them in London. Alfred Molina once played the painter on Broadway. Just a few years before he died in 1966, Phillips was buying oils for his Rothko room - a small, silent space with Mark Rothko's big, dark, glowing canvasses on all four walls.
Collecting goes on so the museum doesn't become, as Kosinski puts it, "a nostalgia piece." Duncan Phillips wouldn't have wanted that. pop up near Bonnard and El Greco and Jacob Lawrence (the museum owns a good chunk of his great Migration series). New works by women, people of color new media - video, L.E.D. Kosinski and her staff have brought the Phillips into the 21st century. "Such a picture creates a sensation wherever it goes," he said. Phillips believed Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81, oil on canvas) was "one of the greatest paintings in the world." He acquired it in 1923. One hundred years later, that belief still holds. And ashtrays!ĭuncan Phillips had money, taste and the generous heart to help others see beauty. It was like visiting a really rich uncle with fabulous taste and a collector's eye. Newly wed and new to Washington, most Sunday afternoons in 1962 Lou Stamberg and I would walk down a hill with coffee and the paper, arrange ourselves on one of the Phillip's brocade love seats, look up at a Matisse or Manet, and. Decades ago, in this city of museums, it became my favorite one. The Phillips was the first to buy a Georgia O'Keeffe. Founder Duncan Phillips was an early collector of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh.
One hundred years ago, America's first museum of modern art opened in a private mansion in Washington, D.C. They are pictured in the Main Gallery, circa 1920. They opened The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in 1921. His wife, Marjorie Phillips, was a painter. After the deaths of his father and brother in 19, Duncan Phillips found solace in art.
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