The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Part I.
When it first opened, The Phillips Collection, near DuPont Circle in Washington, was one of those small private collections open to the public in the tradition of the Italian Cabinet as reimagined by Americans with money …The Morgan Library …The Frick Collection …or the small museum erected by self made men and women …The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Barnes Collection, the Hirshorn Museum, or the Marion Mc Nay Museum in San Antonio. Originally it was the family’s private residence but as this proved disruptive to the family’s life, another home was built elsewhere in the city. Since then the museum has been expanded in two or three buildings that maintain the look and the size of the town houses on the block where it sits.

Duncan Phillips Jr.was the second son of Duncan Phillips, of Pittsburgh Glass, and the grandson of the Jones and Laughlin Steel people, also of Pittsburgh. With the death of his father in 1917, and the death of his brother, of the Spanish flu, in 1918, Phillips decided to build an art collection to memorialize those two men.

The collection was begun with a number of 19th Century French paintings, Corot, Courbet, Chardin, Monet, and some of the other Impressionists, in fact the French school is the strongest element of the collection followed by American, a conscious effort Phillips made to include his fellow countrymen, especially living artists.

Originally Phillips had a strong dislike for modern art, a dislike he overcame after his marriage to Marjorie Acker, a woman who was studying painting at the time of their meeting. Eventually she was able to help him understand the concept of the new painting and where he had once scorned Cezanne, for example, he came to own five of the very important later works by that artist.

At the present time the collection numbers about 3000 works and as it presents itself it initially appears to be an odd assortment of paintings and contemporary photographs. Phillips had definite ideas about art and what constitutes a “great painting” and the works were often placed side by side, disregarding chronology or school, to emphasize his specific understanding of their relationships. Thus in the original Phillips house we see a large El Greco “Saint Peter” and on the wall at the far end of the same room we see Goya’s “Saint Peter”. The El Greco is wonderful painting but one cannot help but notice that the saint’s hands are so delicate as to be almost feminine, whereas in the Goya the large work-swollen hands are those of a man accustomed to hard labor. It can also be seen how both artists inspired the later generations of modernists, the brush work and the limited palette in the Goya is a technique similar to that in the Cezanne self portrait.

I’m not sure, however, that this juxtapostioning always works to the artist’s advantage. In one of the original parlours, there is on one side of a doorway a very strong and dynamic Courbet Landscape and on the other side of the doorway a landscape by George Innes, which I am afraid suffers by comparison. Recently I have begun to think that Innes is a far greater painter than his present low name recognition would indicate …I have seen some really fine Innes paintings in several museums these past few years. But placed next to the Courbet, which has the conviction of a strongly held philosophical world view, this particular landscape comes off as a decorative piece made for a late Victorian parlour. I am uncertain if that was the museum’s intention or if it is the unintended consequence of this museum’s philosophy.

Overall there seems to be a preference in this collection for works that are representational. Among the modern works there are two wonderful cubist works by George Braque, a Robert Henri of the New York Five fame, and the Stieglitz stable, O’Keefe, Marin, Hartley, and Dove. There is an early Jackson Pollack collage, made during the period when he was still dissecting Picasso’s work, and then, suddenly, Helen Frankenthaler and Murray Louis. There is a decided gap in which both Hans Hoffman and William de Kooning were noticeable absent. One of the docents told me, in response to my question, that they were indeed included in the collection but that neither had work on view in the present hanging. So one lives with the idiosyncrasies of the collector and I have to say it is a welcome change to the standard municipal museum practice of hanging similar works by the same artists in look-alike museums all across the country.

Of special interest to me were the two Braque paintings, a very large “The Round Table”, which was featured on the dust jacket of the Rizzoli Braque book, and a wonderful long Still Life with Lemons. As the museum was not crowded …it being a chill winter day and very out of season for museum going… I was able to spend about thirty minutes sitting quietly and studying the larger of the two. Sand has been mixed into the white paint that has been applied as a ground over the drawing and over this the color has been applied in very thin paint, almost as if it were a glaze, except for two areas in the lower right between the table and the wainscoting where there is a thick impasto. As the thin paint is so fluidly and freely applied it made me wonder if Braque, Matisse, and Picasso might not have painted with glazes or glaze thin paint, as in the late Cezanne works, and that that accounts for the spontaneity and dynamic of their brush work …which can seem casual and careless unless that reference is understood. The nearby Cezanne, The Gardens of Les Lauves, 1906, is a good example of this influence.

However, as if to contradict my insights, near the Braque work was a small Picasso cubist work, dated 1918, which was done with a moderately think impasto and then varnished to create an overall even surface. Both Braque and Picasso forewent varnishing in their early cubist works and seeing this one that was so heavily varnish was rather jarring to me: it seemed to be suffocating.

And of very special note, in this same gallery with these paintings as well as the Cezanne self portrait, there was a late Marsden Hartley, Wild Roses, which held its own as an equal among equals. I am becoming more and more convinced the more I see of his work that Hartley is our very best 20th Century American painter.

Elsewhere in the collection two Arthur Doves, Sun something , and, something Moon, are among the least interesting of his works that I have seen… these don’t compare favorably with those in the Lane Collection in Boston. But the American painting section of the Phillips web site, see below, lists an additional 52 Doves. (He and Duncan Phillips carried on a long correspondence.) Wouldn’t it be nice to see them all hanging together!

This museum is the home of the first installed of the Rothko Rooms, four paintings facing one another in a dim space and with a bench for quiet contemplation. In the last five years I have seen at least 25 Rothko paintings, almost all of them this same color field concept. Sitting quietly here and looking at these four I almost convinced myself that they are simply a manufactured contrivance, their reputed “spiritual” experience as shallow as the culture from which they spring. I can imagine an artist doing a series of paintings like these over a period of a few months but I cannot understand how someone could devote years and years to something that was so very thin to start with. But then I have a very low tolerance for repetition. In my house the moving finger writes and having writ moves on.

One last negative note. The reputed center piece of the collection is the Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party. The more Renoir I see the more dreadful a painter I think he was. (In my defense I can add that Picasso agrees with me!!) Here there is a dynamic in the choreography of the figures as arranged across the format, but it cannot help but be noticed that each of the men is wearing a hat many times too small for his head, or else they have deformed heads under their hats. Each of the women looks to be a portrait lifted from another work. Once that is seen it is also noticed that none of these persons relate to one another; it is all pose and composition. But last and not least, at the bottom of the frame amongst the glasses and bottles on the table in the foreground there are a lot of smears of white that I suppose were meant to be read as sunlight glistening off the clear glass. But it is too heavy handed and out of harmony with the rest of the painting. It’s the kind of carelessness with the brush that one sees too often in John Singer Sargent.

But to end on a positive note! There is in one hallway a collection of mid twentieth century photographs…Minor White, Harry Callahan, Ansel Adams …photography as abstract expressionism. (Since Duncan Phillip’s death the collection has continued to grow and a department of photography has been added.) One of the Harry Callahan photographs, Aix en Provence, is tremendously exciting. In a work with a full range of rich tonal values the white ends of the branches of a leafless tree and the white seed heads lining the grasses in the lower section stand out as bright electric moments proving that photography can indeed be a fine art …and that Harry Callahan should be a household name.

Although the original impetus of the Museum was to present fine art paintings in a comfortable home-like setting, the two recent additions are more like small museum environments than living quarters…I suppose that comes from having such a large collection. But at least unlike most recent museum expansions the gallery space far exceeds the public spaces.

There is neither beginning nor end to the collection and so one is encouraged to wander about at leisure and to make his own discoveries and relationships. In the Phillips’ former residence the rooms have been left to suggest what they had been, the illumination comes from heavily draperied windows and drawing room lighting, and chairs, sofas, et al, are placed around the rooms to suggest “homey” and to provide a perch for quiet contemplation. On a cloudy day, such as it was when I was there, the outside greyness seems to overwhelm the rooms with drabness and to emphasize their lack of brick-a-brack.

The Phillips collection was built one piece at a time and has on the whole a wonderful selection of paintings. It is a welcome change from the usual museum going experience; it does not conform to the prevailing trends in museumology, it has a strong personal viewpoint, and it was wonderful to see a selective few pieces of the collection presented in a quiet and comfortable environment rather than to be overwhelmed by a massive collection presented in a rush of department store-like sale day madness. Every member of the staff, many of whom are art students, that I encountered on my rounds was as pleasant and cordial as they could be. The museum exudes good vibes. Good show!

http://www.phillipscollection.org/

http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/index.htm