Duncan Phillips: collector, patron, and critic - art collector started Phillips Collection, Washington D.C - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1999 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Born into a family whose fortune was amassed in the steel industry, Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) turned to art early in his life. While a student at Yale University in 1907 he published in the university's literary magazine an article entitled "The Need of Art at Yale," in which he lobbied for the return of an art history course that had been excised from the curriculum due to lack of interest. It was among the first of his many writings on art, which he combined with a lifelong passion for collecting and patronage, culminating in the establishment of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.the first museum devoted to modern art in this country. An exhibition installed throughout the museum examines Phillips's dual role as outspoken opponent and champion of modern art. The show, which remains on view until January 23, 2000, is entitled Renoir to Rothko: The Eye of Duncan Phillips and comprises more than 250 paintings selected from the institution's permanent holdings of some 2,500 works. The exhibition is sponsored by Merrill Lynch.

The paintings are installed chronologically and thematically to illustrate Phillips's evolving taste, his relationships with the living artists whose work he purchased, and his interest in hanging contemporary paintings next to works by earlier artists, such as Delacroix, El Greco, or Chardin, whose art he felt presaged the modern movement. He saw modern art as a continuation of all that had preceded it, not as a new way of making art. Further insights into this erudite and complex man are afforded by selected letters, journals, manuscripts, photographs, and reviews of the early exhibitions Phillips mounted at the museum.

The museum opened in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery, a tribute to his father and brother who had died within thirteen months of one another in 1917 and 1918, respectively. Documents reveal that during 1919 and 1920 seventy or eighty works were purchased by Phillips, with those by American artists outnumbering Europeans by five or six to one. Membership in the Century Association in New York City brought the collector into contact with a number of artists, one of whom, Gifford Beal, introduced him to his niece, Marjorie Acker, whom Phillips married in 1921.

Along with opening the museum, Phillips set forth and adhered to an ambitious publications' program, and many of the catalogues and books the museum published included contributions by Phillips himself. In 1926, through Alfred Stieglitz, he acquired works by Hartley, Marin, O'Keeffe, and Dove (whom he supported for several years with a monthly stipend). The following year he issued a catalogue that included recently acquired works by Matisse, Braque, and other European artists whose canvases were represented in the total of some forty works he bought that year. Even during the Depression and World War II, the collection swelled, as did the number of exhibitions and publications. In the 1940s Phillips discovered Morris Graves, and, in the ensuing decades, Nicolas de Stael, Richard Diebenkorn, and Mark Rothko.

Later in life Phillips reflected on what he thought he had achieved in his museum and what made it stand apart. He wrote that "the diversity of styles, with a chosen standard for what I consider the best of each style, results not in eclecticism... but rather in an intimate unity of effect." No one could have said it better.

The catalogue of the exhibition contains seventeen essays by sixteen scholars. It is available from the Phillips Collection bookshop by telephoning 202-387-2151, extension 239.