The symbiotic alliance of Duncan Phillips and Alfred Stieglitz

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Stephen Bennett Phillips

In January of that year Stieglitz and Phillips had begun a relationship that was at times harmonious and at other times tumultuous. Their mutual interest in furthering the cause of American art initially brought them together. Stieglitz had just opened his second art gallery in New York City, and Phillips had five years earlier opened an art museum in a section of his family's house in Washington, D.C.

The two men were born a generation apart, Stieglitz in 1864 and Phillips in 1886. In 1905, when Phillips was only a sophomore at Yale University, Stieglitz opened his first gallery, 291,(2) with the photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973). Stieglitz was an early proponent of European modernism, and from 1902 until 1917 he published Camera Work, an avant-garde journal devoted to modernism and photography. At 291 he exhibited works by European and American modernists, including Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove. During the same period Phillips wrote about art for conventional magazines such as The American Magazine of Art and Scribner's Magazine and collected paintings by artists such as Arthur B. Davies, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.(3)

Stieglitz regarded the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York City (better known as the Armory Show) as a culmination of what he had been doing in his gallery for years. To an acquaintance he wrote:

One thing is sure, the people at large and for that matter also the artists, etc. have been made to realize the importance of the work that has been going on at "291" and in Camera Work. This much the Exhibition accomplished for us.(4)

Given his conservative tastes, it is not surprising that Phillips's review of the exhibition was unfavorable. He called the show "stupifying in its vulgarity" and expressed displeasure with the very European radicals whom Stieglitz exhibited in his gallery and wrote about in Camera Work.(5)

In 1916 Phillips began collecting the work of Davies, one of the organizers of the Armory Show. He wrote essays about the artist and in 1916 published a monograph about him. Davies's scholarly manner appealed to Phillips, and after much debate about abstraction Phillips became more tolerant, although still skeptical, about the significance of the new style. Phillips did not subscribe to the abstractionists' theory that form should exist for its own sake. He believed that if contemporary art became too far removed from its representational past, it would be left without any meaning for the future. Speaking to the American Federation of the Arts in 1917, Phillips said:

Aesthetics may be rational in reducing art's emotions to their abstract elements yet, art is personal, art is passionate and its fundamental purpose is to communicate the gift of pleasure.(6)

In 1917 Stieglitz closed 291 and ceased publication of Camera Work. The following year he left his wife to move in with Georgia O'Keeffe.(7) That same year Phillips began planning for the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery, founded as a tribute to both his father and only brother, Jim, who had died within thirteen months of each other.

Phillips envisioned a collection that would continue to evolve over time and would juxtapose the work of contemporary artists with that of recognized masters. He referred to the museum as an "American Prado"(8) to which artists could come to study the masters, just as Edouard Manet had visited the Museo del Prado in Madrid to study the work of Goya, Velazquez, and El Greco. As Phillips began to form his collection, he looked to those American artists whose goal of artistic freedom was just the approach to art that he considered to be the core of modernism. He also considered these artists' work to be of such high quality that it could hold its own when hung next to the works by El Greco, Cezanne, and Renoir in his own collection.

In December 1925 Stieglitz opened a new gallery, which consisted of a single room in the Anderson Galleries building on Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street in New York City. It was officially called the Intimate Gallery, but he also referred to it as The Room or Room 303. Unlike 291, this gallery focused exclusively on American modernist painters, for he disdained the conventional turn that European art had taken by the mid-1920s. He showed the work of Dove, Hartley, Marin, and O'Keeffe, who were all converts to the modern idea that color and form could be independent of naturalistic representation. They were influenced by Wassily Kandinsky's theory (an excerpt of which was first translated into English in Camera Work in 1912) that ideas and feelings could be communicated through abstraction. Stieglitz's constant experimentation in photography also encouraged these artists to push the boundaries of art. The four artists soon came to see abstraction as a means rather than an end in itself. It was a way to see the pure essence of an object, which could be used as a springboard toward a truly personal expression.