Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The Phillips Collection

Today my dear friend, Denise, and I took the Metro downtown to visit The Phillips Collection art gallery to view the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition as well as the permanent collection. After a 45-minute fiasco finding the gallery in 90⁰+ temps, we were happy to enter the cool building and pay the admission fee ($12 for me and $10 for Denise because she is a teacher). By the way, it is located at 1600 21st Street, N.W., one block west of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.

I must say that I have never been a big fan of art galleries, but I must be changing as I get older because I truly enjoyed The Phillips Collection.

The Phillips Collection, originally called The Phillips Memorial Gallery, was opened in 1921 by Duncan Phillips. It was the first museum of modern art in the United States, founded 8 years before the Museum of Modern Art in New York and 2 decades before DC’s National Gallery of Art. The Phillips Collection features a permanent collection of almost 3,000 works of art. Included are stunning paintings by American and European impressionist and modern artists, including Renoir, van Gogh, Picasso, Bonnard and many others.

The gallery is located in Duncan Phillips’ 1897 Georgian Revival home and two similarly scaled additions to the home. Originally, Phillips’ small collection was housed in a specially built room over the north wing of the family home. As the collection grew, the family moved into a new home and turned the entire 21st Street residence into an art gallery. Through the years since, two additions were added to help house the now large collection of art.

Me in front of the entrance to The Phillips Collection.

Denise

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This is the building (actually, 3 buildings) where The Phillips Collection is housed. It is located 1 block from DuPont Circle.

The Round Table, 1929
Georges Braque

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During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Braque created a number of large-scale still lifes set on a round pedestal table. In this one he positioned the table in a corner, its top tilted, mimicking the flat surface of the canvas. The table is laden with his favorite things: a guitar and sheet music, a knife and apples, a bottle, a newspaper, and a pipe. The composition is alive with contrasting shapes and counterpoint rhythms. By adding sand, Braque created an unusual, textured surface.

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In 1929, Duncan hillips had the choice between this great masterpiece and Pablo Picasso's famous Three Musicians, which now hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Through the paintings of Braque, Phillips came to appreciate cubism, the most important and visible art movement of the early 20th century. Picasso's cubist works were somewhat too radical and larger-than-life for Phillips's taste, whereas he considered Braque's cubist paintings to be exemplary for their refinement and balance.

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I can't remember who painted the picture below, but it is quite beautiful.

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The Palm, 1926
Pierre Bonnard

Bonnard's idiosyncratic color and compositional tensions dominate in "The Palm." The painter leads the eye in with glistening masses of deep-green foliage and angled rooftops to the blue Mediterranean Sea beyond. His brush quivers noticeably in delineating the yellows of the shrubbery, textures of the houses and blues of the waves. Angles clash with curves, oranges with purples.

Strangest of all is the mysterious figure at the very front of the canvas. Bonnard has clouded the purplish woman who offers fruit to the viewer. "Her blurred, shadowy form renders an apparition, perhaps a mythical enchantress personifying the seductions of nature," [one] Mrs. Turner perceptively wrote in "The Eye of Duncan Philllips: A Collection in the Making." This strange kind of fantasy is what makes the painter's work so unique and fascinating. (The Washington Times, Sept. 21, 2002)

Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-1881
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir remains the best known and most popular work of art at The Phillips Collection, just as Duncan Phillips imagined it would be when he bought it in 1923. The painting captures an idyllic atmosphere as Renoir's friends share food, wine, and conversation on a balcony overlooking the Seine at the Maison Fournaise restaurant in Chatou. Parisians flocked to the Maison Fournaise to rent rowing skiffs, eat a good meal, or stay the night.

The painting also reflects the changing character of French society in the mid- to late-19th century. The restaurant welcomed customers of many classes, including businessmen, society women, artists, actresses, writers, critics, seamstresses, and shop girls. This diverse group embodied a new, modern Parisian society.

Renoir seems to have composed this complicated scene without advance studies or underdrawing. He also spent months making numerous changes to the canvas, painting the individual figures when his models were available, and adding the striped awning along the top edge. Nonetheless, Renoir retained the freshness of his vision, even as he revised, rearranged, and created an exquisitely crafted work of art.


Succession, 1935
Wassily Kandinsky

This painting represents the musical influence in Kandinsky's work. His visual style connects both music and the language of art. Subtle compositional devices are used to show a musical connection to his work. He uses horizontal bars of mixed color and floating geometric shapes to connect his main design elements.

The Repentant St. Peter, 1600-05
El Greco

Seaside Motifs, 1928
Raoul Dufy

Raoul Dufy (1877 – 1953) was a French Fauvist painter. He developed a colorful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics, textiles and decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events. I personally love the vibrant hues of blues he has used in this painting.

Edgar Degas and one of his paintings featuring ballet dancers.

Autumn, 1917-18
Maurice Prendergast

Autumn, or Autumn Festival, as Duncan Phillips called it, is a work of the artist’s mature period. An animated scene painted with broad, expressive strokes in rich tones highlighted with reds, it illustrates Prendergast’s superb command of color. The subject is one favored by Prendergast at this time: a crowd of people in leisurely activity before a forested landscape. The crowd and mass of trees in "Autumn" dominate the foreground of the composition and form a screen, obscuring the background view. "Autumn" is characteristic of Prendergast’s later work in its freedom of execution and densely packed, tapestry-like surface.

"Autumn" was one of Duncan Phillips's favorite Prendergast paintings, for he frequently wrote not only about its decorative beauty but also the spiritual response it evoked in him, saying: “…in…Autumn Festival, the colors have a translucent splendor like stained glass.’’ He went on to speak of this painting, calling it “…an improvisation, truly pagan,…on the russets, purples and orange tones of autumn orchestrated with inexpressibly gorgeous peacock blues and greens — which has somehow a grave dignity in the design and spacing of the abstract figures which makes me think of august church decorations of the best periods…After looking at this Autumn Festival for long and dreamful moments, I confess that I have fallen under a spell and experienced ecstasy more medieval than modern.”

The Migration Series

In the late 1930s, the American artist Jacob Lawrence began producing extended narratives composed of multiple small paintings that were based on history or biography. By far the most famous of these is The Migration Series (1941), a sequence of 60 paintings depicting the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and World War II — a development that had previously received little or no widespread attention.

Before he began painting, Lawrence spent months researching the subject and distilling it into short captions and preparatory drawings. Then, with the help of his wife, the artist Gwendolyn Knight, he prepared 60 boards for the paintings. He created the paintings in tempera, a type of water-base paint that dries rapidly. To keep the colors consistent, he applied one hue at a time to every painting where it was to appear, a feat of organization that required him to plan all 60 paintings in detail.

Published in part in Fortune magazine, the series was the subject of a solo show at the Downtown Gallery in Manhattan in 1941, making Lawrence the first black artist represented by a New York gallery. Interest in the series was intense. Ultimately, The Phillips Collection and New York's Museum of Modern Art agreed to divide it, with the Phillips buying the odd-numbered paintings.

Mother and Child, 1951

Alfonso Ossorio

Georgia O'Keeffe - Special Exhibition

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Although painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), a central figure in 20th-century art, is best known for simplified images of recognizable objects, her contributions to American abstraction over the course of her long career were radical. Her approach - in paintings, drawings, and watercolors - was determined in 1915, when she decided that her art would record her feelings, rather than the appearance of things. For the remainder of her career, she looked to art, whether abstract or objective, to express emotions for which words seemed inadequate.

In her first abstractions, a series of non-objective charcoal drawings, O'Keeffe reduced her palette to black and white. She filled her compositions with fluid, curvilinear forms reminiscent of Art Nouveau. In 1916, responding to the elemental landscape of western Texas, O'Keeffe reintroduced color into her watercolors. By magnifying and tightly cropping her images, a framing device used by photographers, she found the means to express simultaneously the vastness of nature, the immensity of her own response to it, and a powerful sense of being one with it. Two years later, seeking recognition as a painter in the circle of modern art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, she moved to New York and took up oils again.

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Unwelcome critical interpretations of her work as expressive of her sexuality and a limited market for abstraction led O'Keeffe to turn away from pure abstraction in the 1920s and 1930s. After 1923, she rarely showed her early abstractions. Indeed, between 1935 and 1941, she produced no abstractions at all. Beginning in 1929, O'Keeffe spent long stretches of time in New Mexico, finally moving there in 1949. It proved to be an inexhaustible source of subjects for her mature works. She approached these as she had her most abstract works, through her feelings, using many of the same stylistic means. As she said, "I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it."

Likely stung when critic Clement Greenberg trounced her in 1940 for having chosen representation over abstraction, O'Keeffe returned to it in1942, painting forms she found in the natural world that corresponded to abstract forms in her imagination. With the market more receptive to abstract art, she began to exhibit her abstractions again. By the late 1950s and 1960s she was working almost exclusively in an abstract style, in mural-sized aerial views of clouds and a minimalist, geometric series of patio door paintings. The fields of color of her radical late works set a precedent for a younger generation of abstract artists in the 1960s.

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Included in The Phillips Collection exhibition are more than 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by O'Keeffe, dating from 1915 to the late 1970s, and 12 photographic portraits of her by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

Photography was not allowed of any of O'Keeffe's paintings, but I managed to "sneak" a couple pics before I was caught.

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