Two of my favorite American art museums, the Phillips Collections in Washington, D.C., and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., are this season collaborating on an exhibition that has brought the cream of the Atheneum’s 20th-century collection to Washington for the first time. The show is called Surrealism and Modernism: From the Collection of the Read More
There was a time, in the early decades of the last century, when the newly created museums devoted to modern painting tended to be so closely identified with the work of one or two major artists that these figures came to symbolize, in the public mind, the very spirit of the institutions and their collections. Read More
The American painter Jacob Lawrence, who died last year at
the age of 82, had the good fortune to enjoy a long and cordial association
with the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.. The connection dated from
1941, when the museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, acquired the 30 odd-numbered
panels from the artist’s 60-picture Migration
Series on Read More
Some subjects in the art world are better left to be dealt with historically than in the present tense. One of them is the private patronage of contemporary art and contemporary art museums. History has some wonderful stories to tell on this subject, and some not so wonderful stories, too. Yet when it comes to Read More
There are retrospective exhibitions of well-known artists that ought to be accompanied by a warning label that would read: Do not understand this artist too quickly! In other words, what you know, or think you know, may not be all there is to know. The French painter, sculptor and caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), whose work Read More
For anyone with a keen interest in modern painting for the esthetic and intellectual pleasures it affords-rather than, say, for the political and cultural battles that have sometimes marked its history-the exhibition that is not to be missed this fall is Renoir to Rothko: The Eye of Duncan Phillips , which is currently on view Read More
