Celebrating and Collecting Contemporary Art

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Experiment Station

On Friday evening, March 6, about 40 special guests gathered in a small library at the Metropolitan Club (New York, NY) for a reception celebrating contemporary art at the Phillips. While sipping on champagne, our guests were treated to a salon conversation between Director Dorothy Kosinski and philanthropist, arts patron, and collector Agnes Gund, who captivated the audience with anecdotes from her rich collecting experience.

Top row: Director Dorothy Kosinski in conversation with collector Agnes Gund; Bottom left: Kosinski and Mark Smith; Bottom right: Phillips Contemporaries Carl Bedell, Allana D’Amico, Laura Deming, and event host Todd Galaida

In the spirit of collecting and Duncan Phillips’s vision, Kosinski took the opportunity to announce an exceptional gift of 18 American sculptors’ drawings, promised by Phillips trustee and art collector Linda Lichtenberg Kaplan, showcasing the museum’s commitment to building a carefully crafted, in-depth collection. “These extraordinarily generous gifts enable us to extend Duncan Phillips’s legacy in meaningful ways,” she said. “Through such outstanding works, we can strengthen the museum’s already authoritative voice for modern and contemporary art, while also enriching our distinctive exhibition narrative—one renowned for the visual conversations created between important American and European artists.”

Man Ray’s Literary Homage Through Painting

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Experiment Station

(left) Man Ray, Aline et Valcour, 1950. Oil on canvas, 30 x 38 in. Private Collection. © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2015 (right) Man Ray, Untitled (Mannequin with Cone and Sphere), 1926. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 1/4 in. The Bluff Collection. © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2015

Titling this work after a novel written by the Marquis de Sade while he was incarcerated in the Bastille in the 1780s, Man Ray pays homage to the literary figure greatly admired by the Surrealists. The novel Aline et Valcour explores the relativity of moral standards, a theme the viewer is encouraged to find embedded in this cryptic composition based on Man Ray’s photograph featuring the same elements.

What similarities between Man Ray’s photograph (at right) and his painting (at left) of the subject do you notice? What differences stand out?

Size Matters

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Experiment Station

Arthur G. Dove, Waterfall, 1925. Oil on hardboard, 10 x 8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1926

Would Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party have the same effect on its viewers if it didn’t take up nearly an entire wall at 51 x 69 inches? Conversely, would Jacob Lawrence’s panels from The Migration Series be so poignant if each were triple the size, Panel no. 1 measuring only 12 x 18 inches? In art, size matters. It can make a large piece overcome you. It can force you to inspect a smaller piece more intently than you might if it were just little bit bigger.

One of the smaller paintings and one of my favorites in The Phillips Collection is Arthur Dove’s Waterfall, measuring only 10 x 8 inches. This oil painting done on hardboard could escape you if you were walking through the galleries quickly, but it is a work worth a closer look. In a typical Dovian way, a style shared by other members of the Alfred Stieglitz circle including John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, a natural subject is abstracted in a way that does not immediately depict its title. But as the title indicates, it is a waterfall, a subject found in the nature around us that, when you think about it, does not really have a typical look to it. Not all waterfalls look the same, and Dove is aware of this phenomenon. Dark grey blues swirl into beige washes with highlights of white put carefully on top. The surface is loaded with painterly texture and monochromatic gradients. What the painting captures is a moment in time, the moment you forget what you’re looking at and see only the colors and shapes that make up the nature in front of you.

If we could only ask Dove, why so small? Why is it that the artist chose to depict such a grandiose subject in such a small window? Perhaps it is precisely for this irony. It is at once artful and emotional to represent a subject that takes up so much space in the world around us and impose it onto a surface that only takes up a fraction of a gallery wall. The unique smallness of Waterfall is what drew me to the piece in the first place, intrigued by its placement amongst larger O’Keeffe and Marin works that I could spot from the gallery next door. When I took the time to really look at the painting, it instantly became one of my favorites, and that was because of its size. So size in art really does matter, and sometimes, smaller is better.

Annie Dolan, Marketing and Communications Intern