Through archival materials, Associate Curator Renée Maurer explores the rich relationships among Duncan Phillips and American University students and faculty, including Robert Gates and Alma Thomas.

Robert Gates and the American University art faculty who taught Alma Thomas between 1952-1957 were closely associated with The Phillips Collection, and its former art school, managed by C. L. Watkins. The relationship began when museum founder Duncan Phillips hired Watkins as the institution’s first director of education. Together, they increased The Phillips Collection’s presence in the city, generated extensive relationships, and expanded the museum’s impact through the development of new programs. They engaged with the DC art scene and offered opportunities to burgeoning artists in the city. Watkins organized art classes at the Phillips from 1930-32, and he led the Phillips Gallery of Art School, which Gates attended. When the school became independent in 1933 and renamed the Studio House, Watkins hired Gates as an assistant; a year later, he became an art instructor. Phillips created the Washington Room, two galleries devoted to living artists working in the DC; there, the art of Watkins and Gates was frequently on view.

During the 1930s, as regional chairman of the federal government’s relief program, the Public Works of Art Project, Phillips focused on encouraging local artists. He believed: “US artists of talent who have been unknown or neglected … [need] sustained support from their own museums and fellow citizens.” After federal funding for the program ended, Phillips continued to champion arts in the region, and in 1935 presented Autumn Exhibition Selected from the Work of Artists from Washington, Virginia, Maryland. It featured several artists Phillips promoted while PWAP regional chair, including Watkins, Gates, and Sarah Baker, another of Thomas’s teachers. Thomas probably saw the show because it was on view when she and a group of DC public school art teachers toured the Phillips that fall. A year later, Phillips purchased the watercolor Potomac River Ice Breaker from Gates’s show held at the Studio House and amassed a significant collection of the artist’s work.

In the 1940s, Watkins became chair of AU’s art department, and his students divided their time between academic courses at the university and drawing and painting classes at the Phillips. During Watkins’s tenure and after, AU staffed its art department and gallery with former Phillips Art School alums and associates like Gates, who joined the faculty in 1946. As a student of Gates at AU in 1952, Thomas’s education in part came from her teacher’s training and a close study of the modern art on display at the Phillips.

Gates found exhibition opportunities at the Phillips. In 1952, he was invited to participate in a local artist show at the museum. It featured work by Thomas’s teachers at AU, like Jacob Kainen, along with other artists working in the area. Thomas most likely attended the exhibition. From that show, Phillips purchased Gates’s painting Fish for $300, which was later lent to Barnett Aden’s 10th Anniversary exhibition in 1953. Thomas, who was vice president of Barnett Aden, the first Black owned, commercial art gallery in the US, would have attended the exhibition’s opening, where she may have even seen Gates, the Phillipses, and other museum staff who frequented the gallery.

In the 1950s, Gates embraced abstraction, likely influenced by the work of his peers and the paintings by Karl Knaths and John Marin he knew well from his frequent visits to the Phillips. An important acquisition Phillips made in the mid-1950s of Paul Cézanne’s painting Garden at Les Lauves pushed Thomas toward abstraction. The purchase was highlighted in a February 1955 review in The Washington Post where art critic Leslie Judd Portner said: “Of the new acquisitions, the Cézanne is the most interesting. It is an unfinished landscape which gives us insight into the artist’s method of building up a canvas through color tones.” Twenty years later Thomas, who admired the painting and may have read the review admitted in an ArtNews interview: “Cézanne’s unfinished painting of a landscape . . . Garden at Les Lauves gave me the idea of using color to structure a painting.”

During her life, Thomas’s art could be found alongside works by her teachers. For example in 1956, paintings by Gates and Thomas were on view at the Barnett Aden Gallery’s show Contemporary Artist Group. Thomas also made a point of promoting the art of her teachers and visiting their exhibitions like this Gates show on view at the Phillips in the fall of 1975.

Associate Curator Renee Maurer shares letters and brochures from The Phillips Collection Archives that reveal the museum’s support of artist Jacob Kainen, one of Alma Thomas’s teachers at American University. 

Trained in New York as a painter and printmaker, Jacob Kainen moved to Washington in 1942 for a curatorial job at the Smithsonian. Kainen likely met Alma Thomas at the Barnett Aden Gallery in the mid-1940s, where they would both exhibit and where she worked as vice president. In 1957, Kainen taught Thomas during her last semester at American University. A strong supporter of her art, he became a mentor and offered art critiques at her home. In his oral history Kainen said: “She asked if I would come and give her some criticism. She’d pay me. So, I came from the Smithsonian, visited her home on 15th Street, g[a]ve her criticism every couple of weeks. She’d have a little lunch there . . . . [S]he looked at everything. She really wanted to be a great painter. She not only read all the art magazines, she knew about . . . color theories, and we would discuss . . . should her stripes end before the edge of the canvas or not. We’d discuss what would happen.” Kainen and Thomas also shared an interest in the modern paintings on view at the Phillips. Kainen explained: “The big influence in this town was the Phillips Gallery on artists. . . . [Y]ou could see contemporary art, you could see modern art, you could see the connection between the older art and the new art, because the gallery was devoted to modern art and its sources.”

Kainen received vital support from the Phillips soon after he moved to DC. Advised by his art peers, Kainen wrote a letter of introduction to director Duncan Phillips, hoping to obtain exhibition and acquisition opportunities, as this archival letter indicates. Kainen admitted: “Phillips liked my work, said to bring some paintings up to his office, and leave them there. Duncan Phillips liked to look at paintings against the wall for weeks because he said some paintings look sensational when you see them for the first time. But when you continue looking at them from time to time they sort of fall apart . . . . Other paintings might look very modest, quiet . . . but the longer you look at them, the stronger they get.”

As this letter suggests, Kainen’s efforts succeeded. Duncan Phillips was interested in his art. On Phillips’s behalf, a staff member wrote to Kainen to offer him the opportunity to submit work to a regional sales show held at the museum during the Christmas season. All proceeds from the sales of works went directly to the artists. That December, Phillips purchased Street Corner, 1941, the first painting by the artist to enter a museum collection.

For Thomas’s teachers at American University—Kainen, Robert Gates and Ben “Joe” Summerford—the collection of modern art at the Phillips served as an important resource. In their own work and in classroom discussions, they all drew upon color-filled canvases by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and others at the museum. Duncan Phillips supported Thomas’s teachers in many ways through the acquisition and exhibition of their art. In 1952, the Phillips presented their work in An Exhibition of Paintings by a Group of Washington Artists, which Thomas would have seen. This letter acknowledges Kainen’s participation in the show.

Throughout her many decades in Washington, Alma Thomas frequented the Phillips, a short walk from her home at 1530 15th Street, NW. She held onto brochures that were meaningful to her like this example from Kainen’s retrospective at museum in 1973.

NOTES:

Kainen, Jacob, 1942-1952, The Correspondence of Duncan Phillips, The Phillips Collection Archive, Washington, D.C.

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-jacob-kainen-12620#transcript

The Phillips Collection is excited to share that the recent publication “Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art” (Vernon Press, 2021) by Pamela Carter-Birken is now available in paperback. Here is an excerpt from the book focused on the Phillips’s interest in the artwork of American painter John Marin.

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips collected works by John Marin long before Look magazine named him the best painter in America. They would show Marin’s art with works by established European painters, beckoning viewers to the American Modernist. Duncan Phillips regarded the abstract artist from Maine as “one of the most provoking, challenging innovators in the history of painting,”[i] writing that he “blows through the world of modern art like a strong and bracing wind.”[ii] The pursuit of rhythm and a life-long love of the outdoors guided much of Marin’s painting. His own imagination and his ability to engage the imaginations of viewers are key to Marin’s place in art history.

Summing up Marin’s biography, Duncan Phillips wrote: “Yankee birth and independence—training as an architect—the influence of Whistler—then of the Chinese, then of Cezanne and Stieglitz—that is the story.”[iii] Marin was almost thirty-years-old when he became a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1899. After attending New York’s Art Students League at the dawn of the twentieth century, he lived in France for four years and studied briefly at the Académie Julian. Approaching forty years of age, he moved back to the United States where he would divide his time between New York City and the Maine coastline, the two predominant inspirations for his art. Like his kindred painters of the Stieglitz Circle, Marin did not concern himself with purposeful representation, writing that his works “are meant as constructed expressions of the inner senses, responding to things seen and felt.”[iv] He later added to how he functioned as an artist, writing: “I don’t paint rocks, trees, houses, and all things seen. I paint an inner vision.”[v] Alfred Stieglitz served as Marin’s art dealer, much as he did for other artists of the Circle, including Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley. Buying from Stieglitz, the Phillipses would come to own a half-dozen Marin oil paintings, but mostly they bought Marin watercolors. Like Phillips, Hartley admired Marin’s originality as well as his skill. “He paces his strokes to a new beat,” Hartley wrote of his fellow Modernist. “He is keen as a whip, alert as a razor, and has the grip of steel on his medium. Strength is always a personal thing, and this is the case of the mighty Marin.”[vi]

Proud of his and Marjorie’s Marin purchases, Duncan sent a letter to Alfred H. Barr Jr. in January 1927 about a forthcoming display of Marin’s works at the Phillips Memorial Gallery. “In February and March I will give Washington a bracing shock in the work of this stimulating creator,” Phillips wrote to the future MoMA director, describing Marin “with his incisive brain, his flashing eye, his startling intuition and magic with his medium.”[vii] In highlighting works by Marin in the winter of 1927, Phillips blazed the trail for New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, still two years from its opening. It would take ten years after Phillips’s boast for Barr to present a Marin retrospective at MoMA, the first for an American artist there. Phillips, however, did not wait a decade to broaden potential appreciation for Marin. He reached an international readership with an assessment of Marin’s importance in his 1932 article about American art for the journal Formes, published in French and English. “Never safe and sane,” Phillips wrote of Marin’s paintings, “with details often askew and out of focus, but with the essential part intensified and magnetic.”[viii] The following year, 1933, New York Times art columnist Edward Alden Jewell called Marin “an American artist of genius.”[ix]

About the same time, art critic Lewis Mumford wrote a remarkable essay for the New Yorker which can supply context for the multitudes of accolades Marin amassed. Mumford contrasted the act of viewing works by Marin to those painted by Edward Hopper, famous for restaurant and theater slices of life, sometimes featuring men with fedoras and women in fashionable coche hats, and almost always conveying a struggle to cope with modernity. Hopper’s best-known work is Night Hawks, which hangs in a place of pride at the Art Institute of Chicago. The iconic Night Hawks was not painted until 1942, but Phillips had purchased another Hopper, an imposing oil-on-canvas titled Sunday in 1926, the year the artist created it. In Sunday, the scene is barren save for disturbingly hued building fronts and a lone man sitting on the edge of a wood sidewalk, his feet planted in the street. It is a stunning work of art and will compel all but the most jaded visitors to stop and ask the questions who, what, when, where and why. In the New Yorker essay, titled “Two Americans,” when Mumford praises Marin at the expense of Hopper it is high praise indeed. “Visually speaking,” Mumford wrote, “one may follow Hopper on the pedestrian level; following Marin, one must risk one’s neck in an airplane.”[x] Mumford offered an additional opinion on the impact works by the two artists might have on viewers: “Both Marin and Hopper have been interpreters of America, but while Hopper has utilized our limitations and made the most of them, Marin has demonstrated our possibilities.”[xi]

 

[i] Duncan Phillips, A Bulletin of The Phillips Collection, Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, 1927.

[ii] D. Phillips, “Trowbridge Memorial Lecture: The Artist Sees Differently,” (Yale University, March 20, 1931), The Phillips Collection Archives, Washington, D.C., 12.

[iii] D. Phillips, A Bulletin of The Phillips Collection, 1927.

[iv] John Marin, The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters (New York: Anderson Galleries, 1916).

[v] Marin, “Letter to Stieglitz, Written in 1923,” Philadelphia Museum Bulletin, XL (1945).

[vi] Marsden Hartley, “As to John Marin and His Ideas,” John Marin: Watercolors, Oil Paintings, Etchings (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 18.

[vii] D. Phillips to Alfred Barr, Jr., 15 January 1927, The Phillips Collection Archives, Washington, D.C.

[viii] D. Phillips, “Original American Painting of Today,” Formes, January 1932, 198.

[ix] Edward Alden Jewell, “The Rise of John Marin,” New York Times, October 23, 1933.

[x] Lewis Mumford, Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s, ed. Robert Wojtowicz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 101.

[xi] Ibid.