Author Archives: Klaus Ottmann

A New Artist in The Phillips Collection

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Tobi Kahn, Lyie, 1991. Acrylic on board, 32 x 12 x 1-3/4 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Gift of Victoria Schonfeld in memory of her parents, Hilde and Sydney Schonfeld. Photo: Klaus Ottmann

Last June The Phillips Collection acquired its first painting by the New York artist Tobi Kahn, Lyie (1991). It has now been installed in the spiral staircase of the museum’s Goh Annex. Given by Victoria Schonfeld in memory of her parents, the painting is one of Kahn’s most important paintings of his mature period when forms other than landscape, such as flowers, became a dominant theme. Like most of Kahn’s paintings, Lyie is built up of about 20 layers, beginning with modeling paste containing marble dust on top of white underpainting, followed by opaque paint layers, and finally, a layer of translucent washes.

Earlier this year, Kahn gave an inspiring keynote address at the Phillips during its Art & Innovation Design Gathering, an annual meeting of creative minds that is jointly presented by the Phillips and the University of Virginia.

This week Kahn was invited to speak at Georgetown University by the Program for Jewish Civilization. In conversation with Ori Soltes who teaches theology, philosophy, and art history at Georgetown University, Kahn spoke passionately about how he does not consider himself a Jewish artist or a painter or a sculptor, but just an artist; yet at the same time he cannot separate the knowledge of his Jewish heritage from art history. This combination undoubtedly contributes to Kahn’s unique style of painting that seems equally influenced by Jewish mysticism, such as the color symbolism of the Kabbalah, and the tradition of American modernism, so richly represented by The Phillips Collection’s holdings of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Toward the end of the conversation, Kahn expressed gratitude to The Phillips Collection for his painting being given such generous placement: “Artists always want to have more space, ” he added, “The Phillips Collection is the perfect space.”

Tobi Kahn in conversation with Ori Soltes at Georgetown University, September 20, 2011. Photo: Klaus Ottmann

It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon—

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August 10, 2011

It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon –
The Flower — distinct and Red —
I, passing, thought another Noon
Another in its stead

Will equal glow, and thought no More
But came another Day
To find the Species disappeared —
The Same Locality —

The Sun in place—no other fraud
On Nature’s perfect Sum —
Had I but lingered Yesterday —
Was my retrieveless blame —

Much Flowers of this and further Zones
Have perished in my Hands
For seeking its Resemblance —
But unapproached it stands —

The single Flower of the Earth
That I, in passing by
Unconscious was — Great Nature’s Face
Passed infinite by Me —

Emily Dickinson (1843)

Summer List

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Maurice Prendergast, On the Beach, c. 1907-1909. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 14 1/2 x 21 1/2 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1926.

Last week’s glorious weather inspired me to put together a shortlist of things to read, hear, or see this summer:

To the End of the Land, David Grossman’s haunting novel of love and magical thinking that centers on the emotional struggle of an Israeli mother hiking through the mountainous terrain of Galilee with her son’s estranged father in an ingenuous attempt to keep their son alive while he is on a military offensive in Lebanon by telling his father stories about him.

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. A brilliant first novel of old-world beauty and magic by a surprisingly mature 25-year old, it consists of a series of interwoven stories that take place in a fictional Balkan country and feature, among many other remarkable and wondrous characters, a mute woman who befriends a tiger that has escaped from the zoo and a deathless man who has been condemned to live forever.

Don’t kill the birthday girl! by Washington-based poet and longtime friend of The Phillips Collection, Sandra Beasley. A touching and enlightening memoir of an “Allergy Girl” about learning to live with severe food allergies.

STRATA, the stirring recording of the “Symphony No. 6″ by the Estonian contemporary composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, whose music was performed last February as part of the Phillips’s Leading European Composers series (ECM; Nordic Symphonic Orchestra; Anu Tali, conductor).

Rooms with a View at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on view through July 4), one of the most beautiful exhibitions I have seen in a very long time, exquisitely curated by Sabine Rewald, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Met.

Game of Thrones, a new HBO series based on the epic fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, about the violent struggle for control over the Seven Kingdoms of the northern realm under the background of the arrival of a long winter, which in this world can last several lifetimes and may bring with it unimaginable horrors. In short, the perfect entertainment while we endure the effects of global warming this summer.