Animal lovers who’ve visited our interactive station in the Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland exhibition demonstrate their passion by collecting animal objects. What’s not to love in amassing many adorable furry (or scaled, or feathered!) friends? Share your (p)awesome assembly of animal objects by visiting the exhibition or creating your own at home and share it with #PhillipsGoesSwiss.
Tag Archives: art collections
Join Our Community Collection
What’s in your collection? We want to know! Our in-gallery interactive in the Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland exhibition asks visitors to draw an example of what they collect. We’ve had more than 700 submissions to date; we’ll begin highlighting some of your collections here on the blog. Create your own at home and share it with #PhillipsGoesSwiss.
Collection Comparisons: Picasso’s Harlequins
In the Collection Comparisons series, we pair one work from Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland with a similar work from the Phillips’s own permanent collection.
Painted in Pablo Picasso’s Montrouge, France studio, Harlequin with Black Mask at left above, shows the artist’s embrace of classicism and the motif of the harlequin, which first appeared in his Sketchbook No. 59 in 1916. Also in 1916, French writer Jean Cocteau dressed as a harlequin to invite Picasso to participate in Parade, his project for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Although a harlequin never appeared in Parade, Picasso painted one at the center of the huge curtain designed for the ballet, which may have inspired this painting.
Karl Im Obersteg and Duncan Phillips were also fascinated by this theme in Picasso’s work. In October 1923, Im Obersteg acquired Picasso’s Seated Harlequin (no longer in the collection) from Paul Rosenberg in Paris. Some 15 years later, Phillips purchased the sculpture The Jester (not currently on view at the Phillips) from Buchholz Gallery for $685.