Brochure for Emotional Design in Painting, 1940; front cover and inside page. Phillips Collection Archives.

April 7 is opening day for C. Law Watkins’s education exhibition, Emotional Design in Painting. 72 works are shown, grouped under 28 motifs and design concepts. Watkins, associate director of the gallery and director of the art school, hangs old masters on loan from museums nationwide alongside contemporary works in a didactic sequence, exploring the expressive function of diagonals, organic forms, motion, and shape.

Gallery E in the House.

Gabriele Orozco’s Zapatistas, 1931, on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, displaying the “diagonals” motif.

To illustrate “verticals” Georgia O’Keeffe’s Night in New York is hung near a Chinese scroll from the Ming Dynasty.