Happy Birthday Duncan Phillips, from Korea

In the spring and summer of 1910, Duncan Phillips traveled with his family to Korea as part of a long journey to Asia and the northwestern United States. Phillips’s father, Major Duncan Clinch Phillips, said in his journal that the family stayed at the Sontag Hotel, a hotel catering to Western visitors.

Sontag Hotel in Seoul, Korea, in 1910, the year the Phillipses stayed there.

On this 128th anniversary of Phillips’s birth, some of the most impressive examples of his art collecting are going on display at the Daejeon Museum of Art in central Korea. A team of curators (Sue Frank and Renée Maurer), registrars (Joe Holbach and Trish Waters), and one of our preparators (Bill Koberg) flew around the globe last week to oversee the effort of installing this large traveling show.

Banners featuring our Degas and Ingres, among others and the exterior of the Daejon Museum of Art. Photos: Renee Maurer

Banners featuring our Daumier, Degas and Ingres line the museum grounds and the exterior of the Daejon Museum of Art features a mural of familiar faces. Photos: Renée Maurer

Renée , Bill, and Joe went to Seoul in the days before installation started. They visited the summer palace with its ornately carved and painted structures and throne (left) and watched the changing of the guard (far right). Their interpreter took them for an eel dinner (center right). Photos: Bill Koberg, Renée Maurer

During their down time, assistant curator Renée Maurer, chief registrar and director of special initiatives Joe Holbach, and installations manager Bill Koberg have done some sightseeing around Daejeon and north in the capital Seoul.

A Home for all the Arts

Caption: Duncan Phillips’s journal from between 1917 and c. 1920, on view in the Reading Room through February 2015. Photo: Vivian Djen

Duncan Phillips was a prolific writer. Starting in his days as a student at Yale, Phillips wrote about art and literature, recounted trips abroad, and recorded his dreams for his museum. Meticulously cared for in the Phillips archives, the texts from the 1900s to 1930s show the development of his collecting vision and his passion for art.

Phillips’s journals from 1917 to 1920 anticipate the museum’s opening in 1921:

We dream that the Phillips Memorial Gallery shall be a home for all the arts. We propose that the building shall be of a domestic rather than a formal and institutional type of architecture; that the grounds surrounding the building shall be laid out with terraces and gardens in keeping with the architectural style formally selected, that there shall be, as part of the scheme an Auditorium for lectures, plays and concerts; that there shall be a comprehensive art library; and a gallery for exhibitions of contemporary painting, foreigners as well as American. We propose to especially dedicate ourselves however to the encouragement of American art. We have in mind a plan for exhibiting the permanent collection in units with rooms containing the most important works obtainable by selected artists, rooms that will serve as memorials to the genius of these artists and to which their admirers will make [pilgrimages].