Miss Amelia Van Buren and Otis Skinner Host a Gathering in Fort Worth

Phillips Associate Curator for Research Susan Behrends Frank and Amon Carter Director Andrew Walker with Augustus Vincent Tack's Aspiration (1931). Photo: Matt Golden

Phillips Associate Curator for Research Susan Behrends Frank and Amon Carter Director Andrew Walker with Augustus Vincent Tack’s Aspiration (1931). Photo: Matt Golden

Earlier this month, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art opened To See As Artists See: American Art from The Phillips Collection. The galleries were crowded with guests during receptions on Oct. 3 and 5, and Susan Behrends Frank, the Phillips curator responsible for the show, had the pleasure of being among them.

The Amon Carter threw two wonderful opening parties to celebrate The Phillips Collection’s American art show, the largest special exhibition the Carter has ever presented. On both evenings I gave a short presentation about Duncan Phillips and his lifelong commitment to American art and artists. Everyone attending expressed such excitement about the exhibition and how happy they are to have it in Fort Worth. It was a great time had by all, including yours truly.

Susan Behrends Frank, Associate Curator for Research

 

George Luks's personality-filled 1919 canvas of Otis Skinner as Col. Philippe at left with a gallery of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings beyond. Photo: Matt Golden

George Luks’s personality-filled 1919 canvas of Otis Skinner as Col. Philippe at left with a gallery of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings beyond. Photo: Matt Golden

Guests encounter Thomas Eakins's Miss Amelia Van Buren (c. 1891), one of the Phillips's American masterworks, at the Amon Carter Museum. Photo: Matt Golden

Guests encounter Thomas Eakins’s Miss Amelia Van Buren (c. 1891), one of the Phillips’s American masterworks, at the Amon Carter Museum. Photo: Matt Golden

New York State of Mind

Photo: Piper Grosswendt

A fresh suite of artworks quietly debuted earlier this month in a small gallery, on the second floor of the House. As hallmark pieces of the museum’s American art collection shipped off to Tokyo for To See as Artists See: American Art from The Phillips Collection, and with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in mind, Installations Manager Bill Koberg thought to fill the space with a few choice pieces of New York abstraction from the 1930s-50s.

Gandy Brodie’s undated painting Fragment of a City (1957) anchors the East side of the room, opposite Loren MacIver’s New York (1952). A subtler MacIver, The Window Shade (1948) and Berenice Abbott’s modern consideration of the city as landscape Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place (1936) hang on the North wall across from Aaron Siskind’s photograph New York 6 (1951) and Ralph Flint’s undated colored pencil drawing Metropolis (undated), acquired by the Collection in 1931. The Flint work brings with it some mystery — unframed prior to its recent hanging, Koberg is uncertain if it’s ever graced the walls of the Phillips. Continue reading “New York State of Mind” »

Today is Flag Day

George Luks, Blue Devils on Fifth Avenue, 1918. Oil on canvas, 38 5/8 x 44 1/2 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1918.

This painting depicts the marching of French veterans in the Liberty Loan Drive parade in New York on April 30, 1918. Executed by George Luks especially for a war exhibition at New York’s Kraushaar Gallery in May 1918, the work appealed to Duncan Phillips’s patriotism and political efforts during the First World War.