Author Archives: Sarah Osborne Bender

Go Nats!

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Arnold Friedman, World Series, undated. Oil on canvas, 20 1/8 x 24 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1938.

Arnold Friedman, World Series, undated. Oil on canvas, 20 1/8 x 24 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1938.

Who ever thought D.C. would have such baseball fever after the past few worse-than-lackluster seasons with our Washington Nationals? But this city was full of fans-in-waiting, and now you see red Nationals caps all over town. Will our team make it through today’s playoff game? Will they make it all the way to the Big Show? In a display of support (or premonition?), we’ve hung Arnold Friedman’s painting World Series (undated) in a spot often held by Marjorie Phillips’s Night Baseball (1951). Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, true lovers of the game, would be thrilled at Washington’s display of baseball spirit.

Morning Light in the Galleries

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(left) Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley No. 1, 1953. Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 52 3/4 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Phillips, 1977. (right) Kenzo Okada, Footsteps, 1954. Oil on canvas, 60 3/8 x 69 7/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1956.

(left) Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley No. 1, 1953. Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 52 3/4 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Phillips, 1977. (right) Kenzo Okada, Footsteps, 1954. Oil on canvas, 60 3/8 x 69 7/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1956.

Paintings by Nicolas de Stael and Richard Diebenkorn. Photos: Sarah Osborne Bender

International Day of Peace

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In 1933, as the threats of World War II were beginning to take root, Duncan Phillips delivered an address called “Nationalism or Peace?” in which he voiced his strong feelings about the power of art to establish peace and world unity.

Art is surely one of the greatest natural links between the various breeds of men . . . the rallying point of opposition to all the destructive and anti-social forces which divide them. It offers the only worldwide currency of thought-exchange and self-expression.

Phillips wrote to a fellow activist in 1928, “I see how I can help materially, as well as morally, through an extension of our own work at the Phillips Memorial Gallery. Here in Washington, where provincial minded Congressmen meet, is not a bad place to foster the international spirit so necessary to world peace.” In the late 1920s and ’30s, Phillips curated exhibitions with the explicit intention of evoking peace by hanging works by artists of different nationalities side-by-side, calling one show “Art is International”. What we often view as Phillips’s pioneering artistic spirit–pairing what were considered raw American painters next to the old guard Europeans–was just as much an expression of his deep yearning for understanding and equality between nations and people.

Learn more about International Day of Peace here.