Mock-up wall text quotes from artist Per Kirkeby are tested in the Center for the Study of Modern Art. The exhibition opens October 6, 2012. Photo: Sarah Osborne Bender
The point where Art is found . . .
Author Archives: Sarah Osborne Bender
Phillips Flashback: September 1916
Arthur B. Davies, The Hesitation of Orestes, c.1915-18. Oil on canvas, 26 x 40 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1923.
Art and Archaeology publishes Duncan Phillips’s article, “The American painter, Arthur B. Davies,” a painter about whom Phillips will write many times in the coming years. In the article, Phillips invokes Piero di Cosimo as a painter of related spirit. Around the time Phillips is writing his article, Davies is creating The Hesitation of Orestes, which clearly shares a palette, perspective, and setting with Piero’s A Hunting Scene (c. 1507-08).
. . . However, in spite of the technical distinction of the art of Davies, the originality of the work is mental rather than manual. The paradox of his aggressive attitude as a chef d ecole of modernity is that really he is only a modern edition of that quaint primitive Piero di Cosimo. In every age such dreamers seem unsatisfied, preferring evocations of the past and intimations of the future to sensations of the present hour.
In this year, Phillips acquires at least two works by Davies: Many Waters (c. 1905) and Visions of Glory (1896).
Name that Painting
President Barack Obama and his daughters, Malia, left, and Sasha, right, watch on television as First Lady Michelle Obama begins her speech at the Democratic National Convention, in the Treaty Room of the White House, Tuesday night, Sept. 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
We posted about art in the White House last week, discussing artists from our collection that are also reflected in the works chosen for display in the Obama White House. A photo taken last night of the president and his daughters watching the First Lady give her speech to the Democratic National Convention featured a sliver, but enough for identification, of Susan Rothenberg’s Butterfly (1976) from the National Gallery of Art. Rothenberg is part of our own collection, too, with her work Three Masks (2006).