I Miss William Merritt Chase’s Hide and Seek

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The Phillips Collection galleries have been dark and empty and our staff and visitors have been missing our beloved collection. In this series we will highlight artworks that the Phillips staff have really been missing lately. Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Vesela Sretenović on why she misses William Merritt Chase’s Hide and Seek (1888).

This is one of my favorite works at The Phillips Collection, and I know I am not the only one! It may come as a surprise that the contemporary art curator would pick a 19th-century painting among all the other works in the collection, including many by living artists with whom she has collaborated and whose art has entered the collection. But singling out a favorite artist is like choosing a favorite child—impossible!

William Merritt Chase, Hide and Seek, 1888, Oil on canvas, 27 5/8 x 35 7/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1923

Chase’s Hide and Seek speaks to me personally, especially now. It’s about the hidden, the unrevealed, the unspoken; it is about ideas behind appearances, and about the invisible outside the visible. I’ve been grappling with these concepts ever since my first undergraduate paper, “Ontology in Ancient Greek Art,” and obviously still do.

Now “hiding” at home (and working remotely), I miss the painting; I miss passing by it on my walks through the galleries, or when rushing from meeting to meeting and going from one building to another. I like seeing it most when it is hung in the East Parlor gallery in the Phillips House, in a corner across from the fireplace. It feels like it belongs there—by portraying an intimate interior with children at play it simply becomes part of the House’s domestic setting. Although often in a hurry, I would pause in front of the work and take a quick peak, wave at the girls hiding, and then continue on. That was my own private play. And this element of teasing or playfulness is one of the main reasons I love the work so much. But of course that’s not all—there is so much more . . . a sense of mystery, suspense, and the unresolved . . .

With its silky surface of reddish and brown hues dissolved in light, a blurry scene out of focus and oddly cropped, featuring girls hiding behind heavy curtains, the composition looks flat, empty, almost eerie. It contains quietude and creates anticipation. And the title itself only underlies its hidden meaning.

All of this resonates with me today more than ever before, as we are living this pandemic not with eyes closed but with our faces covered, and facing not only deadly health conditions but also a deep social, political, and moral crises. Who is “hiding” and what are we “seeking” now? What, if anything, can be truthfully revealed and openly shared? Looking at the painting, I see a dash of light coming through the heavy curtain . . . I am awaiting the light at the end of the tunnel. I know it’s there. Hide and Seek will be the first painting I seek upon my return to the museum.

STABLE x The Phillips Collection (Part I)

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We’ve partnered with STABLE arts, a studio complex in DC that provides visual artists with an active workspace. STABLE artists picked a permanent collection artwork and explain how it intersects with their own practice. Visit the Phillips Instagram for more STABLE artwork.

 

linn meyers (@linnmeyers)

I’ve always loved Ryder’s paintings for their moodiness and surface qualities. This image resonated with me decades ago as a college student, and also later when I was in graduate school, when I was making imagined landscapes. The description in the museum’s catalogue addresses the painting’s “theme of supernatural intervention in human events and man’s helplessness in his mortal confrontation with such forces…” Given the tumultuous times we are living in today, the painting takes on new meaning for me. Who isn’t feeling a little (or a lot) helpless these days? Chaos abounds, loss of control is inevitable, and turmoil surrounds us. I continue to explore those themes in my paintings and works on paper.

linn meyers’s paintings, drawings, and site-specific works have been shown in public and private venues, including The Phillips Collection, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA, The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Japan, The Corcoran Museum of Art, and more.

(LEFT) Albert Pinkham Ryder, Macbeth and the Witches, after mid-1890s, Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 x 35 3/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1940 (RIGHT) linn meyers, Untitled, 2019, 11 x 8.5 in., Acrylic ink on found graph paper

 

Mojdeh Rezaeipour (@mojdehr)

I’ve been working in blue a lot this past year, so I decided to choose a blue work at random! I double clicked on a link and this piece popped up—sort of like pulling a tarot card. The series “Unanswered Prayers” imagines a space that is bit by bit flooded with water, as various creatures make their way in and out of the scenes. Atmospherically, it feels like both reality and fantasy, nightmare and dream. My altar installations hold a similar space between dualities of grief and joy, destruction and creation, trauma and healing. They are simultaneously poems, prayers, puzzles.

Mojdeh Rezaeipour is an Iranian-American artist and storyteller based in Washington, DC. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where she studied architecture with a minor in art history, and a graduate of alt*div, an alternative divinity school centering the intersection of justice and art as spiritual practice. She is currently quarantined as an artist in residence at The Nicholson Project.

(LEFT) Anna Paola Pizzocaro, Behind the Mirror from “Unanswered Prayers” (Dall’ altra parte dello Specchio), 2010-2011, Monorail view camera and Photoshop, 47 1/4 x 37 5/8 x 1 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of the artist, courtesy of Embassy of Italy Washington DC, 2014 (RIGHT) Mojdeh Rezaeipour, Welcoming Us

 

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann (@ktzulan)

I first began pouring paint because my teacher, the force of nature and Abstract Expressionist Grace Hartigan, encouraged me to look at Color School painters like Morris Louis. At a time when we yearn for solidity and control, Louis’s work reminds us that solidity is never to be expected, and shows us the grace and poetry in fluidity and flux. This piece, created by pouring diluted paints onto canvas, is 8.5 x 12 feet, making the experience of viewing it immersive and almost cinematic. Influenced by him, other pour painters like Helen Frankenthaler, and traditional Chinese sumi ink painting, I begin every work of mine by pouring diluted paint and ink onto paper as it lays on the floor of the studio.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is a painter based in Washington, DC. Her large paper paintings and installations address themes of chance, environment, mythology and identity by creating hybridized, semi-abstract landscapes. Some of the venues where Mann has shown her work include the Walters Art Museum, American University Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the Art Museum at SUNY Potsdam, the US consulate in Dubai, UAE, and the US embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon.

(LEFT) Morris Louis, Seal, 1959, Acrylic on canvas, 101 1/8 x 140 3/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Marcella Brenner Revocable Trust, 2011 (RIGHT) Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Wrap

 

Nekisha Durrett (@nekishadurrett)

I first saw Vik Muniz’s work in the 1990s while I was in art school. I was particularly struck by “Sugar Children”—a series of black-and-white images of black children that, from a distance, I mistook as snapshots. As I moved closer, I began to perceive texture varying accumulations of tiny grains against a black ground. A quick read of the label revealed that these were photographs of renderings of children made with sugar. A deeper read revealed that these were portraits of the children and grandchildren of sugar plantation laborers. This tension that Muniz builds between the idea, the materials used, and the viewer’s physical and psychological perspective is something that has stayed with me. Years later, I saw a short video of Muniz working in his studio. For a split second, I could see him on the floor carefully placing a butterfly with a pair of tweezers onto a lush bed of green plants and flowers. The camera panned out to reveal that this seemingly random arrangement of flowers made up the stars and bars of the American flag. That transformative moment when a small shift in perspective can make visible what is hiding in plain sight is so powerful. It is the thread that weaves through most art that I am drawn to. As I often work in disparate materials and themes, it is my hope that it is one of the threads that creates continuity within my body of work.

Nekisha Durrett lives and works in Washington, DC, where she creates bold and playful large scale installations and public art that aim to make the ordinary enchanting and awe inspiring while summoning subject matter that is often hidden from plain sight. She earned her BFA at The Cooper Union in New York City and MFA from The University of Michigan School of Art. Durrett has exhibited her work throughout the Washington, DC area and nationally.

(LEFT) Vik Muniz, American Flag (from “America Now + Here: Photography Portfolio 2009”), 2009, Digital c-print, 20 x 24 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of Carolyn Alper, 2010 (RIGHT) Nekisha Durrett, Yes Lawd

 

Shaunté Gates (@studio.gates)

Escaping repression in search of social mobility, my family migrated from South Carolina to DC post WWII, to find themselves entrenched in a new set of social challenges. My artwork and life are interestingly a continuation of Lawrence’s Migration Series as a whole, but particularly Panel no. 3 (contextually). How did their lives look post migration? At the crux of my work, an individual is either trying to find a way to the center or their way out of a labyrinth of social constructs. They are works about self-determination and resilience; akin to The Migration Series.

Shaunté Gates was born June 13, 1979, in Washington, DC, where he began his formal art career while studying at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. His formative years raised in a wild yet, paradoxically, beautiful DC during the eighties and nineties, created complex memories that would supply the energy and settings for his paintings and video pieces, to date. Gates is currently exhibiting works with the Smithsonian as part of a three-year traveling exhibit titled Men Of Change.

(LEFT) Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel no. 3: From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north., 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1942 (RIGHT) Shaunté Gates, Dope Effect: Reagan 88

 

Matthew Mann (@metamuslix)

I first met this painting in the early 2000s when it was hanging near the stairs in the music room. In the 20 or so years since, I think about it maybe once a month and have stolen little bits out of it to apply to my own work almost as often. Braque to me affirms the infinite possibilities in painting and what Terry Winters says about painting being an incredibly absorbent technology. I mean, just look at all the visual material and disjointed space that Braque piled into The Washstand! The faux finished window sill, that green, bean shaped stool at the bottom, that line running through the pitcher from that trapezoidal shape stuck to the top edge…just…what?! It’s as if Braque is saying: “Psst, hey buddy! What are you worried about? It’s just painting. You can do whatever you can think to do. It will all fit.”

Matthew Mann is a painter based in Washington, DC. His paintings take inspiration from a range of visual media: quatrocento frescos, architecture, cartoons, heist films, and cultural ephemera. In Mann’s paintings these subjects flit around each other creating humorous juxtapositions and spatial incongruities that reflect his own interests in free association as well as his experiences as an artist and citizen.

(LEFT) Georges Braque, The Washstand, 1944, Oil on canvas, 63 7/8 x 25 1/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1948 (RIGHT) Matthew Mann, Condessa Courtyard, 2018

 

Damon Arhos (@damonarhos)

I chose this Francis Bacon painting Study of Figure in a Landscape because it both exemplifies and subverts the artist’s tumultuous character. Dark, vulnerable, and naked, the figure demonstrates agitation and gravity—yet, its surroundings suggest dreamlike serenity. I appreciate this duality in the composition as well as the contrast of its painterly and photographic styles. Bacon’s work aligns with mine in its concurrent presentation of conflicting visuals and narratives, those that many find concurrently attractive and disturbing.

Damon Arhos is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and social activist whose work explores and unfolds queer culture. Arhos seeks to promote love and acceptance while investigating social and political environments surrounding gender and sexuality. Arhos, who teaches studio art and art history at Bowie State University, earned an MFA in studio art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore

(LEFT) Francis Bacon, Study of Figure in a Landscape, 1952, Oil on canvas 78 x 54 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1955 (RIGHT) Damon Arhos, If I Am Myself, Then Will I Be A Target? (Self-Portrait)

 

Molly Springfield (@mollyrspring)

I love the work of Dada artists—Kurt Schwitters’s collages in particular—and their use of fragmented and decontextualized language has influenced my own work. Like many of his contemporaries, Schwitters was reacting to the horrors of World War I and its resulting cultural shifts. My current project, Holograph Draft, is inspired by the life and writing of Virginia Woolf, whose work also responded to the turmoil of the early twentieth century. In addition to text-based drawings, my project includes collages made from photocopies of Woolf’s family photo albums, which in turn have inspired a new series of abstract drawings. As the project evolves, it’s become a way for me to reflect on the turmoil of our own moment and how I can best respond to it—both as an artist and as a responsible citizen of a society in the midst of a very different kind of world war.

Molly Springfield is a Washington, DC-based artist who makes drawings that use photocopies of printed text as their source material. Her work has been the subject of fourteen national and international solo exhibitions and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is featured in the new book, You Are An Artist by Sarah Urist Green, released on April 14 by Penguin Books.

(LEFT) Kurt Schwitters, Radiating World (Merzbild 31B), 1920, Oil and paper collage on cardboard, 37 1/2 x 26 3/4 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift from the estate of Katherine S. Dreier, 1953 (RIGHT) Molly Springfield, Monk’s House Album III

Riffs and Relations: Ayana V. Jackson

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Artist Ayana V. Jackson discusses her work Judgment of Paris, which premiered in Riffs in Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, now at The Phillips Collection.

Ayana V. Jackson, Judgment of Paris, 2018, Archival pigment print on German etching paper, 40 × 60 in., Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago

Judgment of Paris was produced in 2017 as part of Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment, a series that looks at the black body in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In general, my work looks at the way the black body, in particular the black woman’s body, has been represented in the history of art and popular culture as well as how it is regarded within the collective memory. Within Intimate Justice, I consider misrepresentation, absence, and exclusion. I look at what is lacking in the representation of the range of possibilities for that body. Using my body, I perform new narratives to reflect the dynamism of the black woman’s experience during that period. Obviously, if we’re talking about the 1800s and 1900s, whether it be in the Americas or other parts of the world, we are likely talking about an enslaved or colonized body, or a body in servitude. That notwithstanding, what is often left out of that frame are other modes of existence that are operating parallel to or at the very least simultaneously.

With regard to the black body in Europe and the Americas, I think it’s important for us to be very careful with the origin stories we tell and the narratives we use to associate with those bodies in that period. One can at once be enslaved and also be a mother, a sister, a lover, an idealist, a dreamer, an inventor, an engineer. These are all selves that the black body and the black woman’s body also occupied in that period of time. To this end, works like Judgment of Paris are my way of portraying the body at leisure as a counterweight to the overrepresentation of black bodies as suffering bodies in pain. It is important to consider that at any given moment, one can choose to embrace another aspect of the self.

Judgment of Paris was selected for the exhibition because it refers to modernism. It references Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, an important piece of Impressionist painting made by Édouard Manet in 1863. It may be known to many that his depiction of two dressed males and two nude and semi-nude females was quite scandalous at the time. As a result, it was rejected from the Paris Salon of 1863, though it was later included in the Salon des Refusés which was commissioned by Edward Napoleon the III.

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863, Oil on canvas, 82 x 104 in., Musée d’Orsay, Paris

I submitted this work to the exhibition not only because of its modernist reference, but more importantly because the “original” itself is a “riff.” To some it is probably unknown that Manet was referring and perhaps sending a nod to an engraving done in the 16th century by a printmaker named Marcantonio Raimondi. This particular engraving, created in conversation with Raphael, depicts the events leading up to the Trojan War. The section that is sampled, riffed, or excerpted by Manet is found in the lower right edge of that print. There are three seated figures—two males and one female seated with her elbow on her knee.

Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, Judgment of Paris, c. 1515

Manet adopts this piece for Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe. I thought it would be interesting to use this work for Riffs and Relations, and initially for Intimate Justice, because Judgment of Paris—the original piece—presents Paris, the mythological character, choosing between three beauties: Juno, Minerva, and Venus. Forced to determine who is the most beautiful he ultimately chooses Venus, as portrayed in the section where he offers the apple to Venus. In considering this scene, I thought it would be beautiful to remix these two narratives and place three black women in the frame.

Manet was quite scandalous for portraying regular woman in his paintings, even worse women believed to be prostitutes in stages of undress. However, the act of bringing the non ”elite” person into the frame is part of what makes that work particularly interesting. My Judgment of Paris seeks to do the same thing—it brings the black woman’s body into a space where it is usually excluded and asks the audience to address it, look at it, and contemplate the meaning of its existence in that context.

I chose not to portray the woman’s figure nude because I didn’t find it necessary; however, I do allow for the character with her elbow on the knee to return the gaze—to confront her audience. Through that confrontation, I’m asking you to not only see the woman but also to see her absence in the history of modernism.

To that point—the topic of erasure—another detail I’d like to point out as we consider my reference material is the story of Manet’s nude in Déjeuner. Victorine Meurent is the same model in his masterpiece Olympia and at least eight of his other major works. Not only that, she was also an artist working in Paris at the time. While this has been proven to be the case, her other “selves” have largely been forgotten in favor of this mode of her existence. And she is not alone in having her agency and her other selves painted over by the brush of history. Thanks to scholars like Dr. Denise Murell, more and more of the names of women working as models during this period are coming to light, particularly black models. For instance, alongside Meurent, the woman presenting the flowers is Laure, a highly sought after and highly coveted model working at the time. She is also featured in multiple masterpieces of the era.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Oil on canvas, 51 1/2 x 74 3/4 in., Musée d’Orsay, Paris

In thinking about Laure and Meurent, I am further convinced that it’s imperative for us to revisit artworks in the cannon. We should regularly reconsider how they’ve been discussed, what we focus on when we look at them, who gets to be considered. It is equally important to revisit the characters that are involved in their production and promotion. This is particularly important for those of us looking at these works from the point of view of a person who inhabits a marginalized body, a body that has been misrepresented or misjudged by history. It is incumbent upon us to judge the judges of history and reconsider their judgement. Even if it comes down through the celebrated Paris Salons of the 19th century which helped determine what is considered relevant.

Finally, I would like to add that I am super excited for the opportunity to participate in Riffs and Relations. I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Adrienne Childs for selecting me. It is not every day that an artist gets to hang alongside masters, mentors, friends, and peers. In this exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems and Renee Cox are presented—these are two women I know personally, but more importantly are artists I studied in my earliest years. Their work, as black women who work with photography and with their own bodies, has been incredibly influential. Their work on absence, their tireless placing of their bodies in spaces where it has been excluded is seminal—I learned to claim space through these two women. The opportunity to hang beside them is amazing. I am incredibly inspired by Elizabeth Catlett, and am also proud to hang alongside peers like Titus Kaphar and Hank Willis Thomas. I am perpetually in awe of their work. And, of course, it is an honor to be presented at The Phillips Collection. It is one of the most important collections in our country so to be asked to hang on their walls is a great accomplishment.

Installation view of Riffs and Relations, featuring (left to right) work by Elizabeth Catlett, Titus Kaphar, Ayana Jackson, Renee Cox, and Faith Ringgold

Lastly, I’d like to thank The Phillips Collection and its entire team for putting on this amazing exhibition, and to Dr. Adrienne Childs, I‘d like to express my deepest appreciation for her faith, confidence, and interest in my work.