Volunteer Spotlight: Jenna Chen

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In this series, Manager of Visitor and Family Engagement Emily Bray profiles volunteers within the museum. Phillips volunteers are an integral part of the museum and help in many ways: greeting and guiding guests through the museum, helping with Sunday Concerts, assisting patrons in the library, helping out with Phillips after 5 and special events, and so much more. Our volunteers offer a wealth of expertise and experience to the museum, and we are delighted to highlight several them.

Jenna Chen, Art Information Volunteer

Jenna Chen

What year did you start volunteering for The Phillips Collection?

I started volunteering the summer of 2017.

 

What do you see as the most valuable aspect of your volunteering?

My favorite part of interacting with visitors is seeing how eager they are to share their previous experiences at art museums and the reasons why they are at the Phillips. Seeing how excited first time visitors are to stand in front of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party enhances my volunteer experience. Volunteering at the Phillips is a wonderful opportunity to surround myself with art lovers.

 

What do you do when you are not volunteering at the Phillips?

As a biology and art history student at Georgetown University, I spend a decent amount of time in the library preparing for class. During my free time, I enjoy hiking and exploring DC with friends.

 

What is your favorite room or painting here?

My favorite painting here is Succession by Wassily Kandinsky. I just read Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, so I now understand his abstract art on a new level. I am still puzzled, yet fascinated by Succession. There is not a time that I walked by the painting without stopping to stare at it.

 

If you had to choose one word to describe The Phillips Collection, what would it be?

Intimate.

 

Share a fun fact about you!

Last semester, I studied abroad in London and took full advantage of the city’s free museums. I constantly lost track of time when wandering through the National Gallery, V&A, Wallace Collection, and Tate Modern. As an extroverted person, I found it surprising how comfortable I felt alone in these museums. I actually strongly prefer to visit art museums without others, and those are the only places where I like to be by myself.

 

Is there anything else that you would like to share?

Volunteering at The Phillips Collection confirmed that I am happiest when surrounded by art. I am now even more determined to pursue a career in art museums!

Charles Ephrussi: Collector and Critic

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Each week for the duration of the exhibition, we’ll focus on one work of art from Renoir and Friends: Luncheon of the Boating Party, on view October 7, 2017-January 7, 2018.

Critic and collector Charles Ephrussi was vital to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s emerging reputation at the time leading up to the creation of Luncheon of the Boating Party. Born in Odessa (formerly Russia, now Ukraine) in 1849 to a family of grain exporters who became international bankers, Charles Ephrussi studied there and in Vienna, arriving in Paris in 1871. Almost immediately his travels, studies, and friendships led him to collecting, beginning with Italian Renaissance works, 16th-century tapestries, and Japanese lacquer boxes; then expanding his collecting to include Meissen porcelain and 18th-century French decorative arts, while never neglecting the art of his time. He became an early and significant collector of Impressionist painting, and reviewed the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881 for the Gazette des beaux-arts, a publication for which he became its co-owner in 1885 and its director from 1894 until he died in 1905.

Renoir and Friends features works from Charles Ephrussi’s collection, including this painting by Édouard Manet, whom Ephrussi greatly admired. Ephrussi purchased A Bunch of Asparagus for a higher price than the artist expected. In gratitude, Manet created an additional painting of a single stalk of asparagus (also in the exhibition) as a present for Ephrussi, saying, “There was one missing from your bunch.”

Édouard Manet, A Bunch of Asparagus, 1880

Édouard Manet, A Bunch of Asparagus (Une botte d’asperges), 1880. Oil on canvas, 18 1⁄8 × 21 11⁄16 in. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud Cologne

Blind Date: Poetic Response to Renoir

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DC-based writer Kate Horowitz penned this poem about about visit Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party after a visit to the museum in January 2017. It was originally published in Qu Literary Magazine.

Blind Date, Phillips Collection Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81)
by Kate Horowitz

August Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-1881.

She is frightened. Surely,
something has happened. She has just come from somewhere
where something
has happened. Hands at her face,
holding her spinning head.

She is flushed,
pinch-browed, squinting hard out onto the water. She is
not alone: there are men

mere inches from her mouth, simultaneously shushing
and asking what has happened, shush, what has happened,

an arm around her waist, shhh, they don’t want answers,

they want an arm
around her waist, their beards by her hot mouth, and
yes, she is stammering,
but shhh, she
will not be for long,
this will blow over,
nothing has happened,
shhh, shhh, Jeanne, shhh—

One hundred thirty-five years later it
has not blown over,
the men are shushing still,
Jeanne, she is still frightened, something has happened, but
the museum guide will say the men “seem to be flirting”;

the museum guide
will not say
what Jeanne is doing,
or where she was before, or even that

something has happened

and when I, pinch-browed,
standing before the painting, spot her for the first time, I say
something has happened,
she is upset, and the man
mere inches from my mouth
turns from my pointing
and says,
Look at that adorable dog