Today is the big opening for our exhibition in Daejeon, Korea, Conversations: Impressionist and Modern Master Works from The Phillips Collection. Two years in the making, this show furthers our relationship with notable museums in Asia and the citizens of those countries who have seen our works in loan and traveling exhibitions in the past.
In the spring and summer of 1910, Duncan Phillips traveled with his family to Korea as part of a long journey to Asia and the northwestern United States. Phillips’s father, Major Duncan Clinch Phillips, said in his journal that the family stayed at the Sontag Hotel, a hotel catering to Western visitors.
Cat fans might be surprised to learn that The Phillips Collection is a notoriously feline-friendly museum. The Phillips Collection has a number of cats represented in its paintings—like Pierre Bonnard’s The Open Window (1921)—but the museum also housed real cats at one point. In the ’70s, two cats roamed the halls of the museum.
