On Shelves Now: The Phillips Book Prize Series

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Experiment Station

Photos: Amy Wike, Eliza French

The next time you’re in the shop, look for the Phillips Book Prize display, highlighting a series of first books sponsored by the museum’s Center for the Study of Modern Art.

The Center awards a biennial book prize for an unpublished manuscript presenting new research in modern or contemporary art from 1780 to the present. Preference is given to applicants whose research focuses on subjects related to the Phillips’s areas of collecting. Scholars who received their PhDs within the past five years are strongly encouraged to apply. The winning author receives $5,000, and his or her manuscript will be published by the University of California Press.

UC Press has published five books in the series so far. The museum has awarded the sixth and seventh prizes, and the manuscripts for those books are in the works.

A complete list of the winning manuscripts is below:

Alicia Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugoro and Japanese Modern Art
Terri Weissman, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott
André Dombrowski, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life
Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites, Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle
Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art
Charles F.B. Miller, Radical Picasso: Surrealism and the Theory of the Avant-Garde (expected 2015)
Joyce Tsai, Painting after Photography (expected 2016)

Eliza French, Manager of Center Initiatives

Unveiling Vesna

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Experiment Station

Phillips preparators unwrap the first of several layers protecting the work. All photos: Amy Wike

Works for Vesna Pavlović‘s Intersections installation at the Phillips, Illuminated Archive, have just arrived at the museum. Here’s a first look at Untitled (Swiss Peasant art exhibition, 1957.4) (2014) as Phillips preparators open it up after arrival. See this and the rest of the works on the walls (and in the staircase!) starting May 22, and don’t miss Pavlović’s talk in the galleries Thursday evening.

Preparators put on gloves to handle the final layer of unwrapping as Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Vesela Sretenovic looks on.

Vesna Pavlovic’s work Untitled (Swiss Peasant art exhibition, 1957.4) is unwrapped and ready for the gallery walls.

The Many (Feathered?) Caps of Walt Kuhn

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Sarah Osborne Bender

I intended to follow up on our post about Plumes (1931) with another about Walt Kuhn’s works of women wearing tall hats and headdresses, of which there are quite a few. But as I started reading more about his life, I found that there is so much else to talk about when we talk about Walt Kuhn. Not only was he a chief organizer and chronicler of the 1913 Armory Show, and a spirited illustrator (as evidenced in his Christmas cards), but, perhaps not surprisingly, he tried to make a go at a theater career. A boyhood job delivering costumes backstage sparked his interest in the theatrical world, and in the 1910s and early ’20s, he was known for his flair with productions. Kuhn produced dramatic parties and masquerade balls for artists’ organizations such as the Kit Kat Club and the Penguin Club, as well as staged one-act plays with the likes of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. He even designed scenes for early stage pieces of Busby Berkeley. In 1923, disheartened by the low (and sometimes non-existent), pay of his theatrical efforts, Kuhn turned his full attention to painting.

For me, a fan of train travel, one of the most interesting branches of Kuhn’s creative career was his design for two Union Pacific Streamliner rail cars. “Little Nugget” was a first class club car designed for a passenger train called “City of Los Angeles”. The interior was meant to evoke an Old West-style saloon with rococo flourishes and also included many of Kuhn’s images of vaudeville clowns and performers. The “Frontier Shack” lounge car for the “City of Denver” train embodied a very different, but equally American, style of the frontier cabin; a woodsy setting replete with wanted posters and hanging lanterns.

Kuhn’s club car for “City of Los Angeles” passenger train, “Little Nugget”. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Kuhn’s “Frontier Shack” lounge car of the Union Pacific “City of Denver” passenger train. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

To learn more about Walt Kuhn and see digitized archival materials related to the projects described above, see the Archives of American Art’s rich holdings on this artist.