Tag Archives: 1960 Annex

Phillips Flashback: November 5, 1960

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A view on 21st Street, NW, of the 1960 annex. Photo: Phillips Collection Archives

A new wing, known as the annex and designed by the firm Wyeth and King, opens. Joined to the 1907 Music Room addition and the 1920 Main Gallery addition by a glass bridge, the new space is hailed in the Sunday Star and the Washington Post as a successful addition to the architecture of Washington. “What you will see will be a small masterpiece of modern museum design and a rare example of quiet brilliance in the installation of art for public view,” writes Frank Getlein in the Sunday Star. The Post’s Leslie Judd Ahlander writes:

The biggest and best art news in Washington this week is that the Phillips Gallery is open again and the new wing can now be seen. . . . Inside, the Duncan Phillipses have happily followed the most successful feature of the old gallery: comfortable chairs and tables, beautifully decorated rooms (the work of Marjorie Phillips) rugs in the floors and large ashtrays on every table, inviting the visitor to sit down and relax in a home-like atmosphere.

The annex’s first iteration will live a relatively brief life, renovated in 1989 by Arthur Cotton Moore and Associates.

Phillips Flashback: April 1962

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David Smith sculptures on display in the 1960 Annex, 1962. Photo from The Phillips Collection Archives.

“David Smith: An Exhibition of Abstract Sculpture: A Survey of the Artist’s Development in the Last Two Decades,” organized by The Museum of Modern Art, closes on April 30, 1962. The exhibition is the first in a series of shows at the museum focusing on large sculpture.

Forty-nine years later, almost to the day, David Smith: Invents, closes May 15.