The Impact of “The Klee Room” at the Phillips

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Experiment Station

Paul Klee, Tree Nursery, 1929, Oil with incised gesso ground on canvas, 17 1/4 x 20 5/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1930

Duncan Phillips was a stalwart champion of Paul Klee, and had his works on constant view over several decades in what became known as “The Klee Room” at the Phillips. In 1971, art critic Barbara Rose wrote about the influence of “The Klee Room” in DC in her essay “Retrospective Notes on the Washington School” in The Vincent Melzac Collection: Modernist American Art Featuring New York Expressionism and Washington Color Painting:

“[Kenneth] Noland was not the only Washington painter to look closely at Klee. Klee played the role in Washington that Kandinsky played in New York, which made for crucial differences in approach and emphasis. As opposed to Kandinsky’s expressionist romanticism, Klee’s experiments with surface and texture, his early use of banding, central images, and geometric motifs, provided important precedents for the kind of technique and imagery eventually developed in Washington. Klee was accessible in Washington as Kandinsky was accessible in New York because of the taste of a local collector. As Solomon Guggenheim had assembled a great collection of Kandinsky’s works in his New York museum, so Duncan Phillips put together a remarkable collection of Klee’s works. No one who has ever lived in Washington (this writer included) can ever forget the impact of the Klee room at the Phillips Gallery.”

This work is on view in Ten Americans: After Paul Klee through May 6, 2018.

90 Years of Sharing Masterworks with Princeton

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Experiment Station

Thirty-eight works from the Phillips’s collection are currently on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, in the exhibition The Artist Sees Differently: Modern Still Lifes from The Phillips Collection, on view through April 29. Frank Jewett Mather, Director of the Princeton Art Museum from 1922-1946, was close friends with Duncan Phillips. Here is an excerpt from the Princeton Art Museum’s spring magazine, by Associate Director for Collections and Exhibitions T. Barton Thurber, about the long relationship between the Princeton Art Museum and The Phillips Collection:

Paul Cézanne, Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears, 1893, Oil on canvas 18 1/4 x 21 7/8 in. Gift of Gifford Phillips in memory of his father, James Laughlin Phillips, 1939

In 1928 the newly expanded Museum of Historic Art (as the Princeton University Art Museum was then known) planned its first major loan exhibition to include a number of 19th-century paintings from the Phillips Memorial Gallery. On May 9 of that year, the Museum’s director, Frank Mather, wrote in a letter to his friend Duncan Phillips that the temporary display was intended to “exemplify the plans and hopes for a future permanent show.” As Mather stated of the Museum in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, these were “the sort of pictures [that] should eventually comprise [the Museum’s] collection.” Chief among the paintings to be borrowed was a still life by Paul Cézanne, whose works both Mather and Phillips greatly admired. In his book Modern Painting (1927), Mather had written of Cézanne:

“In those rugged and ragged canvases lay in germ pretty nearly all the experimentations and aberrations that were to mark the next quarter century. . . .
. . . These arrangements of fruit and kitchen or tableware have the greatest succulence of texture and depth of color. They seem as they glow from within to gain size and monumentality—these apples and pots and pans. They excite and appease, adding, as it were, to our own visual capacity. . . . Look more carefully at these rough and fragmentary indications, and they will begin to build a world; the writhing contours, the blots and smudges, will combine in a ponderous rhythm. . . . Cézanne, then, is the key to modernist painting.”

Cézanne’s magnificent Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears (1893) was acquired by Duncan and Marjorie Phillips in 1939 and is currently on view in The Artist Sees Differently. The painting was first exhibited in the United States in 1929, at the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural exhibition, where Mather’s former student Alfred H. Barr Jr. (Princeton Class of 1922), the founding director of MoMA, observed, “Cézanne’s complexity depends not upon the arrangement of objects but rather upon the composition of color planes.”

Phillips History on View: Loss and Intimacy

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Experiment Station

Duncan and Jim Phillips as boys.

See the introduction to this series here.

Duncan Phillips and Jim, his older brother by two years, were quite close. Jim even waited two years to attend Yale University so that he and Duncan could go at the same time. In 1918, after traveling and collecting art together, Jim died in the Spanish flu epidemic at the age of 34. Duncan’s father, Duncan Clinch Phillips, had died the previous year.

After the death of his father and brother, Duncan and his mother decided to turn their house into The Phillips Memorial Art Gallery in 1921. In an essay titled “Art and Intimacy,” Robert Hughes writes that “Though born in grief, the collection would eschew the monumental: it would go in the family house and, symbolically, restore the life that house had lost.”

The sense of family is reflected in The Phillips Collection, which doesn’t resemble most museums or white-cube galleries, but a home. Hughes quotes Duncan as saying “we plan to try the effect of domestic architecture, of rooms small or at least livable, and of such an intimate, attractive atmosphere as we associate with a beautiful home.” It’s particularly striking to look at old photos of the galleries and see plush furniture, ashtrays, and a coffee table. However, this unusual approach is seamless and makes the viewer feel at home, admiring the old fireplaces, and picturing the galleries as former dining and living rooms. The atmosphere Duncan invented encouraged visitors to linger.

Maya Simkin, Library Intern