Fall for Degas

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Experiment Station

A stunning loan to the Phillips's upcoming Degas's Dancers exhibition. Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, c. 1873. Oil on canvas, 18 3/4 x 24 1/2 in. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., William A. Clark Collection.

A new season for the “painter of dancers” is beginning. Tomorrow, London’s Royal Academy of Arts opens Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, positioning Degas’s images of dancers in the context of photography and early film. The exhibition is on view through December 11, 2011. Early reviews indicate that, while Degas is already well known and well loved, his work continues to offer much to discover. In the Financial Times, Jackie Wullschlager writes that the Royal Academy exhibition, “triumphantly proves how much we can still glean from a deep, precisely focused exploration of the most familiar masters.”

On October 1, our own exhibition opens, exploring Degas’s process in representing ballerinas from the 1870s to 1900. His devotion and commitment to the subject and his deep understanding of the hard work underlying the dancer’s art led him to repeat and revise his depictions of dancers obsessively. Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint takes lessons learned from the conservation of a Phillips treasure as its starting point.

You can also discover another perspective on the artist in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s Degas and the Nude, which includes The Phillips Collection’s After the Bath (c. 1895), below. Across the Atlantic, Rembrandt & Degas, which opened this summer at Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, remains on view through October 23.

If you’re not sure you can make it to these exhibitions (or they leave you wanting more), visit Degas’s work in permanent collections around the world. Here in the DC region, opportunities abound at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Dumbarton Oaks, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Kreeger Museum, National Gallery of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Walters Art Museum, and (of course) here at the Phillips.

Edgar Degas, After the Bath, circa 1895. Pastel on paper, 30 1/2 x 33 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1949.

Astaire, Ally McBeal, My So-Called Life: Your Favorite Phillips Pop Culture Moments

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Brooke Rosenblatt

Recently, I wrote about references to the Phillips in books, movies, and even furniture catalogues. Your comments and clues have inspired “Part 2: Your Favorite Phillips Pop Culture Moments.” Here are some more connections between the museum and the world of moving pictures:

1. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and The Band Wagon. As far as I know, neither Fred Astaire or Cyd Charisse were avid art collectors . . . which might explain why they stumble over some of the facts related to Degas’s Dancers at the Barre, a painting in The Phillips Collection. In the film, Astaire plays Tony Hunter, a dancer/singer/movie star with an amazing art collection; you can catch a glimpse of it in this clip. Included in his fictional collection is the Phillips painting, which Charisse calls a “very early” Degas and pretends to read the date as 1877.

Degas’s process for creating Dancers at the Barre is the subject our upcoming fall exhibition. Scholars believe that he actually started the painting in 1884 and completed it about 16 years later, late in his career.

2. Ally McBeal. The fictional law firm Cage & Fish famously featured unisex bathrooms where the characters sought privacy (but got just the opposite) or channeled their inner Barry White. Where’s the Phillips reference? Hanging on the wall of the bathroom is a reproduction of Adolph Gottlieb’s The Seer (1950). You can catch a glimpse of it about six seconds into this clip.

3. My So-Called Life. Was there ever a better show capturing the awkwardness of being a teenager? Have another look at the pilot and travel back to the mid-’90s when the Cranberries filled the airwaves, flannel shirts were all the rage, and apparently, reproductions of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party operated as ideal dining room décor!

*Bonus* As if that weren’t exciting enough, Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large, was in the 2009 film Breaking Upwards. Though uncredited, he appears in a scene that takes place in his wife’s Chelsea gallery in New York. He also had a small, nonspeaking role playing an East German border guard in the 1982 German movie Der Mann auf der Mauer (The Man on the Wall), filmed in West Berlin and directed by Reinhard Hauff.

On the right is Klaus Ottmann in a scene from Breaking Upwards

Law and Order: Phillips Edition

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Brooke Rosenblatt

Ever been to a dinner party in Washington, D.C. and not met an attorney or someone who went to law school? Wonder what happens when people leave law school behind in favor of artistic vocations?

CakeLove’s Warren Brown stopped practicing law in 2002 to start a bakery, and the Pink Line Project’s Chief Creative Contrarian Philippa Hughes also worked as a lawyer and lobbyist until 2003. I’m sure there are scores of other creatives who’ve joined the ex-lawyer club.

Washington, D.C. takes the legal cake in this map of U.S. career concentration by city from Richard Florida's 2008 book "Who's Your City."

Several artists included in The Phillips Collection initially set out to become lawyers. Here are a few notables; I think art history is glad they changed career paths! Continue reading →