Master Paintings from The Phillips Collection [antikvár]

Pr^ace If we, as representatives of four art museums, were to sit down to plan a major travelling exhibition of European and American painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and could not borrow from The Phillips Collection, we would soon abandon the project or accept drastic compromises in quality. It is truly remarkable that such an exhibition can be drawn entirely from The Phillips Collection. We are reminded that Duncan Phillips's prophetic modern vision has become a reality. As these master paintings begin their first national tour, leaving their wonderfully intimate environment in Washington, D.C. for the enjoyment of art lovers across the country, we wish to thank Laughiin Phillips, Marjorie Phillips, and the other trustees of The Phillips Collection for affording us this opportunity. We are also grateful to James McLaughlin, Willem de Looper, Michael Green, Pamela McDonald, and particularly to Martha Carey for their gracious cooperation in helping to organize the exhibition. Finally, we acknowledge with thanks the generous grant from BATUS, INC., which covered the expenses of the national tour and made this exhibition possible. Ian McKibbin White, Director The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California Harry S. Parker III, Director Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Texas Samuel Sachs II, Director The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota Gudmund Vigtel, Director The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia iff íhi! -i ' Foreword Duncan Phillips: Adventure in Art Duncan Phillips was one of the most fascinating of that galaxy of collectors of modern art who were so influential in the transformation of taste in the United States in the early years of this century. Among the others were John Quinn, Lizzie P. Bliss, Arthur Jerome Eddy, Albert C. Barnes, Walter Arensberg, Katherine Dreier, the Steins— Gertrude, Leo, Michael, and Sarah—the Cone sisters, Clar-ibel and Etta, A. E. Gallatin, and Ferdinand Howald. Almost all of these were patrons of art in the old sense, rather than collectors of art objects. American collecting in the late nineteenth century was concerned almost exclusively with the acquisition of art treasures of the past. The great reservoir of artistic tradition that had accrued over the centuries in the old world offered an inviting shortcut to status and culture to those nouueau riche American merchant princes who could, discriminately or not, plunder them, with considerable profit to their custodians. To such men and women of wealth, collecting art presented the most desirable fonn of conspicuous consumption, in the Veblenian sense, indicative of affluence as well as of refinement. Only works of the revered past and established values carried unquestioned cachet; this bias had a great deal to do with the continued dependence of American art on the imported traditions of European art of the past, and the slighting of contemporary art in general. Collectors like J. Pierpont Morgan, Joseph E. Widener, Henry C. Prick, Henry Walters, and John G. Johnson, to name only the most prodigious, were in their very voracity laying the foundations for the many historically comprehensive museums of this country. Their historic function was as accumulators of treasure, rather than as patrons of contemporary art or artists. On the other hand, the new breed of collectors that surfaced in the early years of this century was more interested in the recent past and the present, in what was then already called "Modern Art." This interest in contemporary manifestations and in living artists led many of them back into patronage. However, these first collectors of modem art were important less as patrons of individual artists than as instruments in the propagation of modernism. Perhaps it was a natural desire to defend the apparent eccentricity of their own taste that led them to proselytizing of modernism that would have been unthinkable to the older generation of collectors. They also differed from their predecessors in a fundamental economic dimension; none of them were mlers of vast financial or industrial empires, nor did they have unlimited funds at their disposal to spend on the expensive treasures of the past. In many cases they were living on income from inherited wealth. Money to them was never an instrument of power. It was simply a condition which permitted a freedom to indulge their intellectual and cultural interests. If not as rich as their