919 BROADWAY NASHVILLE, TN 37203 WWW.FRISTCENTER.ORG FRISTFristFristFRIST CENTERCenterCenter CENTER forfor FOR FOR thethe THETHE VisualVisual VISUAL Arts ArtsARTS ARTS The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of believed that we benefit as viewers by giving modern art, was founded in Washington, D.C. in ourselves over to the direct experience of a work 1921, a decade before the Museum of Modern Art of art. In this way we enter the artist’s world (est. 1929) and the Whitney Museum of American “to see as artists see.” Phillips responded to Art (est. 1930) opened in New York. From its individual artists on their own merits, not to artistic inception, The Phillips Collection has championed movements. In his extensive critical writings the very best American art and artists. Its in-depth Phillips made clear that he was seeking “artists of holdings of American paintings are broad in scope, creative originality and of sincere independence.” yet cannot be characterized as either encyclopedic To See as Artists See: American Art from The or strictly historical. Rather, it is a rich assembly Phillips Collection is divided into ten thematic of independent-minded American artists, most sections, which aim to reveal the breadth of of whom were actively exhibiting when their work America’s modernist vision from approximately entered the museum’s collection. In fact, many 1850 to 1960. The exhibition begins with the great of the more than seventy artists included in this heroes of American art of the late nineteenth exhibition became acquaintances and good friends century whose work set the course for modern art with the museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips in the United States. It concludes with a grand (1886–1966), who often acquired their work in display by the Abstract Expressionists, whose large numbers. efforts to create a new visual language in the A well-regarded critic, in addition to being 1940s turned American art into a global force. a collector and museum director, Phillips firmly Romanticism and Realism Impressionism

From its beginnings in the eighteenth century, brought to their work a new vision of nature For some American artists, trained in the The effort to infuse American painting American art has been one of realism tinged and humanity that was more subjective and academies of Paris and Munich, exposure to with a French Impressionist style gave a with romanticism, whether in storytelling expressive of mood and the inner psychology of French Impressionism in the 1880s proved fresh interpretation to countryside and narratives or in landscapes. During the the individual. to be transformative. Like their French city. Intimate landscape views rooted in the Reconstruction that followed the Civil counterparts, they left the studio and took suburban New England countryside became War, America’s younger painters sought an to painting outdoors in a variety of weather the norm, as did scenes of leisure activities alternative to the sentimentality of American conditions; they adopted a brighter palette in parks and at the beach, along with urban genre painting and the grand theatricality and and substituted color for shadows; they views that captured the genteel character of microscopic realism that characterized Hudson applied pure unmixed color on the canvas the city’s upscale neighborhoods. As one art River School landscape painting. In the work in dabs and broken brushstrokes to create a critic wrote in 1916, “American Impressionism of independent-minded artists such as George sense—an impression—of reflected light, air, and French Impressionism are not identical. Inness, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and atmosphere; and, they borrowed ideas The American painter accepted the spirit, not and Albert Pinkham Ryder, among others, from photography and Asian art, including the letter of the new doctrine.” American art was redefined for the modern cropping, asymmetry, and multiple viewpoints. era. Phillips believed that the modern spirit in Even so, the American Impressionists never American painting could be found in the work lost their foundation in the realist tradition, of these “old masters” of American art, who always keeping three-dimensional volume in form. Nature and Forces of Nature Abstraction

Nature and the land have always held in isolation, combining the heroic realism After World War I, artists and writers struggled but fueled by their individual sensitivities to a special place in American art. In the of Homer with the romantic abstraction of to define America’s modern identity. Some geography, weather, the seasons, and atmospheric nineteenth century the Hudson River School Ryder into an unsentimental modernism. In were fascinated by technology, but others conditions. Marin, for example, followed Eugéne painters treated the landscape of the new the rugged landscapes and harsh climate of searched for an authentically American art Delacroix’s dictum that nature must be viewed world as a divine gift to humanity. The remote northern New England, artists such rooted in nature. The search for equivalents through a temperament, writing that “it is this twentieth-century American artist, however, as Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, Harold to different kinds of sensory experience was ‘moving of me’ that I try to express.” Getting the sought to re-interpret nature in a bold, Weston and others found an escape from essential to a select group of American artists “feel of a particular place,” as O’Keeffe described expressive manner, capturing a personal the confines of civilization where they could between the wars that included Arthur Dove, it, was key for these painters who sought to response to elements seen and unseen, often experience the extremes of nature’s beauty Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others. convey in their art the essence of nature along in styles adapted from those of European and grandeur. John Marin, for instance, Their expressive symbolism grew from a shared with the American land. contemporaries. Trained as realists in the advocated that “the true artist must perforce belief that the experience of the natural world The Phillips Collection holds the distinction academies of New York, Philadelphia, go from time to time to the elemental big was a spiritual one in which nature’s “inner truth” of being the first museum to acquire works by and Europe, the generation of American forms—Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain . . . to sort or essence could be made visible in abstract Dove and O’Keeffe (in 1926) and the first to landscape painters who came of age after the of re-true himself up, recharge the battery.” “equivalents” in which color, form, and line are give Marin a solo museum exhibition (in 1929). turn of the century were generally dissatisfied divorced from representation. O’Keeffe captured Phillips, who acquired more than forty-eight with Impressionism’s emphasis on intimate, this idea by stating “it is only by selection, by works by Dove and gave him lifelong financial domesticated landscape views rendered elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real support, attributed his personal evolution as in soft, atmospheric light. This generation meaning of things.” a critic and a collector to the discovery of the chose to depict the modernist impulse as Subject matter for these artists was firmly artist’s work, which inspired him to “see” without a utopian longing for nature experienced grounded in observable, objective reality anecdote, metaphor, or narrative. Modern Life The City

At the end of the nineteenth century, the and women. Labeled “apostles of the ugly,” As a renewed sense of nationalism settled over New York. Others, like Charles Sheeler, urbanization of America was a fact that they were eventually nicknamed the “Ashcan the United States at the end of World War I, Ralston Crawford, and Stefan Hirsch, now challenged the very identity of a nation School” because of their subject matter. the city became one of America’s most potent known as “precisionists,” were labeled “neo- envisioned at its founding as an agrarian When The Phillips Collection opened in 1921, symbols. Brash, young, and electrified, urban Cubists” because of their hard-edged style society. While the American Impressionists it included many works by the group associated America was dominated by new construction; and preference for flat color shapes, cool chose to ignore the industrialization that with Henri. The gritty realism of the Ashcan its bridges and skyscrapers were emblems colors, and invisible brushstrokes. They found surrounded them, the seamy darkness of artists lived on between the wars, particularly of the nation’s advanced technology and inspiration in the geometry of the city in a modern city life appealed to a younger in the art of Edward Hopper, whose modernism, engineering. As the city replaced wilderness hybrid style that eliminated both people and generation of painters. Led by the always grounded in representation, was infused and countryside as the locus for myth- nature. charismatic Robert Henri, a passionate with psychological insight into the anxiety and making, artists began to explore the modern Phillips, who, in 1919, was the first to realist in the tradition of Eakins, these urban alienation of the twentieth century. industrialized landscape in small and large acquire a John Sloan painting for a museum, dissidents made it their mission to depict cities alike, with New York’s streets and found the modern city to have multiple subjects of everyday life in the rough working- skyline a primary focus. identities: it was not only dynamic and vibrant, class neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Influenced by European Cubism and but romantic, tough, and psychologically Side, as opposed to the genteel social world of Futurism, modern painters looked to the city isolating. He featured the neo-Cubists at Fifth Avenue. and America’s industrialization as subject the museum in early 1926; that same year he The urban realists chose their subject matter. Marin, for example, saw the city as was the first to identify the duality inherent in matter from everyday experience that included something alive and used graphic means to Hopper’s paintings in which the loneliness of street urchins, fortune tellers, and theatrical express both buildings and people pushed modern life is paired with the picturesque. performers, as well as working-class men and pulled by the rhythm and energy of Memory and Identity Legacy of Cubism

Millions of immigrants began arriving in the his time in seeing diversity as a positive While critics ridiculed French Cubism when Phillips was the first American museum United States in the late nineteenth century, influence on American art and part of its examples by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, director to champion the work of John Graham remaking the racial and ethnic character inherent internationalism, was among the few and Marcel Duchamp were introduced to and Knaths. He was also the individual to of the country. America’s demography who celebrated the assimilation of various American audiences in New York in 1913 at whom Davis turned for financial support and was further reshaped from within between aesthetic ideas into one national heritage the famous Armory Show, a small band of encouragement at the height of the Depression 1910 and 1940 when the Great Migration known as “American.” Artists of color who America’s first generation of abstract artists in 1939. Although Phillips’s support for artists brought African Americans from the rural captured aspects of contemporary American embraced it, many of whom, like Marin, had who drew inspiration from French painting South to the cities of the North in search life in their pictures were often overlooked by spent time in Europe. By the 1920s, elements placed him outside the conservative American of jobs, better housing, and freedom from mainstream critics. Phillips was among the of Cubist style appeared in the work of art establishment between the wars, he was oppression. This population shift gave birth few who valued and collected their versions increasing numbers of American modernists. never dissuaded by mainstream criticism from to a generation of artists emboldened to give of the American Scene as an essential part There was an effort among some to Americanize pursuing the work of artists he believed in. voice to their community experience. of American life. Cubism into an original abstract style. Marin, In the 1920s and 1930s, paintings of Niles Spencer, and Karl Knaths, for example, the American Scene, understood to be developed personal Cubist-related styles to about the experience of the people, became interpret their environment. By contrast, Stuart increasingly popular and American art began Davis’s Cubism derived from mass-produced to reflect the country’s ethnic multiplicity. utilitarian objects. For others, like George L. Artists from Europe, Latin America, and K. Morris and Ilya Bolotowsky, Cubism led to a Asia invigorated America’s aesthetic manner of pure geometric abstraction that fused diversity. Phillips, who was far ahead of elements of Piet Mondrian with Joan Miró. Transition to Abstract Expressionism Abstract Expressionism

By the end of the 1930s, American artists spatial relationships in compositions that are The influx of European émigrés into New described as a “crisis of subject matter.” The put increasing emphasis on abstraction as a at once non-objective and representational, York before World War II transformed this search for subject matter became a search for universal visual language of pure form and while Alexander Calder thought of himself as American city into the art capital of the world meaning, especially the meaning of existence. color, whether divorced from nature or a realist interpreting the world around him as and the heart of avant-garde artistic activity. Firmly believing in the creative subconscious, derived from it. Many American abstract pure relationships of color, line, motion, shape, From this international confluence of artists, the Abstract Expressionists looked into their painters looked to mathmatics, music, space, and time. Abstract Expressionism emerged in the 1940s own psyches for inspiration. Theirs was an philosophy, psychology, religion, and science and 1950s as the first truly international style essentially romantic outlook that favored to stimulate their experiments and propel manifested in the United States. It turned personal symbols and the “authenticity” of the their art into new arenas. Some, like Morris American art into a global force. individual gesture. For these artists, painting Graves, absorbed Far Eastern philosophies In the 1940s, America’s avant-garde was a vehicle for passion, a way to give such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism and painters, such as Adolph Gottlieb, Mark concrete expression to thoughts and feelings believed in the subconscious as the locus of Rothko, and Robert Motherwell, among on canvas. creativity. The psychoanalytic theories of Carl others, reacted against the sentimental Phillips’s romantic nature favored the Jung proved transformative to a young Jackson figurative realism of American regionalist poetic and lyrical side of postwar painting Pollock as he sought a visual language that art that dominated the 1930s. They sought that seemed alive with light and movement. could express the unconscious. Others, like a new visual language that was abstract, but He was also attracted to postwar American Theodoros Stamos, were interested in ancient also inherently American. Affected by the art that was connected to themes and ideas rituals and Greek mythological themes as political turmoil of World War II and its already expressed in the collection, especially metaphors for the postwar era. Milton Avery aftermath, these young painters believed evident in the search for one’s place in nature fused abstraction and color with shape and that the contemporary artist faced what they or the cosmos. Images in order of apearance

Cover: Edward Bruce. Power (detail), ca. 1933. Oil on canvas, Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series, Panel no. 3: From every 30 x 45 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Gift of southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north, 1940–41. Mrs. Edward Bruce, 1957 Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1942. © 2011 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Inside cover: Charles Sheeler. Skyscrapers, 1922. Oil on canvas, Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 20 x 13 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1926. Stuart Davis. Egg Beater No. 4, 1928. Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 38 Winslow Homer. To the Rescue, 1886. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. The 1/4 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1939. © Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1926 Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Childe Hassam. Washington Arch, Spring, 1890. Oil on canvas, 26 1/8 Milton Avery. Black Sea, 1959. Oil on canvas, 50 x 67 3/4 in. The x 21 5/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1921 Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1965. © 2011 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Rockwell Kent. Azopardo River, 1922. Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 x 44 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1925. Adolph Gottlieb. The Seer, 1950. Oil on canvas, 59 3/4 x 71 5/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1952. © Adolph and Georgia O’Keeffe. Ranchos Church, No. II, NM, 1929. Oil on Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY canvas, 24 1/8 x 36 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1930. Arthur G. Dove. Morning Sun (detail), 1935. Oil on canvas, 20 x 28 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Edward Hopper. Sunday, 1926. Oil on canvas, 29 x 34 in. acquired 1935. © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1926. Dintenfass, Inc.

John Sloan. Six O’Clock, Winter, 1912. Oil on canvas, 26 1/8 x 32 Conclusion in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; acquired 1922. © 2011 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Over the course of fifty years, from the able to find their own voices and create work 1910s until his death in 1966, Duncan that was deeply personal and expressed Phillips built a collection featuring the with fresh vision, yet connected to the great best of American art. With his early and traditions of the past and the present. steadfast commitment to artists To See as Artists See: American Art from The Phillips Collection with fresh vision, The Phillips Collection Susan Behrends Frank, Ph.D. February 3–May 6, 2012 became an essential force in twentieth- Associate Curator for Research, century American art, particularly between The Phillips Collection This exhibition has been organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. the wars. This exhibition, the first organized Platinum Sponsor: Silver Sponsor: by The Phillips to showcase the full breadth of its American masterworks, features those ANNE AND JOE RUSSELL exceptional artists who were

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