Phillips Gallery Guide.Indd

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.

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