Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Museum of One’s Own?”, 1988 HILTON KRAMER [00:00:00] But also, the kinds of controversies: illegal, moral, polemical, aesthetic that, in past years, raged around the history of Bonds, his collection, and his foundation and museums will know that all of the attitudes that have come to be directed toward collectors who establish museums, have long ago been played out. That is the idea that there’s nothing but vanity involved; the idea that establishing a museum is nothing but a kind of ego trip. In the case of Bonds, he had very specific ideas [00:01:00] about what art should be, what it was, what it wasn’t. He wrote books about art; terrifying thing to think of collectors doing (laughter). He established a school, which probably even the over-reaching contemporary collector would hesitate to do. He invited such intellectual eminences as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey to come and advise him. I think I’m quite safe in the assumption that neither was interested in art. In any case, for the Bonds Foundation from the Frick Collection, from the Phillips Collection in Washington, about which one of our panelists will speak this evening, these collections [00:02:00] around which certain controversies and attitudes have accreted over the years, nonetheless have a way of becoming of becoming favorite collections and favorite museums. We know from the example of Bonds in particular, that the people who established them are not always the most lovable types (laughter), but the one thing that can be said for Bonds was that when it came to art, he delivered. I suppose the question that’s on the minds of many people when they hear about collectors establishing museums is, can they deliver? Well, I thought we would begin this evening with [00:03:00] Laughlin Phillips, the director of the Phillips Collection. Since, in the discussion this evening, the Phillips Collection looms as the historical precedent. I think I don’t exaggerate when I say that it is one of the museums that is most beloved by people who really care about art, rather than all the things that accumulate around art. I will, by way of introduction, only tell one story about Duncan Phillips, whom I cannot claim to have known but whom I met on one remarkable occasion in the mid ’50s when I went down to Washington. I was then the editor of Arts Magazine; I went to Washington because I was doing some work on Bonnard and it wasn’t all that easy in those days to see a lot of [00:04:00] paintings by Bonnard. In fact, it isn’t all that easy today. I knew what the holdings at the Phillips Collection were, and being a little innocent about those matters then, I just went to Washington and assumed they would all be hanging in some public space. When I go out there, I was rather dismayed to find that there wasn’t a single Bonnard on exhibition. So, I went to see a woman sitting behind a desk, told her what my mission was, and asked her if I could have access to the store-rooms where the Bonnards must surely be. She looked very embarrassed and she said, “Well, if I would just take a few minutes to look at other paintings, she would look into the matter.” Then, as I was standing [00:05:00] in the foyer of the old building trying to decide whether anything was gonna come of this visit, I saw this car pull up and the driver get and open the back door, and this very tall, elegant man, unmistakably Duncan Phillips, walk into the museum. This woman went to him and whispered something to him, and he came up to me and said, “Young man, I understand you’ve come to see our Bonnards.” I said, “Well yes I have,” and he said, “Well, in order to do that, you’ll have to come home to lunch with me (laughter) because they’re all hanging in my living room (laughter) at the moment. Now, that’s the other side of having, as it were, your own museum. I did go home to lunch with Duncan and Marjorie Phillips. It was one of the most [00:06:00] extraordinary days of my life. I did get to see the Bonnards, but what made an even greater impression on me was the Braque still life from the late ’20s that was hanging on the wall opposite my place at the lunch table. I had great difficulty Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 18 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Museum of One’s Own?”, 1988 getting the food on my fork from the plate to my mouth because I couldn’t quite figure out where my mouth was (laughter). I had never had lunch with a Braque still life before. It’s another side of the whole enterprise of a collector having his own museum; a story, which in this case, I think has had a happy ending though not an uncomplicated one, and about that I’ll call on Laughlin Phillips to tell us a bit more. PANETLISTS Over here. HILTON KRAMER I’m sorry. LAUGHLIN PHILLIPS Thank you. [00:07:00] I want to hasten to point out that it was possible then to have paintings at home, but under the new (laughs) tax law that is no longer possible. Because even then, it was a public museum, public institution, a foundation, and that’s considered self-dealing under the present law, but my father made a great point of living with the paintings that eventually entered the Collection. He would test them in good company and live them for a week or two. Very often he would ask the galleries to send them down on approval and they wouldn’t go to the museum, they’d go to his home and be put in different places next to tough company. If they survived that, then they might get bought. But, I wanna clarify one point about this evening’s topic in relation to the Phillips, it’s a rather unique institution, in that, it is not a case of a [00:08:00] collector converting his collection into a public institution, into a museum. In fact, the idea of the museum came first and then the collection. If I could, just for a moment, recite how that happened. He had gone through Yale as an— been trained in writing and in fact found himself, in the 10 or 15 years after college, increasingly writing about art. He felt that he somehow was able to interpret what artists were doing in a way that the public could appreciate. He and his brother started in a very modest way to collect, a few paintings prevailing on their father and mother to let them do it. I suppose in 1918, they together had two dozen paintings [00:09:00] and in that year, my father lost both his father and his brother, plunged into depression, and had this feeling that he wanted to establish a memorial to them, but in a very constructive way. He also was imbued with the sense of public service. So, he conceived this idea, which pulled him out of the depression, of founding a museum, which then would permit him to interpret art using the real thing. Of course, he was using his inheritance to do that. So, it is a little different from what we ordinarily think of as a beginning of public collection. He spent the next three years in 1918 to 1921 amassing several hundred paintings and finally opened the [00:10:00] museum in two rooms of the private house, which some of you know, near Dupont Circle in Washington. Then, a few years later, was driven out of the house by having gotten 600 (laughs) paintings and still only two rooms to show them. So, he moved out and the whole house was converted into a museum and kept on collecting at that kind of rate until his death in 1966. He literally poured his life into the museum. In other words, he and my mother were the sole support for some 50 years of the museum, including: acquiring the paintings, paying all the bills, and so forth. He had a very distinct concept. He was very interested in what artists were trying to express in many different ways, but he had this idea that artists see differently. So, it’s a museum with a specific focus; and [00:11:00] although it’s quite eclectic, there are certain points in common. There’s a strong interest in color, there’s a strong interest in expression, there’s a feeling that art somehow enhances life and you should feel good when you look at it. So, he had Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 18 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Museum of One’s Own?”, 1988 almost a missionary zeal along that line. In a sense, it’s a very unique museum, but if I have just one more minute— HILTON KRAMER Yes. LAUGHLIN PHILLIPS — I think there are certain lessons, nevertheless, to be learned from it in connection with a private person establishing a museum. One, it does require far more money than I think (laughs) people (laughs) realize and including my father.