This splendid exhibition brings together more than 350 works from the 2400-odd that Duncan Phillips (1886–1966) collected. Quite apart from the pleasures afforded by the dozens of masterpieces on view, the exhibition serves as a salutary reminder of the power that an individual sensibility can wield in forming and enhancing public taste. These days the word “dilettante,” like “amateur,” is used disparagingly to mean “not quite serious.” Originally, the OED reminds us, it meant “a lover of the fine arts, … one who cultivates them for the love of them rather than professionally.” Phillips was a dilettante and amateur in this older, nobler sense. The museum he began in his family’s townhouse in 1920—eight years before the Museum of Modern Art in New York was founded—is a living monument to the success of his passion. Together with Alfred Barr, Albert Barnes, and Alfred Stieglitz, Duncan Phillips educated the American public in modern art.
A scion of the Laughlin steel fortune, Phillips was the kind of large-souled and cultivated man that once upon a time gave culture a good name. He was an evangelist for the “joy-giving, life-enhancing influence” of art. While at Yale, he lobbied for the reintroduction of a course in art history (dropped for lack of interest) and deprecated the wholesale ignorance of high culture displayed by his peers. One graduate student, Phillips recalled, declared at dinner that “Botticelli is a wine, a good deal like Chianti only lighter. … He was rudely awakened by a sensitive friend to the fact that Botticelli is not a wine but a cheese.”
Duncan Phillips understood the advantages of being able to distinguish between Camembert and Cézanne, and the museum he went on to create is one of the world’s great small museums, standing to nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and American art as the Frick does to the old masters. Phillips acquired only those objects he judged to be of superlative aesthetic quality. In 1923, commenting on his purchase of Renoir’s magnificent Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81), Phillips noted “for such an American Prado as I am planning, there must be nothing but the best.”
“Art offers two great gifts of emotion,” Phillips wrote, “the emotion of recognition and the emotion of escape. Both emotions take us out of the boundaries of the self.” Together with his wife Marjorie, herself a painter of modest achievement, Phillips devoted himself to keeping that avenue of transcendence open. He collected art, wrote persuasively about it in numerous books and articles, personally supported several artists—including Arthur Dove and Stuart Davis—and labored to make the Phillips Collection an oasis for bruised spirits.
For the current exhibition, the largest in the Phillips’s history, the museum’s curators, Eliza Rathbone and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, have put together a chronology of Duncan Phillips’s evolving taste. Room after room is filled with extraordinary things: a suite of beguiling Bonnards (whom Phillips regarded as “the greatest living painter”); Matisse’s Quai Saint Michel (1916); great Vuillards; brilliant works by Ingres, Cézanne, and Degas; magnificent paintings by Braque; good Klees; a Picasso or two; a splendid Chardin; abstractions by Mondrian and Kandinsky.
As the art historian William Agee remarks in his essay for the monumental catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, the Phillips Collection is also “the best place in the world to see American modernist art.” On view are superb pictures by Thomas Eakins, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Charles Demuth; there are excellent things by Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Maurice Prendergast, Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, and (one of Phillips’s particular favorites) John Marin. For better or worse, Mark Rothko gets a whole room to himself. There are a handful of splendid paintings by Richard Diebenkorn and, for those who like that sort of thing, a Jackson Pollock collage and a couple of Kenneth Noland’s “target” paintings.
“Genuine taste,” T. S. Eliot remarked, “is always imperfect taste.” Some of Duncan Phillips’s enthusiasms will strike many as exaggerated today: his passionate belief in the greatness of Augustus Vincent Tack (1870–1949), for example. (The Phillips Collection owns seventy-nine paintings by Tack.) Still, what is remarkable is how regularly Phillips got it right. It is worth noting, as well, to what great extent taste is as much a principle of exclusion as inclusion. Savoring the scores of masterpieces in this exhibition, we are tempted to forget how much is left out. Phillips responded immediately to the warm sensuousness of Bonnard, but he never had much interest in Surrealism; he thrilled to Braque, but Dada left him cold. He loved Diebenkorn, but found himself unmoved by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1927, Phillips wrote that he hoped to conduct “a free-lance war with the Academy” and help sponsor “the independent artist” against “the herd mind.” This exhibition reminds us of how well he succeeded.