The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. is home to some of the most beautiful nineteenth- and twentieth-century French paintings in America. From Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party through Matisse’s Studio, Quai St. Michel to the room full of Bonnards, it’s a place where the great transformations of French art—by which ordinary subjects are carried up to lyric heights —take place again and again. At the Phillips you can’t help feeling wonderful about French art—the collection has an amazing coherence—and the curatorial staff likes to mount temporary shows that expand on the collection’s essential themes. The Phillips organized the memorable “Braque: The Late Paintings” in 1982, and hosted the American side of the Bonnard retrospective of 1984. When the gallery exhibits living artists, an attempt is made to show things that Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, who built the collection that bears their name, might have liked. Two years ago there was a group of paintings by the English abstractionist Howard Hodgkin. This season’s schedule includes shows of works by Elmer Bischoff, the Bay Area painter; Jacob Lawrence, who makes a patchwork quilt of black American history; and, now, the sixty-four-year-old New York painter Leland Bell.[1]

As it happens, Bell had some of his earliest experiences with great paintings at the Phillips back in the Thirties when he was a teenager living in Washington. It was also here that he encountered the work of Karl Knaths, an American painter who was a member of the pioneering American abstract