Thursday 13 October 2011The Phillips Collection: a “life-enhancing” experience of art

To be published by D Giles Limited in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., in January 2012, Master Paintings from The Phillips Collection highlights 108 masterworks from one of the greatest museums of modern art in the world.

The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, was founded in 1921 by Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), a Washington D.C. collector and visionary who played a vital role in introducing America to contemporary art. Unusually for his time, Phillips saw American artists as fully equal to their European counterparts, often hanging their works side by side. Moreover, Phillips chose to buy and exhibit works according to stylistic continuities and affinities, reflecting the visual connections between various artistic expressions, past and present.

Master Paintings from The Phillips Collection explores the influence, inspiration, and collecting of Duncan Phillips and offers a unique insight into the creation of one of the world’s greatest private holdings of modern art. Featuring paintings by impressionists and post-impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edouard Vuillard; twentieth-century modernists Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso; American nineteenth-century painters Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler; and figures of twentieth-century American modernism such as Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mark Rothko, this stunning new volume aims to re-create what Phillips considered the “life-enhancing” experience of seeing art in an intimate setting.

The Authors
Susan Behrends Frank is a curator at The Phillips Collection and co-author of Impressionists: Painters of Light and the Modern Landscape (2007). Robert Hughes is one of the most widely read writers on art criticism today, and is the author or numerous publications, including Rome (2011), Goya (2004), The Fatal Shore (2003) and The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (1991). Eliza E. Rathbone is chief curator of The Phillips Collection and co-author of Impressionists in Winter: effets de neige (2003), Art beyond Isms: Masterworks from El Greco to Picasso in The Phillips Collection (2002), and European Masterworks from The Phillips Collection (2002) With contributions by Susan Badder, Johanna Halford-MacLeod, Renée Maurer, Klaus Ottmann, Elsa Smithgall, and Vesela Sretenovic.

MASTER PAINTINGS FROM THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION

224 pages, 250 x 210mm (8¼ x 10 in.), portrait
125 colour and 20 b& w illustrations, hardback
ISBN: 978 1 904832 92 8
Price: US$34.95/UK£24.95
Publication date: January, 2012
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London

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