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American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of Duncan Phillips
August 6 – December 4, 2016
Exhibition showcases 65 masterworks of American Modern Art
“Our most enthusiastic purpose will be to reveal the richness
of the art created in our United States, to stimulate our native
artists and afford them inspiration . . .to show how our
American artists maintain their equality with, if not indeed
their superiority to, their better known foreign
contemporaries.
-Duncan Phillips, 1921
Edward Hopper, Sunday, 1926, oil on canvas,
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1926
NEWPORT BEACH, CA—On August 6th the Orange County Museum of Art opens American
Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of Duncan Phillips. A collection of American art
from the late 1800s through the mid 1900s, the exhibition reveals the nature of art during the
formation and heyday of modern art in the United States and reflects a culture of independence,
diversity, and experimentation. Included are important works by Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur
Dove, Thomas Eakins, Helen Frankenthaler, Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer, Edward
Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Horace Pippin, and Clyfford Still. (A complete list is attached.) Many
of these artworks have never been on view on the West Coast and offer local audiences a rare
opportunity to see a large cross-section of The Phillips Collection’s renowned American
modernist works on view together. The show provides a thoughtful look into the genius of its
visionary founder, Duncan Phillips. The exhibition is on view August 6 - December 4, 2016.
DUNCAN PHILLIPS
The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum dedicated to modern art, was opened in 1921 in
the nation’s capital by Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), who was determined to lift the work of
American artists out of obscurity at a time when museums and collectors were primarily
interested in European old masters. With an emphasis on the work of living artists, he
assembled a collection of American painting when there were no roadmaps for what would
stand the test of time. Phillips’s collecting interests were broad-ranging. He promoted diversity—
as seen in the works by self-taught artists, artists of color, foreign-born artists, and recently
naturalized Americans—resulting in a rich assembly of independent-minded artists. He also
believed his collection needed to reflect the continuity of art across time. He reached back into
the 19th century to collect artists that he considered America’s first modern masters, particularly
Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, in order to demonstrate the
connections between past and present in American modernism.
Phillips dedicated his life to finding, fostering, and celebrating the very best of American art,
particularly the work of America’s living artists and especially those guided by their
independence and individualism, rather than popular trends. He collected his favorite artists in
depth, committed to purchasing “many examples of the work of artists he admired, instead of
having one example of each of the standardized celebrities.” He also adopted a practice
associated with commercial galleries and unprecedented in the museum setting: Phillips gave
living artists solo exhibitions. He believed that these were an important source of
encouragement for artists, especially at the beginning of their careers.
American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of Duncan Phillips, presented in six
thematic sections, demonstrates not only the changes in American art from the late nineteenth
through the mid-twentieth centuries, it also celebrates Phillips’s lifetime commitment to an
extraordinary vision and how this focus created one of the finest collections of American
modernism in the country.
ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS HIGHLIGHTED IN THE EXHIBITION
Winslow Homer, To the Rescue, 1886
Oil on canvas; The Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C., Acquired 1926
ROMANTICISM AND REALISM
By the second half of the 19th century, young American
painters were seeking alternatives to the sentimentality of
American genre painting and with the work of independentminded artists such as George Inness, Winslow Homer,
Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder (all represented in
this exhibition), American art came of age. Considered
America’s ‘modern’ old masters by Duncan Phillips, these
artists relied more on an artistic inner vision and an exploration
of the emerging interest in psychology.
IMPRESSIONISM
In 1886, work by the French impressionists made it to New York and transformed American
painters who took to painting outdoors, adopting a brighter palette and applying pure unmixed
color on the canvas in dabs and broken brushstrokes to create a sense—an impression—of
reflected light, air, and atmosphere. American Mosaic includes artworks by
Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, and Julian
Alden Weir, who were among the first American painters to assimilate these
new techniques.
FORCES OF NATURE
At the turn of the 20th century, a new generation of artists including Rockwell
Kent, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin—who were dissatisfied with
Georgia O’Keeffe, Large Dark Red Leaves on White, 1925, oil on canvas
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. , Acquired 1943
impressionism’s emphasis on domesticated landscape views rendered in soft, atmospheric
light—sought to reinterpret nature in a bold, expressive manner. In 1928 Phillips wrote of Kent
that his painting captured “The dramatic, the elemental…and the cosmic,” and later referred to
Hartley as “powerful and personal and wholly American.”
NATURE AND ABSTRACTION
After World War I when American artists struggled to define the country’s modern identity,
Phillips was among the most adventurous collectors and museum directors, embracing bold,
original works that signaled a uniquely American style. Through the circle of artists championed
by photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, Phillips met and collected works by Arthur Dove,
John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe, who believed the experience of the natural world was a
spiritual one in which nature’s essence could be made visible in abstract elements—color, form,
and line—divorced from representation.
John Sloan, Clown Making Up,
1910, oil on canvas
The Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C.
Acquired 1919
MODERN LIFE
Moving away from its roots as an agrarian culture, America at the turn
of the 20th century grew fascinated by the emergence of the city and
its newly developing energy. The first wave of American painters
interested in the grit and grim of the city became known as the
Ashcan School while a second wave of artists were more interested in
the effects of the city on the American psyche. Phillips found these
artists, such as John Sloan and later Edward Hopper, to embody all of
the complexity and contradictions of the new urban scene. Drawn to
the work of John Sloan, Phillips noted that the artist “points out not
only the crowd but the lonely individual caught in the maelstrom;” and
similarly, after acquiring Hopper’s Sunday (1926) in 1926, Phillips
described how Hopper balanced the abstraction of architectural
spaces against the psychological isolation of modern life.
THE CITY
The renewed sense of nationalism that settled over the country at the end of World War I
coupled with engineering advances found expression in the new ways to express pictorially the
structures of the city. An early supporter of Charles Sheeler and his interpretations of the city
with abstract patterns of light and dark, Phillips believed his pictures expressed the impersonal
character of the time with dreamlike precision.
MEMORY AND IDENTITY
Millions of immigrants from Europe, Latin American, and Asia began arriving in the United
States in the late 19th century. African Americans from the rural South moved to the cities of the
North seeking freedom from oppression between 1910 and 1940. Phillips—who believed a
diversity of voices was an essential part of American life—was particularly attracted to work by
artists of color, including Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin; and the self-taught Grandma
Moses, who painted the rural life in upstate New York that she knew intimately.
Karl Knaths, Maritime,
1931, oil on canvas,
The Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C.,
Acquired 1931
LEGACY OF CUBISM
Cubism, which developed in France around 1907, burst onto the American
scene in 1913. In the 1920s and 1930s, some American modernists tried to
Americanize cubism, both in style and subject matter. Russian-born Ilya
Bolotowsky, co-founder of the American Abstract Artists advocated for
order and balance through pure geometric abstraction. Karl Knaths
developed what critic Ralph Flint called a “very American, very masculine”
cubist style. Working independently, Knaths developed a highly original
style that used expressive line and planar arrangements of color to
interpret his environment, which Phillips valued for its ‘humanizing
abstraction.’
DEGREES OF ABSTRACTION
By the end of the 1930s, artists in America were putting increasing emphasis on abstraction as
a universal visual language of pure form and color, whether divorced from nature or derived
from it. Moreover, many American abstract painters looked to philosophy, mathematics,
science, psychology, religion, and music to stimulate their visual reality and propel their art into
new directions; appealing to Phillips’s open mindedness in American art.
Morris Graves, steeped in Zen Buddhism and Taoism, believed in the subconscious as the
locus of creativity. Arthur Dove, while still looking to his surroundings for inspiration, eliminated
descriptive detail to concentrate exclusively on spatial, geometric, and color relationships.
Sam Francis
Blue, 1958, oil on canvas
The Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C.
Acquired 1958
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
In the 1940s and 1950s, with the emergence of abstract expressionism,
the first truly international style to emerge in the United States, New York
City became the heart of avant-garde creativity and the art capital of the
world. Abstract expressionism turned American art into a global force.
The artists favored the ’authenticity’ of the individual gesture and although
they shared certain intellectual concerns and social connections, each of
the artists painted in his or her own style. Clyfford Still purged his
paintings of emblematic imagery, making dark canvases that expressed
his philosophical concerns. Younger artists Sam Francis and Richard
Diebenkorn favored expressive use of color. Helen Frankenthaler, Morris
Louis, and Kenneth Noland eliminated the use of thick pigment for a
soaking and staining technique.
American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of Duncan Phillips showcases
extraordinary examples from these American art movements by some of the nation’s most
important artists. The 65 paintings and one sculpture, created between the 1860s and 1960s,
offer a thematic journey that reveals the breadth of America’s modernist vision. For more than
40 years, Duncan Phillips was a major force in promoting American modernism, through
acquisitions, exhibitions, and the presentation of American art in his museum, The Phillips
Collection.
COMPLETE LIST OF ARTISTS REPRESENTED
Milton Avery
George Bellows
Ilya Bolotowsky
Edward Bruce
Alexander Calder
Ralston Crawford
Allan Rohan Crite
Arthur B. Davies
Richard Diebenkorn
Paul Dougherty
Arthur Dove
Thomas Eakins
Louis Michel Eilshemius
Sam Francis
Helen Frankenthaler
John D. Graham
Morris Graves
Philip Guston
Marsden Hartley
Childe Hassam
Stefan Hirsch
Winslow Homer
Edward Hopper
George Inness
John Kane
Rockwell Kent
Karl Knaths
Walt Kuhn
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Jacob Lawrence
Ernest Lawson
Doris Lee
Morris Louis
John Marin
George L.K. Morris
Grandma Moses
Grandma Moses
Kenneth Noland
Kenzo Okada
Georgia O'Keeffe
Guy Pène du Bois
Horace Pippin
Horrace Pippin
Maurice Prendergast
Theodore Robinson
Albert Pinkham Ryder
Charles Sheeler
John Sloan
Theodoros Stamos
Clyfford Still
Augustus V. Tack
American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of Duncan Phillips has been organized
by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
The exhibition is presented by Visionaries.
Significant support is provided by The Segerstrom Foundation
Additional support has been provided by Marcia and John Cashion
OCMA INFORMATION | Hours and Admission prices changed February 2015
Wednesday – Sunday, 11 am – 5 pm; with extended hours Friday, 11 am – 8 pm. Admission: Adults $10,
seniors and students $7.50, children 12 and under are free. Fridays are free to the public. Orange County
Museum of Art is located at 850 San Clemente Drive in Newport Beach, CA. For additional information,
call 949.759.1122 or visit www.ocma.net.