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2 The Domestication of Modernism: The Phillips Memorial Gallery in the 1920s
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2 The Domestication of Modernism The Phillips Memorial Gallery in the 1920s Pictorial Publicity By the 1920s, and particularly after the Quinn auction, collectors of modern art in the United States were loosely cooperating in a general project of popularizing modernism, as well as competing for influence over the mode of its reception—competing, in other words, for the meaning of modernism itself. Of all of these collectors, it was Duncan Phillips who most successfully anticipated the dominant cultural position that modern art would occupy by the 1950s, even though his canon of artists would not be identical to the one that would be enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art. Among his signature practices were the now-customary procedures of borrowing and lending works and the organization of special modernist exhibitions (for his own galleries as well as for civic museums). This groundbreaking work, however, had in some crucial ways been preceded by the activities of Katherine Dreier and the Société Anonyme in the 1920s. The Société Anonyme had staged the enormous International Exhibition of Modernism at the very moment that John Quinn’s collection was being dissolved, and Dreier had also coined the phrase “Museum of Modern Art” a decade before Alfred Barr took the name for his institution in midtown Manhattan.1 But the Société Anonyme’s peripatetic mode of exhibition, along with Dreier’s desire for a more broadly socialized audience for modernism, prevented the Société from cultivating the institutional authority that the Phillips galleries and collection have long enjoyed. After a late attempt to establish her Connecticut home as a public gallery at the end of the 1930s, Dreier bequeathed most of the Société Anonyme collection to Yale University, with Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) going to the Arensberg collection at the 72 Collecting as Modernist Practice Philadelphia Museum of Art. Seventeen other pieces went to the Phillips Collection after Dreier’s death in 1952. It was therefore symbolic in more than one register when the Phillips Collection was among the five institutions to host the 2006–7 exhibition The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, which brought to Washington , DC, a sizable portion of Dreier’s collection.2 Even more than the Philadelphia Museum’s 1999 Mad for Modernism exhibition, which reunited the smaller but more heterogeneous collection of Earl Horter, the Société Anonyme retrospective permitted a glimpse at one mode of modern art’s early reception and organization in the United States. Especially memorable was the first gallery, which recreated the effect of the Société’s first public exhibition by installing white oil cloth on the walls, gray industrial rubber flooring, and electrolier lighting, while framing each of the paintings with paper doilies (the last of these being the contribution of Dreier’s collaborator Duchamp). Yet the very prosperity of the Phillips, which was then celebrating a third expansion of its buildings on Dupont Circle, meant that a palpable subtext of the superb retrospective was Dreier’s failure to have provided a permanent building and endowment for her institution. Indeed, after the imminent move of the Barnes Foundation, the Phillips will be the only modernist collection of the 1920s to remain in its original institutional setting. First opening its doors in 1921, the Phillips is known today for its unparalleled collection of paintings by Pierre Bonnard, for its extensive and important collections of Braque and Georges Rouault, and for one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s greatest paintings. It was an early supporter of several American modernists; can claim extensive holdings in the work of Arthur Dove, John Marin, Karl Knaths, and John D. Graham; and was among the earliest supporters of figures as diverse as Paul Klee, Milton Avery, and Horace Pippin. By midcentury it was still making major acquisitions from contemporary artists, including half of Jacob Lawrence’s monumental Migration Series (originally titled The Migration of the Negro, 1940–41, purchased in 1943). The continued vitality of the Phillips can be gauged by its continuously expanding collection and buildings. If three significant additions (in 1960, 1989, and 2006) have obscured its original identity as an intimate, domestic set of galleries, it has also strived to maintain a connection to this initial identity. It was with Mark Rothko’s approval and assistance that a group of his paintings was hung in a special room in the 1960 annex; now housed in the 2006 annex, the Rothko Room preserves the exact dimensions and qualities of...