Acquired Taste

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In the 1920s, when steel heir Duncan Phillips began amassing European and American modernist masterworks, Georges Braque’s style was still evolving, Georgia O’Keeffe was relatively unknown, and the pictorial innovations of Cezanne and Renoir were recent memories. Phillips collected all these artists early on. This month the museum he founded, the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., offers a rare peek into the logic behind its recent acquisitions with “Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects.” On view from February 9 to May 25, the exhibition spotlights nearly 100 items acquired within the past 10 years. Whether exploring the museum’s new focus on works by great photographic formalists, such as Harry Callahan and William Eggleston; displaying its most recent purchase, painter Susan Rothenberg’s mysterious Crimson Masks, 2006; or hinting at acquisitions to come—Edouard Vuillard’s lush Interior with a Red Bed, 1893, is a promised gift—the show reveals surprising affinities between diverse artistic eras and mediums. Duncan, ever the visionary, would no doubt have approved.

"Acquired Taste" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.