Duncan Phillips

Duncan Phillips was an early collector of twentieth-century American and European art, and co-founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Established in 1921, the Phillips Collection is credited as the first American museum devoted to the collection and exhibition of modern art. Phillips and his museum played a significant role in introducing modernism to the American public and encouraging museums to actively collect contemporary art.

Phillips spent his childhood in Pittsburgh, where his family was involved in the steel industry. In 1895 the family moved to Washington, D.C., settling on 21st and Q Streets in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. Phillips and his brother Jim graduated in 1908 from Yale University, where they both had developed an interest in art. In 1914 Phillips published his first book, The Enchantment of Art, and armed with a collecting allowance from his parents began purchasing works of art in 1916. Following the deaths of his father in 1917, and Jim, who died from influenza in 1918, Phillips and his mother, Eliza Laughlin Phillips decided to found an art gallery in their honor. While preparations for the gallery were underway, Phillips met Marjorie Acker, a student at the Art Students League, who shortly thereafter became his wife.

Duncan, Marjorie, and Eliza opened the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery in 1921 in the Phillips’ family home. Their small collection of Old Master works, including paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Eugène Delacroix, El Greco, and Francisco de Goya comprised the core collection, alongside more recently purchased examples of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century work. Initially, the art gallery was opened to the public three afternoons a week; a year later, it was renamed the Phillips Collection and described as a “museum of modern art and its sources.” Although the collection included Old Master works, Phillips conceptualized the museum as a center of American and European contemporary art. He hoped that the inclusion of Old Master works would encourage visitors to identify aesthetic connections between disparate periods of art history. Phillips, who served as the museum’s director, curated the galleries to emphasize these formal and thematic relationships across periods of history. A painting by Delacroix, for example, might hang next to a canvas from an artist of the School of Paris as a means of recognizing the expressive role of color in painting over time.

In the first ten years of the museum’s existence, Phillips only acquired late nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of art, making the Phillips Collection the first museum of modern art in the United States. Pablo Picasso’s The Blue Room (1901) entered the museum in 1927 through the Wildenstein Gallery; the artist’s Abstraction, Biarritz (1918) entered two years later, from the Valentine Galleries. In 1930 Phillips purchased Georges Braque’s Abstraction (1920) from the Wehye Gallery and Juan Gris’s Abstraction (1915) through John D. Graham. Significant works by Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and José Clemente Orozco also entered the collection during these first few years. By the end of that year, the collection had grown to include over six hundred works, necessitating that the family move nearby to Foxhill Road and expand the museum building. During the expansion, Phillips and his wife transformed one floor of the museum into a studio space, which functioned as an art school until 1933.

Phillips continued to write about art throughout his life and became a generous patron to American artists, including Arthur B. Davies, Arthur Dove, and Edward Rosenfeld. He continued to purchase important contemporary works throughout the immediate postwar period, supporting the Abstract Expressionists and backing lesser-known contemporary artists like Nicolas de Stäel and Georges Mathieu.

In 1953 the Phillips Collection received a bequest from Katherine Dreier, which included important modern works by Braque, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Kurt Schwitters, among others. As the collection continued to grow, the museum building underwent further construction; the addition of a modern wing (known today as the Goh Annex) opened in 1960. After Phillips’ death in 1966, Marjorie, who had been associate director since 1925, took over the directorship, a role she inhabited until 1972. Today the Phillips Collection remains committed to modern and contemporary art, boasting over four thousand objects.