A Livable Treasure-House

There was a time when Americans were apt to connect the owning of art with the possession of virtue, but that is long gone. We know in our heart of hearts that the Rothko on the boardroom wall does not turn the saber-toothed CEO into Bambi and that some of the nastiest beasts in history, such as Hermann Goring, have been sincere and knowledgeable art lovers. Moreover, being an important collector doesn't even show that you have halfway decent manners, let alone morals. Witness the late Dr. Albert Barnes, who before World War I became a multimillionaire from selling a snake oil called Argyrol. He bought a huge collection--175 Renoirs, 66 Cezannes, 65 Matisses--and built a foundation around them, but Philadelphia still remembers him mainly as a geek and a bully, and his theories about art as the honkings of a crank.

Yet there are some American collectors--just a few--whose memory lives on in a distinct aura of sweetness and reason, and at the top of that list is Duncan Phillips (1886-1966). Phillips was the kind of man who gives Wasps a good name: modest, highly educated, public spirited and devoid of affectation. The Phillipses, though not as rich as the Carnegies, had made their fortune in Pittsburgh, Pa., in banking and steel, then moved to Washington. After graduating from Yale, young Duncan set himself the task of becoming an "interpreter and navigator" between the art world and the public. It was he who created one of Washington's most beloved institutions, the Phillips Collection. It is a museum, but not an encyclopedic one, containing slightly fewer than 2,400 works of art (including drawings and prints); a place dedicated to Modern art, but with a collection that ranges back to Goya and Corot; a public space that feels private.

"It is worthwhile," wrote Phillips some 80 years ago, when marble temples of culture were sprouting like didactic mushrooms from the American soil, "to reverse the usual process of popularizing an art gallery. Instead of the academic grandeur of marble halls and stairways and miles of chairless spaces, with low standards and popular attractions to draw the crowds, we plan to try the effect of domestic architecture, of rooms small or at least livable." In fact, Phillips and his artist wife Marjorie started the gallery in their own house, and although since its founding in 1921 it has grown some 19,000 sq. ft., the Phillips Collection still feels more "livable" than any other in America. It is a memorial, but without funerary overtones. It commemorates Phillips' brother James, who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and his father Major Duncan Clinch Phillips, who died the previous year. They were to be remembered not by the tomblike associations of the museum but by the vivacity of the art.

The Phillips Collection was the first U.S. museum to be devoted to Modern art (eight years before Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened its doors) and the first to take serious account of Modern American art (nine years before the Whitney Museum of American Art was founded). In the past, it has mounted a lot of distinguished shows by living artists. But in these closing days of the Modernist century, it has chosen to commemorate itself and its founder. Through Jan. 23, the whole winding building is filled with "Renoir to Rothko: The Eye of Duncan Phillips," the chronological story of its creation, and it's one of the great American cultural narratives.

Phillips wasn't a Modernist missionary like Alfred Stieglitz. He came to things gradually and took his time, feeling no embarrassment about changing his mind: to do so was a sign of authentic judgment. He was still in his 20s when he began writing art criticism, and his first reaction to "radical" Modernism, which hit him in the 1913 Armory Show, was one of utter horror--Cezanne and Van Gogh were "unbalanced fanatics," Cubism "simply ridiculous," Matisse "insanely, repulsively depraved."

His taste changed and developed; in due course he would acquire a number of Cezannes, including the mighty Self-Portrait of 1878-80, solid as a Provencal mountain, which he perceived to be a sort of midpoint between El Greco and Picasso. In the same way, his early dislike of Matisse didn't stop him from eventually buying one of the greatest and harshest of all Matisses, the Studio, Quai St.-Michel, 1916.

There was never a time when Phillips felt the need to approve of all Modernism. He was making a record of his own taste, not trying to reflect whatever was there. German Expressionism, or any other movement whose main aim was to record conflict and misery rather than celebrate a degree of Apollonian pleasure, was foreign to his nature. Dada and Surrealism hardly raise a blip on his radar. All efforts to "subvert" painting were beside the point. In his view, the Modernist impulse really began amid the sensuous delights of Renaissance Venice--Giorgione being the first "Modern" artist.

Phillips' thinking about art, his impulse to collect it and set it in order, was sponsored by two main beliefs. The first is that art is continuous. It is not--whatever the avant-gardists may crudely suppose--locked in an Oedipal battle with its past. Every masterpiece contains the genes of earlier masterpieces, as Manets and Daumiers do of Goyas, as Goyas do of Velasquezes. Second, art gives us access to a paradise of the intelligent senses that, once attained, justifies itself. Its aim is pleasure. Thus, Phillips had a fascinated respect for Picasso's anxiety but no great paintings by him, whereas Braque was wholly another matter. Braque's lucid and calm balance drew the American like a magnet, as a demonstration of the unbroken tradition of classical painting that ran forward from Chardin--tradition being, in Phillips' words, "the heritage of qualities which deserve not only to endure but to develop."