A Livable Treasure-House

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In America, where Picasso ruled supreme among Modernists, this must have seemed heretical. And even more so was Phillips' rapturous appreciation of Pierre Bonnard, whom he prized as much as he did Matisse, while most American pundits were dismissing him as a very delayed Impressionist. In the end, the Phillips Collection was to own the finest group of Bonnards in America, and one can easily see their influence pervading the American artists who saw them: how Bonnard's fierce but modulated color and his love of diagonal cuts in the scaffolding of his compositions affected young Richard Diebenkorn, for instance, when he was a Marine based at Quantico, Va.; how the purity of his color challenged Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, for whom visits to the Phillips were like Sunday attendance at church.

No such collection will ever be assembled again. The money doesn't exist. Nor will the museum's coverage of American painting ever be duplicated. Phillips was the first American museum director to go deep and seriously into U.S. Modernism. "I do not collect American paintings because they are American," he said, "but because they are good and often great." It was a declaration that few U.S. collectors, haunted as they were by the specter of provincialism, would have made. He began with those two heroes of realism, Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. But Phillips' taste was more for the visionary, especially for the dark, light-mottled sea pieces of Albert Pinkham Ryder, and for the younger painters they inspired--Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and others. He was convinced that the defining characteristics of American art were more spiritual than stylistic and that they had been laid down in the 19th century.

In this he was right, and he was right too in his belief that if you scratched any American abstraction, you would find a landscape not far below the surface. This was part of the deep sympathy that ran between Phillips and Dove: a belief that "abstraction" was not autonomous, that it was a way of getting to the core of reality by jettisoning whatever might be incidental. Then, Phillips wrote, "abstract art ceases to be an amusement for the aesthete and becomes a divine activity." Phillips couldn't be Ryder's patron: the man was dead. But he was Dove's lifeline, acquiring some 55 works during the years of their friendship. "After fighting for an idea all your life, I realize that your backing has saved it for me, and I want to thank you with all my heart and soul for what you have done," Dove wrote to Phillips in 1946, just before Dove's death. And as this wonderful show reminds us, Phillips deserved every scrap of thanks he got.