Modern American artists get a rare West Coast showcase at Orange County Museum of Art
Duncan Phillips may not be a household name in Orange County, but many of the American artists in his collection have become almost as familiar as today’s movie stars or celebrities.
Artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Richard Diebenkorn, Stuart Davis and Clyfford Still have become enshrined in museums across the country and the world as great American painters of the modernist tradition.
But Phillips was collecting them when U.S. museums and collectors didn’t care about homegrown artists, and seemed much more interested in European old masters, realists and Impressionists.
Through Dec. 4, the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach is presenting “American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of Duncan Phillips.” The exhibition features 65 works by 53 artists, with a focus on paintings created between 1870 and 1965. Many of the artworks have never been exhibited before on the West Coast.
“When we started to think about what we wanted this entire exhibition season (fall 2016-summer 2017) to provide our visitors, we saw a fantastic opportunity to showcase the entirety of our mission to present modern and contemporary art, and to tell the stories of art since 1900,” said Todd DeShields Smith, director of the O.C. Museum of Art since 2014. “The show provides many definitions of what modernism is and demonstrates how these definitions still shape contemporary art.”
An aristocrat for sure, Phillips was born in 1886 into a wealthy family in Pittsburgh. His mother was an heir to the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company.
His family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1896. Phillips attended Yale University and made his way to New York, becoming an art critic. Back in the nation’s capital, he founded the Phillips Collection in 1921 in the family’s Dupont Circle home — America’s first museum dedicated to modern art.
“During the 1910s Phillips had come to know many American artists and that personal relationship with America’s contemporary artists continued over the next 50 years,” said Susan Behrends Frank, a curator at the Phillips Collection and the organizer of the OCMA exhibition.
“Phillips saw firsthand how they struggled to find collectors to buy their work, how America’s living artists were ignored by museums between the wars. Throughout his life, Phillips gave American artists his patronage and encouragement.”
That support and patronage ranged from Albert Pinkham Ryder, an early and influential Romantic, to American Impressionist Ernest Lawson to John Sloan, a noted “Ashcan” painter.
Phillips also collected self-taught and foreign-born artists, as well as several artists of color, including Jacob Lawrence, Allan Rohan Crite and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
“Phillips’ message about the diversity of American art as the essential nature of our national character was an idea ahead of its time and certainly is still important today,” Frank said.
The OCMA exhibition is divided into 10 chronological and thematic sections, starting with “Romanticism and Realism” and ending with “Abstract Expressionism.”
Highlights of the exhibit include Homer’s windswept oil “To the Rescue” (1886), Marsden Hartley’s colorful, expressionist oil on academy board “Mountain Lake – Autumn” (c. 1910), Hopper’s contemplative, moody oil “Sunday” (1926), and Edward Bruce’s stark and spiritual oil on canvas, “Power” (c. 1933).
Two iconic O’Keeffe’s — “Large Dark Red Leaves on White” (1925) and “Ranchos Church, No. II, NM” (1929) – grace the “Nature and Abstraction” section, as does Arthur Dove’s stunning sunset captured in oil, “Red Sun” (1935).
Dove’s painting “gives visual form to that moment of the sunset that hovers between light and dark over hills and patterned fields,” Frank said. “This picture captures everything I love about Dove —– his rich color and his inventive visual equivalents that capture the interplay of heat and light in the landscape.”
“Red Sun” also is featured on the cover of the catalog, “Made in the U.S.A.: American Art from the Phillips Collection,” an evergreen publication produced to coincide with the 2014 exhibition of the same name at the Washington, D.C., museum.
“American Mosaic” draws heavily from that exhibition, which had a stop at the Tampa Museum of Art, where OCMA’s Smith used to be executive director. This version will close in early December then travel to the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., where it will be on view Feb. 25-May 21, 2017.
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IF YOU GO
What: “American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art Through the Eye of Duncan Phillips”
When: Till Dec. 4; gallery hours are from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays
Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach
Cost: $7.50 to $10; every Friday, children age 12 and under and museum members are admitted free
Information: (949) 759-1122 or ocma.net
