The Phillips Collection to contribute images of modern art to ARTstor

February 21 , 2008

The Phillips Collection will be represented in ARTstor with 1,200 images of Modern and Contemporary art from around the world. In 1921, the Phillips Collection opened to showcase the collection of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) and is the first museum of Modern art in the United States. Phillips (1886-1966) opened the museum in his private residence to showcase his art collection. He built the collection on the premise that artists are influenced by their predecessors, thereby purchasing works by El Greco and Jean-Simeon Chardin as foreshadowings of later Expressionist and Modernist painting. From these foundations, Phillips would acquire works by European masters such as Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edouard Vuillard. Phillips also collected works by American artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence, Maurice Prendergast, Mark Rothko, Albert Ryder, and James Abbot McNeill Whistler, among others. Over the course of 50 years, Phillips and his wife Marjorie would amass a collection of over 2,000 works. Since Phillips' death in 1966, the museum has continued to add to its permanent collection, which now comprises nearly 2,500 works by artists from around the world.


For more information, please view the Phillips Collection page.