As long as I’ve lived in Washington, I’ve been in love with the Phillips Collection. For as historic, influential and mighty a museum as it is, it’s a funny little place — an architectural assemblage built out from the original mansion of American art collector Duncan Phillips, the interior pieced together with an odd jumble of twisting staircases and the shortest skywalk in history.
Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” the singular masterpiece of the collection and one of the most important paintings in the entire city, lives in a gallery about the size and height of an average midcentury den, the frame of the painting rising almost to the ceiling.
Upon turning certain corners, you will sometimes find yourself in what feels like — and what in fact is — an old, empty mansion filled with art. Then you’ll trip up a few steps and be spit out into another walkway or the lobby or, if you’re lucky, a tiny closet made of beeswax (Wolfgang Laib’s “Wax Room,” which opened in 2013).
The Phillips has more quirk and genuine character than any other museum in the city. It also has a collection that punches well above its weight (outrivaling a few much larger and wealthier museums around town, which I’m sure you would love for me to call out by name).
It is one of a handful of museums in the city that gets me excited when it announces an exhibition of its permanent collection. And right now, for a limited time, the Phillips has put together a seriously good one.
“Breaking It Down: Conversations from the Vault” offers a deep dive into several artists who are cornerstones of the collection, including Georges Braque, Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Dove, Sam Gilliam, Paul Klee and Georgia O’Keeffe. It also offers a new take on many of them, by juxtaposing them with works by contemporary artists like Sean Scully, Sylvia Snowden, Karel Appel and Joyce Wellman, tracing arcs of artistic influence over three centuries.
A show like this is in keeping with the museum’s founding spirit. Duncan Phillips wrote in 1926: “My idea is not to show all our treasures at once but in ever-varied and purposeful exhibitions, arranging the Collection in units which are frequently changed so that the walls of the various rooms reveal interesting transformations.”
On a level of pure art, it’s lovely to behold. Each gallery is a conversation, featuring small groupings centered around two or three artists, usually from different time periods, that together inform and enhance your understanding of them all.
For instance, you can engage directly with the influence Paul Cézanne had on the still life paintings of Georges Braque, and in turn see how contemporary artists like Sharon Core call back to them both through delicious and oddly haunting photography.
To see Cézanne’s “Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears” of 1893, Braque’s “Plums, Pears, Nuts and Knife” of 1926 and Core’s “Melon and Peas” of 2009 all in the same gallery is thrilling. These three works trace the history of the still life from Impressionism through today. And yet with the deeply formalist, hyperrealist and frankly Dutch undertones of Core’s photograph, the grouping traces history backwards well beyond Cézanne, which illuminates the world of art from which Impressionism was born.
Each gallery offers up a similar but unique analysis, so all I can really do is encourage you to go see it and make your own connections.
One notable highlight is a stunning opening gallery featuring large-scale masterpieces by Sam Gilliam (1933-2022). Gilliam was a D.C.-based artist with deep ties to the Phillips Collection. In 2011, I actually interviewed him for The Georgetowner about an installation he made celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Phillips.
“Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t new,” Gilliam told me during that interview. “It’s the way that, in his context, he used all the information that he had that was very important in that particular moment. No art is really new in that sense.”
That’s exactly right — and exactly why an exhibition like this is such a joy.
Breaking It Down: Conversations from the Vault
Through Jan. 19
The Phillips Collection
1600 21st St. NW
phillipscollection.org
202-387-2151