Seeing Nature. Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection

February 6 - May 8, 2016
http://www.phillipscollection.org/

Featuring 39 masterpieces spanning five centuries, this exhibition draws from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection to explore the evolution of European and American landscape art. Highlights include Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 17th‐century allegorical paintings of the five senses that invite visitors to consider their own experiences of the world. Venice, one of Allen’s favorite cities, is sumptuously represented in the exhibition through stunning Venetian scenes by Canaletto, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and J. M. W. Turner, among others. Other highlights include five Monet landscapes spanning 30 years, from views of the French countryside to his late immersive representations of water lilies, evocative works by Paul Cézanne and Gustav Klimt, and modern and contemporary perspectives by 20th‐century artists as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha.

Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland

Oct 10, 2015 - Jan 10, 2016
http://www.phillipscollection.org

This exhibition focuses on a groundbreaking shift in the development of Swiss collections that occurred in the first decade of the 20th century, as patrons began to look beyond the contributions of regional painters and broaden their definition of modern art. The exhibition pays tribute to pioneering supporters Rudolf Staechelin (1881–1946) and Karl Im Obersteg (1883–1969), both from Basel, who enthusiastically championed the work of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and School of Paris artists. From their renowned collections, over 60 celebrated paintings created during the mid-19th and 20th centuries by 22 world-famous artists will be on view. The city of Basel’s vital support for modern art, the approaches of the two collectors—who knew each other personally and developed friendships with artists—and their shared preference for colorful, expressive paintings of figures, still life, and landscape unify these impressive works. This exhibition marks the first occasion for these collections to be exhibited together in the US.

Man Ray–Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare

February 7 - May 10, 2015

http://www.phillipscollection.org

Man Ray–Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare explores the intersection of art and science that defined a significant component of modern art at the beginning of the 20th century.

Working in Hollywood in the late 1940s, Man Ray (American, 1890–1976) created the Shakespearean Equations, a series of paintings that he considered to be the apogee of his creative vision. Drawing on photographs of 19th-century mathematical models he made in the 1930s, the series was a culmination of 15 years of exploration of the theme in a variety of mediums. Man Ray–Human Equations displays side-by-side for the first time the original plaster, wood, papier-mâché, and string models from the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, Man Ray’s inventive photographs of these unusual forms, and the Shakespearean Equations paintings they inspired. Placed in context with his other paintings, photographs, and objects, these works illustrate the artist’s proclivity to create art that objectifies the body and humanizes the object, transforming everyday materials into novel forms of creative expression.

The exhibition’s diverse works—including 70 photographs, 25 paintings, eight assemblages or modified “readymades” by Man Ray and 25 original mathematical models—juxtapose the artist’s Surrealist-inspired photographs of mathematical models and the associated Shakespearean Equations within the larger context of the role of the object in the artist’s work. His other canvases, photographs, and objects—some celebrated and others little-known—link his wider artistic practice with the Shakespearean Equations project and casting these accompanying works in a new light.

The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities. Painting, Poetry, Music

September 27, 2014 - January 11, 2015
http://www.phillipscollection.org

Around 1890, Neo-Impressionist painters including Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Theo van Rysselberghe created pictures that accentuate subjectivity and an inner world of experience, approaches they shared with their contemporaries, Symbolist painters, writers, and composers in Paris and Brussels. This focus was different from the movement's beginnings in 1886, when it was hailed as an alternative to Impressionism, offering a fresh opportunity to focus on light and contemporary life. With more than 70 paintings and works on paper this exhibition demonstrates how the Neo-Impressionists employed stylization and a deliberate orchestration of color to create landscapes and figures that went far beyond observed nature.

Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945

08.06-01.09.2013
http://www.phillipscollection.org

This exhibition is the first in-depth study of still life in Georges Braque’s (1882–1963) career framed within the historical and political context of 1928 to 1945. Approximately 40 paintings chart Braque’s work in this genre from small, intimate interior scenes of the late 1920s, to vibrant, large-scale canvases of the 1930s, to darker and more personal interpretations of daily life in the 1940s. Duncan Phillips played a pioneering role in introducing this important European modernist to American audiences, acquiring 11 works by the artist and presenting Braque’s first U.S. retrospective in 1939.
The exhibition is co-organized by The Phillips Collection and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Angles, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet

09.02.-12.05.2013
http://www.phillipscollection.org

The Phillips Collection dives into American abstract expressionism to reveal a little-known but captivating story that focuses on the relationship among three of the movement’s seminal players: American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), American artist and patron Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), and French painter Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985). Featuring 55 paintings and works on paper from 1945 to 1958, the exhibition illuminates a key moment in postwar art. It reunites a number of works by Pollock and Dubuffet from Ossorio’s collection for the first time since they were dispersed after his death in 1990.

Angels, Demons, and Savages highlights visual affinities between the artists’ work, tracing the impact of Dubuffet’s art brut (art by the mentally ill and other so-called outsiders), the experimental spirit of Pollock’s technique, and Ossorio’s figurative language. As the focal point of the art world shifted from Europe to America, the exchange among the three helped bridge the widening gap between the continents.