Exhibition Videos

Exhibition curator Eliza Rathbone gives an introduction to Van Gogh Repetitions. In the first Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) exhibition in DC in 15 years, the Phillips brings together 35 of his celebrated portraits and landscapes from some of the world’s most renowned collections. It features results of more than half a decade of research into the artist’s process, revealing a fascinating picture of his personal life and art. While recognized for the intensity and speed with which he painted, van Gogh also worked with careful deliberation, creating multiple versions of some of his most famous subjects.

In April 2013, the Phillips partnered with the US Department of State to conduct a series of workshops in Pakistan focusing on art and social change. Using Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1940–41) as a catalyst for conversation about the power of storytelling through art, emerging artists, middle and high school students, art educators, and museum professionals worked together to create visual narratives about identity, personal struggle, and Pakistani history. The exhibition, presenting 29 works by emerging Pakisani artists and 20 works by students, continues the Phillips’s history of being a leader in international cultural diplomacy.

Exhibition curator Renée Maurer discusses Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945. The exhibition is the first in-depth look at the years leading up to and through World War II, a period of experimentation and transition in Braque’s career, when he used the motif of still life to synthesize cubist discoveries and hone his individual style. Forty-four sumptuous canvases, along with related objects, trace the artist’s journey from painting still lifes in intimate interiors in the late 1920s, to vibrant, large-scale spaces in the 1930s, to more personal interpretations of daily life in the 1940s

Exhibition co-curator Klaus Ottmann discusses the exhibition Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet, on view February 9 through May 12, 2013.

Curator Klaus Ottman discusses Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture, on view October 6, 2012 through January 6, 2013. Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture is the most comprehensive survey in the United States to date of works by Scandinavia’s most highly acclaimed living artist, Per Kirkeby (Danish, b. 1938). Equally trained as a geologist and an artist, Kirkeby is a painter of eminent sensuality, creating richly layered canvases filled with prodigious detail and animated by an unequaled material quality of color. He is not only a leading painter, sculptor, and printmaker, but also a prolific writer, poet, and filmmaker.

Artist Antony Gormley discusses his exhibition, Antony Gormley: Drawing Space. The Phillips presents drawings and sculptures by one of Britain's most high-profile living artists, Antony Gormley (b. 1950), the Turner Prize-winner's first U.S. museum exhibition of works on paper. Known for his sculpture and installations that investigate the human form and its connection to space, Gormley is also an accomplished draftsman. Approximately 80 works on paper along with two recent sculptures emphasize the intrinsic link between the two media.

Curator Renee Maurer discusses Jasper Johns: Variations on a Theme, on view June 2 through September 9, 2012. One of the most celebrated artists of the modern era, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) transformed the field of printmaking. For over 50 years, he has tested the medium's boundaries, reinventing subjects like targets, American flags, and images from art history in endless variation. The first exhibition of his work at The Phillips Collection features 101 iconic prints with groundbreaking examples of lithography, intaglio, silkscreen, and lead relief.

Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Vesela Sretenovic introduces the installation Eye to Eye: Joseph Marioni at the Phillips, on view Oct. 22, 2011-Jan. 29, 2012. Thirteen glowing paintings by Marioni are surrounded by about 40 works from the museum's collection that trace the development of color and light in modern painting. This is the first Washington, D.C., exhibition of Marioni's work. Organized as part of The Phillips Collection's 90th anniversary. More about this installation: http://www.phillipscollection.org/anniversary/joseph_marioni.aspx

Ballet students from the Kirov Academy of Ballet of Washington, D.C. bring Degas's artworks to life in the Phillips's galleries in honor of special exhibition Degas's Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint on view October 1, 2011 through January 8, 2012 at The Phillips Collection.

Edgar Degas (1834--1917) was fascinated by the world of ballet. Bringing together about 30 works from some of the world's finest collections, the exhibition traces ballet in Degas's art from the 1870s to 1900. It is the first exploration of Degas's dancers in Washington, D.C., in over 25 years. The exhibition celebrates the Phillips's Dancers at the Barre as a crowning achievement in the artist's four decade career and presents discoveries from the painting's recent conservation. The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection.

Will Ryman's Roses: 58th Street August 4, 2011-January 5, 2012 Colossal fiberglass and stainless steel rose blossoms adorn the Phillips's lawn at the corner of 21st and Q streets. Drawing inspiration from nature's cycles, the structure transforms in the changing light of the fall and winter seasons. In conjunction with 90 Years of New, a yearlong celebration of the museum's 90th anniversary.

Curator Elsa Smithgall introduces the exhibition Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border, on view June 11--Sept. 4, 2011. After a visit to his native Moscow in 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (1866--1944) sought to record his "extremely powerful impressions." The exhibition reunites his 1913 masterpiece, Painting with White Border, with preparatory studies from international collections, and compares it with other closely related works.

An overview from curator Elsa Smithgall for the exhibition Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series, on view June 11—Sept. 4, 2011. The eight recent sculptures from Frank Stella's (b. 1936) Scarlatti Kirkpatrick Series—swirling, multicolored polychrome forms with coiled steel tubing armatures—are dynamic evocations of the colorful sounds and rhythms of Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas.

Phillips Curator Susan Behrends Frank gives insight on special exhibition David Smith Invents, on view at the Phillips from Feb. 12 through May 15, 2011. David Smith Invents explores an extraordinarily fertile period in the career of the sculptor David Smith (1906--65) from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. On exhibit are 40 works, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, and Smith's own photographs of his sculptures. Smith famously recognized no distinction between sculpture, painting, and drawing, except for one dimension, asserting that the act of creating does not change just because the medium changes. Instead, he used such widely varying materials as steel, bronze, oil paint, aerosol spray enamels, ink, and tempera to explore his ideas in two and three dimensions. The work of Smith's last 15 years used an increasingly simplified vocabulary of predominantly geometric forms. In the first part of the 1950s, he was particularly captivated by concave and convex forms, from which he produced endless variations on volume, shape, line, and contour, without employing solid mass. In the works in this exhibition, concave and convex shapes play out in two and three dimensions in multiple configurations and repetitions, moving freely between media.

Curator Peter Benson Miller introduces special exhibition Philip Guston, Roma, on view at The Phillips Collection Feb. 12 through May 15, 2011. Philip Guston, Roma brings together for the first time 39 paintings from Philip Guston's Roma series, produced during his six months as artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1970--71. Saturated in deep pinks and salmons, Guston's cartoon-like pictures evoke numerous aspects of the ancient and modern Roman cityscape and Italian art and culture, from the films of Federico Fellini to the works of both modern and Renaissance Italian artists. The Roma paintings mark a pivotal time in Guston's career. Guston (1913--80), whose abstractions in the 1950s and 1960s won him critical acclaim, was a leading figure in the New York School that included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. By the late 1960s, however, Guston felt abstraction was no longer viable. Profoundly affected by the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and the shift in the art world toward pop art and minimalism, Guston was determined to reinvent storytelling in modern painting. His initial effort at creating this new figurative vocabulary went on view at New York's Marlborough Gallery just weeks before he left for Rome. These new works, with their sophisticated political satire and self-parody painted in a deliberately clumsy style, stunned the artistic community, which neither understood nor accepted them. As a part of La Dolce DC, a citywide celebration of all things Italian in partnership with the embassy of Italy, Philip Guston, Roma presents a crucial period in the life of a modern American artist inspired and shaped by Italian art and culture, not only during his Roman sojourn in 1971, but throughout his life.

Sam Gilliam's new work responds directly to Arthur Dove's Flour Mill II (1938) which he first saw at the Phillips in the early 1960s. On view Jan. 29 through April 24, 2011. During the fall of 1967 The Phillips Collection gave Sam Gilliam his first solo museum exhibition. Nearly 45 years later, Gilliam has created his first site-specific installation for the Phillips, to coincide with its 90th anniversary. Artworks: Arthur Dove, Flour Mill II. 1938. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Sam Gilliam, Flour Mill, 2011.

Go behind-the-scenes with Howard Hodgkin's As Time Goes By (2009), among the world's largest etchings, in this three part video series. Part I: Devising a system to mount, display, and store the ten-panel, 3,600 square foot artwork Hodgkin's most ambitious work to date is on view Jan. 8-May 8, 2011 in 90 Years of New: Howard Hodgkin's As Time Goes By, a special installation in honor of the Phillips's 90th anniversary. Comprising starbursts of vibrant color, the two 20-foot-long, hand-painted etchings were recently acquired for the Phillips's permanent collection. Turner Prize winner Hodgkin had his first American exhibition at the Phillips in 1984.

Go behind-the-scenes with Howard Hodgkin's As Time Goes By (2009), among the world's largest etchings, in this three part video series. Part II: Installing the panels in the Phillips's intimate main gallery Hodgkin's most ambitious work to date is on view Jan. 8-May 8, 2011 in 90 Years of New: Howard Hodgkin's As Time Goes By, a special installation in honor of the Phillips's 90th anniversary. Comprising starbursts of vibrant color, the two 20-foot-long, hand-painted etchings were recently acquired for the Phillips's permanent collection. Turner Prize winner Hodgkin had his first American exhibition at the Phillips in 1984.

Dorothy Kosinski, director of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., interviews artist Howard Hodgkin. They discuss the museum's major new acquisition of two monumental Hodgkin works -- As Time Goes By -- gifts to the museum in memory of Laughlin Phillips, installed in the museum's main gallery. The interview took place in January 2011. This video is the third part in a series going behind the scenes with Hodgkin's monumental work As Time Goes By.

In this video, Phillips Collection curator Elsa Smithgall introduces special exhibition TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945, on view at The Phillips Collection Oct. 9, 2010 through Jan. 9, 2011. Like impressionism, which challenged the traditions of painting, pictorialism expanded the possibilities of photography beyond the literal description of a subject. Pictorialist photographers produced some of the most spectacular photographs in the history of the medium and influenced subsequent developments in modernist photography. Comprising over 120 photographs, this exhibition retraces pictorialism's beginnings with the experiments of Hill and Adamson and Julia Margaret Cameron; through its mastery by Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Käsebier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn; to its lasting legacy in early works by Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.

The artist speaks! Hear Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) read from his notebooks on art at The Phillips Collection in 1992. In a special exhibition on view through September 12, 2010 at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., see works from a pivotal interlude in Richard Pousette-Dart's prolific career, when he merged drawing with painting in luminous and poetic works created nearly without paint. They continued to inspire him; as Pousette-Dart said, "white is something you endlessly return to."

Curator Elsa Smithgall introduces the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Although best known for her iconic representations of flowers, landscapes, and animal bones, Georgia O'Keeffe's abstract work is as bold and breathtaking as that of her European contemporaries Picasso, Matisse, and Kandinsky. See an American legend in a whole new light in this exhibition of over 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors. In conjunction with Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, co-organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe.

Renée Stout, a Washington, D.C. painter and sculptor, speaks on the relationship of African art to her practice. In conjunction with special exhibition Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens at The Phillips Collection October 10, 2009-January 10, 2010.

Man Ray translated the 20th-century modernist taste for African art into photographs that reached a popular audience. About 60 of his photographs, many never before exhibited, along with more than 40 photographs by his contemporaries, including Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, and Alfred Stieglitz, will appear side-by-side with 20 of the African objects featured in the images. The exhibition explores the pivotal role of these photographs in shaping the perception of non-Western objects as fine art. Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens is organized by International Arts and Artists.

Paint Made Flesh examines the ways in which European and American painters have used oil paint and the human body to convey enduring human vulnerabilities, among them anxieties about desire, appearance, illness, aging, war, and death. In the tradition of great figure painting stretching back to Rembrandt and Titian, the 34 artists in the exhibition, working in the years since World War II, exploit oil paint's visual and tactile properties to mirror those of the body, while exploring the body's capacity to reflect the soul. Drawn from private and public collections and arranged by chronology and nationality, the 43 paintings in the exhibition reflect a wide range of styles. Strong colors and vigorous brushwork associated with German expressionism give crude life to figures by artists ranging from the San Francisco Bay area painters to a younger generation, including Markus Lüpertz and Susan Rothenberg. Candid depictions of flesh by British painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud suggest psychological pain at the margins of society, while paint as skin betrays the inner feelings of Jenny Saville's swollen females. Other artists represented include Karel Appel, Cecily Brown, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Willem de Kooning Leon Kossoff, David Park, Julian Schnabel, and Pablo Picasso. Paint Made Flesh is organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.

Giorgio Morandi approached painting with the concentration of a Zen master. Working in the small apartment he shared with his mother and three sisters in Bologna, Morandi's carefully chosen collection of bottles, bowls, and jars served as his muse. He altered these objects by painting their exteriors, erasing their labels and reflections to expose their shape and volume, painstingly creating still-life arrangements. Quietly mesmerizing and mysterious, Morandi's paintings hover between physical and spiritual, traditional and modern. Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life features 60 works of art drawn primarily from collections in Italy, with key additions from collections in the U.S. The exhibition tells the story of an artist finding his voice: from early explorations of cubism, futurism, and metaphysical painting rarely found in American museums, to a stunning representation of mature work. It also includes landscapes, a rare self-portrait, and a selection of etchings on paper that reveal his exceptional mastery of the medium. The exhibition is the first retrospective of Morandi's work in Washington in half a century, since the Phillips became the first American museum to present his work. Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life is organized by MART, Rovereto, Italy, in collaboration with The Phillips Collection.

This exhibition celebrates an extraordinary array of newly acquired and promised gifts to the museum. It features nearly 100 works by European and American modern masters including Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Hans Hofmann, Paul Klee, Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Motherwell, Aaron Siskind, and David Smith, as well as living artists William Christenberry, Howard Hodgkin, Ellsworth Kelly, Sean Scully, and many others. The strength and variety of these gifts and acquisitions include some of the most significant developments in painting, photography, works on paper, and sculpture from the 19th to the 21st century.