History
History
The Phillips Collection is America's first museum of modern art and its sources. Founded in 1918, it opened to the public in 1921, eight years before the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Washington, it predates the National Gallery of Art by two decades.
Duncan Phillips established the museum with his mother, Eliza Laughlin Phillips, as a memorial to two family members—his father, also named Duncan Phillips, who died in 1917, and his older brother, Jim, who died in the 1918 flu epidemic. The brothers had shared an interest in modern art, and Phillips saw the institution as a fitting tribute to his two "lost leaders."
Phillips and his wife Marjorie worked hard to expand and shape the collection, which was displayed in special galleries at their home in Washington, D.C. In 1923, Phillips purchased Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, correctly believing that visitors would flock to see the joyful masterpiece. In 1930, the Phillipses and their two children moved to a new home, devoting their entire original residence to the collection.
In 1960, six years before his death, Phillips built an addition to the museum which was reconceived and upgraded in 1989 as the Goh Annex. In 2006, the Phillips doubled its square footage through the addition of the Sant Building, adding several galleries, a modern library, visitor amenities, an auditorium, and an enclosed outdoor courtyard. Just as in Duncan Phillips's time, the galleries in the old and the new spaces form a single, continuous network of art-filled spaces—a human-scale setting for extraordinary modern works.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Ranchos Church, No. II, NM, 1929. © The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation / ARS, New York
Photo by Clara E. Sipprel, Marjorie and Duncan Phillips in Main Gallery, ca. 1922.
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