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.

Exhibition Videos

Van Gogh Repetitions

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.

Pakistani Voices: In Conversation with The Migration Series

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

Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945

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

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

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.

Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture

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.

Antony Gormley: Drawing Space

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.

Jasper Johns: Variations on a Theme

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

Eye to Eye: Joseph Marioni

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.

Dancers at the Barre: Kirov Academy of Ballet

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.

Degas's Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint

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.

Will Ryman's Roses: 58th Street

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.

Kandinsky and the Harmonry of Silence: Painting with White Border

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.

Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series

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.

David Smith Invents

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.

Philip Guston, Roma

The Phillips Collection offers an intimate encounter with one of the worlds finest collections of impressionist and modern American and European art. Works by Degas, Diebenkorn, Klee, Lawrence, Picasso, Renoir, Rothko, and many others are displayed in constantly changing installations that illuminate unexpected relationships and conversations between artists from different time periods and parts of the world. The museum is located in the heart of the vibrant Dupont Circle neighborhood, in Washington, DC.

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Exhibition Videos

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