Against change in Washington, Phillips Coll. version

Good news while we were off on holiday: The Phillips Collection announced it has raised $23.5 million in endowment funds over the last nine months of 2008. That's an important fundraising success for new Phillips director Dorothy Kosinski. [Image: Detail from Pierre Bonnard's Open Window.]

Bad news while we were off on holiday: "This signals a new phase in Phillips history," Phillips board chair George Vradenburg told the Washington Post. Writer Jackie Trescott continued: "The Phillips of the future, he said, will be more involved in 'the living art of today,' will explore younger artists and hopefully increase the numbers of younger patrons, and will develop more international partnerships. 'We understand the integrity of our collection and will become more active in collecting,' he said."

Glad to hear it about the collecting, but... I continue to be concerned about the signs the Phillips is giving off about its interest in chasing contemporary art. The Phillips is one of the country's best collections of modern art. Its collection and its history is primarily about 1880ish-1940ish. For almost its entire life, the Phillips has been about early modernism and about the artists who formed a relationship with the museum and who found the Phillips experience instrumental in their own development. (See Diebenkorn, Richard.) It is a very special place.

Ergo, the Phillips is not the Hammer. It is not a museum about "the living art of today." It is a wonderful thing to have museums dedicated to certain parts of art history. It's especially wonderful to go to the Phillips and to think about how the museum and its founder contributed to that history.

But something seems to be changing. When Phillips director Dorothy Kosinski took the top job a year ago, she talked with me for a Q&A here on MAN. She discussed how much she respected the museum's history and how she thought the museum's history was important to its future. Here's an excerpt:

MAN: In the last couple years several Washington museums have worked to differentiate themselves and to establish themselves as filling certain niches. What is your Phillips going to be?

Kosinski: Honestly, that's something that I really want to do some serious examining about. Talking about what is our mission with our staff and our trustees. I would venture to say that it seems to me the key is that the Phillips touts itself as the first public museum of modern art in America, and I think there's the key. That and the fact that they've now galvanized around the Center for the Study of Modern Art. It's a museum of the classic era of late 19th, early 20thC. What do we mean by modern art? What was modernism? It's such a rich art historical moment and it is such a compelling historical epic. Duncan Phillips thought internationally. And I just think that to really dig in and, as I was saying before, not allow ourselves to not go for the obvious but have thoughtful exciting maybe a little bit against the grain examinations of what does that mean? What is modernism? Let's think seriously and look deeply at modern art. That might be a clue or a key to sort of galvanizing the meaning of the collection within that broader Washington community of cultural institutions.

The Phillips Collection was America's first modern art museum. It doesn't need to be the latest contemporary hotspot.