Last updated: 5/24/2011
1600 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
The Phillips Collection is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm, with extended evening hours on Thursdays until 8:30 pm, and on Sundays from 11 am to 6 pm.
Encounter superb works of modern art in an intimate setting at The Phillips Collection, an internationally recognized museum in Washington's vibrant Dupont Circle neighborhood.
Paintings by Renoir and Rothko, Bonnard and O'Keeffe, van Gogh and Diebenkorn are among the many stunning impressionist and modern works that fill the museum's distinctive building, which combines extensive new galleries with the family home of its founder, Duncan Phillips. The collection continues to develop with selective new acquisitions, many by contemporary artists.
Special exhibitions and frequent changes in the arrangement of the permanent collection mean that there's something new on every visit to the Phillips. The museum's Center for the Study of Modern Art offers stimulating Conversations with Artists, symposia, lectures, and more, while Sunday Concerts, Phillips after 5 programs, and other events provide additional food for thought. The museum also produces a vigorous, award-winning program of educational outreach that serves more than 6,000 students and teachers a year and indirectly reaches many tens of thousands more.
The Phillips Collection opened to the public in 1921 and is America's first museum of modern art. It is a private institution that is not a part of the federal government. It relies for support on admission and program fees, endowment income, and generous assistance from individual donors, corporations, foundations, and others.
The Phillips Collection is "an intimate museum combined with an experiment station." Duncan Phillips, 1926.
The Phillips Collection is an exceptional collection of modern and contemporary art in a dynamic environment for collaboration, innovation, engagement with the world, scholarship, and new forms of public participation.
Description.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.
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