It’s tempting, when writing about modern art, to devote more attention than is useful to the kinds of market forces that bestow, say, Jeff Koons ’s totalitarian visions or Damien Hirst’s intellectual posturing with the imprimatur of respectability. After all, so much modern art has become uniformly perverse, which is to say boring, that it leaves little of interest to be discussed except the prices the pieces command at Art Basel Miami Beach.
Recently, price again became the focal point of the art world with the sale of Gauguin’s 1892 painting Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) to (rumor has it) representatives of the Qatari royal family. The cost came to $300 million, making the sale one of the dearest in history. This is not the primary reason to visit the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., between now and January 10th, but if it is sufficiently attractive to pull you into the Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland exhibit, give way to materialism just this once!
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The origins of Gauguin to Picasso lie in Basel, Switzerland, where two friends, Rudolf Staechelin (1881-1946) and Karl Im Obersteg (1883-1969), developed a life-long interest in supporting both Swiss artists and collecting what they considered the best in Impressionist, Post Impressionist, Expressionist, and School of Paris artwork. Their “sister collections” resulted in 61 pieces by 22 artists that ended up housed in the Kunstmuseum Basel. At exactly the same time, Staechelin and Obersteg were busy supporting local pals Marc Chagall and Alexj von Jawlensky, another art enthusiast, Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), was following similar collecting habits in America.
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Since our natural gravitation is always toward individual pieces in a gallery, we overlook those factors that account for the cohesiveness of a collection. This is akin to the contemporary disposition to create “mixes” using disparate recording artists rather than purchasing whole albums by a single artist. Collections, like albums, have their narratives, which can sometimes be more interesting than the work on display. What we temporarily see here in Washington are the twin storylines of two Swiss collectors, whose themes happened to be shared—unbeknownst to all—by an American across the Atlantic. Thus, what ultimately emerges is a conversation between Gauguin to Picasso and the Phillips Collection, which is chief among the reasons to pay a visit to both collections this winter.
