{"id":8795,"date":"2021-06-28T07:16:25","date_gmt":"2021-06-28T11:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kerryhannon.com\/?p=8795"},"modified":"2021-06-28T07:21:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T11:21:20","slug":"healing-through-the-power-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kerryhannon.com\/?p=8795","title":{"rendered":"Healing Through The Power of Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>The American art collector Duncan Phillips opened the doors of the\u00a0Phillips Collection<\/a>\u00a0on a quiet side street in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Dupont Circle 100 years ago.<\/p>\n

Mr. Phillips\u2019s motivation for the museum, then called The Phillips Memorial Gallery, was to heal from the loss of his father, Major Duncan Phillips, a Civil War veteran who died suddenly in 1917 from a heart condition, and his brother James Laughlin Phillips, who perished in the 1918 influenza pandemic. \u201cSorrow all but overwhelmed me,\u201d wrote Mr. Phillips in his 1926 book \u201cA Collection in the Making.\u201d \u201cThen I turned to my love of painting for the will to live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read here: The New York Times<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

At the time, the intimate museum, which is still housed in his family home, included 237 works. That number has since grown to nearly 6,000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Now open for visitors with time-ticketed entry, the spirit of rejoining with friends and family after a scarcity of social contact this past year is manifest in the quintessential work displayed there, Pierre-Auguste Renoir\u2019s <\/span>\u201cLuncheon of the Boating Party<\/a>.\u201d The oil on canvas of the al fresco gathering that Mr. Phillips purchased in 1923 epitomizes the joy of human connection.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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To mark its centennial, the museum is showcasing more than 200 works in a show, spread across the entire mansion and galleries, entitled \u201c<\/span>Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century<\/a>,\u201d through Sept. 12. The exhibition features artists from the 19th century to the present across gender, national and racial lines. It includes paintings, works on paper, prints, photographs, sculptures, quilts and videos.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As the country begins to mend from Covid-19, the parallel of the exhibit is uncanny \u2014 the museum itself arose as means to heal from death during the earlier pandemic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The historical parallels between the show and the founding of its venue are not lost on Ms. Kosinski. \u201cIt gives me shivers that a hundred years later our world is again totally wrapped up in an influenza pandemic,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s bizarre.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Phillips wrote in his book: \u201cArt offers two great gifts of emotion \u2014 the emotion of recognition and the emotion of escape. Both emotions take us out of the boundaries of self. At my period of crisis, I was prompted to create something which would express my awareness of life\u2019s returning joys and my potential escape in to the land of artists\u2019 dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n