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A holy hour with the Vocation Monstrance, blessed by Pope John Paul II, that traveled around our Diocese for a week after Easter.
The team on the vocations stand singing the opening hymn; the Revd Stephen Partridge (Lytchetts and Upton), the Revd Michael Chandler (Royal Wootton Bassett), Adrian Smale (St. Paul’s, Salisbury).
THE REPENTANT ST. PETER
El Greco
( 1600 - 1605 or later )
Domenikos Theotokopoulos (El Greco) was born in Candia (Iráklion), Crete, in 1541, but little is known about his early life. He took up his vocation as a painter in Crete but around 1568 was in Venice, where he evidently studied the works of Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese. Arriving in Rome in 1570, he became part of a circle of learned churchmen and other notables who shared an interest in the classics, literature, and art. El Greco left for Spain in 1577, possibly in the hope of obtaining more commissions than he had received in Italy. He seems to have pinned his hopes on Phillip II, who was recruiting painters for the decoration of the Escorial palace near Madrid. Although rejected as a court artist, he secured commissions in Toledo, and took up permanent residence there, becoming a citizen in 1589. He developed a highly original style characterized by the elongation of the human figure and flickering brushwork, and he painted mostly for churches and religious orders in and around Toledo, notably the masterpiece, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.
Recalling the traditions of Byzantine icon painting, El Greco adopted a close-up view, thereby charging The Repentant Saint Peter with great feeling. Significantly, El Greco figured in Duncan Phillips’s attempt to employ baroque as a critical rather than a chronological category: “It is possible to be classic or romantic, realist or abstractionist, impressionist or expressionist in a baroque way.” While recognizing the importance of El Greco’s stylistic innovations for modern artists, Phillips maintained that El Greco’s plastic means were in the service of the artist’s own inner life, invoking another twentieth-century notion as he claimed El Greco for expressionism. Phillips insisted that El Greco’s emotional expression was ultimately submerged into a classical feeling for order: “As for El Greco, where in the history of art is there a better example of that search for unity and integration which the romantic artist requires to make his passionate utterance intelligible?”
El Greco’s painting El Greco’s The Repentant St. Peter (c. 1600–1605 or later), acquired by museum founder Duncan Phillips in 1922, is a visual embodiment of distressed emotions confined in a serene pictorial composition. It integrates the flatness, elongated forms, and sense of artifice of Byzantine art, the realism and stability of classicism, and the high drama of the baroque. Referring to Apostle Peter’s anguish at having denied Jesus three times after Jesus’s arrest (a betrayal that Jesus predicted at the Last Supper), El Greco’s painting captures Peter’s guilt, regret, and sorrow.
Bernhard Hildebrandt starts from El Greco’s painting and employs digital photography and video to stage an elaborate contemporary scene that highlights baroque theatricality and spectacle. Hildebrandt’s seven large-scale archival inkjet prints and seven-minute video all depict St. Peter’s repentance as a continuous, repetitive act, exploring the idea of unfolding time through digital media. The title, A Conjugation of Verb, further underlines the idea of repenting as an “active tense” of doing.
Much of Hildebrandt’s practice merges photography and painting. Although he was trained as a painter, photography has always had a great impact on Hildebrandt’s work; he is especially influenced by the medium’s early stages, from mid-19th century daguerreotypes to the late 19th-century photographic studies of motion by Eadweard Muybridge. The paintings of modern European masters Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, and Giacomo Balla, who all in their different ways attempted to distort the picture plane into multifaceted fragments, are also highly inspirational for the artist. Recently, the nexus between painting and photography has become the primary focus of Hildebrandt’s work. Just as early photography challenged the illusionary quality and representational character of realistic painting and pushed painting toward abstraction, painting has also challenged photography both visually and conceptually. This Intersections project links the painterly aspects of photography and the photographic bases of painting that intrigue the artist.
www.phillipscollection.org/event/2013-06-26-intersections...
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Founded by art collector and philanthropist Duncan Phillips in 1921, The Phillips Collection has been collecting modern and contemporary art for over one hundred years. Duncan Phillips’s former home—and additions to it—in Washington’s historic Dupont Circle neighborhood provides a unique setting for the growing collection of over 6,000 works. Following Phillips’s unconventional approach to exhibitions, The Phillips Collection galleries are frequently rearranged to facilitate new conversations between artworks and fresh experiences for visitors.
HISTORY
“Sorrow all but overwhelmed me,” Duncan Phillips wrote. “Then I turned to my love of painting for the will to live.”
Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) was the son of Major Duncan Clinch Phillips, a Pittsburgh businessman and Civil War veteran, and Eliza Laughlin Phillips, whose father was a banker and co-founder of Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. The family moved to Washington, DC, in winter 1895-96.
Duncan was close to his older brother, Jim; Jim postponed attending college for two years so that he and Duncan could attend Yale University together. The brothers moved from DC to an apartment in New York in 1914. Duncan wrote extensively on art and published his first book, The Enchantment of Art, in 1914. Duncan’s passion for art was fueled by trips to Europe in 1911 and 1912 and visits to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with friendships in New York with artists Augustus Vincent Tack, who became a lifelong friend, and American impressionist painter Julian Alden Weir. In 1916 the brothers convinced their parents to set aside $10,000 annually to allow them to assemble a collection of contemporary American painting for the family.
Soon after, tragedy struck the Phillips family. Major Duncan Phillips died suddenly in 1917 from a heart condition and James died from the flu epidemic in 1918. To cope with these stunning blows, Duncan turned to the restorative quality of art. “Sorrow all but overwhelmed me,” he later wrote. “Then I turned to my love of painting for the will to live.” He and his mother founded the museum in late 1918. It was originally called the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery, and opened it to the public in fall of 1921. In a specially designed room added onto the second floor of the family home, they showed selections from their growing 237-work collection that now included examples by European artists, reflecting Duncan Phillips’s pioneering idea of creating a museum in the nation’s capital where one could encounter the art of the past and the present on equal terms. As the collection grew, the family moved out of their Dupont Circle home to a new residence in 1930, allowing the entire house to become a dedicated space for the museum.
Duncan Phillips married painter Marjorie Acker (1894-1985) in 1921, shortly before the museum opened, and she became his partner in developing The Phillips Collection. Born in Bourbon, Indiana, and raised in New York State, she was encouraged by her uncles―painters Gifford and Reynolds Beal―to pursue art; she studied at the Art Students League in New York City. Duncan and Marjorie met at an exhibition of his collection at The Century Club in New York in late 1920. After they were married, Marjorie painted almost every morning, ran the household, and served as Associate Director of the museum. She helped him gain insight into the artist’s process, and over the course of their lifetime together they collected nearly 2,500 works of art. When Duncan died in 1966, Marjorie became the museum director, continuing to develop close relationships with artists and the artistic community of DC. She held that position for six years.
From the outset, the vision for The Phillips Collection was “an intimate museum combined with an experiment station.” As a collector, Duncan Phillips was noted for his willingness to deviate from the art museum standard of displaying works together based on shared nationality and geography, interpreting modernism as a dialogue between past and present. He collected the work of his contemporaries at a time when art that did not follow traditional, academic standards was not widely accepted as aesthetically and culturally valuable. This philosophy of taking risks allowed for Phillips to be the first to collect and exhibit artists who were not well known at the time, such as Milton Avery, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Jacob Lawrence, Grandma Moses, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Rufino Tamayo.
www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/54812157486/in/dateposted/
www.youtube.com/@PhillipsArtMuseum
www.cntraveler.com/activities/washington/phillips-collection
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