The Artist Sees Differently: Modern Still Lifes

This exhibition of forty paintings from The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., offers an analysis of the modernist still life, including rarely seen works by European and American masters such as Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, and Georgia O’Keeffe. 

In their quest to create a new art suited to new times, many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists rejected the official hierarchies of the French Academy, which privileged epic narratives of history, mythology, and religion, and chose instead to paint still lifes—depictions of the humble objects of daily life, and traditionally considered the lowliest of genres.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.        

Read our blog article about the Princeton University Art Museum.

Image1 : Man Ray, American, 1890–1976, The Black Tray, 1914. Oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1927. © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Image 2: Pierre Bonnard, French, 1867–1947, Bowl of Cherries, 1920. Oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Gift of Marion L. Ring Estate, 1987. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Image 3: Giorgio Morandi, Italian, 1890–1964, Still Life, 1953. Oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1954. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Whether you go or not, Twentieth-Century Still-Life Paintings from the Phillips Collection, published in 1997, considers the still life paintings in the Phillips Collection.