DEGAS TO MATISSE: IMPRESSIONISTS AND MODERNIST MASTERWORKS

Book by Phillips, Stephen Bennett, Sawyer, Charles, Wilkin, Karen

Degas to Matisse: Impressionist and Modern Masterworks explores the developing taste for modern art in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century through a comparison of the collections formed by two members of the generation that succeeded the Robber Barons.

Duncan Phillips, born in 1886, converted his inherited Pittsburgh steel fortune into a museum of modern art in Washington, D.C. Robert Tannahill, born in Detroit in 1893, and independently wealthy from the age of thirty-two when he inherited a fortune in J.L. Hudson department store stock, organized exhibitions of modern art in Detroit, and left a great collection to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Tannahill and Phillips indulged their passion for modern art and devoted their energies to proselytizing for it in their respective cities.

An essay by critic Karen Wilkin examines the larger context of collecting in the USA in the early years of the century. Stephen Bennett Phillips, Associate Curator at The Phillips Collection, looks at Tannahill and Phillips as collectors and philanthropists and at the similarities and differences between their collections. Charles Sawyer, a former museum director and friend of Robert Tannahill, contributes his personal reminiscences of the two collectors.

This beautifully illustrated book presents nearly sixty key Impressionist and modernist paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from Tannahill’s collection at The Detroit Institute of Arts alongside their counterparts from Duncan Phillips’s collection. The artists represented include Cézanne, Degas, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Graves, Hartley, Ingres, Klee, Manet, Marc, Marin, Matisse, Modigliani, Moore, Picasso, Renoir, Rivera, Rouault, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec.