A Triumphant Return to Form

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 14, 2006

The title of the Phillips Collection's newest special exhibition, opening Saturday with great hoopla and free admission all weekend, says a lot but by no means says it all. If you think of it in journalistic terms, the headline "The Renoir Returns: A Celebration of Masterworks at the Phillips Collection" and the big news it pitches -- that Pierre-Auguste Renoir's beloved (no, make that revered) "Luncheon of the Boating Party" has finally returned home from its world tour -- the story could be accused of burying the lead.

Sure, it's exciting news. Sent away during the construction of an extensive addition, Renoir's painting of 1880-81 is finally back where it belongs, in the hearts of the Washingtonians who love it and on the wall of the Phillips Collection, where it is arguably the institution's defining canvas. Not just back, but accompanied by what the museum rightfully hopes is the prettiest hanging ever of its best paintings. The expected gems by Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Georges Braque and Vincent van Gogh positively glow, while the occasional surprise (a John Constable landscape here, a Giorgio Morandi still life there) add a touch of mild eccentricity to the mix, making the show something a little different from -- and more interesting than -- just another greatest hits collection.

But the bigger, or rather the better, news is, for my money, the simultaneous opening of the Sant Building, a handsome and at times stunning five-story expansion (with three floors aboveground, two floors below) named in honor of Victoria P. Sant, the Phillips patron and former board president and chair who, along with her husband, Roger, donated $9 million in matching funds toward that building's $27 million fundraising campaign. Bookending the Goh Annex to the north on 21st Street, the Sant serves as a tangible reminder of Duncan Phillips's deeply held belief that the story of art is not one of distinct chapters that open and close, but that art is, at least as Phillips himself appreciated it, and as the museum's newest catalogue puts it, "beyond isms."

That sense of fluid continuity can be not just seen but felt as you move from the old original house, where "The Renoir Returns" has been hung -- and where works range in date from El Greco's early 17th-century "The Repentant St. Peter" to Morandi's 1953 "Still-Life" -- through the Goh's "Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910" to the Sant's wholehearted embrace of the 20th century.

Of particular note in the new building is a single stunning room, officially nameless at this point, but informally known by the museum's staff as the Big Front Gallery. Lit by clerestory windows that throw light down from the gallery's two-story-high ceilings, the room currently houses a mere five pieces by Adolph Gottlieb, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Joseph Stella and John Walker. But their presence, and the way the room lifts its shoulders to give them breathing space, is powerful indeed.

There's another new gallery with exceptionally tall ceilings, but in keeping with the Phillips Collection's tradition of intimate, human-scaled spaces for looking at art, all the rooms feel of a piece and in thoughtful balance with the rest of the museum. Gently curving banisters in the Sant's stairwell, for instance, echo the Goh's spiral staircase, and the American cherry wood used throughout creates a feeling of warmth that keeps the building from ever feeling like, well, almost every other museum. A pair of bronze abstract sculptures in the museum's new outdoor courtyard -- Barbara Hepworth's 1965 "Dual Form" and Ellsworth Kelly's untitled 2004 commission -- add dramatic accent marks to a welcome gathering place. Even on a recent rainy Saturday, and still officially closed to the public, the space beckoned.

Other features of the new wing include a 180-seat auditorium, with refurbished seats from the Kennedy Center (bonus points for recycling!), a cafe run by Firehook Bakery and, drumroll, please, a transplanted version of the 1960 Rothko Room, lovingly re-created here in the original dimensions designed to set off Mark Rothko's quartet of color-field abstractions to their best advantage.

So sure, the Renoir has returned (along with the Rothkos). But what has really returned, in even more beautifully enhanced form, is the Phillips Collection's longstanding commitment to telling the story of modern art, which includes not just its antecedents, but its offspring, to generations yet unborn.