By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Jay Gates, director of the Phillips Collection, announced yesterday that he would leave his job next year.

Gates, who this week marked his ninth year as director, said he was stepping down because both he and the museum were ready for a transition. The museum recently completed a five-year expansion.

"I have spent 36 years in the museum world, since 1971," said Gates, 61. "I love museums, I love what they do. I love the buildings. . . . They have evolved so much. They affect systems of education and the way people live. I would like to think about what that means." After leaving his job, Gates plans to teach and write about changes in museum culture, as visitors demand up-to-date technology and amenities, crowd into blockbuster shows and flock to visit showcase architecture.

He's staying on until the board names a successor sometime next year. Gates is only the fifth director of the museum, which opened in 1921.

Foremost in his timing is the stability of the Phillips, having just approved a five-year plan to strengthen its mission. "There are moments in the life of an institution where these changes seem to be appropriate," Gates said.

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, insightful collectors of contemporary art, opened the museum 86 years ago in a mansion on 21st Street NW, off Dupont Circle, to display a collection including works by Renoir, Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Degas and Klee. It opened eight years before the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is the second-oldest art museum in Washington, after the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

For decades, the Phillips was a gentle and quiet destination for lovers of modern American and European art. Visitors could sit in comfortable rooms and absorb great impressionist and abstract expressionist works as if they were visiting a well-to-do friend.

Gates guided a reinvigoration, but not an overhaul, of the Phillips.

There had been additions to the original mansion before he arrived. But in 2006, Gates opened a 30,000-square-foot expansion that doubled the size of the museum and gave visitors new galleries, a courtyard and the museum's first auditorium. Last year the Phillips also inaugurated a formal Center for the Study of Modern Art and joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in an interdisciplinary research venture that Duncan Phillips had long envisioned. The Phillips has expanded its local education programs, and since Gates's arrival in 1998, there have also been major touring shows drawn from the museum's 2,500 works, including exhibitions centered on Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence and Mark Rothko.

"We raised $30 million during his tenure and have begun to reenergize our collecting legacy," said George Vradenburg, the chairman of the museum's board of trustees. Local art philanthropists Roger and Victoria Sant gave a $9 million challenge grant for the addition, which was named after them.

The $29 million expansion forced temporary closure of parts of the museum, and the painting the Phillips is perhaps best known for, Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party," went on three-year tour. Revenue, attendance and membership fell off, but last year the museum drew 151,142 visitors, roughly its pre-construction average. The Phillips has an annual budget of $11 million, which is raised from private sources, and has an admission charge on weekends from $8 to $10, and $10 to $12 for special exhibitions.

Vradenburg said Gates served as a principal voice in rethinking the mission of the Phillips. "He has been central to the idea that we should have a living collection, not one that is closed. It is part of the life of a museum to be alive, to be open and to extending itself into the 21st century. He has been very much an advocate of staying live and fresh."

To add to the collection, the Phillips plans to conduct an endowment campaign. But its acquisition program has not been dormant. Mainly through gifts, the Phillips has recently acquired "The Ballet Rehearsal" by Edgar Degas, "Ocean Park No. 38" by Richard Diebenkorn and "The Sun and the Moon" by Elizabeth Murray. Next year the Phillips is planning a show on its new holdings.

Gates recalled one particularly tricky interlude during his years at the Phillips: the delicate negotiations with the neighbors over the construction. The two sides ended up working with a mediator to settle questions about hours of operation and parking that were concerns for the neighbors.

"We had to make concessions. They had to make concessions. While I would prefer not to go through those meetings again, it was important to me that the commitments weren't squeaked by. They needed assurances about life in the neighborhood," Gates said.

Richard Suisman, a Phillips neighbor and member of the liaison committee, remembers several contentious meetings before both sides agreed to mediation. "At that first mediated session, we asked Jay Gates if the building could be reduced, and he said: Well, we might. That was a breakthrough statement, and from then on discussions were good and fair," said Suisman.

Gates is a native of Kansas City, Kan., but Washington has grown on him: "I can't imagine ever severing ties with the city."