Time Capsule: Augustus Vincent Tack

Presented in conjunction with Breaking It Down: Conversations from the Vault, Time Capsule: The Phillips Collection Library & Archives is a special installation (on view Phillips House, floor 2U) featuring archival materials that reveal the museum’s dynamic relationships with artists that have “units” in the collection created by Duncan Phillips. 

Duncan Phillips and Augustus Vincent Tack met in 1914, beginning a lifelong relationship of friendship and patronage. Phillips was the first collector to acquire Tack’s art, which Phillips described as “color-music.” 

In the wood-paneled room known today as the Music Room, then called the North Library or Art Library, Phillips presented Exhibition of Recent Decorative Paintings by Augustus Vincent Tack. In 1928, Phillips commissioned Tack to create a cycle of paintings to be permanently installed in the Music Room. Phillips conceived of Tack’s monumental abstractions as unfolding through space, unified by a mystical sense of transcendence and universal order. Tack ultimately created 12 lunette-shaped paintings with gilded borders. 

These samples of their correspondence from 1930 capture parts of their discussion about the commission. After 1930, Phillips embraced a more dynamic model of changing exhibitions that required flexibility for his rapidly growing collection. Although Phillips abandoned the idea of a permanent Tack installation, he continued to champion Tack’s work for the next 30 years. The Phillips Collection Library & Archives preserves decades of correspondence between the two, including hundreds of handwritten and typed pages documenting their lives and work.

Duncan Phillips writes: “The new panels arrived in perfect condition and we are all delighted with them. They are magnificent together and I have hung them in the two spaces between the windows where they lead up to the grand climax of Liberation. I decided to do what should have been done last year, namely, to arrange the panels on the main wall exactly as you planned the scheme of decoration, with Rhythm, Order and Balance in the center and the two primeval Out-posts and the end. The effect is absolutely perfect and the wider space makes each panel count more impressively. The static and architectonic grandeur and simplicity of the Out-posts of Time function logically as the structure within which the swift rhythms of the three central panels live and move and have their being.”

See works by Augustus Vincent Tack in Breaking It Down and browse more correspondence between Duncan Phillips and Tack in the archives.