Marjorie Acker was born on October 25, 1895 and grew up in Ossining, New York. Talent ran in the family, with two of Marjorie’s uncles being American artists Gifford and Reynolds Beal. Gifford and Reynolds’ presence at her grandparents’ home with their canvases, palette and passion for painting soon inspired similar feelings in Marjorie, and despite Marjorie’s father’s initial objections, she enrolled at the Art Students League in Manhattan. At the League, she studied with illustrator and cartoonist Boardman Robinson and realist Kenneth Hayes Miller, and she eventually began to involve herself in the New York art scene.
Duncan Phillips
In 1921, Marjorie met her future husband, critic and patron Duncan Phillips. Phillips’ early collection of artworks in memory of his father and brother was on display at New York’s Century Club, and when Marjorie encountered Duncan along with the paintings at the exhibit, a marriage of mind and soul soon followed.
Far from becoming an idle society wife or creative dilettante, Marjorie pursued her art career while raising a family and helping her husband to continue to acquire significant works. She furthermore urged Duncan to expand his scope beyond famed treasures like Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party to include then lesser-known talents like Arthur Dove, Milton Avery and Georgia O’Keeffe, and to give the collection a more vital and contemporary energy.
Arthur Dove was especially indebted to Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, who provided him with a regular stipend so that he could create without financial pressures. Today the Phillips Collection holds a major cross-section of American art and photography in addition to its other great European acquisitions.
Artistic Career and The Phillips Collection
In developing her own style, Marjorie Phillips preferred to focus on what she described as a “celebration of the wonder of the world.” As Duncan Phillips himself noted regarding Marjorie’s work: “She sings in her pictures about the joys of her own life…[o]ne does not think of art and its controversies but of life and its enraptured moments.”
A great fan of Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard, Phillips’ skilful use of light effects and varied subject matter make her an artist of similarly quiet power, with paintings ranging from the heightened excitement of an evening baseball game to calmly composed landscapes, interiors and still life scenes. Marjorie took part in various significant exhibitions like Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress, and she also exhibited her work at solo and group showings.
When Duncan Phillips died in 1966, Marjorie’s role changed from being Associate Director to Director of the museum. She memorialized her husband’s quest and her experiences as his wife and artistic partner in the 1971 book Duncan Phillips and His Collection, and in the last year of her own life she wrote a memoir entitled Marjorie Phillips and Her Paintings.
Legacy
Marjorie Phillips passed away in June of 1985 at the age of 90. Her works can be found in various American collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and of course the Phillips Collection, with each canvas possessing an underlying "little sensation"—as she described it—that prompted that first special painting impulse. Her influence upon the Phillips Collection as a whole was also truly integral and can be seen firsthand at the museum in Washington, D.C.
Sources
- Marjorie Phillips and Her Paintings – Marjorie Phillips and Sylvia Partridge (W.W. Norton, 1985)
- American Women Artists – Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein (Avon Books, 1982)
- Marjorie Phillips Biography – The Phillips Collection
