Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix, Paganini, 1831

Acquired 1922

Oil on canvas

Pierre-August Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-1881,

Acquired 1923

Oil on canvas

Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky is considered a pioneer of abstract art. Sketch I for Painting with White Border is one of more than 15 preparatory studies he completed leading up to the final masterpiece, Painting with White Border, which is in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Here this is a very, very small room, but it has a very beautiful concentration and intensity, which when you come into a wax room it’s like coming into another world. You are enclosed with your own body by this beeswax, which is not manmade. I think it’s going to somewhere else, to another world. I think that is what a wax room is about.

One of the great French painters of the 20th century, Pierre Bonnard created a highly personal body of work deeply rooted in nature and everyday life. His compositions, full of luminous color and light, anticipated the color fields of Mark Rothko and the vaporous washes of Morris Louis.

This is Southern Monument XI, made in 1983. And it is a cube form with a sphere in the top and it is surrounded by a field of real Alabama red soil. It is an attempt on my part to evoke a feeling of a monument, albeit somewhat abstract, that one might find in the landscape.

The Phillips Collection’s story begins with a family: 11-year-old Duncan Phillips, the future founder of The Phillips Collection, his brother James, and their parents moved from Pittsburgh into this house in the late 1890s.

German artist Paul Klee was one of the great painters and teachers of the 20th century. He inspired generations of artists with his highly personal, whimsical, and often mysterious art. His works are deeply rooted in his love of music, nature, and the ancient traditions of pictorial writing.

Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889

Acquired 1949

Oil on canvas

Mark Rothko, Green and Maroon, 1953

Acquired 1957

Oil on canvas