This selection of the art writings of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), the early twentieth-century art critic, collector, and patron, is the first gathering of these texts into a publication devoted exclusively to this essential side of the man who founded The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. In late 1918, Phillips took a leap of faith when he conceived a unique private art museum in the nation's capital at the end of World War I as a setting for a dialogue between the art of the past and the present with an emphasis on defining what is modern from a distinctively personal perspective. Phillips's extensive writings were the primary instruments through which he expressed and shared his views alongside the artworks he regularly acquired and exhibited in curated installations that were regularly renewed in fresh rearrangements.

This book is not a comprehensive assembly of Phillips's art writings but a representative compendium of his views over the course of his lifetime. The selection includes examples from his early efforts while a student at Yale University (class of 1908) to his thoughts in 1964, two years before his death, on the artist Mark Rothko (1903-70), whose work is inextricably linked to the Phillips Collection through the Rothko Room, the first such dedicated space (est. 1960) for the artist's work in a museum.