The Brooklyn Rail

Dorothy Kosinski is the Director Emerita of the Phillips Collection as of 2023. In 2024 she co-curated the Venice exhibition Federico Solmi: Ship of Fools. She has just completed an essay for an upcoming exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, “Bice Lazzari, Irma Blank, Vera Molnár, Drawing poetic concreteness.” Kosinski continues writing “Cultural Practice as an Act of Citizenship,” resulting from her Getty residency. She continues to serve on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and serves on the Board of Governors of Folger Shakespeare, as well as two grant-making foundations. In the conversation that follows, Kosinski discusses her work as the curator of the Douglas Cooper Collection, her tenure in Dallas, how the expansion of private foundations affects public museums, and the challenges—and ultimate success—of guiding the Phillips Collection through the turbulent politics that surrounded the Black Lives Matter movement.

Joachim Pissarro: Jennifer and I have been looking forward to this opportunity to speak with you. We thought we might start by asking about your move to Switzerland in the eighties. Shall we start there?

Dorothy Kosinski: I moved to Switzerland in 1985, and I worked for five years as the curator of the Douglas Cooper Collection. The sad, very recent news of Leonard Lauder’s passing prompted me to open one of the fifteen boxes of archival material from that period that I am donating to the Getty. It will join the material from Douglas’s library and papers. And this is the dovetailing of lots of original material and vintage photographs, plus research I developed for exhibitions on aspects of Cooper’s collection at the Kunstmuseum Basel and Tate London, and in Houston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

So it’s with some strange, poignant feelings—having revisited the handwriting of Cooper and a fascinating international cast of characters, and all of the evidence of a very vibrant moment in my personal and professional life—that I’m giving this material away. That’s when the history of collecting really entered my imagination, because I was basically living in the endgame of Douglas’s collection and his writing and his lively, sometimes vituperative letters, and all of the fascinating relationships and adventures of his life—this craziness.

Jennifer Stockman: You worked closely with Ruedi (Rudolf) Staechelin, isn’t that right?

Kosinski: Yes. I remember once walking through Art Basel and suddenly hearing someone calling my name, and it was Ruedi Staechelin. At the time the Kunstmuseum was being renovated, as I recall, and Staechelin didn’t want his work in storage. He was always touchy about his family’s collection and he said that he wanted it to go someplace wonderful for a year or two. That’s how we ended up doing a fabulous show at the Phillips Collection. It was actually a presentation of two private collections, sister collections, that were both housed at the Kunstmuseum Basel: the collection of Rudolf Staechelin and the collection of Karl Im Obersteg, two contemporaries and friends (and more or less contemporaries of Duncan Phillips).

Pissarro: I want to interrupt you, because while we are very familiar with who Ruedi Staechelin is and what an important figure he is in Switzerland, I’m sure he’s less well known in America. Can you tell us about him? His grandfather started the collection, correct?

Kosinski: That’s right, so Ruedi ended up having this responsibility for this fabulous collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work.

Pissarro: A dozen paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin—some of the great masterpieces that we know.

Kosinski: And Paul Cézanne and Ferdinand Hodler and Camille Pissarro—Ruedi was always very passionate about the collection, his responsibility to family legacy, and his sense of civic responsibility. He had a keen sense of the value of the collection and how the family legacy should be preserved. And that, of course, dovetails with these very Basel stories about the proposed sale of pictures, the Picassos—

Pissarro: This was in the sixties? I think ’67–68?

Kosinski: Right. In April 1967, there was a crash of a Basel charter plane, and Peter Staechelin was a major shareholder in the airline, and suffered a severe financial setback as a result. The family foundation was forced to sell several paintings including works by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. When the intended sale of two Picassos, Two Brothers (1905) and Seated Harlequin (1923), was announced, the Basel public was stunned, as they had come to see those pictures as “theirs.” They thought, “These are our pictures! They’ve been hanging in the Kunstmuseum for so long.” And it caused such a furor that there were children going door to door, collecting change. Peter Staechelin agreed to sell the two Picassos to the city of Basel. Picasso responded generously and gifted additional works in response to that civic embrace.

Pissarro: So Picasso compensated the sense of ownership that the people of Basel felt, and that corresponds to something that you are very versed in, which is a notion of public community in relation to private art ownership. So, yes, Picasso was so touched by the wave of opposition to the potential loss of the paintings by the Basel population that he gave four paintings out of his own collection. What a perfect way to address the relationship between public and private. Don’t you think?

Kosinski: I think that’s a rare and bold response on the part of the citizenry and the government, and it became a partnership—a sort of public-private partnership—keeping the Staechelin pictures, and then this very lovely response from Picasso. But it opens up all sorts of issues about public responsibility, private philanthropy, the role of museums—and it’s different, obviously, in every country.

Pissarro: I’m interested in hearing you talk about the parallel tracks between the history of collecting in Switzerland, where you spent twelve years, and the history of collecting in America, where you’ve held important roles, as the leader of the Phillips Collection and beforehand, in Dallas—you initiated a lot of projects around this topic. So would you tell us a little bit more about what parallels you found between the two countries, Switzerland and America?

Kosinski: Well, to begin, it was such an unlikely move from Basel to Dallas, a place that I really didn’t know. At first, I worked full-time for the Dallas Museum of Art from my office in Basel, but at a certain point I realized that was not sustainable. Dallas offered such a vibrant community, largely because of the intelligence and engagement of private collectors in the artistic community. So when people ask, “Why Dallas?” I always think we could have the same conversation about Cleveland or Denver or St. Louis—all these cities in the heartland of the United States that have people with great cultural depth and intellectual richness and aesthetic curiosity.

I mean, I can’t tell you how many times people would say to me, “We want this to be the best museum.” There was this sense of inordinate civic pride and ambition, and usually that played out beautifully. I have to give credit to the museum’s director with whom I worked, John R. Lane, who nurtured a whole coterie of contemporary art collectors who were just extraordinary, and that evolved into this tremendous collaborative effort between them and the museum that will unfold in the fullness of time.

Stockman: You’re hitting upon something I’ve been thinking about in terms of the relationship between wealthy collectors and public museums. There are more and more private foundations, which are basically private museums, and it seems different than when Duncan Phillips was getting started.

Kosinski: Duncan Phillips opened his home to the public in 1921. It was opened as a memorial to the recent deaths of his father, and his brother, who died in the Spanish flu. He called it the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery. So as an aside, I must add, it was very bizarre to celebrate a one-hundredth anniversary in 2021, with those uncanny parallels in public health tragedies.

Stockman: I didn’t realize he named it for his father’s legacy.

Kosinski: I think he did it to save his soul, because he was in such distress. He and his wife, Marjorie, made this their life project, building a collection and supporting artists.

I find that I’m increasingly thinking and talking about things like love, communities of affection, generosity, fierce listening—these qualities that reveal ethical or civic or aesthetic values that I want to claim as why I’ve been doing all of this work throughout my career. Obviously the art market is powerful, and I’m not trying to sound naïve, but I think if there is any endurance in the projects that we engage in, they will endure on account of the values that museums create in, for, and around community. They will not endure merely because of the financial value of objects.

Stockman: It’s fascinating to hear you say that, because what dominates the news is not stories of community involvement or what students get out of visiting museums, it’s what artwork sells for. It’s always about money. Of course, the museum has a responsibility to the public, not to the market.

Kosinski: In a sense, that’s why the Phillips Collection was so attractive to me, because for Duncan it wasn’t about fashion. He collected the most unlikely artists—Augustus Vincent Tack, or Louis Eilshemius. Marcel Duchamp was a great fan of Eilshemius. There are several artists he bought in depth, creating “units.” He was not driven by the flavor of the month, but by an aesthetic drive and a commitment to the artist. In contrast, perhaps, he invested more than I think his accountant wanted him to, because he wanted that Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81), and he wrote, “This is going to be my Mona Lisa. People will come and make a pilgrimage to come and see it.” And he’s right, but he also loved supporting artists. He gave Arthur Dove a stipend every year, and had first right of refusal. He made Dove’s career possible. He made deep friendships. He had artists who were part of his family, part of his inner circle.

Stockman: It’s a rare collector, especially today. What is your opinion about so many collectors forming foundations? How do you think that affects the work of public museums?

Kosinski: I think I can answer that best by way of certain paradigmatic examples. I found it astonishingly beautiful, the simplicity of Margaret McDermott leaving her collection to the Dallas Museum, and it being integrated into the substance of the European collection. There is a suppression of ego in that kind of straightforward gesture—“I’m going to give it to the museum that I’ve loved and supported all of my life.” It shows a level of trust in the institution and in the future.

I offer a different example from having shepherded the Phillips Collection for fifteen years. I can tell you that Phillips resisted the idea of moving the collection to a bigger and more grandiose building. He kept it in the 1897 house, and later a room was added, then an annex, which was then enlarged, and then the Sant building. He also resisted the idea of giving his collection to the National Gallery. I think people adore the opportunity to have that intimate, domestic scale experience with great works of art. It’s very different from going through the magnificent rooms at the National Gallery across town.

I admire individuals’ dedication to art. And I think, if we had to judge the sincerity of any of these projects, it would be through their scholarly programs and their exhibitions, their programming and outreach, their accessibility. Those would be key criteria.

Stockman: I recently watched a documentary on Bono, who does a lot of philanthropic work. And he asks at a certain point, “What difference does it make at the end if the good deed is done?” And I think we could say the same thing about private foundations. If the leader of the foundation has created something that is open to the public and is educational and not elitist, in spite of the name—I’m sure you had to deal with that at the Phillips. People knew Phillips came from a very wealthy family, and probably it was a turn off to some audiences. How did you deal with that?

Kosinski: Well, Phillips dealt with it pretty well himself. He wrote extensively. He made presentations on the radio. I mean, he was a very liberal thinker. He talked about art and wellness, way before those were any kind of buzzwords. In fact, that was the genesis of his program. He talked about art as a civic force, a positive force internationally, outlining notions of art in education. Therefore, when I was director and trying to open out the Phillips and expand and change up our acquisitions and programming and exhibitions, it was easy, because I felt he had given us not only permission, but a mandate.

When people asked him, “Mr. Phillips, what are you trying to do?” he talked about how it’s “an intimate museum combined with an experiment station.” He created profound relationships in Washington, DC. For example, there were two collectors affiliated with the faculty at Howard University, and they were modeling the evolution of their collection on the Phillips Collection. And he lent to them and encouraged them and went to their openings and showed some of the artists that they were interested in. Washington, DC was a very segregated city at the time. Duncan Phillips walked the walk. He was quite extraordinary. I should not forget his wife, Marjorie Phillips, who was a painter, and I think really taught him how to look at pictures.

Phillips loved to change up the exhibitions, move the artwork around. He loved conversations between pictures, new conversations, and conversations with the audience. He would encourage lending. His openness, his lack of egotistical desire to legislate from the grave gave me freedom to be nimble. All of our more recent acquisitions of works by women and artists of color—we weren’t responding to the zeitgeist. It is part of the DNA of the institution and its founders.

Pissarro: Did Duncan Phillips know Albert Barnes? Do you know?

Kosinski: They did know each other. I recall one story, though it’s anecdotal and perhaps an embellishment, but it’s of the two of them. Mr. Barnes says, “Well, I just got a huge shipment of Renoirs, 120 of them.” Mr. Phillips nods approvingly before responding, “How lovely, but I have the one that’s worth owning.” But honestly, Duncan Phillips was such a gentleman, I doubt he would ever make such a sharp retort.

Nonetheless, the two of them shared a lot. They collected many of the same artists, and they believed in the roots of modernism. Hence, you find El Greco in both collections. They were both champions of American modernism much before it was fashionable, and they were making a case for that, and a case against segregation. So there are deep parallels. It’s really their personalities that are so dramatically different.

Pissarro: I’m just thinking—since you mention race relations—that you were directing the Phillips Collection when America went through the critical phase of the Black Lives Matter movement, which precipitated quite a debate internally at your institution. Do you want to take us through this?

Kosinski: Well, first of all, I want to give credit to my wonderful staff. We started thinking about engagement, openness, change, probably in 2015, so our work was not a reaction to Black Lives Matter in 2020. It was built upon some of these incredible, incandescent young colleagues within the museum, and not necessarily curatorial, but in education and security—across the board. There was an appetite to make change. And some changes were small, like we needed more handicapped accessible doors; we needed another wheelchair. These might seem like strange things to mention, but it was our staff members who kept making these observations because of their commitment to openness and accessibility. I’m told that we were one of the first art museums to hire a chief diversity officer, Makeba Clay, and that preceded 2020 by quite some time.

Stockman: I hope Phillips still has their diversity officer in spite of the current administration.

Kosinski: I see no diminution of the Phillips’s commitment to those principles. When I talk about ethics and cultural and aesthetic value, those words are richer than any acronym. I have thought a great deal about the importance and power of the words we choose. We’re supposed to be humanists and intellectually rigorous, and I think sometimes we don’t appreciate how museum leaders fall victim to a diminished, superficial vocabulary that sets up their institution to be victimized, or even politically usurped. So, generosity, affection, empathy—those are words that I think more richly describe why those sets of changes, activities, and programmatic efforts are important.

Pissarro: I was hoping you would bring up the episode with Jenny Holzer. Would you tell us how Holzer’s installation came about?

Kosinski: In 2020, when there seemed to be so much tension and strife across the country and within our internal community, the issue of responsiveness was a big one. There was a tremendous demand all around—not just at the Phillips—to respond. But how are we going to respond? I thought it was slightly naïve, and—despite the burning desire to speak out and engage—that an art museum shouldn’t issue statements. I preferred to let the art speak. So there was a debate within the institution. Certain trustees thought we should hang Black Lives Matter banners on the facade of the Phillips. There was some back and forth with my leadership team and the staff, more generally. Some people were for and some were against. And it was Makeba Clay, our chief diversity officer, who objected. She always had this phrase, “Show me the receipts.” In other words: do the work, don’t be performative. So I tried to elucidate the complexity of the discussion, and to tease out why this is important. We took a pause in the summer, and by September, we had a plan to reach out to Jenny Holzer. And I just loved what she produced: two banners, “Moral Injury” and “So Vote.” It’s so crystalline, yet so ambiguous in a sense. Whose moral injury? Vote for whom? It felt so satisfying and appropriate to the moment. We’re an art museum, and in no way was it retreating from our embrace of our principles—namely, that those lives mattered.

Stockman: You handled one of the toughest issues of our time very, very courageously. Now, the Phillips is a collecting museum, which means you are continuing to make acquisitions, correct?

Kosinski: Yes, and we did a lot of very canny acquisitions, because—in comparison to Dallas, where we had a real purse—at the Phillips we had a little bag full of pennies. I’m especially proud of some of our newer acquisitions: a McArthur Binion painting, a small Simone Leigh sculpture, a Nicholas Galanin. Each one of those are fabulous works unto themselves, but they are also objects that speak to the collection in terms of themes, affinities, scale, and quality. We accelerated our acquisitions in broad areas in anticipation of our centennial, and those efforts are captured in the catalogue book Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century.

Pissarro: Did your predecessors also make acquisitions? What criteria did you use to make acquisitions?

Kosinski: Yes, the museum has always been continuing to acquire. We also acquired major works or groups of works that dovetail more directly with the core collection. I’m thinking of Vicki and Roger Sant’s Nabi Collection which will eventually come to the museum, which matches Phillips’s love for Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard so marvelously. My methodology was to look and look and look, going to two or three art fairs every year, going to the galleries in New York and Paris, looking at the work of the curators I admire. I think we really had our fingers on the pulse.

Stockman: Do you think Duncan Phillips would embrace the idea of this continuation of contemporary art through the twenty-first century as well?

Kosinski: That definitely seemed to be part of his mandate: “Look alive, change it up, lend it, grow it, if you can.” That notion of the “experiment station”—we took that terminology and that idea very seriously. Vesela Sretenović was one of the curators I brought in right at the beginning to initiate a vibrant contemporary art program that intersects with the collection. One of the larger shows she initiated was a Zilia Sánchez exhibition called Soy Isla. Here’s a Cuban artist who worked in New York for a time, but really lived in Puerto Rico, and very few knew her work.

Stockman: You also presented a Cuban artist collective, Los Carpinteros.

Pissarro: Was there an emphasis on Cuban contemporary art?

Kosinski: There was really no intentional programmatic focus on Cuban art. The Zilia Sánchez project, prompted by the purchase of one of her shaped canvases, was a major, monographic career retrospective long in the making. The Los Carpinteros project was part of our ongoing “Intersections” series featuring smaller installations. We were glad to explore their work in film and in LED sculptural portraits, and we were particularly happy that it led to a gift to the collection.

Stockman: This brings up such an important point about the canon of art history, which hasn’t changed much in the last two centuries. It’s so fascinating to think the museum is actively shifting that narrative.

Kosinski: We received a wonderful gift from Dennis and Debra Scholl of Aboriginal art. It fit in perfectly and really enriches and internationalizes the notion of abstract art. We were proud to feature those new acquisitions in a fairly major exhibition of Aboriginal women artists from Australia. The Phillips always talked about “units.” We responded to that idea, for example, when we did a Markus Lüpertz show, prompted by a conversation with Michael Werner. And we ended up with a tremendously generous gift from Werner of a “unit” of forty-six works by Lüpertz, Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Per Kirkeby, A.R. Penck, and others. Truly transformative!

Stockman: That’s so fascinating,

Kosinski: Another time, long before I was at the Phillips, I was having a conversation with Klaus Ottmann about Alfonso Ossorio, who is somebody I knew pre-Basel, when I had this brief stint at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. We—Klaus and I—ended up doing this show that we dreamt about, called Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet. As a result, I worked with the Ossorio Foundation, and we have a group of Ossorios within the collection.

Stockman: There is always financial pressure on museums, and I would think that a museum director would be inclined to show popular art—art that is mainstream or recognizable—to get people to visit. You want audiences; you want attendance. So how do you reconcile making an exciting discovery like you’re describing, while also bringing in large audiences?

Kosinski: At the Phillips Collection, I always used to say, what we don’t have in money we have in our capacity to be nimble. I spent part of my energy during those fifteen years building up our endowment, to give the institution a bit more footing. We did a lot of investment in infrastructure, but a lot of our time, energy, and passion went to providing that financial foundation.

But to your point, Jennifer, we need to balance between lesser-known artists and those who are more mainstream. So the Staechelin/Im Obersteg show was Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland, and featured great artists popularly known, and the exhibit was very popular. We did really smart shows, such as Van Gogh Repetitions and Picasso: Painting the Blue Period. We like to provide new insights and offer new knowledge based on new conservation/scientific inquiry. The public loves that, because it’s like you’re perched on the shoulder of the conservator, looking through the microscope. It provides such a sense of discovery and knowledge. I’m a huge believer in the power of that aspect of looking at pictures, of the knowledge from the collaboration between the curator and the scientist, or the conservator and the curator. It’s fun and it fulfills the responsibility that you’re not just rehashing the same damn thing all the time. So we did quite a lot of that.

I think my final thumbprint on the schedule at the Phillips was an Alphonse Mucha exhibition that just closed in May. I had come to know the Mucha family when I included that artist in Degas to Picasso: Painters, Sculptors, and the Camera at the Dallas Museum. I maintained those ties. Nobody knows the name Mucha, but everyone knows the images that dominated posters and advertisements all over Europe. The new twist is to show that he is such an inspiration to young manga artists and to comic book illustrators. So, I think it’s a matter of balance.

Stockman: That’s great. You’re always adding value, even with existing brand-name artists. So it’s a reason to come back to the Phillips: there’s always going to be something new to learn.

Pissarro: We’re not just talking about financial value, but scientific value, knowledge value, and new values of other sorts. Having been a curator for several years at MoMA—whch is often said to be the first museum of modern art—it’s interesting to me that that the Phillips has the very same claim. I mean, Duncan Phillips opened his house to the public in 1921, correct?

Kosinski: So technically, the Phillips is the first museum of modern art. We’re talking about a few years between the Whitney and MoMA and the Phillips. But that’s only interesting insofar as we appreciate the excitement about modern and contemporary art that was emerging all around in a forceful way. But in Washington, DC, the only interest in modern art was from Duncan Phillips. He was the pioneer. He was passionate that the nation’s capital should have a museum of modern art. I should add that he was also on the board of MoMA and the National Gallery, and he made important gifts to both of those institutions and to the Yale University Art Gallery.

Stockman: We’ve talked a lot about Duncan Philips, but I’m curious about you, Dorothy. What was the light bulb that went off for you in terms of being in the art world?

Kosinski: I was thinking about this recently because my oldest brother—older by almost twenty years—just passed away. So the year I was born, he was a freshman at Yale College. When I was eight years old, roughly, he and his Hungarian-French professor wife got on the Flandre, and we waved goodbye at the pier on the Hudson. They spent a couple of years in Paris because she was finishing up her dissertation in French at Yale, and he was working there, launching his career in architecture. So during their sojourn in Europe, I would get these postcards from museums and monasteries and churches. And my brother would draw. We were not a house with books. Neither of my parents had the opportunity to go to college, but there was an emphasis on education.

So the light bulb was probably due to this bizarre, almost twenty-year age difference. They showed me that there was life outside the rural area of Wallingford, Connecticut. It impressed me much more than the yellow school bus ride to the Wadsworth Atheneum on a rainy day, which I thought was the dreariest place on the face of the Earth.

I got to Yale College in 1971 and I thought I was going to major in English. I wanted to be the first woman editor of the Yale Daily News. But everything about the English course turned me off. I was studying French, as I had for about ten years already. And I thought, you know, a lot of people are always going to speak French better than me. And that’s how I started taking art history classes.

Pissarro: So you had Robert Herbert as a—

Kosinski: Yes, I had Bob Herbert, and then I studied Sienese Trecento painting with Charles Seymour.

Pissarro: Oh my gosh.

Kosinski: And the transformative thing—even if he was so profoundly wrong in his principle or conservation approach—was that most of the class was in the conservation studio. And in the classroom.

Pissarro: Really? With the Jarves Collection?

Kosinski: Exactly. That idea of being taught in the proximity of conservation—so that you thought of objects as objects that had a skin and a health and a materiality—I think was fundamental, and that continued at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.

Pissarro: You’ve said in various interviews that one of the principal things you retain from your early professional experience was the one-on-one relationship with the art object. I didn’t realize it went back to your college years at Yale. That’s amazing!

Kosinski: That really had a profound impact, and it was only reinforced at the Institute. And I have to say, working at the Guggenheim for Angelica Zander Rudenstine was very impactful—I still have her sheet about how to do proper research, and I gave it to everyone I’ve ever mentored. Those were the formative experiences in terms of how I approached working in museums. All of these experiences engendered a profound respect for the object, the exactness of information about its material, its provenance, its history.

This precision and object-driven inquiry is perhaps totally contradicted by another facet of my intellectual personality, I have rediscovered recently. A few months ago I was in New York, and I was telling some of my graduate school friends about my research at the Getty during a wonderful three-month residency last year, about “Cultural Practice as an Act of Citizenship,” and the idea of consilience, biomimicry, and communities of affection and generosity as models for cultural practice. I was so amused when Susan Galassi looked at me, and smiled in her gentle way, and said, “You certainly always go for the small topics, Dorothy.” She had remembered me writing my dissertation on the image of Orpheus in nineteenth century art and literature. At my defense, Colin Eisler said, “You know, this isn’t classical, traditional art history. I think more accurately, it’s intellectual history.” And I said, “I hope that’s a compliment!” Clearly there are two sides driving me. One is the artist and their practice and the object. The other side comes from this hunger to decipher big systems. Orpheus was a good path to follow, because it was the history of religion, syncretism, art, music, literature, the roots of abstraction. I have yet to resolve that schizophrenic polarity. That gives me many paths to follow!