A snapshot of exhibit program at The Phillips Collection

'Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border' (June 11–September 4, 2011) is on view at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

After a visit to his native Moscow in 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) sought to find a way to record the ‘extremely powerful impressions’ that lingered in his memory. Working tirelessly through numerous drawings, watercolors, and oil studies over a five-month period, he eventually arrived at his 1913 masterpiece, ‘Painting with White Border’.

The show reunites this painting with over 12 preparatory studies from international collections that also include the Phillips’s oil sketch, and compare it with other closely related works. Complemented by an in-depth conservation study of Painting with White Border, the exhibit provides viewers with a glimpse into the master artist’s creative process.

This exhibition is co-organized by The Phillips Collection and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. On the other hand, for the first time in a museum exhibition, The Phillips Collection presents recent works from Frank Stella's Scarlatti Kirkpatrick Series. It has been inspired by 18th-century composer Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas.

Made from lightweight resin, the swirling multicolored polychrome forms with coiled steel tubing armatures are dynamic evocations of the colorful sounds and rhythms of Scarlatti's music. Traveling through space, the sculptures perform like objects on a stage.

Each one begins as a hand-crafted model that is scanned into a computer, where Stella refines the design before realizing it at full-scale. Moving at the crossroads of painting, drawing, and sculpture, Stella's Scarlatti K series ushers in a bold new chapter in the artist's exceptional five-decade career.

The Phillips Collection, an internationally recognized museum in Washington's vibrant Dupont Circle neighborhood. Paintings by Renoir and Rothko, Bonnard and O'Keeffe, van Gogh and Diebenkorn are among the many stunning impressionist and modern works that fill the museum's distinctive building, which combines extensive new galleries with the family home of its founder, Duncan Phillips. The collection continues to develop with selective new acquisitions, including those by contemporary artists.

(Information courtesy: The Phillips Collection)