Meet art collectors Patricia and Phillip Frost—and two of their artworks by Byron Browne and Werner Drewes!
The Frosts assembled an exceptional collection of nonobjective art, now a key part of our early twentieth-century collections.
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Meet art collectors Patricia and Phillip Frost—and two of their artworks by Byron Browne and Werner Drewes!
The Frosts assembled an exceptional collection of nonobjective art, now a key part of our early twentieth-century collections.
When Patricia and Phillip Frost, in the early 1980s, began acquiring art created by members of the American Abstract Artists Group, they showed a sophistication and intellectual proclivity that is unusual in beginning collectors. Abstract art is still difficult for many people to love and rarely forms the sole focus of collections even though it has now enjoyed decades of critical praise. The structured, densely formal abstractions of the 1930s and 1940s are an especially unusual first romance because they avoid the easy allure of fluid brushwork and luscious color. This is a laboratory art—a disassembling of the gears and wires of image-making, and an engineering blueprint for the construction of a new kind of visual expression.
Pictured top: Byron Browne, 1907–1961, Chinese Dancer, 1949, oil on fiberboard, 14 x 12 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost.
Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989).
Pictured bottom: Werner Drewes, 1899 Germany–1985 USA, Untitled, 1941, paper and gouache on paper, 9 1/4 x 10 5/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost.