TAMPA, FL.- The Tampa Museum of Art is hosting a once-in-a-generation exhibition of American masterpieces from The Phillips Collection from February 2 through April 28, 2013. To See as Artists See: American Art from The Phillips Collection presents 100 paintings by seventy-five artists that trace the course of American painting from the 1850s through the 1960s. Artists included in the exhibition are Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, John Sloan, Rockwell Kent, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Grandma Moses, Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko. The exhibition takes its title from an oft quoted line from Duncan Phillips' own writing on art, "All of us can acquire eyes wherewith to see the world as artists see it, variously, selectively, intellectually or emotionally, in full possession of the latent capacity for seeing nature in pictures and pictures in nature."

To See as Artists See is the first large-scale, traveling presentation of the Phillips’s celebrated collection of American art, chronicling the broad scope and richness of its holdings. The exhibition had its premiere in Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy, then traveled to the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain, and National Art Center Tokyo, Japan. It has been shown at only two U.S. venues: The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Tampa Museum of Art Executive Director Todd D. Smith remarked, “The Tampa presentation is the final showing of this spectacular collection before it is returned to Washington. It will be celebrated with a homecoming exhibition at the Phillips in 2014.”

The exhibition unfolds in ten thematic groups:

• Romanticism and Realism (Works by Thomas Eakins, Edward Hicks, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and Albert Pinkham Ryder)

• Impressionism (Works by Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, Theodore Robinson, and John Henry Twachtman);

• Forces in Nature (Works by Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, Harold Weston, and others);

• Nature and Abstraction (Works by Arthur Dove, Hartley, Kent, Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Augustus Vincent Tack, and Max Weber);

• Modern Life (Works by Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Walt Kuhn, George Luks, Guy Pène du Bois, and others);

• The City (Works by Ralston Crawford, Hopper, Marin, Charles Sheeler, John Sloan, and others);

• Memory and Identity (Works by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Grandma Moses, and Horace Pippin);

• Legacy of Cubism (Works by Ilya Bolotowsky, Stuart Davis, John Graham, Karl Knaths, Marin, and others);

• Transition to Abstract Expressionism (Works by Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Morris Graves, Alfonso Ossorio, and Jackson Pollock); and

• Abstract Expressionism (Works by Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolf Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still).