Personal papers of Ewan Phillips

Ewan Maurice Godfrey van Zwanenberg Phillips (1914-1994) was born in London to a middle-class secular Jewish family. His father, Godfrey van Zwanenberg Phillips, had trained as a solicitor but later opened an art gallery on Duke Street in 1926, which closed during the economic downturn of the early 1930s. His mother, Dorothy Phillips (née Jacobs), modelled for artists including Jacob Epstein and Augustus John. Ewan was thus exposed to the London art world from a young age.

Following a boarding school education at Epsom College, Phillips studied successively at Goldsmith's College School of Art (where he met his first wife Betsy Blake), University College London, and the newly opened Courtauld Institute of Art, where his tutor was Anthony Blunt. During this period he was involved in left-wing artistic organisations including the Artists International Association and the Artists' Refugee Committee, and also assisted with the landmark 1938 'Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art' (a riposte to the Nazis' 'Degenerate Art' exhibition) at the New Burlington Galleries.

During the Second World War he served in the Intelligence Corps, first as a clerk in the recruitment office and then abroad in Mombasa and Mauritius. At the end of the war he was invited to join the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission in occupied Germany, based in Hamburg, where his duties included helping to return church bells which had been requisitioned by the Nazis as a source of metal.

From 1948 to 1952 Phillips served as the first Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, leading the day-to-day running of the organisation during its cash-strapped first few years until differences with the management committee led to his forced resignation. After this he worked as an art dealer, independently and at the Kaplan Gallery, before briefly running his own gallery on Maddox Street from 1965 to 1970. He later retired to Suffolk, where he lived with his second wife Kathleen Grant.

Phillips's archive (donated to Tate as two separate collections) has been catalogued with generous support from the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust as part of the Émigré Art Archives Project. A selection of this material has been digitised, including correspondence, photographs and ephemera.

Collection Owner

Ewan Phillips

Collection

Tate Archive

Acquisition

Presented to Tate Archive by the executors of Ewan Phillips, 1996.

Reference

TGA 9610