Today on Modern Art Notes: Art historians have never quite known what to do with Augustus Vincent Tack, the New Yorker with the Roman name. While Tack was a a contemporary of the artists who made up the Stieglitz circle, his portraiture and decorative work was too traditional — too full of references to Europe — to gain him entre into that club. True, Tack (1870-1949) began to move toward a more avant-garde style in the early 1920s, but that seems to have been too late, especially because even as he inched toward abstraction, he kept on painting traditional portraits and maudlin murals. A 1993 retrospective at the Phillips elevated Tack’s profile so little that he didn’t merit a mention in the most thorough recent book on early American modernism, Wanda Corn’s 2001 “The Great American Thing.” Sculptor and Washington-native Martin Puryear put it best when he described Tack as “a painter who seems to not be very well-known outside of Washington.” 

For the first time since 1999, Washington’s Phillips Collection has installed Tack’s breakthrough work, a series of 12 panels Tack painted for Phillips’ Music Room. I explain why they’re worth a serious look.

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