WASHINGTON, DC.- The Phillips Collection’s Director Dorothy Kosinski announced today the decision of Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone to leave her long-held position after nearly 30 years with the institution. Her new status as Chief Curator Emerita will be effective September 30, 2014. Rathbone has led the museum’s curatorial department for more than 20 years, organizing more than two dozen major exhibitions during her tenure and facilitating many more.

“It has been a pleasure for me to work closely with Eliza during the past six years,” says Kosinski. “This is a major transition for her and for The Phillips Collection. She has played a key role in shaping this museum’s aesthetic direction for years and is counted among the nation’s most respected curators of 19th and 20th century art,” Kosinski adds. “We look forward to our collaborations with Eliza in the coming years and, in the next weeks, to celebrating her tremendous career and new status as Chief Curator Emerita.”

Rathbone has spent nearly 40 years in the museum world. She started her career in 1977 as the National Gallery of Art’s Assistant Curator of 20th Century Art. She joined the Phillips in 1985 as an associate curator, serving as the museum’s Curator of 20th Century Art before being named Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs in 1992, leading the curatorial, installations, library, curatorial archives, and conservation departments.

“The Phillips Collection has enriched my life more than I can say,” says Rathbone. “I am delighted to continue to be affiliated with the museum, while also free to pursue other projects, and I look forward to organizing a special exhibition around the Phillips’s masterpiece, Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, planned for fall 2017.”

As Chief Curator, Rathbone has been responsible for mounting major exhibitions and overseeing the permanent collection of more than 3,000 works of contemporary and modern art, and also facilitating donor cultivation, gifts, and acquisitions. As a member of senior staff, she has participated in strategic planning, architectural planning and implementation, and development and preservation of the museum’s collection.

“The entire Board of Trustees is so grateful for Eliza Rathbone’s outstanding service to The Phillips Collection,” says George Vradenburg, Chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees. “Over the years I personally have been impressed, even enthralled, by the brilliance and creativity of her work. I know our future collaborations will be equally inspiring.”

Throughout her tenure at the Phillips, Rathbone has initiated many major exhibitions and collaborated on countless others that have been drawn from the permanent collection and important international loans. Such exhibitions have been organized with partners including but not limited to the National Gallery of Canada, the Réunion des musées nationaux, Tate Britain, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Her projects have included both American and European masters, ranging from Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi, Constantin Brancusi, and Nicolas de Staël to Susan Rothenberg, Richard Diebenkorn, Adolph Gottlieb, Wayne Thiebaud, and Milton Avery.

In 1986, she organized Duncan Phillips: Centennial Exhibition, a museum-wide showcase of over 200 works from the permanent collection celebrating the Phillips's founder. Rathbone was project director for The Eye of Duncan Phillips: Renoir to Rothko (2000) and organizing curator of a series of exhibitions dealing with masterpieces of 19th century French art, including Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (1996), Impressionists in Winter: Effets de Neige (1998), Honoré Daumier (2000), and Impressionist Still Life (2001), the largest exhibition of Impressionist painting ever presented at The Phillips Collection.

More recently Rathbone has added to her legacy of exceptional exhibitions with Degas's Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint (2011), which traced the Impressionist master's experiments with movement and dance over four decades, Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard (2012), a collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Van Gogh Repetitions (2013), which went beneath the surface of some of the artist's best known paintings to examine how and why he repeated certain compositions. Van Gogh Repetitions, co-organized with The Cleveland Museum of Art, proved to be one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum’s history, bringing in nearly 115,000 visitors and garnering more than 346 million media impressions around the world.

Rathbone was educated at Smith College and New York University, where she was a special student in graduate studies at the Institute of Fine Arts. She received her master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London in 1974.