Mary Anne Goley reviews William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., on view through September 11, 2016.

Goley writes: "To strive to be modern, as Chase’s generation did, was to be party to an evolution in painting that was reductivist in matters of form and content, prefiguring the more radical fracturing and ultimate dissolution of form (through cubism and abstraction) that ensued in the 20th century… This study of one artist’s search for the modern – a path shared by those of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic – advances our understanding not just of Chase’s work, but also of the origins of 20th-century modernism."