A new memorial to Native American veterans occupies a quiet corner of D.C. The Phillips Collection has the advantage of being a relatively small museum. In the 100 years since it was founded, the museum's holdings have grown from 237 to almost 6,000 works. Regular visitors know the core collection like they know the rugs and lamps of their own living room. It is possible to have a personal relation with the key treasures of the Phillips Collection in a way that is no longer sustainable at MoMA, given the crowds, foot traffic and institutional emphasis on growth. It would be difficult for any curator, no matter how visionary, to display the essential highlights of MoMA without invoking their canonical power. The isms and taxonomies of modern art are, to a large degree, essentially the isms and taxonomy established by MoMA over the last century. And so the monumentality of the major works at MoMA led to what felt like an effort to contain or neutralize them. They would be kept on display — the paying public would otherwise revolt — but they must ultimately be defeated rather than reconceived. One doesn't sense that self-defeating cynicism at the Phillips. The audience favorite of the collection — Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party" — has been moved from its old gallery, which it dominated like a cross on an altar, and reinstalled in the museum's Music Room, where it sits behind the piano, enhancing the implied conviviality of the room, but in a rather genial, retiring way. It doesn't feel quite so loud, or overbearing, but rather as if it has learned to sit back and listen a bit. Another gallery, on the second floor of the old mansion, is devoted to small domesticities, including photographs of families by Bruce Davidson and intimate scenes of ordinary life by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. But it also includes important paintings by Horace Pippin, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and William Merritt Chase. The racial and ethnic diversity of the artists is striking, but more important, the gallery rises above the bland generalization: We are all human, all devoted to family, all equally committed to home and hearth. There are unities here, to be sure; but there are also essential differences, in scale, in wealth, in material comforts and in the subtleties of emphasis on what makes a house a home.