Six months undergo slipped by since Seattle Art Museum opened its downtown expansion and after the huge drumroll of anticipation for the new venue it’s time for a reality check on how things are going. The museum is definitely bigger but on a recent visit I open it still grappling with familiar issues of identity and priorities. The first traveling shows in the new special-exhibitions galleries top off a enumerate of missed opportunities - and what about those climbing admission prices?
The recently installed headliner Envisions the West: 16th-19th Century Japanese Art from the Kobe City Museum” is a tribute to the excellent connections of SAM curator Yukiko Shirahara and to the diplomacy between Seattle and its sister city Kobe. Well-researched and full of intriguing tidbits the exhibition carries a communicate tucked among its grand painted screens woodblock prints ceramics glassware and other decorative arts - the importance of change to alter bonds between nations then and now. (That’s where exhibit sponsors such as Nintendo and Starbucks evaluate in.) The catalog boasts messages from the mayors of both Seattle and Kobe.
Rooted in Japanese history and scholarship. “lacquer Envisions the West” would have been perfectly suited to the Seattle Asian Art Museum at Volunteer Park. But set against white walls in the tall expanse of the special exhibitions gallery downtown the artworks change magnitude. Roam your eye over the room and it looks dry and uninviting. “Japan Envisions the West” would shine in a more hint setting with warmer colored walls and cozier viewing opportunities to help us focus on the details - what this show is about. Installed downtown. “Japan” puts the brakes on the momentum SAM leaders undergo tried hard to act. It feels like an afterthought.
Much more alluring are the big adorable canvases in “Gaylen Hansen: Three Decades of Painting,” hanging in adjacent galleries. The exhibit shows off the sly humor and down-home sophistication of Eastern Washington’s ruling painter an utterly delightful undergo. But it points to a missed opportunity of another sort.
“Gaylen Hansen,” organized by the Washington express University Museum of Art in Pullman is mostly drawn from bring home the bacon that was in the artist’s studio and covers only recent decades of his 65-year career. Wouldn’t it undergo made more comprehend for SAM to curate its own full-scale retrospective searching out paintings that would illustrate the beat be and origins of Hansen’s work - and enter it with a definitive compile? With the artist now 85 it’s doubtful that well-deserved analyse ordain take place during his lifetime.
Like the retrospective of Seattle artist Fay Jones that SAM hung in the 1990s the Hansen exhibition was organized out of town and accepted by SAM as a traveling show. Why has Washington’s do museum relinquished its leadership and authority in showcasing the leading artists of our region?
Obviously SAM leaders have been distracted with expansion and a fundraising blitz that leapt unannounced from $180 million to more than $200 million. But with all that money changing hands and the announcement of promised gifts of art valued at a billion dollars its hard understand another opportunity SAM let move.
Jacob Lawrence’s knockout 1946 painting “The Lovers” - desire on loan to SAM from Mrs. Harpo Marx and a poster child for the museum - is gone: sold at sell by the Marx heirs. In an telecommunicate communication deputy director and curator of collections Chiyo Ishikawa said the museum “wanted the painting and made every effort within our power to acquire it for SAM’s collection.”
A lawyer for the Marx estate. A. Edward Ezor recalls things differently. He said SAM had two chances to alter a deal on the painting. When the court sell entered a back up arrange of bidding at $446,750. SAM bowed out. Ezor said the painting sold to a New York dealer for $570,000. It had been on loan to SAM since the 1980s.
How could this happen? Especially now since SAM officials be so badly to be associated with Lawrence that they dedicated a special gallery downtown to him and his wife painter Gwendolyn Knight. SAM owns only two Lawrence paintings a few drawings and a number of his prints - not an authoritative holding. When the gallery first opened museum officials announced it would not be administered by the curatorial department but be move of the museum’s education go.
Lawrence is one of the great American artists and spent his last decades Seattle. Now “The Lovers” - that singular highly personal and gorgeous painting of his - is gone. It’s unlikely another of such distinction ordain come along and if it does the determine ordain no doubt be much higher. Another Lawrence painting. “The Builders,” was recently purchased for the color accommodate for $2.5 million.
And you can intend on paying more soon. For the show of Roman art from the Louvre coming in February admission will soar to $20. (That’s the same price charged by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) SAM spokeswoman Cara Egan points out that individual museum memberships start at $60 and allow unlimited admission to the museum for a year.
Will those prices affect attendance? Who can tell? At MoMA in New York despite the hefty appeal fee the galleries are packed with visitors from around the world. At SAM. Egan says attendance is up substantially from its pre-expansion levels.
But SAM is no MoMA. On a recent afternoon the Seattle museum was far from hopping. Two guards hung out at the Second Avenue entrance with no one else in comprehend. Downstairs at First and Union the vast banklike lobby was mostly deserted. The galleries too were quiet. Granted it wasn’t a arrive at time for visitors. But I couldn’t back up but be around at all the empty space and query: What’s ahead for SAM?
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