In a time when new museum buildings are more often designed to showcase the daring of the architect rather than the art that's to be seen within, the enlarged Seattle Art Museum is a welcome return to the concept that form follows function. This is a museum that works. Much like the recently reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York, it has spacious galleries, multiple angles for viewing the art from close up and far away and creative access to natural light. Its escalators offer expansive overviews. There are intimate spaces for smaller collections and plenty of seating space for the visitors who experience museum fatigue.
It's a street-friendly building, offering numerous access points along First Avenue from Union to University. Opening onto the street are the museum's shop, its well-priced restaurant and areas for activities and assemblies. Visitors entering at First and Union can check their coats and visit the information desk in Sarkowsky Hall on their way to the massive Brotman Forum, whose windows bring the outside in and vice versa. I found this space to be a bit sterile with its white floors and gray and white walls, but no one can question its monumentality.
The museum has filled the Forum initially with a mammoth modern sculpture by Cai Guo-Qiang. Composed of eight white Ford Taurus cars and one Mercury Sable, the assemblage pulsates in the glow of multicolored light rods. The cars with their spines of flashing light hang from the ceiling as if tumbling through space. (See if you can find the Mercury in the mix.) The work speaks both to the fragility and stability of modern life, and gives notice that the new SAM is something to be reckoned with.
The Brotman Forum and the entire first floor are free to the public, but please don't stop there. It's well worth paying the entrance fee to visit the art on the upper two exhibit floors. The new museum offers a display of 2,000 objects spread over 268,000 square feet. Among the artworks are a billion dollars' worth of new acquisitions, loans and promised items provided by the region's generous private collectors. More than 200 of these works are tucked in throughout the galleries and presented en masse in a temporary exhibition on the fourth floor.
The new galleries contain treasures never displayed in Seattle before. The collection of modern and contemporary art is amazingly rich. And the American Art on the third floor is a joy to behold. It's been a great sadness to me during the nine years I've lived in Seattle that there really hasn't been any place locally to see American art of the 18th and 19th centuries. Well, now there is. The enhanced collection isn't massive, but it contains some true gems.
There's a John Singleton Copley portrait and Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Church landscapes. Winslow Homer, George Bellows, Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam are represented. The list goes on and on, and the works are top quality. There's a rich collection of American silver and a small collection of fine decorative art objects. There's also a small painting by an artist who never fails to delight me. Have you ever seen the still-life paintings of John Frederick Peto? He worked in the late 19th century, creating trompe-l'oeil depictions of such mundane objects as used envelopes, matchboxes and keys. They seem to pop off the wall. You want to touch them to be certain that they aren't really three-dimensional.
Adjoining this collection is the much larger series of galleries devoted to Northwest Coast art. Here the quality is matched by the breadth of the collection. Every artform practiced by Indians of the Northwest is represented, from masks, button blankets and bent-wood boxes to argillite carvings and cedar bark and goat-hair weavings and baskets. This is one of the prize collections of the museum.
Great care has been given to exhibit design throughout the museum, in some places more successfully than in others. The Native American collection is superbly handled. One of my favorite exhibit concepts involves the presentation of a late-18th-century/early-19th-century carved screen depicting a raven from a Tlingit clan house. The raven is seen from all angles inside and out. In its center is a large opening.
Directly across the room from the Raven Screen is a work by contemporary glass artist of Tlingit heritage Preston Singletary. One of Sin-gletary's family crests is that of the killer whale. He has created a whale from 16 panels of fused and sand-carved glass. It incorporates many of the design forms traditional to his people, and it too has a large opening in its center. The juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary Native American art is wonderful.
As SAM curators and exhibit designers were planning this new museum, they had the enormous challenge of creating a design plan that suited an incredibly eclectic collection that includes within it a number of strong sections and some rather weak areas. How were they to draw it all together thematically, visually and intellectually? And how were they to provide cultural context? They decided to exhibit only the prime examples from the various collections. A wise choice indeed. They also thought that it would be sensible to present a cultural context for the works. That, too, makes sense. You can't very well appreciate Renaissance art unless you have a sense of what was going on in Europe during the 14th through 16th centuries.
Finally they decided to unite the diverse collections within a connecting narrative. And here's where they ran into trouble. It caused them to incorporate two Hogarth prints within the African collection on the fourth floor. Hogarth, a 19th-century British painter and printmaker, is best known for his pictorially presented moral lessons. He's an important figure in British art history and belongs with European art. He's lost on the walls in the midst of the African collection. He was placed there because of his purported influence on one of the contemporary African artists. Bad exhibition decision! And examples of this sort appear throughout the museum.
But the place is brand new. It will be tweaked, reworked, modified over time as it becomes clear what works and what doesn't. Meantime, Seattle has a major art center to be proud of. It was made possible through a creative commercial/nonprofit collaboration between Washington Mutual and SAM. The terms of the partnership allow for SAM expansion over the years as finances and collections warrant growth.
The partnership was feasible because of the acumen and devotion of SAM's board and staff leadership. And the new museum is filled with remarkable art because of the generosity and sophistication of the wealthy art collectors of our region. How fortunate we are.
SEATTLE ART MUSEUM 1300 First Ave.
Open Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays until 9 p.m.
Suggested admission: adult $13, seniors $10, youth over 13 $7, children free
[[In-content Ad]]
