Museumania!

Over the past six months I’ve had the good fortune to visit eight important regional art museums in the West and Northwest. This summer I entered the recently reborn and outwardly Azkaban-like de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park only to find that this new bunker of a building (complete with looming guard tower) has absolutely none of the charm and grace of the old, Spanish style de Young I spent so many happy hours in, which was devastated by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The new de Young has many minimalists in an ecstatic thrall; I loathed its exterior as I never have any museum before or since. It has won prizes for accessibility, which is commendable, but these photos meant to celebrate it show how stark and unwelcoming its courtyard is. There were some pleasing surprises inside, but the architecture got in the way of the art more than once, even once inside its hideous walls.

The delightful San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), on the other hand, is bold and modern, yet it offers both a nod to the art historical past (its graphic black and white horizontal lines echo those of Siena's cathedral) and the interior provides an attractive yet unobtrusive backdrop to any art displayed within its walls. Its architecture, inside and out, is as big and beautiful a success as the de Young’s is a failure.

A highlight of my pilgrimage through the museums of the West was the Portland Art Museum. This was due less to the museum itself (which is a lovely place) than to the excitement of seeing some of my favorite 17th century Dutch masterpieces in the “Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam” show. The exhibition was breathtaking. I haven’t seen so many perfectly executed small masterpieces in one place since I last visited my favorite American shrines to art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (home to the most wonderful array of John Singer Sargent portraits anywhere) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. At PAM I saw one exquisite work after another by some of my favorite artists working during my favorite era in one of my favorite locations on earth. I was dumbstruck by the perfection of the technique of artist after artist. I found that the delicacy and immediacy of the Rembrandt etchings on display rendered them even more touching than the Rembrandt paintings they featured, and when I got to one of my favorite Frans Hals portraits, I wept for the sheer joy of seeing it again.

In August I ventured up to British Columbia and enjoyed the lovely but relatively small Vancouver Art Gallery. With only about 9,000 works of art in the collection, it is still the grandest art museum in the city though it has just a tiny fraction of number of pieces found in San Francisco or Seattle. Vancouver staged a pleasing traveling show, “Monet to Dalí: Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art.” There were no standout masterpieces to take my breath away; it was a useful overview for comparing and contrasting various important artists' styles and influence, but their greatest work wasn't on display. It was no blockbuster.

I quite enjoyed the Bellevue Art Museum’s extensive and beautifully curated show titled “Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture” which displayed the work of the brilliant and influential mid-20th century industrial designer. The transformation of BAM from another pleasant midlevel regional art museum to a showcase for craft and design as well as “fine art” over the past few years has been very successful artistically, even if their endless financial woes don’t ever seem to ebb completely. I give them kudos for coming up with some startlingly inventive and beautiful shows featuring calligraphy, beadwork, textiles, woodwork and assemblage, among other offerings.

Seattle’s Frye Museum always provides a quirky mix of fresh new, sometimes painfully in-your-face or self-conscious pieces and delicious little gems. During the ten years I’ve been going there, the museum has been consistently original and unusual in the artists it has chosen to showcase. Some I can’t stand, others amuse and delight me. They’ve had some particularly exciting and interesting photography shows over the years, and offered a terrific survey of comic strip art that I still remember years after the fact. Their permanent collection of primarily mid-19th century Mitteleuropean art bequeathed by the founders of the museum is mostly sedate and often academic, but still quite pretty. It includes a dark, erotically-charged and dangerous-seeming painting by Franz von Stuck, “Sin” (“Die Suende”) that’s a real crowd pleaser. It is rehung and reimagined in various forms for different shows nearly every year.

This past week I made it to the Seattle Art Museum, which reopened six months ago after a major expansion and a billion (with a B) dollars worth of new acquisitions. I found some of it very successful, and some quite disappointing. It is huge now, and I was barely able to see a third of it in the two hours I spent there. I plan to return in December to see the second half of the very enjoyable two-part show called “Japan Envisions the West” and to try to get into all the galleries I didn’t even glance into. I should spend more time there before I presume to grade how successful it is over all. I’m afraid it was much less impressive, appealing or approachable than the Denver Art Museum’s dramatic new Hamilton Building, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and opened to the public a year ago. I found it at first off-puttingly spiky from the outside, but I was captivated by the giant Claes Oldenburg broom and dustpan sculpture out front and have so many positive things to say about all they did right inside. (I've loved Oldenburg since I was six.) And I will say those positive things here, very soon. Over the coming weeks I plan to write a little more about my experiences in each of these museums. Stay tuned. And don't forget to check out my own artworks at www.lauragrey.com.