Wowed by Denver's Splendid Art Museum

Last month I visited Denver for the first time, and was wowed by the fabulous weather (sunny and 72 degrees in November!), the inviting and attractive mix of historical and brand-new architecture, the friendly locals, the city’s progressive vibe, and, especially, by the Denver Art Museum, which I can now call one of my favorite regional museums in the country.

San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the Seattle Art Museum were both renovated recently at enormous expense with mixed results. In contrast, the money, thought and care Denver has poured into the expansion of its most important art museum is successful on many levels. This is primarily because DAM's designers and curators never forgot that the point of having an art museum is to create a positive, exciting and enriching environment for all sorts of people that helps them to enjoy, understand and grow more intimately acquainted with art.

A great civic building should not be an impressive but intimidatingly impersonal temple to the arts that sets the work on display apart from humanity, only to make people feel smaller, less connected and more confused as a result. Often, proponents of modern architecture dedicated to the arts take the view that a fresh, modern approach requires that the building and the art experienced within it must be spare, cold, harsh and huge. I find that such buildings (and such viewpoints) dwarf the soul and undermine both the art and the viewers’ experiences of the art. Those of us who prefer a warmer, more human (and more humane) arts experience are usually left clinging to the old ways and the old styles of display and design if we want to enjoy artworks in an atmosphere that isn’t devoid of charm or feeling. While I love many antique and classic architectural styles and can derive great pleasure from viewing artworks housed in them, I can also take pleasure in the clean lines, fresh perspectives and bold breaks with the past that modernity has to offer. That is, I can enjoy them if the purpose of the building and the needs of its visitors (and appropriate display of its contents) are all taken into consideration as well.

There are alternatives to the bleak, forbidding, humorless and sometimes artistically anorexic big-box museums popping up like pox around the world. San Francisco has the Museum of Modern Art, which is massive and impressive but broken up into digestible chunks of architectural space so that one can enjoy soaring curves and architectural leaps toward the sky from within the building without feeling dwarfed and swallowed by it. The Bellevue Arts Museum has grand vertical spaces in its entry hall, but the floorspace isn’t overwhelmingly large, and the mix of colors, windows, materials and artworks in the space keeps it from being too intimidating. Indeed, most of the museum is broken up into small galleries that allow the primarily intimately-scaled works they feature to be enjoyed without feeling lost or dwarfed by an overscaled, overly bright display space.

When I saw photographs of the Denver Art Museum’s new Hamilton Building I was at first disappointed. The building, which houses about half of the museum’s holdings (the rest are in the more sedate building across the street and connected to the Hamilton Building by a skybridge), was meant by architect Daniel Libeskind to imply the craggy triangular shapes of the Rocky Mountains. This is a respectful nod to the region’s geography, but to me it looked in photographs like a colossal pile of broken glass with huge spikes jutting out into the surrounding plaza in what I feared would be an intimidating fashion. I expected to find it as numbingly offputting as I find Rem Koolhaas’ design for the Seattle Public Library, which looms menacingly over downtown Seattle in sharp, cold, übergeometric fashion.

I find the Seattle Public Library's geometric shapes aggressively, threateningly angular, completely counter to anything found in nature, oversized and overscale, and too unyielding in style and material. When my daughter visited it shortly after it opened, she noted that even its children's section features hard, cold, unwelcoming surfaces and furnishings. Koolhaas’s library, so roundly praised by professional architects, feels claustrophobic to me despite all its glass; the large scale of the diamond-shaped metal grid covering the building makes me feel like a bug crushed beneath a window screen when I am inside the building. The library is oddly scaled and full of unusable spaces yet lacking in enough room to give those browsing the book stacks space to amble and view the books without feeling rather squashed. The building has been praised for bringing nature inside, but I find this laughable. The unattractive and half-dead grasses around and inside the building look weedy, and the grass-patterned carpeting inside only makes the rest of the interior look that much more divorced from nature and natural forms, most importantly including human beings, whose presence within the pile of offset oddly-angled glass blocks seems to be an afterthought. Rather than being a welcoming place in which to study, rest, read, browse, learn and renew, the place has all the welcoming cheer of an airport terminal. Less, actually; many airports, including Seattle’s, are quite full of friendly, inviting public artworks, from inlaid metal salmon swimming along one terminal’s floors to columns covered in intricate mosaic designs to exceptionally pretty stained glass windows that evoke Northwest Indian designs and stories.

But I digress. Yes, the Denver Art Museum’s spiky glass hull does loom a bit over visitors, but it sits in a splendid plaza, a welcoming public space bordered by an appealing glass multiuse building as well as by a practical and lovely modern library complex composed of buildings that reminded me of castles, towers and Monopoly houses, among other pleasing simple shapes. There is a giant sculpture of two cattle next to the museum, "Scottish Angus Cow and Calf" by Dan Ostermiller, which was voted the “Best Climbable Art" by locals, and an enormous Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a dustpan and broom right out front; it is hard not to smile when viewing either of these monumental yet whimsical works. Upon viewing DAM in its architectural context, one gets an immediate impression that those responsible for designing, making and presenting this plaza had not only panache and vision, but also well-developed senses of humor. A major arts center that doesn’t take itself too seriously? How refreshing!

Once inside DAM, the boldly scaled building is broken into component spaces that work with each other seamlessly, giving a sense of an inviting multitude of options without overwhelming the visitor and making her feel insignificant. Ceilings are dropped and comfy yet modern chairs are sized for humans. From the main floor’s small café, one can sit and admire the quirky furnishings that make up several relaxed conversation areas, view the main entrance, the ticket-purchasing area, get a glimpse into the well-stocked gift shop through a triangle of glass and watch a slideshow of images of artworks through another triangular cut-out in a wall. It’s easy to get one’s bearings at a glance and feel that one’s immediate needs have been considered and are easy to fulfill: snacks here, tickets there, comfy conversation area here, gift shop there, stairs to the special exhibition there, views out into the inviting plaza here.

Once upstairs, one finds generous exhibition spaces and many delightful resting spots, small libraries and fascinating exhibits explaining art conservation methods incorporating beautiful pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. There are attractive and comfortable areas for rest and research scattered everywhere, each different and appropriate to the style and content of the gallery. Child-friendly spaces attract people of all ages with interactive lights and activities. Colorfully painted walls act as invigorating backdrops that make artworks pop, a welcome alternative to the sterile and generic white or grey galleries favored at some newly minted museums. The museum is proud of its gallery of Western art, which I expected to find as uninspiring and hackneyed as an old episode of “Bonanza.” Boy, was I wrong. It housed my favorite works in the museum, a series of twenty 12x12-inch paintings of different grasses by Karen Kitchel, in addition to excellent paintings of cowboys, Indians and animals and the expected Frederick Remington horse-and-cowboy sculptures and paintings (which are actually quite impressive).

Just beyond the Western gallery is the skybridge to DAM’s other building, which houses an imposing and impressive gallery of Native American/Indian/First People’s artworks including masks, paintings, sculptures and fiber art. There was also a visiting exhibition of color field paintings that left me unmoved, but which was full of important works by influential artists, few of whom I like. Still, it was an appropriate and important juxtaposition to the rest of the museum’s holdings and to the other main visiting show at the time, an assortment of works of decorative art (from chandeliers to dishes to tapestries) on loan from Paris titled "Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre."

The scale, the high quality of the artworks in the collection, the breadth of work on display, the excellent libraries and reference rooms scattered about, the attractive and appropriate design of the galleries, and the awareness of the museum’s planners regarding how the museum fits into its metropolitan surroundings both physically and metaphorically all work together to make the Denver Art Museum a great success aesthetically and culturally for people of any artistic persuasion, be it traditional or minimalist, abstract or figurative. The restaurants and gift shops are even well thought out, as are the sizes and layouts of the public spaces. Denver has a lot going for it that makes it worth a visit, but for me, just having another chance to enjoy DAM (and to see the wonderful 40-foot-tall blue bear sculpture at the Colorado Convention Center) will be worth the trip.