A critical look at the Frye
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Normally I wouldn't do something like this in an art museum; but the situation is dire and I need help. I spot two able-looking men gesturing in front of a big oil painting, dissecting the technique.
It's the middle of a workday; they aren't wearing suits and they're unusually absorbed in the brushwork. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that these guys are artists.
We're standing in the back gallery of the Frye Art Museum looking at "Recent Acquisitions 1995-2000," and I'm here to assess what the Frye has accomplished in the past four years. That's how long it's been since the building reopened, after an extensive renovation, with a new director, Richard West, and the promise of great things.
Before the Frye's remodel, faltering under an octogenarian director and an injunction to show only representational art, the museum had ended up being popular mostly with the retirement crowd.
"Certainly, in the past, art lovers in the area have seen the Frye as something of a dinosaur," West told The Times in 1997. "But we want to be exciting and to be part of the Seattle art community." He vowed that "anything we show, whether it's contemporary or 19th century, will have to have substance and content."
So I'm here to see if the Frye is living up to its promises. With West's words in my mind, I walk over to the two men and throw myself at their mercy. "What do you think of all this?" I ask.
I already know that the museum is well-liked, which is why artists can be spotted hanging around the galleries. In fact, with its free admission, free parking, spacious galleries and pleasant cafe, the Frye is such a nice place to spend an afternoon that people tend to go there regardless of what the current show is.
But this time the current show has broader implications. Many of the Frye's acquisitions from the past few years have been purchased from exhibits that West selected, so this is sort of a capsule overview of his taste.
For example, here is David Ligare's 1993 oil painting "Hercules at the Crossroads," from a show I don't remember fondly. Mythical subjects usually appeal to me, yet this romanticized landscape with a brawny but unengaging male figure plunked in the foreground strikes me as pap - and not even especially well-painted. Harry Patterson's "Voices of the Ancestors," an image of two Native Americans in front of a floral background, and Leslie Morgan's "Bear Icon," a sweet-looking bear with a copper-colored halo, would look right at home in a Santa Fe gift shop.
There's more promising work, such as a 1967 Alice Neel ink portrait. Neel is a well-respected artist, but this isn't a good example of her drawing or portraiture.
So I'd like to get another opinion on the direction the museum is headed and of what I'm seeing here. I put my question to the two artists. Erik Filban of Seattle and Guntis Apse of Bremerton are happy to oblige. And it turns out they, too, are unexcited by what they see.
The work is neither the best of current representational art nor meaningfully connected to our region. (Director West is from California and still seems more familiar with that scene than what's happening in the Northwest.)
I point to David Dewey's watercolor, "Icicles." "What do you think of that?" I ask.
"Almost a Hallmark card," Filban replies.
Similarly, he sums up William Beckman's "Side Road Landscape" as "a total snooze," William Bailey's pencil still life "Via del Pantheon" as "utterly bereft of interest," and Andrew Raftery's "Bridal Registry" as "a waste of talent."
"At least the guy can paint," Filban acknowledges, looking at Raftery's free-standing painted linen screen. "But what is this?"
Apse laments the unsophisticated palette of many of the artists, calling the color "a little too raw: just naked paint." He takes me into an adjoining gallery hung with classics from the Frye collection and points out how some of those artists - "with better training" - subtly blend their color instead of using so much of it straight from the tube.
What a contrast to the first show West curated for the Frye - a group of big, dynamic oil paintings by Odd Nerdrum that got everybody's hopes up. The Norwegian painter had been causing a big stir in international art circles with his Renaissance technique and intense, apocalyptic imagery. Talk about content! People were arguing about it for months afterward. Was it illustration; was it kitsch; was the guy a total genius? One thing was for sure: Everybody had to go see it.
In "Recent Acquisitions," the best example of the provocative content that West had promised is still the big Nerdrum "Man Bitten by a Snake," purchased from that first show. Apse and Filban like some other things as well.
They find a small Sydney Laurence, "Sailing Offshore" from the 1920s, is gracefully executed. I concur. The two artists agree that Graham Nickson's enormous 1980s painting "Sphinx" - a group of large-as-life bathers arranged on an urban shoreline - is formally adept. Apse tells me that when he first saw Carlo Mariani's "Abyss-First Dream" from a distance, "it did sort of get me." But Filban disagrees. "I had a lukewarm feeling immediately," he asserts. We could go on, but I thank my new friends for sharing their impressions and return to the task at hand.
What to make of all this? In spite of the acquisitions we've been looking at, the Frye has mounted some refreshing traveling shows in the past few years.
A special favorite was a tribute to the great Russian ballet dancer "Nijinsky," with a little-known group of his drawings and paintings, done while hospitalized for mental illness.
But many of the shows West has selected, and the guest curators he has relied on to fill the front galleries at the museum, have not lived up to his early promise.
One hopeful note to consider is that earlier this year West hired the Frye's first staff curator, Debra Byrne, who will take over a lot of the daily curatorial tasks that West has juggled. Byrne, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri, comes to the Frye from the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, where she was curator of European and American art.
Although West still will be in charge of acquisitions and the rotation of the permanent collections, we can expect a fresh approach to the changing exhibitions. West has booked artists at least a year out, but Byrne will be selecting the individual artworks for upcoming shows, including "Heightened Realities: The Monotypes of Ruth Weisberg," opening in April. Weisberg is dean of fine arts at the University of Southern California.