The art | SAM's collection has never looked better

Earlier this week at a preview of the new Seattle Art Museum, a little girl stepped among the displays of African masks, clutching her father's hand and staring at the fantastical costumes, her face lit up with wonder.

In case anyone has forgotten in all the fuss over fundraising, expansion and patronage, what really matters when SAM's doors open to the public Saturday is the art. Planning the new building, SAM leaders hoped to place maximum attention on the collection rather than architecture. Did they succeed? Well, yes — and no.

The expansion goes a long way toward making SAM's downtown venue a more satisfying place to view art: It's more spacious, open, generally more functional and places much more of the museum's wide-ranging collections in the public eye. But the new SAM also has some built-in problems and unresolved issues that won't easily go away.

When the building is working well, it disappears. When it isn't, it's all too present.

The architecture does its job in a tall, expansive contemporary art gallery that gives elbow room to the museum's largest artworks. A wall of see-through glass cases shows off the Katherine White collection of African art, which grabs attention with a thrillingly in-your-face masquerade at the top of the fourth-floor escalator. The Roman gallery gives new life to an interesting small collection that was previously overlooked. Of course, having permanent space devoted to Northwest art and to the late Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight is a no-brainer (although it doesn't make sense to have the Lawrence gallery run by the education department instead of the curatorial division).

With so much openness between galleries, however, transitions can be tricky. The biggest clash right now is at the entrance to the special exhibitions gallery, where the lively African art display — complete with video screens and sound — adjoins an installation of iconic 20th-century art. Brancusi's elegant abstract sculpture "Bird in Space" suffers most, caged in among so many other artworks you can hardly get a clear backdrop to its subtle lines. Exhibition designer Mike McCafferty has plans to position portable walls for a more comfortable transition between galleries for the next show.

New acquisitions and exciting loans pop up all over the place, including the lovely surprise of a Botticelli tondo (round painting) hanging near the entrance to the new Italian Room, a loan from the Paul Allen family. But occasionally, there can be too much of a good thing. The contemporary and special exhibition galleries feel a bit overstuffed, with curator Michael Darling trying to get as many of the important new gifts on view as possible.

The whole point of the new Porcelain Room is to be over-the-top, with floor to ceiling cases stacked with extravagant wares. The displays are wonderful, but I have reservations about the mirror panels tucked in between. From some angles they beautifully reflect the porcelain, but they also seriously distract from it with the constant motion of your own image and others passing by.

There are other distractions, too — times when the building gets in the way.

First: the windows. SAM curators wanted natural light in the galleries and architect Brad Cloepfil's answer was to blanket the west and north sides of the building with glass. It's too much. Ultraviolet rays can damage sensitive pigments and surfaces, and you can't have sun shining in people's eyes and reflecting off the art. In order to subdue the light, the building had to be outfitted with various layers of sun blocks, diffusing shades and portable walls.

The fussy apparatus stands out most in the fourth floor African galleries, which on a recent visit had some windows blocked out and others variously screened. All that direct sun will be blocked soon by the new Four Seasons Hotel being built across First Avenue. We'll have to wait and see how that plays out in light levels in the galleries. In the meantime, with our mutable Seattle weather, the light can change from bright to gloomy in seconds and keep shifting all day. How much fussing will it take to keep the light levels comfortable?

Of course, the windows aren't just there for light; some of them are aimed at the view. Cloepfil placed tall windows looking north over First Avenue to the Market, presumably taking a cue from the gorgeous immediacy of the city views in the Taniguchi-designed Museum of Modern Art in New York. There the windows are placed strategically, so that you come upon one and suddenly feel slam-bang in the middle of the city, transported from the museum back to the larger world. At SAM, the view is impaired by the light diffusing shades, creating a fuzzy, distanced look at the city.

Touch-screen computer monitors spread around the galleries also distract from the artworks, as do the video screens scattered about the fourth floor special exhibition space. I liked having a chance to hear the donors talk about their collections on-camera, but trying to look at art with the videos running nearby is like trying to have a conversation with a TV on. Why not put the touchscreens and videos in the lobby or the family areas and let people do their research away from the art?

Of course, any major new museum will have its share of quirks. It remains to be seen how SAM's administration will address them.

On thing they might look at is the decision to clutter the Venturi stairway with interactive art projects. While it's great to have local artists engaged, I'd rather have seen Jason Puccinelli's commission located somewhere else. I sympathize with the urge to reinvent the stairway as a more functional place, but the new displays utterly trivialize the massive Chinese Ming dynasty camels and solemn tomb guardians that were moved downtown from Volunteer Park for the opening of the Venturi building in 1991. If the Second Avenue lobby, stairway and mezzanine are going to remain in SAM's education wing, it's time to find a more suitable home for the Chinese sculptures.

Still, SAM's collection has never looked better. And there's more of it than ever before. Keep in mind that for all the additional space at SAM, you can't comfortably take in all the art at one swoop. For your first visit, plan on a leisurely walk-through to get familiar with the new layout, but don't expect to spend quality time with all of the displays. You can focus in more depth next time — and there is plenty of incentive to come back often.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com