Frye Art Museum

Frye Art Museum
Category: Museums
Neighborhood: First Hill
Update - 7/31/2009
The Frye Art Museum continues to offer interesting, often-beat, and usually significant exhibitions, to wit, "The Puppet Show" most recently and before that "The Munich Succession" (and just before that, "Napoleon on the Nile"). Small, but intimate, exhibitions.

And, as usual, the accompanying lectures, films, and other events were compelling.

The current "Puppet Show" is all the following things: kitschy, bizarre, satiric, cute, semi-serious, and deadly serious...Jen Graves (The Stranger) explains this better than I ever could.

Its highlight is the surrealistic/cubist Pierre Huyghe video "Still from This is not a time for dreaming" (2004) with marionettes that included a remarkably lifelike Le Corbusier, one of the landmark architects of the 20th century, locked in an eerie struggle with the Darth Vader-resembling Dean of the Arts and Sciences at Harvard over the ultimate design for the new Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

Also remarkable for its dreamlike qualities is the small group of sculptures by the 96-year-old French-born Louise Bourgeois, especially the Henriette, with its precariously dangling two-part black bronze limb burnished to a sheen, the calf and foot hanging like a prosthetic golf club, the thigh resembling a harpooned whale, with an "eyelet" where it would connect to the hip.

The volunteers who work at reception are gracious and the museum guards are more discreet than those at, for example, the Seattle Art Museum: you rarely hear them shouting from one gallery to the next. Or walking in pairs while shooting the breeze ("yammering"): what they're going to go this weekend (or girl-/boy-friend troubles).

That said, there are a few lemons.

Boredom has its cost.

One security guard, whom I asked for clarification as to why visitors could not walk around the motor-driven marionettes in Dennis Oppenheim's 1974 "Theme for a Major Hit" (there was only "Do Not Touch" printed on the floor) was particularly rude. She cut me off in mid-sentence with a "YOU CAN'T" and walked off to play sentinel in the doorway.

She should have herself been part of the exhibition: nasty college-student marionette. At 4:55 p.m. she undoubtedly tells visitors to get out ("You've got to leave. Now"). And she's on the fast track to a promising career as a prison guard at San Quentin.

(I guess when you're a chirpy sophomore with a summer job. you think you know everything, even if you obviously don't).

If her job is to replace a taped black line on the floor with the words "Please do not cross" underneath, why not have just a surveillance camera with several guards watching?

http://www.centrepompi...
Edit Remove
People thought this was:Useful (2)Cool (3)
2 Previous Reviews: Hide »
9/21/2008
The Frye Art Museum continues to provide the most eclectic, quality programming of art in Seattle.

While the Henry focuses on cutting edge contemporary art (much of it, frankly boring) and the Seattle Art Museum on blockbuster exhibitions as well as being an institution with a comprehensive collection of world art, the Frye has managed to carve out for itself a "brand" all of its own.

Case in point: "Napoleon on the Nile," from the Dahesh Museum in New York City, with engravings, paintings, artifacts, and documents from the Napoleonic art (1798-1815), the current exhibition on view. (One of the discoveries of this expedition was the Rosetta Stone, later taken away by the British).

The finely detailed engravings recount an early 19th century Cairo and Egypt long since disappeared: scenic views of mosques, palaces, people, flora and fauna, and a way of life now replaced by the chaotic modernity of the past century.

The opening day talk by the curator Lisa Small was a small but stellar event that focused on the cultural importance of the amazing Description de L'Egypte, the 23-volume set (text and engravings) compiled by the 150-strong group of scientists, artists, archaeologists, engineers that sailed with Napoleon's navy to the Middle East.

The comparison with Bush's ill-fated invasion and occupation of Iraq two hundred years later is an obvious one. I only Bush had shown just 10% of the interest Napoleon had in the culture, natural history, customs of the region, not just the latter's imperial ambitions of bringing his nation's notions of "enlightenment."*

Both men, however, harnessed an incredible propaganda machine to conceal the real nature of the disaster of their countries' respective occupations.

The exhibition makes clear that though Napoleon's military conquest and occupation ultimately failed, the cultural achievement remains undiminished to this day. This exhibition also bears comparison with the "Spain in the Age of Exploration" presented at SAM several years ago.

The West's modern (mis-) understanding of the Middle East largely began with Napoleon's colossal adventure, not with Cecil B. Demille's "Ten Commandments."

http://fryemuseum...
http://www.dailym...

Nijinski's dance slippers came to Seattle via the Frye ten years ago...following in his footsteps, Napoleon Bonaparte and his savants. A past era in all its glory, defeat, hopes, ambitions, and contradictions opens up to the visitor.

Note: Napoleon for Dummies is for sale in the bookshop, as are the exhibition catalog and other books on Napoleon.

* Recall in 2003 when the U.S. took control of Baghdad how American soldiers "guarding" the Baghdad Archaeological Museum allowed it to be looted of its treasures.

Edit Remove
People thought this was:Useful (1)Funny (1)Cool (1)
10/22/2006
Charming private museum with pretensions in inverse proportion to the uniqueness of its programming. I recall with pleasure the exhibitions devoted to the costumes of Nijinsky, the oeuvre of Fairfield Porter, and others--far from the blockbuster exhibitions, and hype, of what large urban art museums favor these days.

The benefactors, Charles and Emma Frye, ensured that their own private collection be turned into a museum after their deaths and that would be always free to the public. This represents, in my opinion, the kind of public-spirited generosity that Seattlities have exemplified for decades (think of Dorothy Bullitt and King-FM, et. al.).

The Frye offers varied programming as well--recitals as well as round-table discussions (witness the round-up of the best films of the year, moderated by Robert Horton of KUOW, with local movie critics of the caliber of Sheila Benson, etc.), and noted guest speakers.

The Frye could give the Clark Art Institute (on the East Coast) a run for its money....

Some of the gems of its collection include German and French academic painting of the 19th century, including the famous Franz Stucke painting of female "Sin" as well as some works by the once very popular (and considered sentimental to the point of bathos) Bouguereau, who fell out of favor with the rise of modernism (think abstract painting) in the early 20th century..

A visit to the Frye makes for a relaxed time spent looking at various forms of the visual arts...and you usually do not have to navigate crowds as one does at SAM.

Edit Remove
People thought this was: