Arts Time to Go
posted by on May 4 at 2:10 AM
Tonight, I spent a good 2 1/2 hours wandering around the Seattle Art Museum during a preview event, marveling again.
I’m telling you to go. At 10 am Saturday the doors open. They remain open for 35 hours straight, until 9 pm Sunday.
I saw people stretching their legs. Stretching their legs. Yes, the Seattle Art Museum is now so large that it can not really be covered properly in a single visit. Know what this means? That it is no longer a place largely suited to tourists, but instead to repeat visitors, committed visitors, locals, scholars, careful lookers.
“How do you like the new museum?” one man asked another tonight.
“It’s like a museum now,” the other one answered.
In my review of the new SAM experience (the story also has a great slideshow), there were several things I couldn’t mention because I just didn’t have enough room.
First, the most shocking work of art in all the museum* is the painting that hangs in the special-exhibitions gallery to the right of Matta’s gaseous-green geometric-surrealism painting. It looks, as one artist told me tonight, like something thick and graphic, like Jean Dubuffet. It has arrows pointing in various directions, and is brightly colored. Are you ready for this? It’s a 1964 painting by Eva Hesse. Do. Not. Miss. It. It caused another artist to proclaim, “I never knew she was a tube-squeezer!”
(If you’re interested, there’s an essay on Hesse and color in the current edition of October.)
Another unsung thing to behold: the circa-1600 Italian room, made of wood and never before seen (or smelled—smell that wood smell) at SAM.
More: the Chinoiserie room on the fourth floor, decked in Belgian tapestries.
And: the 1640s oil painting Boys Blowing Bubbles, also on the fourth floor, which SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa, in her research for the reopening, recently re-attributed to the female artist Michaelina Woutiers, about whom I know nothing and am thoroughly curious. (The painting has been in SAM’s collection since 1958.) As Ishikawa pointed out, the bubbles are 350 years old and still haven’t popped.
Anyway, have fun. I won’t lay a bunch of stuff on you all at once—or any more than I already have. Do go. You’ll be glad you did. (Although the Larry Bell fans in the house should return on Tuesday, when the fragile transparent cube by Bell will be replaced in the minimalism gallery after the opening crush.)
*(Sadly, SAM doesn’t have seductive high-res images of any of these things on its web site …)
What, seriously? We can go at 2am on Sunday morning if we want? That would be cool for us night owls.
I am wildly jealous.
Love the porcelain room! Thanks for the slideshow, didn't see it last time. Will have to go check out the Hesse, couldn't find any web images. Her lifespan on Wiki harks to Van Gogh, despite being relatively sane and well-off, married and with some acknowledgements during her time. Gosh, I was smoking doobies less than 1km from his dedicated museum in Amsterdam. Fool I was not to take in the Voluminous masterworks by a man who was profoundly ignored. Any sunflowers perchance at SAM?
Are there any ticket requirements in order to enter this first weekend? I thought I remember something about having a ticket to get in for the first couple of days. A quick look at SAM's site doesn't say anything about it.
Yes, you can go Sunday morning at 2 am, and what's needed for this weekend are timed tickets. (Call 654-3100 for details.)
FYI ...no tickets are required for entry to SAM between 12 am & 8 am...
that's helpful...right?
Great! Now they just need to:
1) Get a halfway-decent acquisition budget.
2) Realize that there is a difference between an art museum and a natural history museum.
3) Hire a curator who can use this knowledge and money effectively.
Why is it that the Henry manages to be approximately 1000% more interesting and relevant than the SAM, with only a fraction of the (original SAM) exhibit space?
As with the SPL before it, Seattle is trying to solve the problem of a half-assed institution by building it nicer buildings....
Thanks for the ticket heads up. And yes it is helpful to know that a ticket isn't needed between 12 and 8.
Thanks!
How's the Australian room?
Australian room has a couple of nice choices, curatorially speaking (video on floor is one of them), but it's in the old building, so not terribly different. At least it's in a contained space now and not a hallway, so that's nice.
A Nony Mouse: Museums change over time. Your opinion sounds familiar, but circa 2002. I say give them all a chance once they're all set next to each other. All of Seattle's art museums have bumped themselves up with building projects, and for all of them, what goes on curatorially has been more important than any architecture. That said, I have never before been in a museum building I liked less than SAM's Venturi building. The new building is hardly a vanity move, more like the arrival of an ambulance.
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