Spring Break Redux: Frye Art Museum

Finishing up my last day in Seattle after the spending the morning and early afternoon at and around the Space Needle, I went to a small art museum called the Frye Art Museum. Like everything in Seattle, it was unknown to me. I made the decision to visit based on their website and proximity to my hotel. It seemed to have a lot of works by Russian painters of the 19th & early to mid-20th centuries in its collection. It's home is a lovely modernist building in a residential neighborhood just on the edge of the downtown high-raises. The building has wonderful sight-lines and a very well placed reflecting pool. Besides the building; however, the collection is rather unimpressive overall, but idiosyncratic enough to also be interesting--to it's benefit the parking and admission are both free!

Much of the limited space was in the process of being transformed for a new exhibit so all of the museum's major works were on display in a single large room stacked together like jigsaw pieces in a manner known as Salon-style. I first encountered this at the Pitti Palace in Florence, and interestingly enough a similar collection of works was once hung in this manner at the Baltimore restaurant Hausner's before it went out of business and the collection was sold at Sotheby's--so I was familiar with the technique, but here it made viewing more confusing.

As fate would also have it, my visit was timed to coincide with an art appreciation lecture being given to a group of seniors from a local retirement home, as well as, a local artist copying one of the paintings in the salon gallery.

Whatever other space, including a long hallway, were used to display a collection of pro-Russian revolutionary propaganda posters circa 1918-1920--about 30 works in all.