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.
