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By David Lane
DENVER, COLORADO, 15
November 2006—Recently—like many other proud Colorado natives—I toured
the new Hamilton addition to the
Denver Art Museum
. While it is an
architectural triumph, I am sorry to report the curators did the public
and the museum’s collections a major disservice in how they have chosen to
showcase the existing collections within the new space.
When
entering the Hamilton’s ground floor you are immediately struck by the
hushed tones and reverent comments made by patrons entering the space.
Daniel Libeskind has a rare gift for being able to sculpt with both
exterior form and interior light in creating his gallery spaces. Entering
the structure you feel as if you are in a work [of] art, with natural
light filling the large gallery spaces provided. At the core, the central
staircase combines light, shadow and angular form in mesmerizing fashion
that somehow unifies the structure, giving it a wonderful sense of flow
and movement. The central core space is unfortunately the single greatest
piece of modern art in the whole facility.
The opening had
for many years been eagerly awaited as the museum outgrew its original
facilities. Denver residents would often wait years before favorite pieces
came out of storage for display. The original North building designed by
Gio Ponti and James Sudler was highly controversial when it opened its
doors in 1971. Unlike the Beaux Arts buildings surrounding the Civic
Center space at the time it was built, the original museum was a
seven-story collection of modernistic/medieval towers. Denver was at the
time choosing to reinvent itself and one of its most treasured public
spaces, giving itself a new skyline; the medieval keep design suitably
reached for the sky to reflect the city’s aspirations while giving the
city its own version of the Tower of London. Unfortunately, this design
did impose a number of physical limitations. Large-scale pieces were
essentially limited to the temporary galleries on the ground floors or the
adjoining spaces. Consequently, only a very limited number of large-scale
modern pieces could ever be displayed at any one time. Modern art was
relegated to a few spaces on the ground floor, which must have been an
enormous source of frustration for curators.
The Hamilton
addition must have seemed a golden opportunity to let the museum’s modern
collections emerge from storage and see the light of day. The addition
effectively doubled the museum’s exhibition space, but also provided
gallery spaces capable of displaying the largest pieces. While the
curator’s stated intent was to showcase the museum’s existing collections,
the museum’s greatest strengths were in fact ignored. Denver has one of
the country’s outstanding collections of Native American art, a fine
collection of Western painters, and recently acquired the Harmsen
collection of Western art. However, rather than emphasizing the museum’s
strengths, the vast majority of the new gallery space in the Hamilton
building is devoted to the museum’s modern collection. Instead of
displaying the best and the brightest, the curators apparently went to
enormous effort to highlight the regrettable and forgettable.
Denver simply never had the financing or the exhibition
space to develop a modern collection of any note so that its collection is
dominated by minor lights whose apparent talents lie mainly in the areas
of self promotion rather than artistic merit. One is left with the
impression that a significant number of the pieces may have been purchased
by the pound, with the scale of the stunning new gallery space serving
only to overshadow the mediocrity on display.
When an effort
was made to display a portion of one of the museum’s better recent
acquisitions, the Virginia Vogel Mattern collection of Contemporary Native
American Art, no attempt was made to tie the collection to the outstanding
collection of traditional Native American pottery to provide a context. As
part of the design the architect provided a sculpture terrace in which the
curators neglected to place a single work of art. This is striking given
that Colorado has a large community of sculptors and foundries nearby that
cast bronzes for artists from all over the country. Given this local asset
it is difficult to believe that no works could have been found to
contribute to the space. Time and time again you can’t help but question
if the curators really appreciated the strengths of the collections
already at hand.
However, the slavish devotion of the
curators to the museum’s financial benefactors was never in doubt. The
curators seem to have taken particular pains to create shrines to the
principal patrons for the major new galleries in the addition. Large-scale
portraits of the patrons figure prominently at the entrance to the larger
galleries. The only missing touches are small altars and burning incense.
While it is appropriate to show gratitude to a public benefactor, is
ancestor worship really required?
Denver now has the
architectural icon it hoped for in its new museum addition. Hopefully, the
museum’s curators will learn to use the new spaces
effectively and eventually come to appreciate the strengths of the
museum’s collection. Until then, the new wing will unfortunately be a flawed
creation, marred by the lack of vision of its curators.
David Lane is a software engineer in
Denver, Colorado.
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