visual codec archives »
one shot project »
one shot specifications »
one shot purchasing »
about us »
contributors »
submissions »
contact us »
Present Tense
By Regina Hackett
In the gift shop at the Frye Art Museum, there are silk scarves, impressionist notepaper, art history hardbacks, beaded jewelry, floral purses, soft alphabet letters for tykes, and Dean Sameshima's booklets titled, "Men at play."
Circle the one that does not belong.
For those who haven't been to the gift shop lately and need a little help finding the right answer, here's a clue: Sameshima's booklets feature grainy reproductions of naked young men cavorting, sometimes in conjugation. Children who enter hazy on specifics of sexual congress will leave thoroughly enlightened.
Any complaints?
"Not one," said a gift shop clerk. "Those booklets are flying out of here. Volume One sold out immediately, and we're almost out of Volume Two."
The new, improved Frye has achieved the goal sought by its namesakes: to be a singularity in the multiplicity of art museums. While other museums present a cohesive narrative, the new Frye delights in showing off its multiple personality disorder. While its core galleries feature Charles and Emma Frye's reactionary art history, wrapping them are galleries devoted to distinctly progressive art experiences.
What is the Frye's core audience thinking? In a twinkling, Rip van Winkle became a wide-awake laboratory of contemporary experiment. Put another way, the Frye time-traveled from a stuffy 19th century to a progressive 21st, without stopping, even to refuel, in the 20th.
Sure, there have been complaints, but mostly bewildered instead of outraged. Nobody's carrying picket signs with a couplet from e.e. cummings stenciled on the front:
what's too far, said he.
where you are, said she.
In the ecology of Seattle museums, the Frye was always burrowed deep into its niche, a haven for those who never liked modernism and devoutly wished a robust academy could have made everybody from Cezanne to Duchamp unnecessary and their progeny stillborn.
Seattle meatpacker Charles Frye and his wife Emma maintained an unswerving loyalty to a lost world, the German romantic painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These Germans painted high theatrics (dashing men, sinful or angelic women), sod (barnyard animals covered in painterly glory), and literary narratives (domestic interiors suspended in pregnant pause).
Modernism struck, but struck out with the Fryes.
When they were buying, Impressionists and post-Impressionists were within their grasp, but the Fryes didn't like the French. As Ida Kay Greathouse, future Frye director, put it, they thought the French were "dirty" and their art unseemly. Nor did the Fryes endorse the great German Expressionists derided by Hitler, who backed up his art criticism with a gun.
The Fryes enriched Seattle with their generosity, but imagine what their gift could have been if they'd cultivated their taste and intelligence, instead of wallowing in their prejudices.
After their deaths, their lawyer, Walser Greathouse, offered the collection to the Seattle Art Museum. SAM declined, thanks to all the strings attached. Greathouse opened the Frye in 1952 and served as its director 'til his death in 1966. His wife's the one who gave the Frye its combative personality. Because she knew little about art, she took time off to see Europe, serving as a perfect example of the adage, "travel narrows the mind." When I met her in the 1980s, she was happy to report that on her tour she never saw a single museum as fine as the Frye.
But she could afford to see what she wanted and ignore all dissenting voices; the Fryes left an endowment, secured with rental properties, that now exceeds $92 million.
Other, less wealthy museums she scorned as "beggars at the public trough." As soon as the national endowment for the arts was established, she was calling for its demise. She refused to lend anything to any other museum, citing as her reason, "Neither a borrower nor lender be." Needless to say, she refused to join arts organizations or conform to commonly held standards of museum practice.
Some people loved her, and I'll admit to being charmed by her cantankerous warmth. One day, I heard her tell a museum guard he had to go home and get his teeth. She liked to hire guards as a helping hand to the down and out, but insisted on teeth. "They need to be able to blow the whistle," she said. Their whistles could summon the dead.
While she and her husband put together a decent survey of early American art to add to the Frye core, he banned abstract art and she reinforced the rule. Realism for her meant no threat to her family values: yes to Andrew Wyeth, no to de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. She favored the sweet end of French Impressionism, but she thought Picasso was a fraud and the Museum of Modern Art a hotbed of left wing politics poorly disguised as aesthetics. With few exceptions, she passed on the Northwest school. Her omissions were glaring, and some of her purchases inexcusable: for example, the realist, non-native Alaskan painters and the Russian realist Nicolai Fechin, in hideous depth.
Behind Greathouse was her hand-picked board. Decades passed, but finally (thanks to Monty Bean), the board maneuvered her into retirement as her eyesight began to fail, paid for an excellent remodel, and hired the Frye's first museum professional as director, Richard West, in 1995.
He's the Frye's great transition figure. He broadened the meaning of realist art, exhibiting significant conservative painters from around the world and locally, from Norway's Odd Nerdrum to San Francisco's Robert Schwartz and Seattle's Helen Loggie.
He also secured traveling exhibits, a first for the Frye. We owe him for "Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art" from 2002; "Scenes from American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian" from 2001, and "Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures from the Royal Academy of Arts," in 1999, among others.
A gentleman and a scholar, he had weaknesses as a curator, most glaringly, a tendency to favor painterly skill over vision, mistaking subject matter for content. The curator he hired to help him, Debra Bryne, wasn't much better, and could be, on occasion, much worse. West never patronized the audience. Bryne made me feel as if I were back in elementary school being victimized by a nun.
After west left in 2003 and Bryne found work elsewhere, the fun began.
Midge Bowman became director and hired Robin Held, formerly associate curator at the Henry Gallery, as curator.
In placing Held, the Frye abandoned its niche, and nothing represents the gap between the old Frye and the new as well as "Swallow Harder," an exhibit culled from the raw but savvy collection of Ben and Aileen Krohn.
Some of it the Seattle Art Museum wouldn't show or even allude to. For example, asked if SAM would exhibit Jason Salavon's digitally layered photo, "76 Blowjobs," a museum spokesperson didn't hesitate.
"No."
Maybe in the future?
"Not in any future I can imagine," she said.
An exhibit devoted to the metaphor and fact of blow jobs certainly sports adventurous subject matter, but "Swallow Harder" is also adventurous in its content, the way the subject is handled. The icky and sticky shake hands with the cool and detached. Things fall apart, including gender roles.
Held has done a lot to lighten and brighten the dark load of the permanent galleries, but she hasn't (who could?) found a way to engage a dialogue between old and new.
In the meantime, the old might be getting restless. While the new Frye has more than doubled its audience, the old has the ear of the board.
The breezy disregard for the feelings of the more mainstream in the audience is itself startling. "Swallow Harder" comes with no warning labels. Those accompanying preteens into the galleries could find themselves wishing they'd come alone.
This disregard is what links the new and old Frye. Kay Greathouse didn't care what progressives thought, and Held (underneath her make-nice rap), doesn't care what fogies think. She couldn't, or she would have built to her current moment instead of leaping there.
Some say the Held era will be a blip on the screen, that the Frye board is searching for a way to ease her out without losing her many admirers. (Note to board: give up. If you dump held, say goodbye to the now thronging Frye openings, studded with hordes of tattooed and pierced younglings. Say goodbye to fawning attention from art critics. Say goodbye to The Stranger's 2005 "genius award" and expect the paper to bill you for the cake.)
What is happening at the Frye is rippling through the previously well established museum hierarchy. The roles of Seattle's three major museums have shifted, and the other two aren't so happy with their new status. The Henry is now the moderate middle, and SAM is old school.
Where do reactionaries go to see art in Seattle?
As it stands, they have to hurry, eyes averted, into the Frye's core galleries. They may be down, but they're not out. The dead hand of the past has a way of reaching out of its grave to slap down upstarts, who may, in the end, include Held.
But if so, her Frye has been fun while it lasted.
