With Monday’s removal of a 14-foot-wide mobile by Alexander Calder from the elevator lobby of its original building, the Denver Art Museum took another small but important step toward the Oct. 7 opening of its $90.5 million addition.
The 1959 sculpture by one of the most popular artists of the 20th century will hang in a prominent location in the soon- to-be-completed Hamilton Building – an atrium space stretching from the third floor to the fourth.
“As you walk out to the sculpture deck, you will walk under it,” said Dianne Vanderlip, curator of modern and contemporary art. “As you walk up or down the stairs between the third and fourth floors, you’ll experience it. It should look great.”
About one-third of the 1,000 or so objects that will be shown in the addition are already installed – including almost all of those in two of the three opening exhibitions and the Western American art galleries on the second floor.
Construction on the fourth floor will be completed this week, and at the end of June workers will begin installing artworks there in the African and modern and contemporary galleries.
“We’re very excited. June is going to be a good month for us,” said Michelle Assaf, director of exhibitions and collections.
The Calder mobile is expected to be hung during the week of July 31. It will be among 120 or so works on display in the modern and contemporary galleries on the third and fourth floors – a total of 19,300 square feet.
“The space I’m going to be installing in is decidedly unconventional, so we’re really going to have to learn how to get the works to talk to each other in a really different kind of environment than they have ever experienced before,” Vanderlip said. “We’ve worked this out to the inch in our models, but I suspect we’re going to get into there and there’ll be lots of shifting and changing and eyeballing in a new way.”
Vanderlip said the Calder, which the museum acquired in 1996 after a four-year search, is a first-rate example of the sculptor’s familiar mobiles with their rounded fins mounted on carefully balanced arms.
“It is such a magnificent Calder,” she said. “I had a Calder expert here last Thursday … and he said it was one of the great, great white Calders he had ever seen.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
