From 1978, when the Denver Art Museum belatedly started collecting modern and contemporary art in earnest, until this year, such work was only shown sporadically in temporary displays of various kinds.
Despite that enormous handicap and no reliable source of acquisition funds, Dianne Vanderlip, the young curator hired at the time to build this new museum department, was no in way deterred.
Cutting deals with art galleries worldwide, cajoling donors for needed money and spotting new talent before the rest of the art market, she shrewdly assembled a first-rate collection of more than 5,000 objects.
Understandably, the museum’s holdings in modern and contemporary art cannot compete with most institutions that specialize in such work, but they certainly stand tall in comparison with those at most other general art museums.
The problem all along has been that no one has had any real sense of Vanderlip’s accomplishments, because the collection, unlike all the other major ones at the art museum, never had a permanent gallery space.
Finally, with October’s opening of the $110 million Hamilton Building, all that has changed. The modern and contemporary holdings stand as the centerpiece of this new, Daniel Libeskind-designed addition, occupying 19,300 square feet of the most dramatic space on the third and fourth floors.
The installation of the 120 or so works in these spaces is the swan song for Vanderlip, who is retiring in January. She can leave with her head held high, because these galleries and the department’s entire collection are an impressive accomplishment by any measure.
Although the displays begin with galleries devoted to impressionism and European modernism, this analysis will focus on the artworks produced after World War II, which make up the bulk of the selections on the two floors.
While there is some vague attention paid to the chronology and stylistic development of the inclusions, the art is predominantly hung in a more intuitive fashion. Vanderlip sought convergences between the art and the angled, asymmetrical galleries and among the works themselves.
She amply succeeds on both counts. The fourth-floor gallery in the prow of the building that extends over 13th Avenue is nothing short of masterful, with Anthony Gormley’s “Quantum Cloud XXXIII” (2000), looking like it was custom made for the space’s tip.
The floating figure, constructed of hundreds of interconnected rods, anchors the room and seems to radiate into the space. Light shining onto the piece from an adjacent window casts fascinating, ever-changing shadows that further enhance its visual impact.
Though quite different in period and style, two nearby pieces are ideally attuned to the work: Sol Lewitt’s prototypical 12-foot-tall gridlike sculpture, “13 x 13 x 1 To 1 x 1 x 7 ” (1988), and Robert Smithson’s blocky, iterative sculpture, “Plunge” (1966).
Another stunning space is the Vicki & Kent Logan Atrium, which connects the two floors and opens onto the Bartlit Family Sculpture Deck. “Snow Flurry May 14” (1959), a classic, perfectly scaled mobile by Alexander Calder, hangs above the room’s open stairway. It, too, looks like it was made expressly for that location.
In addition, Vanderlip has smartly placed Tom Friedman’s 5-inch-tall Styrofoam figure, “Untitled (Styrofoam Man) TFF96-02” (1996) on the atrium’s balcony, allowing the expanse to dwarf the piece and further emphasize its extreme, diminutive size.
In a few of the rooms, she has grouped pieces around a theme, such as a fourth-floor gallery devoted to diverse takes on land- and cityscapes. These range from Alex Katz’s atmospheric, foggy view of New York City, “New Year’s Eve” (1990) to “Blast Furnaces, Perspective Views” (1980), an unemotional group of deliberately repetitive photographs by the famed German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher.
But this gallery also contains one the installation’s few miscues. Though it fits the theme, an otherwise fine painting by Agnes Martin, with its muted abstraction rooted in the Southwestern landscape, seems out of place – almost an after-thought.
Some viewers will no doubt be critical of Vanderlip’s installation, because it largely leaves art history aside, and such concerns are understandable. But this more open-ended approach makes sense for several reasons, including the free-wheeling nature of the architecture.
Displays carefully plotting an art-historical continuum work best with conventional, rectangular galleries where viewers pass logically from one room to the next. In Libeskind’s design, there is no obvious pathway, so viewers must constantly choose where to go next.
In addition, the museum’s collection probably does not have the kind of comprehensiveness needed for a strict art-historical approach, where the weaknesses of the holdings, particularly in the periods before the 1970s, would readily be made clear.
That said, the collection has made important strides recently. Take the striking gallery devoted to abstract-expressionism, which would not have been possible even five years ago.
While the selections, almost all gifts or loans from area collectors, are not masterpieces, they are all works by each artist. Key examples include Joan Mitchell’s “Dune” (1970), a 2001 gift from Charles and Linda Hamlin, or “1965” (1965), a rare work by Clyfford Still on loan from an anonymous private collection.
The only discordant note in this gallery is Ossip Zadkine’s cubist sculpture, “Le Brillant Silence” (1958). It is worthy inclusion, but it is displayed near the wall and disrupts the visual continuity of the paintings.
Unlike many curators who can be slavish to the latest fads in the art world, Vanderlip, to her credit, was willing to follow her own instincts and include works by artists, such as William T. Wiley, Alan Rath and Robert Arneson, who are hardly in fashion at the moment.
Other significant selections include a kind of shrine to the under-appreciated, iconoclastic contemporary artist, Lucas Samaras, whom the art museum has collected in depth. Among works on view are “Box No. 109” (1982) and “Chair with Objects (Glass Bird)” (1986).
Also deserving note are:
Taken together, this installation, along with “Radar: Selections from the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection,” a complementary exhibition on view elsewhere in the Hamilton Building through July 15, has to be the biggest and most explosive display of contemporary art ever in Colorado.
All this is even more impressive if one considers that there is enough depth in the modern and contemporary holdings that the museum could put together an entirely different installation with works of similar or nearly similar quality.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
