DENVER—Despite the resplendence of the soaring titanium walls of Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Denver Art Museum, it’s time to turn attention to what goes inside.
In October, an exhibition, “Artisan & Kings, Selected Treasures from the Louvre,” with more than 125 paintings, sculptures and decorative arts collected by the Sun King, Louis XIV, and his two successors, as well as works seized after the revolution or later by Napolen, will do that. It will be the first from the world art summit to ever travel to the western states, the Denver museum said.
“Our visitors will have the unprecedented opportunity to see works from the world’s greatest collection of European art. The expansion of the museum enables us to host an exhibition of this magnitude, and we are delighted to launch our traveling exhibition program with a show of this caliber,” said Lewis Sharpe, museum director.
“It is really a chance to take advantage of what the Frederic C. Hamilton building has to offer. We are using two out of our three exhibition spaces. We are in a great position to be attracting phenomenal exhibitions,” said Melora McDermott-Lewis, director of education and master teacher for European and American art at the museum. “I think our spaces are going to sing with this much material.”
The Louvre’s director Henri Loyrette, says the museum believes it has an obligation to serve the entire art world. “It seems especially natural for us to turn to the United States, with whome we have very special, longstanding ties,” he said.
McDermott-Lewis said Loyette and other world museum directors are interested in learning how Americans do things, both displaying art and raising money to pay for it.
For example, Denver will feature an area where artisans will demonstrate the metal, weaving and porcelain painting techniques used to create the decorative art.
Works in the October through January exhibition include pieces by Anthony Van Dyck, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velazquez and Gianlorenzo Bemini.
In fact, Denver has had remarkable success in recent decades in drawing quality exhibitions to the museum’s original castle-like building, designed by the late architect Gio Ponti. Next door is the Denver Public Library, renovated by Michael Graves, making the one-block area almost a museum of architecture.
Libeskind’s 146,000-square-foot work is connected to the Ponti building by a skyway. Since it opened in April its once-silver walls have begun turning a gold color as they have aged.
Lenders have been impressed with how the museum has handled exhibitions, both in the way they are displayed and the colors used on the walls that hold them.
McDermott-Lewis is credited with coming up with the idea of disregarding chronology and region and hanging all portraits together, the still lifes in one place, landscapes in another.
A major exhibition of Impressionist paintings from dozens of museums is planned for next February, followed by two more exhibitions from the Louvre. Many of the works in the October exhibition are being displayed now at the High Museum in Atlanta, though some will not come here, and some that did not go to Georgia, will come to Denver.
Meanwhile, a museum is being built nearby to house the works of iconoclast Clyfford Still, once called “the Unabomber of abstract painting.” The city recently created a theater district. The Central City Opera, one of 13 opera companies in the state, is celebrating its 75th anniversary, though in its first life it opened in 1878, during the gold rush, and five years before the Met in New York.
The reach for culture by Denver and Colorado since the first gold miners arrived during the Civil War has seemed almost unstoppable. Construction cranes still dominate the skyline. The late comedian Red Skelton, during a visit, said he wasn’t going to come back to the Mile High City again until it was finished.
A record 11.7 million visitors stayed overnight in Denver last year, spending a record $2.76 billion. Next year it hosts the Democratic presidential convention. Cultural attractions outdraw the area’s four major sports franchises.
A new transit system has made it easy to reach the main entertainment and art enclaves, though pollution is becoming a problem again with ozone levels higher than allowed in a city where gas-guzzling SUVS are very popular.
