In late 2009, the Denver Art Museum will present a major exhibition devoted to Charles M. Russell, who, along with Frederic Remington, ranks among the most of popular artists of the American West, the institution announced today.
The show, titled “Charles M. Russell: The Masterworks in Oil and Bronze,” will be organized in Denver and curated by Joan Troccoli, senior scholar at museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art.
A leading expert in the field, she also oversaw the museum’s 2000 show, “Painters and the American West: The Anschutz Collection.”
The Russell exhibition will travel to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla., and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Few other details about the offering were available Thursday.
The museum also announced that its Western American collection will be totally reinstalled by early 2009. In addition to its present galleries on the second floor of the Hamilton Building, additional space will be devoted to the department on the long-closed seventh floor of the museum’s original building.
In November, Director Lewis Sharp said the seventh floor’s galleries would be divided between photography and Western American works. But how much space on the floor would be devoted to each area apparently has not been set.
“The Denver Art Museum is still in the hiring process for the photography curator position,” spokeswoman Kristin Bassuener said Thursday via e-mail. “The museum would like the new photography curator to help shape the direction of the photography program, and is leaving open the option of including photography as a potential part of the 7th-floor reinstallation.”
In other news, the museum has decided not to present the third in a previously announced series of exhibitions featuring works from the Louvre. In 2006, the museum revealed it had entered a partnership with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to present three shows from the famed Parisian museum.
The first offering, “Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre,” concluded Jan. 6. The second, “Houdon from the Louvre,” featuring works by neo-classical French sculptor, Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), is scheduled for Oct. 11 through Jan. 4, 2009.
But according to Bassuener, the museum has exercised its option not to present a third Louvre show later in 2009. Instead, in that slot, it plans to display a group of site-specific works titled “Embrace!”
