The Frye Art Museum to open New Exhibition Honoring the Museum Founders

Written by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker Sunday, 23 August 2009 21:36

SEATTLE, WA.- Newly appointed director of the Frye Art Museum Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker honors Charles and Emma Frye’s visionary patronage with an exhibition featuring a selection of important works from the Museum’s Founding Collection. The exhibition, Living Legacy, will be on view September 1, 2009 through January 10, 2010. Curated by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, recently appointed director of the Frye Art Museum, Living Legacy features works that exemplify the vision and collecting practices of Charles and Emma Frye as they assembled the 232 works of art that would become the Frye Art Museum’s Founding Collection.

The exhibition is based on works from the Frye Founding Collection, established in the first decade of the twentieth century by Charles Frye (1858–1940) and his wife Emma (1860–1934). A first-generation American of German descent, Charles reputedly saw his first oil painting at age thirty-five in 1893. By 1909 the Fryes were already avid collectors, evident by their loan of a French painting to Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, a World’s Fair celebrating the development of the Pacific Northwest.

Significant purveyors of European culture in Seattle for the remainder of their lives, Charles and Emma Frye focused their collecting efforts on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German art, a reflection of a singular moment one hundred years ago when a number of influential American collectors and museum curators sought to establish close cultural ties between Germany and America. The Frye’s collection included exemplary works by the founding members of one of Europe’s most influential artists’ association, the Munich Secession, and important works by the generation of German artists preceding them. It also included fine French and American paintings. Charles Frye’s dream to bequeath the collection to the people of Seattle became a reality in 1952 when the Frye Art Museum opened to the public.

The Frye Art Museum information posted on the American Association of Museums’ Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal is in accordance with the Guidelines Concerning the Unlawful Appropriation of Objects during the Nazi era, which was adopted by the Association of Art Museum Directors in June 1998. The Frye Collection research posted on the AAM site is the result of a thorough examination of our collection for works that were created before 1946 and acquired after 1932, which may have changed ownership during this same period, or may have been in continental Europe between those dates. Visit : http://fryemuseum.org/

Living Legacy will be presented in Frye Viewpoints galleries 1 and 2 from September 1, 2009 through January 10, 2010. Artichokes is included in the exhibition Open Roads and Bedside Tables: American Modernism in the Frye Collection (September 26, 2009 – January 10, 2010).

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