SEATTLE – Claude Monet, meet Jimi Hendrix. Vincent van Gogh, meet Captain Kirk.
The unlikely pairings are the result of a new fine-art show scheduled to open April 8 at the Experience Music Project, the Seattle pop-culture museum dedicated to rock ‘n’ roll, and the adjoining Science Fiction Museum, a showcase of Klingons and other extraterrestrials.
For the first time, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the museums’ primary benefactor, has opened up his private art collection. Twenty-eight works, some not seen in public for more than 50 years, will be on display under the same metallic, multihued Frank Gehry-designed roof that holds some of the other cool stuff Allen has collected.
Down the hall from Renoir, Seurat and Picasso is Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, Darth Vader’s helmet and Michael Jackson’s jeweled glove.
“Is it that much different from Egyptian art being next to Italian art?” said Paul Hayes Tucker, the exhibit’s curator. “It’s all relative.”
Allen was not immediately available for an interview, said Christian Quilici, an EMP spokesman.
Tucker, a Monet expert, was selected by EMP and Allen’s people to search through Allen’s art collection – they won’t say how big it is – and pick out some of the works Tucker thought would engage a mass audience. He said the initial idea was to feature impressionist works and show how radically they changed the art world in the late 19th century.
But he said today’s museum visitors don’t see impressionism for what is was. Monet, Van Gogh and Renoir have become ubiquitous images in popular culture, he said.
Rather than explaining the art history behind impressionism – how Monet and others brought more realistic images of everyday life to museum walls that once were dominated by pristine classical scenes – Tucker said he wanted the artworks to tell the story.
So Tucker, an art history professor from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, came up with an idea as radical as putting Gauguin under the same roof as Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road costume.
The show, aptly titled “DoubleTake,” groups impressionist and contemporary works in an unprecedented way, Tucker said.
He’s placed a lush Renoir portrait of a girl next to a giant Roy Lichtenstein cartoonlike painting of a blond bombshell. Fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Younger is grouped with Georges Seurat, the 19th-century pointillist, and Pablo Picasso, the famous cubist. A tranquil Monet water lily painting hangs next to a fiery, angry painting by American abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning.
“We all continue to learn from Monet,” Tucker said. “I’d like to think all his impressionist and post-impressionist friends will be seen anew.”
Museum officials expect about 100,000 people to pay $8 each to view the exhibit in the six months it will be in Seattle. Based on the success here, the show may go on the road, officials said.
If previous Monet exhibitions are any precedent, the show is likely to do well.
“Monet, money,” Tucker said.
Allen, one of the richest men in the world, is famous for his acquisitiveness. Besides artwork and rock and sci-fi artifacts, his worldy goods include antique aircraft, books, downtown Seattle real estate, software company startups, megayachts and pro sports teams – the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers.
Museum officials aren’t saying much about what Allen might decide to take out of his closet next to share with the world. When asked if he’s got, say, a collection of Egyptian mummies, Quilici said, “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Associated Press
Paul Hayes Tucker curated the show of artworks from Paul Allen’s collection at the Experience Music Project. It opens April 8.
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