Top review entered in ad hoc contest
By Grace Rainaldi, Kent Denver School / Sun Devil’s Advocate
The Denver Art Museum is about to come out with their new exhibit Passport to Paris, and I was lucky enough to join a tour through the galleries led by Angelica Daneo, associate curator of painting and sculpture, and Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum.
This experience allowed me to appreciate the art on a more intimate setting, and understand the layout and ambience of the displays more fully.
Broken up into three sections, this exhibit is truly a multi-sensory journey into the world or Parisian art. Christoph Heinrich said this exhibit is “out to give an experience to all the senses.”
The first section, Court to Café, is a sweeping look at 300 years of French art, broken into periods. Each century has a different flavor, with immense preparation having gone in to replicating the unique ambience of each. Everything from the music to the wallpaper is historically accurate to the period of the art displayed.
Court to Café is also accompanied by music of the time period, and the Denver Art Museum is collaborating with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra to create a multi-sensory experience for visitors to appreciate.
This exhibit is especially interesting for those of you studying history in the 19th century. As Ms. Daneo said, the French Revolution was a “major, pivotal moment in French history,” and one can see how the paintings changed from royal portraits to scenes of everyday life as he or she travels through the exhibit.
The second section in the exhibit is The Drawing Room, which is a collection of drawings by Parisian artists. Ms. Daneo described this room as having a much more “masculine feel” as opposed to the other sections, but there is still a “dialogue between this show and Court to Café.” Many of the same artists featured in the other two galleries appear here, just working in a different medium.
Drawing is much more flexible than painting, and for this reason there is a great variety in the types of sketches that are shown. From portraits to animals to strange, quickly drawn creatures, the variety in the drawings is both interesting and exciting.
The museum is trying to put visitors in an intimate setting with the art (although not close enough to touch it!). In the hopes that visitors will get closer to the paintings, magnifying glasses are scattered throughout the exhibit with descriptions of different mediums used in the drawings attached.
Once you travel downstairs, you find the Drawing Studio. This is a space created for visitors to try their hand at drawing. There are enticing stations scattered throughout the room to help spark interest; one area is dedicated to trying out different mediums; one area, called Dare to Draw, is targeted towards those of us who were not born to be artists; one area is fully equipped to create drawing machines.
The third section, Nature is Muse, is a collection of impressionist paintings that has never been on show publicly before now. Many of the paintings in this exhibit are landscapes, and you are able to get a feel for the artist’s love of the outdoors as you travel through the exhibit. This section includes a room dedicated solely to Monet, with six of his paintings each representing a different aspect of his painting personality.
Many of the impressionist paintings are hoping to make the mundane beautiful. From the exquisite colors of a muddy street to the ephemeral beauty of smog from a factory, this exhibit captures the regular life of a Parisian citizen in the 19th century.
Passport to Paris is an exhibit targeted towards people interested in history, art, and life in the past. In this way, the name is quite fitting. This exhibit hands its visitors a passport into the life of a Parisian artist, and lets them travel through time into a new, fascinating world.
CHSPA thanks Darryl Stafford for representing the association at the Denver Art Museum for the Media Preview, and thanks the staff of the DAM for our continued relationship.
