Modern Art from the Pacific Northwest

In the Collection of the Seattle Art Museum

By Barbara Johns

Published by Seattle Art Museum, 1990

Paperback

Very Good Vintage Condition. The book is clean, covers attached, secure stapled binding, unmarked, no writing, no highlighting, crisp inner pages, no fading, no stains, no ripped pages, no edge chipping, no corner folds, no crease marks, no remainder marks, not ex-library. Some very light surface and edge wear from age, use, storage and handling. 

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The  Seattle Art Museum  (commonly known as  SAM) is an  art museum  located in  Seattle,  Washington, United States. The museum operates three major facilities: its main museum in  downtown Seattle; the  Seattle Asian Art Museum  in  Volunteer Park,  Capitol Hill; and  Olympic Sculpture Park  on the central Seattle waterfront, which opened in 2007. Among the museum's notable exhibitions were a 1954 exhibition of 25 European paintings and sculptures from the  Samuel H. Kress  Foundation; these pieces were donated to SAM in 1961. A 1959  Van Gogh  exhibit drew 126,100 visitors. That same year, SAM organized a retrospective of the work of  Northwest School  painter  Mark Tobey  that traveled to four other U.S. museums. Tobey's works and highlights of SAM's Asian collection were featured under the museum's aegis at the  Century 21 Exposition  (the 1962 Seattle  World's Fair). A  Jacob Lawrence  retrospective in 1974 honored a giant of  African American  art who had settled in Seattle four years earlier.  Leonardo Lives  (1997) featured the  Codex Leicester, the last manuscript of  Leonardo da Vinci  in private hands, which had then been recently purchased by  Bill Gates.

As of January 2023, the museum's collection includes about 25,000 pieces. Among them are  Alexander Calder's  Eagle  (1971)  and  Richard Serra's  Wake  (2004), both at the Olympic Sculpture Park;  Cai Guo-Qiang's  Inopportune: Stage One  (2004), a sculpture constructed from cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes on display in the lobby of the SAM Downtown;  The Judgment of Paris  (c. 1516–18) by  Lucas Cranach the Elder; Mark Tobey's  Electric Night  (1944);  Yéil X'eenh (Raven Screen)  (c. 1810), attributed to the  Tlingit  artist Kadyisdu.axch';  Do-Ho Suh's  Some/One  (2001); and a coffin in the shape of a  Mercedes Benz  (1991) by  Kane Quaye  of  Ghana. The museum returned to the heirs of 1930s French-Jewish impressionist and post-impressionist art dealer  Paul Rosenberg  a painting by  Henri Matisse  which had been  looted by Nazis  in World War II, after having requested that the family sue in order to reach a legal settlement that included another art dealer. So in October 1997, Rosenberg's family filed suit in  District Court, to recover the painting  Odalisque  (1927 or 1928). It was the first lawsuit against an American museum concerning ownership of Nazi plunder during World War II. Then museum director  Mimi Gardner Gates  brokered an 11th hour settlement that returned the artwork, after which the museum sued the gallery which had sold it the painting in the 1950s. Author  Héctor Feliciano  said it was only the second instance in the US of a museum returning looted art.