A Modern Champion: Virginia Wright (1929–2020)

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Feb 19 2020

A Modern Champion: Virginia Wright (1929–2020)

With a heavy heart, we share the news of the passing of Virginia Wright, a pillar of the SAM family. Virginia and her late husband Bagley played pivotal roles in the development, vibrancy, and accomplishments of the Seattle Art Museum for more than half a century. Beyond being generous contributors, the Wrights’ greatest impact on SAM is seen in the art of the collection and in the art shown. Virginia was among a very small group of people who, in the 1960s, pushed SAM to create its first modern and contemporary art program. Virginia and Bagley also contributed to the purchase of many important acquisitions over the years. Above all else, the Wrights amassed one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary art in the world (over 200 works), all purchased with SAM in mind as the collection’s eventual home. When the bulk of it came to SAM in 2014, forming the backbone of its modern and contemporary collection, SAM was transformed from a great institution into a truly remarkable one.

Earlier this month, Virginia said, “When I think about the future of the Wright Collection at SAM, I put my trust in the artists. I trust that future generations will value their work, that SAM will continue to provide meaningful access to it, and that the conversations that their work has inspired will continue.” We are honored by her faith in Seattle’s museum and, because of her support over the last 60 years, we are confident that we can live up to the legacy she established.

Born in Seattle and raised in British Columbia, Virginia went East for college and majored in art history. Out of college, she worked for Sidney Janis Gallery in Manhattan and began collecting art. Mark Rothko’s abstract painting Number 10 (1952) was one of her early, daring purchases and it is now part of SAM’s collection.

Virginia has been a SAM member since 1951. She began docent training in 1957 and led her first public tour in 1959. In 1959, the Wrights made their first-ever gift to SAM’s collection: Room with White Table (1953) by William Ward Corley. That year they also provided funding for SAM to acquire Winter’s Leaves of the Winter of 1944 (at the time titled Leaves Before Autumn Wind) by Morris Graves.

In 1964, she and a group of friends persuaded then-director Richard Fuller to let her start the Contemporary Art Council (CAC), a group of collectors at the museum. For the next decade, it functioned as the museum’s first modern art department. The CAC sponsored lectures and supported the first exhibitions of Op art and conceptual art in Seattle. It also brought the popular Andy Warhol Portraits exhibition to Seattle in 1976, among many other important exhibitions. Her role in bringing great art to the Seattle Art Museum also involved the curation of two solo exhibitions for Morris Louis (in 1967) and William Ivey (in 1975).

Virginia joined SAM’s board in 1960, making 2020 her 60th anniversary with the Seattle Art Museum. She temporarily stepped away in 1972 when her husband Bagley joined the Board and rejoined in 1982. She served as President of the Board from 1987–90. Virginia was President of SAM’s Board of Trustees from 1986–1992, years that coincided with the construction and opening of the downtown Robert Venturi building in 1991—the museum’s first major transformation since its opening in 1933 and a major shift in Seattle’s cultural life to downtown First Avenue (with the Symphony soon following).

In 1999, SAM mounted an exhibition of the Wright Collection (The Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection of Modern Art, March 4–May 9, 1999). The Wrights’ entire art collection—the largest single collection of modern and contemporary art in the region—has been gradually donated (and the balance of the collection promised) to the Seattle Art Museum. A significant portion of the collection came to the museum in 2014 when the Wrights’ private exhibition space closed.

When the Seattle Art Museum opened the Olympic Sculpture Park in 2007, many works from the Wrights’ collection were installed there, including Mark di Suvero’s Bunyon’s Chess (1965) and Schubert Sonata (1992), as well as works by Ellsworth Kelly, Tony Smith, Anthony Caro, and Roxy Paine.

SAM’s ongoing exhibition Big Picture: Art After 1945 draws from the Wrights’ transformative gift of over 100 works and is a reminder of their incredible generosity.

Virginia was an active board member up to the end of her life, regularly attending meetings and advising the museum in many important endeavors. About SAM Virginia said, “It’s always been the main arena. I never wanted to break off and start a museum. I wanted to push the museum we already had into being more responsive to contemporary art.” And SAM would like to acknowledge that she did just that, leaving an undeniable mark on the cultural landscape of the entire Pacific Northwest.

As Amada Cruz, SAM’s Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO, says, “Even having only been in Seattle for a short time, it’s clear that Virginia Wright’s impact on the city and on SAM is beyond measure. Her legacy, and that of her late husband Bagley, is seen in both the very walls and on the walls of the downtown museum, and it fills the Olympic Sculpture Park’s landscapes. I’m honored to have been able to know her and of her hopes for SAM’s continued future.”

Object of the Week: Royal Incubator

Elisabeth Smith on Nov 16 2018

Object of the Week: Royal Incubator

Widely regarded as one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century, David Smith once described his early sculptures of the 1940s and 50s, like Royal Incubator, as “drawings in space.” Smith, a welder, often used wrought and soldered metals such as steel, bronze, and silver, arranged in a highly visual and pictorial arrangement. As explained by art historian Richard J. Williams, “[these sculptures] were really only legible as three-dimensional pictures, albeit abstract ones.”[1]

Smith’s early work prioritized the act of viewing from a fixed perspective, and while experiencing his pieces in space—and in the round—is important, Royal Incubator’s legibility as a single plane, much like the Cubist paintings of Picasso, is tantamount. In addition to finding influence in Cubism, the dream-like imagery in such early works evidences the heavy influence Surrealism had on Smith. However, thanks to its location installed in Big Picture: Art after 1945, now on view in SAM’s Modern and Contemporary Galleries, Royal Incubator’s association with Abstract Expressionism is also made clear. In many ways, it can be seen as a three-dimensional equivalent to the active, monumental, and gestural paintings by Pollock, Krasner, and Gorky nearby.

Born and raised in Indiana, Smith first worked as a welder and riveter at the Studebaker automobile plant in South Bend. Later, during World War II, Smith worked for the American Locomotive Company, working to fabricate trains and M7 destroyer tanks. These experiences proved formative, advancing his welding skills and relationship with metalwork. Smith’s early works bring together the real, often in the form of found metal scraps, with the imagined, resulting in a unique and at times deeply autobiographical visual style. For example, in Royal Incubator, metal spigots become birds of flight in a dream-like composition that defies clear interpretation.

Delta Air Lines, the Official Airline of the Seattle Art Museum, is a generous sponsor of Big Picture. Their support makes it possible to share this incredible post-war collection with our community.

– Elisabeth Smith, Collections Coordinator

[1] Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe, 1965-70 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000), 23.
Image: Royal Incubator, 1949, David Smith, steel, bronze and silver, 37 x 38 3/8 x 9 7/8 in., Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2016.17.5 © Estate of David Smith

Object of the Week: Mann und Maus

Seattle Art Museum on Sep 29 2017

Object of the Week: Mann und Maus

As you’re pondering your Halloween costume this year and watching politicians locked in a game of cat and mouse, you may want to stop by SAM for a bit of inspiration. Installed in Big Picture: Art after 1945 is Katharina Fritsch’s Mann und Maus (Man and Mouse). An enormous mouse towers like a dark specter over a sleeping figure of a man, who is as white as his downy bed. The man seems undisturbed while the animal appears alert and ready to pounce. A bizarre mirage? A nightmarish vision? Or, a secret story of affection? It all depends on your point of view.

When the German artist Katharina Fritsch made this sculpture in 1991/1992, she was working in the context of the recent fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the beginning of a rejoinder of long-divided East and West Germany. Following World War II, allied forces divided the country—the East fell under Russian control, the western portions under that of the United States, Britain, and France. The division into East and West became the fault line of the so-called Iron Curtain. Given the extreme ideological differences on either side of that border, reunification was an unexpected and momentous event, with enormous new social and economic challenges. Fritsch was born and raised in West Germany and grew up during the post-war years. Artistically, Fritsch came into her own in the 1980s, part of an artistic and cultural cohort skeptical and ironic vis-à-vis government and symbols of power. Characteristic of Fritsch is the manipulation of scale that renders the most ordinary domestic animals and objects uncanny or strangely surreal. Mann und Maus makes a nice bookend to another celebrated work by the artist called the Rat King—a circle of sixteen rats, their tails tied in a knot and facing outward in what looks like a defensive military formation. The fact that each rat is 12-feet tall, however, turns the tables and puts us, as viewers circling that formation, in a rather uncomfortable defensive position. Scale remains a key ingredient in the theatrical staging of power relationships, a timeless topic that the artist leaves up to the viewer to interpret. For English-speaking audiences, the title of our work, Mann und Maus, will bring to mind John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men, a story worth rereading in view of a global surge in migration and displacement.

– Catharina Manchanda, Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Image: Mann und Maus, 1991-92, Katharina Fritsch, polyester resin and paint, 90 1/2 x 51 1/2 x 94 1/2in., Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2007.118 © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Object of the Week: Die Orden der Nacht

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Dec 9 2016

Object of the Week: Die Orden der Nacht

At times an artwork has so much to say that I approach it and, admittedly, fail to meet the challenge. I’m not able to engage with the artist at the intellectual height or emotional depth that they have established in the piece. I just can’t always get there. One of the ways I encourage myself is by returning to these works to see if they teach me more on the next visit. Lately I’ve been returning regularly to Anselm Kiefer’s Die Orden der Nacht (translated as The Orders of the Night), which is hanging in a haunting installation called Material Difference, part of the larger Big Picture: Art after 1945 show at Seattle Art Museum.

First, it is huge, ambitious, and awe-inspiring. An oppressive energy emerges from the canvas. In the picture, a figure lies supine as giant sunflowers loom above, their seeds black and charred, their wilting stems and downcast petals seeming both sad and malicious. Wide-reaching symbolism informs the picture. When Kiefer says “These sunflowers are black like the firmament,” he assigns cosmic significance to them, to go along with their tremendous proportions.1 The man lying flat on the soil from which the sunflowers grow also links to a range of mythologies that tell of creation sprouting from suffering.

We can say, for sure, that it’s not an easy painting to digest. Kiefer believes firmly that art should be difficult—to make, and to understand—and that the challenge it offers can also bring growth.

He has caked paint all over the canvas in thick sloshings, building the picture outward as he has filled it horizontally and vertically. The surface shows cracks from the artist’s heavy application of paint, and this natural reaction of the medium also contributes to the mood of the painting. Like cracks in dried mud, they leave behind impressions of drying up and drought. Up close, one can see the paint applied aggressively, in big, slashing marks.

One of three really exemplary works by Anselm Kiefer in SAM’s collection, Die Orden der Nacht figured prominently in the two most important recent exhibitions of Kiefer’s work, the first displayed at London’s Royal Academy of Arts from September to December of 2014, and the second at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, from December of 2015 through April of this year. The celebrated Pompidou show was a globally important one, marking the first Kiefer retrospective in 30 years to be held in France, where the artist has made his home since 1992.

Also praised by art critics, the 2014 exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy in London united Die Orden der Nacht with another work of the same name by Kiefer. An earlier work, dating to 1988, this other Die Orden der Nacht is an illustrated book, comprising 40 pages, drawn in lead and bedazzled with diamonds. Though a large book, with dimensions of about three feet by two feet, it represents another face to Kiefer’s work that is different in many ways, including its size. With this and other illustrated books, the artist whose effectiveness seems, at first, so linked to the scale on which he is working—dwarfing viewers with the massive dimensions of his paintings, making grand gestures in lavish outlays of materials—moves into intimate territory, creating poetic images that approach the seemingly un-Kiefer idea of beauty. One artist has produced both bodies of work.

To view SAM’s Die Orden der Nacht next to the museum’s other two dark and enigmatic Kiefers, Die Welle (1990) and Untitled (1983), gives one a great introduction to Kiefer, and only an introduction. As much as we like to know artists, the great ones continue to challenge us. As much as we like to define artworks and achieve a sense of resolution,

–Jeffrey Carlson, SAM Collections Coordinator

1 Quoted by Christian Weikop in “Forests of Myth, Forests of Memory,” in Anselm Kiefer, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2014; 38.
Image: Installation view of Die Orden der Nacht, 1996, Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945), acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas, 140 x 182 1/4 in. Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard C. Hedreen, 99.85, © Anselm Kiefer, Photo: Natali Wiseman.
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